Things Will Never Be the Same Page 15

  No one in the courthouse tower heard the sound of the steam. They were all deaf as posts from the explosion. The barrel of the cannon was burst all along the end. The men on the other roof were jumping up and down and clapping each other on the back. The COME AND TAKE IT sign on the courthouse had two holes in it, neater than you could have made with a biscuit-cutter.

  First a high whine, then a dull roar, then something like normal hearing came back to the sheriff’s left ear. The right one still felt like a kid had its fist in there.

  “Dang it, Sweets!” he yelled. “How much powder did Luke use!”

  “Huh?”

  Luke was banging on his head with both his hands.

  “How much powder did he use?”

  “Two, two and a half cans,” said Sweets.

  “It only takes half a can a ball!” yelled the sheriff. He reached for his hat to hit Luke with, touched his bare head. “I feel naked,” he said. “Come on, we’re not through yet. We got fires to put out and some hash to settle.”

  Luke was still standing, shaking his head. The whole town was cheering.

  It looked like a pot lid slowly boiling open, moving just a little. Every time the end unscrewed a little more, ashes and cinders fell off into the second pit. There was a piled ridge of them. The back turned again, moved a few inches, quit. Then it wobbled, there was a sound like a stove being jerked up a chimney, and the whole back end rolled open like a mad bank vault and fell off.

  There were 184 men and 11 women all standing behind the open end of the thing, their guns pointing toward the interior. At the exact center were Sweets and Luke with the other courthouse cannon. This time there was one can of powder, but the barrel was filled to the end with everything from the blacksmith-shop floor—busted window glass, nails, horseshoes, bolts, stirrup buckles, and broken files and saws.

  Eyes appeared in the dark interior.

  “Remember the Alamo,” said the sheriff.

  Everybody, and the cannon, fired.

  When the third meteor came in that evening, south of town at thirteen minutes past six, they knew something was wrong. It wobbled in flight, lost speed, and dropped like a long, heavy leaf.

  They didn’t have to wait for this one to cool and open. When the posse arrived, the thing was split in two and torn. Heat and steam came up from the inside.

  One of the pale things was creeping forlornly across the ground with great difficulty. It looked like a thin gingerbread man made of glass with only a knob for a head.

  “It’s probably hurting from the gravity,” said Leo.

  “Fix it, Sweets,” said Lindley.

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  There was a gunshot.

  No fourth meteor fell, though they had scouts out for twenty miles in all directions, and the railroad tracks and telegraph wires were fixed again.

  “I been doing some figuring,” said Leo. “If there were ten explosions on Mars last month, and these things started landing in England last Thursday week, then we should have got the last three. There won’t be any more.”

  “You been figurin’, huh?”

  “Sure have.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Sheriff Lindley stood on his porch. It was sundown on Sunday, three hours after another meteor should have fallen, had there been one.

  Leo rode up. “I saw Sweets and Luke heading toward the Atkinson place with more dynamite. What are they doing?”

  “They’re blowing up every last remnant of them things—lock, stock and asshole.”

  “But,” said Leo, “the professors from the University will be here tomorrow, to look at their ships and machines! You can’t destroy them!”

  “Shit on the University of Texas and the horse it rode in on,” said the sheriff. “My jurisdiction runs from Deer Piss Creek to Buenos Frijoles, back to Olatunji, up the Little Clear Fork of the North Branch of Mud River, back to the Creek, and everything in between.

  “If I say something gets blowed up, it’s on its way to Kingdom Come.” He put his arms on Leo’s shoulders. “Besides, what little grass grows in this county’s supposed to be green, and what’s growing around them things is red. I really don’t like that.”

  “But, Sheriff! I’ve got to meet Professor Lowell in Waxahachie tomorrow morning . . .”

  “Listen, Leo. I appreciate what you done. But I’m an old man. I been kept up by Martians for three nights, I lost my horse and my new hat, and they busted my favorite gargoyle off the courthouse. I’m going in and get some sleep, and I only want to be woke up for the Second Coming, by Jesus Christ Himself.”

  Leo jumped on his horse and rode for the Atkinson place.

  Sheriff Lindley crawled into bed and went to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  He had a dream. He was a king in Babylon, and he lay on a couch at the top of a ziggurat, just like the Tower of Babel in the Bible. He surveyed the city and the river. There were women all around him, and men with curly beards and golden headdresses. Occasionally someone would feed him a great big fig from a golden bowl.

  His dreams were not interrupted by the sounds of dynamiting, first from one side of town, then another, and then another.

  This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919-1983)

  AFTERWORD

  “I’ve told the story behind this one so many times now you’d think I’d know it by heart . . .” as the late great Robert (Psycho) Bloch used to say. (It was also him who first said “I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”)

  This started out to be a whole different story, set in modern times, and it was about a car powered by Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Trust me.

