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

by R. A. Lafferty

  The regular season began.

  “Now we'll see what this early-blooming crocus can really do,” a few of the unsold critics muttered.

  Young Cy Slocum, pitching every third day, won his first thirteen games without a loss. There would be no limits at all to such a career as was opening up before him.

  “How old are you anyhow, Cy?” a reporter asked him one day.

  “Eighty-one,” Cy said promptly. Then he corrected himself. “No, no, I mean eighteen. I have a speech affliction; I sometimes get my numbers transposed.”

  Flambeau La Flesche the zoom-zoom girl had zoomed to the top of everything with electronic swiftness. She was on Live; she was on 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D (you have to be smarter than hell to even know how to watch 4-D; only Mensa members are allowed to apply for tickets to see it); she was on Voxo; she was in five simultaneous musical comedies; she was on Vodvil and Sound in the Round; she was in the Old Time Electric Theatre; and she was big in Metranome. Already she looked like a shoo-in to take the Nobel Prize in the Centerfold Division. Few were the media in which she had not quickly become outstanding. But had there not been a Flambeau La Flesche a long time ago? Had that other young girl not been identical to this both in name and appearance? Yes, even in voice.

  “I suspect that I'm the same kid, only refleshed,” Flambeau told an interviewer. “I'm reincarnated, that's what I am, and you have to have the right kind of flesh to do that. That's what it means. I'm very carnal. That's why I reincarnate so easy.”

  Really, what else can you say of Flambeau? She did have the flesh, she did have a spirit as torchy as her name. She did have all the forms and resonances. She was everything, just as her preincarnation had been everything so many years before.

  And as she found, as had the previous she, that there were only twenty-four or twenty-six hours in the day; she could never remember which, but there weren't enough. Then she had a hot idea to save everyone money and to save herself drudgery and time.

  “You, moguls, why don't you just dig out the old movies that I made in my previous life,” she said. “I haven't changed any since then. When you have class you don't have to change. Just get them out and fill in the scratches and cracks and run them again. Nobody can know that it isn't me, because it will be me.”

  They did it. It worked. They ran all those old ones and they were explosive hits.

  Oh, the names of those two-timing great movies are like music: Louisiana Haystack, Popsie, The Cremation of Betty Lou, Zephyr Jones, The Day the Lilac Bush Burned Down, Nine Dollar Dog, Three Fish Out, Little Audrey, Crabgrass Street, Slippery Elm, Spider Spider Down Inside Her, Lady Bug Bongo, Accolade and Accolade Revisited (This latter had been titled Son of Accolade the first time around).

  What Drama, what Comedy, what Music, what Memories!

  But Flambeau wasn't quite so happy with it that second time around. “I knew that the competition nowadays was nothing,” she said once, “but, after all, what is there to compete for? The Accolades aren't what they used to be. And Accolade Revisited has an emptiness and irony that wasn't, at first, intended. The thing about us excelling types is that when we ascend to great heights it is all the same as if we stood still and the world went downhill. We must have excelled too much; the world sure has gone down.”

  “Miss Flambeau,” another interviewer asked her, “we know that you are an old car fancier, but many of the big three restorers are puzzled and jealous about the restoration job you've had done on that old Dusenberg. It's almost as it were new. What's the secret?” “It is new,” Flambeau said. “The secret is to buy a dollar jug. A fifty cent jug is all right for people, but it just isn't enough for a snazzy speedster like that.”

  But the interviewer didn't seem to understand her.

  “Why don't we produce The World Under Louisiana Haystack again?” she asked her producer. “That was a movie a girl could really put herself into.” “But, Flambeau, The World Under Louisiana Haystack was never finished,” the producer said. “There were difficulties with it.”

  “Let's finish it then,” she said. “The difficulties are the best part.”

  They set about the task of finishing it. There were real difficulties. The resolution of these difficulties might take all things to the end of this account, or to the end of the world, whichever came first.

