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

by R. A. Lafferty

  3

  “Oh, my God!” Rich Frank Lampiste cried again. “The monitoring screen shows that the belly of the plane has burst open and the uncrated Le Hot Sport automobile is falling out!” And so it was happening. But Le Hot Sport, having a mind of its own, or possibly a mindful spirit in it, was into a high-speed glide. These cars always had the tendency to haze and float at above two hundred miles an hour, and they would actually become airborne at approximately three hundred miles an hour. It was thus that most of them had made their kills. The car had left the plane at about twenty thousand feet but it had inherited most of the plane's speed. It circled in a wide, fast glide. “It is scanning and searching,” Frank Lampiste said. “It is looking for my son. Oh, it knows that I have switched boys. Or does it? It is going to hit us dead, or it is going to fill our nostrils with its reek.” “Hadn't we better drop below?” the bunko cop Karl Staripen asked.

  “You go down if you wish, Karl. And unshackle George Hegedusis and take him with you. I will stay here.”

  “And I will stay here,” said nephew Roland Lampiste.

  “And I will stay here,” said the shackled George Hegedusis. “Should I not watch the end of my own prediction?”

  “I'll stay too then,” Karl Staripen growled. Le Hot Sport came dead at them. Then it swerved past and filled their nostrils with its reek. It landed easily on the road three hundred yards beyond the mansion house, with hardly a jolt, and its speed had fallen below two hundred miles an hour. And the son Caspar Lampiste was seen on a scanning screen, running open-armed toward the insane car. The boy Caspar Lampiste had lost his wits, or his wits were trammeled. Le Hot Sport had braked and slowed, and it came to the encounter at no more than twenty-five miles an hour; and the boy, the Caspar-goat, was running open-armed toward it at at least half that speed. The way he went down when he met the car, it was clear that the joyous boy was killed instantly.

  “The debt, whatever it was, is paid. The sin, whatever it was, is subsumed. The impediment on the power of special men is removed!” the nephew Roland Lampiste was jabbering inconsequently. “Now our family name is no more ‘Lampiste’ or ‘scapegoat’. Our family name becomes ‘Langa’ or ‘flame’ now. I am Roland Langa now.” The nephew was very excited. “All right, Roland,” mumbled Rich Frank, who was crying. “I'll have our names changed legally today. Yes, Henry, bring the body of my son here. Then have the mortician come for him in a quarter of an hour. Bring Le Hot Sport here also. I am impounding it. I will pay the list price of three million dollars to the Moroccan from whom it was stolen, but I will prevent by litigation its ever going back.”

  “Will you give it to me, Uncle Frank, now that Caspar is dead?” the nephew Roland Langa asked.

  “Yes, Roland, I give it to you. You become my son now. You become a Romany man in his full powers.”

  “But my name will be Robert Langa and not Roland Langa,” the boy said. “As Roland Lampiste I was included in the bloodlust of the car, but it won't know that I am the same person with both of my names changed.”

  “All right, Roland, Robert,” said his uncle, his new father, Rich Frank Langa. “George Hegedusis, why are you white and why are you trembling? Your prediction came true.”

  “He is trembling because the Power has left him,” Roland-Robert taunted. “Four days isn't very long to have the power, Fiddler George. I intend to have it for more than forty years. I will drive Le Hot Sport, and my own totemic name will be Le Hot Sport. And you are wrong in your own prediction, that of your own death, George Hegedusis.”

  But the suddenly-much-older Rich Frank Lampiste-Langa was weeping as only a Gypsy man can weep. “Why do you still mourn, Rich Frank?” Karl Staripen asked. “You have your son again, reborn into the body of your nephew Roland.”

  “Yes, I have him again, but for less than ten minutes.”

  “Have you your Gypsy up, Rich Frank? Do you also predict?” Karl asked.

  “Yes, I also predict. And Moira is standing in the room with us again.”

