“Enough, enough,” said the judge after the flood of paper had narrowed down to a trickle. “Stop the paper,” but he didn't stop flipping that silver dollar or humming that McGinty's Saloon Waltz. “All a-sea that's going a-sea, Miss Calliope, it is time you laid a little evidence on the table if you are to be a party to these hearings.”
“My evidence is too large and too living to lay on the table,” Clarinda said. “But listen, and perhaps look. Due to the magic of the selenium ‘slow response’ principle, and to the walls of this very room being wired parallel to the receiver in this room, we may be able to bring to you a veritable reconstruction of past words and avowals and persons.”
And pretty soon the voice of the once-in-a-century man began, ghostly at first, and then gradually taking on flesh.
“Oh, Aurelian!” Adeline Addams squealed. “Where are you?”
“He is here present, in this room where he spent so many wonderful hours with me,” Clarinda said. “All right, Aurie baby, talk a little bit clearer and start materializing.”
“All these things I will give you, Clairie,” came the voice of Aurelian Bentley, and Bentley was there in shadow form of himself. “No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much… trust me, Clarie.”
Aurelian Bentley was standing there solidly now. It was a three-dimensional projection or re-creation of him, coming into focus from all the eared and eyed and remembering walls of the room that was wired in parallel to the television receiver. Aurelian stood in the midst of them there in his own luxurious den.
“Clarie, I will do handsomely by you… a million dollars, my love, and I will give it to you.” Oh, these were startling and convincing words coming from the living ghost there! “I swear to you, Clarie… I will buy any island or group of islands in the Pacific Ocean for you… Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Name it and it's yours.”
What man ever made such tall promises and with such obvious sincerity?
“Not on paper, not on air, Clarie, but in real life. I will make you the real and living queen.”
If they will not listen to one risen from the dead, whom will they listen to?
“Clarie, believe me, believe me, believe me! I will do all things for you. I promise it.” How are you going to top something like that?
“I leave you… my kingdom, ah, estate, Clarie. My word is good for that.”
It was all in the bag, and the drawstring was being tightened on the bag.
“I hereby attest that… my estate… belongs to you. Let the eared walls of this room be witnesses to what I say, Clarie. If the walls of this room will swear to it, then surely they will be believed.”
The image of Aurelian Bentley disappeared, and his sound was extinguished with a sharp snipping sound. Adeline Addams was putting a scissors back into her handbag.
“I've meant to find out what that wire there was for several times,” she said. “That sort of shuts it all off when the wire is cut, doesn't it?”
“Here, here, you are guilty of destroying my evidence,” Clarinda Calliope said. “You can go to prison for that! You can burn in fire for that!”
A sudden flaming hay wagon with a wild woman driving it rushed into the room and seemed about to destroy everyone in the room. Everyone cringed from it except Clarinda and the probate judge. The flaming hay wagon did crash into all the people of the room, but it did them no damage. It was only a scene from one of the earlier plays. You didn't think that Clarinda had only one circuit in that room, did you? But several of the persons were shaken by the threat.
“Good show,” said the probate judge. “I guess it wins, what there is left to win.”
“No, no,” Adeline cried. “You can't give her the estate?”
“What's left of it, sure,” said the judge, still flipping the silver dollar.
“It isn't the principle either,” said Clarinda, “it's the dollar.” She plucked the silver dollar out of the air as the probate judge was still flipping it.
“This is the entire residue of the estate, isn't it?” she asked to be sure.
“Right, Calliope, right,” the judge said. “That's all that was left of it.”
He continued to flip an invisible coin into the air, and he whistled the last, sad bars of the McGinty's Saloon Waltz.
“Anybody know where a good actress can get a job?” Clarinda asked. “Going rates, two dollars a day per role.” She swept out of the room with head and spirits high. She was a consummate actress.
The other persons fade out into indistinct sounds and indistinct shadows on the old kerosene-powered television receiver.
The prospects of retrieval and revival of the first and greatest of all television series, The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley, recorded and produced in the year 1873, is in grave danger.
