Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

  “Ume hoi uli koi hwa hwa

  Wa haweaee omi oi lui lui . . .”

  And the applause began before Rooster Joe finished alone with a dying struck high note that held for ten or fifteen seconds. People were yelling and screaming and the Cardui people didn’t know what to do with themselves.

  “Thank yew, thank yew!” said Luke Apuleus, wiping his brow with his arm while holding his big straw hat in his hand. “Now, here’s another one I heerd. We hope you-all like it. It’s from the Abe Schwartz Orchestra and it’s called ‘Beym Rebn in Palestine.’ Take it away, Sawing Boys.”

  They hit halting, fluttering notes, punctuated by Rooster Joe’s hammered ripsaw, and then the bucksaw went rolling behind it, Felix pumping up and down on the handle, Cave Canem bowing away. It sounded like flutes and violins and clarinets and mandolins. It sounded a thousand years old, but not like moonshine mountain music; it was from another time and another land.

  Something is wrong, for Chris is standing very still, like he is already in the old oak kimono, and I can see he is not going to be giving me the High Sign.

  I see that Little Willie, who never does anything on his own, is motioning to me and Large Jake to come over. So over I trot, and the music really washes over me. I know it in my bones, for it is the music of the old neighborhood where all of us but Miss Millie grew up.

  I am coming up on Chris the Shoemaker and I see he has turned on the waterworks. He is transfixed, for here, one thousand miles from home he is being caught up in the mighty coils of memory and transfiguration.

  I am hearing with his ears, and what the saws are making is not the Abe Schwartz Orchestra but Itzikel Kramtweiss of Philadelphia, or perhaps Naftalie Brandwein, who used to play bar mitzvahs and weddings with his back to the audience so rival clarinet players couldn’t see his hands and how he made those notes.

  There is maybe ten thousand years behind that noise, and it is calling all the way across the Kentucky hills from the Land of Gaza.

  And while they are still playing, we walk with Chris the Shoemaker back to the jalopy, and pile in around Miss Millie Dee Chantpie, who, when she sees Chris crying, begins herself, and I confess I, too, am a little blurry-eyed at the poignance of the moment.

  And we pull out of Brimmytown, the saws still whining and screeching their jazzy ancient tune, and as it is fading and we are going up the hill, Chris the Shoemaker speaks for us all, and what he says is:

  “God Damn. You cannot be going anywhere these days without you run into a bunch of half-assed klezmorim.”

  For Arthur Hunnicutt and the late Sheldon Leonard.

  Glossary to “The Sawing Boys”

  Balonies—tires

  Bargain Day—court time set aside for sentencing plea-bargain cases

  Beezer—the face, sometimes especially the nose

  Bleaso!—1. an interjection—Careful! You are being overheard! Some chump is wise to the deal! 2. verb—to forgo something, change plans, etc.

  The Cherry-colored Cat—an old con game

  Cicero Lightning and Illinois Thunder—the muzzle flashes from machine guns and the sound of hand grenades going off

  Do a minute—thirty days

  Dogs are barking—feet are hurting

  Fall Togs—the suit you wear going into, and coming out of, jail

  Flit—prison coffee, from its resemblance to the popular fly spray of the time

  Flivver—a jalopy

  Frammus—a thingamajig or doohickey

  Geetas—money, of any kind or amount

  Glim Drop—con game involving leaving a glass eye as security for an amount of money; at least one of the con men should have a glass eye . . .

  Glims—eyes

  Goozle—mouth

  Hooverize—(pre-Depression)—Hoover had been Allied Food Commissioner during the Great War, and was responsible for people getting the most use out of whatever foods they had; the standard command from parents was “Hooverize that plate!”; possibly a secondary reference to vacuum cleaners of the time.

  Irish buggy (also Irish surrey)—a wheelbarrow

  Jalopy—a flivver

  Lizzie—a flivver

  Mazuma—money, of any kind or amount

  Mook—face

  Motorman’s gloves—any especially large cut of meat

  Nugging—porking

  The Old Hydrophoby Lay—con game involving pretending to be bitten by someone’s (possibly mad) dog

  Piping Some Doll’s Stems—looking at some woman’s legs

  Pull—gas and oil

  Sammys—the Feds

  Zex—Quiet (as in bleaso), cut it out, jiggies! Beat it!

  Laying zex—keeping lookout

  Rules of pig Latin: initial consonants are moved to the end of the word and -ay is added to the consonant; initial vowels are moved to the end of the word and -way is added to the vowel

  AFTERWORD

  Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling did a series of anthologies of retold fairy tales in the mid and late ’90s, and they wanted me in them.

  I said “I’ll do the Brementown Musicians” without thinking much about what I was saying.

  Well, now. Go read “The Brementown Musicians”: I’ll wait.

  Back already? Tell me what happens in the tale.

  Not much, you say. Well, that’s what struck me, too, on rereading it for the first time in 40-some-odd years.

  A bunch of animals who want to be musicians go to Brementown, meet up with a bunch of robbers, make a lot of noise, and scare them off. The end.

