Stranger Than You Think Read online

  “That too occurred to me but I could not take the easy way out. And then, I was curious. Wolf children, you know. What could this creature be in normal surroundings?

  “But I did not expect to live more than six months. Nor would the baby, even if he survived after losing his postnatal immunity.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t make those disconcerting statements about when the world’s going to end,” my mad friend said.

  “So I went back thirty five years,” the Byzantine continued, “and doctored a birth record. I placed little Caliban with a middle-aged couple and told them he was my wild oat on a brilliant but unstable actress. I set up a trust fund.”

  The Byzantine’s account abruptly ended. His eyes crossed and he laid his head on the table.

  “Interesting,” I said to my mad friend. “But what’s with the extradition? I’ve heard some weird ideas to get a tax-free Paris vacation but what do the property owners have to say?”

  “In addition to being police chief of Speedtrap, I am also mayor,” my mad friend said.

  “But don’t you have to answer to the city council?”

  “Not after she’s absconded,” a wife said.

  “I should think the citizens would protest these high-handed tactics.”

  “Since the mine closed down I am the sole property owner of Speedtrap,” my mad friend said.

  “And one half of the total electorate,” a wife added.

  I began to see it but I still couldn’t quite believe it. “How do you live?” I asked, then I remembered.

  “As long as I can ticket two tourists a day we won’t starve,” my mad friend said. “But, just assuming God would permit such things, what do you think of the FBI story?”

  I frowned. “He’d be 35 now, almost 36. With all the eightballs in existence I suppose he could find a place somewhere.”

  “A nice comfortable hole in civil service?” my friend needled.

  “Well,” I said thoughtfully, “it’s of, by, and for the people and I’ve heard that the only difference between us and the Neanderthaler is accumulated experience.”

  “Assuming he had a soul,” my mad friend injected.

  “Cavemen were as smart as you?” a wife asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said, thinking it over. “Civilization protects the oddballs and freaks who, little by little, breed us back up into the trees. Primitive man, on the other hand, may not have believed in survival of the fittest, but he practiced it.”

  My mad friend made a rude noise.

  “He had neither fang, claw, horns nor hooves. Nor was he crutched with 70 centuries of accumulated gadgetry. Your adult Neanderthaler was either very smart or very dead.”

  The errant Catalán—he of the shabby overcoat—returned with an immense, pouter-pigeon-breasted woman. He caught his partner’s eye and they converged on our table. “Yankees go home!” the virago shrilled. With the ease of long practice, she lifted the Byzantine to his feet, reoriented his boina, and slapped him awake.

  My mad friend produced a pistol with a suddenness which amazed me. “Hold it!” he growled, “I’ve seen that kind of commie snatch before.”

  “You want to see my papers?” the second Catalán asked in Brooklynese. The Tugboat Annie type suddenly lapsed into English and offered her credentials too. My mad friend hid his pistol.

  I took a closer look. “Take it out again,” I told my friend. “These amateur snatch artists have gotten the FBI and the Secret Service confused.”

  The Catalán smiled wickedly. “Kindly remind yourself of the Secret Service’s principal function. And by the way,” he added, “the director of the Saucer Works will take a dim view of your future if this gets out.”

  The Byzantine was awake now and stared blearily, mumbling. I bent closer and listened. “Fine boy,” he was saying. “Proud of my son.” His eyes came momentarily into focus and he remembered us. “By the way,” he asked, “Did any of you vote for him?”

  A beer and a half later I was still worrying about the Byzantine’s attitude toward reality. “Do you think our boy Ug is going to take that Ultimatum in stride?” I asked.

  “To be a man,” my friend was muttering, “one must have an immortal soul.”

  “But is possession of one’s soul a requisite for political office?”

  “Probably not,” my mad friend admitted.

  THE WORLD MUST NEVER KNOW

  IT WAS VERY LATE OF A DARK and moonless night. My mad friend was near exhaustion and I had arrived. Crouching in a thicket of some thorny desert flora, we listened for sounds of pursuit. After a moment my friend stopped panting. “You suppose it really worked—like he said it would?”