  “I am wrong in none of my predictions,” the trembling George Hegedusis the fiddler jittered. “I am no longer shackled, men, though it appears that I am. But I was an escape artist when I was in show business.” Hegedusis stood up, free of his shackles. “I had to study a bit to see the hidden hinge on the encircling windows, but I knew there had to be a hinged section.” Suddenly the unshackled Hegedusis was across the big room. He swung out a narrow section of the encircling glass. He stepped out. And he fell six stories. “God receive his ghost,” Frank Lampiste-Langa spoke with emotion. “But at least we didn't fling him out.”

  “Yes, I flung him out, but not with hands,” Roland-Robert spoke in a sort of power rapture. “I killed him. He didn't want to die but he foresaw it, and I compelled it. And I inherited his father the Thunder. And his losing the power killed him.”

  “Maybe not,” said the old bunko cop Karl Staripen. “Hegedusis was possibly the finest practitioner in the world at the ‘Fallen Angel’ act. As an aerialist, he would miss his trapeze and fall eighty feet. And the horrified crowd would believe that he was dead. And then, after a powerful and dramatic interval, the ‘Fallen Angel’ would rise up from the sawdust and walk out painfully but triumphantly. He really knew how to fall. I think he remembered how to fall just now, either consciously or subconsciously.”

  “He looks dead enough,” Rich Frank Lampiste-Langa commented, looking down and still sobbing.

  “Fallen Angel, rise up again!” Roland-Robert Langa commanded in a loud and rough voice. “We are onto your tricks. Rise up, and slink away.” And George Hegedusis did rise up, slowly and torturously, like a zombie, from the flagstones below the encircling windows. He dragged himself a few feet, trembling and seething with black despondency.

  “What will happen to him now?” Frank Lampiste-Langa asked. “He can't live with the shame of his lost power.”

  “What will happen is what he predicted would happen,” jeered Roland-Robert. “His father the Thunder will come and kill him presently. And his family is already on the way here with propitiative music for his funeral.” Men brought the dead body of the boy Caspar Lampiste up into the big room then. And on his dead face was the look of radiant happiness. “You and I are cousins-closer-than-brothers,” Roland-Robert spoke softly to the dead boy. “We pledged that, whichever of us should die first, he would give one-seventh of his soul to the other one. You have kept your pledge, Caspar. You have yielded only six-sevenths of your soul to God. And you still have the seventh portion tight in your hands for me. Release from your hands to mine now.” And the dead boy, in some form of post-mortem relaxation, did open his tightly clenched hands, and his brother-cousin did take something from them. Then the mien of dead Caspar Lampiste was completely peaceful. “And now, Fiddling George Hegedusis must not die in his miseries. He must die in his powers,” Roland-Robert-of-the-powers said. “His last prediction must come true. His father must take him out of his shame and unhappiness. But wait, wait, his father the Thunder is my father now too.”

  “Do what you have to do, Roland-Robert,” the choked-up Frank Lampiste-Langa uttered, but his attention was on his dead son Caspar.

  “O Strafil, O two-tined lightning!” Roland-Robert called out loudly is he looked down on George Hegedusis collapsed against a nearby stone fence, perishing in his dejection. “Two-faced and double-dealing lightning, come and kill him. Come and get him, and he will play the fiddle tonight during the supper for all your high company in Nebos in Electric-Cloud Land. One thing he can do, lightning, is play the fiddle.” There was a small thunder out of the cloudless sky, but the two-faced, two-pronged lightning did not strike yet.

  “Oh go away, Moira!” Karl Staripen the bunko cop spoke sharply to the ghostly lady. “There is one death, and there may be another. But death does not happen in this room itself. You are wrong. Get out.”

  “Let her alone,” weeping Frank Lampiste-Langa spoke hollowly.

  “This is not an ordinary person who asks th
is,” Roland-Robert was railing up at the lightning-bolt that still withheld itself. “I am a Romany man who has entered into my powers at the present moment. I have subsumed one part of the soul of my dead brother-cousin here, and now I am an enchanted man. I own a Le Hot Sport automobile, and there are only twelve of those wonders in the world. I am Le Hot Sport in my totemic name, and there is only one of such wonders as myself in the world. My new family name is Langa or ‘flame’ and it is given to me to command. Come down, come down, Strafil the double lightning-thunder. Oh, surely there is a more spacious place where I can revel in my new power! Oh, I want to go in my power to that more spacious place right now! Strike, two-faced Strafil, strike!” Then the double-pronged lightning-thunderbolt did come down. One prong killed and crisped George Hegedusis as he slumped against the stone fence in his dejection. And the other prong came right into the room and killed the boy-man Robert-of-the-powers. He died with a cry of delight, and fell across his dead brother-cousin Caspar Lampiste. Robert Langa had found a more spacious place where he could revel in his sport-styled powers.

