Horse of a Different Color Read online

  Table of Contents

  Horse of a Different Color: Stories

  Howard Waldrop

  Old Guys With

  Busted Gaskets

  Why Then Ile Fit You

  Afterword Why Then Ile Fit You

  The Wolf-man of Alcatraz

  Afterword The Wolf-Man of Alcatraz

  The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)

  Afterword

  The Horse of a

  Different Color

  (That You Rode in On)

  The King of Where-I-Go

  Afterword The King of Where-I-Go

  “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew . . .”

  Afterword “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew . . .”

  Thin, On the Ground

  Afterword Thin, on the Ground

  Kindermarchen

  Afterword Kindermarchen

  Avast, Abaft!

  Afterword Avast, Abaft!

  Frogskin Cap

  Afterword Frogskin Cap

  Ninieslando

  Afterword Ninieslando

  Publication History

  About the Author

  Howard Waldrop titles available from Small Beer Press

  Short story collections and novels from Small Beer Press for independently minded readers

  Horse of a Different Color: Stories

  Howard Waldrop

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Horse of a Different Color: Stories copyright © 2013 by Howard Waldrop. All rights reserved. Page 211 of the print edition (“Publication History”) functions as an extension of the copyright page.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com

  www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Waldrop, Howard.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Horse of a different color : stories / Howard Waldrop. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Howard Waldrop’s stories are keys to the secret world of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps stories between the known stories. From “The Wolf-man of Alcatraz” to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew” to the Vancean richness of a “Frogskin Cap,” this new collection is a wunderkammer of strangeness”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-073-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-074-9 (ebook)

  1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3573.A4228A6 2013

  813’.54--dc23

  2013028910

  First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Text set in Centaur.

  Cover © 2013 by Brian Lei (brianlei.com)

  Paper edition printed on 50# 30% PCR recycled Natures Natural paper by the Maple Press in York, PA.

  Old Guys With

  Busted Gaskets

  This collection is about evenly divided between stories I wrote before and after May 2008.

  Before May 2008 I was the usual amiable zany buffoon you’ve been following through these collections for thirty-something years.

  After May 2008 I’d had quintuple bypass (as a charity patient) and could no longer walk (possibly a bad reaction to the anaesthesia) and spent, first six months in physical rehab at a VA hospital in Temple, Texas, and then two months at my sister Mary and bro-in-law Danny’s house in Nettleton, Mississippi.

  Believe you me, I’d undergone a sea-change (on dry land).

  The first thing I’d been told in the ambulance on the way to Seton Hospital in 2008 was 1) you obviously had a silent heart attack sometime in the past to be having a flash pulmonary edema now and 2) you’re diabetic.

  Well, in the course of things (over the six months I was being retrained to walk at the VA hospital) the eyes began to go (this will be important in the discourse later).

  A word of fatherly advice: if you’re going to spend any length of time in a hospital, check your dignity and free will at the door (along with your shivs and shanks). It’ll save time.

  Anyway, since then and in the last few years, I’ve had many eye surgeries (both laser and meatball), mostly on the right eye, and some more’s coming up.

  Needless to say, this time of incapacity was also the time of the greatest opportunities I’d been offered in my career. (It goes without saying.) EVERYBODY wanted something from me, for more money than usual. Some of them got them, and some had to be as disappointed as I was.

  I’m still finishing The Moone World and The Search for Tom Purdue, short novels you’ll see shortly (all things being equal), and other stories here and there, of which I have a great steaming pile of ones I want to do.

  I’ll fill you in, in greater or lesser detail, in the Afterwords to the individual stories.

  You’ve been warned.

  Your Pal,

  Howard

  Why Then Ile Fit You

  One of the ones I can see told me it is already the year 1951. Good Gracious!

  I believe one of the other ones told me it was 1950, last year, when they took me out to act in David and Bathsheba.

  I can’t keep them straight anymore, the years or the people floating in and out of here—they come, they go, the ones I can see and the ones no one can.

  It had been good to see Hoey again on that quasiBiblical set—we had not acted together since he was Lestrade and I Moriarty—No, no, it was the other one, the one in Washington, where I wasn’t Moriarty—how long ago was that? It must be years and years. The time goes by—I never know whether it has been a day, two minutes, or five years since something occurred.

  They even tell me I was in a film two years ago—a musical with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. I have absolutely no memory of that. Upon my soul, I do not.

  You see, my agent comes to get me—I’m sure he has checked with the staff and doctors, and has probably even talked to me, but I do not remember that, either—and he takes me to the studios, and I act, and there are various pleasantries, and then I find myself back here in what I have come to refer to as Shady Bedlam Manors, though I am sure the name is something quainter, more reassuring. Others here call it The Home for Old and Bewildered Actors . . .

