Stranger Than You Think Read online

  “In 1960 I shall be dead,” the major said to no one in particular.

  As we walked toward the car our wives still discussed the botch look in that fall’s styles. Suddenly mine turned. "I don't believe they're ever going to put it out," she said, pointing at the firemen who now looked very tired.

  And suddenly, the chill Thanksgiving wind seemed colder.

  "FROM CARIBOU TO CARRY NATION"

  "Reincarnation and transmigration/From caribou to Carry Nation," my mad friend strophed.

  A llama spat, scoring a hit on my No. 3 boy. A wife performed prophylaxy and we returned to the subject. “I don't care if St. Catherine was a Buddhist,” my mad friend said, “the whole idea’s in direct opposition to the doctrine of free will.”

  I sighed and we moved on before the llama could score again. It was spring and my mad friend was retaliating for the incident of several months ago when I and mine had descended in visitation upon him and his. With his arrival, we had immediately faced the Great American Problem: What shall we do with the children?

  An always resourceful wife came up with the standby: Why not take them to the zoo?

  No sooner said than, two and one-half hours and many facewashings later, it was done. The Berlin zoo was larger, someone said. But bombed out and much farther, someone answered, so we went to San Diego’s which was now the world’s-largest. And only four miles away. Here, overlooking the Galapagos tortoises, I had vocally wondered what sort of sin could penalize a transmigrationist into several centuries of amphibian exile.

  “The most objectionable facet to any belief in reincarnation,” my mad friend continued, “is that it relieves us of any obligation to better the world. As for transmigration, a renegade uncle of mine died outside the Church.”

  I had not believed such a thing could be possible.

  “Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent,” my mad friend quoted as we meandered down the greensward where alligators and crocodiles obligingly yawned beneath a sign which pointed out their variant maxillary and dental structures. “To cut it short,” he continued, “like Menotti, I once wasted four bits on a spook raiser.”

  This was so alien to my friend's normal behavior that I immediately sensed what was coming. “Please continue, Mr. Bones,” I murmured. »

  “A typical setup: a largo, rundown house set back in an overgown weedy yard, a gingerbread anachoronism plumped between a second-rate nightclub and a small Japanese-owned bakery with a tremendous thumping machine which pressed out Chinese fortune cookies.

  “I was ushered into the seance by a be-turbaned Hibemo-Nubian. After some preliminary fumblings with the wrong light switch I was speaking to my transmigrationist and totally fictitious uncle.”

  “ ‘It’s wonderful over here, nephew,’ he said in a cadaverous, echo-chamberish voice. ‘The fields are green, the sun always shines, and I’ve nothing to do all day long but lie in the grass, surrounded by females who gaze at me with large, adoring eyes.”

  “It must be wonderful in Heaven,” my mad friend had interjected.

  "Then suddenly, the cadaverous echo-chamberish voice shifted in timbre. ‘Heaven! Are you nuts?” it demanded, ‘I’m a Jersey bull on a farm in Iowa.’ ”

  “Not up to standard,” I said.

  “I was afraid not,” my mad friend sighed. “I won’t use ft again.”

  We had progressed by this time to the monkeys, who seemed vaguely amused by us and our offspring.

  There was a scream from No. 3 boy—the same who had already been target to a llama’s displeasure. Some time was consumed in removing the stinger without injecting more poison. After the first bright flame of agony, the boy settled into his usual observant silence. "He’s the only one I worry about,” I said in confidential tones. “The others are cast-iron-stomached little monsters, each thoroughly capable of giving the world a bad time.”

  “And this?”

  "Causes me much preoccupation,” I answered in the same tongue. “As you have just observed, a llama and a bee select him from the crowd. He falls heir to all the world’s evils. "Is he an accident prone or does he have a poor karma rating?”

  My mad friend shrugged.

  "Timid as he seems, there’s something in him. One of these days he’ll burst like Attila or Pizarro onto an unsuspecting world. If the world doesn’t destroy him first.”

  My mad friend gazed at the boy, who still limped but ignored his wounds as he stared into the eyes of a puma who regarded him with equal interest. “Probably grow up to be a writer,” my friend muttered.

