The Dark Side (18 page)

Finally it pretty well stopped. Slop Chute was too weak to stand. We cleaned him up and I put my pajama top on him, and we stood him up. If Casey hadn’t took half the load, we’d’a never got him back to his bunk.

Godalmighty! I used to carry hundred-kilo sacks of cement like they was nothing.

We went back and cleaned up the head. I washed out the pajama top and draped it on the radiator. I was in a cold sweat and my face burned when I turned in.

Across the ward Casey was sitting like a statue beside Slop Chute’s bunk.

Next day was Friday, because Pink Waldo made some crack about fish to Curly Waldo when they formed up for sick call. Mary moved closer to Curly Waldo and gave Pink Waldo a cold look. That was good.

Slop Chute looked waxy, and Uncle Death seemed to see it because a gleam come into his wooden eyes. Both Waldoes listened all over Slop Chute and told Uncle what they heard in their secret language. Uncle nodded, and Casey thumbed his nose at him.

No doubt about it, the ways was greased for Slop Chute. Mama Death come back soon as she could and began to loosen the chocks. She slobbered arthurs all over Slop Chute and flittered around like women do when they smell a wedding. Casey gave her extra special hell, and we all laughed right out and she hardly noticed.

That afternoon two orderly-masks come with a go-to-Jesus cart and wanted to take Slop Chute to X-ray. Casey climbed on the cart and scowled at them.

Slop Chute told “em shove off, he wasn’t going.

They got Mary and she told Slop Chute please go, it was doctor’s orders.

Sorry, no, he said.

“Please, for me, Slop Chute,” she begged.

She knows our right names—that’s one reason we love her. But Slop Chute shook his head, and his big jaw bone stuck out.

Mary—she had to then—called Mama Death. Mama waddled in, and Casey spit in her mask.

“Now arthur, what is this, arthur, you know we want to help you get well and go home, arthur,” she arthured at Slop Chute. “Be a good boy now, arthur, and go along to the clinic.”

She motioned the orderlies to pick him up anyway. Casey hit one in the mask and Slop Chute growled, “Sheer off, you bastards!”

The orderlies hesitated.

Mama’s little eyes squinted and she wiggled her hands at them. “Let’s not be naughty, arthur. Doctor knows best, arthur.”

The orderlies looked at Slop Chute and at each other. Casey wrapped his arms and legs around Mama Death and began chewing on her neck. He seemed to mix right into her, someway, and she broke and run out of the ward.

She come right back, though, trailing Uncle Death. Casey met him at the door and beat hell out of him all the way to Slop Chute’s bunk. Mama sent Mary for the chart, and Uncle Death studied Slop Chute’s reflection for a minute. He looked pale and swayed a little from Casey’s beating.

He turned toward Slop Chute and breathed in deep and Casey was on him again. Casey wrapped his arms and legs around him and chewed at his mask with those big yellow teeth. Casey’s hair bristled and his eyes were red as the flames of hell.

Uncle Death staggered back across the ward and fetched up against Carnahan’s bunk. The other masks were scared spitless, looking all around, kind of knowing.

Casey pulled away, and Uncle Death said maybe he was wrong, schedule it for tomorrow. All the masks left in a hurry except Mary. She went back to Slop Chute and took his hand.

“I’m sorry, Slop Chute,” she whispered.

“Bless you, Connie,” he said, and grinned. It was the last thing I ever heard him say.

Slop Chute went to sleep, and Casey sat beside his bunk. He motioned me off when I wanted to help Slop Chute to the head after lights out. I turned in and went to sleep.

I don’t know what woke me. Casey was moving around fidgety-like, but of course not making a sound. I could hear the others stirring and whispering in the dark too.

Then I heard a muffled noise—the bubbling cough again, and spitting. Slop Chute was having another hemorrhage and he had his head under the blankets to hide the sound. Carnahan started to get up. Casey waved him down.

I saw a deeper shadow high in the dark over Slop Chute’s bunk. It came down ever so gently and Casey would push it back up again. The muffled coughing went on..

Casey had a harder time pushing back the shadow. Finally he climbed on the bunk straddle of Slop Chute and kept a steady push against it.

The blackness came down anyway, little by little. Casey strained and shifted his footing. I could hear him grunt and hear his joints crack. -

I was breathing forced draft with my heart like to pull off its bed bolts. I heard other bedsprings creaking. Somebody across from me whimpered low, but it was sure never Slop Chute that done it.

Casey went to his knees, his hands forced almost level with his head. He swung his head back and forth and I saw his lips curled back from the big teeth clenched tight together… Then he had the blackness on his shoulders like the weight of the whole world.

Casey went down on hands and knees with his back arched like a bridge. Almost I thought I heard him grunt… and he gained a little.

