The Essential Noir Bundle, page 164
Tulip asked, “What’s the Sexo stuff?”
“That’s his nickname for his older sister this month. She’s at the age when she wants to know about things and she’s been asking questions.”
“And you’ve been answering them. Oh, boy, I can just see you licking your lips and snowing her under with answers. Is she a good lay? Some kids are.”
“Now, now, it’s nothing like that. This hasn’t got anything to do with yes or no. It’s on a level you probably wouldn’t understand.”
“If it’s nothing like that, it’s a cinch I wouldn’t understand it,” he agreed. “I’m a yes or no man myself.”
“I know,” I said, “you’re a dominant personality, so you go around thinking you’re getting a great deal of variety but really, when you look at it for what it is, it’s only masturbating in one way or another, except for a couple of times when you were outsmarted.”
He laughed. “I’ll have to think that over, which is more than I can say for most of the things you tell me. Do you guess that’s why it’s dull sometimes, not really dull, but duller than it ought to be?”
“With your mind and your way of operating it ought to be always dull.”
“You don’t use your mind in that kind of operation, Pop, not if you’ve got anything else. That’s only for writers. Look, while we’re on the subject, you once told me a piece of advice you said your mother gave you. Remember?”
“She never gave me but two pieces of advice and they were both good. ‘Never go out in a boat without oars, son,’ she said, ‘even if it’s the Queen Mary; and don’t waste your time on women who can’t cook because they’re not likely to be much fun in the other rooms either.’ ”
“You know your mother was dead and in her grave years before they even thought of building the Queen Mary.”
“She was part Scot,” I said, “and some of those people can see ahead.”
“All right, but it was the other one we were talking about. There’s more truth in it than I thought at first, but it’s not always right.”
“There aren’t many things that are always right.”
He got up and went over to the corner table. “I’m going to fix up my nightcap now so I can make a quick break for bed if you keep on talking like that. You’re a dull bunny when you get philosophical, Pop. Why don’t we just keep on talking about poontang?” He came back with his drink and sat down.
“Tulip,” I said, “you look to me like a man who wants to tell me about a little girl he met in Boston and—”
“Well, it was actually in Memphis that I first ran into her, but—”
“And I hope I look to you like a man who’s not going to listen, but who’s about to go up to bed and read awhile before he falls asleep.”
“Okay,” he said good-naturedly. “I’m in no hurry to get anything off my chest, though this baby I ran across in Memphis couldn’t cook worth a damn, just garlic in everything.”
“You used to like garlic.”
“Sure, I like it, but there’s a lot of lousy cooks in this world who think you can make anything good by just slapping enough garlic in it, and then if you kick about it they grin at you like they’d caught you picking a pocket and say, ‘Oh, so you don’t really like garlic?’ What time do you get up in the morning?”
“Around eight this time of the year, but you don’t—”
“Call me when you get up. I’ll have breakfast with you. Any particular reason for not telling me these Irongates were on their way home?”
“No, just my usual deviousness.”
He finished his drink while I put out the lights and we went upstairs together. I went through the motions of looking into his room and bath to see that everything was all right, then said good night and went back to my own room at the other end of the hall. Cinq, the young black poodle, had made himself comfortable near the foot of my bed and after I’d undressed came over for his goodnight head-scratch and pat. Then I got into bed and read Samuel’s Essay in Physics with Einstein’s polite letter declining to find anything in the Two-State Ether for a physicist to chew on.
I had meant to think about Tulip afterwards, but I got to thinking about the notion of an expanding universe being only an attempt to bootleg infinity again, and of what rearrangements would be necessary in mathematics if one, the unit, the single item, were not considered a number at all, except perhaps as a convenience in calculating. And presently I was pretty sleepy and put out the light and went to sleep.
Tony was in the dining room when I came down for breakfast, eating kippers and reading one of the newspapers. We said good morning and I sat down with another of the papers. Donald brought me orange juice and then kippers and toast. I was about halfway through my meal when Tulip joined us, and we left him to finish alone while the boy and I went out on the porch to look at the new crossbow he had asked me about the night before.
“It’s brutal,” Tony said as he handed it to me. “Of course all of ’em are brutal, but this is really brutal.” It was a sort of cross between an arbalest and the thing those fellows in western Pennsylvania used to make out of automobile springs. “It’s got all the power in the world, but—see?—the bolt slides down if you tilt it.” His dark eyes were very bright. He liked weapons.
“We can fix that with a dingus here to hold the bolt back till you pull the trigger, but I don’t know that I’d bother with it. You’re not going to shoot down a lot. Why don’t you just dab a little piece of Scotch tape across the bolt when you need to hold it there? You can’t make any speed loading and cocking these things anyhow and with a little piece of tape I doubt if you’ll lose anything in force or accuracy.”
“Well, if you really think so,” he said slowly, “but—”
I looked down at him. “But maybe I’m just trying to get out of some work? Stop talking like Tulip.”
He laughed and said, “Your friend Tulip’s a character, isn’t he?”
