Short Fiction Collected, page 34
“Sure and ye’ll weigh anchor immejitly,” blustered Captain O’Ho, “and take this spalpeen wid ye, or the Oblivian Air Force will blow your ship out of the water.”
The mate ejaculated, “Well, frigate!”—a nautical oath, if ever I heard one. But he complied and began shouting orders to the crew to cast off. Within an hour, Ciudad Ynercia was out of sight and, within a day, all Oblivia was out of nose range.
What more can I write, Reverend Kallikak? I did my utmost to bring both pagan and Papist Oblivia into the SoPrim fold, and I find it hard to blame myself for the whims of fate which dictated otherwise. Oh, I know the calumnies that have been heaped upon me. From the rumors (and leers and sneers and wisecracks) I have encountered at the island ports along our way, I know that Oblivia is still in the throes of a war-against-itself, that it has huffily recalled its ambassadors from every foreign country (notably ours), that it has resigned from the United Nations, seceded from South America and set itself up as the first and only country of what it calls the Fourth World.
But look at it this way, sir. When I came to Oblivia, it had been ravaged by a politically motivated civil war. When I left Oblivia, it was being ravaged by a religiously motivated bloodbath. And isn’t religious motivation a missionary’s stock in trade? Bear only that in mind, Reverend Kallikak, and I think you can bear no ill will toward
Yours truly religiously,
Crispin Mobey
Let Us Prey
In this new Crispin Mobey story, the country is hit by a wave of senile delinquency, as elderly citizens turn from shuffleboard to robbery, rape, hijacking and worse. Mobey is sent on a fact-finding mission . . .
SUN CITY, ARIZONA (UPI)—The 3,000 enlisted men of Luke Air Force Base near here are grumbling mutinously because today is a payless payday. Their entire month’s wages—some sixteen million dollars in cash—were hijacked yesterday in this ordinarily serene senior citizens’ retirement community.
The robbery occurred when a USAF armored van carrying the payroll from a Phoenix bank to the airbase stopped for a moment as it passed the Sunland Memorial Park Garden of Prayer here, to let a feeble little old lady in a wheeled aluminum walker negotiate a ramped pedestrian street crossing.
“While she was inching past our truck,” the driver told police, “an old man tapped on my window with a corncob pipe and asked for a light. When I politely opened the triple-locked door, me and my partner were surrounded by this bunch of old geezers who wheezed, “Stand and deliver!” Now I ask you: how can an Air Police sergeant draw a gun on a pack of bandits old enough to be his grandfathers?”
Questioned by Sun City police and Air Force CID agents, the guards could describe the hijackers only sketchily: “They all wore identical jogging suits, and their faces were masked with Avon Essence-of-Cucumber Wrinkle Remover Cream . . .”
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA (AP)—The white-haired and wizened rapist who preys op the few young and beautiful females in this predominantly elderly community last night claimed his third victim in three years, this time a pretty coed of South Florida University.
The sex fiend’s modus operandi was the same as in the two previous incidents, of which he has repeatedly and brazenly boasted to local newspapers, sending obscene letters signed with an obvious alias, “The L-Dopa Lecher.”
He limped up to the girl as she hurried home from a late class through a dark area of the Bay Campus. He quaveringly asked her the time, and when she raised her book-laden hands to consult her wristwatch, he instantly bound her wrists together with the rubber arm-cuff of a sphygmomanometer (an instrument more properly used to measure blood pressure).
Before the girl could call for help, he clapped an adhesive Dr. Scholl’s bunion pad across her mouth. Then, as in the previous assaults, he dragged the girl into bushes nearby and bound her more securely with a swathing of Ace bandages. This, police theorize, enables him to rest and catch his breath after his exertions, until he recovers strength to proceed with the molestation.
The victim was able to provide one possible new clue to the identity of the L-Dopa Lecher. She told St. Petersburg police that, after laboriously completing the attack and before he limped off into the night, her assailant cackled to himself, “I may not be as good as I once was, hee hee hee, but I’m still as good once as I ever was . . .”
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA (UPI)—This heretofore almost crime-free town, populated mainly by respectable retirees and pensioners, was shocked today when the Cub Scout son of a retired stockbroker reported to La Jolla police that he was robbed last night of “an investment that took all my life savings.”