  Then I went (we’re talking mid-1985 here) as I usually did then, fishing in Colorado for a month with Chad Oliver. The only book I took with me was Frank McConnell’s critical edition of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

  About halfway through the annotations to the latter, I got to thinking . . .

  Anyway, we made the two-day 1000 mile drive back to Austin because, besides Chad’s having to start teaching at UT the next Tuesday, the 1985 NASFIC (the National Science Fiction Convention—held as an alternate when the World SF Convention is out of the US) was in Austin, starting Thursday, and Chad was Toastmaster.

  I also had to read a new story at the convention.

  We get home Wednesday morning. Chad drops me off.

  I find instantly 1) my housemate’s 14-year-old dog has dropped dead that morning 2) my most recent ex-girlfriend is in Brackenridge Hospital for emergency surgery 3) my convention reading is at 3 p.m. Thursday.

  Well, I deal with my housemate as best I could (total uselessness); I take off to the hospital (after a two-hour nap) at 7 p.m.—the lady’s pretty much okay except she has to make Gardner Dozois leave the room—he’s making her laugh so much she’s afraid she’ll bust her stitches—the room’s full of friends and visiting SF fans, so I leave when I can. I go home, get a couple more hours’ sleep, get up and start writing “Night of the Cooters.”

  I have a panel at one, before my reading at 3 p.m. I shower about a minute, get a ride to the convention, do my panel, get off, borrow somebody’s room (I think it was Pat Cadigan’s, but that, as Capote used to say, could have been other stories, other rooms.)

  I got up and left the room, still writing in longhand at 2:58, got in the elevator, stepped off and finished the last “r” as I got to the room where about 250 people waited to hear me. I put on my hat (just like Sheriff Lindley’s!) and read the story to them.

  This was August 29, 1985 at 3 p.m. CDT.

  A few days later, after some real sleep after the convention was over, I typed it up and sent it to Ellen Datlow, who bought it. It was published in Omni in 1986. Gardner put it in his YBSF
and it’s been in two or three European alien invasion anthologies. It’s the only reprint in the Kevin J. Anderson-edited War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches where you find out what everyone was doing when Wells’ Martians landed, published for the Centenary in 1998. It’s the story I chose (after much soul-searching, since I don’t write humor; humor happens in some stories) in the Mike Resnick-edited My Funniest Story.

  I miss Slim Pickens, and so do you. I can’t imagine anyone filming this without him around to play the part. It was written for and about him and his career.

  Sorry he never got to read it.

  We Do What We Can.

  DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?

  The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap with rusty spoons.

  “Frank! Frank!” the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before they canceled it.

  “No need to stand,” I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can, no glass.

  “How y’all?” I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted a conversation.

  “I feel like six pounds of monkey shit,” said Bob, who had once been tall and thin and was now tall and fat.

  “My mother’s at it again,” said Penny. Her nails looked like they had been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a snowbank.

  “Jim went back to Angela,” said Barb.

  I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music over the speakers was “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” by Johnny Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that livelied us up.

  “So,” said Barb, looking up at me. “I hear you’re going to be a tour guide for the reunion.”

  There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great catastrophes just waiting to happen.

  But the greatest one of all, the thing time’s been holding its breath for, the capo de tutti capo of impending disasters, was going to happen this coming weekend.

  Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what that switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.

  The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.

  And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high school—it had been phased out in a magnet school program in ’74. The building had been taken over by the community college.

  The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.

  Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building, then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to get stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what used to be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.

  That was the reunion Barb was talking about.

  “I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so existential that I offered to help out,” I said. “Olin Sweetwater called me a couple of months ago—”

  “Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater!” said Penny. “Geez! I haven’t heard that name in the whole damn twenty years.” She held onto the table with both hands. “I think I’m having a drug flashback!”

  “Yeah, Olin. Lives in Dallas now. Runs an insurance agency. He got my name from somebody I built some bookcases for a couple of years ago. Anyway, asked if I’d be one of the guides on the tour Saturday morning—you know, point out stuff to husbands and wives and kids, people who weren’t there.”

  I didn’t know if I should go on.

  Bob was looking at me, waiting.

  “Well, Olin got me in touch with Jamie Lee Johnson—Jamie Lee Something hyphen Something now, none of them Johnson. She’s the entertainment chairman, in charge of the dance. I made a couple of tapes for her.”

  I don’t have much, but I do have a huge bunch of Original Oldies, Greatest Hits albums and other garage sale wonders. Lots of people know it and call me once or twice a year to make dance tapes for their parties.

  “Oh, you’ll like this,” I said, waving to Carole to bring me another Ballantine Ale. “She said, ‘Spring for some Maxell tapes, not the usual four for eighty-nine cents kind I hear you buy at Revco.’ Where you think she could have heard about that?”

  “From me,” said Barb. “She called me a month ago, too.” She smiled a little.

  “Come on, Barb,” I said. “Spill it.”

