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

by R. A. Lafferty

“Well doggone, guys, I'll treat,” Elroy said suddenly. He went across the street to the Whistle Stop grocery store. He bought a mastiff-size box of Wigby's Dog Chunks for a dollar and nineteen cents, tax included. He brought it back across the street and filled five dog bowls with it, and it wasn't even a quarter empty. There was a park department faucet there, and he added water to the chunks, and the dogs went about the happy business of eating them.

  “Don't worry, Donnicker,” Elroy said. “There's plenty left. And Curtis will win you a ‘Donnicker’ bowl and bring it out pretty soon. Then you can have your feast.”

  Bascomb Whizzer himself, the owner of the park, came out and sat with Elroy Hunt on the bench.

  “Ah, it looks like a good season,” Whizzer said. “Everything is greatly improved, and our theme for this year is ‘Science of Today.’ How do you like the park this year?”

  “I haven't been in yet,” Elroy confessed. “I may just possibly go in later.”

  “I thought you always came early and stayed late,” Whizzer said. “And the doors, the highly scientific doors, how do you like them?”

  “I think they're a fraud,” Elroy Hunt said.

  “No. That's impossible,” Whizzer said. “They are absolutely scientific in their selection. They let in all people of every sort. They let in most other things. And they keep out all dogs. That's because of the new state law that we can't have dogs in an amusement park. And the doors can't be fooled, and they can't make a mistake.”

  “Everything can make mistakes,” Elroy maintained. “And if one door should make a mistake, suffer a malfunction of its mechanism, then all the doors would suffer the same malfunction, since, I presume, you have them all wired together in some manner.”

  “Absolutely not,” Whizzer said. “The doors work independently of each other. A fault in one door, if it should happen once in a billion times maybe, would not have any effect on the working of the other doors at all. What one door says is right is right. And what all seven doors say is right has got to be right. There is just no way to argue with science when it is right. There isn't a human in the world who can't go through those doors. There isn't a dog in the world who can.” And Whizzer himself went back inside his park with that cocksure walk of his. The door closed very slowly after him, and Elroy—

  “I swear that damned door giggled at me!” he said furiously. And he was thoroughly miserable.

  Curtis and the other boys came out again after a while, and Curtis had two dog bowls with him.

  “Here's yours, Donnicker,” he called, and Donnicker accepted it with glad yelps. And Elroy Hunt filled it with Wigby's Dog Chunks and water. And Donnicker began to eat with the special joy that only Wigby's can bestow.

  “The other bowl has ‘Elroy’ on it,” Curtis said. “It's the only other one they would let me throw for. They said that I had to quit after that, that I had to be a ringer. Does anyone know a dog named Elroy?”

  “No,” said Mr. Hunt. “But my own name happens to be Elroy.”

  They whooped and laughed on that one.

  “You, Mr. Hunt?” Curtis guffawed. “Well, do you want it?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Curtis gave him the bowl. Then Curtis and his friends went on home, followed by most of the dogs with their bowls.

  “That Mr. Hunt sure is a nice fellow,” Curtis said as they went away. “He treated all the dogs to Wigby's Chunks, and he took the ‘Elroy’ bowl for a joke.”

  The dog Donnicker was still eating his chunks, and one other dog (a good judge of character and circumstance) waited slyly with his empty bowl. Elroy gave him some more chunks. Then he filled Donnicker's bowl again.

  “They look good,” Elroy Hunt said. “They sure do.” He filled his own “Elroy” bowl with Wigby's Chunks and water. He didn't have any spoon or fork to eat them with, and his face wasn't built as well as the dogs' for eating directly out of the bowl. Nevertheless, he began to eat the chunks. And they were good.

  Elroy calculated in his head: A mastiff-size box for a dollar and nineteen Cents. And look how many servings could be got out of it! It would do me for more than a week, probably a week and a half, I could eat for less than a dollar a week. That's something to think about. And they're good.

  His face wasn't shaped right for eating out of a bowl, but it would become easier in time. And he could always use a spoon or a fork when he ate the chunks at home. But he probably wouldn't.

