A Saucer of Loneliness (35 page)

Whimpering with fury and revulsion, Precious pulled a handful
of grass and began wiping her shoe.

Something moved into her field of vision. She glanced at it, squealed, and moved back. It was an enormous stag beetle, three times life-size, and it was scuttling toward her.

Another beetle—or the same one—met her at the corner.

With her hard black shiny shoes, she stepped on this one, so hard that the calf of her leg ached and tingled for the next half-hour.

The men were back when she returned to the house. Mr. Brent had been surveying Mr. Purney’s fence lines. Jokey was not missed before they left. Mrs. Purney looked drawn and frightened, and seemed glad that Mrs. Brent was leaving before Jokey came in for his supper.

Precious said nothing when asked about the dirt on her dress, and, under the circumstances, Mrs. Brent thought better of questioning her too closely.

In the car, Mrs. Brent told her husband that she thought Jokey was driving Mrs. Purney crazy.

It was her turn to be driven very nearly mad, the next morning, when Jokey turned up. Most of him.

Surprising, really, how much beetle had stuck to the hard black shoe, and, when it was time, turned into what they found under their daughter’s bed.

I’
LL HAVE TO START WITH AN ANECDOTE
or two that you may have heard from me before, but they’ll bear repeating, since it’s Kelley we’re talking about.

I shipped out with Kelley when I was a kid. Tankships, mostly coastwise: load somewhere in the oil country—New Orleans, Aransas Pass, Port Arthur, or some such—and unload at ports north of Hatteras. Eight days out, eighteen hours in, give or take a day or six hours. Kelley was ordinary seaman on my watch, which was a laugh; he knew more about the sea than anyone aft of the galley. But he never ribbed me, stumbling around the place with my blue A.B. ticket. He had a sense of humor in his peculiar quiet way, but he never gratified it by proofs of the obvious—that he was twice the seaman I could ever be.

There were a lot of unusual things about Kelley, the way he looked, the way he moved; but most unusual was the way he thought. He was like one of those extraterrestrials you read about who can think as well as a human being but not
like
a human being.

Just for example, there was that night in Port Arthur. I was sitting in a honky-tonk up over a bar with a red-headed girl called Red, trying to mind my own business while watching a chick known as Boots, who sat alone over by the jukebox. This girl Boots was watching the door and grinding her teeth, and I knew why, and I was worried. See, Kelley had been seeing her pretty regularly, but this trip he’d made the break and word was around that he was romancing a girl in Pete’s place—a very unpopular kind of rumor for Boots to be chewing on. I also knew that Kelley would be along any minute because he’d promised to meet me here.

And in he came, running up that long straight flight of steps easy as a cat, and when he got in the door everybody just hushed, except
the jukebox, and it sounded scared.

Now, just above Boots’ shoulder on a little shelf was an electric fan. It had sixteen-inch blades and no guard. The very second Kelley’s face showed in the doorway, Boots rose up like a snake out of a basket, reached behind her, snatched that fan off the shelf and threw it.

It might as well have been done with a slow-motion camera as far as Kelley was concerned. He didn’t move his feet at all. He bent sideways, just a little, from the waist, and turned his wide shoulders. Very clearly I heard three of those whining blade-tips touch a button on his shirt
bip-bip-bip!
and then the fan hit the doorpost.

Even the jukebox shut up then. It was
so
quiet. Kelley didn’t say anything and neither did anyone else.

Now, if you believe in do-as-you-get-done-to, and someone heaves an infernal machine at you, you’ll pick it right up and heave it back. But Kelley doesn’t think like you. He didn’t look at the fan. He just watched Boots, and she was white and crazed-looking, waiting for whatever he might have in mind.

He went across the room to her, fast but not really hurrying, and he picked her out from behind that table, and he threw her.

He threw her at the fan
.

She hit the floor and slid, sweeping up the fan where it lay, hitting the doorjamb with her head, spinning out into the stairway. Kelley walked after her, stepped over her, went on downstairs and back to the ship.

And there was the time we shipped a new main spur gear for the starboard winch. The deck engineer used up the whole morning watch trying to get the old gear-wheel off its shaft. He heated the hub. He pounded it. He put in wedges. He hooked on with a handy-billy—that’s a four-sheave block-and-tackle to you—and all he did with that was break a U-bolt.