  I shrugged and a thorn raked my shoulder. “Want to go back and see?”

  He climbed to his feet and helped me up. “Better get to the car before daylight,” he said. We began trotting. A half hour later we collapsed in a dry arroyo and he was pecking at it again. “God would never permit such a thing,” he complained.

  “He permits this,” I panted. “As for the rest, The World Must Never Know.”

  “About the icebox or about the writer?”

  A horse neighed somewhere so we began running again.

  The trip had been one undiluted disaster. First, the transmission had exploded. Then my agent had phoned at the last minute and stuck me with this fool’s errand. About that time the only wives on friendly terms with us had decided they’d had enough Mexican desert to last the rest of their Jives. In another month this town would be uninhabitable. Already, the mirages were carrying parasols.

  We sat on a backless bench under the scant shade of the military society’s ramada and surveyed the dancers who tramped and spun monotonously. My mad friend sipped asphaltum-like coffee and looked surreptitiously for a place to spit. Finding none, he swallowed. “It is my considered opinion,” he pontificated, “That we pursue the wild goose.”

  I tasted tizwín and agreed. With neither ice, head, nor maturity, the tizwín offered little, apart from bits of fermenting maize and possibly less danger than the local water. “I only knew him by reputation,” I said.

  “So what makes your literary skill think he’d end up in a place like this?”

  I shrugged. “Last known address.”

  My friend waited in silence. “Apparently he was living in one of those Truman Crackerbox developments, skinning mules or missiles up in California when he first started dumping his frustrations into the typewriter.”

  My mad friend gave me a sharp glance. “Sounds familiar.”

  “He had one of those weird, gingerbread styles,” I continued, “Unreadable until somebody performed an adjectivotomy.”

  A strident chirping issued from the church as cantor as antiphoned their distaff portion of the mass back at the chanting maestro. A pascola—one of the dancing clowns—gave us each a hand-rolled cigarette and began a long, rambling story. The language was quicker than I, but the punch line, which convulsed our neighbors, seemed to involve a coyote urinating on someone.

  “You suppose he spoke it?” my friend asked.

  “Must’ve. His Spanish was as ungrammatical as Hemingway’s.”

  “Why do you suppose he left Utopia-on-the-Freeway?”

  I shrugged. “He had a job, a wife, two daughters—none of which, apparently, he cared much for.”

  “Gauguin syndrome,” my mad friend observed. “What caused him to bolt?”

  A small brown man with a large canvas musette bag appeared on the opposite side of the plaza. Standing between the cross and the whipping post, he peered uncertainly through the dancers’ dust. Spotting the only foreigners, he advanced, unconsciously parodying the sacred steps as he wheeled to avoid a gyrating platoon whose skirts fooled no one, save possibly the BoyStealing-Devil for whom they were intended.

  Having safely skirted the skirts, the small brown man stopped at our bench beneath the military society’s ramada. He removed an immense hat and fanned himself before rummaging in the bag and extracting a
much handled post card. “Meester EeYAHree?”

  This was vaguely reminiscent of my mad friend’s patrilineal handle so he took the plunge. “Ehui.”

  The small brown man brightened. “You speak the language!”

  My friend lapsed into Spanish. “Not well,” he admitted. “I can never remember when the double vowels should have a glottal stop in between.” He turned the post card over.

  “May we buy you a drink?” I asked.

  The mail carrier rearranged the one or two letters in his bag, searching for a graceful way to apprise me of my gaffe. “I am pweplum,” he said, which meant he belonged to the club whose shade we used, and was a citizen of this city-state where we barbarians gaped. “You are yorim?” The word referred to races less favored by God—people of degenerate religious practice who are not quite human—and presumably excused me from knowing that Drink came from the Great Mother and was neither bought nor sold.