  “This is a job that calls for another jug,” Flambeau said. “It may even call for a dollar jug this time.”

  Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson (great nephew of Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson) had won the first of the Presidential primaries, that of Massachusetts and Connecticut Plantations. So he was off and running ahead. He took Florida State Conglomerate. That was expected. He took Los Angeles State, and that had not been expected. It was a big one.

  Johnson was speaking well and often, nine times a day. It was the Golden Guff itself, and no one could do it like your Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson. In this, he reminded old-timers and historians of his own great uncle the President Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson. That Ex-President, by the by, was unavailable for comment or for appearance.

  But the young Johnson campaigned energetically and wantonly, if not always well. He wore a scrape and grass sandals when he campaigned in the Chicano districts, though the Chicanos did not wear these things and many of them had never seen them before. He was decked out in Navajo bead-work and a Sioux war-bonnet when he spoke at a supermarket in Indianapolis. Indianapolis really meant Indian City, didn't it? Johnson went equipped with skullcap and nine phrases of Yiddish into the adjacent Jewish suburbs. He wore a miter and alb and carried a crosier when he went into an Irish Catholic neighborhood; and he offered what he said was holy water from Exendine Creek. “Nine doctors out of ten state that it is more efficacious than Lourdes water,” he declared, “and it contains eleven more additives.” He wore a zebra-hide cape and crocodile-tooth necklace when he entered the chocolate suburbs. “For our common African heritage,” he would say. “One of my ancestors was Postmaster General for the Pharaoh Ra-ta-ta.”

  He opened a wild but calculated bloodletting against the other candidates of his own party. “They have turned the House of Our Fathers into the Outhouse of our Fathers,” he would roar in his golden roar. There was nothing gingerly about his attacks; he left no stone unthrown in his assaults. What matter? He could always unlet the blood, he could always unthrow the stones again when there might come the proper time for it. Often he hummed to himself that old healing melody ‘Will you love me in September as you hated me in May?’ Of course they'd all love him in September, if he won the nomination. Their heads would roll else.

  He won the primary in Chicago Metropolitan, a high-number delegate state. He won it narrowly by means of a little over a million votes that came in or were discovered very late, the morning after the voting. They had been unaccountably overlooked in the tabulations of the evening before.

  He most handily won the primary in Missouri Valley, that grand old state with its capital in Omaha. He had lost a few along the way, but we will not mention those. He was leading, it was believed, and he should increase his lead in what was still a close race.

  Then it came, a threatening and chilling storm of a cloud no bigger that a man's thorax. While yodeling at Swiss Colony Wisconsin, Johnson's golden voice broke; it broke into a cavernous old-man cough. Several rude persons laughed. This could go badly. There is nothing so contagious or epidemic as laughter. Johnson got his broken voice temporarily fixed at nearby Koffkoff Wisconsin, the cough drop capital of the world. But he knew that the fixing was only temporary.

  “I'll have to get hold of that Licorice Man,” C. H. A. Johnson told himself. “I'd better get another big jug of it. That'll come to seventy-one cents, taking the exemption for excise tax. I'll have to find a way to afford it.”

  3.

  Deprived of elixir, a Horse,

  A Pitch, a Pres, a Lassie;

  And three erupted crass and coarse,

  And one was kind of classy.

  �
��Boomer Flats Ballads

  There would have to be confrontation. And just how does one go about arranging a confrontation with a vagabond peddler like the Licorice Man who has no regular residence except the misty, muddy, half-mythical place named Boomer Flats?

  One uses intuition; one uses deduction; one uses that other thought process whose name is at the moment forgotten. And one does not eschew luck. (Is eschew a real word? It sure does sound funny, and it sure does look funny.)

