Ten minutes later, he was at the farmhouse.

  Riley greeted him by biting him.

  3.

  Eyre parked the car in front of his house. The driveway was blocked with a car to which was hitched a boat trailer, a motorcycle lacking a motor, and a Land Rover on top of which was a half-built camper. Behind it was a large garage crammed with machines, tools, supplies, old tires, and outboard motors in the process of being repaired.

  Thirteen-thirty-one Wizman Court was in an area which once had been all residential. Now the huge old mansion across the street was a nursing home; the houses next to it had been worn down and buildings for a veterinarian and his kennels were almost completed. Eyre’s own house had looked large enough and smart enough when he and Mavice had moved into it twenty years ago. It looked tiny, mean, and decaying now and had looked so for ten years.

  Paul Eyre, until this moment, had never noticed that. Though he felt crowded at times, he attributed this to too many people, not the smallness of the house. Once he got rid of his son and daughter, the house would again become comfortable. And the house was paid for. Besides taxes, maintenance, and the utilities, it cost him nothing. If the neighborhood was run down somewhat, so much the better. His neighbors did not complain because he was conducting his own repair business here.

  Until now, he had not thought anything about its appearance. It was just a house. But now he noticed that the grass on the tiny lawn was uncut, the wooden shutters needed painting, the driveway was a mess, and the sidewalk was cracked.

  He got out of the car and picked up his shotgun and bag with his left hand. The right hand was heavily bandaged. The old ladies sitting on the side porch waved and called out to him, and he waved back at them. They sat like a bunch of ancient crows on a branch. Time was shooting them down, one by one. There was an empty chair at the end of the row, but it would be occupied by a newcomer soon enough. Mr. Ridgley had sat there until last week when he had been observed one afternoon urinating over the railings into the rosebushes below. He was, according to the old ladies, now locked up in his room on the third floor. Eyre looked up and saw a white face with tobacco-stained moustaches pressed against the bars over the window.

  He waved. Mr. Ridgley stared. The mouth below the moustache drooled. Angry, Paul Eyre turned away. His mother had stared out of that window for several weeks, and then she had disappeared. But she had lived to be eighty-six before she had become senile. That was forgivable. What he could not forgive, nor forget, was that his father had only been sixty when his brain had hardened and his reason had slid off it.

  He went up the wooden unpainted steps off the side of the front porch. It was no longer just a porch. He had enclosed it and Roger now used it for a bedroom. Roger, as usual, had neglected to make up the bed-couch. Four years in the Marines, including a hitch in Viet Nam, had not made him tidy.

  Eyre growled at Roger as he entered the front room. Roger, a tall thin blond youth, was sitting on the sofa and reading a college textbook. He said, “Oh, Mom said she’d do it.” He stared at his father’s hand. “What happened?”

  “Riley went mad, and I had to shoot him.”

  Mavice, coming in from the kitchen, said, “Oh, my God! You shot him!”

  Tears ran down Roger’s cheeks.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Paul waved his right hand. “Didn’t you hear me? He bit me! He was trying for my throat!”

  “Why would he do that?” Mavice said.

  “You sound like you don’t believe me!” Paul said. “For God’s sake, isn’t anyone going to ask me how badly he bit me? Or worry that I might get rabies?”

  Roger wiped away the tears and looked at the bandages. “You’ve been to a doctor,” he said. “What’d he say about it?”

  “Riley’s head has been shipped to the state lab,” Paul said. “Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like if I have to have rabies shots? Anyway, it’s fatal! Nobody ever survived rabies!”

  Mavice’s hand shot to her mouth and from behind it came strangled sounds. Her light blue eyes were enormous.

  “Yeah, and horseshoes hung over the door bring good luck,” Roger said. “Why don’t you come out of the nineteenth century, Dad? Look at something besides outboard motors and the TV. The rate of recovery from rabies is very high.”

  “So I only had one year of college,” Paul said. “Is that any reason for my smartass son to sneer at me? Where would you be if it wasn’t for the G.I. Bill?”

  “You go to college to get a degree, not an education,” Roger said. “You have to educate yourself, all your life.”

  “For Heaven’s sake, you two,” Mavice said. “Quit this eternal bickering. And sit down, Paul. Take it easy. You look terrible!”

  He jerked his arm away and said, “I’m all right.” But he sat down. The mirror behind the sofa had showed him a short, thin but broad-shouldered man with smooth pale-brown hair, a high forehead, bushy sandy eyebrows, blue eyes behind octagonal rimless spectacles, a long nose, a thick brown moustache, and a round cleft chin.

  His face did look like a mask. Tincrowdor had said that anyone who wore glasses should never sport a moustache. Together, these gave a false-face appearance. That remark had angered him then. Now it reminded him that he was looking forward to seeing Tincrowdor. Maybe he had some answers.

  “What about a beer, Dad?” Roger said. He looked contrite.

  That’d help, thanks,” Paul said. Roger hurried off to the kitchen while Mavice stood looking down at him. Even when both were standing up, she was still looking down on him. She was at least four inches taller.

  “You don’t really think Riley had rabies?” she said. “He seemed all right this morning.”

  “Not really. He wasn’t foaming at the mouth or anything like that. Something scared him in the woods, scared him witless, and he attacked me. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Mavice sat down in a chair across the room. Roger brought in the beer. Paul drank it gratefully, though its amber color reminded him of the yellow stuff. He looked at Mavice over the glass. He had always thought she was very good-looking, even if her face was somewhat long. But, remembering the profile of the woman in the woods, he saw that she was very plain indeed, if not ugly. Any woman’s face would look bad now that he had seen that glory among the trees.

  The front door slammed, and Glenda walked in from the porch. He felt vaguely angry. He always did when he saw her. She had a beautiful face, a feminization of his, and a body which might have matched the face but never would. It was thin and nearly breastless, though she was seventeen. The spine was shaped like a question mark; one shoulder was lower than the other; the legs looked as thin as piston rods.

  She stopped and said, “What happened?” Her voice was deep and husky, sexy to those who heard it without seeing her.

  Mavice and Roger told her what had taken place. Paul braced himself for a storm of tears and accusations, since she loved Riley dearly. But she said nothing about him. She seemed concerned only about her father. This not only surprised him. It angered him.

  Why was he angry? he thought.

  And he understood, then, that it was because she was a living reproach. If it weren’t for him, she would not be twisted; she’d be a tall straight and beautiful girl. His anger had been his way of keeping this knowledge from himself.

  He was amazed that he had not known this before. How could he have been so blind?

  He began sweating. He shifted on the sofa as if he could move his body away from the revelation. He felt the beginning of a panic. What had opened his eyes so suddenly? Why had he only now, today, noticed how ugly and mean the house was, how frightened and repulsed he was by the old people across the street, and why Glenda had angered him when he should have shown her nothing but tenderness?

  He knew why. Something had happened to him in the woods, and it was probably the stuff which had fallen on him, the stuff expelled by the thing. But how could it have given him this insight? It scared him. It made him feel as if he were losing something very dear.

  He almost yielded to the desire to tell them everything. No, they would not believe him. Oh, they’d believe that he had seen those things. But they would think that he was going crazy, and they would be frightened. If he would shoot Riley while in a fit, he might shoot them.

  He became even more frightened. Many times, he had imagined doing just this. What if he lost control and the image shifted gears into reality?

  He stood up. “I think I’ll wash up and then go to bed for a while. I don’t feel so good.”

  This seemed to astonish everybody.

  “What’s so strange about that?” he said loudly.

  “Why, Dad, you’ve always had to be forced to bed when you’ve been sick,” Glenda said. “You just won’t admit that you can get ill, like other people. You act as if you were made of stone, as if microbes bounced off of you.”

  “That’s because I’m not a hyper — a hyper — a what-you-call-it, a goldbricker, like some people,” he said.

