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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “This will be loud,” said Jim Snapjudge, “but it will not be comic.”

  Shadows of gone dogs or coming events were lurking and skulking about the floor, too low to be clarified by the gas lights. A river loon sounded outside. The Buckaroo stood very tall and bulky and dark and formidable, and he imposed silence on the room. There was a threatening bulge in his right-hand coat pocket and the monicker of that bulge was ‘murder’. Curiously there was another and only slightly smaller bulge in his left-hand coat pocket; and it was the left-hand bulge that the Buckaroo now drew out and held awkwardly, for he did not seem to be left-handed.

  At his table, Godfrey Halskragen regarded the Buckaroo with paling eyes and wary ears: (it is the ears that tell the Prejudicial Analyst so icy, ah, the nervous, waiting lobe, the graceful tragus); and the very shadow of an amoebic wink disfigured that apprehensive face.

  Teresa Tuesdaychild watched the Buckaroo with a dusky grin, but a little shiver ran right through that grin. She was either uneasy or excited by the appearance of the Buck. All sorts of vagrant and subtle hues played in and out of her primary colors.

  The music in the other room had changed its motif. Now it was menace music and it built to a climaxing mood. Then the Buckaroo exploded in voice and action.

  “Caught the two of you here!” he howled, and a not-quite-right gun was in his left hand. “Die, pig, die.”

  “Shriek!” cried Teresa.

  “Bang!” cried the explosion. And the gunshot hit Godfrey Halskragen in the face and head.

  Gore! Bright red gore, dark red gore, serum-colored gore, brain gore all over Godfrey! A moan, probably a death moan, from the bespattered man with the gushing head! Smokey smell of blood and of burnt flesh!

  What? Here was Fate vindicated indeed. But could so much blood some from one pistol shot?

  “It's wrong, something has gone wrong!” Jim Snapjudge was complaining in a voice that had gone reedy. “The blood-smell is wrong, and it's too clotted. There cannot be that much splattered out of one little bullet hole. And the gun should have cried ‘Bang!’ The man shouldn't have cried ‘Bang!’ Fate will not be mocked. Make it right somebody or there will be terrible retribution.”

  “Damn you, Buck!” Godfrey Halskragen howled at the big Buckaroo. “This is my best and only suit. Yeah, and it's my best and only face.”

  “Bang! Bang!” Buck cried out the explosion noises again, but the big water pistol with its load of Old Hickory Barbecue Sauce and Vinegar and Ketchup had jammed. Buck applied great power and fervor to it. Then it exploded into the primariest color of them all and completely covered the face and head and hair of Teresa Tuesdaychild with a mélange of writhing red sauce.

  “Ruined, ruined, now I can never marry!” she whooped. Then there was hilarity and happy pandemonium throughout the Ruination Bar and Grill and Candy-House! Most of the people who came there knew the Buckaroo and always they awaited an elaborate visual joke of some sort from him. Towels were brought to the victims, and the chortling laughter of all present was a full thing.

  But not of all present either. There was one person there who was not touched by the high comedy of the low joke. Jim Snapjudge was in a gibbering, whey-faced shock.

  “It is wrong, it is all wrong,” he moaned. “The shadows show the way it should be, but the primaries have it all wrong. Look, people, do as the shadows do.

  The shadows — the three shadows: — one of them was supine on the floor and bleeding a little stream of shadow-blood from a small hole in the head; one of them was sitting on the floor and rocking and moaning out of an exploded face; and the third shadow had drawn itself up into an impossible tallness and was shaking and swelling with fear and shock with the frustrated attempt to flee (but the tall shadow could not flee while its primary remained.)

  And the three primaries were cleaning themselves up with an air of great amiability and gaiety. Jim Snapjudge went resolutely over to the faulting trio.

  “Since we all of us are a part of Fate, then we all have the duty to guard the province of Fate,” he said pedantically. “You, Buckaroo, you still have the proper gun, the real gun, in your right-hand coat pocket. Take it out.”

  “What, long-nose, what?” Buck asked startled, but he took the proper gun out and held it in his huge right hand.

