The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Ishmael led another hundred children into the Barrens over a period of some weeks. But seven incursions, the last one led by the notorious Peeler again, killed seventy of the Barrens nothoi. Ishmael was not four years old. Is not a wild ass full grown at three? He had cursed Peeler before, and the cursing hadn't been effective. “I will do something else. I will get him where it hurts him,” Ishmael said.

  Peeler had a little boy, older than Ishmael but about the same size. Ishmael knew this. Ishmael knew everything.

  Ishmael found the little boy, Onlyborn Peeler, struck him down wildly, and stripped him naked. Then he changed clothes with him. Thereupon, he made himself to look exactly like that little Peeler boy. How could he have done it, with the wild-ass crine standing up on his head and neck like that? With the wild eyes rolling around in his head the way they did? With the hands and feet that were too big for him, with the ass-springs (which were like the cat-springs of his father) in his steps, with the sloping shoulders and haunches on him that the little Peeler boy didn't have? Well hokey, he wasn't even the same color as the Peeler boy!

  Well, he did it. Ishmael was hypnotic. He drew eyes to him or away from him as he wished. He made those hypnotized eyes see what he wanted them to see. He could make his face look like anything he decided. “Why, I almost peeled you for a potato!” Jane the Crane had said to him once. “Why are you looking like a potato?” He had the face of the little Peeler boy now and the Peeler boy's clothes. He went and found Peeler himself, sitting with Slickstock and Quickcoiner.

  “Hey, Pop, get on the op!” he spoke boldly to Peeler, using the voice of the Peeler boy and the kind of talk that legal kids talked. He put his eye to the barrel of Peeler's gun and looked down it.

  “What is the matter with you, Onlyborn? Why do you look so funny? What are you doing here? Why aren't you in kindergarten?” Peeler asked Ishmael with rising anger.

  “Peeler, I never realized that your kid looked so funny,” said Quickcoiner, “and looking from him to you, I never realized that you looked so funny either.”

  “Got him easy, got him hard, got him dead in our own backyard,” Ishmael chanted in the little Peeler boy voice.

  “Talk sense, or get out of here and back to school,” Peeler ordered.

  “Peeler!” Slickstock roared, rising, “Let's go see! If somebody's dead, we want to know why we didn't get to kill him. Maybe somebody else has been potting our game.”

  Ishmael was running toward the Peeler house, and the three big nothoi-hunters were clattering after him to see who was dead there.

  “Who is it, Onlyborn, who is dead?” Peeler was calling after Ishmael, still thinking he was his own son.

  “On the op, Pop, see the fish,” Ishmael chanted as he ran, “all laid out and his name is Ish.”

  “Ishmael!” Peeler roared like a wounded boar. “Somebody has stolen Ishmael from us.”

  “Ishmael!” Slickstock shouted. “We've been robbed. He was our assigned kill.”

  “Ishmael!” Quickcoiner shrieked. “I'll have coin back from the tipsters. They assured me he could never be caught in the city.”

  Ishmael pointed when they came to the body. Then he faded back through the big nothoi-hunters and was into the trees. He was in the near trees for a moment, till he should see how the hunters carried on, but ready to be into the far trees as soon as these big men realized what had happened.

  “Ishmael!” Peeler agonized as he bent over the little body where Ishmael had struck it down. “Wait, men, wait!” he said then. “Why, this can't be Ishmael at all! This is my little boy Onlyborn who is dead here. This is the funniest thing I ever heard of. What do you make of it, fellows?” Peeler didn't particularly care for his small son. The kid-card and the kid (for prestige) had put him into hock for years.

  “But since this is little Onlyborn” — Quickcoiner hesitated — “ then who was—?”

  “Ishmael!” Slickstock roared. “It was himself! He tricked us! He bearded the lions in our own jaws. We'll have him, we'll have him! He's our kill!”

  “Coin out of my hand,” Quickcoiner cried. “I'll overdraw. I'll get every tipster in town on this. We're tricked. We'll get him, we'll get him fast.”

