Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (6 page)

Introduction to
FREE DIRT
by Dennis Etchison
In the fifties and sixties Charles Beaumont's name was magic. With a style so smooth and polished that it could be published in Playboy and the slicks as easily as in the genre magazines, he was a singular inspiration. Ray Bradbury had achieved some degree of detente with the literary mainstream years earlier; now there was a new champion and role model, one with a unique aura of glamour, confidence and apparently unlimited potential who would surely succeed in elevating imaginative writing from its adolescent ghetto to a position of respectability in the real world. His method was facile and yet sophisticated, accessible and esoteric, readable and technically impeccable, and somehow never superficial or calculated but deeply personal, sincere and committed in the manner of any serious art. The field has not known his like before or since.
In 1963 the UCLA Extension catalogue listed an Advanced Science Fiction Workshop, one of the first of its kind anywhere, to be taught by Beaumont himself. I was still living at home and had no job or money other than the small checks I had begun to receive for my fiction. But UCLA was within driving distance of Lynwood, and I did own a 1950 Ford, bought with my first short story sale, that might get me there if I carried an extra quart of oil in the trunk and stayed off the freeway. So I signed up as quickly as I could borrow the enrollment fee from my parents, and set out on the long haul down Imperial Highway for ten weeks of evening sessions.
I had seen him before, at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1958, where he and Richard Matheson shared the spotlight, and at the Pacific Coast Writers Conference, where he appeared along with the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. He was as I remembered him, though his sandy hair was no longer bright and his eyes showed signs of sleeplessness. There he sat behind his desk, dignified beyond reproach, chain-smoking Pall Malls so deeply that nothing re-emerged after he inhaled. He spoke quietly and charmingly on a level perfectly adjusted to the needs of the class. He suggested that we submit stories, read them or allow him to read them aloud if he wanted an oral critique, and entertained us with anecdotes. From time to time friends of his would drop by, lecture or answer questions if they felt like it- William Shatner, who had starred in the film of The Intruder, stayed to give a cold dramatic reading of one of the student stories; William F. Nolan taught us the value of notebooks; Ron Goulart remained in the background shy and self-effacing. Our teacher honored us by sharing a new manuscript of his own, and went so far as to offer us an idea that he had never gotten around to writing but which, he said, was ours to use as we liked. It was about a man who is killed in an accident but revived after being dead for several minutes-long enough to develop a ghost. Several in the class wrote about this premise. I did not, but the idea remained with me, and in the late sixties I used it as the basis for a pseudonymous novel. Later, in the eighties, a variation became the core of my novel Darkside. A definitive version has yet to be written, but someday one of us may get it right enough to do Beaumont justice.
He even took us to the movies one session for a sneak preview of The Haunted Palace, which he had scripted from work of Lovercra ft's but which was presented by AlP as another Edgar Allen Poe adaptation. We were encouraged to invite friends, and when two or three times as many people as were in the class gathered around Beaumont in front of the World Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, he reached for his wallet without hesitation and purchased a kitetail of tickets several feet long. Needless to say we applauded when his name came on the screen.
One night Ray Bradbury spoke to our group. It came out in passing reference that Bradbury was ten years older than Beaumont, who was then only thirty-four. I remember my shock, since Ray looked healthy enough to pass for ten years younger than our teacher. Had they misspoken, reversing the order? Later I learned of the illness that had already begun to take its debilitating toll, and wondered if on some molecular level Beaumont had understood how short his time was and that he must compress a lifetime's achievement into only a few years .
All that remains now is the memory of that summer as it exists unchanged in the minds of those who were there, and the typed comments he handed back with our assignments. I have carefully saved mine, a brief page on "Wet Season." Not long after the class ended I sent the story to Nolan, who was then editing the magazine Gamma. He rejected it with the longest and kindest such letter I would ever receive. He said that he did not quite understand the story but that it reminded him of "Free Dirt," another tale he could not grasp logically but which he found haunting and compelling. I was overwhelmed, particularly since the Beaumont story was a favorite of mine. My piece had nothing to do with it in either style or substance, and the comparison was certainly unwarranted as an assessment of quality, but Nolan had detected Beaumont's influence. Six months later Nolan wrote asking to see the story again, claiming that he could not get it out of his mind. This time he did publish it, something that would not have happened had it not been for the class.