  “This is all right, this is all right,” he said. “I guess I'll just eat them out of the bowl forever.” And he continued to eat the tasty dog chunks.

  Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight

  Delicious bird, and tree unkind,

  And swallowed storms and matters murky,

  However find the truth behind?

  You find it out by talking turkey.

  —Winding Stair Woomagoos

  “We are now in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle of weather phenomena,” Hector Voiles said with that breeze-showing voice of his. “This is the area where storms and inversions and highs disappear and are never seen again.”

  “There is one characteristic of triangles in this area,” said Lloyd Rightfoot. “They are unstable. The triangle will collapse right along here, within a mile either way. And the three elements of the triangle will become four.”

  “Oh, is the fourth man following us?” Andrew Widepicture asked. “I hadn't felt his presence today. I do now. He isn't following us though. He's up ahead.”

  Really there wasn't anything preternatural about the game warden Will Hightrack joining any group of hunters coming up from the Jack's Fork into the foothills. And groups of hunters are almost always groups of three. This group was made up of Hector Voiles, a weatherman, Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, and Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist. They all liked to foot-scuff around in the Winding Stair Mountains, and they often carried firearms as an excuse.

  “I hadn't paid too much attention to the Bermuda Triangle aspects myself,” Hector said. “I was too close to the clouds to see the weather. But I've reported an awful lot of the disappearances without seeing the connection, and other weathermen have made the connections. The weather is always stormier and more sudden on the other side of the fence, you know? And the weathermen have their own other-side-of-the-fence publication, Cloud Nine D, and it handles weather wrinkles from all around, all the odd facts that don't fit in. Some of the stuff is pretty curious. Several of the men want me to do a piece on the Bermuda Triangle aspect of this corner of the Winding Stair Mountains.”

  The Winding Stair Mountains are pleasantly junky little mountains, very pretty, but small-scale and in no way unique.

  “Be a little more clear, Hector,” Lloyd Rightfoot said. “What are you trying to imply with your talk of ‘Bermuda Triangle’ weather phenomenon here?”

  “Oh, gathering storms do disappear here. They disappear as if something gobbled them right up, or as if they were sucked into big holes in the air or in the mountain. There can be a pretty active tumbling storm moving right along and spreading and gaining strength. And then (such a thing shouldn't happen, of course) that storm will cease to spread. It will narrow, rather. It will narrow further, and it will grow in intensity. Then it will become quite concentrated and powerful so that it seems certain to break into thunderburst or cyclone. And then, at its most intense and threatening, it will absolutely disappear; and there will not be a trace or a track of it left.”

  “Where and when do these things happen?” Andrew Widepicture asked. He was skeptical but interested. Cosmologists are interested in almost everything.

  “They happen right around here,” Hector told them, “always within a radius of one or two miles of here. And it happens about once a year, right about now, mostly in the month of March, but sometimes in April. Not every year, but almost every year. Really, storms and incipient storms do disappear here without a trace, and their disappearances violate the law of conservation of meteorological energy.”

  “That I'll n
ot believe,” Lloyd Rightfoot said. “When anything is reported as disappearing without a trace, then the report is false. Have you been putting out false reports, Hector? Or is it that you cannot recognize traces? Nothing disappears. But some things transmute so strangely that they seem to have disappeared. Don't your active and tumbling storms transmute into something else when they are gobbled up, Hector?”

  “Yes, they do. They transmute into cold, into very sudden and quite severe cold. This cold is always narrowly localized, of course. And, for that matter, so are the storms.”

  “Like the quick-freeze spell we ran into last year, Hector?” Andrew Widepicture asked. “That was just about this time of year.”

  “It was about a week later,” Hector said, “the latest freeze I remember here. I won't say that it was the latest freeze ever recorded here, because it wasn't recorded. I was talked out of recording it. It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should have been recorded. And the report would have been tainted by the fact that only myself and two anacronies (yourselves) encountered it. There would be people who said that we had drunk off too many cans of Old Frosty during our day's hunt.”

  “How have other weathermen come onto the storm-disappearances?” Rightfoot asked.

  “Oh, it's been happening for several generations, all the generations that records go back here. And it's almost always observed by several fellows. And weathermen are natural browsers of old records, besides having long noses and long ears and long instruments.”

  “Your swallowed storms don't seem to blow me down,” Rightfoot said. “What I would like to find out is about a most peculiar tree in this region. It's a consistent legend, and a consistent legend has to have a pragmatic kernel to it. They say that this tree produces — No, they say that it almost produces a bloody-awful-red fruit. But, happily, something always kills that fruit. The tree, I have heard the bark-brained say, is of no known species. Oh wood lice plague them all! A tree has to be of a known species, or we will name it and make it known. I want to get a look at that tree with the flesh-red fruit that never develops.”

  “What I would like to find about is a most peculiar cock-crow in this region,” Andrew Widepicture said. “It also is a consistent legend, so I cannot throw it away completely. But a cattle-killing crow takes a lot of believing.”

  “Crows have killed small calves,” Rightfoot the naturalist said, “but these are mostly misborn calves that are dying anyhow. Crows have been known to eat the eyes and even the tongues of such calves.”

  “According to the bird-brained, this most peculiar crow carries full-grown cattle off in its claws and beak,” Widepicture said, “and it will eat a grown bull at a single roosting.”

  “Holy crow!” Hector Voiles cried. “Your legends have gobbled up my legend.”

  “What are you fellows hunting?” the game warden Will Hightrack demanded as he appeared in their rocky path and collapsed their triangle by becoming the fourth man. “You cannot in good conscience be out gunning at all. There is nothing at all in season right now.”

  “Storm-Cock is in season, Hightrack,” Widepicture said. “Storm-Cock has a very short season, less than a month, and it hasn't been hunted near enough. Storm-Cock and Freeze-Bird! You show us a regulation that we can't hunt them.”

  “Ah, I may be hunting some long-tongued town-trotters this very day,” said game warden Hightrack. “But it's said about the birds that you mention that they never saw the inside of an egg.”

  “Holy crow is in season,” Widepicture said, “but the holy crow season is appointed backwards. It's that crow that does the hunting.”

  It was a nice sunny day there. Sometimes the breeze showed a slight edge to it, but the hills and the trees and the brush exuded warmth, as did the air between the breezes.

  “If town gentlemen could shoot, I wouldn't object to one of them shooting a very big wild tom turkey,” game warden High track said. “But I'd object to any of them getting a closer shot than the present eighty yards. I'd object to more than one of them shooting. And I'd object to myself pointing the shot out to any of those gentlemen. But town gentlemen cannot see and they cannot shoot, so that feast will not come to the board.”

  “I can see. I can shoot,” Andrew Widepicture said. He raised his rifle towards a blurred bit of mountain brush in the middle distance. He held his point for a measured five seconds. Then he squeezed off his shoot.

  “Good,” said Hightrack. “That will make a good meal for the six of us.”

  “You say ‘for the six of us,’ Will Hightrack,” Widepicture remarked then. “Will the dead turkey arrange for its own transportation? Yes, I see that it will.”

  A bit later, two men brought the shot turkey. These men were James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain. They were scrub-cattle ranchers and rock-acre farmers of the region.

  They were large, burly, brown men. They were Jack's Fork Choctaw Indian men.

  Yeah, it would take about an hour and a half to get that turkey ready. There aren't any experts at cooking a turkey or anything else in the open. Not white men, not Indians, not hunters, not wranglers, none of them are any good at it. There's a lot of large-mouth fakery about such cooking. Half the meat would be ruined, and half of it would be only half bad when finally prepared; but it was a big turkey, and the not-bad half would feed six men.

  It was pleasant noon or early afternoon. There was new moss grass there on the slopes, and old buffalo grass. There were rotten boles of hackberry and there were joints of cedar wood that didn't care whether they were burned or not. There was last season brush, and it all made a strong and smoky fire. If smoke would roast a turkey, that big tom would be roasted quickly. But it would be a while yet.

  So they talked turkey while the turkey cooked unevenly in pits and in rock ovens and on spits, and half of it would be ruined. “Turkey talk” doesn't mean exactly what is supposed of it. It isn't plain talk. Sometimes that gobble-gabble gets fancy.

  “It occurs to me that the three gentlemen don't know very much about what they have been talking about,” Thomas Wrong-Rain said. “It occurs to me that even the weatherman gentleman doesn't know why we have to have another freeze this year.”

  “No, we will not have another freeze this season,” weatherman Hector Voiles said. “The rattlesnakes have been coming out of their holes for a week. The swallows and swifts and cardinals have all arrived. The oak leaves are as big as squirrels' ears, so it is time to plant corn. We had a light freeze on the first day of spring, and it will have been the last one. We have had later freezes, two I believe, but all the signs say that we will not have another freeze this season.”

  “Then all the signs are mush-mouthed frauds,” Thomas Wrong-Rain maintained. “I did not say that we would have another freeze: say it that way and maybe we won't. I said that we have to have another freeze. The alternative to that is pretty shaggy. If it comes right down to the raw end and we haven't had that freeze, then we will have to make it freeze!”

  “What will you do, Wrong-Rain, have a rain dance or a frost dance to make it freeze?” Will Hightrack the game warden jeered.

  “No, no, no!” Wrong-Rain rejected that. “You're talking about Cherokees or some of the other brain-damaged Indians. Rain dances and frost dances are kid stuff. We will just get wrought up and make it freeze. I think it's down to the raw end already. I don't think the last freeze killed it. The tree's getting smarter. I have heard that the tree was already in bloom. If the last frost didn't kill it, then we will have to have another frost. It will be pretty direful if that tree is allowed to fruit.”

  “Wrong-Rain, I don't believe that even you can pull off a direful tale today,” Widepicture joshed, “not with the sun shining in the little Winding Stair Mountains, and a mocking bird mocking. And that edge on the breeze, it isn't much of an edge.”

  “Yeah, the sun does spoil it,” Wrong-Rain admitted. “Never mind, the sun
will cloud for the story if the story's true. Well, the tree is less than a hundred feet from here. All of you have seen this tree: I have shown it to all of you. But after persons have seen this tree, sometimes a breeze will blow. Then a fine red powder or bloom-dust will drift down on the people. This makes them forget all about the tree. Normally it's good that the people should forget. This saves them from worry and stomach-rot and irregularity and anxiety. But some of us have to remember about the tree. If it ever comes to full fruit, it will send a shadow like a blight over the whole land. This shadow will kill cattle, and it will kill people.”

  Andrew Widepicture laughed. Then his laugh crumbled a bit at its leading edge. The sun clouded, and it had clouded phenomenally fast. That meant that Wrong-Rain's story was true, except that he really wasn't telling a story. The mockingbird had left off its melody and was squalling and mewing fearfully like a catbird. And the edge of the breeze had reasserted itself.

  “How does the fruit, or the shadow of the fruit, kill people?” Widepicture asked. “By disease? By disaster? By ill luck?”

  “I don't know,” Wrong-Rain admitted. “It hasn't done it for two hundred years. But that's just because the tree has had its fruit frost-killed every year. I tell you, though, that the tree's getting smarter. It's got the weather tricked this year, unless we use tricks of our own. And our own tricks are about worn out.”

  “And that's the end of your story?” Rightfoot asked.

  “Yes. I wish it were the end of the tree and its fruit, too. That's the end of my story. The sun can come out again.”

  The sun came out again. And everything was again casual and unimpressive in the Winding Stair Mountains. The Winding Stairs were toy mountains. They were much less impressive even than the Potato Hills in an adjoining region. There was not any way that they could be taken seriously for long. There was no way that they could maintain a sinister aspect for more than brief minutes. These mountains were too light-minded. They were too little. So thought they all of them.