Abnormal Occurrences (6 page)

“Thank you, Myra Clendenning,” said Wonk, “but I’m afraid
we’re
the ignorant ones. I’ve only just been taught by your friend how to sit down and that there are other things to eat than ants, though I hope I’m not being rude in saying that there’s still nothing tastier.”

“What in the world has he given you to drink?” Myra asked, then glared at me and said, “Open the Talbot, for heaven’s sake.”

“I think we might wait for that,” I told her. “Everything’s so new.”

“It’s
my
property,” she said irritably though continuing to beam at Wonk. She went to the under-sink area that served as wine cellar and brought out the only bottle that remained there. She had bought it on sale somewhere. I suspected it was an off-year, though I can never find one of those little vintage-cards when I want to.

Myra deftly extracted the cork with the two-pronged non-screw gadget that I have never mastered. “I know,” she said to Wonk, “that you undoubtedly have much to teach us, not only about technology, but the more important issues. Foremost among them would be how to live in peace with one another.” She poured some wine for him.

“Myra,” I said, “he doesn’t drink from a glass. You’d better—”

“Teach us,” Myra said. “Oh, teach us how to live together.”

“Goodness gracious,” said Wonk. “I’m afraid we’re the last people who could do that. You see, we were able to come to power only because our old bosses went elsewhere in the galaxy to find new people to conquer and treat like scum. But now we’re in the lamentable situation of being on top, with nobody else underneath us, no inferior folks to despise and mistreat.” He gave me a sheepish look. “I must apologize for lying to you, Tony Walsh. We came here not only to look for food. We were searching for slaves. But it didn’t take me any time at all to see that if you are representative of Earth’s population, we would be savagely whipped if we tried anything here. You have every advantage: you can eat and drink anything, you tame and keep as pet an animal who would otherwise be ferocious, and you have a friend who smells sweet and speaks melodiously. I suspect she’s an example of your females.”

Myra hated being spoken of as if she were absent, and she moved quickly to assert herself. “I admire your humility,” said she. “We can certainly learn a lesson from that. But don’t sell yourselves short. Let me suggest that you get more particular in your search: look for inferior
individuals
, not peoples. I assure you, the former are in abundance. True, collecting them one by one can be tedious, but the effort will be well worth it.”

“Myra,” I cried. “What are you saying?” To Wonk I hastened to say, “Myra is known for her sense of
irony
. Let me explain that term—”

“No need for that,” said he. “It’s certainly one thing we are familiar with: pretending that what everyone knows is true is really false, and vice versa. It was the only way we survived when under the thumb of the Bosses. We could use less of it now they’ve gone, but unfortunately we just can’t seem to shake off the habit, even though it really makes no sense nowadays.”

“You just let me characterize my own mystique,” Myra said nastily to me. She turned to Wonk. “I was not being ironic. If you want a collection of boneheads, just come to the company for which I work, or go to the nation’s capital or to any state legislature.”

I had not realized she was such an anarchist. I shrugged and added, “Well, for that matter, how about the factories where they make garments with buttons from which the thread had already mostly unraveled before you’ve worn them for the first time?”

“Oh,” Myra scoffed, “that’s frivolous. But what about all the thieves on Wall Street, and the people who, though not in need, think it’s cute to shoplift?”

“Drunken airline pilots!” I shouted.

“The illiterates who misspell names printed at the bottom of TV screens.”

“Waiters who are insolent, and then mispronounce ‘crepes.’”

“Excuse me,” Wonk said in a tone of distress. He had not touched his wine. “I do believe you are bickering. That’s one thing we cannot endure: a conflict of opinions. All of us are always in perfect accord at all times. Perhaps it’s a racial trait. In any event, I thank you for your kindness, which I must say I’d have taken as a symptom of weakness had you not proved our superiors in so many other ways.” He smiled. “I still can’t quite understand why you haven’t given me a good thrashing and then burned the spacecraft. I don’t mind admitting that’s the way we would have treated you had the situation been reversed. I think we might have the moral edge on you, there. What’s the purpose of being strong unless it’s to exploit the weak?”

