Things Will Never Be the Same Page 35

  “They just like old ones great-great-many-many grandfathers hunted. Only they no have hair,” said Mo, the lot many Smart.

  “We know how do them,” said Ug the lot-many-lot. “Get ’em.”

  * * *

  The fattest big nosed guy some jaw they chose for signal honors.

  They whacked up the Great Big Things with the Long Noses and the Two Big Curved Teeth, the people of the other villages carrying off as much as they could.

  They found that the one-add-one-add-one big log-boats were filled with men who were fastened where they sat. They jabbered, afraid. The people broke up the things that held them down with some of the useful hard implements they found. They herded all the loosened men onto one big log-boat.

  Ug the lot-many-lot made a shooing motion with his hands.

  “Go way,” he said. “Go way.”

  The men looked at him a moment. Then they began yelling and making noise and running up and down and below into the log-boat, and the big hide flopped down and they waved and yelled and ran out of sight and the paddles all started working. And the big log-boat went out of sight toward where the Big Big Water started.

  They wrapped the fattest big nosed guy some jaw with the things which had held the paddlers to the log-boats.

  He jabbered, but he stood straight and tall.

  Ug the lot-many-lot leaned in very close.

  “Yum yum eatem up,” he said.

  * * *

  Nu the lot-many-many stood on the cliff, looking back over the downs and the village. He could see a herd of the red deer browsing not very far away, and further up a flock of birds drank at the mouth of the creek. He could see women gathering seeds at the weed fields, and a couple of men were out killing hares up near the boggy place.

  Down in the village, the gray shapes of the old boatlogs from many-lot-great-grandfather time, which had been made into a meeting place where the people from all up and down the coast came every twelve moons to make Ug All-Boss, stood out from the other hide and mud huts. Here and there was smoke from a cooking fire. He raised his eyes and could just see smoke from the next village far up the coast.

  He turned his eyes back to the Big Water, still dull in the early morning sun, and the far smudge of the land you could barely make out. It was going to be a warm fine day, and Mo the lot-lot-many Smart said it was just one more moon until the yummy fish came up the creek again, and there were signs of a mild winter.

  Later he would go down, he thought, and join the boys poking sticks into the little fish that were always in the Big Water. They would have to do until the yummy fish came in.

  * * *

  Girl Look For Husband was in the sky. Even in the late afternoon, a swatch of white with a glowing head stretched halfway across the heavens. “She really looking this time,” the people said.

  All-Boss Ug the lot-many-lot was fixing his hut, pounding wooden pegs in with a big rock.

  “Grandfather! Grandfather!” yelled little Nu the lot-many-lot, running in from the cliffs.

  “Not have time everyone come in flaring sagittal crest,” said Ug. “What now?”

  “Ab many-lot-lot say big logs come again. Come quick bring clubs pointy sticks.”

  Ug dropped the rock and began to yell everyone out of their huts and send ones running to the other villages.

  * * *

  All the people stood on the big white cliffs. It would have been dark had not Girl Look For Husband been blazing bright as a full Moon. Everything was a sort of silvergray twilight.

  They looked down where lot-many boat-logs were drawn up on the beach and saw (what Ab who had seen them before dark had said were) weasel-eyed guys some jaw there. Many-many-lot. They all had long pointy sticks with shiny ends and shiny flat things on their hip-clothes, and some had curvy things on their backs and bags full of little sticks.

  Ug poked Mo the lot-many-many Smart.

  “More them than us,” said Mo.

  “Not wait day,” said Ug. “Go get ’em!”

  Yelling and waving their clubs and pointy sticks, they charged down the hills.

  AFTERWORD

  You have just read (unless there are lacunae in my knowledge even I don’t know about) the only story you will ever read about Piltdown Man (and Woman).

  Essentially, Piltdown Man was a hoax perpetrated on or by an amateur archaeologist @ 1910 on the Sussex Downs in England. There are four or five good books about the hoax; read one. Everybody had to rewrite the (pre)history books to account for Piltdown Man (which was essentially the filed-down jaw of a modern orangutan and a human skull, probably from a Roman burial, stained to look like they’d been in the gravel a million years or so.)

  Nobody questioned that there weren’t even fossil apes in Britain; or how to account for the modern-looking skull and primitive jaw (it did fit right in with the theories of the time; Man evolved because he grew a big brain first, rather than, as we now think, the brain developed after we got upright, began to use our hands and developed swell binocular vision high up due to our posture.) Eoanthropus Dawsonii (Dawson’s Dawn Man) was called “The First Englishman” to give Britain pride of place in everything, not just colonial slaughter, genocide and piracy.

  I started thinking. What would it have been like to have been a Piltdowner? What if they had been real? What would the British Isles had to have been like to keep Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons from coming over and having a cannibal party early on—what possibly could have kept the Picts and Romans away? And so on and so forth.

