Dr. Bloodmoney (18 page)

They were both silent, then.

“They drink it, though,” Stuart said. “I’ve seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks.”

“Of course, because people will drink anything they can get their hands on now. So do you, so do I.” Mr. Hardy raised his head and regarded Stuart. “You know who has liquor? I mean the genuine thing; you can’t tell if it’s prewar that he’s dug up or new that he’s made.”

“Nobody in the Bay Area.”

Hardy said, “Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert.”

“I don’t believe it.” He sucked in his breath, fully alert, now.

“Oh, he doesn’t produce much of it. I’ve only seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it.” Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. “You would have liked it.”

“How much does he want for it?” He tried to sound casual.

“More than you have to pay.”

“And—it tastes like the real thing? The
pre-war?”

Hardy laughed and returned to his trap-assembling. “That’s right.”

I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest … walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy, snow-white hair, imported monocle—I can picture him. He probably drives a Jaguar, converted of course now to wood, but still a great, powerful Mark XVI Saloon.

Seeing the expression on Stuart’s face, Hardy leaned toward him. “I can tell you what else he sells.”

“English brier pipes?”

“Yes, that, too.” Hardy lowered his voice. “Girly photos. In artistic poses—you know.”

“Aw, Christ,” Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. “I don’t believe it.”

“God’s truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They’re worth a fortune, of course. I’ve heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1962
Playboy
calendar; that’s supposed to have happened somewhere back East, in Nevada, somewhere like that.” Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space, his vermin trap forgotten.

“Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the service department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed.

Hardy nodded in a resigned way.

“Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere,” Stuart said. “And he came onto a entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions? He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”

“Right,” Hardy said, nodding.

“I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Japan, but they’re no good.”

“I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”

“Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation, and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”

Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where; maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”

“Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”

After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—”

“But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—”

“I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”

Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me.”

Hardy grunted, frowning.

“I don’t mean to insult you,” Stuart said, “but I want to grow. I
have
to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten yeas ago, and that’s not good enough.”

Scratching his nose, Hardy said, “What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”

“Just one potato?”

“I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’re all those freak animals and funny people here in the city.”

Hardy said, “Maybe you could locate an intelligent bean.”

“I’m not joking about this,” Stuart said quietly.

They faced each other, neither speaking.

“It’s a service to humanity,” Hardy said at last, “to make homeostatic vermin traps that destroy mutated cats and dogs and rats and squirrels. I think you’re acting infantile. Maybe your horse being eaten while you were over in South San Francisco—”

Entering the room, Ella Hardy said, “Dinner is ready, and I’d like to serve it while it’s hot. It’s baked cod-head and rice and it took me three hours standing in line down at Eastshore Freeway to get the cod-head.”

The two men rose to their feet. “You’ll eat with us?” Hardy asked Stuart.

At the thought of the baked fish head, Stuart’s mouth watered. He could not say no and he nodded, following after Mrs. Hardy toward the little combination living room and kitchen in the rear of the building. It had been a month since be had tasted fish; there were almost none left in the Bay any longer—most of the schools had been wiped out and had never returned. And those that were caught were often radioactive. But it did not matter; people had become able to eat them anyhow. People could eat almost anything; their lives depended on it.

The little Keller girl sat shivering on the examination table, and Doctor Stockstill, surveying her thin, pale body, thought of a joke which he had seen on television years ago, long before the war. A Spanish ventriloquist, speaking through a chicken … the chicken had produced an egg.

“My son,” the chicken said, meaning the egg.

“Are you sure?” the ventriloquist asked. “It’s not your daughter?”

And the chicken, with dignity, answered, “I know my business.”

This child was Bonny Keller’s daughter, but, Doctor Stockstill thought, it isn’t George Keller’s daughter; I am certain of that … I know my business. Who had Bonny been having an affair with, seven years ago? The child must have been conceived very close to the day the war began. But she had not been conceived before the bomb fell; that was clear. Perhaps it was on that very day, he ruminated. Just like Bonny, to rush out while the bomb was falling, while the world was coming to an end, to have a brief, frenzied spasm of love with someone, perhaps some man she did not even know, the first man she happened onto … and now this.

The child smiled at him and he smiled back. Superficially, Edie Keller appeared normal; she did not seem to be a funny child. How he wished, God damn it, that he had an x-ray machine. Because—

He said aloud, “Tell me more about your brother.”

“Well,” Edie Keller said in her frail, soft voice, “I talk to my brother all the time and sometimes he answers but more often he’s asleep. He sleeps almost all the time.”

“Is he asleep now?”