The only true and complete version of the series reposes in one single television receiver; Aurelian Bentley's own control receiver, the one that he kept in his own luxurious den where he spent so many happy hours with his ladies. The original librettos are stored in this set: they are, in fact, a part of this set and they may not, for inexplicable reasons, be removed to any great distance from it.
All the deep and ever-growing side talk, “slow talk”, is in this set (All the other sets are mute.) All the final drama Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is recorded on this set and is in none of the others. There is a whole golden era of television recorded in this set. I bought this old kerosene-burning treasure from its last owner (he did not know what it was: I told him that it was a chestnut roaster) for eighteen dollars. Now, by a vexing coincidence, this last owner has inherited forty acres of land with a fine stand of chestnut trees, and he wants the chestnut roaster back. And he has the law on his side.
I bought it from him, and I paid him for it, of course. But the check I gave him for it was hotter than a selenium rectifier on a shorted circuit. I have to make up the eighteen dollars or lose the receiver and its stored wealth.
I have raised thirteen dollars and fifty cents from three friends and one enemy. I still need four dollars and a half. Oh wait, wait, here is ninety-eight cents in pennies brought in by the “Children for the Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley Preservation Fund”. I still need three dollars and fifty-two cents. Anyone wishing to contribute to this fund had best do so quickly before this golden era of television is lost forever. Due to the fussiness of the government, contributions are not tax-deductible.
It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard:
“—what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?”
The Funny Face Murders
1
Judy Kingfixit filled a large paper sack with bundles of paper money and went down to Broken Bench Lane on the outskirts of T Town. She had a need to see whatever new face the Lane presented this morning. “What we do on Broken Bench is look at the world and reality out of new faces,” Judy's husband Harry often said, “and that's another name for the Science of Invention. And we who invent, we see the world as wearing a new face every morning.”
“I will have to find Harry,” Judy told herself. “He cannot get along without me, and he will have to be on Broken Bench Lane. That's the only place he knows to go. He isn't much fun, but he's habit-forming and I live by habits now. I wasn't paying attention when he said what he was on to this time, but he's got to be down here. Now there's an idea! I'll try it.”
There was a sign on a booth there that read Trouble-Dissolver Ten Cents a Large Glass. Judy got a large glass of it and drank it off quickly.
Two adventurous boys were coming to the Lane at the same early morning moment. They were coming at it from the woods to take it unaware, to ambush it and to be ambushed by it. To be an adventurous boy in the very early morning is even better than to be Judy Kingfixit with a large sack full of money. It was very
much as though the boys came on a raft from those flowing woods. It was really a Big Star Weed Rider that they came on. But it is Judy on scene yet. “This leaves me at loose ends,” Judy said when she had drunk off the Trouble-Dissolver. “I hadn't expected it to work so quickly. My troubles are all dissolved and I become a balloon without ballast.”
“It takes a little time,” said the proprietor of the place with a happy leer. “But now that I am used of it this way, I wouldn't go back to having troubles again for anything.”
Judy hadn't a whole lot of respect for Broken Bench Lane. “I have an uncle just like this alley,” she said out loud. “Disreputable, that's what they both are.”
She really hadn't a whole lot of money that she could afford to waste here; but there was an attraction (besides trying to find her husband Harry Kingfixit who was usually somewhere on the Lane), there was a seeking and a shabby interest that got hold of her sometimes and drew her down to the Lane. Sometimes? It drew her down there just about every morning, just as soon as the morning began.