The youngster (name withheld because of his tender age) said he was riding his mo-ped to a 3:00 a.m. rendezvous with some fellow Cub Scouts when he was overtaken by about a dozen motorized wheelchairs. Forcing him to a halt at the curb, the chairs’ occupants snatched his schoolbook satchel from the mo-ped’s luggage rack.
“They didn’t get any moola,” said the young victim, “because I’d shelled out every buck I had for the package of pot I’d just brought up from Tijuana to peddle to my buddies. Don’t ask me what a lot of old (expletives deleted) would want with a poor kid’s first and only score of Acapulco Gold which I’d saved up all my hubcap and CB money to buy it. But they heisted the goods and went whizzing off in their electric wheelchairs.”
While the boy waited at the police station for his parents’ chauffeur to come for him, a reporter asked him if he could describe the heisters. The tearful little victim could only shrug and murmur, “They were old. Men, women, I dunno. Like I mean, man, who can tell one old (expletive deleted) from another?”
A police spokesman, who estimated the street value of the stolen marijuana at more than $50,000, said, “La Jolla may look tolerantly on kiddy pranks like pot-pushing. But, at the scene of the crime, we also found nitroglycerin pills, amyl nitrite ampules and empty insulin syringes, carelessly dropped by the criminals. This may presage a new and viciously indiscriminate kind of dope traffickers . . .”
Department of Dynamic Maturity
Southern Primitive Protestant Church
World Headquarters Abysmuth, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Dear Department:
To begin at the beginning . . . I was summoned to World Headquarters to confer with your department’s Advisor on Aging Gracefully, the venerable Reverend Peter Gleet, on a Friday evening in April.
When his secretary announced me—“The Reverend Crispin Mobey of the Missionary Division”—and I tottered breathless and flustered into his office, I did not at once blurt out my excuse for being both late and untidy in appearance. But then Rev. Gleet handed me that sheaf of newspaper clippings and after I’d read them, I had to tell him:
“Sir, I was mugged on my way to our appointment tonight. An old lady bashed me in the back of my head with her crutch. Then, holding me helpless at the point of a steel knitting needle, she rifled my pockets. I was carrying only bus fare, but she took even that mite, and I had to run all the way to headquarters here.”
He solemnly shook his hoary head and sighed, “I am beginning to feel ashamed of being a senior citizen myself. This crime wave of senile delinquency is sweeping from coast to coast, wherever there is a concentration of elderly, from inner-city slums to the most exclusive and determinedly vivacious Swinging Sunsets estates.”
I solemnly shook my still-aching head and asked, “Does this somehow involve our dear Southern Primitive Protestant Church?”
“SoPrim has always been ready and eager to meddle—er, to concern itself with any urgent social issue. And, as in any Fundamentalist sect, practically all of our members are elderly.” I coughed, and he tactfully amended that: “Well, in their sclerosed intellects, if not in their sum of birthdays.” I smiled, appeased, and he continued: “We have no evidence that any SoPrim Protestants have yet participated in any of these atrocities. However, we must take measures to avert their involvement as this madness spreads.”
“You expect it to spread, sir? Might it not be just another geriatric fad, like those copper bracelets to ward off arthritis?”
“It shows no sign of abating.” The Reverend Advisor sighed again and leafed through his file of clippings. “Here is another item. The Lake Havasu City shopping plaza was plagued by a continuing pilferage of hot-water bottles, trusses and Kellogg’s All-Bran. When the police finally tracked the shoplifter to a seedy local trailer court—the Modern Maturity Mobile Mansions—all the inhabitants drew up their Winnebagos and Airstreams into a frontier-style circle. For three days, they held the police force at bay with a gas bombardment.”
“Gas?” I inquired. “The butane from their trailer tanks?”
“No, they all stoked up their bedside steam inhalers, aimed the nozzles at the police and let fly with the fumes of Vicks VapoRub. They also set fire to their mustard plasters and Preparation-H suppositories and fanned that smoke of acrid mustard and poisonous mercury at the beseigers. The police couldn’t breach the barrage until they got gas masks from the National Guard. Now all the oldsters are in custody and enduring interrogation, but—”
“Don’t tell me the police are subjecting those old folks to the Third Degree!”