For a moment the child was silent. “No, he’s awake.”

Rising to his feet and coming over to her, Doctor Stockstill said, “I want you to show me exactly where he is.”

The child pointed to her left side, low down; near, he thought, the appendix. The pain was there. That had brought the child in; Bonny and George had become worried. They knew about the brother, but they assumed him to be imaginary, a pretend playmate which kept their little daughter company. He himself had assumed so at first; the chart did not mention a brother, and yet Edie talked about him. Bill was exactly the same age as she. Born, Edie had informed the doctor, at the same time as she, of course.

“Why of course?” he had asked, as he began examining her—he had sent the parents into the other room because the child seemed reticent in front of them.

Edie had answered in her calm, solemn way, “Because he’s my twin brother. How else could he be inside me?” And, like the Spanish ventriloquist’s chicken, she spoke with authority, with confidence; she, too, knew her business.

In the years since the war Doctor Stockstill had examined many hundreds of funny people, many strange and exotic variants on the human life form which flourished now under a much more tolerant—although smokily veiled—sky. He could not be shocked. And yet, this—a child whose brother lived inside her body, down in the inguinal region. For seven years Bill Keller had dwelt inside there, and Doctor Stockstill, listening to the girl, believed her; he knew that it was possible. It was not the first case of this kind. If he had his x-ray machine he would be able to see the tiny, wizened shape, probably no larger than a baby rabbit. In fact, with his hands he could feel the outline … he touched her side, carefully noting the firm cyst-like sack within. The head in a normal position, the body entirely within the abdominal cavity, limbs and all. Someday the girl would die and they would open her body, perform an autopsy; they would find a little wrinkled male figure, perhaps with a snowy white beard and blind eyes … her brother, still no larger than a baby rabbit.

Meanwhile, Bill slept mostly, but now and then he and his sister talked. What did Bill have to say? What possibly could he know?

To the question, Edie had an answer. “Well, he doesn’t know very much. He doesn’t see anything but he thinks. And I tell him what’s going on so he doesn’t miss out.”

“What are his interests?” Stockstill asked. He had completed his examination; with the meager instruments and tests available to him he could do no more. He had verified the child’s account and that was something, but he could not see the embryo or consider removing it; the latter was out of the question, desirable as it was.

Edie considered and said, “Well, he uh, likes to hear about food.”

“Food!” Stockstill said, fascinated.

“Yes. He doesn’t eat, you know. He likes me to tell him over and over again what I had for dinner, because he does get it after a while… I think he does anyhow. Wouldn’t he have to, to live?”

“Yes,” Stockstill agreed.

“He gets it from me,” Edie said as she put her blouse back on, buttoning it slowly. “And he wants to know what’s in it. He especially likes it if I have apples or oranges. And—he likes to hear stories. He always wants to hear about places. Far-away, especially, like New York. My mother tells me about New York so I told him; he wants to go there someday and see what it’s like.”

“But he can’t see.”

“I can, though,” Edie pointed out. “It’s almost as good.”

“You take good care of him, don’t you?” Stockstill said, deeply touched. To the girl, it was normal; she had lived like this all her life—she did not know of any other existence. There is nothing, he realized once more, which is “outside” nature; that is a logical impossibility. In a way there are no freaks, no abnormalities, except in the statistical sense. This is an unusual situation, but it’s not something to horrify us; actually it ought to make us happy. Life per se is good, and this is one form which life takes. There’s no special pain here, no cruelty of suffering. In fact there is solicitude and tenderness.

“I’m afraid,” the girl said suddenly, “that he might die someday.”

“I don’t think he will,” Stockstill said. “What’s more likely to happen is that he’ll get larger. And that might pose a problem; it might be hard for your body to accommodate him.”

“What would happen, then?” Edie regarded him with large, dark eyes. “Would he get born, then?”

“No,” Stockstill said. “He’s not located that way; he would have to be removed surgically. But—he wouldn’t live. The only way he can live is as he’s living now, inside you.” Parasitically, he thought, not saying the word aloud. “We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” he said, patting the child on the head. “If it ever does.”

“My mother and father don’t know,” Edie said.

“I realize that,” Stockstill said.

“I told them about him,” Edie said. “But—” She laughed.

“Don’t worry. Just go on and do what you’d ordinarily do. It’ll all take care of itself.”

Edie said, “I’m glad I have a brother; he keeps me from being lonely. Even when he’s asleep I can feel him there, I know he’s there. It’s like having a baby inside me; I can’t wheel him around in a baby carriage or anything like that, or dress him, but talking to him is a lot of fun. For instance, I get to tell him about Mildred.”