  Young Cy Slocum had pitched in Dallas the day before, and he had lost three to nothing. Never before in his young career had he allowed three runs in one game. He had tired. And new gray hairs had been peppering his youthful head for several days now. He needed another jug of the Royal Licorice and he needed it quickly. He got permission to drive up to his ranch in the gypsum hills. He borrowed a car and drove. He stopped at his ranch only an hour or so. Then he drove at random. His receptors were open to any kind of signal. Half a dozen miles from his own ranch, on the fringe of the Big Blue-Stem country, by the side of a little country road where the gypsum begins to merge with honest limestone, Slocum saw an angry young colt who seemed not quite so young as he should be. This colt was widely known, and his name was Red Licorice.

  With the colt was his owner, a man whom Slocum had known casually for a dozen years.

  “Are we looking for the same thing, Cy?” the owner asked.

  “I think so,” said the young, but not quite so young as he should have been, Cy Slocum.

  “Red got a package from that devilish old codger,” the colt-owner said. “It was full of either pills or dung-beetle rollings. Red took a few of them. They didn't have the same restoring effect on him as the original elixir had had. They had an effect quite otherwise, unique, and unpleasant. I can't stand a horse when he gets too smart.”

  Red Licorice snorted his contempt for his owner, for the old codger who had sent him either pills or dung-beetle rollings, and for the woozy world itself.

  Eleven new, beautiful, qualified, turreted, bulletproof cars approached in caravan. They stopped by the pitcher, the colt-owner, and the angry young colt. Out of the cars bound presidential candidate Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson, a speechwriter, a lawyer who was also bodyguard, a chauffeur, and twenty-one security men.

  “Disperse, all of you!” the head security man ordered. “We are commandeering this area. An important meeting will take place here soon.”

  “I think so too,” the colt-owner said, “but I'll not be commandeered into or out of anything.”

  “You are standing in a public roadway,” the head security man said. “And the road was built with mixed funds that included five percent Federal monies. Therefore, we as Federal men can commandeer this region.”

  The colt-owner took one step backward.

  “I'm on my land now,” he said. “Let's see you commandeer me.”

  “It is all right,” Candidate C. H. A. Johnson said. “I know the colt and both the men. All three are solid citizens.”

  “Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You'll put your foot in it some way.”

  (Johnson wasn't supposed even to say Good Morning unless he read it off a piece of paper handed to him by his speechwriter.)

  A golden-haired young, or almost young, lady came over the hill in a Dusenberg car. The Dusenberg also was almost young, but it had developed a bad cough. It stopped and died there. “So, that's the way it is,” said the almost young lady. “A sharp young pitcher (but not quite as sharp as he was for a while) who is his own grandfather; a rock-headed colt who's had to run on his father's hoofs; a presidential candidate trying to stand out of his great uncle's shadow, but whose shadows grow longer when evening comes and they will swallow a man. Who are we kidding? We are all second-timers. We are all in the same barkentine. But the Licorice Man will be along in a moment. I heard the hoof-beats of the horse Peegosh; the hoofs never quite touch the road, you know.”

  And the Licorice Man, the Medicine Wagon, and the horse Peegosh had arrived suddenly in clattering silence (the clatter was on a different plane; these weren't normal people, not the Licorice Man, not the Wagon, not the horse Peegosh). “Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” said candidate Johnson. “that will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise tax exemption.”

  “Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You'll put your foot in it some way.” The speechwriter rapidly wrote out something on a sheet of paper and handed it to Candidate Johnson.

  “Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” Candidate Johnson read dutifully. “That will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise tax exemption.”

  “My equine associate would like a dollar jug of the elixir this time,” the colt-owner said. “I'm afraid that the effect of the fifty cent jug has worn a little thin.”

  “I'll have to take a stock of it to last me through the season,” Pitcher Cy Slocum said. “And I'll have to have a firm guarantee of sufficient supply every springtime. You let me run short, Licorice. They tagged me for seven hits yesterday, and that's something that never happens.”

  “I'm not sure that I want any more for myself,” said Flambeau La Flesche. She was the golden-haired almost-young lady. “If I ever do want it and want it bad enough, I could probably make it myself. After all, I know the one thing that makes a mud-goose cry, and I'm probably the only reanimated one who does know. I never did use that story, Licorice. Really, it was a little too raw to tell.