  Now tell me that’s not what happens in “The Sawing Boys”?

  Writing like Damon Runyan is not as easy as it looks; present tense for one thing is counter to how we think; we tell stories in the past tense—they’ve already happened as they’re being told.

  Runyan wrote as if the story hadn’t happened yet, was taking place as he wrote it.

  What you have to do is, you write a part for the late Sheldon Leonard to say out of the side of his mouth.

  The other part—the Sawing Boys part—I wanted to write for the late Denver Pyle to speak in his role as the father of the band (played by the Dillards) on the old Andy Griffith Show set in Mayberry RFD.

  I think I did a swell job on both counts.

  There are some philology/fairy-tale collecting references here, but pretty subtle (not as many as in my later contribution to the series—“Our Mortal Span”—which came from an epiphanic moment as the Middle Billy-Goat-Gruff in a second-grade play.)

  This was published in Black Thorn, White Rose, the second in the series.

  When I tell people what this story is really about—the spread of mass communications (radio and gramophone records) in the early 20th Century, they don’t believe me.

  It must be true, because Gardner Dozois picked it up for his Year’s Best SF.

  HEART OF WHITENESSE

  “Doctor Faustus?—He’s dead.”

  * * *

  Down these mean cobbled lanes a man must go, methinks, especially when out before larkrise, if larks there still be within a thousand mile of this bonebreaking cold. From the Rus to Spain the world is locked in snow and ice, a sheet of blue glass. There was no summer to speak of; bread is dear, and in France we hear they are eating each other up, like the Cannibals of the Western Indies.

  It’s bad enow I rehearse a play at the Rose, that I work away on the poem of the celebrated Hero and Leander, that life seems more like a jakes each day. Then some unseen toady comes knocking on the door and slips a note through the latchhole this early, the pounding fist matching that in my head.

  I’d come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in, then dressed as best I could, and made my way out i
nto this cold world.

  Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn’t it.

  And what do I see on gaining the lane but a man making steaming water into the street-ditch from a great bull pizzle of an accouterment.

  He sees me and winks.

  I winks back.

  His wink said I see you’re interested.

  My wink back says I’m usually interested but not at this instant but keep me in mind if you see me again.

  He immediately smiles, then turns his picauventure beard toward the cold row of houses to his left.

  Winking is the silent language full of nuance and detail: we are after all talking about the overtures to a capital offense.

  * * *

  I come to the shop on the note, I go in; though I’ve never been there before I know I can ignore the fellows working there (it is a dyer’s, full of boiling vats and acrid smells and steam; at least it is warm) and go through a door up some rude steps, to go through another plated with strips of iron, and into the presence of a High Lord of the Realm.

  He is signing something, he sees me and slides the paper under another; it is probably the names of people soon to decorate a bridge or fence. This social interaction is, too, full of nuance; one of them is that we two pretend not to know who the other is. Sometimes their names are Cecil, Stansfield, Salisbury, sometimes not. Sometimes my name is Christopher, or Chris, familiar Kit, or The Poet, or plain Marlowe. We do pretend, though, we have no names, that we are the impersonal representatives of great ideas and forces, moved by large motives like the clockwork Heavens themselves.

  “A certain person needs enquired about,” said the man behind the small table. “Earlier enquiries have proved . . . ineffectual. It has been thought best the next devolved to yourself. This person is beyond Oxford; make arrangements, go there quietly. Once in Oxford,” he said, taking out of his sleeve a document with a wax seal upon it and laying it on the table, “you may open these, your instructions and knowledges; follow them to the letter. At a certain point, if you must follow them—thoroughly,” he said, coming down hard upon the word, “we shall require a token of faith.”

  He was telling me without saying that I was to see someone, do something to change their mind, or keep them from continuing a present course. Failing that I was to bring back to London their heart, as in the old story of the evil step-queen, the huntsman and the beautiful girl who ended up consorting with forest dwarves, eating poison and so forth.

  I nodded, which was all I was required to do.

  But he had not as yet handed me the missive, which meant he was not through.

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “I said your name was put forth,” he said, “for this endeavor. But not by me. I know you to be a godless man, a blasphemer, most probably an invert. I so hate that the business of true good government makes occasional use of such as you. But the awkward circumstances of this mission, shall we say, makes some of your peccadoes absolute necessities. Only this would make me have any dealings with you whatsoever. There will come a reckoning one fine day.”

  Since he had violated the unspoken tenets of the arrangement by speaking to me personally, and, moreover, telling the plain unvarnished truth, and he knew it, I felt justified in my answer. My answer was, “As you say, Lord ___,” and I used his name.

  He clenched the arms of his chair, started up. Then he calmed himself, settled again. His eyes went to the other papers before him.

  “I believe that is all,” he said, and handed me the document.

  I picked it up, turned and left.

  * * *

  Well, work on Hero and Leander’s right out for a few days, but I betook me as fast as the icy ways would let, from my precincts in Shoreditch through the city. Normally it would mean going about over London Bridge, but as I was in a hurry I walked straight across the River directly opposite the Rose to the theater itself in Southwark.