  My mad friend said something in Arabic. It sounded like an old window shade being ripped down the middle.

  “Qué hubo?” I asked.

  “They twist the dagger in a still bleeding wound!”

  The post card had squares for “x”s after Was your car ready on time? Were our employees courteous? Were you satisfied with the work performed? Was the steering wheel clean?

  I sympathized, for my mad friend was acutely unhappy with the re-transmissioned and re-radiatored behemoth which languished at Road’s End some 100 km below us.

  “Just wait,” he muttered, “Until one of those courteous, cheerful, clean-steering-wheeled pirates tools into my speed trap!” He remembered the mail man. “Will you honor us by sitting?”

  The small brown man gave a furtive Indian smile and sat. A boy brought him a glass of tizwín. Still shrilling, the purple crowned cantor as emerged from the church, surrounding Virgin & Child. Age and an unsophisticated wood-carver had given these statues a color and ethnic cast more probable than that of the Aryan travesties one encounters among Nordic Faithful.

  “Murphy was lacerating his duodenum up in California,” my mad friend prompted.

  “Ah yes. My city slicker spent a great deal of time showing him die ropes. About the time the slicker was ready to get his money back, presto!”

  My mad friend sighed.

  “At first my shill thought he’d been lured away by some other razor merchant. But after several months he received a letter—”

  My mad friend began dictating: “ ‘I take the liberty of enclosing a MS which you may find marketable. Should you decide to handle me, I must stipulate that my whereabouts remain secret.

  “ ‘Should any unusual conjecture cross your mind, please be assured I have excellent reason for conducting my affairs in this fashion. Sincerely, Joe Blow.’ ”

  “You got it all right but the name,” I conceded. “He signed himself S. Murphy.”

  The mailman coughed and blew a fine spray of tizwín in the general direction of the dancers. “Something wrong?” I asked. He shook his head and continued gasping. My mad friend thumped him on the back and after a couple of agonized wheezes the mailman was himself again. “You are writers!” he said.

  “I demand trial by jury,” my mad friend hastened.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” I wondered.

  “You spoke of S. Murphy. I have read his works.”

  “Has he been translated?”

  “I read him in English,” the mail carrier said.

  I raised my eyebrows but did not manage to cover my bald spot. “Obviously,” my friend said, “You are a man of parts.”

  The cantoras had by now escorted Virgin and Child to the Mother cross next to the whipping post. After some complicated footwork and flag waving by the village’s little girls, they returned the images to the church.

  “This Murphy,” my mad friend prompted.

  I managed another sip of tizwín. “You’re the crime crusher. You put the clues together. He pulled the plug on his instalments and in-laws and disappeared in a transparent but satisfactory manner since the joy and fruits of his gonads didn’t bother or think to trace him through his agent.

  “When he incarnated as Murphy, his kookie gingerbread style was unchanged, the subject matter still autobiographical. Previous stories had dealt with an Outsider type trying rather desperately to establish some contact with his family. The new run was beachcomber-remittance man genre—about the lonely stranger who nobly bears his white man’s burden through some dark and secret corner of existence.”

  “My old sabre wounds are throbbing,” my mad friend grunted.

  The mail carrier took a deep breath. “I would write,” he said, “If only I could find more time.”

  My friend flinched from the look in my eye.

  “I have many ideas,” the little man continued.

  My mad friend glanced upward at the ramada which shaded us, reminding me that as guests we were duty-bound to hear out the club bore. “You didn’t know S. Murphy?” I asked.

  The mailman was swallowing tizwín, throwing his head back chicken fashion. He waggled a finger in the Latin negative.

  “And you obviously know everyone in this district,” my mad friend added.

  The mail carrier nodded and spat the taste of tizwín toward the plaza where men danced in eternal penance for having slept when the Romans came to arrest their Saviour.

  “Your agent’s never met Murphy?” my friend asked.

  I shook my head. “In this racket those who know your most intimate secrets are people you’ve never seen outside of an envelope.”