  “But Dusie here needs a jug now. This poor car has been suffering all sorts of ailments for the last several days.”

  “No, you'd not be able to make it yourself, Flambeau,” the Licorice Man said. “Licorice can mean so many different things. I alone use the genuine licorice, and I alone know which it is. Do you believe it is the lykyrriza or wolf-root? Or that it is the glykyrrhiza or sweet root? Try them and see.”

  “Enough of this,” said Cy Slocum the pitcher. “You have customers waiting while you jabber. A large dollar jug, please, and enough more to carry me through the season.”

  “There's only one jug of it left,” said the Licorice Man, “and I'm going to pour it into the car Dusie. There won't be any more of it. I'm going on to other things.”

  “Aw horse hokey!” snorted the horse Red Licorice.

  “There's got to be more of it. Say, how come that horse can talk?” Cy Slocum asked in angry puzzlement.

  “I sent him some smart pills,” the Licorice Man said. “That's what I'm working on now. Anyone else want to try some smart pills?”

  “No, I sure don't. I'm plenty smart now,” Cy said emphatically. “I want the elixir!”

  “Smart pills are the one thing I don't need,” declared the candidate Johnson. “I've got more smart than anyone I've ever seen. I want some of the youth elixir. I want all of it!”

  “Would smart pills make me smart enough to do the tough scene in The World Under Louisiana Haystack?” little golden-head asked.

  “No, Flambeau. The World Under Louisiana Haystack should not be finished. Accolade Revisited shouldn't have been finished either, you know, and it was. Too bad. Here, try these. One is a smart pill. The other is a dung-beetle rolling. Take one.”

  “They look just alike.”

  “Not to a really fine eye.”

  Flambeau La Flesche took one of the offered pills, plopped it in her month, chewed it and swallowed it. The Licorice Man dropped the other pellet into the tank of the Dusie and also poured the world's last jug of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder in there.

  “Thanks,” said the Dusie, setting its motor to going with the sweetest purr ever. “I needed that.”

  “You gave Dusie the smart pill,” Flambeau said. “Then I ate the dung-beetle rolling.”

  “I want a jug of that elixir!” pitcher Cy Slocum swore, “or I'll spill conman brains and horse brains and wagon brains all over the road.” With his terrific speed he began to rifle fist-sized rocks at the contraption. They didn't reach it. There seemed to be an airy but impermeable s
hield around horse and wagon and Licorice Man. They were a special case, and the rocks fropped back from them harmlessly.

  “Fire on them, security men,” Candidate Johnson barked with his full golden voice. “Withholding the elixir is a warlike act against myself. Fire on them!”

  Twenty-one men raised service revolvers and fired all together in one grand volley. And twenty-one bits of long lead bounced back from the airy shield and rolled around in the roadway.

  “Give me a jug or I'll kick the three of you to pieces!” Red Licorice swore madly in horsey hate. And he began to let fly hoofs at the withholders.

  “Watch it, horse-face,” the Licorice Man said rather testily. “Watch it, junior,” the paint-flaked medicine wagon said.

  “Watch it, buster,” the horse Peegosh neighed. “Two can play that kicking game, and I've never been bested.” Peegosh, it was now seen, had hoods of flame, and they did not quite reach down to the roadway. Neither did the wheels of the wagon, or the feet of the Licorice Man.

  Nobody ever heard such a display of shouting, bawling, snorting, neighing, and just plain bad manners as followed. It was enough to make one ashamed of being a man or horse. Slocum beat on the airy shield with now bloody fists and shouted vile obscenities. Pray that his youthful admirers never glimpse that side of the man! Johnson belched sulphur-flame and gave that merchandising conglomerate very hell as he ordered volley after volley to be fired into it. And the ignoble Red Licorice was the worst of them all, cursing in man and horse talk, stomping, gnashing, making dirty noises. That horse should never have been given smart pills.