“Get the goddamn jack up; what’re you dreaming about? Quit stumbling over your goddamn feet, for cry-sake; you think I got nothing better to do? You think I do nothing but sell greasy stoves to greaseballs? Move it, nipplehead! I want you to know that I also own the biggest goddamn shoe store in Babylon, Long Island. Pick up that tire iron!”
Crazy Old Lady
INTRODUCTION BY ETHAN DAVIDSON
When I was fourteen, I lived with my father, Avram Davidson, in the town of Richmond, California. I picked up his copy of Ellery Queen, and read the Edgar-nominated story “Crazy Old Lady.” As was often the case when I read his stories, I didn’t quite understand the ending, so he explained it to me.
At that time, Richmond was a boring, lower-middle-class suburb. Avram shared a house with a blind man.
Avram liked to move every few months, and I became accustomed to living with all sorts of people. Most of these people had something unusual about them. In this case, it was a physical disability. Others had psychological problems. One was even a crazy old lady. Even when he lived alone, he sometimes brought in homeless derelicts or confused young people. Avram was sometimes irritable. But he often also displayed quite a bit of compassion.
Eighteen years have passed. The number of people who are poor, elderly, and live in bad neighborhoods has increased tremendously. Richmond today is a violent, crime-infested slum town. Toward the end of his life, Avram found himself living in another slum. This one was in Bremerton, Washington. He was robbed in his home by two men who must have seen him as eccentric and very vulnerable, much like the woman in this story.
The story provides no real answers. It does provide a vivid and insightful description of the problem. This, it seems to me, can only help. As Avram might have said, “Could it hoyt?”
CRAZY OLD LADY
BEFORE SHE BECAME THE Crazy Old Lady she had been merely the Old Lady and before that Old Lady Nelson and before that (long long before that) she had been Mrs. Nelson. At one time there had also been a Mr. Nelson, but all that was left of him were the war souvenirs lined up on the cluttered mantelpiece which was never dusted now—the model battleship, the enemy helmet, the enemy grenade, the enemy knife, and some odd bits and pieces that had been enemy badges and buttons.
The enemy had seemed a lot farther away in those days.
But the shopping had been a lot closer.
Of course it was still the same in miles—well, blocks, really—it just seemed like miles now. It had been such a nice walk, such a few blocks’ walk, under the pleasant old trees, past the pleasant old family homes, and down to the pleasant old family stores. Now not much was left of the way it had been.
For one thing, the trees had not had sense enough to adjust to changing times. Their branches had interfered with the electric power lines and their roots had interfered with the sewer lines and their trunks had interfered with the sidewalks.
So most of the old trees had been cut down.
That was quite a shock and no one had prepared the Old Lady for it. One day the old trees had been there as always and then the next day there were only stumps and branches, bruised twigs and leaves and sawdust. And the next day not even that.
A lot of the old family homes had been, so to speak, cut down too, and most of those that had not been cut down had been cut up and converted into multiple dwelling units. It is odd that somehow families do not seem to feel the same about dwelling units as they do about homes.
And as for the pleasant old family stores, what had happened to them? Mr. Berman said, “There’s hardly anything I sell today that they don’t sell for less in the supermarket, Mrs. Nelson. The kids don’t come in the way they used to with a note from their parents, they just come in to steal. I used to think my boy would take over when I’m gone but he came back from Vietnam in a box, so what’s the use of talking.”
Where there had been a lot of storefronts with either changing displays, which were interesting, or the same familiar old displays, which were comforting, now the storefronts were all boarded over.
The supermarket was where there hadn’t been a supermarket—strange that it wasn’t built where all the boarded-up stores were; strange that the pleasant old empty lot with its wild flowers had to give way to the supermarket, and now the children played in the street instead.
But that was the way it was. Prices may have been cheaper in the supermarket in the long run, but the prices had to be paid in cash and there were no deliveries, no monthly bills, no friendly delivery boy who thanked you for a fresh-baked cookie.