  We moved on to the pachyderms, where our offspring listened to the muted rumblings of digestive processes and stared in fascination as a bull emitted a tremendous ball of steaming sparrow fodder. My mad friend stared with equal fascination at the elephant’s forehead. “Almost ready to go musht,” he said.

  “Let’s make sure we have our terms correct,” I observed. "Kindly define.”

  “A reincarnationist believes the soul is born into decreasing or increasing opportunities as reward or punishment for his past life. A transmigrationist, on the other hand, returns as an ape, ivory bearer, or peacock.”

  At this point the elephant trumpeted deafeningly. From the monkey house came additional comment.

  “I had a grandfather who believed in transmigration—”

  “Please continue,” my mad friend murmured. He had a woman-like ability to listen while simultaneously explaining the differences between camels and dromedaries to children and wives.

  “My grandfather lived to an old age. And the older, the riper. Though virile enough to participate in the Klondike rush and actually make a little money out of it, his declining years brought on one idiosyncrasy after another.

  "First, he stopped eating pork. Some time later he learned beef and lamb were unhealthy. By age sixty he was strictly a fish eater. At sixty-seven my grandfather became a full-fledged vegetarian—by which I mean one who eschews milk, butter, eggs, and all animal products. Had plastic been available, I’m sure he’d have given up woolen suiting and leather shoes.”

  “A Transcendentalist among Calvinists,” my mad friend said. The musk ox nodded and continued chewing.

  “Transcendentalist was not the word we used. My family thought he was nuts. But such was the force of the old man’s personality that twenty-five years later he was. still going strong, and had restricted his diet to a daily two pounds of boiled carrots.”

  “No kidding?” my mad friend asked. “A girl in England tried that not long ago. She turned yellow.”

  “Grandpa was redhaired to begin with,” I continued, “but he did have an unusual color in his last few years.”

  “And he was a transmigrationist?”

  “Among other things. Of course, I’ve never tried to contact him. Colorful I’ll admit he was, but he was pushing a hundred and had become something of a problem.” I pointed at my llama bespat and bee-stung offspring. “There was his only mourner. The child had an uncanny habit of appearing from nowhere with a match just as the old man reached for a cigar.”

  “Fascinating,” my mad friend said. “And nothing but carrots?”

  “For the last three years,” I indicated the child, who now communed with a condor.'“He also devours them.”

  Our arches had sagged from triumph through uncertainty to despair before our iron-stomached extroverts decided they’d seen enough. Four miles and several cloverleafs later supper was being prepared.

  “I fully intend to excoriate the next beast I see with an elephant gun," my mad friend observed.

  From the relative comfort of a gibson, I could afford to be charitable. "You should never have sworn off,” I said.

  “Dinner is served,” said a voice from the kitchen.

  And it was, if not superb, at least satisfactory. Though hours had elapsed since the last ice cream and pop, there were the usual difficulties between children and vegetables. “Odd,” my wife was saying, "He usually loves carrots. . . .No, darling, you can’t trad
e it for another one.”

  We were nearing the end of a long and tiresome day. I decided it was time something definite was done. “Eat your carrot!" I thundered, “Or I shall descend upon you like a wrathful god!"

  No. 3 boy made an agonizing reappraisal of how much he could get away with before company. After one quick look he ingested the carrot, meanwhile putting on his pale, drawn act.

  “We grew these in the back yard,” a wife remarked. “Since the first one sprouted he’s had some odd idea that he couldn’t eat these particular carrots.”

  Late that night, after children had been shuffled around into the makeshifts necessary when two families occupy an Einfamilianhaus, my mad friend returned once more to the subject. “Like most heresies," he said, “there is a certain dark logic which runs through these two doctrines. And therein lies the danger.

  “The reincamationist is born king or beggar and feels no need to complain about the excesses of the former or the miseries of the latter. Thus man lives complacent in the midst of evil.

  “Transmigration is even more absurd. Because a man likes cats, should be be reborn as one? I like filet mignon, but I sincerely hope I shall never be a steer.”