There is more to tell, but this book is supposed to be by and about Beaumont, not his fans and camp followers. So let me just say that there were other lessons I am only now beginning to understand. Over the years I have come to see that summer as immeasurably richer than it seemed at the time, one of the cornerstone events of my life and career. Twenty years later I decided to try in my own small way to pay back the debt by teaching my version of the same class for UCLA Extension. I do not have Charles Beaumont's talent, but I have done my best to inspire students as young as I was then, and to retell as much of the advice from 1963 as I can remember. Nolan has dropped by several times, as have Bradbury and Matheson and many others who have become my friends, including Beaumont's son Chris, now a successful writer, producer. And on those nights when my class lets out after three all-too-short hours, I wish that I had taken Chuck up on his repeated offers to join him for a drink at the Cock & Bull on Sunset. I never did, because I was embarrassed to be only twenty and poorly dressed with barely enough gas money in my jacket pocket, and because I did not know that that time would never come again. The only thing I can do now is to buy my own students a drink while they are still mine to know, and to ask them to raise their glasses with me in tribute to the living memory of the man they should have known.
FREE DIRT
by Charles Beaumont
No fowl had ever looked so posthumous. Its bones lay stacked to one side of the plate like kindling: white, dry and naked in the soft light of the restaurant. Bones only, with every shard and filament of meat stripped methodically off. Otherwise, the plate was a vast glistening plain.
The other, smaller dishes and bowls were equally virginal. They shone fiercely against one another. And all a pale cream color fixed upon the snowy white of a tablecloth unstained by gravies and unspotted by coffee and free from the stigmata of breadcrumbs, cigarette ash and fingernail lint.
Only the dead fowl's bones and the stippled traceries of hardened red gelatine clinging timidly to the bottom of a dessert cup gave evidence that these ruins had once been a dinner.
Mr. Aorta, not a small man, permitted a mild belch, folded the newspaper he had found on the chair, inspected his vest for food leavings and then made his way briskly to the cashier.
The old woman glanced at this check.
"Yes, sir," she said.
"All righty," Mr. Aorta said and removed from his hip pocket a large black wallet. He opened it casually, whistling The Seven Joys of Mary through the space provided by his two front teeth.
The melody stopped, abruptly. Mr. Aorta looked concerned. He peered into his wallet, then began removing things; presently its entire contents was spread out. He frowned.
"What seems to be the difficulty, sir?"
"Oh, no difficulty," the fat man said, "exactly." Though the wallet was manifestly empty, he flapped its sides apart, held it upside down and continued to shake it, suggesting the picture of a hydrophobic bat suddenly seized in mid-air.
Mr. Aorta smiled a weak harassed smile and proceeded to empty all of his fourteen separate pockets. In a time the counter was piled high with miscellany.
"Well!" he said impatiently. "What nonsense! What bother! Do you know what's happened? My wife's gone off and forgotten to leave me any change! Heigh-ho, well-my name is James Brockelhurst: I'm with the Pliofilm Corporation. I generally don't eat out, and-here, no, I insist. This is embarrassing for you as well as for myself. I insist upon leaving my card. If you will retain it, I shall return tomorrow evening at this time and reimburse you."
Mr. Aorta shoved the pasteboard into the cashier's hands, shook his head, shoveled the residue back into his pockets and, plucking a toothpick from a box, left the restaurant.
He was quite pleased with himself-an invariable reaction to the acquisition of something for nothing in return. It had all gone smoothly, and what a delightful meal!
He strolled in the direction of the streetcar stop, casting occasional licentious glances at undressed mannequins in department store windows.
The prolonged fumbling for his car token worked as efficiently as ever. (Get in the middle of the crowd, look bewildered, inconspicuous, search your pockets earnestly, the while edging from the vision of the conductor-then, take a far seat and read a newspaper.) In four years' traveling time, Mr. Aorta computed he had saved a total of $211.20.
The electric's ancient list did not jar his warm feeling of serenity. He studied the amusements briefly, then went to work on the current puzzle, whose prize ran into the thousands. Thousands of dollars, actually for nothing. Something for nothing. Mr. Aorta loved puzzles.
But the fine print made reading impossible.
Mr. Aorta glanced at the elderly woman standing near his seat; then, because the woman's eyes were full of tired pleading and insinuation, he refocused out the wire crosshatch windows.
What he saw caused his heart to throb. The section of town was one he passed every day, so it was a wonder he'd not noticed it before-though generally there was little provocation to sightsee on what was irreverently called "Death Row"-a dreary round of mortuaries, columbariums, crematories and the like, all crowded into a fiveblock area.
He yanked the stop-signal, hurried to the rear of the streetcar and depressed the exit plate. In a few moments he had walked to what he'd seen.
