The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Then Dr. Velikof Vonk had come onto a tape in a bunch of anthropological tapes, and the tape contained sequences like this:

  “What do they do when the river floods?”

  “Ah, they close their noses and mouths and ears with mud, and they lie down with big rocks on their breasts and stay there till the flood has passed.”

  “Can they be taught?”

  “Some of the children go to school, and they learn. But when they are older then they stay at home, and they forget.”

  “What sort of language do they talk?”

  “Ah, they don’t seem to talk very much. They keep to themselves. Sometimes when they talk it is just plain Cimarron Valley English.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “They boil river water in mud clay pots. They put in wild onions and greenery. The pottage thickens then, I don’t know how. It gets lumps of meat or clay in it, and they eat that too. They eat frogs and fish and owls and thicket filaments. But mostly they don’t eat very much of anything.”

  “It is said that they aren’t all of the same appearance. It is even said that they are born, ah, shapeless, and that—ah—could you tell me anything about that?”

  “Yeah. They’re born without much shape. Most of them never do get much shape. When they have any, well actually their mothers lick them into shape, give them their appearance.”

  “It’s an old folk tale that bears do that.”

  “Maybe they learned it from the bears then, young fellow. There’s quite a bit of bear mixture in them, but the bears themselves have nearly gone from the flats and thickets now. More than likely the bears learned it from them. Sometimes the mothers lick the cubs into the shape of regular people for a joke.”

  “That is the legend?”

  “You keep saying legend. I don’t know anything about legend. I just tell you what you ask me. I’ll tell you a funny one, though. One of the mothers who was getting ready to bear happened to get ahold of an old movie magazine that some fishers from Boomer had left on the river edge. There was a picture in it of the prettiest girl that anyone ever saw, and it was a picture of all of that girl. This mother was tickled by that picture. She bore a daughter then, and she licked her into the shape and appearance of the girl in the movie magazine. And the girl grew up looking like that and she still looks like that, pretty as a picture. I don’t believe the girl appreciates the joke. She is the prettiest of all the people, though. Her name is Crayola Catfish.”

  “Are you having me, old fellow? Have those creatures any humor?”

  “Some of them tell old jokes. John Salt tells old jokes. The Licorice Man tells really old jokes. And man, does the Comet ever tell old jokes!”

  “Are the creatures long-lived?”

  “Long-lived as we want to be. The elixir comes from these flats, you know. Some of us use it, some of us don’t.”

  “Are you one of the creatures?”

  “Sure, I’m one of them. I like to get out from it sometimes though. I follow the harvests.”

  * * *

  This tape (recorded by an anthropology student at State University who, by the way, has since busted out of anthropology and is now taking hotel and restaurant management) had greatly excited the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk when he had played it, along with several hundred other tapes that had come in that week from the anthropology circuit. He scratched his—(no he didn’t, he didn’t have one)—he scratched his jowl and he phoned up the eminent scientists Arpad Arkabaranan and Willy McGilly.

  “I’ll go, I’ll go, of course I’ll go,” Arpad had cried. “I’ve traveled a million miles in search of it, and should I refuse to go sixty? This won’t be it, this can’t be it, but I’ll never give up. Yes, we’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Sure, I’ll go,” Willy McGilly said. “I’ve been there before, I kind of like those folks on the flats. I don’t know about the biggest catfish in the world, but the biggest catfish stories in the world have been pulled out of the Cimarron River right about at Boomer Flats. Sure, we’ll go tomorrow.”

  “This may be it,” Velikof had said. “How can we miss it? I can almost reach out and scratch it on the nose from here.”

  “You’ll find yourself scratching your own nose, that’s how you’ll miss it. But it’s there and it’s real.”

  “I believe, Willy, that there is a sort of amnesia that has prevented us finding them or remembering them accurately.”

  “Not that, Velikof. It’s just that they’re always too close to see.”

  * * *

  So the next day the three eminent scientists drove over from T-Town to come to Boomer Flats. Willy McGilly knew where the place was, but his pointing out of the way seemed improbable: Velikof was more inclined to trust the information of people in Boomer. And there was a difficulty there.

  People kept saying, “This is Boomer. There isn’t exactly any place called Boomer Flats.” Boomer Flats wasn’t on any map. It was too small even to have a post office. And the Boomer people were exasperating in not knowing about it or knowing the way to it.

  “Three miles from here, and you don’t know where it is?” Velikof asked one of them angrily.