  “I'll kill him, I'll kill him,” Peeler jabbered. “Made fools of us! Looked right down my gun. Insulted us. Something else. Yeah, he killed my boy. I'll kill him, I'll kill him.”

  It hadn't quite fallen as Ishmael (now in the far trees) had figured. He hadn't gotten Peeler where it hurt him in killing his son, Onlyborn, and this puzzled Ishmael. But he had got him where it hurt him in tricking him, in making a fool out of him. It had been to the death between them before. Now it was triply so.

  Quickcoiner poured out money to the tipsters, and they began to hem Ishmael in, so they thought. Peeler and Ishmael declared the special game of his set.

  But there was enough hunting for all the nothoi-hunter sets now. A dozen other wild-ass kids were working in the city, instructed by Ishmael himself and by the intrepid nine-year-old male that the nothoi-hunters had never been able to kill. And new Barrens-like places were already being used: a skimpy little region called the Potato Hills, a swampy stretch called the Deadwood Bottoms. And the wild-ass kids were breaking out all over the world; wilder than they had been before, donkey-smart now, long-eared for rumor and news, mule-strong, jenny-fleet, hoof-hard, rebels, misbegottens, Issachars, asses indeed. They even used the sinister-barred bray for signal now and for mockery. The left-handed brotherhood had rampaged before, and it refused to believe now that it was extinguished.

  But the nothoi-hunters also came on stronger now, more professional, better provided, better intelligenced, more adaptably armed. Every new evasion tactic that the nothoi kids discovered was soon the property of the prediction scopes of the hunters' rifles.

  Ishmael had run other branches of illegitimate kids into the Barrens and the Bottoms and the Potato Hills. Then it came to his mother (who had powers) that he had run his way; to whichever end, she did not know.

  “You have run to the end of the line in this,” she said. “You are already too big to crawl in many of the walls and under many of the floors and streets. The crawl spaces are only suited for very small children. You are too big to be passed over by the sharp eyes, you are too big to vanish absolutely. You will die on your next incursion; or you will get through to the wilds a last time and remain there to be a male in the Barrens or the Bottoms. There is no plan, there has never been any plan except to live: that everybody be allowed to live once — a little while at least. To have been is to be forever. But never to have been is to be nothing.”

  “Oh, we make plans, the nine-year-old male and I. But they close in on us more and kill more of us every time. And we run out of tricks and dodges and evasions. The prediction scopes on their guns know them all. They know when we will break pace, when we will cut back, even before we know it.”

  “There is one trick that they don't know, Ishmael of the high crine and the wobbly eyes,” Jane the Crane said. “If you are trapped for the last time, run straight. The scopes will not understand it, and the hunter-men will not understand it. Run a straight line that last time. The very idea of a straight line has vanished from this world.”

  Quickcoiner had poured more money to the tipsters. Slickstock had organized beaters. Peeler had led incursions into the Barrens and Bottoms and Hills that had left those refuges torn to pieces. Ishmael could tell by the tint of the streams in the mornings how many had died in the Barrens the night before. “It is the last day,” Jane the Crane told Ishmael now. “Not the last day for you, maybe. Not the last day for me, maybe. But the last day for us. I knew which was the last day I would have with your father. I know this is the last day I will have you. Whatever I have done I have done. Now it is time that I do it again.”

  After that, Ishmael went on incursion and got through with a good pack of kids. He got back just in the closing hours of swing-time and found that every entrance to every burrow was spotted and g
uarded and closed to him. He could smell the hunters smelling him. He could sense their sensors.

  He heard also that his mother Jane the Crane had now been declared open game. He was trapped and angry. He was an animal-smart six-year-old boy of the species that had once been human, that might again be human after its freakish interlude. He was a towering and intelligent example of that species which was being hewn to death in its best, in its left-handed blood.

