The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Jay Dee gave Tracey a kiss. “I’ll relieve you in a minute, hon. But I got to do something first.”

  He went back into the private office on the far side of the bar, picked up a board—

  —and gave Larry another whack on the ass.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When Ed Ferman purchased this story for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he called it one of the funniest he had ever read. That was high praise indeed, although I’m not sure the story sits at the very pinnacle of comic SF. But I think it does capture a Thorne-Smithian ambiance quite well. The Li’l Bear Inn actually exists in Tiverton, Rhode Island. I’ve never dared set foot inside, for fear of ending up on its walls.

  THE MILL

  1.

  Brick dust mottled the still valley air around the noisy scrambling boys, rising and quickly falling like their cries and shouts in thin ragged clouds that puffed from beneath their hands and feet as they clambered clumsily upon the vast irregular pile of broken and discarded bricks. Its dry powdery sunbaked scent—as familiar as the odor of homemade waterwheat bread—filled their nostrils, even as the settling pale orange-red powder layered their dull black clothing, penetrating its very weave and filtering through to veneer their skins with an ineluctable talcum, so that mothers, washing these boys later, would exclaim, “I swear by the Factor’s immortal soul, this brick dust is leaking out from inside you. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover you’re nothing but a human brick yourself!”

  But the kettle-filled tub and the scrubbing with smoke-colored sea sponges and the gentle feminine upbraiding would come later, and was not to be worried about now. Now only the mad, ecstatic spirit of competition held sway, raging in their veins like the Swolebourne at flood. On and around the huge tumulus of bricks the boys swarmed, in a single-minded and almost desperate game to reach the top. Hands relinquished their holds to reach for the shirttails of those who surged ahead, to yank them back with savage glee. The boys seemed oblivious to the impact of the corners and edges of the broken blocks on their knees and shins and forearms, intent only on achieving the instant and insurmountable but fleeting glory of standing upon the pinnacle of the heap.

  The boys ranged in age from five to just under twelve. No distinction in treatment was made between younger and older, all ages giving and taking equally in the mutual ferocity of the jagged ascent.

  Dislodged bricks tumbled down the pile with a resonant clatter, and it seemed as if the pile would soon be leveled before any individual could reach the top. In the next instant, though, one boy emerged above the rest, eluding the outstretched hands that sought to capture him and deny him the top. Bent almost parallel to the slope of the heap he clawed like an animal with hands and boot-shod feet working alike to reach the apex of the mound. Sweat turned the dust upon his face into a crimson paste.

  All the boys seemed to realize at once that victory for this upstart was now foregone, all their own chances lost in the sudden burst put on by the boy now nearing the top. Instead of reacting badly, they gave in to their natural inclination to cheer an honest victor, and exhortations and encouragements replaced their wordless exclamations of struggle. “Go it, Cairncross!” “Yay, Charley!” “They can’t stop you now, Charles!”

  With the cheers of his peers ringing in his ears, the boy reached the top.

  His heart was pounding, and he could hardly see. His white sweat-soaked shirt clung to him like the mantle of a cape-wolf. He feared he might faint, but knew also somehow that he would not. It was not destined for his body, the instrument of his victory, after all, to spoil this moment. Getting his feet precariously under himself, he stood erect atop the crumbling mass, panting, bruised, sweaty, triumphant, and surveyed those below him, who had come to a complete cessation of movement, as if they had finally assumed the earthen nature of the brick they had so long played upon.

  For the first time in all the years he had been competing in this brutal, vital, irreplaceable game, he had won. He had won. And there could be only one reason why. Tomorrow he turned twelve. When you turned twelve you entered the Mill to work. You played on the bricks no more. This had been his last chance ever to stand here, in unique and poignant relation to his fellows. And he had been granted the privilege. Through some unseen intervention of God or Factor, unwonted energy and determination had flooded his limbs, urging him on to the top, where now he stood with shaky knees. He had won.

  For the next twenty years this moment would be the highlight, the indescribable epiphanic summation and measure of Charley Cairncross’s life. Neither his first kiss from his betrothed nor commendation from his superiors; neither the birth of his children nor the praise of the Factor himself would equal this heartbreaking moment.

  Moved by a premonition of what this moment meant, under the impulse of forces he could neither identify nor control, Charley, risking a tumble and cracked skull, began to jig and prance, whooping and yelling in a giddy crazy dance atop the bricks, unimpeded by his heavy leather shoes, like a fur-faced South Polar savage gloating over the skulls of his vanquished enemies. The boys below Charley watched in fascination, as the skinny lad flailed his arms and legs about. No one had ever done this before, and they were utterly baffled, but at the same time respectful.

  There was no telling how long Charley might have continued his victory dance, had not noontime intervened. From some distance away came the loud tolling of a big bell, echoed up and down the Valley by remoter cousins. Its brazen strokes pealed out, shattering both Charley’s visionary state and the hypnotic trance of his audience. Immediately boys began to descend the heap of rubble, brushing futilely at their clothes.

  Charley, recovering from his ecstasy, looked up at the cloudless summer heavens. Several kites and cliff kestrels glided lazily in the depths of the aquamarine heavens. The enormous blue- white sun was directly overhead. Noontime indeed, and lunch still had to be delivered, despite the unique and magnificent events of the day. Not even for transcendence—especially not for transcendence—could the routine of Mill and Valley come to a halt.

  Lowering his center of gravity so as not to topple, Charley crabbed backwards down the pile. By the time he reached the ground, all the other boys had already vanished among the houses not far off. Charley hastened after them.

  The brick dump lay on the outskirts of Charley’s village, just beyond the outermost houses. In neat, garden-broken ranks the brick bungalows marched alongside the Mill with geometric precision. They clustered familiarly together, despite the abundance of open space in the Valley, as if making a united front against the mystery of the world around them.

  By tradition, the master masons of Charley’s village for centuries had dumped their waste here, on the last bit of level cleared ground before the land became wooded and began to slope up, forming the eastern side of the Valley. All the subsequent decades of weathering and decomposition had permeated the original soil with the sterile runoff from the pile, rendering it mostly fruitless. Among the trailing tendrils of discarded brick grew only the hardiest weeds. Sourpeas, their gaudy spring flowers only a memory now, their poisonous yellow pods harvested occasionally as an emetic; dangletrap, its jaws snapping softly on the odd insect; maidenhair, its black tendrils lying wispily atop red shards.… A foot-beaten path, trod by generations of boys, led back to the houses.

  Halfway across the waste, the path was intersected at a right angle by a twin-rutted dirt road with a thin grassy median. The road, like the Swolebourne, like the Mill itself, ran north and south, leading in the latter direction down the length of the Valley to where the Swolebourne emerged from its human-made brick shell. Here, new construction was always going on.

  Once among the shadows of the somber brick dwellings—each two stories tall and divided by an interior wall so as to house two separate families, whose compact and well-tended garden plots flanked each proud owner’s door, serving in lieu of useless grassy lawn—Charley speeded up his pace. He knew his mother would be waiting for him. More impor
tantly, so would his father.

  On the paths threading the village, Charley passed many boys bent on errands identical to his. They had already been home, however, and now raced by carrying tight-lidded tin pails that they swung by their handles, and stone bottles stoppered with ceramic plugs and wire caps, and suspended from twine knotted around the bottlenecks. The stone bottles were slick with condensation, their contents cool from all-morning immersion in the family wells.

  Soon Charley reached the doorstep of his house, indistinguishable from all the rest and yet so deeply and immutably known by him as his. A woman with plaited honey-colored hair stood impatiently in the doorway, tapping a foot beneath her long baize skirts and holding his father’s lunchpail and beer crock. The left corner of her lips twitched the big dark beauty spot above it in a familiar gesture of annoyance.

  His mother cut off Charley’s attempted explanation of his lateness and disheveled condition. “No excuses, boy. Just get your Da’s meal to him before it gets cold.” Without even stopping, Charley grabbed the pail and bottle and took off.

