Melancholy Elephants Read online

  Spud nodded grimly and selected a butt of his own. They smoked for what seemed like an interminable time in silence broken only by the rustling of paper and the sound of Dinny’s pimples popping.

  “Awright,” the mechanic said at last, “the warranty’s still good. Lucky you didn’t come ta me a week from now.”

  “The speed you’re goin’, maybe I have,” Joe snapped. “Come on, come on, will ya? Get me my legs back—I ain’t got all night.”

  “Take it easy,” Dinny said with infuriating glee. “You’ll get your legs back. Just relax. Come on over inna light.” Moving with sadistic slowness, he acquired a device that seemed something like a hand-held fluoroscope with a six-inch screen, and began running it around the belt. He stopped, gazed at the screen for a full ten seconds, and sucked his teeth.

  “Sorry, mister,” he drawled, straightening up and grinning. “I can’t help you.”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Joe roared.

  “Somebody tampered with this belt, tried to jinx the override cutout so they could visit some Interdicted Period—probably wanted to see the Crucifixion or some other event that a vested-interest group got declared Off-Limits. I bet that’s why it don’t work right. It takes a specialist to work on one of these, you know.” He smiled proudly, pleased with the last sentence.

  “So you can’t fix it?” Koziack groaned.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no, but I ain’t gonna try ’less I see some cash. That belt’s been tampered with,” Dinny said, relishing the moment. “The warranty’s void.”

  Joe howled like a gutshot buffalo, and stepped forward. His meaty right fist traveled six inches from his shoulder, caught Dinny full in the mouth and dropped him in his tracks, popping the mechanic’s upper lip and three pimples. “I’d stomp on ya if I could, ya smart-ass mugger-hugger,” Joe roared down at the unconscious Dinny. “Think you’re funny!”

  “Easy, Joe,” Spud yelled. “Don’t get excited. We gotta do something.”

  “What the hell can we do?” Joe cried despairingly. “That crumb is the only mechanic in a hundred miles—we’ll never get to the next one in time, and we haven’t got a prayer anyway with four dollars and change. Crummy pap-lapper, I oughta…oh damn it.” He began to cry.

  “Hey, Joe,” Spud protested, flustered beyond measure at seeing a sober grownup cry, “come on, take it easy. Come on now, cut it out.” Joe, his face in his hands, shook his head and kept on sobbing.

  Spud thought furiously, and suddenly a light dawned and was filled with a strange prescience, a déjà vu kind of certainty that startled him with its intensity. He wasted no time examining it. Stepping close to Joe, he bent at the waist, swung from the hip, and kicked the belt as hard as he could, squarely on the spot Dinny had last examined. A sob became a startled yell—and Joe’s fat legs appeared beneath him, growing downward from the belt like tubers.

  “What the hell did you kick me for?” Joe demanded, glaring indignantly at Spud. “What’d I do to you?”

  Spud pointed.

  Joe looked down. “Wa-HOO!!” he shouted gleefully. “You did it, Spud, I got my legs back! Oh, Spud, baby, you’re beautiful, I got my legs back!” He began to caper around the room in a spontaneous improvised goat-dance, knocking equipment crashing in all directions, and Spud danced with him, laughing and whooping and for the first time in this story looking his age. Together they careened like an improbable vaudeville team, the big fat man and the mustached midget, howling like fools.

  At last they subsided, and Joe sat down to catch his breath. “Woo-ee,” he panted, “what a break. Hey, Spud, I really gotta thank you, honest to God. Look, I been thinkin’—you can’t make enough from the bookies for both of us without stickin’ your neck way out. So the hell with that, see? I’ll give you the Series winner like I promised, but you keep all the dough. I’ll figure out some other way to get the scratch—with the belt workin’ again it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  Spud laughed and shook his head. “Thanks, Joe,” he said. “That’s really nice of you, and I appreciate it—but ‘figuring out’ isn’t exactly your strong suit. Besides, I’ve been doing some thinking too. If I won fifty bucks shooting pool, that’d make me happy—I’d be proud, I’d’ve earned it. But to make twenty-thousand on a fixed game with no gamble at all—that’s no kick. You need the money—you take it, just like we planned. I’ll see the bookies tonight.”

