The Complete Roderick (40 page)

The seance was even worse.

‘Now you just sit down there,’ she said, ‘by the African violets, and I’ll sit here in Pa’s chair. And for Pete’s sake, try to get into the correct frame of mind, I don’t want the astral waves all cluttered up with sceptical static’

(‘Saw ’em through the window,’ Miss Violetta Stubbs would
say later. ‘Her and that black man sitting practically in the dark, holding hands and I don’t know what else!’)

But how could he get into the correct frame of mind? The whole game seemed so pathetic, with Ma asking herself questions and then kicking the table leg once for yes twice for no … and not even really acting as if she believed it herself:

‘Is there anybody there?’ she called out, adding with a chuckle, ‘said Walter de la Mare. “Mr Sludge, stop clowning!” said Robert Browning.’ How could she quote her own wretched doggerel at a time like this, and then swing to the other extreme, sighing and sobbing as she rapped away? It made no more sense than the message she finally came up with when, inevitably they got around to automatic writing. The planchette looped and jogged madly under their fingertips, and it was clear to Roderick that Ma was doing it all. The final result began: ‘deaear son, remind your ma thathat i punoqun md poow sdn hpouow wyo-I I …’

‘Maybe it’s one of his funny ciphers,’ Ma suggested. ‘Keep it and work on it.’

‘Oh sure,’ he said, crumpling it into his pocket. ‘A cipher.’

All the same, he kept it and worked on it, if only to stop worrying about Ma.

The rain had stopped too soon, to the delight of Wally Muscatine. He set up his camera while the others (Roderick, Mr Swann, Ma and Miss Violetta Stubbs) lined up next to a hole in the ground. No one knew exactly why Miss Stubbs was here; it was said she came to all the funerals, if only for a ride out into the country. But here she was, smiling down into the oblong hole and saying, ‘Looks like a nice day after all. Nice.’

Mr Swann nodded, which prompted her to say, ‘Nice of Mr Muscatine to demonstrate his new Patent Applied For, isn’t it? And for no charge, I do believe. Very nice.’

They waited. At some distance, the machine was backed up to the hearse – or anyway the hearse was backed up to some kind of big tent made of tarpaulins – and something was almost going on. Cliff kept going into the tent and hammering on steel. Each time he reappeared they all craned hopefully, but it seemed always to be another false alarm; Cliff would grab an oil-can or a wrench and disappear again. With the tombstones, they waited.

At last there was a report, a flash of blue smoke, and a different knocking sound (as though a giant chain-saw had bitten into something indigestible). The tent began to lurch.

Ma looked apprehensive. ‘I suppose that thing’s
safe?’
she shouted over the noise.

Wally winked. ‘No complaints so far!’ and shouted to Cliff to drop the tarps.

Finally the tent collapsed, taking Cliff down with it, but unveiling – Them. Six tall, gleaming figures in stovepipe hats, hoisting between them an insignificant little coffin, and marching in perfect step towards the grave.

‘Very nice,’ gasped Miss Stubbs.

One of the hats backfired. By now they were close enough for Roderick to see that they were real stovepipes, and that their wearers seemed to be made of every kind of junk: he saw a breadbin head, shoulders made from a sewing-machine, arms of beercans and legs of steel rails. And as they suddenly clanged into a tombstone and veered off in a new direction, he noticed something else, something eerie. There was his own childhood skull! now part of a buttock.

The six giant pall-bearers were really part of a single machine, for on each side three legs moved in step, driven by one great driving-rod. Patent Applied For was making poor progress now. It kept ramming tombstones, stopping, turning and marking time with feet so heavy they sank into the wet earth.

‘Turn ’em, Cliff, turn ’em! They’re gettin’ outa frame!’ Mr Muscatine waved his arms, Cliff fiddled with his model-airplane transmitter, and slowly Patent Applied For stumbled towards its destination.

‘At last,’ said Mr Muscatine, sighing. ‘Now tell ’em to stop, Cliff. Cliff?
CLIFF
!’ But They continued their clanking march to the edge of the grave and off it, the first pall-bearers striding on air for a second before the clay walls collapsed under those behind them. And then the whole contraption pitched into the hole, groaning and spluttering, its twelve legs kicking out to bring down the wet clay walls, until almost everything was buried except Pa. ‘Suffering cats!’