  Down the narrow cindered lanes—which had just lately dried completely after the final spring rains—Charley raced, his tough leather-soled high-topped shoes crunching the grit as if it were rock candy. Eventually he caught up with the other boys, who had not been so far ahead of him after all, and who—by an unconscious and daily urge to gregariousness, as if they were determined to offset now the future semi-isolation they would endure when tending their machines in the Mill—had funneled together from their various starting points and subsequently moved in a jubilant pack through the last shadowy stretch of serried houses. Occasionally a pail would bang up clumsily against one of its mates, eliciting dull clunks and anxious belligerent warnings to “watch out for my Da’s dup, you dodder!” Some boys carried two or more pails, for both brothers and father.

  Sighting Charley, many of the boys whooped out fresh congratulations for his recent performance on the brick heap. Several of them mimicked his celebratory dance, infusing it with an absurdity he had surely not felt. Had he really looked so foolish? Or was it the perceptions of his friends that was distorting the reality of what he had experienced? Not for the first time, Charley felt distanced from the other boys. He wondered whether anything as intense as what he had just experienced could ever be truly communicated or understood.…

  At last the boys burst out from the maternal embrace of the houses, leaving behind shadow for diamond-hard translucent sunlight that fell sharply on a wide swath of wildflower-spotted, untamed emerald field that stretched away to the Mill. The cindered path continued across this intermediate zone between home and work, heading toward the immense brick structure that was the Mill.

  The Mill was ungraspable from this vantage in its entirety, looking merely like a high endless madder-dark windowless wall capped by a mansard roof whose expanse of thick slates looked like the spine of some unknown beast. It stretched to right and left as far as one could see, dividing the Valley like a ruler laid across a bear-anthill. Its majestic presence was so much a given, so taken for granted, that the boys truly did not even really see it. Their attention was focused on meeting their fathers.

  The boys moved on through the fragrant waist-high unscythed grass, spreading apart a bit, some stopping to investigate a flower or insect, then having to run to rejoin the rest. In a minute or so they had crossed this interzone and entered upon the territory of the Mill proper. Here, as at the brick heap, the ground was bare of anything but the most tenacious and hardy of weeds, due to the accumulation of generations’ worth of waste oil. The smell from the organic detritus—Charley had once heard that the oil came from a special kind of plant that did not grow hereabouts—was dense but not overpoweringly unpleasant, especially to those who had lived with its smell engrained in the creases of their fathers’ rough hands ever since those selfsame hands had first reached to absent-mindedly stroke the new babe in its cradle. The air here smelled rather like slightly rancid fried food.

  Charley and the others hurried across this oily waste toward an opening in the Mill’s flank. A wide double-doored portal of thick planks, this entrance was marked by the rising of a clocktower up from the roofline above its location, and also by a heterogenous collection of backless benches scattered around just beyond the entrance. Above the benches, the gilded hands of the clock hung at ten past the hour, scything inexorably toward the inevitable return to work. Under their stern progress, the benches were already filling up with sweaty, hungry, brawny, tired-looking men, and many of their older sons, looking like shrunken or as yet uninflated replicas of their sires.

  When the lunch-carriers saw their relatives waiting they picked up their feet even more fleetly and began to cry out like a flock of particularly limited birds. “Da! Da! Da! Da!” The men and workerboys perked up, hearing these youthful voices and knowing their meals had arrived. More and more laborers—those who worked farther inside the depths of the Mill and so had farther to walk for lunch—continued to pour out of the doors.

  Straggling alongside Charley in the rear was poor Jemmy Candletree. The boy had six or seven pails to lug. His mother, a widower, supported herself and Jemmy by supplying meals to childless and unmarried men.

  Charley silently took one of Jemmy’s pails; the lad smiled gratefully.

  On the far side of the Mill, Charley knew, this same scene was being mirrored. It gave him a curious sense of twinness to think about it.