  The River was, and had been for two months, frozen to a depth of five feet all the way to Gravesend. Small boys ran back and forth across the river. Here and there were set up booths with stiff frozen awnings; the largest concatenation of them was further up past the town at Windsor, where Her Majesty the Queen had proclaimed a Frost Fair and set up a Royal Pavilion. A man with a bucket and axe was chopping the River for chunks of water. Others walked the ice and beat at limbs and timbers embedded in it—free firewood was free, in any weather. A thick pall of smoke hung over London town, every fire lit. A bank of heavy cloud hung further north than that. There were tales that when the great cold had come, two months agone, flocks of birds in flight had fallen to the ground and shattered; cattle froze standing.

  To make matters worse, the Plague, which had closed the theaters for three months this last, long forgotten summer, had not gone completely away, as all hoped, and was still taking thirty a week on the bills of mortality. It would probably be back again this summer and close the Theater, the Curtain and the Rose once more. Lord Strange’s and Lord Nottingham’s Men would again have to take to touring the provinces beyond seven mile from London.

  But as for now, cold or no, at the Rose, we put on plays each afternoon without snow in the open-air ring. At the moment we do poor old Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay—Greene not dead these seven months, exploded from dropsy in a flop, they sold the clothes off him and buried him in a diaper with a wreath of laurel about his head—we rehearse mine own Massacre at Paris, and Shaxber’s Harry Sixt, while we play his T. Andronicus alternate with Thom Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, of which Andronicus is an overheated feeble Romanish imitation.

  Shaxber’s also writing a longish poem, his on the celebrated Venus and Adonis, which at this rate will be done before my Hero. This man, the same age as me, bears watching. Unlike when I did at Cambridge, I take no part in the Acting; Will Shaxber is forever being messengers, third murderer, courtier; he tugs ropes when engines are needed; he counts reciepts, he makes himself useful withall.

  No one here this early but Will Kemp; he snores as usual on his bed of straw and ticking in the ’tiring house above and behind the stage. He sounds the bear that’s eaten all the dogs on a good day at the Pit. I find some ink (almost frozen) and leave a note for John Alleyn to take over for me, pleading urgent business down country, to throw off the scent, and make my way, this time over the Bridge, back to Shoreditch.

  * * *

  Shoreditch is the place actors live, since it was close to the original theaters, and so it is the place actors die. Often enough first news you hear on a morning is “Another actor dead in Shoreditch.” Never East Cheap, or Spital Fields, not even Southwark itself; always Shoreditch. At a tavern, at their lodgings, in the street itself. Turn them over; if it’s not the Plague, it’s another actor dead from a knife, fists, drink, pox, for all that matter cannonfire or hailstones in the remembered summers.

  I make arrangements; I realign myself to other stations; my sword stays in its corner, my new hat, my velvet doublet all untied, hung on their hooks. I put on round slops, a leathern tunic, I cut away my beard; in place of sword a ten-inch poinard, a pointed slouchhat, a large sack for my back.

  In an hour I am back at River-side, appearing as the third of the three P’s in John Heywood’s The Four PPPP’s, a ’pothecary, ready to make my way like him, at least as far as Oxenford.

  The ferrymen are all on holiday, their boats put up on timbers above the ice. Here and there people skate, run shoed on the ice, slip and fall; the gaiety seems forced, not like the fierce abandon of the early days of the Great Frost. But I have been watching on my sojourn each day to and from the Rose, and I lick my finger and stick it up (the spit freezing almost at once) to test the wind, and as I know the wind, and I know my man, I walk about halfway out on the solid Thames and wait.

  As I wait, I see two figures dressed much like the two Ambassador
es From Poland in my Massacre At Paris (that is, not very well, one of them being Kemp) saunter toward me on the dull gray ice. I know them to be a man named Frizier and one named Skeres, Gram and Nicholas I believe, both to be bought for a pound in any trial, both doing the occasional cony-catching, gulling and sharping; both men I have seen in taverns in Shoreditch, in Deptford, along the docks, working the theaters.

  There is little way they can know me, so I assume they have taken me for a mark as it slowly becomes apparent they are approaching me. Their opening line, on feigning recognition, will be “Ho, sir, are you not a man from (Hereford) (Cheshire) (Luddington) known to my Cousin Jim?”

  They are closer, but they say to my surprise, “Seems the man is late this day, Ingo.”

  “That he be, Nick.”

  They are waiting for the same thing I am. They take no notice of me standing but twenty feet away.

  “Be damn me if it’s not the fastest thing I ever seen,” says one.

  “I have seen the cheater-cat of Africa,” says the other, “and this man would leave it standing.”

  “I believe you to be right.”

  And far down the ice, toward where the tide would be, I spy my man just before they do. If you do not know for what you look, you will think your eyes have blemished and twitched. For what comes comes fast and eclipses the background at a prodigious rate.