by Various
But, as my friend Galileo once muttered under his breath, eppur se muove.
This engaging story (one of a series) about the Mayor of a Maine town and his inventive buddy Howie is from a 36-year-old resident of Belfast, Maine. Mr. Easton writes that he went to high school and college in Maine, went to Chicago for grad school and a Ph.D. in theoretical biology. He worked as a textbook editor, has been a full time free lance writer since 1976, and is currently a contributing editor to Biology Digest and a book columnist for Analog.
Gambling Man
BY
THOMAS A. EASTON
Howie Wyman had been known to tinker. He had a shop in his barn where his deft fingers, so knobby you wondered how he bent them, could fix a washing machine or a chain saw, build a motorbike or a chest of drawers. Could, I say, and did, too, at times. More often, he just fiddled around with assorted parts, piecing them together, taking them apart, winding up with contraptions that whirled and buzzed and blinked. One of them once earned him a blue ribbon in the Waldo County Regional Arts and Crafts Show. Kinetic sculpture, the judges called it.
But this story isn't about Howie's lone attempt at art. Not that he was trying to make art. He thought he'd built something that would keep the starlings out of his strawberry patch. It worked, too, until Betty Hawkins, our librarian, spotted it and insisted he loan it to her for the show. She was hard to refuse.
This story is about something else Howie put together one day. What makes it a story is that Howie's damned tinkering brought the Mafia—the Cosa Nostra, the Syndicate, the Black Hand, whatever you call it, the folks who run most of the gambling in this country—to our town. It brought a junior godfather, a skinny fellow in tailored brown, elevator shoes, and a shiny Lotus. He had buck teeth and a receding hairline, and he didn't look like a rat. Far from it. For one thing, he didn't have a tail. For another, his nose was too broad. And his ears weren't pointed.
His name was Vincent Conant. Bonny showed him into my townhall office, he took a seat, and when she had closed the door behind her, he said, "Mayor Bowen."
I inclined my head. That was what strangers called me. Friends called me Harry. "What can I do for you?" I asked.
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, extracted a small, cream-colored card, and handed it across my desk. I accepted it. My fingers told me the printing was embossed. I read it. It gave his name and said he was the representative of something called "Counterchance." I must have looked perplexed, for he then said, "I am a consultant. To the gambling industry."
Ah. Now I knew. I carefully refrained from looking at the TV set on the bookshelf to the left of the door. I had wondered how long our luck would last, how long we could keep getting away with it. "And?"
He crossed his legs and plucked at his trousers. He glanced out the room's one window behind me, toward the firehouse across the street, at the color of the trees beyond. He sniffed as if the view didn't suit him. "I have been asked to find an explanation for your extreme good fortune," he said. He paused. "And to stop it."
"Ayuh," I said. I picked up the pipe I had set aside when Bonny knocked. I tamped the ashes down and lit it. I blew a cloud of smoke over Conant's head. "But you can't stop luck. You have to wait for it to turn. It always does."
He stared at me. No, he wasn't a rat. His eyes seemed more reptilian at the moment. "Usually," he agreed. "But for the past six weeks, you have been placing bets on horse races, football games, anything my clients offered odds on. And you have not lost once. It is as if you had access to tomorrow's papers."
I laughed, still not looking at the TV set. "You or your bosses have been smoking the wrong stuff. I'm just lucky."
He didn't buy it. He stood up, set his hands on the edge of my desk, and looked down at me. I had to lean back in my chair to meet his eyes. "You have cost us too much," he said. "You have a system. I want it. I will have it."
I laughed again. I wanted him to think I didn't find him threatening at all. But the laugh was a lie. His threat was real, if implied, and I was suddenly aware of my guts. It wasn't a pleasant feeling. I repeated the only secret I intended anyone besides Howie or Bonny to share. "I'm just lucky."
He stared down at me for another minute. "Sure," he said. He straightened, turned toward the door, turned back, and said, "You will not be able to place any more bets, of course." He turned again and left.