“In a way, but you’ve got to figure that he and I play games together and you’ll probably come out closer to the facts by not believing either of us too exactly. Mostly he tries to make himself out a little worse than he is and I try to make myself out a little better. Old men cutting up old touches do a good deal of that, and a lot of male nonsense anyhow is only to impress women and children when it’s not just to impress one another, or maybe themselves.”
“You’ve told me that before,” he said.
“That doesn’t keep it from having some truth in it somewhere,” I said. “Come on, let’s take this thing over behind the garage and try it out.” We went down off the porch—the screens were not up yet—and across the lawn that had the scrunchiness of early spring underfoot to the gravel road past the garage where the maples looked still a month from flowering. “They’re some nice things about Tulip. One of ’em I always liked was about his education. He’s a Harvard man, you know.”
Tony, walking beside me carrying the crossbow and the leather bag that went with it, said, “No kidding?” in a tone that I could not quite understand. I did not always understand Tony.
“Yes. I don’t know anything about Tulip’s family or where he came from—he’s told me things I didn’t choose to believe—but anyhow he went to Harvard for four years and when they graduated him he took for granted that he was an educated man till he ran into a fellow named Eubanks down in Jacksonville the next year who explained to him that there was more to being an educated man than just going through a university, though that might be a necessary first step. Tulip had never thought of that before, but he believed it when Eubanks explained it to him and said to hell with it and stopped being an educated man.”
Tony said, “Hey, I like that too,” and we began to zero in the crossbow against a tree stump we had used as target for various weapons before: the ground rose steeply behind it to the hill above the old orchard. This was really a murderous weapon: it hurled its three-inch steel bolts with force and—once we had got the hang of it—accuracy. Tony grinned up at me. “It’s okay, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “M-m-m.”
His grin widened. “And it would be just silly to complain that it’s no good for anything at all except this, wouldn’t it?”
“It would for us.”
He sighed and nodded.
When we got back to the house Tulip was reading a morning newspaper over a cup of coffee in the puce and white ground-floor room that for some reason was called the study, a nice many-windowed booky room that opened on the long end of the lawn that ran out of sight among trees.
He looked up from his newspaper to the crossbow. “Aren’t you people backing up on time a little?” he asked. “I read about ray guns and blasters and disintegrators and—”
“Phases,” I said, “that defeat themselves in the end, like gunpowder. Want to walk down to the pond?”
“Sure.” He finished his coffee and stood up.
I found a mackinaw for him—it was still chilly—and the three of us cut across the lawn to the pond path. Some of the juncos that hadn’t yet gone back up north were scratching the ground under a bird-feeder, one of the nut-hatches that lived in the black walnut tree was waddling swiftly down its trunk, a chickadee sang out and three of them flew tentatively at us.
“They’re looking for sunflower seeds,” Tony told Tulip. “He feeds them out of his hand.”
“It’s the St. Francis streak in him,” Tulip said. “He’s a doddering old man who’s read too much, and he always has been.”
The boy laughed up at him: he was walking between us. “Have you ever seen him do his fly-petting act? It’s sharp.”
“I can imagine,” Tulip said. “Pop’s really a cute kid in a lot of ways. I wish I could tell you about once in a town out near Spokane—”
“Tony’s one of the people we can talk in front of,” I said. We were walking along the muddy path then. It was wide enough for us to go abreast. Some of the dogwood looked almost ready to start popping open; it always hangs on the verge for weeks and weeks before anything happens.
“You mean I can tell him about that time out in the Coeur d’Alenes?” Tulip asked.
“I don’t know what’s on your mind, but you can tell him. About the flies, there’s nothing much to it. You’ve seen how they like to scratch their wings. Well, if you’re careful not to scare ’em with the shadow of your hand when you start, and you scratch them gently on the wings they like it and will stick around. That’s all there is to it.”
“Okay,” Tulip said. “That’s why you think they like it. Now why do you think you like it?”
“In case there’s anything to the theory that the insects will eventually take over the world it might be just as well to have friends among ’em.”
“Isn’t he a disgusting old fossil?” he asked the boy. He shook his head. “I can remember back when he had hair on it.”
Tony said, “You’ve known each other a long time, haven’t you?”
“Long enough, but you don’t have to think we’re such good friends. It’s just that every once in a while he shows up wherever I am and hangs around for a few days. It’s never very long.”
Tulip said somewhat truculently over the boy’s head, “You know when I show up and why I don’t stay long.”
When I didn’t say anything Tony asked, “Do you?”
“He’s nuts,” I said. “I know, all right, but he’s nuts just the same.”
“That’s easy enough to say,” Tulip said indifferently.
“Hey,” Tony said, “you said just now I was one of the people you could talk in front of. You’re not talking in front of me; wherever you’re talking it’s certainly not in front of me.”
Tulip poked Tony’s shoulder with an elbow. “A juvenile wise guy, huh? You punks!” He scowled over the boy’s head at me. “Shall we put the whole thing up to the boy and see what he says about it?”
“If you want,” I said, “but you ought to know I’m making up my own mind for myself no matter who says what.”
“I know that. You’re an enemy of democracy.”
“Not an enemy, though I don’t trust its value much in small groups. Don’t go around saying I’m an enemy of democracy, they’ll put me in jail again.”