  He was blocked in, he was sighted, he took to the trees. This city (thanks for all green and growing favors) had preserved its trees. But the trees did not reach all the way to the Barrens. They did not, but they reached to—

  —Too late! He smelled the trip wire, of course, but he could not avoid tripping it, not at the speed he was going. And he hadn't expected a sky trap, a treetop trap. He had never encountered such before. But the tipsters had gathered information on Ishmael's every route, even his routes through the high trees.

  There was a searing and acrid explosion. There was a ballooning wave of green fragments and gray-brown bark branches, and there was a sudden gap in the sky where there had been foliage. Ishmael, broken and burned considerably, fell to the street out of that sudden gap in the sky. Communication crackled, and three sets of nothoi-hunters converged on the boy. Peeler was barking that it was his kill and the other sets should desist.

  Ishmael, dazed and bloodied, rose out of the green trash that covered him and began to run in the direction of the Barrens. He ran in a straight line. The short-range rifles began to cough at him; they were mostly from Peeler's set. One set of hunters did desist. Another set was firing crazily. It almost seemed as if men were firing at Peeler and Slickstock and Quickcoiner. There were confused and angry cries and the barking of weapons, but Ishmael ran on, straight as a lance and untouched; ran on under the last of these trees, under the open sky, toward distant trees again, on and on.

  The prediction scopes of the hunters' rifles simply could not handle a straight-line trail. Nothing in their data or in their world gave information on this ultimate evasion tactic. The scope on Peeler's own gun failed in frustration and smoke, and the other scopes glowed red in malfunction and failure.

  It seemed that Ishmael might make it through clear again, to trees, to escape, to the Barrens. He didn't. A ricochet shot killed him there, no more than a dozen bounds from the skirting woods. He bunched and fell; he looked half animal, half child, as he curled into a small ball and died quickly.

  There was Peeler's barking laugh of triumph; then a quick flash out of those skirting trees sawed it in half. Something had dived down from those trees, too swift for free fall. The something had hit, rolled, scurried, run, and swooped to the curled-up ball that was the dead boy Ishmael. The something had Ishmael (knowing that he was dead), bounded with him while the fury howl and fast clatter of bullets came from at least two sets of hunters, reached the skirting trees with the burden, and bounded up a trunk like a giant squirrel. Perhaps the apparition got away clear, perhaps not. The trees were almost bowed over with the blow of automatic weapons.

  It had been the ten-year-old male from the Barrens who had come and snatched the body of Ishmael from under the noses of the guns. For what? He himself knew that Ishmael was already dead. He himself had taught Ishmael never to waste time on a dead one. For what then?

  For heroism. He did not know that heroism was already dead. He believed that he could establish a mystique and a tomb.

  Half a dozen sets of hunters were now after the young male and his dead burden. Not the set of Peeler, however. Peeler's set had got its kill, though by accident. It wanted more of the same blood, and it had one more prey assigned to it as open game.

  “Where's the mother?” Peeler howled. “We may as well have double party today,” Slickstock exulted. “Tipsters, tipsters, where is the leggy one?” Quickcoiner screeched.

  But Jane the Crane had already rushed out, wailing and keening:

  “Oh my son, Oh my son!” she cried. “Oh my son, come back to me!”

  Somehow that didn't sound like Jane the Crane's way of carrying on.

  But shots sang out. Janine went rigid in spread agony; she fell at full length; she spilled out gore, quivered, and was quiet.

  The shots had not come from the unready guns of Peeler's set. They had come, apparently, from another set of hunters down a side street. There was an afterburst of firing from there also; again it almost seemed as if someone was shooting it Peeler's set. Peeler and his associates took cover, confused by the dangerous random firing, happy that Ishmael and his mother had been killed, somewhat morbid that they themselves had not done all the killing.

  (Check it, sensors, check it. Is there something tricky about all this? — No. It appears quite authentic.)

  Janine Pervicacia lay in her gore in the open street, and a yellow-card street-sweeper came dutifully to dispose of her. Slain illegal women were common enough, of course; but Janine was uncommonly comely and leggy, and many eyes were on her. This had to be done carefully, and she herself was not very careful now. But what would it matter, when she was already slain?