I was glad to see him go, glad to be able to look at the TV set that—had he but known it!—had brought him here. A moment later, Bonny came in, closed the door, and leaned against it. I shifted my gaze to her. My Bonny. My secretary, my fiancee. Intelligent, sympathetic eyes; short, dark hair; an armful of a figure. I had loved to look at her since the day I'd hired her. I still did, all the more because I now knew what her light-blue pants suit concealed.
She broke the silence with, "He sounded like Mafia."
I nodded. What secretary doesn't listen in when she can?
"It's not good, Harry. That bunch'd do anything to get their hands on the thing."
We both looked at the TV set. I agreed, but.... "When it comes right down to it," I said, "I'd rather they got it than the government or the insurance companies."
"I suppose." The TV didn't look like anything special. And it wasn't, really. Howie hadn't modified the TV at all. But the antenna leads went to an old hifi amplifier with one tube burned out. The amplifier in turn was hooked to an antenna Howie had concocted. That was what was special.
Last April, when the ice had been too soft for ice fishing and the water in the brooks had been too high for the trout to bite, when nobody had had any odd jobs for him, Howie had spent a day in the town library. Emma had had it in for him, as usual, and he had felt that anything was preferable to staying home.
Anyway, he'd been leafing through back issues of Scientific American and found an "Amateur Scientist" column that said how to build an electric furnace. He built the thing, and by June he was able to use it to coat young raspberry stems with vaporized aluminum. He got the stems out with acid, wired up the resulting prickly tubes, and built a TV antenna. From a distance, it looked normal; the fuzz of tiny thorns that covered the thing was invisible. But Howie thought that fuzz should let his TV pick up short wavelength radiation as well as microwaves. He plugged the amplifier into the circuit just in case the new signals weren't too strong.
I was there in his shop the day he tried it out. He flipped the switch, we waited a minute, and the screen lit up. But what it showed didn't look like any TV show I'd ever seen. The picture was the same on all channels, and it looked for all the world like the middle of our town, though distorted by a shimmer like a heat haze. There wasn't any sound.
We fiddled with the knobs on the TV and the amplifier until the picture became a mite clearer. At the same time, we discovered we could make the picture move, as if the camera were being carried down the street. We brought the view right up to the townhall, found that we could steer it through the wall, and stopped it when we could see an office calendar. The date was two days away. A clock told us it was just over fifty hours off.
And that was what we had. Not only a camera-less TV, but a time-watcher, a time-spy, as well. Bonny took two steps, flicked it on, and played with the knobs to make the picture scan across town. We noticed the cloud of smoke simultaneously. She veered her scan path, tracked it down, and I said, "The Jackson house." Flames were breaking through the roof beside the chimney. "Call Bryant," I said. He was the fire chief. "Ask him to get a chimney-cleaning crew out there today." He would listen. We had made enough such requests lately, both of him and of the town's police. The statistics were down, way down, and I knew we were saving people grief. But I wondered what the effect would be if this were done on a larger scale. That it was worth it here and now, I knew even as I spoke to Bonny. The picture changed, the flames and smoke fading to a shadow.
It hadn't taken us long to figure out what the fuzziness in the picture meant. Perhaps my previo
us exploits had helped, though Bonny had been the one to make the suggestion, and she'd had only hearsay to go on. The picture was a double—multiple—exposure, showing all the possible futures, shaded according to their probability. Nothing was certain unless the picture was clear, and even then the picture could change between now and then.
Bonny was back at the controls again, the phone call finished. Scanning, scanning, coming back to the townhall and the conference room down the hall from my office. She centered on the long table, its top was bare. So we were taking Conant seriously. I supposed we had to. But it was a shame. For more than six weeks now, we had been covering that table with the sports pages so we could read the headlines in advance. The fine print of the text was virtually invisible to us. Word choice was too arbitrary, too improbable, to give us more than a blur. We had some of the same problem with the headlines, of course, but then we only bet when the news was unmistakably clear.
Bonny turned the TV off and crossed the room toward me. She hitched her fanny up onto the corner of my desk, kicked off one shoe, and rested a foot on my thigh. "I wish Howie had left you out of this one," she said. She looked troubled.
I slid a hand up the leg of her pants suit and stroked her calf. I shrugged. "You know Emma. I don't think he wanted it anywhere she might get her hands on it. She tries to keep him on a short rein as it is."
She wiggled her toes. "I guess it's safe enough here. But shouldn't you tell him about Conant?"
I nodded and picked up my pipe again. "I would if I knew where he was."
I didn't have to worry long about finding Howie. He found me. He showed up in the office the very next day, looking as disreputable as ever in worn boots, dirty overalls, and a checked shirt. His shaggy, greying hair stuck out under the brim of a floppy green felt hat. His cheek bulged with the usual wad of tobacco, and as soon as he entered the room, I toed my metal wastebasket out from under my desk. He spat, making a nasty noise, half clang and half rustle.
Bonny followed him in to listen while I told him about Conant. His reaction only proved I didn't understand him perfectly, for all the years I'd known him. I'd expected him to get mad—in as few words as humanly possible, perhaps—but he only looked disgusted. "So that explains it," he said, and he spat again.
"Explains what?" I asked.
"Burgulars," he said. "Last night. Didn't take any thin', but Emma's madder'n hell."
I could imagine. So could Bonny, from the look on her face. "I told you he was a crook," she said.
I waved a hand. "Of course he is." What else could he be, after all? "But what now? Will be break into my house? Yours, Bonny? Here?"
"All of 'em," said Howie.
"Huh!" Bonny spun on a heel and turned to the TV. She yanked it half off its shelf and reached behind it. She disconnected the leads to the amplifier and then unhooked the amplifier from the antenna, which we had mounted in the townhall attic, amidst the cobwebs, dust, and old files. "He won't find anything here," she said.
Howie nodded. I agreed. It was best to hide the evidence, to make the TV just a TV, the amplifier just a broken-tubed shelf ornament. But still, I regretted it.
"Besides," said Bonny. "We don't really need it anymore. We all have plenty of money now."
Sure.
Howie got out of his chair. "Ayuh," he said. "S'pose we do. I'm goin' birdin'."
I envied him. It was fall, the air was crisp and tangy, the woods and fields were brilliant. And the partridge were out there, ready to burst into flight like a bolt—not of lightning, they weren't that fast; but of thunder, they were that noisy—and fall to shotgun blasts. But I was mayor of our town, unpaid but devoted to the job, the voters all agreed. I had my oil business as well, and that took all the time I could give it, now that the cold weather was coming. I would be lucky to go hunting once that fall. Not Howie, though. He could go when he liked, for as long as he liked. He was limited only by the need he felt to earn just enough money to keep Emma at home. Usually, that meant plowing driveways, painting houses, haying, cutting wood, and the like. But not now. He could go for a year on his share of the betting.
I didn't see Howie again for another week, and nothing remarkable happened while he was gone, unless you count the turkey someone tethered to the church bell clapper. I tended to the affairs of my two offices, undisturbed by Conant or anything relating to him. Bonny kept me company at the townhall and at home. She was almost ready to move in with me. In fact, her own house wasn't much more than a mail drop now.
We had just finished supper and were lingering over our coffee, talking, when Howie showed up at the kitchen door. I hadn't heard him drive in, and when I went to the door I didn't see his pickup in the driveway. Then I looked at him through the screen. I stopped wondering about the truck. He was a mess. He stank. There were saddle bags under his eyes. His face was bruised. His hat was missing. And his shirt was torn.
I let him in. His first words were, "Never did get to go huntin'."
I grabbed him by one elbow as he staggered. "What happened?"
Bonny came up behind me. "Good Lord, Howie!" She caught the other elbow. Together we led him to the table and plunked him down. She went to the sink to wet a dish towel. I reached for the jug in the cupboard over the fridge.