It was a sign, artlessly lettered though spelled correctly enough. It was not new, for the white paint had swollen and cracked and the rusted nails had dripped trails of dirty orange over the face of it.
The sign read:
FREE DIRT
Apply Within
Lilyvale
Cemetery
and was posted upon the moldering green of a woodboard wall.
Now Mr. Aorta felt a familiar sensation come over him. It happened whenever he encountered the word FREE-a magic word that did strange and wonderful things to his metabolism.
Free. What was the meaning, the essence of free? Why, something for nothing. And to get something for nothing was Mr. Aorta's chiefest pleasure in this mortal life.
The fact that it was dirt which was being offered Free did not oppress him. He seldom gave more than a fleeting thought to these things; for, he reasoned, nothing is without its use.
The other, subtler circumstances surrounding the sign scarcely occurred to him: why the dirt was being offered, where free dirt from a cemetery would logically come from; et cetera. In this connection he considered only the probable richness of the soil, for reasons he did not care to speculate upon.
Mr. Aorta's solitary hesitation encircled such problems as: Was this offer an honest one, without strings where he would have to buy something? Was there a limit on how much he could take home? If not, what would be the best method of transporting it?
Petty problems: all solvable.
Mr. Aorta did something inwardly that resembled a smile, looked about and finally located the entrance to the Lilyvale Cemetery.
These desolate grounds, which had once accommodated a twine factory, an upholstering firm and an outlet for ladies'shoes, now lay swathed in a miasmic vapor-accreditable, in the absence of nearby bogs, to a profusion of windward smokestacks. The blistered hummocks, peaked with crosses, slabs and stones, loomed gray and sad in the gloaming: withal, a place purely delightful to describe, and a pity it cannot be-for how it looked there that evening has little to do with the fat man and what was to become of him.
Important only that it was a place full of dead people on their backs under ground, moldering and moldered.
Mr. Aorta hurried because he despised to waste, along with everything else, time. It was not long before he had encountered the proper party and had this sort of conversation:
"I understand you're offering free dirt."
"That's right."
"How much may one have?"
"Much as one wants."
"On what days?"
"Any days; most likely there'll always be some fresh."
Mr. Aorta sighed in the manner of one who has just acquired a lifetime inheritance or a measured checking account. He then made an appointment for the following Saturday and went home to ruminate agreeable ruminations.
At a quarter past nine that night he hit upon an excellent use to which the dirt might be put.
His back yard, an ochre waste, lay chunked and dry, a barren stretch repulsive to all but the grossest weeds. A tree had once flourished there, in better days, a haven for suburbanite birds, but then the birds disappeared for no good reason except that this was when Mr. Aorta moved into the house, and the tree became an ugly naked thing.
No children played in this yard.
Mr. Aorta was intrigued. Who could say? Perhaps something might be made to grow! He had long ago written an enterprising firm for free samples of seeds, and received enough to feed an army. But the first experiment had shriveled into hard useless pips and, seized by lassitude, Mr. Aorta had shelved the project. Now…
A neighbor named Joseph William Santucci permitted himself to be intimidated. He lent his old Reo truck, and after a few hours the first load of dirt had arrived and been shoveled into a tidy mound. It looked beautiful to Mr. Aorta, whose passion overcompensated for his weariness with the task. The second load followed, and the third, and the fourth, and it was dark as a coalbin out when the very last was dumped.
Mr. Aorta returned the truck and fell into an exhausted, though not unpleasant, sleep.
The next day was heralded by the distant clangor of church bells and the chink-chink of Mr. Aorta's spade, leveling the displaced graveyard soil, distributing it and grinding it in with the crusty earth. It had a continental look, this new dirt: swarthy, it seemed, black and saturnine: not at all dry, though the sun was already quite hot.
Soon the greater portion of the yard was covered, and Mr. Aorta returned to his sitting room.
He turned on the radio in time to identify a popular song, marked his discovery on a post card and mailed this away, confident that he would receive either a toaster or a set of nylon hose for his trouble.
Then he wrapped four bundles containing respectively: a can of vitamin capsules, half of them gone; a half-tin of coffee; a half-full bottle of spot remover, a box of soap flakes with most of the soap flakes missing. These he mailed, each with a note curtly expressing his total dissatisfaction, to the companies that had offered them to him on a money-back guarantee.
Now it was dinnertime, and Mr. Aorta beamed in anticipation. He sat down to a meal of sundry delicacies such as anchovies, sardines, mushrooms, caviar, olives and pearl onions. It was not, however, that he enjoyed this type of food for any aesthetic reasons: only that it had all come in packages small enough to be slipped into one's pocket without attracting the attention of busy grocers.