  Another thing: people were always telling me the only way to get rich writing is to do a multi-volume series following a family down through the generations. Hence the title, with a tip of the Waldrop iceberg to Thomas Hardy.

  This was written (in the big Eileen Gunn ledger) Nov. 9-10 1998 and read at Orycon in Portland. It was published in the 50th Anniversary October 1999 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was about 2” thick. I’m real glad Gordon van Gelder squeezed it in there: I’m the only person in the issue without his name on the cover . . . As I said before, you gotta watch me every minute . . .

  Yum yum eatem up.

  CALLING YOUR NAME

  All my life I’ve waited for

  someone to ease the pain

  All my life I’ve waited for

  someone to take the blame

  —from “Calling Your Name” by Janis Ian*[1]

  I reached for the switch on the bandsaw.

  Then I woke up with a crowd forming around me. And I was in my own backyard.

  It turns out that my next-door-neighbor had seen me fall out of the storage building I use as a workshop and had called 911 when I didn’t get up after a few seconds.

  Once, long ago in college, working in Little Theater, I’d had a light bridge lowered to set the Fresnels for Blithe Spirit, just after the Christmas semester break. Some idiot had left a hot male 220 plug loose, and as I reached up to the iron bridge, it dropped against the bar. I’d felt that, all over, and I jumped backwards about 15 feet.

  A crowd started for me, but I let out some truly blazing oath that turned the whole stage violet-indigo blue and they disappeared in a hurry. Then I yelled at the guys and girl in the technical booth to kill everything onstage, and spent the next hour making sure nothing else wasn’t where it shouldn’t be . . .

  That’s while I was working 36 hours a week at a printing plant, going to college full-time and working in the theater another 60 hours a week for no pay. I was also dating a foul-mouthed young woman named Susan who was brighter than me. Eventually something had to give—it was my stomach (an ulcer at 20) and my relationship with her.

  She came back into the theater later that day, and heard about the incident and walked up to me and said “Are you happy to see me, or is
that a hot male 220 volt plug in your pocket?”

  That shock, the 220, had felt like someone shaking my hand at 2700 rpm while wearing a spiked glove and someone behind me was hammering nails in my head and meanwhile they were piling safes on me . . .

  When I’d touched the puny 110 bandsaw, I felt nothing.

  Then there were neighbors and two EMS people leaning over me upside down.

  “What’s up, doc?” I asked.

  “How many fingers?” he asked, moving his hand, changing it in a slow blur.

  “Three, five, two.”

  “What’s today?”

  “You mean Tuesday, or May 6th?”

  I sat up.

  “Easy,” said the lady EMS person, “You’ll probably have a headache.”

  The guy pushed me back down slowly. “What happened?”

  “I turned on the bandsaw. Then I’m looking at you.”

  He got up, went to the corner of the shed and turned off the breakers. By then the sirens had stopped, and two or three firefighters and the lieutenant had come in the yard.

  “You okay, Pops?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said. I turned to the crowd. “Thanks to whoever called these guys.” Then the EMS people asked me some medical stuff, and the lieutenant, after looking at the breakers, went in the shed and fiddled around. He came out.

  “You got a shorted switch,” he said. “Better replace it.”

  I thanked Ms. Krelboind, the neighbor lady, everybody went away, and I went inside to finish my cup of coffee.

  My daughter Maureen pulled up as I drank the last of the milk skim off the top of the coffee.

  She ran in.

  “Are you alright, Dad?”

  “Evidently,” I said.

  Her husband Bob was a fireman. He usually worked over at Firehouse 2, the one on the other side of town. He’d heard the address the EMS had been called to on the squawk box, and had called her.

  “What happened?”

  “Short in the saw,” I said. “The lieutenant said so, officially.”

  “I mean,” she repeated, “Are you sure you’re alright?”

  “It was like a little vacation,” I said. “I needed one.”

  She called her husband, and I made more coffee, and we got to talking about her kids—Vera, Chuck and Dave, or whichever ones are hers—I can’t keep up. There’s two daughters, Maureen and Celine, and five grandkids. Sorting them all out was my late wife’s job. She’s only been gone a year and a month and three days.

  We got off onto colleges, even though it would be some years before any of the grandkids needed one. The usual party schools came up. “I can see them at Sam Houston State in togas,” I said.

  “I’m just real sure toga parties will come back,” said Mo.

  Then I mentioned Kent State.

  “Kent State? Nothing ever happens there,” she said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said, “Like the nothing that happened after Nixon invaded Cambodia. All the campuses in America shut down. They sent the Guard in. They shot four people down, just like they were at a carnival.”

  She looked at me.

  “Nixon? What did Nixon have to do with anything?”

  “Well, he was the President. He wanted ‘no wider war.’ Then he sent the Army into Cambodia and Laos. It was before your time.”

