by Jack Vance
About three miles west of us was the town of Oakley. In the drugstore was a magazine rack, and there I came upon the Amazing Stories quarterly, edited by Hugo Gernsback, and also the Amazing Stories monthly. I subsequently discovered Weird Tales and subscribed to it. It was a banner day of the month when I ran down to the mailbox in front of Iron House School to find it there. Of the authors I read in Weird Tales I recall the names Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, and one which I assumed to be a pseudonym: Nictzin Dyalhis. I was amused to think that this chap had gone to such pains to give himself a memorable identity. Later I learned that this had been his real name! His father, a Welshman, had been obsessed by the Aztecs, and so had given him the name Nictzin.
Another resource was the public library in Oakley, where I read anything that seemed interesting.
The years went past, these golden years of the ‘20s. At Iron House School I had no friends to speak of; in fact I was thought to be rather eccentric. But I was not overly concerned. One afternoon, two girls came up to me. These were the prettiest girls in the school: one dark, the other blonde. They cornered me, menacingly, and said: “We hear you’ve been talking about us.” I said no, I had not. They said, “Yes! You said that when you grow up you’re going to have one of us for a wife and the other for a girlfriend. And we can tell you—you’d better change your mind!”
“No, no, no!” I said. “I never said any such thing.”
“Don’t try to fool us,” they said, “this is definitely what we heard.”
For a fact, at that stage in my life, I entertained no such thoughts.
At the ranch we had many visitors, some of whom were down on their luck. There was Jack Blossom, the golf pro, currently employed in laying out miniature golf courses. Another was Eddie Carroll, who had something to do with baseball, and who was also a chemist; he had invented a method for detecting how much water there was at the bottom of an oil tank. Others came from dubious backgrounds. There was a pair of gentlemen whose occupation was selling Tsarist Russian bonds to investors who were innocent enough to believe that Stalin was anxious to redeem old Romanoff securities. But the most important, as far as I was concerned, and the one who had the greatest influence on me, was George Gould, a pianist of remarkable abilities. My mother was also a good pianist; she could sight-read but could not improvise. George played music which utterly captivated me: he played jazz, as I was to learn. At one time, George Gould’s orchestra was the best in San Francisco, better than Paul Whiteman’s or Art Hickman’s*.
A mile south of the ranch was a town called Knightsen. At the farm center every Friday night there would be a whist party followed by dancing. My mother would play piano for this dancing, sometimes with a saxophone and drum, but just as often alone. When George was with us, she would take him up there to play the piano, and it was wonderful to see the dancers respond to the way he swung that music. George at this time was past his first youth, and clearly not in good health. He left the ranch to take a job at Stockton, and several months later we learned that he had died there.
Along about this time, I read a book by Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us. I became involved with a new preoccupation: namely, identifying the stars. I obtained star charts. I would take a flashlight, cover it over with a red bandana, lie out in the sand a few hundred feet from the house, stare up into the sky and trace out the constellations. In due course I learned all the constellations and all the first magnitude stars, and many of the second magnitude stars. I find it hard to convey how much pleasure this pursuit gave me. The stars all became familiar, friends almost, and I rejoiced when, in the middle of the summer, Fomalhaut would appear over the southern horizon. Even now, as I write this, I can envision how the skies looked, aglow with those wonderful stars: Arcturus, Vega, Betelgeuse, Antares, Sirius, Achernar, Algol, Polaris.
During these years, my father was not much in evidence. He had acquired a hacienda of three thousand acres near Tepic, in Mexico, not far from Puerto Vallarta. He left San Francisco and went to live on this hacienda, where he remained, and we saw no more of him. In effect my mother and father were separated, although the divorce did not occur until some years later.
We still received income from the rental of our house in San Francisco, but my aunt managed to keep this to a minimum, so that we were obliged to rely upon the largesse of my grandfather, who himself was encountering financial difficulties. Breweries were his principal clients, but with the coming of Prohibition the breweries declined, and so correspondingly did my grandfather’s income.
In 1928 I was graduated from Iron House and started high school. I was then eleven years old. I was small and thin, without any social graces. As a consequence I was not particularly popular; the girls never looked twice at me.
This was about the time that my aunt convinced my two older brothers that life in San Francisco was far more exciting than life at the ranch, and far more sophisticated. She lured them away to live with her in San Francisco and so split up the family. My mother was left at the ranch with her three younger children: myself, Patricia and David.
My grandfather continued to be on hand on weekends, with all the usual excitement. He liked to rise early in the morning, and would take himself into the kitchen, make himself coffee, pour the coffee into a mug, followed by cream from a pitcher. One morning he poured himself a second cup of coffee, then cream—and along with the cream came a dead mouse, which plopped into the cup.
My grandfather was not a man to stifle his emotions, and on this occasion the remarks were loud and profane.
I recall my grandfather’s favorite imprecation, which predictably came in response to some mischief or misfortune. He spoke always with dramatic fervor, in a measured and staccato style, using a rasping, almost lyrical cadence: “God damn the world, by quarter-sections!”