When the machine stopped, Mr Muscatine looked around the cemetery. Turf was up, floral arrangements scattered and
trampled, lasting monuments chipped and cracked, a haze of blue smoke hanging over a grave containing two tons of perverse scrap metal, and the coffin – scarred rosewood, bent silver handles – still lying in the grass awaiting burial.

‘Well, Cliff,’ he said. ‘You had your chance. You sure had your chance.’

While they waited for the grave-digging machines to make a new resting-place, Mr Swann got out his briefcase.

‘We might as well get right down to it,’ he said. ‘Plenty to get through here, quite a nice little financial mess. He’d already cashed his insurance, understand he owes the doctor – I was kinda surprised at this elaborate funeral, all this waste just when – but I guess that’s your business, Ma. But I mean two uninsured mortgages plus all this electronic stuff – I got nothing against hobbies but there’s a limit – anyway too bad you don’t have a car to repossess I mean sell. Naturally the house goes back to the Bangfield Trust Bank – there now, there now … maybe you want to sit down?’

Ma staggered and leaned on Roderick’s arm for support. The three of them sat in the grass, dangling their legs into the grave of Patent Applied For.

‘Not all that bad,’ said Mr Swann. ‘Course we gotta fight. Hold off the IRS boys while we try a little debt consolidation, then –’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Roderick. ‘If Pa didn’t have any money, how could there be tax –?’

‘Technically intestate, yes, indigent too only he purchased this electronic stuff as a corporation see? Tax shelter I set up for him, so he could write it all off as depreciable stock using the Class Life – well how did I know he’d up and croak on us? Now the stuff has to be inventoried and sold, taxed as corporate profits sure, but the other stockholders want to liquidate and cut their losses.’

‘Other stockholders?’ Roderick asked. ‘Who?’

‘Me, my wife and kids.’ Swann licked his thumb and began dealing papers out on the grass. ‘I feel we can work all this out by consolidating these debts, re-negotiate at a more favourable rate of interest. Should come out to something like a hundred and eighty-five thou, excluding the usual – but listen, all we have to do is, Ma, you listening? All we have to do is your Roderick here
forms a finance company, takes over the whole debt and then discounts pieces of it to a few banks –’

Roderick stared down into the grave. ‘But you said I’m not a person in law, how can I –?’

‘But your company
is
a person in law, see? So it doesn’t matter what you yourself are as long as you’re not a crook or a bankrupt. But what I was just getting to, you got terrific collateral, very expensive electronic gadget in perfect working order – yourself. Assuming you got a clear title, of course. I already filed a writ of
habeas
for you there, no problem, some of the legal technicalities might cost a little, sure, but we can cover that by suing Welby.’

‘Doctor Welby?’ Ma looked faint again. ‘Sue him – for what?’

‘Never mind, once we start digging we’re bound to come up with something. Went around saying Pa was healthy a few days before he became a decedant, didn’t he? There you are, breach of patient privacy, mis-diagnosis – we’ll pick up
half a million
there, easy. Then we sue Muscatine here. I can see his gadget caused you a total breakdown – but Welby’s the real mother lode. Let his receptionist sign the death certificate, looks like, got the name and cause of death in the wrong places –
half a million,
believe me.’

Roderick looked up. ‘But wouldn’t that cover our debts?’

‘No, barely covers costs in your claim for title, see, first we gotta file this writ of
habeas
to keep anybody else like this Kratt Industries from slapping a claim on you, then we gotta go through one of these procedures I outlined before, what we want is a clear title over your body … this has to take time … costs … but when you own your body you can sell it like any other chattel, see, borrow money on it, anything …’

Roderick stopped listening to stare down at his childhood skull. Inside that hollow piece of tin, I was.

Miss Violetta Stubbs did not wait to take off her hat when she got home. She went straight to the crocheted doll covering her telephone, removed it, and punched a number.

‘Doreen? Listen I was just at the funeral, Pa Wood you know … the Guild? No wait listen,
she
was flirting with this
black man
right there in front of everybody! Leaning on his arm! Listen they sat right down and stuck their feet right in the ga-rave! And that … yes but listen, that’s not all. If I hadn’t heard it myself I
wouldn’t believe it either, but there they were, bold as brass, with a lawyer, talking about cutting up half a million dollars! Half a … and poor Pa not even covered up with earth yet – oh yes, and there’s something very wrong with the death certificate! Well I can put two and two togeth … wouldn’t put it past her, would you?