Mr. Aorta cleaned his plates so thoroughly no cat would care to lick them; the empty tins also looked new and bright: even their lids gleamed irridescently.
Mr. Aorta glanced at his checkbook balance, grinned indecently, and went to look out the back window.
The moon was cold upon the yard. Its rays passed over the high fence Mr. Aorta had constructed from free rocks, and splashed moodily onto the new black earth.
Mr. Aorta thought a bit, put away his checkbook and got out the boxes containing the garden seeds.
They were good as new.
Joseph William Santucci's truck was in use every Saturday thereafter for five weeks. This good man watched curiously as his neighbor returned each time with more dirt and yet more, and he made several remarks to his wife about the oddness of it all, but she could not bear even to talk about Mr. Aorta.
"He's robbed us blind," she said. "Look! He wears your old clothes, he uses my sugar and spices and borrows everything else he can think of! Borrows, did I say? I mean steals. For years! I have not seen the man pay for a thing yet! Where does he work that he makes so little money?"
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Santucci knew that Mr. Aorta's daily labors involved sitting on the sidewalk downtown, with dark glasses on and a battered tin cup in front of him. They'd both passed him several times, though, and given him pennies, both unable to penetrate the clever disguise. It was all kept, the disguise, in a free locker at the railroad terminal.
"Here he comes again, that loony!" Mrs. Santucci wailed.
Soon it was time to plant the seeds, and Mr. Aorta went about this with ponderous precision, after having consulted numerous books at the library. Neat rows of summer squash were sown in the richly dark soil; and peas, corn, beans, onions, beets, rhubarb, asparagus, water cress and much more, actually. When the rows were filled and Mr. Aorta was stuck with extra packs, he smiled and dispersed strawberry seeds and watermelon seeds and seeds without clear description. Shortly the paper packages were all empty.
A few days passed and it was getting time to go to the cemetery again for a fresh load, when Mr. Aorta noticed an odd thing.
The dark ground had begun to yield to tiny eruptions. Closer inspection revealed that things had begun to grow. In the soil.
Now Mr. Aorta knew very little about gardening, when you got right down to it. He thought it strange, of course, but he was not alarmed. He saw things growing, that was the important point. Things that would become food.
Praising his good fortune, he hurried to Lilyvale and there received a singular disappointment: Not many people had died lately. There was scant little dirt to be had: hardly one truckful.
Ah well, he thought, things are bound to pick up over the holidays; and he took home what there was.
Its addition marked the improvement of the garden's growth. Shoots and buds came higher, and the expanse was far less bleak.
He could not contain himself until the next Saturday, for obviously this dirt was acting as some sort of fertilizer on his plants-the free food called out for more.
But the next Saturday came a cropper. Not even a shovel's load. And the garden was beginning to desiccate .
Mr. Aorta's startling decision came as a result of trying all kinds of new dirt and fertilizers of every imaginable description (all charged under the name of Uriah Gringsby). Nothing worked. His garden, which had promised a full bounty of edibles, had sunk to new lows: it was almost back to its original state. And this Mr. Aorta could not abide, for he had put in considerable labor on the project and this labor must not be wasted. It had deeply affected his other enterprises.
So-with the caution born of desperateness, he entered the gray quiet place with the tombstones one night, located freshly dug but unoccupied graves and added to their six-foot depth yet another foot. It was not noticeable to anyone who was not looking for such a discrepancy.
No need to mention the many trips involved: it is enough to say that in time Mr. Santucci's truck, parked a block away, was a quarter filled. The following morning saw a rebirth in the garden.

And so it went. When dirt was to be had, Mr. Aorta was obliged; when it was not-well, it wasn't missed. And the garden kept growing and growing, until-
As if overnight, everything opened up! Where so short a time past had been a parched little prairie, was now a multifloral, multi-vegetable paradise. Corn bulged yellow from its spiny green husks; peas were brilliant green in their half-split pods, and all the other wonderful foodstuffs glowed full rich with life and showcase vigor. Rows and rows of them, and cross rows!
Mr. Aorta was almost felled by enthusiasm.
A liver for the moment and an idiot in the art of canning, he knew what he had to do.
It took a while to systematically gather up the morsels, but with patience, he at last had the garden stripped clean of all but weeds and leaves and other unedibles.
He cleaned. He peeled. He stringed. He cooked. He boiled. He took all the good free food and piled it geometrically on tables and chairs and continued with this until it was all ready to be eaten.