At just this time there was a terrific crash involving that least dependable of all aircraft, the Big Star Weed Rider, and two boys, Roy Mega and Austro. The fact that they were traveling very low, about six inches above grass-top, probably saved their lives and got them off with nothing more than grass bums. But the crash was damaging to their reputations as aircraft designers. You can't have something go wrong with the design of your ailerons and still keep a sound reputation on Broken Bench Lane. Broken Bench Lane, that bright ribbon in a sea of green, was particularly verdant because of the great quantities of Great Heart Discovery grass that grew so thickly in the whole region that the Lane traversed. The grass was the discovery of Great Heart Harkte who had been an inventive man of several generations earlier. He had invented a sod buster plough superior to every other one. He had invented a pokeweed harvester and a coon skinner. He had grown the first puffed wheat and the first Golden Day sand plums. And he invented Great Heart Discovery grass that did not thrive well until after Great Heart Harkte himself was dead and buried. Then it grew richly, with every primordial root of it coming out of Harkte's buried heart, and it covered a region of several miles. Wherever it grew, there was inventiveness supreme; and Broken Bench Lane had the lushest Discovery grass of the whole region.
Where else but on the Lane was there such a mercy, early morning chirping going on at every hour of the day and night? The barkers and cardinals and meadow larks all seemed to sing together:
“Lookie, lookie, lookie! Invent now! Be a millionaire by noon!”
Broken Bench Lane was the gaudiest-appearing of all those little streets and ways that tumbled and twisted down the green slopes all the way from Standpipe Hill to the south edge of town till they disappeared in the verdant haze beyond which, in the misty distance, rose Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow. There were not streets and arteries like these everywhere, not like this bunch: Jenks Road, Clown Alley, Harrow Street, Five Shill Road, Lollywaggers Left-Hand Lane, Speckled Fish Road, Leptophlebo Street, Trotting Snake Road, Broken Bench Lane! And the brightest jewel of them all was Broken Bench.
(Yes, Judy Kingfixit will be all right for a while. What can possibly go wrong with anyone who has had all her troubles dissolved and who is wandering around with a large sack full of large bundles of money?)
These streets are not necessarily located in the order here given. There are many other streets, better kept and broader, that intrude between these. Half of these arteries are not even proper streets in the sense of accepting vehicular traffic; they are mere pedestrian walks or paths or alleys. (Broken Bench was in between the categories in that it accepted vehicles, but for only one hour a day.)
Quentan Whitebird, in his monumental work Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, refers to this cluster of little streets (plus four others, and with Lollywaggers unaccountably left out) as “dream streets.” Well, there is a green haze over all of them that is very like a summer afternoon sleep. Even in the brightness and hustle of some of them, there is always this noddiness or nappiness. And there is the frightening snapping-out of it also, and the raffish terror at realizing that one hasn't quite snapped out of the spell after all.
There was a graffito on a wall that read “Who is False Face Flaherty?” That was the beginning of a doubt.
“Oh, what is there so weird about Harry disappearing this time?” Judy Kingfixit moaned, “and what is there so weird about me myself? And how has False Face Flaherty come into the thing these last several days?” The Trouble-Dissolver would really dissolve all troubles, but if new and different troubles should arise, it would require another glass of the stuff to get rid of them.
Broken Bench was the brightest and most hustling of all those little roads. What factories and shops there were there! What venture-houses! What money coining enterprises! What dreams that had taken flesh in solid crab-orchard stone with tomorrow-glass façades! There were bustling manufactories and tall financial empires and inventories (well, what do you call the studios where inventors work?) There was all the flowing lifeblood of newness. The Lane was so crammed with newness that those who visited it only once a day were always dumbfounded by the changes in it. Here were the waves of the future sold by the gallon or barrel or oceanful.
“Be on time,” read another graffito on another wall. “The murders take place this morning at nine o'clock in Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum.”
And here was something new! The Lane never disappointed. Judy Kingfixit was at a Mokka-Chokka stand where she was both attracted and repelled by the hot odour of something new.
“You look like a lady I know,” Edith Thornbush said, and she was a bit puzzled. “You have ankles and wrists kind of like hers. Her name is Judy Kingfixit.”
“And my name is Judy Kingfixit,” Judy said, “and it's no more than eight hours since we were together last. What's the matter with you anyhow, Edith?”
