Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (9 page)

—Angus

PS: This will play heck with Daylight Summer Time.

* * *

Teeheezal was asleep when the whole force burst into his office and Sgt. Hank started unlocking the rack with the riot guns and rifles.

“What the ding-dong?” yelled Teeheezal, getting up off the floor.

“They say Pancho Villa’s coming!” yelled a patrolman. “He knocked over a coupla banks in New Mexico!”

Teeheezal held up his hand. They all stopped moving. He sat back down in his chair and put his feet back up on his desk.

“Call me when he gets to Long Beach,” he said.

Sgt. Hank locked the rack back up; then they all tiptoed out of the office.

* * *

“Look out!” “Get ’im! Get him!” “Watch it!!”

The hair-covered man tore the cell bars away and was gone into the moonlit night.

* * *

“Read everything you can, Hank,” said Teeheezal. “Nothing else has worked.”

* * *

“You sure you know what to do?” asked the captain.

“I know exactly
what
to do,” said Patrolman Al. “I just don’t
like
it. Are you sure Sgt. Hank is right?”

“Well, no. But if you got a better idea, tell me.”

Al swallowed hard. He was on his big unicycle, the one with the chain drive.

There was a woman’s scream from across the park.

“Make sure he’s after
you
,” said Teeheezal. “See you at the place. And, Al . . .”

“Say ‘break a leg,’ Captain.”

“Uh . . . break a leg, Al.”

Al was gone. They jumped in the police patrol truck and roared off.

* * *

They saw them coming through the moonlight, something on a wheel and a loping shape.

Al was nearly horizontal as he passed, eyes wide, down the ramp at the undertaker’s, and across the cellar room. Patrolman Buster closed his eyes and jerked the vault door open at the second before Al would have smashed into it. Al flew in, chain whizzing, and something with hot meat breath brushed Buster.

Patrolman Al went up the wall and did a flip. The thing crashed into the wall under him. As Al went out, he jerked the broken baseball bat out of the guy it had been in for two years.

There was a hiss and a snarl behind him as he went out the door that Buster, eyes still closed, slammed to and triple-locked; then Mack and Billy dropped the giant steel bar in place.

Al stopped, then he and the unicycle fainted.

There were crashes and thumps for two hours, then whimpering sounds and squeals for a while.

They went in and beat what was left with big bars of silver, and put the broken Louisville Slugger back in what was left of the hole.

* * *

As they were warming their hands at the dying embers of the double fire outside the undertaker’s that night, it began to snow. Before it was over, it snowed five inches.

1917

T
HE CAPTAIN WALKED BY
the
No Smooching
sign in the park on his way to talk to a local store owner about the third break-in in a month. The first two times the man had complained about the lack of police concern, first to Teeheezal, then the mayor.

Last night it had happened again, while Patrolmen Al and Billy had been watching the place.

He was on his way to tell the store owner it was an inside job, and to stare the man down. If the break-ins stopped, it had been the owner himself.

He passed by a hashhouse with a sign outside that said “Bratwurst and Sauerkraut 15¢.” As he watched, the cook, wearing his hat and a knee-length apron, pulled the sign from the easel and replaced it with one that said “Victory cabbage and sausage 15¢.”

There was a noise from the alleyway ahead, a bunch of voices “get ’im, get ’im”; then out of the alley ran something Teeheezal at first thought was a rat or a rabbit. But it didn’t move like either of them, though it was moving as fast as it could.

A group of men and women burst out onto the street with rocks and chunks of wood sailing in front of them, thirty feet behind it. It dodged, then more people came from the other side of the street, and the thing turned to run away downtown.

The crowd caught up with it. There was a single yelp, then the thudding sounds of bricks hitting something soft. Twenty people stood over it, their arms moving. Then they stopped and cleared off the street and into the alleyways on either side without a word from anyone.

Teeheezal walked up to the pile of wood and stones with the rivulet of blood coming out from under it.

The captain knew the people to whom the dachshund had belonged, so he put it in a borrowed toe sack, and took that and put it on their porch with a note.
Sorry. Cpt. T.

When he got within sight of the station house, Patrolman Chester came running out. “Captain! Captain!” he yelled.

