“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.
Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”
“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousand lots.”
“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.
“No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”
Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the run-down building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.
A dark pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.
“I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.
“Oh, that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”
“What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”
“What are you think? I do it of course.”
“Could you type a letter for me?”
“Sure is can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp.”
“Ah, let’s see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”
“You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.”
Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”
“Ah—that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.
“Not P.S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.
“Hardly. It’s a business letter to a person I barely know.”
“I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can’t do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.
Then there was silence.
“What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.
“Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.
“But I don’t hear a typewriter going.”
“What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.
The girl opened the door and handed Art the three-page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.
“There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.
“Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”
“No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”
“He cuts prices.”
“Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”
“My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”
“There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.
“Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What’s the best Indian to be?”
“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.
“OK then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”
“We’re already taken,” Boomer said. “I’m a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”
“Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That’s from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”
“I have two-bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.
“I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there’s a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”
“Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let’s go, Jim.”
“P.S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.
The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.
“We’d like a couple of Buds, but you don’t seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.
“Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.
“Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn’t hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.
“Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn’t take up space, like if he made it before time.”
“But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.
“No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”
“This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”
“Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn’t remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.”
She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.
“But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.
“Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in a Schlitz bottle and the man didn’t like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle, ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don’t even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It’s hard to keep from making mistake when you’re stupid.”
“No, you don’t have a light or a window in here, and it’s light,” Slick said. “You don’t have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”
“Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”
“Yes, we will. And I’m interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.
“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried. “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”
But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.
“How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.
“Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”
“You’re not from around here,” Slick said. “You’re not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”
“Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”
“You wouldn’t be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.
“I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”
“What’s in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”
&n
bsp; “My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she’s crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn’t be bald-headed in the first place.”
“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.
“Oh sure. Can’t you?”
There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn’t seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.
“I don’t remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.
“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.
Weathered boards, rusty nails … and he had just made it.
“Why didn’t you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.
“This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We’re new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I’m trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”
“What is that?” Slick asked.
“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh well, I’ll put them in. I’ll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”
“No. I’ve already got a car,” Slick said. “Let’s go, Jim.”
That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.
“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There’s a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”
“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”
They went by the public stenographer shack again.
“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.
“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.
“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.
“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”
“Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”
“You promise you won’t tell anybody.”
“I promise.”
“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.
They started slowly on up the block.
“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.
“With my other tongue,” the girl said.
There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute—in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.
“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.
“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let’s go over to the Red Rooster and see if there’s anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”
Ride a Tin Can
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
When I wrote to R. A. Lafferty as a very young man, I asked him about his favorite of his own short stories. He mentioned three stories that I had read and loved—“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” “Configuration of the North Shore,” and “Continued on Next Rock”—and one that I hadn’t. It was called “Ride a Tin Can.”
Shortly afterward, I bought a copy of Strange Doings, and read “Ride a Tin Can,” and was disappointed. It made me sad.
I think I wanted to be uplifted. I wanted the thing that Lafferty did where his apocalypses were joyful things one went into with delight. And here were the Shelni race going into an apocalypse with joyful delight, and I walked away from the story feeling that I might just have read the saddest story in the world. I felt manipulated, because it was an ending that called for tears, told in a way that did not allow for tears. I did not trust tears anyway. “Ride a Tin Can” left me disappointed in Humanity. It was a story I could admire, but I could not love, and which I did not look forward to rereading.
As an older reader, I can love it: I can love it for the shape of the story, the three tiny tales that hover at the end of understanding; I love it for the worldbuilding that is never fully described, for the relationship between the Shelni and the Skokie and the frogs and the trees. I love it for Holly Harkel, a human woman who is goblin enough to talk to goblins under their tree-root home, goblin enough to ride a tin can herself.
It’s a story nobody else could have written, pulled off in a way nobody else would have imagined, that describes a genocide that hurts, without a word wasted.
I think, “We are better than this. Surely we must be better than this?” And I think, “How do you write a story like that anyway? Write a story like that, and make it look easy?”
But he does. Somehow he does.
It’s OK if you cry.
Ride a Tin Can
These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.
Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy.
“After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,” Holmberg told me, “and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list. I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You’ll have to hurry. They’re about gone.
“And let me say in all compassion that anyone who looks like Miss Holly Harkel deserves her heart’s desire. That is no more than simple justice. Besides, the bill will be footed by the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. These companies are bitten by the small flea of remorse every now and then and they want to pitch a few coins into some fund for luck. It’s never many coins that they want to pitch; the remorse bug that bites them is never a very large one. You may be able to stretch it to cover your project though, Vanhoosier.”
So we had our appropriation and our travel, Miss Holly and myself.
Holly Harkel had often been in disrepute for her claims to understand the languages of various creatures. There was special outrage to her claim that she would be able to understand the Shelni. Now that was odd. No disrepute attached to Captain Charbonnett for his claim to understand the planetary simians, and if there was ever a phony claim it was this. No disrepute attached to Meyro-witz for his claim of finding esoteric meanings in the patterns of vole droppings. But there seemed something incredible in the claim of the goblin-faced Holly Harkel that not only would she be able to understand the Shelni instantly and completely but that they were not low scavenger beasts at all, that they were genuine goblin people who played goblin music and sang goblin songs.
Holly Harkel had a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body, and a brain too big for her curious little head. That, I suppose, is what made her so lumpy everywhere. She was entirely co
mpounded of love and concern and laughter, and much of it bulged out from her narrow form. Her ugliness was one of the unusual things and I believe that she enjoyed giving it to the worlds. She had loved snakes and toads, she had loved monkeys and misbegottens. She had come to look weirdly like them when we studied them. She was a snake when we studied them, she was a toad when they were our subject. She studied every creature from the inside of it. And here there was an uncommon similarity, even for her.
Holly loved the Shelni instantly. She became a Shelni, and she hadn’t far to go. She moved and scooted and climbed like a Shelni. She came down trees headfirst like a Shelni or a squirrel. She had always seemed to me to be a little other than human. And now she was avid to record the Shelni things “—before they be gone.”
As for the Shelni themselves, some scientists have called them humanoid, and then braced themselves for the blow and howl. If they were humanoid they were certainly the lowest and oddest humanoids ever. But we folklorists knew intuitively what they were. They were goblins pure and simple—I do not use the adjectives here as cliché. The tallest of them were less than three feet tall; the oldest of them were less than seven years old. They were, perhaps, the ugliest creatures in the universe, and yet of a pleasant ugliness. There was no evil in them at all. Scientists who have tested them have insisted that there was no intelligence in them at all. They were friendly and open. Too friendly, too open, as it happened, for they were fascinated by all human things, to their harm. But they were no more human than a fairy or an ogre is human. Less, less, less than a monkey.
“Here is a den of them,” Holly divined that first day (it was the day before yesterday). “There will be a whole coven of them down under here and the door is down through the roots of this tree. When I got my doctorate in primitive music I never imagined that I would be visiting Brownies down under tree roots. I should say that I never so much as hoped that I would be. There was so much that they didn’t teach us. There was even one period in my life when I ceased to believe in goblins.”
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 9