When my brother Louis departed for San Francisco he left behind a bright orange Model T Ford Roadster, which he sold to me for $5. I had no driving license, but still I drove this Model T around the countryside without remorse.
This Model T figures in many of my adventures. On one occasion I took it to the high school baseball diamond, and there met my friend Lewis Berry, who drove a Model T of his own. We drove back and forth, circled, slid, stirred up a lot of dust, and left the diamond in a sorry state indeed. On the following Monday, Lewis and I were summoned to the principal’s office, where he gave us what-for, and sent us out to rake the baseball diamond until it was smooth as a billiard table. Lewis and I toiled in the heat for several hours until the job was done.
One night I had a flat tire, and while I was fixing it, I stood in front of the tail light. A car came up behind and tossed me into a ditch. Luckily the car was being driven very slowly by an old Italian farm worker. Still, I can’t imagine how I escaped that collision without broken bones.
The Model T also provided a more amusing function of which I am not particularly proud. I attached a spark coil and a chain which, when lowered, provided a ground. When I touched a button, anyone standing with their hands on the car would receive the most amusing jolt of high-voltage electricity. On one occasion, this ploy backfired. I had raised the hood and was working on the motor when my brother David pressed the button and I jumped six feet in the air. While he sat grinning, I realized that the ploy no longer amused me.
One morning David and I, with a boy named Wendell Pond, drove to the base of Mt. Diablo, where we parked the Model T and climbed to the summit of the south peak. Then we returned to the car and started to drive home. Along the way the transmission developed some alarming grinding noises and we were barely able to limp back to Green Lodge Ranch. My grandfather refused to finance repairs, stating that he had already put too much money into the wretched vehicle, so it was rolled into the barn to await a time when funds became available. Such time never came, and the Model T languished in the barn and I drove it no more.
At school, one year followed another. I played a great deal of tennis, and spent much of my t
ime in the science laboratory. Sometimes I tried to formulate substances of my own contrivance, hoping to hit upon some interesting chemical reaction. Luckily I failed, since the science teacher had the forethought to include no fuming nitric acid among the chemicals available to the students.
As the years passed, I gradually came to realize that the girls no longer regarded me as a pariah, and even, so I was told, thought me rather engaging. I developed a crush upon a pretty girl named Helen Ricks, who occasionally consented to accompany my on romantic drives through the moonlight. In the senior year book, members of the graduating class were listed along with their foibles. There it was reported that my favorite remark was: “Do you want to go for a ride, Helen?”
My high school was not large, and there were only thirty-eight students in the graduating class. Many of these went on to live lives which, at the time of graduation, we would have considered unpredictable and astonishing, if not worse. Richard Townsley almost immediately was stricken by some rare disease and died. Two of the group committed suicide: one was Jimmy Cooper, a casual young scapegrace with an impenetrable personality. He was thin, sandy-haired, nonchalant, and he took no interest whatever in school activities. He was also seen smoking cigarettes, which at the time was not fashionable. The other was Nola Frye, a strikingly beautiful girl, who was also very proper and even prim. I remember an occasion when she was playing tennis, while my friend Henry White and I were sitting on a bench nearby. Henry, who was usually restrained in his conduct, now was prompted to call out: “Nola, by golly but you’ve got a beautiful figure!”
Nola, flustered and blushing, swung around and regarded Henry with disapproval. “Henry, you shouldn’t say such things,” she told him. A year or two after graduation, she killed herself, and no one knows why, although there were rumors of an unhappy love affair.
Kyla Moore married a jockey who was later sent to jail on grounds of doping racehorses. Another girl, whose name I won’t mention, by rumor had taken herself to Reno, where she engaged in a rather scandalous profession.
The strangest of all was what happened to Henry White. Henry, in addition to being my best friend at the time, was a good-natured, lanky chap; his hair was so blond as to be almost white, and he carried himself with a jaunty swagger. He was universally popular. After high school, I lost track of him for several years, during which time he married a girl with extravagant tastes, who later divorced him.
I next came upon Henry almost by accident. We brought each other up to date as to what was going on in our lives. He mentioned that he’d been divorced, but said that at the moment, his ex-wife had gone off on a trip somewhere, and that he’d undertaken to look after her dogs. She had eight miniature French poodles. Henry was supposed to go to her house every day to feed and water them, groom them, and comb their fur. A week went by, and I failed to hear from Henry. Then the news came: Henry had been found murdered in the driveway of his ex-wife’s house. All eight of the poodles had also been killed; four were arranged along one side of his body, and four on the other side. The perpetrator remained unknown.
As for me, my life had slanted off in a different direction. During my last year of high school, I became friendly with one Glen Douglas. This was the year 1932, the heart of the Great Depression. Glen and his family were among the migrants who had come out in great numbers from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and elsewhere. Glen was intelligent and easy to get along with. He and I used to discuss cosmology, philosophy, and the way the world goes, at great length. After graduation he planned to attend junior college in Porterville, a town far to the south, half under the first rise of the Sierra Nevada and surrounded by orange groves. I had no hopes of immediately starting university, and so I became intrigued with Glen’s program.