Then the blackness settled heavier, and I heard Casey’s tendons pull out and his bones snap. Casey and Slop Chute disappeared under the blackness, and it overflowed from there over the whole bed… and more… and it seemed to fill the whole ward.

It wasn’t like going to sleep, but I don’t know anything it was like.

The masks must’ve towed off Slop Chute’s bulk in the night, because it was gone when I woke up.

So was Casey.

Casey didn’t show up for sick call and I knew then how much he meant to me. With him around to fight back I didn’t feel as dead as they wanted me to. Without him I felt deader than ever. I even almost liked Mama Death when she charlesed me.

Mary came on duty that morning with a diamond on her third finger and a brighter sparkle in her eye. It was a little diamond, but it was Curly Waldo’s and it kind of made up for Slop Chute.

I wished Casey was there to see it. He would’ve danced all around her and kissed her nice, the way he often did. Casey loved Mary.

It was Saturday. I know, because Mama Death come in and told some of us we could be wheeled to a special church hooraw before breakfast next morning if we wanted. We said no thanks. But it was a hell of a Saturday without Casey. Shakey Brown said it for all of us—“With Casey gone, this place is like a morgue again.”

Not even Carnahan could call him up.

“Sometimes I think I feel him stir, and then again I ain’t sure,” he said. “It beats hell where he’s went to.”

Going to sleep that night was as much like dying as it could be for men already dead.

Music from far off woke me up when it was just getting light. I was going to try to cork off again, when I saw Carnahan was awake.

“Casey’s around somewhere,” he whispered.

“Where?” I asked, looking around. “I don’t see him.”

“I feel him,” Carnahan said. “He’s around.”

The others began to wake up and look around. It was like the night Casey and Slop Chute went under. Then something moved in the solarium…

It was Casey.

He come in the ward slow and bashful-like, jerking his head all around, with his eyes open wide, and looking scared we was going to throw something at him. He stopped in the middle of the ward.

“Yea, Casey!” Carnahan said in a low, clear voice.

Casey looked at him sharp.

“Yea, Casey!” we all said. “Come aboard, you hairy old bastard!”

Casey shook hands with himself over his head and went into his dance. He grinned… and I swear to God it was Slop Chute’s big, lopsided grin he had on.

For the first time in my whole damn life I wanted to cry.

Like “Trouble with Water,” this next one is just for fun; you are not expected to take the basic premise seriously, only to swallow it and enjoy what happens next. The pattern of the story is Oil” in which science fiction excels—a wish-fulfillment fantasy, examined in sober detail to see where the catch is. And there always is a catch. -

We were both surprised the first time I made a ten-dollar bill. My wife sat there and her eyes were as wide as mine. We sat awhile, just looking at it. Finally she reached over to my side of the table and poked at it a little gingerly before she picked it up.

“It looks just like a real one,” she said thoughtfully; “looks good, feels good. Wonder if it
is
any good.”

I told her I didn’t know. “Let me see it once,” and she handed it over to me.

I rubbed it gently between my fingers and held it up, to the light. The little whorls, so delicately traced on a geometric lathe, were clear and clean; the features of Alexander Hamilton were sharp, the eyes grimly facing to the west. The paper was reasonably crisp, the numbers solidly stamped.

I couldn’t see a single thing wrong with it.

My wife is more practical than I. She said, “Maybe you can’t see anything wrong with it yourself. But I want to know if they’ll take it at the supermarket. We need butter.”

They took the ten-dollar bill at the supermarket; we got two pounds of butter, some coffee and some meat, and I bought some magazineswith the change. We went home to think it over and chased the kids outside so we could talk without interruption.

Jean looked at me. “Now what?”

I shrugged. “So we make some more ten-dollar bills. You trying to tell me we don’t need any more?”

She knew better than that. “Talk sense, Mike McNally. That ten-dollar bill means that we’ll have meat tomorrow instead of macaroni. But that doesn’t answer my question: now what?”

I told her I wanted to think it over.

“No, you don’t. Any thinking is going to be done on a corporate basis.” She meant it. “If you’re going ahead with this—well, I’m in it, too.”

“Fair enough,” I told her. “Let’s wait until the kids get to bed and we’ll get it straightened out. In the meantime get that other bill out again. I need a new battery, and the right front tire isn’t going to last much longer.”

She agreed that was fair, and took the other bill—and, I’ll say right here that it was the only bill we had left, with payday three days away—out of her purse. She laid it on the coffee table in front of me, smoothing out the creases.

“All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

I shifted the ten-dollar bill a little closer to me, leaned my elbows on the table, and concentrated.

Almost immediately the duplicate began to take shape; first in outline, then in color, then in fine lines of script and curlicued detail. It took about five seconds in all, I suppose. We hadn’t us yet attempted to time it.