Often after Mr. Nelson passed away, the delivery boy—or was it his brother?—would mow the small lawn for a quarter. Now no one would mow the small lawn for a quarter or even for two quarters. No boys were interested in collecting empty bottles for the deposits, the way they used to be. Strange, if they were poor, why they would prefer to smash the bottles on the sidewalk and against the lampposts. The yard was a thicket now and not even a clean thicket.
“What is the world coming to?” the Old Lady used to ask.
By and by she stopped asking and started screeching. “Don’t think I don’t see you there!” she would screech. That was around the time they started calling her the Crazy Old Lady. She said the bigger boys had thrown rocks at her and the bigger boys denied this and the police said they could do nothing.
It wasn’t the police who laughed when she took to wearing the military helmet whenever she did her shopping. She had to go out to do her shopping because it was a thing of the past to phone the store and say, “Now before I even ask about Esther and the new baby, don’t let me forget the quarter pound of sweet butter for my pastry crust.” Sometimes she would forget and call the old number which now belonged to some other people and after a while they weren’t nice about it, not nice at all.
There were, of course, still some other old ladies and old gentlemen around in the old neighborhood, although she didn’t at first think of them as old. “Now my Grandmother Delehanty, she was old and she had seen the soldiers marching off to remember the Maine and she never forgot anyone’s birthday to the last day she lived, but I don’t suppose you would remember her.”
“Listen to the Crazy Old Lady talking to herself,” some girls would say very loud and not nicely at all.
“There, never mind, Mrs. Nelson, pay no attention and we’ll pretend we didn’t notice, shhh,” Mrs. Swift would say, hobbling up.
“Why, Mrs. Swift. Your arm! Your poor arm. What happened?”
“Let’s just walk along together and I’ll tell you when they aren’t listening.” Mrs. Swift, what a fine-looking woman she had been in her time! Why would anyone want to knock her down so badly that she broke her arm?
“My grocery money was in my purse. I don’t know what to do. I can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
“Oh dear, oh dear.”
It just went to prove how necessary it was to wear the war helmet. If Mr. Schultz had been wearing one, would they have been able to fracture his skull?
They who?
“Why don’t you catch them? What are the police for?”
The policemen said that the descriptions would fit half of the hoodlums in the neighborhood. “More than half,” they said. The policemen said that about the one who killed Mr. Schultz. The policemen said that about the ones who had just grabbed her and pulled the war helmet off her head and then shoved her and had hardly bothered to run away very fast, just half looking back and half laughing. “You got off lucky,” the policeman said to her. “Don’t go out at night if you can help it.”
“It was broad daylight!” she screeched.
And then someone threw a rock through her window. No, it wasn’t a rock, it was the war helmet, her husband’s souvenir from the mantelpiece. How hard they must have worked to dent it and bash it and cave it in so that no one could wear it now. And what was she to do about protection now when she had to go out for the quarter pound of bacon and the box of oatmeal and the three eggs? Where were the
police?
“Sorry, lady, sorry,” the policemen said. “You can’t carry no knife this size. It’s against the law.” The knife was her husband’s war souvenir of the enemy, but the police took it away from her anyway.
She wanted to tell Mrs. Swift—what a fine-looking woman she was in her time—and she called out, “Oh, Mrs. Swift,” but her voice didn’t carry. No one heard her over the street noises and the noises of all the radios and record players from every window and all the television sets on full blast. How fast the man was running when he grabbed Mrs. Swift’s purse as though he had practised and practised, and he knocked her down as before and kicked her as she started to get up and then he ran away laughing and laughing with the purse held high up, shielding his face.
What could she do then? No helmet. No knife. And she had to go out shopping. She couldn’t carry much at one time. She looked for the old coat with the inside pocket so she could keep the money in that, but somehow she couldn’t find it and so she had to carry a purse after all.
Carrying the purse with the few dollars in it when the man came running up. She could hear him running and she started screeching when he grabbed her purse, just as she knew he would some day, and he tugged hard and the string broke. The Crazy Old Lady, had she thought tying something with a string to her scrawny old arm would help?
Then something fell to the sidewalk and jangled, a metal ring or pin, and he ran off laughing and faster than she could ever run, the purse held high to shield his face from passers-by as the Crazy Old Lady screeched after him. And he must have got almost half a block away when the enemy grenade went off.