“Not exactly. The officers simply confiscated the old folks’s bottles of Hadacol and Geritol so they’d suffer alcohol-withdrawl pangs. But that still hasn’t compelled any of them to crack and name the shoplifter among them.” Rev. Gleet shook his snowy locks again.
“To what, sir, do you attribute this sudden rebellion of the ancients?”
“There are two prime causes, Mobey. One is the increase in leisure time, owing to automation’s doing more and more of the world’s work. The other is mankind’s increasing longevity, owing to modern medical miracles.”
“Excuse me,” I ventured, “but those hardly sound pernicious.”
“Son, the Devil finds work for idle hands. A while back, when juvenile delinquency became a scourge, it was blamed on the lack of gainful employment for the young. The poor kids, or so said the psychologists, had nothing to occupy them but mischief. Well, by the same token, aren’t most old people unemployed? Oh, they may be legitimately retired, and they may enjoy subsistence pensions or doles of some kind. But their stipends are fixed, while the cost of living keeps rising. So, if they’ve got the pep for it, why shouldn’t they, like the young, turn to crime to augment their income?”
“But these,” I said, riffling through the news items, “aren’t all profit-motivated crimes.”
“Nor are all crimes in general. Some are done, as the jargon has it, purely for kicks. SoPrim policy forbids me to preach any such heresy, but I personally would prefer playing Dillinger to playing shuffleboard for the rest of my days. The so-called three B’s of retirement are—if you’ll pardon the vulgarity—Boredom, Bitchiness and Booze. Apparently many oldsters are now substituting the fourth B of Banditry simply to enliven their lackluster existence.”
“Or,” I muttered, “L for Lechery.”
“Yes,” said Rev. Gleet. “There you see the pernicious influence of all these new magazines aimed at the aged—though they would never print a foul four letter word like ‘aged.’ They unceasingly drum into their readers that sexual fun and games can continue unabated unto the brink of the grave. Any day now, I expect to be called to give pastoral comfort to some SoPrim elder on his deathbed and find it is an undulating waterbed with a mirror canopy.”
“Oh, come, sir,” I chuckled. “A magazine may increase its circulation by flattering or even deceiving its rickety readers, but it certainly can’t increase their—”
“Ah, but there has been another medical miracle. Science concocted the drug L-3, 4-dihydroxyphenylanine as a palliative for certain geriatric ailments. The drug is better known as L-Dopa, and it turned out to have a spectacular side effect. It gave every elderly patient a new and even rampant sex drive. Its prescription is now most carefully controlled—where it can be. But you can imagine that every retirement community now has its resident L-Dopa pusher, hence a high proportion of prancing old goats and simpering old cows. You can also imagine that the old goats and cows don’t chase each other. They go rutting after nymphets and faunlets.”
I blushed, but forebore to tell him what that old mugger lady had attempted while her scrawny claw groped in my trousers pocket. Instead I remarked, “But these—what shall we call them?—these rebels post-menopause—surely they, ate few and feeble compared to our forces of law and order.”
“You are wrong. America has for so long worshiped the cult of youthfulness that it overlooks the grim statistics. Old people live to get even older these days. Meanwhile, America’s birthrate has declined over the past decade or more. Just because young people tend to be offensively obtrusive, we think we live in a country of the young. Not so. At this moment, Reverend Mobey, approximately one of every eight Americans is over the age of sixty-five. Thus the United States has a population of some 28 million senior citizens—more than the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, militia, secret services and all the police forces of every state, city, town and village combined!”
“Merciful Heavens,” I murmured.
“The danger is plain. So far, the old people’s depredations have been scattered and whimsical. But eventually they will recognize their potential for nationwide organized crime. Among them are retired military men, deposed politicians (Nixon is nearly seventy), rich financiers, even nuclear scientists. When they decide—I do not say if—when they decide to mobilize, they can pool their resources of talent and experience. They can pool their riches and savings, their pensions and insurance annuities, their newly ill-gotten loot. They can afford to buy or make every kind of weapon from zip-guns to nuclear devices. They can arm themselves more formidably than any underground terrorist group, or even the mighty Mafia. At a signal, all the feisty ancients can rise up in concert, to mount an irresistible assault on the bastions of our society. The forces of law and order will be hopelessly outnumbered.”