  Slain? She was not slain. She wasn't touched. She hadn't lived with Morgan that long, she hadn't lived with Ishmael that long, to be killed in the open street, and for nothing. But it is good to have “Dead” written on your record and have it closed when it has gotten out of hand. Perhaps one can become another person with another record, or with none. The yellow-card street-sweeper (who looked very like Morgan Saunders and had been friend of him) did indeed gather Janine up as if she were dead, bending her difficultly in the middle and stuffing her into his wheeled canister. Quite a bit of her still stuck out; she was pretty leggy. But there had been signal between Jane the Crane and the sweeper, and perhaps illegal communication had also been held with others.

  The gore that had spilled out in the street was not Jane's own. Many of the illegal birthing women now carried gore with them for just such eventualities as this. (And there were more and more of them now in the ghetto that is under the ghetto; there were more and more of their issue getting through to the various Barrens to set up kids' kingdoms. For already the Plateau had begun to tremble with its great underlying fault. Earthquake and Volcano and Upheaval!)

  “Is it Agar again, or is it the Jane?” the trundling sweeper asked softly to the inside of his canister. “No, no, do not sing and whistle, or softly if you do. That's enough to make any canister suspect.” Jane the Crane had lost her man, the dashing street-sweeper from over the sea. She had lost her son Ishmael, the incandescent wild colt of a boy. But she sang and whistled (doubled up as she was in the canister) gaily but so low that only her new sweeper-man could hear her.

  She'd do it again — and again. She would be a birthing woman once more. And once more she would give merriment with her milk.

  All Pieces Of A River Shore

  It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing happened. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground. And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along the river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves.

  His name was Leo Nation and he was known as a rich Indian. But such wealth as he had now was in his collections, for he was an examining and acquiring man. He had cattle, he had wheat, he had a little oil, and he spent everything that came in. Had he more income he would have collected even more. He collected old pistols, old ball shot, grindstones, early windmills, walking-horse threshing machines, flax combs, Conestoga wagons, brass-bound barrels, buffalo robes
, Mexican saddles, slick horn saddles, anvils, Argand lamps, rush holders, hay-burning stoves, hackamores, branding irons, chuck wagons, longhorn horns, beaded scrapes, Mexican and Indian leatherwork, buckskins, heads, feathers, squirrel-tail anklets, arrowheads, deerskin shirts, locomotives, streetcars, millwheels, keelboats, buggies, ox yokes, old parlor organs, blood-and-thunder novels, old circus posters, harness bells, Mexican oxcarts, wooden cigar-store Indians, cable-twist tobacco a hundred years old and mighty strong, cuspidors (four hundred of them), Ferris wheels, carnival wagons, carnival props of various sorts, carnival proclamations painted big on canvas. Now he was going to collect something else. He was talking about it to one of his friends, Charles Longbank, who knew everything.

  “Charley,” he said, “do you know anything about ‘The Longest Pictures in the World’ which used to be shown by carnivals and in hippodromes?”

  “Yes, I know a little about them Leo. They are an interesting bit of Americana: a bit of nineteenth-century back-country mania. They were supposed to be pictures of the Mississippi River shore. They were advertised as one mile long, five miles long, nine miles long. One of them, I believe, was actually over a hundred yards long. They were badly painted on bad canvas, crude trees and mudbank and water ripples, simplistic figures and all as repetitious as wallpaper. A strong-armed man with a big brush and plenty of barn paint of three colors could have painted quite a few yards of such in one day. Yet they are truly Americana. Are you going to collect them, Leo?”

  “Yes, but the real ones aren't like you say.”

  “Leo, I saw one. There is nothing to them but very large crude painting.”

  “I have twenty that are like you say, Charley. I have three that are very different. Here's an old carnival poster that mentions one.”

  Leo Nation talked eloquently with his hands while he also talked with his mouth, and now he spread out an old browned poster with loving hands: