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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Hey, you know why the Winding Stair Mountains are so little?” James South-Forty asked them, coming in on their thoughts rather than on any words of theirs, in the way that the Jack's Fork Choctaws have. “They're so little because they're the biggest mountains that the bird could carry here, and here is where he wanted them. Even a big bird has his load limit.”

  “Are we now in consideration of the second plague of the Winding Stair Mountains?” Andrew Widepicture asked with an asymmetric grin.

  “I think so,” said James South-Forty. “Sometimes you lose me with that T-Town talk. Yeah, I'm talking about the Storm-Cock, the big bird. I don't know much about that tree that Tom Wrong-Rain talks about. I don't know how a shadow of a tree can kill cattle or people, but I know how Storm-Cock kills them. He eats them alive and he eats them dead. That's how he kills them. He's one big bird.”

  “How big is he, South-Forty?” Hector Voiles asked. James South-Forty extended his arms. South-Forty was about six feet four inches tall, and from extended fingertip to fingertip he was about the same.

  “About that big,” he said.

  “We might as well go look at the tree while South-Forty talks,” Wrong-Rain said listlessly, and then they were already beside that tree. It was no more than a hundred feet from the turkey fire. A little breeze blew as they first stood by the tree, and a little bit of bloom-dust drifted down on them so that they were unable to notice much about the tree. It unhinged their limbs and their minds, it gave them stomach-rot-and-apprehensions, it set them to shaking in every joint and tendon, but they didn't really notice much about it. The fruit was huge and horrible and livid red. It had a rank murder-smell to it, and it would kill you. That fruit had been frosted, and it had rotted. But it wasn't certain that it was quite dead. A small breeze blew again, and who notices details about a tree when there is that sort of bloom-dust in the air?

  “South-Forty, you indicated that Storm-Cock was between six feet and six and a half feet big,” Hector taunted. “Well, that's big for a bird, but it's not big enough for a bird that can carry off full-grown cattle. How many cattle can he carry off at a time, South-Forty?”

  “Three,” said James South-Forty. “One in his beak, and one in each claw. And sometimes he carries another one in — aw naw, I'd better not tell that. It'd be a lie.”

  “Ah, but look, James,” Widepicture reasoned. “The bird wouldn't be big enough to do it. A bird couldn't carry three or four head of grown cattle even if it had a six and a half foot wingspan.

  “Wingspan!” South-Forty gasped. “Who said wingspan? I showed you how big Storm-Cock was between the eyes. That's the way you always measure a storm-cock, between the eyes.”

  They all laughed then. “Seems like I whomped you all between the eyes with that joke,” South-Forty gloated. “You walked right into that one.”

  Another small breeze blew, and a critical amount of bloom-dust drifted down from the tree onto the six men. It was a sufficient quantity of dust so that none of them would remember seeing a tree with livid red undead fruit with a rank murder-smell. They wouldn't remember that tree at all, except Wrong-Rain.

  They went to eat the turkey meat. Some of the pieces were burnt on the outside and raw-red on the inside. Some of them were burnt all the way through. And a few of the chunks were pretty good.

  “When are you going to give me some good weather tips again, Wrong-Rain?” Hector Voiles asked as they chewed the stringy meat. “I have consistently been the worst weatherman in town for quite a while. They're going to give me the boot if I don't come up with something sharp.”

  “You'll be like that weatherman who had to move to California because the weather here didn't agree with him,” Lloyd Rightfoot said.

  “Maybe I'll phone you tonight,” Wrong-Rain said. “I may give you a tip on the weather that no one else would ever guess. Will you use it if I give you a real slanted tip?”

  “Yes, I will,” Hector promised. “I'll use it, whatever you give me.” They ate the rest of the turkey, except for a few pieces which were an extreme case.

  “Do you know what's the spookiest phrase that can be spoken?” Wrong-Rain asked them suddenly. “It's ‘The Bird in the Tree’, that's the spookiest of all. Think about it.” But they couldn't think whether he meant the bird they had just eaten or some other bird. They shot three or four rabbits for the hunting pouch. Then Voiles and Rightfoot and Widepicture scuffled down the little mountain and to their car.

  They left the livid and hating tree behind them; but they couldn't give a name to the menace because its bloom-dust had destroyed their memory of it.

  They got in the car and drove back to T-Town.

  Oh wayward storms, destroyed, demurred!

  Oh tree to gobble and defeat them!

  All caution lest the murder-bird

  Should bite folks clear in two and eat them!

  —Winding Stair Woomagoos

  Thomas Wrong-Rain phoned Hector Voiles at his studio at nine o'clock that night. “A hard freeze tonight in the Winding Stairs, Mr. Voiles,” Wrong-Rain said. “We have to have that. The fruit is alive. It would break out before dawn tomorrow. Remember that ‘The Bird in the Tree’ is the spookiest phrase of them all. It has got to freeze hard tonight. Have you any storms that we could use to fuel the freeze?”

  “A warm spell is blowing in, Wrong-Rain. It's strong and twisty, and it's probably dangerous. It could be a real nine-county thunderburst, or it could spin into half a dozen cyclones. It would be a pretty strong storm to swallow, even in the Bermuda Triangle.”

  “It should be strong enough to make a heavy freeze. Remember the bird that never saw the inside of an egg! That fruit has got to be killed! Announce that it will freeze, and that will put the pressure on for it.”

  “Wrong-Rain, this storm is a strong-warm. It's seventy-two degrees here now, and it's nine o'clock at night. Fun's fun, but you can't make a freeze out of this one, and it's too big to swallow. How do you make the changes, anyhow? Or are you the one?”

  “I'm one of the ones. When the menace appears, and we just got to have a hard freeze for the safety of the region, then I'm one of those who goes for it. I bust my mind for it, as did my father Joe Wrong-Rain before me. Dammit, Voiles, this is The Bird in the Tree! Help us to kill it. We need help. But my friends and I do have the support of a strong person named am, Plus tophushmasapulphattalokarchikkapokartahapatishomobilmingo.”

  “With five t's? Got it. All right, Wrong-Rain, I'll do it. I'll put my neck in the frosty noose. I'll give them a weather report tonight that'll rupture the station. That's my own neck I feel them chopping off, but it all might be fun.”

  “Watch that fun stuff, Mr. Voiles,” Thomas Wrong-Rain begged.

  “No derision, please. Derision will imperil the whole business.”

  “Well, all right,” Voiles agreed dubiously, “but you're asking a lot there. I break up sometimes.”

  There were already tornado alerts out for Pushmataha, Latuner, Le Flore, and Haskell Counties. So Hector Voiles put out his own alert, to the other weathermen of the country, especially to those of the Cloud Nine D interest. Voiles told them flatly that there would be a storm disappearance in the Little Bermuda Triangle of Oklahoma tonight. He told them that history would be unmade before their very eyes on their very charts if only they paid attention. And he said that the disappearance of the storm would be marked, not by an oil slick, but by an incredible freeze.

  Then he went and got half a snoot-full before he broadcast his nightly weather at ten o'clock. He gave the routine reports. He gave the information that four counties were under tornado alerts. Then he grinned a lowering grin and began a brisk gust in that breeze-a-blowing voice of his.

  “Forget the tornado alerts,” Hector told his airy audience. “There won't be any tornados tonight. That skirmish line of storms, it will be funneled and narrowed into a single disturbance, a concentrated storm. And this storm will disappear completely when it is in its most powerful and most concentrat
ed stage. It will disappear in the Little Bermuda Triangle and it will never be seen again. It will disappear in the Winding Stair Mountains at the border of Latimer and Le Flore Counties. It will disappear in storm-wreck and annihilation.

  “Listen, people, there is a Bird in a Tree. This is a crucial bird, and it never saw the inside of an egg. This bird must be killed even before it comes to sustaining life. Otherwise, it will fly around the region, with its black shadow under it, and it will destroy land and kill cattle and people.

  “There is only one thing that can destroy the Storm-Cock, the Bird in the Tree. A hard freeze can kill it, after the bird has begun to bloom but just before it has attained mobile life. It must happen right now, before morning, or the Tree-Bird will rive open the tree and go out and destroy the land and its crops and its cattle and its people.