Then Kelley came on deck, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and took one brief look. He walked over to the winch, snatched up a crescent wrench, and relieved the four bolts that held the housing tight around the shaft. He then picked up a twelve-pound maul, hefted it, and swung it just once. The maul hit the end of the shaft
and the shaft shot out of the other side of the machine like a torpedo out of its tube. The gearwheel fell down on the deck. Kelley went forward to take the helm and thought no more about it, while the deck crew stared after him, wall-eyed. You see what I mean! Problem: Get a wheel off a shaft. But in Kelly’s book it’s: Get the shaft out of the wheel.

I kibitzed him at poker one time and saw him discard two pair and draw a winning straight flush. Why that discard? Because he’d just realized the deck was stacked. Why the flush? God knows. All Kelley did was pick up the pot—a big one—grin at the sharper, and leave.

I have plenty more yarns like that, but you get the idea. The guy had a special way of thinking, that’s all, and it never failed him.

I lost track of Kelley. I came to regret that now and then; he made a huge impression on me, and sometimes I used to think about him when I had a tough problem to solve. What would Kelley do? And sometimes it helped, and sometimes it didn’t; and when it didn’t, I guess it was because I’m not Kelley.

I came ashore and got married and did all sorts of other things, and the years went by, and a war came and went, and one warm spring evening I went into a place I know on West 48th St. because I felt like drinking tequila and I can always get it there. And who should be sitting in a booth finishing up a big Mexican dinner but—no, not Kelley.

It was Milton. He looks like a college sophomore with money. His suits are always cut just so, but quiet; and when he’s relaxed he looks as if he’s just been tagged for a fraternity and it matters to him, and when he’s worried you want to ask him has he been cutting classes again. It happens he’s a damn good doctor.

He was worried, but he gave me a good hello and waved me into the booth while he finished up. We had small talk and I tried to buy him a drink. He looked real wistful and then shook his head. “Patient in ten minutes,” he said, looking at his watch.

“Then it’s nearby. Come back afterward.”

“Better yet,” he said, getting up, “come with me. This might interest you, come to think of it.”

He got his hat and paid Rudy, and I said, “Luego,” and Rudy grinned and slapped the tequila bottle. Nice place, Rudy’s.

“What about the patient?” I asked as we turned up the avenue. I thought for a while he hadn’t heard me, but at last he said, “Four busted ribs and a compound femoral. Minor internal hemorrhage which might or might not be a ruptured spleen. Necrosis of the oral frenum—or was while there was any frenum left.”

“What’s a frenum?”

“That little strip of tissue under your tongue.”

“Ongk,” I said, trying to reach it with the tip of my tongue. “What a healthy fellow.”

“Pulmonary adhesions,” Milton ruminated. “Not serious, certainly not tubercular. But they hurt and they bleed and I don’t like ’em. And acne rosacea.”

“That’s the nose like a stoplight, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t as funny as that to the guy that has it.”

I was quelled. “What was it—a goon-squad?”

He shook his head.

“A truck?”

“No.”

“He fell off something.”

Milton stopped and turned and looked me straight in the eye. “No,” he said. “Nothing like anything. Nothing,” he said, walking again, “at all.”

I said nothing to that because there was nothing to say.

“He just went to bed,” said Milton thoughtfully, “because he felt off his oats. And one by one these things happened to him.”

“In
bed
?”

“Well,” said Milton, in a to-be-absolutely-accurate tone, “when the ribs broke he was on his way back from the bathroom.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No I’m not.”

“He’s lying.”

Milton said, “I believe him.”

I know Milton. There’s no doubt that he believed the man. I said, “I keep reading things about psychosomatic disorders. But a broken—what
did you say it was?”

“Femur. Thigh, that is. Compound. Oh, it’s rare, all right. But it can happen, has happened. These muscles are pretty powerful, you know. They deliver two-fifty, three-hundred-pound thrusts every time you walk up stairs. In certain spastic hysteriae, they’ll break bones easily enough.”

“What about all those other things?”

“Functional disorders, every one of ’em. No germ disease.”