“That’s something to worry about on gloomy mornings before you’ve had your coffee. Look, Pop, why don’t we approach this thing realistically? I—”
“Realistic is one of those words when it comes into a discussion sensible people pick up their hats and go home,” I told Tony. “How’d you make out with that lamp you were going to try?”
He had had an idea—partly out of childish let’s-try-and-seeness, partly out of a book on dynamic symmetry his father had around the place, partly out of knowing nobody had too much faith in the currently accepted theories of light—that a sheet of reflecting metal curled at both ends into a sort of right-angle spiral might make an economically valid lampshade. He was ignoring some heat factors, of course, or hoping to take care of them accidentally, but then what theory of lighting doesn’t?
“Oh that? I never got around to it.”
The dogs caught up to us as we reached the fork in the path—the left running over a hill to the McConnells’ new bird sanctuary, the right going down to the pond—made their great momentary fuss over us, and went on scampering ahead, down towards where parts of the pond—all the ice had been gone for a few weeks now—were visible through still-bare trees: most of the evergreens were on the other side. It was an eight- or ten-acre spring-fed pond with a couple of small islands in it—not more than twelve feet deep at its deepest—and some large-mouthed bass, pickerel, sunfish, snakes, frogs and snapping turtles in season. I had never tried eating water snakes, the bass were a little too muddy tasting—from the bottom—for me, but the other things made good eating. The water got too warm in the summer for the trout; there’s not enough oxygen in warm water for them. I thought again of the likeness of the pond to Tulip’s description of the Horris woman’s lake, though he had given that a stone dock while this had only a ten-foot canvas-covered wooden pier.
“Heavy paper with aluminum foil pasted on it would be as good as shiny metal,” I said. “The main thing’s the base and top with spiral grooves in them to guide it. Paper might be better in a way, easier to cut off or paste together when you start finding out what length gives you most light.”
“You think I ought to go ahead with it, then? I thought maybe I didn’t know enough about what I was doing. I’d kind of like to try it, though, if you think it’s all right.”
“I think it’s worth trying,” I said. “Knowing what you’re doing is only part of good work. It’s using what you know—and not only what you know about the business at hand—to find out things you don’t know yet that makes good work. Almost is pretty good as a result: it’s only when you get what’s known as common sense and start accepting it as a goal that you’re in trouble. That’s the difference between a carpenter and a man who’s really making something.”
“My father was a carpenter,” Tulip said. “I don’t know that I ought to let you talk like that.”
“Your father was either a pickpocket or a pimp.” We had left the path and were walking over towards the little pier on the edge of the pond. I was looking at Tulip, but couldn’t decide whether he looked like a man who had seen this pond before.
“But he wasn’t good enough at ’em to make a full-time living that way. Most of the time he had to do carpenter work.” He nodded at the pond, looking sidewise at me almost as if he knew what I was thinking. “That lake of Lee’s I was telling you about looked kind of like this, except it had a stone dock and the hut was down at the water instead of back aways like this one, and their lake’s bigger.”
What he called the hut used to be down on the edge of the pond till the Irongates had it moved back on dryer ground, and things were always bigger in Tulip’s stories. That left the stone dock.
The dogs were wading in and out of the water in their usual examination of the shoreline. Twenty feet off the end of one island a pair of early-northing Canada geese or brant—I couldn’t tell which at that distance—were watching us or the dogs: at this time of the year wild geese had more curiosity than timidity.
“What bothers me most,” Tony said, “is the beginning of the spiral’s going to be too close to the lightbulb unless the whole thing’s too big.”
“You’re figuring on a lot of spiral,” I said, “and you might need a lot less than you think. Anyhow your light meter will tell you what length’s best. If you want something to bother about, maybe your answer’s in a three-dimensional spiral and not in the two we’re fooling with.”
The boy shut his dark eyes, then opened them to ask, “But how do you get light out of your three-dimensional spiral? It traps it, or most of it, doesn’t it? And I’m not exactly sure how you hold this spiral—the way you mean it—down to three dimensions.”
My mathematics wasn’t good enough to answer any of his questions and I said so, adding, “Of course we might not be up against a mathematical problem at all. Folks call topology a branch of mathematics, but I think they’re nuts, and we might be headed for topology. I don’t mean only us; I mean anybody fooling with light problems.”
Tony gave a little gurgle of delight when I said topology, as if I had mentioned an old friend. He used to listen one winter while Gus and I gave dimensions back to the sculptors and spent hours talking about painting having to do with the relationship in space of the surfaces of objects and nothing else. I liked topology: a few years before that I had written a story on a Möbius band, designed to be read from any point in it on around to that point again, and to be a complete and sensible story regardless of where you started. It had worked out pretty well—I don’t mean perfectly; what story ever does that? But pretty well.
Tulip was throwing a stick out in the water for Cinq to swim for. The dogs used to swim a good deal till Jummy had to have some growths in his ears cut and water seemed to bother them so he stopped swimming very much and the other two didn’t do things he didn’t do. Cinq swam out for the stick now—head high out of the water, the way poodles swim even when not clipped for it. Jummy and Meg were wading in and out of the water around a bend in the pond shore.