  “A hypochondriac,” Glenda and Roger said at the same time.

  “Don’t look at me when you say that,” Mavice said, glaring at him. “You know I have a chronic bladder infection. I’m not faking it. Dr. Wells told you that himself when you called him to find out if I was lying. I was never so embarrassed in all my life.”

  The shrill voice was coming from a long way off. Glenda was becoming even more crooked, and Roger was getting thinner and taller.

  The doorway to the bedroom moved to one side as he tried to get through it. He couldn’t make it on two legs, so he got down on all fours. If he was a dog, he’d have a more solid footing, and maybe the doorway would be so confused by the sudden change of identities it would hold still long enough for him to get through it.

  He heard Mavice’s scream and barked an assurance that he was all right. Then he was protesting to Mavice and Roger that he didn’t want to stand up, but they had hoisted him up and were guiding him toward the bed. It didn’t matter then, since he had gotten through. Let the doorway move around all it wanted now; he had fooled it. You could teach an old dog new tricks.

  Later, he heard Mavice’s voice drilling through the closed door. Here he was, trying to sleep off whatever was ailing him, and she was screaming like a parrot. Nothing would ever get her to lower that voice. Too many decibels from a unibelle, he thought. Which was a strange thought, even if he was an engineer. But he wished she would tone down or, even better, shut up. Forever. He knew that it wasn’t her fault, since both her parents had been somewhat deaf during her childhood. But they were dead now, and she had no logical reason to keep on screaming as if she were trying to wake the dead.

  Why hadn’t he ever said anything about it? Because he nourished the resentment, fed it with other resentments. And then, when the anger became too great, he in turn screamed at her. But it was always about other things. He had never told her how grating her voice was.

  He sat up suddenly and then got out of bed. He was stronger now, and the doorway was no longer alive. He walked out into the little hall and said, “What are you saying to Morna?”

  Mavice looked at him in surprise and put her hand over the receiver. “I’m calling off tonight. You’re too sick to have company.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m all right. You tell her to come on over as planned.”

  Mavice’s penciled eyebrows rose. “All right, but if I’d insisted they come, you would have gotten mad at me.”

  “I got work to do,” he said, and headed toward the rear exit.

  “With that bandage on your hand?” Mavice said.

  He threw both hands up into the air and went into the living room. Roger was sitting in a chair and holding a textbook while watching TV.

  “How can you study freshman calculus while Matt Dillon is shooting up the place?” Paul Eyre said.

  “Every time a gun goes off and a redskin bites the dust, another equation becomes clear,” Roger said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means,” Roger said calmly. “I just know it works.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Paul said. “When I was studying I had to have absolute quiet.”

  “Didn’t you listen to the radio while you were hitting the books?”

  Paul seemed surprised.

  “No.”

  “Well, I was raised this way,” Roger said. “All my friends were. Maybe we learned how to handle two or more things simultaneously. Maybe that’s where the generation gap is. We take in many different things at once and see the connections among them. But you only saw one thing at a time.”

  “So that makes you better than us?”

  “Different, anyway,” Roger said. “Dad, you ought to read MacLuhan. But then…”

  “But then what?”

  “But you never read anything but the local newspaper, sports magazines, and stuff connected with your work.”

  “I don’t have time,” Paul said. “I’m holding down a job at Trackless and working eight hours a day on my own business. You know that.”

  “Leo Tincrowdor used to do that, and he read three books a week. But then he wants to know.”

  “Yeah, be knows so much, but if his car breaks down, can he fix it himself? No, he has to call in an expensive mechanic. Or get me to do it for him for nothing.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Roger said. “Anyway, he’s more interested in finding out how the universe works and why our society is breaking down and what can be done to repair it.”

  “It wouldn’t be breaking down if people like him weren’t trying to break it down!”