In the fall, we set off to the south. We traveled by hitchhiking and riding the Santa Fe box cars. The Santa Fe was easy in this respect, and allowed hobos and bums to ride box cars without too much trouble. Southern Pacific, however, was very strict, and the railroad bulls were not at all kind to this sort of passenger. Nevertheless, we arrived in Porterville, rented a cabin among several other such cabins in a compound where agricultural workers lived, and started at junior college. We had very little money, and were forced to live in spartan style. We ate a lot of beans, and a dish called “slumgullion”. This is actually quite good: it consists of canned corned beef, shredded and fried to a frizzle, hashed potatoes, and lots of onions, all browned together in a skillet. It’s a lot better than it sounds, I assure you.
The atmosphere at junior college was totally different from that of high school. I found it to be somewhat formal, impersonal, even class-conscious, and the students tended to divide into cliques. None of this, however, affected me or Glen, who were off in a group of our own—namely the two of us.
I made several new friends, and became infatuated with a girl named Alice Wood. She was tall, dark-haired, and unutterably beautiful. She took no heed whatever of me, and I doubt if she was even aware of my existence. In biology class, I noticed that if I looked into the microscope, and adjusted the mirror in a certain way, I could see her at her desk. I spent most of the class period staring at her through the eyepiece of the microscope. Glen became aware of my preoccupation, and jeered at me mercilessly.
In general, despite our enforced propinquity, Glen and I got along quite well. Only a single trivial aspect of our shared existence served to irritate each of us, in varying degrees. Glen had brought a guitar with him, which he was learning to play. He had found the chords for “Red River Valley” and one or two other such tunes. He was trying to learn a more complicated song, currently very popular, whose name I can’t now recall. He played and sang this song with great diligence, but every time he reached a certain sequence, he played a note incorrectly, flatting it, so that the tune sounded off-key. I politely tried to correct him, but he paid no heed, and the next time he played the tune, he’d play the same off-note again. So once more I would correct him, which I could see annoyed him, and eventually I discontinued my advice.
This was about the only time we got on each other’s nerves. Glen was really a fine fellow: decent, generous, good-natured, and he loved to discuss abstruse topics, although he had no interest in science or mathematics. I recall a time while we were still in high school when he told me that he had invented a revolutionary device which was certain to make him a great deal of money. He did not like to talk about it for fear that the news would leak out before he had secured the patent. Still, he agreed to describe this marvelous concept to me on the basis of absolute confidentiality, to which I agreed.
Glen proceeded to describe his invention. The basis was a cigar-shaped balloon about twenty feet long or so, filled with buoyant gas, and outfitted with a hammock-like device attached below. In this hammock a farm worker could lie face-down while he drifted slowly over the field picking peas, tomatoes and other produce. This device, so Glen assured me, would greatly facilitate the work and also minimize the aches and pains attendant upon such an occupation. I listened politely, but made to comment, except to reassure Glen that I would maintain total secrecy with regard his plans.
My funds, meanwhile, were growing short, to the point of disappearing. I wrote to my grandfather, asking for some help, but I received no answer, which puzzled me. Finally, I ran out of funds totally. I was forced to quit junior college. I took myself home to the ranch—hitchhiking, riding box cars, and finally arriving late one afternoon—only to find the place deserted. No one was home: not my mother, nor my brother, nor sister, nor any indication as to their whereabouts. I telephoned San Francisco, and learned that my grandfather had died during the previous week. My mother had discovered that he too was utterly broke, which explained why he had sent me no money at Porterville.
Many years later, I chanced to encounter Glen Douglas one last time. The occasion was a school reunion. He invited me and my wife Norma to visit him at his house in Covelo, a town near an Indian reservation. We accepted, and a week later set off
to the north.
We discovered that Glen had established himself on a hilltop in a forest of tall pines and firs. His house was quaint and picturesque; he had built it himself to his own specifications, acting upon the influence of his memories of growing up in Oklahoma.
On the evening of our visit, Glen informed us that he had bought into the business of selling and renting forklifts, at which he had prospered to such a degree that he was now retired. Whenever the mood came upon him, or when he felt like picking up some spare change, he would drive down into the Indian reservation and play poker with the Indians, always returning with $50 or $60.
In the morning Norma and I took our farewell. We invited Glen and his wife Ruby to visit us at our home in Oakland. But they never showed up, and I never saw Glen again.
Chapter 2
I cannot stand where once I stood;
It takes a life to learn
That none may steer a course to shear
The trail of light astern.
S. Fowler Wright
I mentioned that my mother and father had divorced, but perhaps I did not go into all the attendant detail. The facts were that before my mother and father were married, my father had transferred title to the house on Filbert Street to my aunt. This was a secret, so that at the time of the divorce, my mother thought that the house was a joint property. She was disabused. In short, she had been swindled by my aunt and my father. When the divorce became final, my aunt stopped making over any income proceeding from rental of the house, so that when my grandfather died, we were left without any income whatever. Green Lodge Ranch was still under mortgage, and the bank, receiving no payments, foreclosed.