It was well known, of course, that she was crazy, and really they take good care of her where she is, and anyway she can do her little bit of shopping in the canteen, as they call it, and nobody bothers her now at all.
“Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?”
INTRODUCTION BY MIKE RESNICK
Avram Davidson was a wise, humorous, gentle, and knowing man. I would have thought (and still believe) that if he were to start counting his friends he’d run snack-dab into Eternity before he finished. So to find that I was on a list of “special friends” was not only a surprise, but more of an honor than I think you can imagine.
My very last conversation with Avram was the day I bought the reprint rights to the following story for an anthology I was editing (Inside the Funhouse if you can find it, and I’ll lay plenty of eight-to-five that you can’t).
“Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?” is relatively minor Davidson, if such a thing can be said to exist. Yet if you take a good hard look at it, it is absolutely stunning in its complexity, not unlike Avram himself.
The use of language is unique. It might drive an unimaginative high school English teacher straight up a wall, but Avram, like the immortal Walt Kelly before him, refused to be hemmed in by standard sentences and punctuation. Check the end of the very first paragraph; you’ll see what I mean. More to the point, you’ll see, quite clearly, what Avram means.
Then there are the in-jokes. Calvin M. Knox was a pseudonym of the youthful Robert Silverberg—and Wendell Garrett is a very thinly disguised version of science fiction writer and bon vivant Randall Garrett, Silverberg’s sometime collaborator in the early days of his career.
In fact, the entire cast of mildly warped characters acting in concert for no particularly valid reason is reminiscent of many of the conceits of R. A. Lafferty, though with Avram’s unique backspin on the notion.
I could go on and on, but why bother? Avram does it so much better.
Enjoy.
“HARK! WAS THAT THE SQUEAL OF AN ANGRY THOAT?”
AT A TIME SUBSEQUENTLY I was still living back East, we were so many of us then Living Back East, and I was still living on the seventh floor of a seven-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village. Edward lived down the hall: Fox-fire Edward. Fiduciary Debenture III lived downstairs. Gabriel Courland lived around the corner in the hay-loft of the Old De Witt Clinton Livery Stable, a location ideally suited and situate—he said—to pour boiling oil down upon unwelcome visitors: bill collectors, indignant fathers of daughters, people with Great Ideas For Stories (“All you got to do is write it down and we’ll split the money, I’d do it myself if I had the time.”), editors with deadlines, men come to turn off the electricity (the gas) (the water) (the whale-oil)—
“Doesn’t it smell a little in here, Gabe?” asked Edward.
“It smells a lot—but look! Look!” Here he’d point to the neat trap-door through which hay had once been hauled (and maybe smuggled bombazine and who knows what, poled up Minetta Stream, midnights so long long ago). “You can pour boiling oil down on people!”
Edward gives me to understand that Gabe never actually did pour boiling oil or even unboiling oil, down on people; although occasionally, Edward said, G. would allow trickles of water to defoliate the importunate, as who? put it. Someone else.
Fiduciary Debenture III lived downstairs, and across the narrow street dwelt Wendell Garrett, in the parlor of a once-huge apartment deftly cut up and furnished by his Great-aunt Ella, relict of his Great-uncle Pat Garrett, yes! The very same Sheriff Pat Garrett Who; Aunt Ella was in the Canary Islands at the time, teaching (I understand) the two-step to the wives of the Spanish officials, to whom, in that not-exactly-then-in-the-beating-heart-of-things archipelago, it—the two-step-represented Modern Culture, if not Flaming Youth in Revolt, and one of the few (very few) occupations or occasions for which their husbands would let them out of the patio.
“The Moors may have been driven out of Spain,” Aunt Ella had said, or, rather, written; “but they haven’t been driven out of the Spaniards. For God’s sake, Wendell, see to it that Mary Teresa empties the pan under the ice-box.”