  “Why the sudden interest in looking him up?”

  I fanned myself and wished either the weather or the tizwín were cooler. “Our errant scribe underwent some sort of metamorphosis once he escaped the strictures of Organizationville. Maybe it was a spiritual rebirth; maybe his typewriter got gummy. (He began hitting the keys a lot harder.) But he started leaving out all those adjectives. Suddenly, he had one of those simple, effective styles which makes Genesis read rather like a comic book. Of course, he loused it up by going off on some sort of phonetic spelling kick but writers never can spell anyway.”

  The low slanting sun was beginning to reach us beneath the ramada whose shade was now transposed to the plaza where chapayecas in needlenosed demon masks waved wooden swords in mute menace at children who made faces at them.

  “What kind of stories do you write?” the little brown mail carrier asked.

  “Mostly, I write the kind everybody was buying last year.”

  “Principalmente,” my mad friend contributed, “He writes accounts of the fantasy scientific.”

  “—so, about this time, S. Murphy—”

  The mailman had taken the bit in his teeth. Though the Spanish language was no more native to him than to me, he had a certain way with words. “It was on the island,” he began, “Which lies in the sea two days N from the river mouth. There had been a burning. The people accused him of being ñagual. The Mexicans got wind of it and I was taken along to interpret when they arrested the headman.”

  “¿Nagual?” my mad friend asked, “You believe that?”

  “Certainly not,” the mail carrier said. “A man is a man and a bear is a bear. They do not trade shapes. But these island people—”

  “But there are no bears on this island,” I protested, “How could the belief have drifted over there?”

  The mail carrier shrugged. “No one ever got to the bottom of it. I could not understand their language so finally the Mexicans shot the headman and we left.

  “On the way back, after the Mexicans had gone their way and I mine I decided to pass the night at—”

  He whisked through the double voweled stutterings which mean Jackrabbit Drinking Place Where the American Killed Many Mexicans Before They Cut Off His Head. “You have been there?”

  We nodded.

  “I watered my horse and hobbled him, a large alazán which I had acquired from a Mexican who no longer needed him.”


  No longer needed was a euphemism which I understood. “But you were working for the Mexicans,” I protested.

  “For their money,” the mail carrier corrected. “This was some years ago, before they learned to respect us.

  “It was early spring and there were still a few green weeds inside the hacienda’s house garden. I led my sorrel in and was getting ready to boil coffee when a light came on inside the ruined building. It startled me,” the little man continued, “For I had not seen many electric lights. Since then I have been in large cities and seen the colored lights which twist into letters but I have never seen light like this. It came from everywhere, like sunlight through fog. Though there was enough to sight a rifle, it cast no shadow.”

  A chapayeca came to the ramada and gestured with his wooden sword. While men were bringing out the drum I studied his needlenosed mask of fresh deer-hide. Around the neck, his rosary strung up and was hidden under the demon face. I glanced at my mad friend.

  “Vow of silence,” he explained. “They keep the crucifix in their mouth for the entire week.”

  The mail carrier sensed that we were not particularly interested and began speeding up his story. “He was very white. His face had the pale, corpse color—like the part of a white man which is always covered by trousers. It was hard to know where clothing ended and skin began. He had no pockets. Carried a bag like this, only smaller.” The mailman smiled momentarily. “His trousers were tight but showed no bulge at the seat of courage. His hair was like dried corn silk and bristled a half centimeter over face and head. His eyes were pink, like those of a horse I stole once. He carried no rifle. I was certain he was not Mexican so even though he was alone, I did not kill him.

  “I accepted his invitation. His food came in square pieces like that tasteless bread you Americans eat. I did not care for it but since I had only a handful of piñole and three more days to ride . . . His beer was cold. Have you ever seen a small box from which one takes soft bottles and bites off the end?”

  “No, but I’ve seen this story.”

  “About once a month for the first twenty years after Stanley G. Weinbaum’s floruit,” my mad friend suggested.