“Now this boy,” I said, “
really
has something on his mind.”

“Yes, he has.”

But I didn’t ask what. I could hear the discussion closing as if it had a spring latch on it.

We went into a door tucked between storefronts and climbed three flights. Milton put out his hand to a bell-push and then dropped it without ringing. There was a paper tacked to the door.

It was unsigned. Milton turned the knob and we went in.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Not too strong, but not the kind of thing you ever forget if you ever had to dig a slit trench through last week’s burial pit. “That’s the necrosis,” muttered Milton. “Damn it.” He gestured. “Hang your hat over there. Sit down. I’ll be out soon.” He went into an inner room, saying, “Hi, Hal,” at the doorway. From inside came an answering rumble, and something twisted in my throat to hear it, for no voice which is that tired should sound that cheerful.

I sat watching the wallpaper and laboriously un-listening to those clinical grunts and the gay-weary responses in the other room. The wallpaper was awful. I remember a nightclub act where Reginald Gardiner used to give sound-effect renditions of wallpaper designs. This one, I decided, would run “Body to
weep …
yawp, yawp; body to weep … yawp, yawp,” very faintly, with the final syllable a straining retch. I had just reached a particularly clumsy join where the paper utterly demolished its own rhythm and went “Yawp yawp body to
weep
” when the outer door opened and I leaped to my feet with the rush of utter guilt one feels when caught in an unlikely place
with no curt and lucid explanation.

He was two long strides into the room, tall and soft-footed, his face and long green eyes quite at rest, when he saw me. He stopped as if on leaf springs and shock absorbers, not suddenly, completely controlled, and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’ll be damned,” I answered. “Kelley!”

He peered at me with precisely the expression I had seen so many times when he watched the little square windows on the one-armed bandits we used to play together. I could almost hear the tumblers, see the drums; not lemon … cherry … cherry … and
click!
this time but tankship … Texas … him!… and
click!
“I be
god
dam,” he drawled, to indicate that he was even more surprised than I was. He transferred the small package he carried from his right hand to his left and shook hands. His hand went once and a half times around mine with enough left over to tie a half-hitch. “Where in time you been keepin’ yourse’f? How’d you smoke me out?”

“I never,” I said. (Saying it, I was aware that I always fell into the idiom of people who impressed me, to the exact degree of that impression. So I always found myself talking more like Kelley than Kelley’s shaving mirror.) I was grinning so wide my face hurt. “I’m glad to see you.” I shook hands with him again, foolishly. “I came with the doctor.”

“You a doctor now?” he said, his tone prepared for wonders.

“I’m a writer,” I said deprecatingly.

“Yeah, I heard,” he reminded himself. His eyes narrowed; as of old, it had the effect of sharp-focusing a searchlight beam. “I heard!” he repeated, with deeper interest. “Stories. Gremlins and flyin’ saucers an’ all like that.” I nodded. He said, without insult, “Hell of a way to make a living.”

“What about you?”

“Ships. Some dry-dock. Tank cleaning. Compass adjustin’. For a while had a job holdin’ a insurance inspector’s head. You know.”

I glanced at the big hands that could weld or steer or compute certainly with the excellence I used to know, and marveled that he found himself so unremarkable. I pulled myself back to here and now and nodded toward the inner room. “I’m holding you up.”

“No you ain’t. Milton, he knows what he’s doin’. He wants me, he’ll holler.”

“Who’s sick?”

His face darkened like the sea in scud-weather, abruptly and deep down. “My brother.” He looked at me searchingly. “He’s …” Then he seemed to check himself. “He’s sick,” he said unnecessarily, and added quickly, “He’s going to be all right, though.”

“Sure,” I said quickly.

I had the feeling that we were both lying and that neither of us knew why.

Milton came out, laughing a laugh that cut off as soon as he was out of range of the sick man. Kelley turned to him slowly, as if slowness were the only alternative to leaping on the doctor, pounding the news out of him. “Hello, Kelley. Heard you come in.”

“How is he, Doc?”

Milton looked up quickly, his bright round eyes clashing with Kelley’s slitted fierce ones. “You got to take it easy, Kelley. What’ll happen to him if you crack up?”

“Nobody’s cracking up. What do you want me to do?”