  I have just noticed an insect—some beetle or one of the true bugs—which probably flew in when the wide back doors were open during visiting hours. It seems to like the very-well-designed bedside lamp on the somnoe—it is crawling in an endless pattern over the rim of the shade, down inside, across the far side, reappearing at exactly the same place above the rim each time.

  I shall time its circumnavigation of the lampshade. Perhaps this will give me a clue to . . . something or other.

  Appropriately enough, my clock has stopped. I give a small laugh, and think that it has been a long time since I’ve done that.

  Still the insect appears, disappears, reappears, so time does go on . . .

  I must have been doing something naughty, or nonU, and been seen, for I find myself lightly restrained to my bed.

  I must have told them about the insect, or it found its way out of the Magellanic voyaging of its Luciferian world, for now it is gone.

  And I am reminded of poor Dwight Frye. How long now? There we were, in my fitter years, making Dead Men Walk in the middle of the war. I am playing, if I remember right, a vampire whose one goal in life is to suck all the blood out of his twin brother—also me—a Goody Two-Shoes. And then there’s
Dwight, doing his usual, as Jewish-Americans say, schtick, giving it his all, like always. And then there he is, lying dead of a heart attack, at little more than half my age.

  How many deformed and demented human wrecks did he play in his time? Twenty? Thirty? In the movies, and more on stage. The fellow was a fine actor. Yet there we both were on Poverty Row, bugging our eyes out like Mantan Moreland . . .

  It was as nothing that each of us had Shakespeare, Shaw, Galsworthy in our pasts, great and enduring roles. There we were in films which barely lasted as long in theaters as it takes to dress for dinner at a country house weekend . . .

  And now, Dwight dead and me here.

  Someone I couldn’t see must have been here. My restraints are gone. There is a new clock on the bedside table. It seems to be working very well.

  There is also a swelling in my left arm—a sure sign one I can’t see has given me an injection, while the others are invisibly ransacking my room, looking for money or sweets. Or watching me. Jove knows what.

  One can never be sure whether they are there or not.

  I often wonder if it were for my eyes that I was cast as all those crazy doctors, Moriarty, small-town Torquemadas. It was a small trick—letting the face go soft but keeping the eyes hard, flinty, moist. An old Victorian rep thing—I learned it from older heavies and villains when I was playing leads in my much younger days. Then came the films, and I worked in them. And one reviewer had said: “He enters the movie. His eyeballs come on the screen before the rest of his head does.”

  I never forgot that review.

  I had a very nice letter from dear old Jimmie Whale yesterday. He says he will come out of retirement—what, ten, twelve years now? —and direct a film again, but only if I appear in it.

  I call my agent. Then I am asking one of the male nurses if he thinks I am well enough to do a movie again, when one of the invisible ones comes in, makes me do a bad thing, I think, and then jabs me in the arm with the kind of needle they always had me fooling with at Monogram and PRC, the kind that is really used to extract blood from cattle and horses for serum . . .

  This morning, free of the bands again, I write Jimmie a courteous note, thanking him for the offer but telling him I really don’t feel up to it. I do not know if he is really trying to come out of his self-imposed exile only a few miles from here, or is just being kind to me, or if I am favoring him with a negative reply, that he expects, so he won’t have to go through with all the bother and nonsense.

  Out here, in what others call Tinseltown, one can never be sure who is doing a favor for whom.

  I just don’t want to embarrass myself, or Jimmie, if there were a movie and I were in it.

  Dear old Marjorie Main. Now playing Ma—what? Some utensil. Ladle? Pot? Kettle—yes, Kettle! She could always out act almost anyone she was onscreen with. Now that she has the security of a series, she can pick and choose her other roles, and can perhaps slow down.

  Dear Eve Arden. I can now listen to her on the radio, in the teacher part, Constance Brooks.

  Dear old—Ah! What’s the use. If I keep going on like this I shall begin to sound like Dear Old Boris Karloff. One thing is sure—he and Lugosi will be doing this stuff forever, dropping in harness like Dwight. Only, fittingly and not nearly so young . . .

  I must have been asleep in my chair, in my dressing gown, reading Cedric Hardwicke’s book.

  There was a touch on my arm.

  I opened my eyes. “George,” he said.

  “Jimmie!” I said, dropping the book to the floor, reaching for it.

  He retrieved it, putting it on my reading table, carefully placing the bookmark in it before closing it.

  Except for a few wrinkle lines, and the fact that his hair was now pure white, he hadn’t changed a bit in more than a decade. (I’ve not had more than a fringe of hair at the back of my head since my late thirties . . .)

  “Jimmie, old fellow! What brings you here?”

  “Well, George,” he said, “the movie might be on again, and I’ve come to ask you once more to be in it. I absolutely won’t, can’t do it without you.”

  “It’s very nice of you to ask, Jimmie, but—look about you. Does this seem to be the lodging of a working actor? Scripts everywhere, bad food boiling in a pot, unpaid bills stacked up? No. This is very much the room of an ex-actor.”