  Now the lead boys had begun to circulate among the men, handing out the lunchpails and stone jugs they had ferried from hearth to hand. The men assumed a certain dignity with the arrival of these tin vessels and crocks. Each set his shoulders back somewhat more stiffly beneath his coarse jacket (donned in the morning upon departure, doffed once inside the Mill to allow shirt-sleeved freedom, and re-donned at lunch), as if to say, “My wife and oldest homeson have both done their part once again. Let all see and note this.” Then they fell to disassembling their tripartite pails. A twist unlocked the first section from the second. Removal of the top lid, which was balanced carefully on the knee throughout the meal, always revealed inside this first container an enormous slab of dense waterwheat bread smeared with orange butter, nearly a quarter of a loaf. The container below this held the main course: a hot, fragrant stew of rocklamb and capers, say, or two groatgoat chops, or some kind of meatloaf redolent of greennut shavings. The final sealed container held dessert. Berry cobbler, stuntapple pie, spicebark cookies.

  The sounds of restrained but hearty eating filled the summer air. The men were as yet too intent on sating their Mill-born hunger to engage in conversation.

  Charley shuffled from foot to foot, awaiting the arrival of his father, who worked in roving, some distance away. He examined the lone pail he now carried while he waited. His father’s initials—RC—were awkwardly engraved on cover and bottom. The alphabetic furrows in the tin held ineradicable dirt from a thousand handlings, which, scrub as she would with boar-bristle brush, his mother could never totally remove.

  Suddenly, without warning, Charley experienced a revelation. Tomorrow, he would not be carrying this pail. That task would fall to his little brother, Alan, whose small hands would have to manage two lunches. He—Charley—would have his own lunch-pail. Already it must have been bought at the Company Store, and even this minute was probably sitting on a shelf in the kitchen. Tonight he would have to scratch his initials on it. CC. Tomorrow he would be sitting here with his father, probably famished and more tired than he had ever been before. No more eating at home with his mother and Alan and Floy.…

  CC. See, see. See, see what would come.

  It was all too strange for Charley to really fathom. How could he travel from his temporary yet eternal enshrinement atop the brick heap to the interior depths of the Mill in less than a day? It seemed impossible.…

  Charley lifted his gaze once more to the door. His father was coming through.

  For one brief moment, as the man became visible j
ust within the tenebrous interior of the Mill and yet had not fully emerged, he was dusted with light. All over his bare skin and clothing danced tiny motes and atomies of radiance. He looked dipped in some marvelous powder that did not reflect light, but created it, engendered it of its own miraculous being and nature. Charley’s father wore, for the briefest second, a chatoyant suit of fireflies. It was, of course, only a coating of the airborne fibrous lux particles that were everywhere within the Mill. And as soon as the man came completely into the sun-drenched outside air his suit of lights disappeared, leaving him clothed like the others, in drab utilitarian fustian weave.

  Charley ran to his father and handed over his pail and beer crock. The man nodded wordlessly, tousled Charley’s brown hair, and moved to an empty spot on a bench. He dropped wearily down, as if his bones were lead. The inner containers soon ranged along his leg as on a serving board, Roger Cairncross dug out a spoon from his pocket, polished it on his sleeve (thereby probably depositing as many particles on it as he removed) and began to eat, shoveling stew beneath his droopy mustache like a man filling a ditch.

  Normally Charley would have rejoined his peers in their roughhousing as they waited for the empty pails, which they had to bring home. But today, he wasn’t quite sure who his peers were. So he hung quietly by his father’s elbow while the man and his comrades ate, not venturing to speak.

  His father seemed not to mind. At least he did not gruffly order Charley to move off. Perhaps he too recognized the in-between nature of the day and of Charley’s state of mind. At last, with a final swipe of his bread through the remnant gravy, the elder Cairncross was done. He packed up the assemblage of containers neatly and handed them back to Charley. He brought a pipe out from within his jacket, filled it with smokeweed and began to puff. His fellows were doing likewise, down almost to the youngest. Charley coughed as the acrid smoke reached his nostrils. He vowed then and there never to acquire so inexplicably vile a habit.