  “But you earned it, kid,” Joe said in bewilderment. “You went through a lotta work to get me here, and you fixed the belt.”

  “That’s all right,” Spud insisted. “I don’t want money—but there’s one thing you can do for me.”

  “Anything,” Joe agreed. “As soon as I take a piss.”

  Three hours later, having ditched the car and visited the home of “Odds” Evenwright, where he placed a large bet on a certain ball club, Spud arrived home to find precisely what he had expected:

  His mother, awesomely drunk and madder than hell, sitting next to the pool table on which his personal cue and balls still rested, waiting for him to come home.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said cheerfully as he entered the living room, and braced himself. With a cry of alcoholic fury, Mrs. Flynn lurched from her chair and began to close on him.

  Then she pulled up short, realizing belatedly that her son was accompanied by a stranger. For a moment, old reflex manners nearly took hold, but the drink was upon her and her Irish was up. “Are you the tramp who’s been teachin’ my Clarence to shoot pool, you tramp?” she screeched, shaking her fist and very nearly capsizing with the effort. “You fat bum, are the one’sh been corrupting my boy?”

  “Not me,” Joe said politely, and disappeared.

  “They ran out of pink elephants,” he explained earnestly, reappearing three feet to the left and vanishing again.

  “So I came instead,” he went on from six feet to the right.

  “Which is anyway novel,” he finished from behind her, disappeared one last time and reappeared with his nose an inch from hers. Her eyes crossed, kept on crossing, and she went down like a felled tree, landing with the boneless grace of the totally stoned.

  Spud giggled, and it was not an unsympathetic giggle. “Thanks, Joe,” he said, slapping the fat man1 on the back. “You’ve done me a big favor.”

  “Glad I could help, kid,” Joe said, putting his own arm around the boy. “It must be tough to have a juicer for an old lady.”

  “Don’t worry, Joe,” Spud said, feeling that the same unexplainable certainty he had felt at the time-belt repair shop. “Somehow I’ve got a feeling Mom has taken her last drink.”

  Joe nodded happily. “I’ll be back after the Series,” he said, “and we can always try a second treatment.”

  “Okay, but we won’t have to. Now get out of here and get back to your wife—it’s late.”

  Joe nodded again. “Sure thing, Spud.” He stuck out his hand. “Thanks for everything, pal—I couldn’t have made it without you. See you in a couple o’ weeks and then, who knows—Alice an’ I might just decide this era’s the one we want to settle down in.”

  “Not if you’re smart,” Spud said wryly.

  “Well, in that case, maybe I’ll be seein’ ya again sometime,” Joe pointed out. He reached down, making an adjustment on the time-belt, waved good-bye and vanished.

  Or nearly. A pair of fat legs still stood in the living room, topped by the time-belt. As Spud stared, one of the legs stamped its feet in frustration and fury.

  Sighing, Spud moved forward to kick the damned thing again.

  Satan’s Children

  Satan’s Children

  A beginning is the end of something, always.

  Zaccur Bishop saw the murder clearly, watched it happen—although he was not to realize it for over an hour.

  He might not have noticed it at all, had it happened anywhere but at the Scorpio. The victim himself did not realize that he had been murdered for nearly ten minutes, and when he did he made no outcry. It would h
ave been pointless: there was no way to demonstrate that he was dead, let alone that he had been killed, nor anything whatever to be done about it. If the police had been informed—and somehow convinced—of all the facts, they would have done their level best to forget them. The killer was perhaps as far from the compulsive-confessor type as it is possible to be: indeed, that was precisely his motive. It is difficult to imagine another crime at once so public and so clandestine. In any other club in the world it would have been perfect. But since it happened at the Scorpio, it brought the world down like a house of cards.