“If you are Judy,” Edith said, “and even if you aren't, it doesn't come well from you to ask anybody what's the matter with them. Just what has happened to you? Where did you get that face?”
“You are Judy Kingfixit, aren't you?” Ophelia Izobret asked in a pained way. “Didn't you happen to look in the mirror this morning?”
“No, the mirrors kept breaking,” Judy said. “I never did get a good look at me.”
“Well, sit down with us,” Ophelia said. “None of us is perfect this time of day, but you miss it farther than anyone I ever saw.”
“Thank you, Ophelia,” Judy said and she sat down with them all in a booth in the Mokka-Chokka stand. Cornelia Falselove was there also. “You have to be Judy,” this Cornelia said. “No one else would ever imitate Judy Kingfixit. Who'd want to?”
“Thank you, Cornelia,” Judy said. She bought and began to drink a cup of hot Mokka-Chokka, the first time in her life she had ever drunk it or heard of it.
There was a new graffito on the wall: “False Face Flaherty is a Corporation Man.”
Oh the drink was horrible! But, oh, it was sociable! Really, is there anything in the world so pleasant as to sit and drink hot Mokka-Chokka with friends?
“Oh yes, isn't it horrible!” Ophelia Izobret asked. “The inventor said that he worked for seven years to find something bad enough to be this good. But he had precedent to go by. When first introduced to the western world six hundred years ago, coffee was almost as horrible, so ancient writers have indicated. It was instantly terrible and it was an instant success. And it came with its own furniture, which we still have with us, up until this morning at least. With the coming of coffee, there was born in one blinding flash the coffee houses or cafés, the eating-out places of ever since then. There hadn't been any regular eating-out places before that, except in the Asian regions that already had coffee. Kitchens were changed, or real kitchens were born. They are all coffee kitchens now, or were up till this morning.
“Now there is Mokka-Chokka the totally new beverage, and it predicates totally new and different sor
ts of eating-out places and kitchens for the whole world. It is by such giant leaps or mutations that the world and its institutions change, but the changes are usually ascribed to lesser things.”
“Mokka-Chokka franchises and distributorships are going to sixteen figures,” Cornelia Falselove said, “and that's a lot of Mokka. I hope that my—what's his name anyhow?—George is able to get in on it. He's here somewhere on the Lane, if I can find him. I'd like to get in on it myself, but I could hardly raise an eight figure ante. And George, he couldn't even raise a one figure ante, but sometimes he thinks of something. Oh, there is so much that is new here this morning! Whenever I am about to give up I come here and find out just how stimulating things are. Say, are you sure that you're Judy Kingfixit? You are very funny-looking this morning, even for Judy.”
On the wall, a writing finger wrote “Cornelia Falselove is a Corporation Woman,” and, having writ, passed on. But there is nothing like Mokka-Chokka to get the morning juices to surging through one.
“Invest in Broken Bench Lane!” a fuzzy-faced boy was calling. “Ten cents a front foot!”
They all had dimes out to make deals with him when they heard that. Land on Broken Bench Lane usually sold somewhere between two dollars and a thousand dollars a front foot: ten cents a front foot was fantastic.
“I want eight front feet,” Edith Thornbush cried out. “I'll set up my own little booth in the Lane, just eight feet wide.”
But the fuzzy-faced boy hadn't mentioned front feet of land. They were front feet of rabbits that he was selling for a dime each.
“Aw, Austro, that's cheating,” Judy Kingfixit said (the fuzzy-faced boy was Austro, that youthful genius of the Australopithecus race). “Give me two more though. Where do you get them?”
“I get them from the Sooner State Rabbit Fattery out on the Sand Springs Road,” Austro said. “They butcher a million fat rabbits a week there. They've always disposed of the left hind feet to Luck Charms Limited. And there is a very peculiar industrial application for the right hind feet only (I cannot tell you any more about that: I am besworn). But the front feet of the rabbits were always thrown away until I thought of this grift. Ahoy there, folks! Invest in Broken Bench Lane! Ten cents a front foot!”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 248