Then he began. Starting with the asparagus-he decided to do it in alphabetical order-he ate and ate clear through beets and celery and parsley and rhubarb, paused there for a drink of water, and went on eating, being careful not to waste a jot, until he came to water cress. By this time his stomach was twisting painfully, but it was a sweet pain, so he took a deep breath and, by chewing slowly, did away with the final vestigial bit of food.
The plates sparkled white, like a series of bloated snowflakes. It was all gone.
Mr. Aorta felt an almost sexual satisfaction-by which is meant, he had had enough… for now. He couldn't even belch.
Happy thoughts assailed his mind, as follows: His two greatest passions had been fulfilled; life's meaning acted out symbolically, like a condensed Everyman. These two things only are what this man thought of.
He chanced to look out the window.
What he saw was a bright speck in the middle of blackness. Small, somewhere at the end of the garden-faint yet distinct.
With the effort of a brontosaurus emerging from a tar pit Mr. Aorta rose from his chair, walked to the door and went out into his emasculated garden. He lumbered past dangling grotesqueries formed by shucks and husks and vines.
The speck seemed to have disappeared, and he looked carefully in all directions, slitting his eyes, trying to get accustomed to the moonlight.
Then he saw it. A white fronded thing, a plant, perhaps only a flower; but there, certainly, and all that was left.
Mr. Aorta was surprised to see that it was located at the bottom of a shallow declivity in the ground, very near the dead tree. He couldn't remember how a hole could have got dug in his garden, but there were always neighborhood kids and their pranks. A lucky thing he'd grabbed the food when he did!
Mr. Aorta leaned over the edge of the small pit and reached down his hand toward the shining plant. It resisted his touch, somehow. He leaned farther over and still a little farther, and still he couldn't lay fingers on the thing.
Mr. Aorta was not an agile man. However, with the intensity of a painter trying to cover one last tiny spot awkwardly placed, he leaned just a mite farther and plosh! he'd toppled over the edge and landed with a peculiarly wet thud. A ridiculous damned bother, too: now he'd have to make a fool of himself, clambering out again. But, the plant: He searched the floor of the pit, and searched it, and no plant could be found. Then he looked up and was appalled by two things: Number One, the pit had been deeper than he'd thought; Number Two, the plant was wavering in the wind above him, on the rim he had so recently occupied.
The pains in Mr. Aorta's stomach got progressively worse. Movements increased the pains. He began to feel an overwhelming pressure in his ribs and chest.
It was at this moment of his discovery that the top of the hole was up beyond his reach that he saw the white plant in full moonglow. It looked rather like a hand, a big human hand, waxy and stiff and attached to the earth. The wind hit it and it moved slightly, causing a rain of dirt pellets to fall upon Mr. Aorta's face.
He thought a moment, judged the whole situation, and began to climb. But the pains were too much and he fell, writhing.
The wind came again and more dirt was scattered down into the hole: soon the strange plant was being pushed to and fro against the soil, and dirt fell more and more heavily. More and more, more heavily and more heavily.
Mr. Aorta, who had never up to this point found occasion to scream, screamed. It was quite successful, despite the fact that no one heard it.
The dirt came down, and presently Mr. Aorta was to his knees in damp soil. He tried rising, and could not.
And the dirt came down from that big white plant flip-flopping in the moonlight and the wind.
After a while Mr. Aorta's screams took on a muffled quality.
For a very good reason.
Then, some time later, the garden was just as still and quiet as it could be.
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph William Santucci found Mr. Aorta. He was lying on the floor in front of several tables. On the tables were many plates. The plates on the tables were clean and shining.
Mr. Aorta's stomach was distended past burst belt buckle, popped buttons and forced zipper. It was not unlike the image of a great white whale rising curiously from placid, forlorn waters.
"Ate hisself to death," Mrs. Santucci said in the fashion of the concluding line of a complex joke.
Mr. Santucci reached down and plucked a tiny ball of soil from the fat man's dead lips. He studied it. And an idea came to him.
He tried to get rid of the idea, but when the doctors found Mr. Aorta's stomach to contain many pounds of dirt-and nothing else, to speak of-Mr. Santucci slept badly, for almost a week.
They carried Mr. Aorta's body through the weeded but otherwise empty and desolate back yard, past the mournful dead tree and the rock fence.
They gave him a decent funeral, out of the goodness of their hearts, since no provision had been made.
And then they laid him to rest in a place with a moldering green woodboard wall: the wall had a little sign nailed to it.
And the wind blew absolutely Free.