  “Oh, you've brought it, Buck,” Godfrey said. “I'll give it a good going-over. I told you I was a gun-smith by hobby. If it acts as if it wasn't to hang fire then it's dangerous. I'll check over the whole firing mechanism.”

  “You, Buckaroo,” Snapjudge said. “You know that you have two bullets in that gun. Shoot Godfrey in the head with the first one and kill him. You know that that is what the fate and prejudice of both of you have ordained that you should do. Then try to shoot Teresa in the head with the second one. It will hang fire. Try it again, and try it the third time. The chamber of the gun will explode then, and the face of Teresa will explode from the same action. And you will be badly injured yourself. I have already seen all this happen in a valid and prejudicial vision. Now do it, and let this terrible and ridiculous mistake be righted.”

  “What, what, what?” the bewildered Buckaroo jabbered.

  “Give me that gun!” Godfrey ordered, and with a rapid movement he took the gun from the Buckaroo. “Damn you, Buck, for a minute there you looked as though you might do it. Oh damn those spooky eyes of yours!” he yelped in relief as he broke the gun and unloaded it.

  “Whoop, har, har, whar, whar whar, you thought I'd do it!” Buck chortled and howled with giant joy (was it possible that there were touches of horror and relief in that boisterous joy?), “Man, you should have seen the spooky eyes on you!”

  “Little long-nose, little bug-eyes,” Teresa was saying to Jim Snapjudge. “You get out of here! Get a long ways out of here! We hate you. We hate everything about you and your insanity. Mr. Ruination, come throw this damned whey-faced bum out!”

  And other people there said other abusive things to and about Jim Snapjudge. The common people have always understood the character and use of prejudice, and they had strong prejudice against Snapjudge. Prejudice is a tool-weapon, honed for thousands of years, that is designed to cut a guy down and cut a guy up. And it will do this every time if it is employed with determination and steadiness.

  So George Ruination had to throw Jim Snapjudge out of the establishment, but he was not too rapid about it. Holding Snapjudge by collar and the seat of the pants, he allowed him a last colloquy. “You know that the man should have been shot to death, and the face of the girl should have been ruined,” Snapjudge said in a begging voice. “That was the judgment and decision of prejudicial fate from the beginning of the world.”

  “Oh, I know that, Snapjudge,” George said, “but I also know that fate can be subverted in a few neighborhoods of this world. As to Rhineland here, this is the case: Originally God had jurisdiction over Ohio and the Devil had jurisdiction over Kentucky; and Rhineland was then a part of Kentucky. Then the course of the river changed on one stormy night and Rhineland ended up on the Ohio side. Neither God nor the Devil ever laid claim to Rhineland in its new situation though, and fate has had a very insecure time here with no higher jurisprudence to appeal to. I imagine that a similar account could be given of most of the other unruly sections of other towns. Well, on your way!” And George Ruination, swinging Jim Snapjudge by his collar and the seat of his pants, threw him out the door and into the night in a beautiful arching trajectory.

  “Watch out for the broken plank. A man can get a bad fall there!” Ruination called after the flying Snapjudge as he slammed the door.

  And Jim Snapjudge did get a bad fall at the broken plank; he fell right through the wooden walkway that went out over the water. He fell into that water that is called Ruination's Duck Pond and Cess-Pool; it is a small, splintered-off backwater of the Ohio River. And Snapjudge drowned there.

  That had been his fate and prejudice from the beginning. But his original fate hadn't included that part about h
im been thrown out by his collar and the seat of his pants.

  That broken plank was out of a tree that had been cut in Scioto County, Ohio; and the tree had belonged to one of those sacred, talking groves. Now the talking plank began to moan ‘A Prophet is dead! A Prophet is dead!’; but nobody in the Ruination Bar and Grill and Candy House paid any attention. That plank had been a noisy nuisance for a long time.

  And on Ruination's Duck Pond, the little ducks, waking up into a new world the next day, found the body of Jim Snapjudge at first morning. They gaggled and splashed around Snapjudge. They asked him questions in their way, the first friend they had found in the new world that day. They did not find his nose too long or his eyes too bugged. They did not find his visage too bloated or purpled. And they did not discover him to be either cold or unlikable.

  They were unprejudiced little ducks.