  There was no sound but a quickening of parental instinct made me suddenly get up. No. 3 boy was crying in his quiet, apologetic manner. “I’m not a cannibal, Grandpa,” he whispered into the darkness, “he made me do it."

  THE GALACTIC CALABASH

  THE AFFAIR OF THE GALACTIC calabash began one Sunday almost a year ago when, after much wheedling, I had induced my mad friend to abstain from suppressing coastal carpet-baggers for one weekend. We were bruising tires and nerves slightly south of the place where U.S. 101 becomes Carretera Federal Número 2, when he applied brakes with soul-shattering suddenness.

  The cow gazed at us with the equanimity of a Methodist bishop while my friend applied the horn. At imminent risk of impacting a sinus, he lowered the window and shouted raucous Arabic into the damp, maritime air. It sounded like something an Arab might say to a Jew.

  But the cow took no offense until my mad friend nudged her gently with the grill. As she trotted away a turgid udder swung, and I was struck with the resemblance to a Wagnerian soprano we had once known, and said so. My mad friend laughed uproariously.

  “What’s so funny?” a wife asked from the rear seat.

  “A play on words,” I explained.

  “You’d have to speak Gaelic to understand it,” my friend added.

  The wives returned to their discussion of whatever it is that wives discuss.

  “You’ll find him interesting.” I referred to the man we were going to visit. I went on to explain how the meteor-stricken Señor Galindo had arrived ten years ago from some pauperous tropic. He had brought little, save an immensely fertile wife, to this brawling, wide-open land of opportunity and inflation far up in the northwest comer of the republic. And now he was a power to be considered.

  My mad friend placed his forefinger stiffly to one side of his nose and inhaled with difficulty through the other. “Serves me right for leaving Arizona,” he muttered.

  “If you’re immune to neo-synephrine I have some Scotch snuff.”

  He shook his head and continued driving. There was a tremendous bump where rain had undermined a bridge approach. My friend registered suffering as he thought of martyred tires, “Back to the subject,” he continued; “man is a theomorph. Therefore, any intelligent being is sure to be anthropomorphic. And please can if you will any hoopla about binary planets with tides being necessary before an air-breather climbs out of his tidal pool. We still haven’t made peace with Darwin.”

  “But you will concede that dogma is not overthrown by admitting these possibilities?”

  “We outlived Galileo.”

  “Turn here,” I interrupted. We hurdled a culvert. Yesterday’s cloudburst had removed all die topsoil so we crept with agonizing slowness over a jumble of headsized boulders for the next kilometer. Just over the rise of the hill we came to La Granja Galindo.

  “Thank God he doesn’t call it hacienda,” my mad friend muttered, “but what’s the difference between granja and rancho. “All same: farm and ranch.” The central core of Sr. Galindo’s house was a marvel of decrepitude and slipshod construction.

  Surrounding it concentrically were the additions which fertility and increasing opulence had forced him to. Though he fully intended someday to erect a palace more in keeping with his present station in life, so far every peso had gone into more of the narrow, corrugated iron edifices which covered the downwind portion of his granja.

  As I alighted from the car, Sr. Galindo detached himself from the sons, daughters, and employees who were unloading and tallying a truck. He was a large, bald-headed man, much whiter than I or my mad friend, and made a perfect picture of a jovial, Irish bartender until he opened his mouth to shout, “¡Hola! ¿What is new in the platívolo factory?”

  “We’ve converted to cups,” I said.

  “I thought flying saucers were platos voladorcs,” my mad friend muttered.

  “Newspaper jargon,” I explained. The Saucer Works gag referred to the place where I work—about which no more. We passed a bare, grave-like mound adjoining the kitchen garden and once more I admired the Mexican’s practicality. How many men would let a meteorite do the spadework for a new septic tank?

  I presented my mad friend and his wife to Sr. Galindo, whose own wife arrived, wearing knee-length rubber boots and carrying a clipboard. She favored us with a grin and took our wives in tow toward the kitchen where they could supervise a young tortillera and discuss the new botch look which none dared as yet to wear.

  ‘Thank God you speak Spanish,” Sr. Galindo said to my friend. “I dislike to inflict my English on persons of discernment.”