“But not the forces of Faith!” I cried. “If the Lord be with us, who can stand against us? I assume SoPrim has a plan, sir. Where do I come in?”
“The plan is, first, for me to make a fact-finding tour of a specially selected senior citizens’ retirement community. You have been assigned to accompany me as my interpreter.”
“To interpret?” I said, confused. “I don’t speak Old, sir.”
“You speak Spanish, do you not? I know you spent some time in Oblivia.”
“Well, yes, sir, I reckon my Spanish is passable. But”—I gulped—“You must also know that Crispin Mobey is persona non grata in Oblivia. I can’t ever go—”
“We are going to Mexico. Many elderly Americans retire there, both for the clement climate and the lower cost of living. And there have been no reported cases of old-codger crime among the American retirees in Mexico. I am to find out why not. If I can learn anything which may be applicable here, I shall return and use that knowledge, God willing, to help stop the Stateside surge of senile delinquency. Your being able to speak Spanish to the natives should make my trip easier. So go now, my boy, and pack. And pray.”
Except that it is unthinkable that I ever could or would retire from my chosen lifework, I believe I too would gladly retire to San Miguel de Atayde. It is a quaint and lovely mountain town, of tenderly preserved Spanish Colonial architecture, cobbled streets, perpetual springtime, crystalline air, hummingbirds, butterflies and flowers, everywhere.
Once I had got Rev. Gleet and myself from the Mexico City airport, onto a bus for Atayde, and there booked us into adjoining rooms in the Hotel Feliz, I found little use for my fund of Spanish. Excluding the native Mexicans, Atayde is almost entirely populated by male and female retirees (jubilados in Spanish, though that word is not pronounced like “jubilation,” nor is it anywise synonymous). They are mostly American, a few Canadian, and almost none of them, though many have lived in Atayde for years, yet speak anything but English.
The majority of them congregate each morning, and spend the remainder of every day, sunning their old bones under the topiary laurels of the town’s central plaza, on a long row of park benches facing the rose-and-amber stone Parroquia, biggest of Atayde’s countless Roman Catholic churches. That line of benches has been known as Castanet Row ever since an irreverent wag commented that, if all its inert benchwarmers were to take out their teeth, they could perform the world’s greatest castanet concert.
Rev. Gleet (“Call me Pete”) easily insinuated himself into the ranks of the day-long sitters, while I—not being white-haired, gray-haired, blue-haired or bald—sort of lurked unobtrusively in the background. The others, who had long been boring each other with their reiterated life stories, were only too pleased to have “Pete’s” newcomer ear to bend.
I suppose they comprise an assortment typical of any retirement community anywhere. There was Brig. Gen. Volpone (Ret.), who adamantly insisted on being addressed always by his full title of rank—and who was currently on the verge of apoplexy because the local telephone directory, prone to typographical error, now flaunted the listing “Frig. Gen. Volpone.” There was the inevitable old biddy obsessed with occultism, Patty O’Manny, forever blathering about her “psychic awareness” of other people’s “psychic auras” and predicting dire things therefrom. There were the wilted ex-warriors of the Atayde American Legion post, each of whom (I was told) had fought his Great War in some such capacity as clerk-typist at some such place as Fort Sill. Okla. These spent less time basking on Castenet Row than boozing in the Cucaracha catina, whence they kept sending to the White House blearily bellicose manifestoes denouncing “the Panama Canal giveaway” and other U.S. foreign-policy follies.
There were several retirees who, to avert petrifaction, had devised make-work for themselves. A retired interior decorator offered classes in rug weaving and had somehow acquired a nickname which no one ever explained to me: “Fruit-of-the-Loom.” An elderly black gentleman was engaged in teaching the plaza urchins a brand of English which (should they ever emigrate to Mississippi) would get them thrown out of every white-only restaurant. Others of the oldsters were writing their memoirs. One retired physician brought his portable typewriter to Castanet Row every day, to peck at what he described as “a witty, wise and winsome” account of his long career as a simple country proctologist: All Things Prone and Puckered.