We got the story out of him while he sipped whiskey between swipes of the towel. It seemed he hadn't been a mile out of town on the old county road when two characters in a Landrover ran him off the road, waved guns at him, and hauled him off to an old camp in the woods. He thought it was the Peterson camp.
They had tied him to a bunk frame, standing up. They had beat him with fists and pieces of hose. They had quizzed him: "How do you read the future?" "What's the secret?" "How do you read the future?" over and over again. And they hadn't let him sleep, except for catnaps, for a week.
But it hadn't worked. I could have told them that. Howie wasn't very ambitious, but he was a tough old bird. He never said anything he didn't want to say, and you couldn't change his mind with dynamite. Eventually, they had seen that. A third man had appeared, Conant by the description. He had taken a long look at Howie and said, "Turn him loose." The others obeyed, though they drove deeper into the woods before they threw him into the bushes, still tied.
Howie hadn't stopped to sleep before working his bonds loose and hoofing the ten miles back to town. Now he was ready to drop, as soon as we would let him. I stripped his clothes off—his captors hadn't let him loose for anything—and got him into the tub, scrubbed him down, and tumbled him into my bed. Tough as he was, I expected him to sleep till noon. Bonny and I could bunk on the couch.
When I returned to the kitchen, Bonny was holding Howie's clothes at arm's length. "Should we burn these?"
I shook my head. "We can soak 'em in a bucket outdoors. I'll do it if you'll get the coffee going again."
It was another twenty minutes before we could sit down once more. It took that long to hose the worst of the filth off Howie's clothes and change my own outfit. I'd rubbed a bit too close to my old friend for comfort.
By then the coffee was ready and poured. I topped the cups with a splash of brandy, and we both sighed. I said, "I hadn't thought it would come to this."
"But that's who we're dealing with," said Bonny. "Animals! We can't just stop betting."
I nodded glumly and sipped the coffee.
"We have to do something!"
"Like what?" I felt almost as tired as Howie had looked.
"Convince them there's no secret. That even if there is, it's not worth their trouble."
It would be quite a trick, I thought the next day. How do you call a dog off a hot scent? How do you make precognition look like blind, fool luck? I didn't have any ideas, and neither did Bonny. Neither did Howie, when he finally woke up and got enough eggs and bacon into his belly to talk.
I didn't get into the office till nearly noon. By then, Bonny had put in a good morning's work. Howie was home again, dressed in clean clothes from my closet. And I was still sty
mied.
Vaguely, I thought a look at the future might help. I hooked up the TV and scanned the town. I saw nothing useful, not even a fire. I couldn't even spot the Landrover. I quit, disgusted, and turned to the work that was always waiting. This time it was the agenda for the city council meeting next week. But I didn't get very far; my mind just wouldn't settle down.
Lunch helped. Barbara Johnson ran the diner, and her pie was enough to improve anyone's mood. When I got back to the office, I tried the TV again. That didn't do me any more good than before, but now it didn't discourage me. The big trouble with Howie's gadget was that you couldn't scan time. You were stuck with a fixed focus, so to speak, fifty hours off. So I kept trying. The agenda could wait.
Eventually, my effort was rewarded. It was about five, and I was checking my house for the umpteenth time, scanning right through it on the way to other parts of town. As the view passed through the living room, I stopped. There I was, with Bonny, being tied up with what looked like bell wire and tossed on the couch. The villains were two greasy-looking characters clad in dirty leisure suits. One was tall, fat, and pimply. The other was short and skinny. Both had long hair and grim mouths, but it was the fat one who leaned over Bonny and gave the wire around her wrists an extra twist. She winced.
I watched as the interrogation proceeded. It wasn't pretty. But my attention wasn't entirely on what was being done to us. Instead, I was looking for shadows, for possible outs. A little twiddling with the knobs brought out the blur. A little more showed up a nice one, surprisingly strong. I followed the new action until I began to laugh. I laughed so hard that Bonny opened the door to see what was wrong.