  “I don’t even know that it is,” the Boomer man had said in his own near anger. “I don’t believe that there is such a place.”

  Finally, however, other men told the eminent scientists that there sort of was such a place, sort of a place. Sort of a road going to it too. They pointed out the same improbable way that Willy McGilly had pointed out.

  The three eminents took the road. The flats hadn’t flooded lately. The road was sand, but it could be negotiated. They came to the town, to the sort of town, in the ragged river flats. There was such a place. They went to the Cimarron Hotel which was like any hotel anywhere, only older. They went into the dining room, for it was noon.

  It had tables, but it was more than a dining room. It was a common room. It even had intimations of old elegance in blued pier mirrors. There was a dingy bar there. There was a pool table there, and a hairy man was playing rotation with the Comet on it. The Comet was a long gray-bearded man (in fact, comet means a star with a beard) and small pieces were always falling off him. Clay-colored men with their hats on were playing dominos at several of the tables, and there were half a dozen dogs in the room. Something a little queer and primordial about those dogs! Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place!

  But, as if set to serve as distraction, there was a remarkably pretty girl there, and she might have been a waitress. She seemed to be waiting, either listlessly or profoundly, for something.

  Dr Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step.

  “Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered simply, but it wasn’t simple at all. Her voice didn’t go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes.

  “We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?”

  “They’re fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I’ll bring it after a while.”

  There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit.

  “Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar duality.”

  “Not just a springtime; it’s an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I’ve noticed that about them in other places. It’s old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.”

  The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric.

  “There’s a lot of the gas-light
era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren’t gas lights either.”

  “No, they’re hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”

  “Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her.

  “Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame.

  “Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked.

  “They’re fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I’ll bring them after a while.”

  Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation.

  “We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?”

  “You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

  Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn’t such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn’t done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink. Velikof was always strong on the folk memory bit.

  Arpad Arkabaranan screamed, rose backward, toppled his chair, and stood aghast while pointing a shaking finger at his splashing clay cup. Arpad was disturbed.

  Willy McGilly drank deeply from his own stirring vessel.

  “Why, it’s Green Snake Snorter!” he cried in amazement and delight. “Oh drink of drinks, thou’re a pleasure beyond expectation! They used to serve it to us back home, but I never even hoped to find it here. What great thing have we done to deserve this?”

  He drank again of the wonderful splashing liquor while the spray of it filled the air. And Velikof also drank with noisy pleasure. The girl righted Arpad’s chair, put Arpad into it again with strong hands, and addressed him powerfully to his cresting breaker. But Arpad was scared of his lively drink. “It’s alive, it’s alive,” was all that he could jabber. Arpad Arkabaranan specialized in primitives, and primitives by definition are prime stuff. But there wasn’t, now in his moment of weakness, enough prime stuff in Arpad himself to face so pleasant and primitive a drink as this.

  The liquid was sparkling with bright action, was adequately alcoholic, something like choc beer, and there was a green snake in each cup. (Velikof in his notebook states that they were green worms of the species vermis ebrius viridis, but that is only a quibble. They were snakelike worms and of the size of small snakes, and we will call them snakes.)

  “Do get with it, Arpad,” Willy McGilly cried. “The trick is to drink it up before the snake drinks it. I tell you though that the snakes can discern when a man is afraid of them. They’ll fang the face off a man who’s afraid of them.”

  “Ah, I don’t believe that I want the drink,” Arpad declared with sickish grace. “I’m not much of a drinking man.”

  So Arpad’s green snake drank up his Green Snake Snorter, noisily and greedily. Then it expired—it breathed out its life and evaporated. That green snake was gone.

  “Where did he go?” Arpad asked nervously. He was still uneasy about the business.

  “Back to the catfish,” the girl said. “All the snakes are spirits of catfish just out for a little ramble.”

  “Interesting,” Velikof said, and he noted in his pocket notebook that the vermis ebrius viridis is not a discrete species of worm or snake, but is rather spirit of catfish. It is out of such careful notation that science is built up.

  “Is there anything noteworthy about Boomer Flats?” Velikof asked the girl then. “Has it any unique claim to fame?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “This is the place that the comets come back to.”

  “Ah, but the moths have eaten the comets,” Willy McGilly quoted from the old epic.

  The girl brought them three big clay bowls heaped with fish eggs, and these they were to eat with three clay spoons. Willy McGilly and Dr. Velikof Vonk addressed themselves to the rich meal with pleasure, but Arpad Arkabaranan refused.

