Steel Beach (51 page)

“How about a skyline, Huck? ‘Special Bicentennial Issue,’ something like that. What do you think? Too modern?”

“Shoot, no, Hildy. Charity said she’d like to start up a roto-something but she said you’d think it was too modern.”

“Rotogravure, and I don’t give a hoot about modern, but that’s big-city stuff, and it’d be too dang expensive right now. If she had her way she’d have me buying a four-color web.”

“Ain’t she something?” he said.

“Huck, have you thought about learning to read?” It’s not something I would normally have asked, but I was concerned about him, he was such a likable goof. I couldn’t see Charity ever hooking up with an illit.

“If I did, then I couldn’t ask Miss Charity to read to me, could I?” he asked, reasonably. “Besides, I’m picking up stuff here and there, I watch when she reads. I know a bunch of words now.” So maybe there was method in his madness, and love would conquer all.

I left him to his job case and composing stick. Taking a sheet of paper and a pen from my center desk drawer, I dipped the nib in the inkwell and began to write, printing in block letters.

HEAD
: Prize-winning Journalist Visits Town

STORY
: The streets of New Austin were recently graced by the presence of Miss Brenda Starr, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the late unpleasantness within the Latitudinarian Church in King City. Miss Starr is employed by the
News N-----e
, a daily paper in that town. Many a young bachelor’s head was turned as Miss Starr promenaded Congress Street and dined on the excellent food at Foo’s Celestial Peace with this reporter. According to our sources, love might be in the air for the comely young scribe, so to the eligible gents out there, be on the lookout for her return! H.J.

(CHARITY: run this in the “MONSTER”)

The “Gila Monster,” named for a vicious little reptile that lurks under rocks and presumably hears everything, was my very own gossip column, and by far the most eagerly-awaited part of the paper. Not for little fillers like the above, but for the really
nasty
tittles so often tattled there. It’s true that everyone in a small town knows what everyone else is doing, but they don’t all know it at the same time. There is a window of opportunity between the event and the dissemination, even as the news is spreading at about the speed of sound, that a top-notch reporter can exploit.

I’m not talking of myself. I’d begun the “Monster,” but Charity was the venom in the critter’s tooth. My teaching tied me down too much, I never had the time to range around getting the scent. Charity never seemed to sleep. She lived and breathed news. You could rely on her for two scandals per week, really remarkable when you consider that she didn’t drink and hardly ever visited the Alamo, that ever-flowing gusher of gossip, that Delphi of Dirt.

The correspondent herself breezed into the office around sundown, just back from Whiz-bang, a town that aspired to become our freshly-minted Disneyland Capital in a referendum to be held in three month’s time, with a good story about bribery and barratry amongst our elected representatives, a quite juicy one that would have prompted me to tear up the front page if I hadn’t owned the paper and known what it would cost me. The economic facts of the
Texian
were quite simply that I’d sell as many copies with or without that particular story, since everyone in Texas read it anyway, so I had to tell her I’d be running it below the fold. I mollified her somewhat with a promise of a two-column head, and a by-line.

Sweeteners like that were necessary because of the second bit of news she brought in, of a job offer from the
Daily Planet
, a good second-string pad in Arkytown. She basked in the glow of our admiration, oblivious to my chagrin at the thought of losing her, and then announced she wasn’t
about
to leave the
Texian
until she could go to a really
good
newspad, like the
Nipple
. Charity was about 350 picas tall, according to Huck—call it six-tenths of a Brenda, and still growing—but made up for her size with enthusiasm and energy. She was cute as lace bloomers, and so self-involved as to notice neither Huck’s tongue hanging out when she was around nor my choked cough at her reference to my old place of employment. Sounds awful, I know, but somehow you forgave her. If she knew you were hurting, no one could have been more concerned.

I went around lighting the kerosene lamps as she chattered on, Huck continuing to set type while seldom taking his eyes from her. Typos would be multiplying, but I had to put up with it.