  “Now hear my predictions, on which I am staking my reputation and perhaps my life. There will not be thunderstorms or tornados or cyclones. The skirmish line of storms has already narrowed into a single storm front. This storm front will disappear completely within the next fifteen minutes. It will disappear into a hole in a mountain, or into a hole in the air. And the kickback of the disappearing storm will be the cold. This will be hard-freezing cold, extreme cold over the area of the four counties that have been under the alert.

  “I predict that the storm will disappear completely within the next fifteen minutes; I predict that the disappearance will be followed by a quick fifty-degree drop in temperature in that same region; I predict the consequent very hard and killing freeze; and I predict that the big bird in the tree will be freeze-killed in the bloom tonight, and that it will not ravage the country and destroy the kin and the people tomorrow. These are the things that I predict, and I will stake my reputation and my life on my predictions. Who else makes such bold predictions?”

  It would have been bad even if Hector had left it at that. He didn't. He broke up. He began to laugh, to yowl, to chortle. He went into cascades of clattering and rotten laughter. The monitors cut him off, but he continued to laugh like a bloated buffalo.

  And that is when the warm moist Gulf air hit the updraft. Turgot Cantowine busted in, and Cantowine was a mighty man at the studio.

  “The only thing that can possibly save you, Voiles, is for your predictions to come true!” this Turgot swore angrily. “Man, they'd better come true! Will they?”

  “I don't know,” Hector Voiles giggled. “They would have come true, I think, if I hadn't broken up. There's something down there that can't stand derision.”

  “There's something right here that can't stand it either,” Cantowine barked. “You're deriding the wrong people when you start to deride people. The phones are jumping clear out of their cradles. People are storming the studio doors within seconds of your being cut off. Let's see you make that storm disappear. Man, do you realize what you've done! You've made light of the last still-standing institution. If the weather isn't sacred, what is?”

  “I don't know,” Hector giggled.

  The storm didn't disappear. The thunderbursts plowed the whole northeast corner of the state with lightning outage and flash floods and wind damage. There were six deadly tornados spawned out of the thing, and more than two dozen howling gales. The tornados killed people in the towns of Poteau and Spiro, and in the country around Jack's Fork and the Winding Stairs. That storm sure wasn't one that disappeared and was never heard from again: you'd be hearing about that storm as long as the last survivor or the last victim was still alive.

  Hector Voiles followed all the reports. The studio was full of reports of the rising numbers of the dead, but Hector didn't care much about that. He had trouble getting temperature reports from the afflicted area; people seemed too busy to notice the temperature. It was eight in the morning before he was able to get a temperature reading from near the area. The temperature was sixty-nine degrees. There hadn't been a freeze.

  Thomas Wrong-Rain phoned Hector Voiles about eight-thirty that morning after.

  “Mr. Voiles, the worst that could happen has happened,” he announced. “We just weren't able to make it freeze and we busted our brains for it. I think somebody laughed at the wrong time.”

  “Was there tornado damage in your immediate neighborhood?” Hector asked.

  “Oh, some. My house and barns blew away, and my wife got killed; but that's not what I meant by the worst that could happen. Didn't you hear me, Voiles? It didn't freeze.”

  “No. I know that it didn't.”

  “So the last chance to kill the murderous fruit, the bird in the tree, has gone by. We just couldn't change the storm into a freeze. So that bird broke out. It split that tree with a thunder twice as loud as the storm itself. It came out of that riven tree then, and it came out of it, and it kept on coming out of it. It was as big as a herd of elephants when it came out. Then it went on a rampage.

  “It ate a few cattle, but mostly it went after people. It comes on people in groups of three, and it takes and kills one of them. It's very ritual. I was over at James South-Forty's house after my own house had blown away. John Short-Summer was with us. The bird came, and we knew that it wanted just one of us. It isn't a loud bird, but it makes itself understood. We drew low-card-go to see which one of us it would be, and James South-Forty drew low card; the bird killed him and carried him off. And it's been to lots of other places and killed lots of other people. It kills people who gaped at it when it was trapped in the bloom or in the fruit. It kills people who laughed at it or made light of it. It'll probably come and kill one of you.”