  “Well, I wanted to—”

  “I’m not going,” said Penny.

  We all looked at her.

  “Okay. Your protest has been noted and filed. Now start looking for your granny dress and your walnut shell beads.” I said.

  “Why should I go back?” said Penny. “High school was shit. None of us had any fun there, we were all toads. Sure, things got a little exciting, but you could have been on top of Mount Baldy in Colorado in the late Sixties and it would have been exciting. Why should I go see a bunch of jerks making fools of themselves trying to recapture some, some image of themselves another whole time and place?”

  “Oh,” said Bob, readjusting his gimme hat, “you really should hang around jerks more often.”

  “And why’s that, Bob?” asked Penny, peeling the label from her Lone Star.

  “’Cause if you watch them long enough,” said Bob, “you’ll realize that jerks are capable of anything.”

  Bob’s the kind of guy who holds people’s destinies in his hands and they never realize it. When someone does something especially stupid and life-threatening in traffic, Bob doesn’t honk his horn or scream or shake his fist.

  He follows them. Either to where they’re going, or the city limits, whichever comes first. If they go to work, or shopping, he makes his move then. If they go to a residence, he jots down the make, model and license plate of the car on a notepad he keeps on his dashboard, and comes back later that night.

  Bob has two stacks of bumper stickers in the glove compartment of his truck. He takes one from each.

  He goes to the vehicle of the person who has put his life personally in jeopardy, and he slaps one of the stickers on the left front bumper and one on the right rear.

  The one on the back says SPICS AND NIGGERS OUT OF THE U.S.!

  The one he puts on the front reads KILL A COP TODAY!

  He goes through about fifty pairs of stickers a year. He’s self-employed, so he writes the printing costs off on his Schedule A as “Depreciation.”

  * * *

  Penny looked at Bob a little longer. “Okay. You’ve convinced me,” she said. “Are you happy?”

  “No,” said Bob, turning in his chair. “Tell us whatever it is that’ll make us happy, Barb.”

  “The guys are going to play.”

  Just the guys. No names. No what guys? We all knew. I had never before in my life seen Bob’s jaw drop. Now I have.

  The guys.

  Craig Beausoliel. Morey Morkheim. Abram Cassuth. Andru Esposito. Or, taking them in order of their various band names from junior high on: Four Guys in a Dodge. Two Jews, A Wop and A Frog. The Hurtz Bros. (Pervo, Devo, Sado, and Twisto). The Bug-Eyed Weasels. Those were when they were local, when they played Yud’s, the Vulcan Gas Company, Tod’s Hi-Spot. Then they got a record label and went national just after high school.

  You knew them as Distressed Flag Sale.

  That was the title of their first album (subtitled For Sale Cheap One Country Inquire 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). You probably knew it as the “blue-cake-with-the-white-stars-on-the-table-with-the-redstripes-formed-on-the-white-floor-by-the-blood-running-in-seven-rivulets-from -the-d
ead-G.I.” album.

  Their second and last was NEXT! with the famous photo of the Saigon police chief blowing the brains out of the suspected VC in the checked shirt during the Tet Offensive of 1968, only over the general’s face they’d substituted Nixon’s, and over the VC’s, Howdy Doody’s.

  Then of course came the seclusion for six months, then the famous concert/riot/bust in Miami in 1970 that put an end to the band pretty much as a functioning human organization.

  Morey Morkheim tried a comeback after his time in the juzgado, in the mid-Seventies, as Moe in Moe and the Meanies’ Suck My Buttons, but it wasn’t a very good album and the times were already wrong.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Penny. “None of them have played in what, fifteen years? They probably’ll sound like shit.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I know,” said Barb. “Jamie Lee—Younts-Fulton is the name, Frank—said after his jail term and the try at the comeback, Morey threw it all over and moved down to Corpus where his aunt was in the hotel business or something, and he opened a souvenir shop, a whole bunch of ’em eventually, called Morey’s Mementoes. Got pretty rich at it supposedly, though you can never tell, especially from Jamie Lee—I mean, anyone, anyone who’d take as part of her second married name a hyphenated name from her first husband that was later convicted of mail fraud just because Younts is more sophisticated than Johnson—Johnson-Fulton sounds like an 1830 politician from Tennessee, know what I mean?—you just can’t trust about things like who’s rich and who’s not. Anyway, Morey was at some convention for seashell brokers or something—Jamie says about half the shells and junk sold in Corpus come from Japan and Taiwan—he ran into Andru, of all people, who was in the freight business! Like, Morey had been getting shells from this shipping company for ten years and it turns out to belong to Andru’s uncle or brother-in-law or something! So they start writing to each other, then somehow (maybe it was from Bridget, you remember Bridget? From UT? Yeah.) she knew where Abram was, and about that time the people putting all this reunion together got ahold of Andru. So the only thing left to do was find Craig.”