  “It was quite a short ‘Days of Power’ that he had,” Karl Staripen the bunko cop spoke sadly in a voice that was always like gravel.

  “Are you satisfied, pernicious Moira thou ghost?” Frank Lampiste-Langa asked tearfully. “I have seen your look several times before. You smile that treacherous smile, but you cry tears at the same time. You tears should be analyzed. I will inter Le Hot Sport in the same crypt with my son Caspar and my nephew-son Roland-Robert. They can drive it forever in that More Spacious Place. Oh, it'll roar and rev in there, and there will grow the legend of lively happenings in the crypt. What is that violin music drifting in through the swung-out window section, Staripen?” Frank Lampiste-Langa was red-eyed and he spoke with a curiously red and choking voice.

  “It's the family and mourners of dead George Hegedusis, come to take him away with weeping and violin-playing,” Karl said as he looked down. “And the tune, it's our oldest tune, the everlastingly happy tune that we play at birthings and weddings and funerals, all of them. It's ‘The Gypsy Hangman’, Rich Frank.”

  “Ah yes. It's sad and happy at the same time. I remember now that George Hegedusis did play it at my wedding twelve years ago. Now they will play it for his funeral.” And Rich Frank smiled curiously and tapped the desk table before him to the music. No Gypsy, whatever his straits, can completely resist the happy lilt of “The Gypsy Hangman”.

  Magazine Section

  I

  Strange Incident At Hatbox Field

  Years ago (oh, from 1958 to 1962) Junior Giant Jet-Hoppers were used on short commercial flights out of small airports in the NE Oklahoma, NW Arkansas, SE Kansas, and SW Missouri areas. These smallest of jets would carry only thirty-two passengers. Well, on the routes they ran there were seldom more than twenty passengers: if there'd been smaller jets made they'd have been used.

  The Junior Giants had size limitations in several places. They had the narrowest throats of any jets, entirely too narrow; and because of this the Junior Giants were often choked down by the birds they sucked in, especially ducks and geese.

  At dusk of November 2, 1940, a Junior Giant took off a north-oriented runway from Hatbox Field of Muskogee, Oklahoma bound for Fayetteville, Arkansas, a flight of ninety-four miles. This was a little early in the year for geese to be flying south, and yet they had been heard the night before this.

  It was for this reason that Flight Attendant Angela Rebhuhn brought her shotgun along with her on that flight. Just after takeoff, seeing a flying V of geese coming right at them, she opened the nose-escape window (quite against regulations) and shot a blast at the V of geese to make it veer off. Then she readied herself for the second blast but she did not shoot it. She said later that she had the clear impression that the leading goose of the V was not a goose.

  The Junior Giant sucked up the first five flyers of the V, then choked and died, banked over the Cookson Hills, and came back to Hat-Box Field at an easy glide and made an easy landing.

  The night service crew (it consisted of a man and a boy) removed four geese (and one thing that was not a goose) from the gullet of the Junior Giant Jet-Hopper. The damage was declared to be minor, and the Jet-Hopper took off again after a total delay of only seven minutes.

  The four geese that had been sucked into the narrow gullet of the jet and choked it down were now no more than four hot little blocks of charcoal (damn, they stayed hot for a long time!), and the man and boy spread them out on the floor of the machine shed.

  But the leader of the V, the thing that was not a goose, did not seem to be badly burned. It was a curious creature. Its wings were like bat wings, very long fingers with a leather-like webbing between them. The creature was slightly made, but it had a finger-wing span of at least five feet. Its head and face were not at all goose-like. They were a little like those of a coon, or a monkey, or a comically ugly little man. Then the funny face stretched itself, flexed its web-jointed fingers, opened its eyes,

  and it said “Hot and fast, there's just no thrill like it.”

  and it winked at the man and the boy,

  and the man and the boy fell all over themselves getting out of that maintenance shed.