“I know,” said Teeheezal. “We’re at war with Germany.”

* * *

A month later another postcard arrived. It had a view of the Flatiron Building in New York City, had a Newark New Jersey postmark, and the usual address. On the left back it said:

Well, went to the first Sunday baseball game at the Polo Grounds. New York’s Finest would have made you proud. They stood at attention at the national anthem then waited for the first pitch before they arrested McGraw and Mathewson for the Blue Law violation. You can imagine what happened next. My credo is: When it comes to a choice between a religion and baseball, baseball wins every time. Last time I go to a ball game until they find some way to play it at night. Ha ha. Will write more later.

—Angus

PS: Sorry about Buffalo Bill.

1918

I
F EVERY RUMOR WERE TRUE,
the Huns would be in the White House by now. Teeheezal had just seen a government motion picture (before the regular one) about how to spot the Kaiser in case he was in the neighborhood spreading panic stories or putting cholera germs in your reservoir.

Now, last night, one had spread through the whole California coast about a U-boat landing. Everybody was sure it had happened at San Pedro, or Long Beach, or maybe it was in Santa Barbara, or along the Sun River, or somewhere. And somebody’s cousin or uncle or friend had seen it happen, but when the Army got there there wasn’t a trace.

The blotter had fourteen calls noted. One of them reminded the Wilcox police that the President himself was coming to Denver Colorado for a speech—coincidence, or what?

“I’m tired of war and the rumors of war,” said Teeheezal.

“Well, people out here feel pretty helpless, watching what’s going on ten thousand miles away. They got to contribute to the war effort
somehows
,” said walrus-mustached Patrolman Billy.

* * *

Innocently enough, Patrolmen Mack and Rube decided to swing down by the railroad yards on their way in from patrol. It wasn’t on their beat that night, but Sgt. Fatty had told them he’d seen some fat rabbits down there last week, and, tomorrow being their days off, they were going to check it over before buying new slingshots.

* * *

The patrol wagon careened by, men hanging on for dear life, picked up Teeheezal from his front yard, and roared off toward the railroad tracks.

* * *

The three German sailors went down in a typhoon of shotgun fire and hardly slowed them down at all.

What they did have trouble with was the giant lowland gorilla in the spiked
pickelhaube
helmet, and the eight-foot-high iron automaton with the letter
Q
stenciled across its chest.

* * *

The Federal men were all over the place; in the demolished railyard were two huge boxes marked for delivery to the Brown Palace in Denver.

“Good work, Captain Teeheezal,” said the Secret Service man. “How’d you get the lowdown on this?”

“Ask the two patrolmen,” he said.

At the same time, Mack and Rube said, “Dogged, unrelenting police procedures.”

* * *

The postcard came later than usual that year, after the Armistice.

It was a plain card, one side for the address, the other for the message.

Well, here in Reykjavik things are really hopping. Today they became an independent nation, and the firewater’s flowing like the geysers. It’s going to be a three-day blind drunk for all I can figure. Tell Sgt. Fatty the fish are all as long as your leg here. Pretty neat country; not as cold as the name. Last time I come to a place where nobody’s at work for a week. Will write more later.

—Angus

PS: Read they’re giving women over thirty in Britain the vote—can we be far behind? Ha ha.
PPS: I seem to have a touch of the flu.

1919

S
GT. HANK DIDN’T LOOK UP
from the big thick book in his hand when Teeheezal came out of his office and walked over and poured himself a cup of steaming coffee. Say whatever else about the Peace mess in Europe, it was good to be off rationing again. Teeheezal’s nephew had actually brought home some butter and steaks from a regular grocery store and butcher’s last week.

“What’s Wilson stepping in today?”

No answer.

“Hey!”

“Huh?! Oh, gosh, Chief. Was all wrapped up in this book. What’d you say?”

“Asking about the President. Seen the paper?”

“It’s here somewhere,” said Sgt. Hank. “Sorry, Chief, but this is about the greatest book I ever read.”

“Damn thick square thing,” said Teeheezal. He looked closely at a page. “Hey, that’s a kraut book!”

“Austria. Well, yeah, it’s by a German, but not like any German you ever thought of.”