  Galindo’s English was fully as bad as he described it. It had been learned mostly during hours spent puzzling over bulletins from the U.S. Dep’t. of Agriculture.

  After outfitting us with specially disinfected galoshes, he took us on a tour of the long, sheet-iron buildings and explained with loving thoroughness the workings of his fully automated factory. Conveyor belts brought compounded feeds directly from the mill to galleries where 7 kilograms of feed plus measured amounts of antibiotics and water could be counted upon to produce 3 kilograms of dressed-out fryer at the end of 8 weeks. But there was a slightly careworn look about the fryers’ beady eyes, also little trilling noises and ruffled plumage. I wondered if my mad friend’s aura was incompatible with avian contentment. Sr. Galindo disembarrassed me. “Since that accursed aerolith fell,” he muttered.

  I pressed him for particulars.

  “For the past few months they’ve been a little slow making weight.

  “Genetic difficulties?”

  Galindo shrugged. “Maybe the strain’s playing out. So far it’s not serious.”

  We passed to another gallery where fertile eggs rolled gently from hens to another conveyor, through grading and candling machinery to incubators whence, twenty-one days later, they would be recycled into the eight week grain-to-meat process.

  “All this I owe to the gringos” Sr. Galindo said expansively. He was a great admirer of Americans with their beautiful machinery and assembly line processes.

  “Horse manure!” I spoke with the familiarity of long friendship.

  Sr. Galindo glanced at me with a slight, quizzical smile.

  “I imagine some small part of it can be laid to Yankee ingenuity,” my mad friend said placatingly.

  “Damn small,” I said, for I remembered the long bouts of legal skirmishing which had built Senor Galindo’s business. Before his time every chicken and egg consumed in this territory had been imported from Yankeeland. When the government, in misguided eagerness to protect and promote local industry, had forbidden the importation of eggs and chicken feed, Sr. Galindo had been close to ruin.

  But by paying the fantastic interest rates prevalent in an unregulated economy, he had floated and juggled sto
ck issues with an abandon far wilder than any blue-sky railroad pirate’s. By dint of frantic prestidigitation and prevarication Sr. Galindo bought out his American suppliers and transported their equipment to his own side of the border.

  Thanks to a total absence of income tax, the Americans were now almost paid off and Sr. Galindo would soon be in the black. Though he admired American efficiency and often talked of emigrating, the jovial Mexican was never quite fool enough to do it.

  “What’s the new building?” I asked.

  “Ah, this you must see.” We waded through trays of disinfectant and took off the galoshes. On the way we passed through the sacrificadora where fryers were placed on the hooks of a chain which delivered them via scalding tank to a revolving drum with dozens of rubber fingers which plucked feathers and rapped the unwary knuckle which came too near.

  Farther down was a table where the fryer’s less appetizing portions were removed to ride another conveyor to the cooker which sterilized them before relaying to a far corner of the gratija.

  Senor Galindo’s unbelievably handsome son gave me a smile of recognition as his cleaver did things worthy of a Samoan sword dancer. A daughter and another girl I did not recognize were stuffing dismembered fryers into plastic bags which they shrunk tight with the aid of a vacuum cleaner. A third girl snapped a rubber band over each bag and packed it in a square stacking carton.

  As smaller son followed us, plucking periodically at Galindo’s sleeve and whispering.

  Galindo led us into the new building which was, of course, a freezer. “Let’s see those cuckolds”—cabrónes was the word he used—“try it again.” He was referring to the time a conspiracy had been organized to down the price just when he had thirty-thousand fryers ready to kill and gobbling tons of feed each day.

  “What’s that thing?” my mad friend asked, pointing at a frost-rimed sphere in one comer of the vast freezing compartment.

  Sr. Galindo picked it up with a puzzled air. He juggled it gingerly from hand to hand as we hurried from 60° below out into the watery February sunshine. He placed the sphere atop a bird bath he’d started two years ago and never had time to finish. While he clapped his hands and blew on them the frost began melting. “Ah,” he said with a sudden smile, “Now I remember. Es una caXabaza” Which, owing to a linguistic peculiarity, could mean pumpkin or several kinds of squash, but not calabash.