  Heart Grow Fonder

  “Our new neighbor on the west is a creep,” Simon Radert said sourly, “and what this neighborhood doesn't need is another creep.” “No, you're the creep in residence,” said his sly wife Norah. “Can't stand the competition, can you? But Simon, he doesn't look like a creep to me. He sure doesn't creep around. He bounces around on his heels, and he's as open as a Dutch door in a Payne County wind. His name is Swag, and does he ever have a swagger! I wish you were like him. And that wife of his, Buxom Jean (that's really her name), wow, I wish I were like her. They sure seem to have a lot of fun at their house.”

  “Let's swap houses, then, if that's the way you want it.”

  “Would that work, Simon? Let me think about it a little. I don't think that would do much good. We'd still be the same people wouldn't we?” (Simon was fond of his sly wife. This is a factor in the whole business.)

  “Yes, we'd still be almost the same, Norah. Maybe not quite. But he's still a creep. I'm just going to take a look at what that creep put out there. But I'm going to do it without looking like I'm looking. And if he comes bouncing out again with a bunch of conversation in his mouth and mind, I'll leave him there talking to that idiot air.”

  “Walk out backwards real fast, Simon, and he'll think you're hurrying back in.”

  It was Tuesday when the people in that block put out their yard trash and their magazines for the trash men to pick up. (Monday they put out dry garbage; Wednesday they put out cans; Thursday they put out wet garbage in plastic sacks; Friday they put out newspapers.) Simon Radert went out and pulled a couple more tomato and pepper vines that were finished, now that it had frosted. He threw them into the big plastic container that he used for his yard trash. Then he looked over the fence (red climber rose vines on his side of the fence; honeysuckle growing on Swag's side) to see what that creep Henry H. Swag had put out for the trash men.

  Quite a few magazines. There was Wife Swappers Weekly; there was Psychological Adventures; there were Mind Wanderer, Get Out of Yourself, Changing Iconographies of Identity, Greener Grass, and Straw-Men.

  “What kind of creep would read that stuff?” Simon hooted out loud.

  “I would, I do, I read and recommend it,” Henry H. Swag burst out, bouncing around on his heels and coming from nowhere at all. “Why don't you take some of these, Radert? Better you take them than the trash men. Here's a good one. You go in for wife-swapping?” Swag was a little bit pudgy, a little bit short.

  “No, dammit, no!” Simon said heatedly.

  “No need to get angry, friend. It can be a lot of fun. And have you ever had a good look at my wife, Buxom Jean?”

  Simon Radert began to get a funny feeling. Yes, he had got some good looks at Buxom Jean, and yet not nearly good enough. Buxom Jean had set something going in his system ever since the Swags moved in Sunday evening. If it were not that Simon was so fond of his own sly wife Norah…

  Henry Swag had also set some paperback books out for the trash men. They were books like Change Your Mind, You'll Like It, In Another Man's Shoes, People Exchange Mechanism (anyone with high-school mathematics can follow the procedures here); there was Self Renewal, and If A Body.

  “This isn't the Tuesday the trash men pick up paperback books,” Simon said. “Only yard trash and magazines. It's only the third Tuesday of the month that they pick up the paperbacks.”

  “Oh, I didn't know,” Henry Swag said. “Why don't you take them and read them, then?” He put the books into Simon's hands. “And have one of my cards,” Swag said.

  “I have four of them already.”

  “Good start. I have seven sorts of cards, all different.”

  Simon took the card. It said “Henry H. Swag. Mind-Changer. Let Me Change Your Mind! Highly Scientific Methods. By Appointment Only.”

  And then Henry H. Swag had gone off bouncing on his heels, and Simon Radert stood there, with his hands full, and with a look on his face as if his hands were full of ordure.

  “Creep, creep, creep,” Simon said.

  “Oh, that's the way a baby grackle goes,” Buxom Jean Swag said (where had she come from?), “and the babies of all the other blackbirds go ‘Cheep, cheep, cheep.’ Are you a bird-watcher?”

  How did such chattering people slip up on one so suddenly and silently? And where had Buxom Jean come from, anyhow? Buxom Jean didn't exactly bounce around on her heels. She bounced everywhere with everything. She took the magazine Wife Swappers Weekly and put it with the books in Simon's hands.