  “You know as well as I, George, that it’s like the sound of the bell to an old firehorse out to pasture—the right role comes along, you can smell it like a fire, miles away. I’m surprised you hadn’t written me in the last few weeks, scenting the script.”

  “Of course, that’s the line every producer or director uses on every old bunged-up actor,” I said. “I believe I heard Beerbohm Tree used it on Mrs. Patrick Campbell herself, a couple of years before he himself quit producing and started teaching.”

  “No, George. This time it’s a real role. I promise you, you won’t have to eat a rat, or anything. You get to act. An actor’s dream!”

  “But not, I’m sure, alas, actor-proof,” I said.

  “At least tell me you’ll look at the script if I send it,” he said, smiling earnestly. “When I first asked you, two years ago, it wasn’t quite ready. Now it is.”

  “Oh, Jimmie. I’m truly flattered. But I’m so rusty.”

  Jimmie put his hand on my shoulder. “I absolutely can’t do this without you, George. It will be bad enough coming back to all that. I really don’t want to do this if you don’t.”

  “Oh, Jimmie,” I said. I believed him. “Ask Karloff. I don’t think he’s taken a day off since 1931, and that was a world away. You and he did so well together, every time out . . .”

  “Karloff isn’t right for the part, George,” he said quietly. “No matter how well he and I got on and helped each other, he would have to tie himself in a knot—no doubt he’d find some way to do it—but why do that, when it’s your role in the first place? Something you can do as naturally as . . . as reading Sir Cedric’s book there?”

  “I’m just too old and too . . . too confused to do a film just now. You’re seeing me at my best, my very best. I haven’t felt so good in, oh, days and days. And those, Jimmie, are becoming more and more infrequently. Good days, I mean.”

  He laughed. “I believe you’re having Fear of Success, George.”

  That broke much of the tension. I called down for tea to be brought up. (Wrong time of day, I know: Jimmie used to have real tea at four on his sets for all the expatriate Brits—Karloff, Lanchester, himself, anyone else vaguely British or colonial—and there were lots of us in the old days.)

  We talked, then, about those old days and compatriots. He caught me up on such gossip as he had; after a while I showed him around the place, feeling quite the squire. He paused in the walk to talk with another old, old actor, who’d been in Journey’s End when Jimmie had come over to direct it in New York before coming out here to film it in 1930. It was very nice of Jimmie to do that; the man was much older than I and had been in this place long before I got here.

  Before he left, Jimmie, of course, asked me to reconsider one more time, and I of course declined.

  That night I had a dream. In the dream, I was asleep. People kept waking me up and giving me Academy Awards. I kept telling them to get out and let me sleep. Every time I got back to sleep, another person came in and gave me another one. I had more than Walter Brennan, more than some scene designers, more than costumers, more than anyone. And all I really wanted was sleep.

  When I awoke in the morning, I was surprised to find that the room wasn’t full of gold statuettes. Same old room; same bedside stand, same chairs and tables. No Academy Awards.

  I was out of sorts all that day and the next.

  The only trouble with this place, fine though it is, is that they think I’m crazy. Don’t they know it’s not me, but the ones I can’t see, they can’t see, that are doing things to me? I don’t know if they—the Unkind Ones—are truly invisible, or whether they just move so fast the hum
an eye cannot take them in. I have suggested to the doctors they set up some—is it undercranked or overcranked?—time-lapse cameras to test this latter hypothesis.

  I have been reading a book of famous last lines, dying words of the famous, notorious, and not-so-either. Such as that of the condemned man who stepped onto a rickety scaffold and asked the sheriff “Is it safe?” Or the last words of Arthur Flegenheimer, that is, Dutch Schultz, which was more than four thousand words long spoken in a raving 104o delirium, which ended with the words “French Canadian Bean Soup.”

  I shall try to exercise enough restraint that my last ones should not be something like “bibblebibblebibble . . .”

  One of the new nurses, named I think Bettina, brought my paper in this morning.

  “Mr. Zucco,” she said. “They asked me to tell you that Mr. Whale passed away yesterday.”

  I could tell that she was upset. I reached out and patted her hand.

  “There, there,” I said. “I’m sure it was time for him to go, and I’m sure it was for the best.”

  She left. Whale. Whale? Where have I heard that name before? Possibly an old, old timer.

  I shall have to ask Jimmie next time I see him if he knew anyone named Whale. Strange name, that.

  One of the Unkind Ones is here: but this one I can see. It is not one of the people I can usually see—but I know that she is one of the ones usually invisible. She looks somewhat like Aquanetta from the Paula the Ape Woman movies. (If it were her, I could make her laugh. I could do that, like I used to do, with the woman who played Pauline Dupree, by simply saying; “Rondo Hatton: Why the long face?”)