He had acquired a look of discomfort. After a moment I realized that he was trying to rise from the chair but was in too close, his thighs under the table. I told him what to do.

“So many things to remember!” he complained when he was finally erect. “As if the learning isn’t enough.” He beamed at Myra. “Thank you. For a female, you’re quite articulate.”

He had already forgotten the location of the door by which he had entered, and I had to lead him out of the house. When we reached the yard I remembered I had not seen Bub for a while: the reason for which was that he had stayed on guard against the saucer. Or so I believed until he turned to me with a snarl. Had the space creatures transformed him? ...He sullenly averted his head in a familiar movement. Of course! He was bitter about the false promise of steak with which I had earlier subdued him. “All right,” I said, “I’ve got that coming. But just trust me awhile longer.” Alas, it would have to be quite a while, until the following evening in fact, back in town, for the Briceville convenience store, though open twenty-tour hours, sold cold cuts only.

“Goodbye, Tony Walsh,” said Wonk.

“Goodbye to you, Wonk. I won’t wish you well, for in fact I disapprove of your mission. Why don’t you people go back home and buckle down and try to improve yourselves? Study and work hard and make a real effort not to be such jerks. You’d surely improve yourselves significantly. Look what you learned in the short time here: sitting, drinking sardine oil, and so on. And then, once you had acquired self-respect based on accomplishment, you wouldn’t need anyone else to lord it over.”

He stared searchingly into my eyes, and then, with the greatest good humor, uttered one stark obscenity, after which he plodded to the space vehicle and went up the gangplank. In a trice the saucer rose noisily into the air and whirled away.

I returned to the kitchen, where Myra sat with the glass of wine Wonk had not touched.

“I hope you’re not brooding,” I said, “over that tasteless comment of his.”

She showed a vulpine grin. “Hardly. What can you expect from some fat old freak like that?”

“I’m glad you came back before they left. I didn’t have a camera.”

“Don’t think I intend to tell anyone about this,” she said firmly.

“Are you serious?” I cried, and we proceeded to argue heatedly.

Finally Myra made a crucial point. “All right,
you
tell and see how far you get!
I
have no intention of confirming your account.”

“You mean you’ll suppress the entire incident just because maybe there’ll be some people who won’t even believe the two of us? But it
happened
, did it not? I never thought you of all people could ever be accused of a lack of conviction.”

She gulped what was in her glass and poured herself more Chateau Talbot. I had to pour my own. “As usual,” she said, “you’re barking up the wrong tree... The reason I’ll keep quiet is that the Wurtzels are contemptible trash. Why give them publicity?” She stared into the middle distance. “I say let’s wait for more positive-thinking space visitors. I
know
they’re out there. Maybe those Bosses will show up, and we’ll have a fight on our hands. But who needs more Wurtzels?”

I hope I haven’t given the impression here that I don’t admire Myra. We may wrangle, but underneath it all, we invariably end up seeing eye to eye. Except perhaps about wine. This one, with its excess of tannin, was as yet far too young to drink. But, I kept my own counsel on the matter, fearing that were I to mention it to Myra, she might storm out again. And frankly, I was scared to be alone, lest tougher guys appear now that the trail had been, so to speak, blazed.

K
IM AND DICK CAVANAUGH
had been married some four months when each decided independently to have the other murdered. It was not an easy decision for either, for both had been, at least while living together for two years eight months and then in the earliest weeks of the marriage, in what if it weren’t love, then what?
You could have fooled me
, said Dick to himself in the bathroom mirror and then amended it to:
You
did
fool me, in fact
.

Kim never spoke to herself, and when she talked with her shrink she habitually lied, which was self-defeating and an awfully expensive indulgence, but she was constitutionally incapable of confessing even to a doctor that she had made the most devastating mistake a person of her sort could make, for if she prided herself on any talent, it was for penetrating the facades of other people to the inner essence underlying all the surface bullshit.
Come ON!
though she would not have been caught dead saying it, was her implicit slogan. She could not be bluffed by reality. So when she discovered that, married long enough to have moved into a new phase, Dick bore little resemblance to the man he had been as companion or newlywed, Kim’s fiercest rage was directed at herself. Ultimately she came to understand that she had failed in judgment so profoundly that nothing would serve to expunge her error but something like swallowing poison. However, at barely thirty years of age she had much of her life yet to live, with a myriad of things to accomplish and enjoy.