Mary Teresa was the, so to speak, concièrge, and refused to allow an electric, gas, or even kerosene fridge to be installed in her own kitchen: slightly larger than a commemorative stamp. This devotion to tradition was much appreciated by the sole remaining Iceman in The Village, whose clientele by that time consisted of several fish markets and a dozen or so other ladies of the same age and model as Mary Teresa; the Iceman was related by ties of spiritual consanguinity to all the prominent mafiosi—a godfather to godfathers, so to speak—and this in turn enabled her to do as she liked and had been accustomed to do, in a manner which would be tolerated in no one else, nowhere else.
Wendell lived rent-free in the former parlor of the house in return for his acting as an Influence upon Mary Teresa and curbing in some few important particulars her turn-of-the-century vigor.
When asked where he lived, he would say, bland as butter, “In a parlor house.”
Round the corner in a decayed Federalist Row located behind an equally decayed non-Federalist row (Whig, perhaps, or, as Wendell once suggested, brushing himself, Free Soil), lived the retired Australian sanitary scientist and engineer called Humpty Dumpty. He had indeed once had a lot of cards printed:
Sir Humphrey Dunston
Remittance Man
Privies Done Cheap Retail and to the Trade
But, he had observed, these last phrases had been subject to most gross interpretations by members of one of the Village’s non-ethnic minorities; so the only card still in evidence was tacked to his greasy front door. Humpty patronized the Ice-man, too, Sangiaccomo Bartoldi, but not for ice: Jockum retained the antique art of needling beer, an alchemy otherwise fallen into desuetude since the repeal of the 18th (or Noble Experiment) Amendment, and which—Humpty Dumpty said—alone could raise American lager to the kick of its Australian counterpart (“Bandicoot’s Ballocks,” or something like that).
If you stood on what had once been the Widow’s Walk atop the only one of the Federalists which still had one, you could toss a rubber ball through the back window of the Death House and into the Muniments Room of Calvin M. Knox. This great granite sarcophagus of a building had once, it was said, carried across the front of it the advice that THE WAGES OF SIN IS DE
ATH: but only the last of those words remained. Mary Teresa, that repository of local arcane information, sometimes claimed that “The Patriot Boys” had torn off the others to hurl them at the Invalid Corps of the Union Army during what she termed “the Rebellion”—not, indeed, the entire Civil War, but that part of it fought thereabouts and called by others The Draft Riots. Not, of course, by Mary Teresa.
Nor, in fact, did she ever use the name Invalid Corps of the Union Army.
She called them “the Prodissint Bastids.”
“I understand that this used to be a House for Fallen Women,” Fiduciary Debenture III had once said to Calvin Knox.
“Yes,” said C. Knox, gloomily, “and if you’re not careful, you’re going to fall through the very same place in the floor, too. It quivers when my cat walks across it.” It was in consequence of this statutory infirmity of part of the front floor that the back chamber was called the Muniments Room and was heaped high with pulp magazines in neat piles, each bearing some such style and label as (it might be) Influences of Ned Buntline on Doc Savage, or Foreshadowings of Doc Savage in Ned Buntline, or Seabury Quinn Type Stories Not Written By Seabury Quinn, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu Plot Structures Exemplified in Spicy Detective Stories.
And, as Mary Teresa so often put it, ecKt, ecKt, ecKt.
“I have reduced,” C. Knox said, entirely without boastfulness, “the Basic Short Story to its essential salts.”
The last, the very very last of the Hokey Pokey Women practiced in the basement. Edward often patronized her.
Wendell at that time was devoting less time to writing fiction than to his great project of reconciling the Indo-European Exarchate with the Dravidian Rite of the Sanscrit Church (Lapsed Branch) in Exile. Bengali archimandrites in cruciform dhoties and deaconesses in the Proscribed Saffron Sari fluttered round about his doors like exotic butterflies—could chrismation be administered in ghee?—was the bed of nails a legitimate form of penance?—their collective presence a great perturbation to Mary Teresa, who referred to the entire kehilla as Them Gypsies. The only thing which indeed prevented her taking her broom to the lot of them was that a genuine Monsignor of the True Church as recognized by the Police Department had chanced by: whereat the whole ecclesia had knelt as one and collectively kissed his brogans.
The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 40