Teeheezal tried to read it, from what he remembered of when he went to school in Pennsylvania fifty years ago. It was full of two-dollar words, the sentences were a mile long, and the verb was way down at the bottom of the page.

“This don’t make a goddamn bit of sense,” he said. “This guy must be a college perfesser.”

“It’s got a cumulative effect,” said Sgt. Hank. “It’s about the rise of cultures and civilizations, and how Third Century
B.C.
China’s just like France under Napoleon, and how all civilizations grow and get strong, and wither and die. Just like a plant or an animal, like they’re alive themselves. And how when the civilization gets around to being an empire it’s already too late, and they all end up with Caesars and Emperors and suchlike. Gosh, Chief, you can’t imagine. I’ve read it twice already, and every time I get more and more out of it . . .”

“Where’d you get a book like that?”

“My cousin’s a reporter at the Peace Commission conference—somebody told him about it, and he got one sent to me, thought it’d be something I like. I hear it’s already out of print, and the guy’s rewriting it.”

“What else does this prof say?”

“Well, gee. A lot. Like I said, that all civilizations are more alike than not. That everything ends up in winter, like, after a spring and summer and fall.” He pointed to the Cole picture on the wall—today it was
The Pastoral State
. “Like, like the pictures. Only a lot deeper. He says, for instance, that Europe’s time is over—”

“It don’t take a goddamned genius to know
that
,” said Teeheezal.

“No—you don’t understand. He started writing this in 1911, it says. He already knew it was heading for the big blooie. He says that Europe’s turn’s over, being top dog. Now it’s the turn of America . . . and . . . and Russia.”

Teeheezal stared at the sergeant.

“We just fought a fuckin’ war to get rid of ideas like that,” he said. “How much is a book like that worth, you think?”

“Why, it’s priceless, Chief. There aren’t any more of them. And it’s full of great ideas!”

Teeheezal reached in his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar gold piece (six weeks of Sgt. Hank’s pay) and put it on the sergeant’s desk.

He picked up the big book by one corner of the cover, walked over, lifted the stove lid with the handle, and tossed the book in.

“We just settled Germany’s hash,” said Teeheezal. “It comes to it, we’ll settle Russia’s too.”

He picked up the sports section and went into his office and closed the door.

Sgt. Hank sat with his mouth open. He looked back and forth from the gold piece to the stove to the picture to Teeheezal’s door.

He was still doing that when Patrolmen Rube and Buster brought in someone on a charge of drunk and disorderly.

1920

C
APTAIN TEEHEEZAL TURNED HIS MODEL T
across the oncoming traffic at the corner of Conklin and Arbuckle. He ignored the horns and sound of brakes and pulled into his parking place in front of the station house.

A shadow swept across the hood of his car, then another. He looked up and out. Two condors flew against the pink southwest sky where the orange ball of the sun was ready to set.

Sgt. Fatty was just coming into view down the street, carrying his big supper basket, ready to take over the night shift.

Captain Teeheezal had been at a meeting with the new mayor about all the changes that were coming when Wilcox was incorporated as a city.

Sgt. Hank came running out, waving a telegram. “This just came for you.”

Teeheezal tore open the Western Union envelope.

TO: ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS, ALL CITIES, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FROM: OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

1. VOLSTEAD ACT (PROHIBITION) IS NOW LAW STOP ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS EXPECTED TO ENFORCE COMPLIANCE STOP
2. ROUND UP ALL THE REDS STOP

PALMER

Teeheezal and the sergeant raced to punch the big red button on the sergeant’s desk near the three phones. Bells went off in the squad room in the tower atop the station. Sgt. Fatty’s lunch basket was on the sidewalk out front when they got back outside. He reappeared from around back, driving the black box of a truck marked
Police Patrol
, driving with one hand. And cranking the hand siren with the other, until Sgt. Hank jumped in beside him and began working the siren on the passenger side.

Patrolmen came from everywhere, the squad room, the garage, running down the streets, their nightsticks in their hands—Al, Mack, Buster, Chester, Billy, and Rube—and jumped onto the back of the truck, some missing, grabbing the back fender and being dragged until they righted themselves and climbed up with their fellows.