  Then they heard the popping of stretched leathery-fingered wings as the thing that was not a goose took to the air and vanished.

  Nobody except Angela Rebhuhn ever believed the man and the boy. The man got testy and would not answer questions about it unless you found him boozed up down on Callahan Street in Muskogee. The boy started out hitchhiking the morning after the incident. He said that he was going back home (to Olathe, Kansas) to finish high school. He said that he had seen something that only a liar could believe. But their unbelieved story survived.

  Every two or three years after that, people (even newcomers to the neighborhood who could not have heard the story) would report seeing a V of geese going south in the evening sky with a lead flyer that wasn't a goose.

  I found the boy in an art class in Olathe, Kansas. He drew for me a clear picture of what he had seen. I found Angela Rebhuhn and showed her the picture.

  “That's him, that's him exactly,” she said. “I've seen him twice since then. But he doesn't lead geese into the hot throat when I'm on a flight. He and I have come to an understanding, an understanding over about three hundred air yards. When I shoot my warning shotgun blast, he veers off with the V. He understands that my second shot will be more than a warning.”

  By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Muskogee Messenger — of quite a few years ago.

  John T. Woolybear was a casual man with pale blue eyes. He was flecked with large tan freckles, and each freckle had a slight blue ring around it as though it had been drawn by a cartoonist. He had three wives, one in Illinois, one in Nebraska, one in Texas. He was on tolerably good terms with all three of them. Well, he sent each of them a card on her birthday every year. But he never entered the three states where they lived because (tolerably good terms or not) they had legal writs out against him.

  John Woolybear was a newspaper hobo. He could run a linotype machine and all those other machines around a newspaper. He was a fair reporter. He wrote unusual feature articles for the Sunday Magazine Sections of newspapers. He had sold at least one of them a week for about forty years and that was about two thousand of them. He had his own rules for writing these Magazine Section stories: “THEY MUST BE STRANGE, THEY MUST BE OUTRAGEOUS, THEY MUST BE GARISH, and they must be true.” And he insisted on that lower-case truth in every one of them. He seldom stayed with one newspaper for more than a month.

  When he left a town he usually left about an hour before dawn, dragging a suitcase big enough for three men, picking a highway nexus on the edge of town to hitch a ride from.

  2.

  Strange Happenings At Blackberry Patch, Kansas

  Parallel to the Cross-Timbers there is a ridge known, but not known at all widely, as Big Wind Ridge, which runs from
the Texas gulf-shore through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and into Canada. It is the unofficial place where the Great Plains and the hilly woodlands begin, and one goes down from the plains to the hills. There is always a strong wind out of the west all along the ridge, and as a result of this there is much kite-flying by men and boys also all along the ridge. Big Wind Ridge is the best kite-flying place in the world, and the best kite-flying place along the whole Ridge is Blackberry Patch, Kansas, an unincorporated place in Doniphan County.

  Blackberry Patch, Kansas is the only place in the world where boy-carrying kites and man-carrying kites are really common. The west wind at Blackberry Patch will sustain really large kites, some of which are equipped with seats or even dangling gondolas such as passenger balloons have. It is not uncommon for three to five persons to be airborne by a single kite; it isn't uncommon if they are Blackberry Patch people. But there is something unusual and even secret about the people of Blackberry Patch.

  The Blackberry Patch from which the settlement got its name was originally a hundred miles across, back in the Indian days, and the very vines were thick. But now (for the last hundred years or so) the patch has been nibbled away by settlers and farmers. But the heart of the patch still remains thick and secret; and it is there that the Blackberry Patch people (they are now an ethnic mixture of Kaw Indians and settler-Germans) live and make blackberry jelly at the Jelly Factory to sell all over the United States, and make kites and Fat Air suits. Since there is no graveyard or burying place around Blackberry Patch itself, one has to believe that the people go to what they humorously call the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky, in kites and their Fat Air suits, when their days are finished.