So the only thing for it was instead to get rid of Dick, who she was certain would be so opposed to the idea of divorce, none ever having occurred in his family (whose members tended to brag about that fact at holiday get-togethers, graduations, weddings), that it would be useless even to bring up the subject. Not to mention that Kim had come not only to love him no longer but positively to hate his guts for precisely those attributes, habits, and practices that she had formerly found attractive: his crooked smile, which favored one dimple; his lank-locked haircut, not so much the work of a barber but due essentially to the awkward contours of his cranium; his use of “with all respect” as a preface to an assertion that would not have been nearly so malicious without it; the faint odor of tobacco that hung about him though he claimed not to smoke (and to be sure she had never caught him doing so; was he screwing some woman who did?), a smell which in better days Kim had mistaken for the manly aroma of leather.

Not finally, for she had scores of such issues, what she had first seen as a charming grace of bodily movement, a quick stride, a gesture of forearm, an angle of neck, a cocking of ear, she suddenly identified as girlish, not homosexual as such—her gay brother was macho as they came—but annoyingly mannered, and it was soon extended to his style even with the steering wheel of a car and, at table, the manipulation of the cutlery.

For his part, Dick Cavanaugh had developed a distaste for his wife equivalent to hers for him, though unlike her he never considered blaming himself in any way for the unfortunate marriage: it was wholly a case of deceit on the part of Kim, whose idea it had been to ruin a perfectly satisfactory partnership by replacing it with wedlock. She had not been aware that while red hair was acceptable in a girlfriend, it simply did not suit a wife, and since Kim’s was natural she would certainly not have been amenable to dyeing it another color. Her body was very lean, once again just fine for an unmarried young woman who worked out three times per week, but there was something pathetic about wedded couples who piously went to a gym together, yet if they did so independently it seemed too much like visiting a bar alone. (Dick solved that particular dilemma by beginning to work out with a fellow computer programmer named Stephanie, whom he had never known that well at the office but who turned out to be fun, and before long they topped off their sessions on adjacent treadmills with sex at her divorcee apartment on his way home.)

He might straightforwardly have put the matter of divorce to Kim were he not certain she could never have survived such a defeat, she who was so vain about her status as, in her own estimation, a lifelong winner. He had thought about this a lot, not being one to act superficially in any area of life—he was famous for his perfectionism: “Dicky as a boy wouldn’t touch a piece of meat unless every smidgeon of fat was trimmed away,” his mother was wont to remember—and with all respect concluded that it would be doing Kim the greatest favor to arrange for bringing about her nonexistence by instantaneous means. A shot to the back of the head would accomplish that nicely.

Of course the problem was how to find someone who would perform the deed. Vicious criminals abounded, but to come in contact with any, if you were Dick Cavanaugh’s sort, would be the unlikeliest of events. Trolling for a killer in certain dangerous parts of the city was to endanger one’s own life: before you could proffer thousands for the crime to come your throat might well be cut for the fifty-four bucks currently in pocket. So much for the sidewalk thug, but what about the professional hitman so familiar from movies and TV, both fiction and documentary? Dick had no idea of how to reach out to one. Apparently there had been a day, as he had learned by television, when such characters offered their services, in none too subtle code, in a periodical for military mercenaries, but once the muckrakers and grandstanding politicians had publicised the practice, it was abandoned by the magazine.

Kim was at the same impasse. In high school she had known a kid who had the hots for her and who also by her later assessment had been sufficiently sociopathic, with the requisite arsenal, to have anticipated the Columbine massacre by some years. But when she inquired about Baxter on a rare visit to her hometown she learned that, married and the father of four, he was in his second term as reformist mayor, having previously served as incorruptible chief of police. The sole Sicilian-American of her acquaintance was not only of a now lace-curtain family but was her boss at the advertising agency; she could scarcely inquire as to his familiarity with the Mafia.