  “You would have said the same thing a hundred years ago,” Roger said. “You think things are in a mess now; you should read about the world in 1874. The good old days. My history professor —”

  Paul strode from the room and into the kitchen. He never drank more than two beers a day, but today was different. And how it was different. The top of the can popped open, reminding him of the sound when the field had snapped back to normalcy. Now there was a connection which Roger, anybody else in the world, in fact, would not have made. He wished he had stayed home to catch up on his work instead of indulging himself in a quail hunt.

  4.

  At seven, the Tincrowdors walked in. Usually Paul kept them waiting, since he always had to finish up on a motor in the garage. By the time he had washed up, Leo had had several drinks and Morna and Mavice were engaged in one of their fast-moving female conversations. Leo was happy enough talking to Roger or Glenda or, if neither were there, happy to be silent. He did not seem to resent Paul’s always showing up late. Paul suspected that he would have been content if he never showed up. Yet, he always greeted him with a smile. If he had been drinking much, he also had some comment which sounded funny but which concealed a joke at Paul’s expense.

  Tonight, however, Paul was in the living room when they arrived. He jumped up and kissed Morna enthusiastically. He always kissed good-looking women if they would let him; it gave him a sense of innocent infidelity, outside of the sheer pleasure of kissing. Morna had to bend down a little, like Mavice, but she put more warmth into it than Mavice. Yet she was always, well, often, chewing him out in defense of her friend, Mavice.

  Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor enclosed Paul’s hand with his over-sized one and squeezed. He was a six-footer with heavy bones and a body that had once been muscular but now was turning to fat. His once auburn hair was white and thinning. Below protruding bars of bone, his strange leaf-green eyes, the balls bloodshot, looked at and through Paul. His cheeks were high and red. His beard was a mixture of gray, black, and red. He had a deep voice the effect of which was lessened by a tendency to slur when drinking. And Paul had only seen him twice when he hadn’t been drinking. He pushed ahead of him a balloon of bourbon. When he had money, it was Waller’s Special Reserve. When he was broke, it was cheap whiskey cut with lemon juice. Evidently he had recently received a story check. The balloon had an expensive odor.

  “Sit down, Leo.” Ritualistically, Eyre asked, “What’ll it be? Beer or whiskey?”

  Ritualistically, Tincrowdor answered, “Bourbon. I only drink beer when I can’t get anything better.”

  When Paul returned with six ounces of Old Kentucky Delight on ice, he found Tincrowdor handing out two of his latest soft-covers to Roger and Glenda. He felt a thrust of jealousy as they exclaimed over the gifts. How could the kids enjoy that trash?

  “What’s this?” he said, handing Leo his drink and then taking the book from Glenda. The cover showed a white man in a cage surrounded by some green-skinned women, all naked, reaching through the bars for the man. In the background was a mountain vaguely resembling a lion with a woman’s head. On top of the head was a white Grecian temple with small figures holding knives around another figure stretched out on an altar.

  “Sphinxes Without Secrets,” Leo said. “It’s about a spaceman who lands on a planet inhabited by women. The males died off centuries before, mostly from heartbreak. A chemist, a women’s lib type, had put a substance in the central food plant which made the men unable to have erections.”

  “What?” Mavice said. She laughed, but her face was red.

  “It’s an old idea,” Leo said. He sipped the bourbon and shuddered. “But I extrapolate to a degree nobody else has ever done before. Or is capable of doing. It’s very realistic. Too much so for the Busiris Journal-Star. Their reviewer not only refused to write a review, he sent me a nasty letter. Nothing libelous. Old Potts doesn’t have the guts for that.”

  “If there weren’t any men, how could they have babies?” Paul said.

  “Chemically induced parthenogenesis. Virgin birth caused by chemicals. It’s been done with rabbits and theoretically could be done with humans. I don’t doubt that the Swedes have done it, but they’re keeping quiet about it. They have no desire to be martyrs.”

  “That’s blasphemy!” Paul said. His face felt hot, and he had a momentary image of himself throwing Tincrowdor out on his rear. “There’s only been one virgin birth, and that was divinely inspired.”

 

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