When I left it was full dark with a moon on the rise. Charity had fallen asleep in her chair and Huck was still stolidly pulling the handle on the magnificent old Columbian. The town was quiet but for the chirping of crickets and the tinkle of the piano around the corner in the Alamo. My hands were stained with ink and my back hurt and the first breath of cool night air only served to remind me how sweaty I was around the collar and under the arms and…  well, you know. I mounted a lantern on the front of my bicycle, swung aboard and, with a tinkle of the bell which brought twin howls of desolation from the firehouse, I started pedaling the long road home.

How much happiness could one person stand?

I
do
believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many times in my life I’ve seen that He’s out there, watching, keeping score. When you’ve just about reached a Zen state of pure acceptance—and the beauty of that night combined with the pleasant aches of work well-done and friends wellmet and even the little fillip of two dogs you knew would be waiting for you the next morning…  when that state approaches He sends a little rock down to fall in the road of your life.

This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town and it caused two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my front wheel. I just missed a painful tumble into a patch of cactus. That was God again: it would have been too much, this was just to serve as a
reminder
.

I thought about returning to town and waking the blacksmith, who I know would have been happy to work on the newfangled invention that was the talk of the town. But he’d be long abed, with his good wife and three children, and I decided not to bother him. I left it there beside the road. You can’t steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you explain riding around on Hildy’s bike? I walked the rest of the way and arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little deflated.

I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight revealed a man sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away from me.

“Goodness,” I said. Well, I’d taken to talking like that. “You gave me a start.” I was a little nervous, but not frightened. Rape is rare, not unknown, in Luna, but in
Texas
…  ? He’d have to be a fool. All the exits are too well controlled, and hanging is legal. I held the lantern up to get a better look at him.

He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face, twinkling eyes, a mustache. He wore a tweed double-breasted suit with a high wing collar and red silk cravat. On his feet were black and white canvas and leather Balmorals. A cane and a derby hat rested on the floor beside him. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before, but there was something in the way he sat.

“How are you, Hildy?” he said. “Working late again?”

“That’s either Cricket, or her identical twin brother,” I said. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Well, I already had the mustache and I thought, ‘What the hell?’ ”

And what happened to the girl we last saw speaking to an inhuman golem in a padded cell off the Leystrasse, hearing things no human ear was meant to hear, her insides all atremble? How came this quivering wreck, freshly tossed by the twin tempests of another botched suicide attempt and the CC’s ham-fisted attempt to “cure” her, to her present tranquility? How did the young Modern butterfly with the ragged wings retromorphose into the plain but outwardly-stable Victorian caterpillar?

She did it one day at a time.

As I had hinted to Brenda, no matter how much the governing boards might say concerning the functions of the historical disneys, an unexpected and unmentioned side benefit they had provided was to work as sanctuaries—all right, as very big unfenced asylums—for the societally and mentally shell-shocked. In Texas and the other places like it, we could cease our unfruitful baying at our several lunatic moons and, without therapy
per se
, retire to a quieter, gentler time. Living there was therapy in itself. For some, the prescription would have to be carried on forever; for others, an occasional dose was enough. It wasn’t established yet which applied to me.

The
Texian
had been a big step for me, and lo, I found it good. I was prevailed on to become a teacher, and that, too, was good. Learning to not only have friends, but to open up to them, to understand that a true friend
wanted
to hear my problems, my hopes and my fears, didn’t happen overnight and still wasn’t an accomplished fact, but I was getting there. The important thing was I was creating my new world one brick at a time, and so far, it was good.

It was also, compared to my old life, boring as hell. Not to me, you understand; I found every new crayon drawing by one of my students an object of amazement. Each new trivial news story dug up by Charity made me as proud as if she were my own daughter. Publishing the
Texian
was so much more satisfying than working at the
Nipple
that I wondered how I’d labored there so long. It’s just that, to an outsider, the attraction was a little hard to explain. Brenda found it all very dull. I fully expected Cricket to, as well. You may agree with them. This is why I’ve omitted almost seven months that could really be of interest only to my therapist, if I had one.