  “I don't think it could find us,” Hector said. (All the breeze was gone out of his voice now.)

  “Yeah, he can find you,” Thomas Wrong-Rain said.

  Hector phoned Lloyd Rightfoot and Andrew Widepicture to join him at his office at the studio. Both had been out among the elements all night, and both said that they would be right over.

  “As a naturalist, my most rewarding studies are of nature at her most violent,” Rightfoot said as he came in. “Hector, she was violent last night, violent for hour after hour! Somebody cut the nets and let all the thunder-fish out. The floods are the worst thing right now. Oh, was there ever a storm that exploded like that one! I once knew a horse that would stampede like that whenever someone would try to throw a bridle rope over his nose.”

  “Someone did try to throw a bridle rope over that storm's nose last night,” Hector mumbled. “It's so easy to insult an element if you're not careful. They don't like to be laughed at.”

  “No, nothing in nature likes to be laughed at,” Rightfoot said.

  “As a cosmologist, my most illuminating moments come when I discover simple natural things going cosmic,” Andrew Widepicture spoke as he came in. “There are truly cosmic elements in the peculiar wrong-headedness that has run through the night's events. It just didn't have a neat ending, not any of it. Now, if my calculations are correct, it will require the ending of either the world or myself.”

  “Of yourself,” said Voiles. “A legend-come-to-life always eats flesh, but it will not eat all the flesh. I hope it will be satisfied with yours.”

  “The legend is a badly-done one, Voiles,” Widepicture remarked. “It has too many moving parts. Storm-Cock and Tree-Freezer, that's enough elements there. And Tree-Freezer is complicated by the long-named demiurge who also serves as Tree-Freezer. Is the demiurge only an aspect of Wrong-Rain, or is he an independent element? And Storm-Swallower is much too much. He belongs to another legend entirely, but he was instrumental in this one. And the bird grows bigger and bigger, and less possible. I'm convinced that he's strutted with wooden bones, as he should be, coming out of a tree. He isn't a bird of the ornis sort at all, and he's aerodynamically unsound.”

  “And I'm not sure that he'll stand the test of daylight,” Lloyd Rightfoot hazarded hopefully. “Some of the most incredible prodigies have very short existence spans. And at the end of their span they do not so much die as become unshaped and unrecognized. H
e may not have time for us before he returns to an unremembering form.”

  “He'll have time enough for us,” Hector said. “He believes that we laughed at him when we saw him still in the bud, or anyway that we didn't pay him enough respect.” Hector took a pack of cards out of a drawer and put it on his desk.

  “If you spooked the bard-freeze, Voiles, then the bird owes its life to you,” Widepicture said. “But don't expect gratitude. Ah, reality is very hard to define. I also doubt that the uncreature will pass the daylight test.”

  “We'll cut the cards for low-man-dead when he gets here,” Hector said. “And the daylight test is no test at all of reality. Many very real things disappear before morning.”

  “This is more than a mere daylight test,” Rightfoot proposed. “This is a time test. This is the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the uncommon era, and tenuous reality cannot enter here. There is a place test. This is the ninth floor of the Television Plaza Building, and reality must be more than merely contingent to exist here. There is a context test. This is beautiful downtown T-Town in broad daylight on a spring day. The blooms along the Main Mall are blooming, and the sap-sucker butterflies are fluttering around them. Automobiles are crumpling each others' fenders in the middle distance, and all the girls walking on the sidewalks are pretty. The very walls here are made out of glass and sunlight, and a too-dark reality becomes no reality at all.”

  A too-dark bird took out the entire outer glass-and-sunlight wall of the room and crammed the space with head and pinion top.

  “So much for this particular reality,” said Widepicture. “It brings its own context.”

  “James South-Forty was correct,” Rightfoot said nervously. “The bird is about six and a half feet between the eyes.”

  “The bird killed South-Forty several hours ago,” Hector said. “Well, the rules are (how do I know what they are?) that he takes only one of us. We cut cards, low-man-dead for it.” Hector cut to a red six-card, while the Storm-Cock watched with hard hatred in his big eyes. “Oh, that's awful low,” Hector moaned.