  “Read it,” she said. “You might want to do it. We do it all the time, but our bunch does it a different way than you're thinking. There's an advertisement in the magazine about the way we do it, but you won't understand what it means unless you already know about it. Isn't it a shame that we've lived here ever since Sunday night and here it's Tuesday morning and we're not near well-enough acquainted?”

  “A shame, yes, perhaps, lady. I will read these things, I think, though it isn't at all certain that I will. And it may be that our paths will cross again.”

  “If you ‘change your mind,’ come see me,” Buxom Jean Swag bubbled. “You have to already know that to understand it. That's kind of a joke, Radert. Don't you get it?”

  “No,” Simon Radert said. And he went into his house with an anger that he couldn't explain.

  “Mmmm, how do you like Buxom Jean?” Norah asked him, and she stuck out her sly tongue. “Oh, she's got a lot of stuff,” Simon said. “All in the wrong places, though.”

  “I don't think so, Simon,” sly wife Norah said. “With Buxom Jean there aren't any wrong places.”

  It was time to go. Simon Radert went crosstown to his business building to work. He liked his job. It used to worry him that he liked it. He didn't worry about that now, and he didn't care what things people might say. He still liked it. It was a paper-shuffling job, and he shuffled papers until noon. Several times he had dipped into the paperback books, but then he had put all thought of creeps out of his mind.

  And at noon he went for a walk. It was bright and crisp and he liked it. Then, in the street there, the wind changed, and other things changed with it. Suddenly Simon was hit in the face by a complex funny feeling. Part of that feeling was the creeps coming back into his mind, and they came with a hint of menace. Part of it was the same feeling that he had experienced that morning when Swag had said, “And have you ever had a good look at my wife, Buxom Jean?” And part of it was a new and wild feeling that his clothes were too tight for him; too tight and too long. This was all wrong stuff. He wore good clothes. He got careful fits. And his clothes had fitted him fine all that morning: they had always fitted him fine. Something else was wrong, wrong, wrong. Simon was bewildered. He stopped in his tracks, and the latter wrongness stopped also. He walked on again, and there was something wrong, wrong, wrong about his walk.

  “Why the hell am I bouncing along on my heels?” he jabbered to himself. That silly bouncing was what was wrong with his walk. “That creep Swag has too much influence over me. It's almost as though he had hypnotized me.” Simon was angry, and almost afraid. “He's sure got under my skin, boy!” Whye
ver should Simon be bouncing along in the manner of a creepy neighbor that he had seen only a few times? But Simon went on and on with it, and he couldn't stop the insane gait. It went on for nearly an hour, and then Simon broke the pattern only by angry effort.

  “Get out of my mind, you creep, out, out, out!” Simon cried aggressively. And suddenly, like the breaking of a bubble, it was all over with. Simon walked with his own seemly step and didn't bounce like a simian or creep. And the illusion that his clothes misfitted him had also vanished. They fitted him well, quite well. They were good clothes, and he was in accord with them. He was in accord with the whole world again. He wheeled happily around and returned to his own place, breasting cheerful flocks of people and pigeons.

  “It's nice to be home in myself again,” he said, and he didn't have any idea what he meant by such a thing. But the afternoon went well for him. Once more he shuffled papers: carefully shuffling; canny and custodial papers. One can make a lot of money shuffling papers. There's a real fulfillment in the cryptic and consequential things. Radert was on the verge of growing quite rich in a gradual and pleasant manner; his sort of paper-shuffling paid well. He liked the labor and he liked the richness accruing to himself.

  In the evening he left the business with a feeling of postponed pleasure, and he arrived home in an eerie sort of anticipation. He felt himself eagerly waited for by his sly and pretty (and often passionate) wife. It wasn't a frequent evening feeling. Usually the signals that came from her to him were much more slender things, more of the theme of “Waiting for you? What for?”

  But tonight Norah was really happy to see him. She smooched and smirked and purred and sang little songs. She entangled herself with him.

  “You have been so nice to me, now I will try to be just as nice to you.” She smiled and caressed. Sly Norah was a delight at her best. And whenever she was less than her best, it may have been two people's fault.