While Jean carefully examined the duplicate, I made two more, three in all besides the original. I gave Jean back the original and one of the duplicates to boot and went down to price new batteries. It was a warm day, so I piled the kids into the car and took them along with me for the ride.

After the kids get to bed and after the dishes are washed and left to dry on the sink, the house is quiet. Too quiet, sometimes, when I think how fast little children grow up and leave home. But that’s a long time away, especially for the little guy. Jean brought in the beer, and we turned on the Canadian station that doesn’t have commercials. They were playing Victor Herbert.

“Well?” Jean, I could tell, was a little nervous. She’d had all day to think things over with the children not underfoot. “I see they took them, all right.”

“They” and “them” were the bills and the people that had sold me the tire and the battery. “Sure,” I said. “Nothing to it.”

Jean put down her beer and looked me straight in the eye.

“Mike, what you’re doing is against the law. Do you want to go to jail, and do you want the kids to know their father—”

I stopped her right there. “You show me,” I challenged her, “where what I’m doing is against the law.”

“Well—”

I didn’t let her get started. “In the first place, those bills are not counterfeits. They’re just as real as though they were made right in Washington. They’re not copies, because “copy” implies that in some way they attempt to emulate the original. And these don’t emulate anything—they’re real! Just as real as could be—I showed you that on the microscope and you agreed to that.”

I was right, and she knew it. I was perfectly confident that even the atoms in the original bill and the duplicates were identical.

I had her there. She just sat and looked at me, with her cigarette burning away in the ashtray. I turned up the radio a little louder. Neither of us said anything for a while.

Then she asked, “Mike, was anyone else in your family ever able to do this, anyone that you know for sure?”

I didn’t think so. “My grandmother was always having some presentiments about things that came true about half the time, and my mother was always able to find things that were lost. My Aunt Mary is still having the wild and woolly dreams she’s had all her life, but that’s as far as it goes, if you except the fact that my own mother was born with a caul and when I was real small, before she died, she always used to insist that I would learn to make money just when I needed it most.”

Jean said, “What about that relative of yours that was burned alive in Belfast?”

I was insulted. “That was County Monaghan, which is a long way from Ulster. And it was my great-grandaunt Brigid-Nora. And she was burned because her father was Spanish and because she always had plenty of gold and food during the Great Famine; not because she was a witch.”

“Your grandmother always used to say she was a witch.”

“Logical way to reason,” I said. “Brigid-Nora was from the Connaught side of the family. You know, like the Walloons and the Flemings, or the Prussians and the Bavarians.”

“Never mind your Irish history. You said your mother—”

“Yes, she said I’d have plenty of money just when I needed it most. But you’re a mother yourself; you know how mothers feel about their offspring.”

Jean sighed, and split the last bottle evenly between our glasses. “Your mother certainly knew her little boy. ‘Just when you need it most!’ Mike, if this doesn’t work out I’m going to go back to work. I can’t stand this—this no-meat, no-clothes, no-nothing diet any more. I can’t take this sort of life much longer!”

I knew that. I couldn’t take it much longer myself. Borrowing five here, ten there, driving a car that hadn’t been in corporate existence for twelve years, getting gas and oil on a pay-you-Friday basis, wearing suits that—well, you know what I mean. I didn’t like it. And the two kids would wait a long time before they got to live in a house their father could buy on a foreman’s pay.

Regardless of what they say in comic strips, I really proposed in the rumble seat of a Whippet roadster; otherwise, I hadn’t been on my knees in front of anyone since I was a boy. But that night I just got down on the floor in front of Jean and we really had it out; all the things that people usually don’t say, but think. I told her what I wanted and she told me what she wanted and we both made sloppy spectacles of ourselves. Finally we got up and went to bed.

The next morning I was up before the kids, which, for me, is exceptional. The first thing I did after breakfast was to call up my boss and tell him what he could do with his job. An hour after that
his
boss called me up and hinted that all would be forgiven if I reported for work on the afternoon shift as usual. I hinted right back for a raise and waited until he agreed. Then I told him what he could do with his job.

We sat out in the kitchen for almost an hour that morning making duplicate ten-dollar bills, with Jean keeping track until we got up to two thousand dollars in cold, hard, green cash—more money than we had ever had at one time in our whole married or single life. Then we dressed the kids and took a cab downtown. Shopping. Shopping for cash, with no looks at the price tags. Oh, Jean tried to sneak a look every once in a while, when she thought I didn’t see, but I always ripped the tag off and stuck it in my pocket.

The bicycle and the scooter and the bigger things we had delivered; the rest we carried. The landlord’s wife was immensely surprised when we came back home in another cab with the trunk full of packages; she wanted to express her sympathy over the sudden event that had caused us to go away in one taxi and return in another. Nothing serious, she hoped. We said no, it wasn’t serious, and shut the door.