  “Why, it’s all mixed with mud and sand and trash,” he objected.

  “Certainly, certainly, wonderful, wonderful,” Willy McGilly slushed out the happy words with a mouth full of delicious goop. “I always thought that something went out of the world when they cleaned up the old shantytown dish of shad roe. In some places they cleaned it up; not everywhere. I maintain that roe at its best must always have at least a slight tang of river sewage.”

  But Arpad broke his clay spoon in disgust. And he would not eat. Arpad had traveled a million miles in search of it but he didn’t know it when he found it; he hadn’t any of it inside him so he missed it.

  One of the domino players at a near table (the three eminents had noticed this some time before but had not fully realized it) was a bear. The bear was dressed as a shabby man, he wore a big black hat on his head; he played dominos well; he was winning.

  “How is it that the bear plays so well?” Velikof asked.

  “He doesn’t play at all well,” Willy McGilly protested. “I could beat him. I could beat any of them.”

  “He isn’t really a bear,” the girl said. “He is my cousin. Our mothers, who were sisters, were clownish. His mother licked him into the shape of a bear for fun. But that is nothing to what my mother did to me. She licked me into pretty face and pretty figure for a joke, and now I am stuck with it. I think it is too much of a joke. I’m not really like this, but I guess I may as well laugh at me just as everybody else does.”

  “What is your name?” Arpad asked her without real interest.

  “Crayola Catfish.”

  But Arpad Arkabaranan didn’t hear or recognize the name, though it had been on a tape that Dr. Velikof Vonk had played for them, the same tape that had really brought them to Boomer Flats. Arpad had now closed his eyes and ears and heart to all of it.

  The hairy man and the Comet were still shooting pool, but pieces were still falling off the Comet.

  “He’s diminishing, he’s breaking up,” Velikof observed. “He won’t last another hundred years at that rate.”

  Then the eminents left board and room and the Cimarron Hotel to go looking for ABSMs who were rumored to live in that area.

  ABSM is the code name for the Abominable Snowman, for the Hairy Woodman, for the Wild Man of Borneo, for the Sasquatch, for the Booger-Man, for the Ape-Man, for the Bear-Man, for the Missing Link, for the nine-foot-tall Giant things, for the living Neanderthals. It is believed by some that all of these beings are the same. It is believed by most that these things are no thing at all, no where, not in any form.

  And it seemed as if the most were right, for the three eminents could not find hide nor hair (rough hide and copious hair were supposed to be marks by which the ABSMs might be known) of the queer folks anywhere along the red bank of the Cimarron River. Such creatures as they did encounter were very like the shabby and untalkative creatures they had already encountered in Boomer Flats. They weren’t an ugly people: they were pleasantly mud-homely. They were civil and most often they were silent. They dressed something as people had dressed seventy-five years before that time—as the poor working people had dressed then. Maybe they were poor, maybe not. They didn’t seem to work very much. Sometimes a man or a woman seemed to be doing a little bit of work, very casually.

  It may be that the red-mud river was full of fish. Something was splashing and jumping there. Big turtles waddled up out of the water, caked with mud even around their eyes
. The shores and flats were treacherous, and sometimes an eminent would sink into the sand-mud up to the hips. But the broad-footed people of the area didn’t seem to sink in.

  There was plenty of greenery (or brownery, for it had been the dusty weeks) along the shores. There were muskrats, there were even beavers, there were skunks and possums and badgers. There were wolf dens and coyote dens digged into the banks, and they had their particular smells about them. There were dog dens. There were coon trees. There were even bear dens or caves. But no, that was not a bear smell either. What smell was it?

  “What lives in these clay caves?” Velikof asked a woman who was digging river clams there.

  “The Giants live in them,” she said. Well, they were tall enough to be Giants’ caves. A nine-footer need hardly stoop to enter one.

  “We have missed it,” Arpad said. “There is nothing at all to be found here. I will travel farther, and I may find it in other places.”

  “Oh, I believe we are right in the middle of it,” Velikof gave the opinion.

  “It is all around us, Arpad, everything you wanted,” Willy McGilly insisted.

  But Arpad Arkabaranan would have none of the muddy water, none of the red sand or the red sand caves, nothing of anything here. The interest had all gone out of him. The three of them went back to the Cimarron Hotel without, apparently, finding primitive creature or missing link at all.

  They entered the common room of the hotel again. Dominos were set before them. They played draw listlessly.

  “You are sure that there are no odd creatures around this place?” Arpad again asked the girl Crayola Catfish.