Which all makes it sound as if I were well and truly cured. And if I was, how come I still woke up two or three times a week in the empty hours before dawn, drenched in sweat, heart hammering, a scream on my lips?

“Why in heaven’s name are you sitting out here?” I asked him. “It’s getting chilly. Why didn’t you go inside?”

He just looked blankly at me, as if I’d said something foolish. To someone who hadn’t spent time in Texas, I suppose it was. So I opened the door, showing him it hadn’t been locked. You can bet he had never tried it himself.

I struck a lucifer and went around the room lighting the kerosene lamps, then opened the door of the stove and lit the pile of pine shavings there. I added kindling until I had a small, hot fire, then filled the coffee pot from the brass spigot at the bottom of the tall ceramic water cooler and set it on the stove to boil. Cricket watched all these operations with interest, sitting at the table in one of my two kitchen chairs. His hat was on the table, but he still held on to his cane.

I scooped coffee beans from the glass jar and put them in the grinder and started cranking it by hand. The room filled with the smell. When I had the right grind I dumped it into the basket and put it into the pot. Then I got a plate and the half of an apple pie sitting on the counter, cut him a huge slice, and set it before him with a fork and napkin. Only then did I sit down across from him, remove my hat, and put it next to his.

He looked down at the pie as if curious as to the purpose and meaning of such a thing, hesitantly picked up his fork, and ate a bite. He looked all around the cabin again.

“This is nice,” he said. “Homey-like.”

“Rustic,” I suggested. “Plain. Pioneering. Boeotian.”

“Texan,” he summed up. He gestured with his fork. “Good pie.”

“Wait’ll you taste the coffee.”

“I’m sure it’ll be first-rate.” He gestured again, this time at the room. “Brenda said you needed help, but I never imagined this.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“No. What she said was, ‘Hildy’s smiling at children, and teaching them her card tricks.’ I knew I had to get here as fast as I could.”

I can imagine his alarm. But why shouldn’t Hildy smile at children? More important, why had she spent so much time not smiling at anyone? But the business about the cards was sure to worry Cricket. I never taught
anyone
my tricks.

And now for the first of several digressions…  

I can’t simply gloss over those missing months with the explanation that you wouldn’t be interested. You wouldn’t, but certain things did happen, mostly of a negative nature, to get me from the CC to the kitchen table with Cricket, and it’s worth relating a few of them to give a feel for my personal odyssey during that time.

What I did was use my weekends on a Quest.

Every Saturday I went to the Visitors Center and there I shed my secret identity as a mild mannered reporter to become a penny-ante Diogenes, searching endlessly for an honest game. So far all I’d found were endless variations of the mechanic’s grip, but I was undaunted. Look in the Yellow Files under Philosophers, Professional, and you’ll get a printout longer than Brenda’s arm. Don’t even try Counselors or Therapists unless you have a wheelbarrow to cart away the paper. But that’s what I was doing. Once out in the real world again, I spent my Saturdays sampling the various ways other people had found to get through the day, and the next day, and the next day.

Of the major schools of thought, of the modern or trendy, I already knew a lot, and many of them I felt could be dispensed with. No need to attend a Flackite pep rally, for instance. So I began with the classic cons.

I’ve already said I’m a cynic. In spite of it, I made my best attempt to give each and every guru his day in court. But with the best will in the world it is impossible for me to present the final results as anything other than a short series of comedy blackouts. And that’s how I spent my Saturdays.

On Sundays, I went to church.

It’s not really proper to start supper with dessert, but in Texas one is expected to put some food in front of a guest within a few minutes of his crossing your threshold. The pie was the best thing close at hand. But I soon had a bowl of chili and a plate of cornbread in front of him. He dug in, and didn’t seem to mind the sweat that soon beaded his forehead.