Well, that was the beginning. Two or three days of steady buying will buy an awful lot of clothes. In three weeks we had all we could wear and were thinking seriously of buying some things for the house. The stove we had was on its last legs before we bought it, and the furniture was all scratched and marred from when the kids were still crawling and spilling things.

But we didn’t want to buy any furniture until we could find a place to live out in the country, and all the places we looked at in our Sunday drives were either too much or too far or too something. So I called Art’s Bar, where I hang out sometimes on paynights.

“Art,” I asked, “do you remember that real estate man that wanted to sell me that cottage before he found out I didn’t have the money?”

Sure, he remembered. “As a matter of fact, he’s here right now trying to sell me some insurance. Why?”

I told him I might want to see him about a new house.

“Then come on down and get him out of my hair. I need more insurance like I need more rocks in my head. You coming down here or do you want me to send—”

No, I’d come down there. I didn’t want anyone except relatives to see the crummy place where I lived. Even relatives like to rub it in.

The real estate man—even if his name was important, I couldn’t remember it now—had gone over to DeBaeker’s grocery for bread. He’d be right back, Art said.

All right. I could wait. I asked Art for a short beer, and he slid it deftly down to my favorite corner. It tasted a little too cold, and I warmed it a bit with my hands. This mechanical refrigeration is all right when business is rushing, but when business is slow the beer in the coils gets too cold for my taste.

“Art,” I said, “the paper isn’t here yet. What have you to read besides the
Neighborhood Shopper
?”

Art looked up from the cash-register tape. “I don’t know, Mike. There’s a whole bunch of mail I opened that I haven’t had a chance to look at yet. There might be the last
Bar News
in there. Take a look for yourself while I see how much dough the night man was off last night.”

He shoved over the morning mail. I used to help out Art every once in a while to make myself a few extra dollars, and he knew there wasn’t anything in the mail besides the usual advertising circulars, which he had no objection to my reading.

There was no
Bar News
there, and I idly turned over the pile, glancing at advertising puffs for spigots and coil cleaners and sham glasses. Then I saw it, and looked closer. I might add that I read everything, from streetcar transfers to medicine labels to the Men Wanted posters in the post office.

This particular circular was a copy of others that every small businessman gets from his post office or Federal Reserve District.

This one was just like the rest, with warnings of flaws or errors or careless workmanship in the usual number of counterfeit bills always in circulation. This warning caught me Where it hurt.

It said:

WATCH FOR THIS TEN-DOLLAR BILL

Federal Reserve Note, Series G, serial number G 69437088 D. Series 1934 D, with 7 printed four lower comers on obverse of bill. Portrait of Alexander Hamilton.

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT COUNTERFEIT!

and can be distinguished at first glance only by above serial number on face of bill. Special warning to groceries and clothing stores; all detected so far have been from these businesses. It is thought that since so few bills have been detected these bills are only samples being tested for public reception. If you see one of these bills, detain the passer on some reasonable pretext and call…

and it gave the Federal Building telephone number.

That was enough for me. I crumpled up the circular and I dropped it to the floor, with my ears waiting for it to explode. Art rolled up the tape and dropped it in the cash drawer. I sat there, thankful I was sitting. My knees wouldn’t have held me.

Art drew himself a short beer. “Find anything good?”

I managed to take a shaky breath. Anything good? Hell, Art was never going to know just how good, or how bad, I felt.

“Art,” I said, “I want another beer. Better give me something stronger with it.” So I paid Art, got a shot and a beer, which I’m not used to, and sat back trying to get my breath back under control. I didn’t realise how stupid I’d been until Art came back from the cash register with the duplicate ten in his hand.

“Here, Mike. You’d better take this ten back—pay me later, unless you want a lot of silver. Too early in the day for me, and the last two guys that came in had twenties. Okay?”

You bet it was okay. “Sure, Art. I know how it is.” I took the ten from his outstretched fingers with a hand that quivered. “As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t have given you that ten at all.” You bet I shouldn’t. “I’ve got the right change right here—” and I dumped a handful on the bar. “You better have one with me, yourself.”

Art had another short beer; I finished my drink, and I went out to the car and sat in it and quietly had the male equivalent of hysterics. I made it home all right, and got through the rest of the day without saying much to my wife. And then I lay in bed half the night, thinking.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be a crook, nor did I want to be one. I hadn’t thought about it too much because those ten-dollar bills looked too good to me and Jean. But I had a decision to make; was I going to go ahead with this, or was I going to go back to the dog-eat-dog life I’d given myself and my family?

Money? Well, the Government prints it, sends it to the bank, and from there to the man who actually spends it. After passing through scores or hundreds of hands, each time acting as a buying or selling catalyst for the national economy, it wears out—the paper becomes worn or torn. Then it is totaled, shipped back to Washington, and destroyed. But not all of it.