  The Scorpio was one of those clubs that God sends every once in a while to sustain the faithful. Benched from the folkie-circuit for reasons he refused to discuss, a musician named Ed Finnegan somehow convinced the owners of a Chinese restaurant near Dalhousie University to let him have their basement and an unreasonable sum of money. (Finnegan used to claim that when he vacationed in Ireland, the Blarney Stone tried to kiss him.) He found that the basement comprised two large windowless rooms. The one just inside the front door he made into a rather conventional bar—save that it was not conventionally overdecorated. The second room, a much larger one which had once held the oil furnace (the building predated solar heat), he painted jet black and ceilinged with acoustic tile. He went then to the University, and to other universities in Halifax, prowling halls and coffeehouses, bars, and dormitories, listening to every musician he heard. To a selected few he introduced himself, and explained that he was opening a club called Scorpio. It would include, he said, a large music room with a proper stage and spotlight. Within this music room, normal human speech would be forbidden to all save the performers. Anyone wishing food or drink could raise their hand and, when the waitress responded, point to their order on the menu silk-screened into the tablecloth. The door to this room, Finnegan added, would be unlocked only between songs. The PA system was his own: six Shure mikes with boomstands, two Teac mixers, a pair of 600-watt Toyota amps, two speaker columns, four wall speakers, and a dependable stage monitor. Wednesday and Thursday were Open Mike Nights, with a thirty-minute-per-act limit, and all other nights were paying gigs. Finnegan apologized for the meagerness of the pay: little more than the traditional all-you-can-drink and hat privileges. The house piano, he added, was in tune.

  Within a month the Scorpio was legend, and the Chinese restaurant upstairs had to close at sunset—for lack of parking. There have always been more good serious musicians than there were places for them to play; not a vein for the tapping but an artery. Any serious musician will sell his or her soul for an intelligent, sensitive, listening audience. No other kind would put up with Finnegan’s house rules, and any other kind was ejected—at least as far as the bar, which featured a free juke box, Irish coffee, and Löwenbräu draft.

  It was only because the house rules were so rigidly enforced that Zack happened to notice even that most inconspicuous of murders.

  It happened in the spring of his twenty-fourth year. He was about to do the last song in his midevening solo set; Jill sat at a stageside table nursing a plain orange juice and helping him with her wide brown eyes. The set had gone well so far, his guitar playing less sloppy than usual, his voice doing what he wanted it to, his audience responding well. But they were getting restive: time to bottle it up and bring Jill back onstage. While his subconscious searched its files for the right song, he kept the patter flowing.

  “No, really, it’s true, genties and ladlemen of the audio radiance, I nearly had a contract with Chess Records once. Fella named King came to see me from Chess, but I could see he just wanted old Zack Bishop for his pawn. He was a screaming queen, and he spent a whole knight tryin’ to rook me, but finally I says, ‘Come back when you can show me a check, mate.’” The crowd groaned dutifully, and Jill held her nose. Lifting her chin to do so exposed the delicate beauty of her throat, the soft grace of the place where it joined her shoulders, and his closing song was chosen.

  “No, but frivolously, folks,” he said soberly, “it’s nearly time to bring Jill on back up here and have her sing a few—but I’ve got one last spasm in me first. I guess you could say that this song was the proximate cause of Jill and me getting together in the first place. See, I met this lady and all of a sudden it seemed like there was a whole lot of things we wanted to say to each other, and the only ones I could get out of my mouth had to do with, like, meaningful relationships, and emotional commitments, and how our personalities complemented each other and like that.” He began to pick a simple C-Em-Am-G cycle in medium slow tempo, the ancient Gibson ringing richly, and Jill smiled. “But I knew that the main thing I wanted to say had nothing to do with that stuff. I knew I wasn’t being totally honest. And so I had to write this song.” And he sang:

  Come to my bedside and let there be sharing

  Uncounterfeitable sign of your caring

  Take off the clothes of your body and mind

  Bring me your nakedness…help me in mine…

  Help me believe that I’m worthy of trust

  Bring me a love that includes honest lust

  Warmth is for fire; fire is for burning…

  Love is for bringing an ending…to yearning

  For I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  He was singing directly to Jill, he always sang this song directly to Jill, and although in any other bar or coffeehouse in the world an open fistfight would not have distracted his attention from her, his eye was caught now by a tall, massively bearded man in black leather who was insensitive enough to pick this moment to change seats. The man picked a stageside table at which one other man was already seated, and in the split second glance that Zack gave him, the bearded man met his eyes with a bold, almost challenging manner.

  Back to Jill.

  Come to my bedside and let there be giving

  Licking and laughing and loving and living

  Sing me a song that has never been sung

  Dance at the end of my fingers and tongue

  Take me inside you and bring up your knees.

  Wrap me up tight in your thighs and then squeeze

  Or if you feel like it you get on top

  Love me however you please, but please…don’t stop

  For I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  The obnoxious man was now trying to talk to the man he had joined, a rather elderly gentleman with shaggy white hair and ferocious mustaches. It was apparent that they were acquainted. Zack could see the old man try to shush his new tablemate, and he could see that the bearded man was unwilling to be shushed. Others in the audience were also having their attention distracted, and resenting it. Mentally gritting his teeth, Zack forced his eyes away and threw himself into the bridge of the song.

  I know just what you’re thinking of

  There’s more to love than making love

  There’s much more to the flower than the bloom

  But every time we meet in bed

  I find myself inside your head

  Even as I’m entering your womb

  The Shadow appeared as if by magic, and the Shadow was large and wide and dark black and he plainly had sand. None too gently he kicked the bearded man’s chair and, when the latter turned, held a finger to his lips. They glared at each other for a few seconds, and then the bearded man turned around again. He gave up trying to talk to the white-haired man, but Zack had the funny idea that his look of disappointment was counterfeit—he seemed underneath it to be somehow satisfied at being silenced. Taking the old man’s left hand in his own, he produced a felt-tip pen and began writing on the other’s palm. Quite angry now, Zack yanked his attention back to his song, wishing fiercely that he and Jill were alone.

  So come to my bedside and let there be loving

  Twisting
and moaning and thrusting and shoving

  I will be gentle—you know that I can

  For you I will be quite a singular man…

  Here’s my identity, stamped on my genes

  Take this my offering, know what it means

  Let us become what we started to be

  On that long ago night when you first came with me

  Oh lady, I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  The applause was louder than usual, sympathy for a delicate song shamefully treated. Zack smiled half-ruefully at Jill, took a deep draught from the Löwenbräu on the empty chair beside him, and turned to deliver a stinging rebuke to the bearded man. But he was gone, must have left the instant the song ended—Shadow was just closing the door behind him. The old man with the absurd mustaches sat alone, staring at the writing on his palm with a look of total puzzlement. Neither of them knew that he was dead. The old man too rose and left the room as the applause trailed away.

  To hell with him, Zack decided. He put the beer down at his feet and waved Jill up onto the stage. “Thank you folks, now we’ll bring Jill back up here so she and I can do a medley of our hit…”

  The set went on.

  The reason so many musicians seem to go a little nutty when they achieve success, demanding absurd luxuries and royal treatment, is that prior to that time they have been customarily treated like pigs. In no other branch of the arts is the artist permitted so little dignity by his merchandisers and his audience, given so little respect or courtesy. Ed Finnegan was a musician himself, and he understood. He knew, for instance, that a soundproof dressing room is a pearl without price to a musician, and so he figured out a cheap way to provide one. He simply erected a single soundproof wall, parallel to the music room’s east wall and about five feet from it. The resulting corridor was wide enough to allow two men with guitars to pass each other safely, long enough to pace nervously, and silent enough to tune up or rehearse in.