  “Daddy,” she said, “I don’t remember much American history. But Nixon was never President. I think he was vice-president under one of those old guys—was it Eisenhower? Then he tried to be a senator. Then he wanted to be President, but someone whipped his ass at the convention. Where in that was he ever President? I know Eisenhower didn’t die in office.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You stay right here,” she said, and went to the living room. I heard her banging around in the bookcase. She came back with Vol 14 of the set of 1980’s encyclopedias I’d bought for $20 down and $20 a month, seems like paying for about fifteen years on them. . . . She had her thumb in it, holding a place. She opened it on the washing machine lid. “Read.”

  The entry was on Nixon, Richard Milhous, and it was shorter than it should have been. There was the HUAC and Hiss stuff, the Checkers speech, the vice-presidency and reelection, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the loss, the Senate attempt, the “won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more” speech, the law firm, the oil company stuff, the death from phlebitis in 1977. . . .

  “Where the hell did you get this? It’s all wrong.”

  “It’s yours, Dad. It’s your encyclopedia. You’ve had them 20 years. You bought them for us to do homework out of. Remember?”

  I went to the living room. There was a hole in the set at Vol 14. I put it back in. Then I took out Vol 24 UV and looked up Vietnam, War In. There was WWII, 1939-1945, then French Colonial War 1945-1954, then America In 1954-1970. Then I took down Vol II and read about John F. Kennedy (president, 1961-1969).

  “Are you better now, Daddy?” she asked.

  “No. I haven’t finished reading a bunch of lies yet, I’ve just begun.”

  “I’m sorry. I know the shock hurt. And things haven’t been good since Mom . . . But this really isn’t like you.”

  “I know what happened in the Sixties! I was there! Where were you?”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s drop it. I’ve got to get back home, the kids are out of school soon.”

  “Alright,” I said. “It was a shock—not a nasty one, not my first, but maybe if I’m careful, my last.”

  “I’ll send Bill over tomorrow on his day off and he can help you fix the saw. You know how he likes to futz with machinery.”

  “For gods sakes, Mo, it’s a bad switch. It’ll take two minutes to replace it. It ain’t rocket science!”

  She hugged me, went out to her car and drove off.

  Strange that she should have called her husband Bob, Bill.

  No wonder the kids struggled at school. Those encyclopedias sucked. I hope the whole staff got fired and went to prison.

  I went down to the library where they had Britannicas, World Books, old Compton’s. Everybody else in the place was on, or waiting in line for, the Internet.

  I sat down by the reference shelves and opened four or five encyclopedias to the entries on Nixon. All of them started Nixon, Richard Milhous, and then in brackets (1913-1977).

  After the fifth one, I got up and went over to the reference librarian, who’d just unjammed one of the printers, and she looked up at me and smiled, and as I said it I knew I should not have, but I said “All your encyclopedias are wrong.”

  The smile stayed on her face.

  And then I thought here’s a guy standing in front of her; he’s in his fifties; he looks a little peaked, and he’s telling her all her reference books are wrong. Just like I once heard a guy, in his fifties, a little peaked, yelling at a librarian that some book in the place was trying to tell him that Jesus had been a Jew!

  What would you do?

  Before she could do anything, I said, “Excuse me.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  I left in a hurry.

  My son-in-law came over the next morning when he should have been asleep.

  He looked a little different (his ears were longer. It took a little while to notice that was it) and he seemed a little older, but he looked pretty much the same as always.

  “Hey. Mo sent me over to do the major overhaul on the bandsaw.”

  “Fuck it.” I said. “It’s the switch. I can do it in my sleep.”

  “She said she’d feel better if you let me do it.”

  “Buzz off.”

  He laughed and grabbed one of the beers he keeps in my refrigerator. “Okay, then,” he said, “can I borrow a couple of albu
ms to tape? I want the kids to hear what real music sounds like.”

  He had a pretty good selection of 45’s, albums and CD’s, even some shellac 78’s. He’s got a couple of old turntables (one that plays 16 rpm, even). But I have some stuff on vinyl he doesn’t.

  “Help yourself,” I said. He went to the living room and started making noises opening cabinets.

  I mentioned The Who.

  “Who?”

  “Not who. The Who.”

  “What do you mean, who?”

  “Who. The rock group. The Who.”

  “Who?”

  “No, no. The Rock group, which is named The Who.”

  “What is this,” he asked. “Abbott and Hardy?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” I said. “Same time as the early Beatles. That . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Let me start over. Roger Daltry. Pete Townsend. John Entwhistle. Keith—”

  “The High Numbers!” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “A minute ago. I said they came along with the early Beatles and you said—”

  “Who?”

  “Do not start.”

  “There is no rock band called the Beetles,” he said with authority.

  I looked at him. “Paul McCartney . . .”

  He cocked his head, gave me a go-on gesture.

  “. . . John Lennon, George Harri . . .”