‘Now this Guild thing, I’m sorry but it looks like they’ve sent us the wrong speaker … yes
again
… I don’t know … must be something wrong with their computer … No listen, I wanted the Reverend Capon just as much as you dear … But listen, we can have Positive Breathing
next
month then, we’ll just have to put up … I say we’ll just have to put up with this, this Miz Indica Dinks,
whoever
she is, she’s going to speak on
something
called Machines Liberation … neither do I, but I certainly don’t intend to just sit home tomorrow night, do you? And so what if she
is a
Communist we can always just walk out and leave her cold … Doreen, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

That night when Ma went out for her walk, Roderick followed. At first they headed for Main Street, past the post office, the Courthouse, Simms’s Do-It-Ur-Self, the Idle Hour (where a few men lounging on car bumpers drinking beer gave him hard looks) and the place that had once been Selma’s Beautee Salon but was now called
HAIR TODAY
. But then Ma turned off by the library, headed down Church Street and straight on out of town. Was she lost? Or just nuts? Because there was nothing out this way, not even lights. Just the darkness and the gravel road leading out to Howdy Doody Lake.

Roderick didn’t like it. If he dropped back too far, she might turn off somewhere and disappear. If he kept too close, she might hear his footsteps on gravel. There didn’t seem to be any distance at all between too close and too far, and he could think of only two other answers: go home, or catch up with her and pretend it was just a coincidental meeting. (‘Hello Ma. Pa told me he didn’t want anything upstairs, said I should get out and get some fresh air like you. Funny we both decided to go this way, ain’t it? Odds against it must be, let’s see … Well sure I know
most
robots don’t need fresh air, guess I must be different …’)

Ma wouldn’t want company. In fact she was acting kind of
stealthy,
walking too quietly on the gravel, stopping every now and then (to listen?). Like an international spy on his way to the hollow tree. Was she meeting someone? Was she, was she … but spies made him think of the cipher in his pocket, and that made him think of Pa, Pa and this miserable little old woman hobbling along in her bare feet in the middle of the night.

A penance, that was more like it. Offered up to reduce Pa’s days in Purgatory, his time off for her good behaviour. She must love him a lot.

Or maybe she hated him a lot. Sure it was her cooking that used up that million dollars’ worth of gas, caused Pa to take one look at the bill and keel over. Probably she felt relieved (‘So much for chickens and damn dumplings!’) and probably that made her feel guilty. Walking it off, trying to walk it off, not knowing it really came from her unhappy childhood, those early traumas causing horizontal cracks in the ego structure for which she could never forgive her father, hence Pa, hence herself. And even now unconsciously she was humming that tune: ‘Take me to the river, deliver me to the lake …’

Well suicides are stealthy. Roderick resisted the impulse to rush forward and stop her, before the cathartic moment when – but holy mackerel, didn’t she know it was a
sin?
St Augustine said if you were a pure, innocent person suicide was twice as bad because then you were guilty of murdering a pure, innocent person – something wrong with that maybe but sin was sin. And even if John Donne thought that suicide was no self-murder, that Jesus Christ had killed himself on the Cross by just taking a breath and blowing out his soul (but then how did he get it back three days later?), sin was sin.

Unless maybe Ma was thinking of a
literary
suicide! But then why pick this lake? It was so shallow that any man could be an island, and its history was no deeper than its dirty waters. Even the name sounded like reconstituted orange juice, who wanted to drown in Howdy Doody, that’s just asking for obscurity. Unless maybe she wanted to make a protest: life is shallow, art is shallower … poop on the world!

A protest, though, might be a real protest about the real world, a focus for the historical perspective, sure because look at greedy capitalist
entrepreneurs
like Welby and Bangfield, putting up their
so-called leisure complex right on the shores of good old Howdy Doody Lake. There once silvery fish leapt, jewel-bright dragon-flies hovered near a silent canoe in which a lean red man glided o’er the glassy waters to claim his bride; they would live simply, in peace with Brother Nature.

Okay, okay it was an artificial lake only about fifty years old, but same principle – once the horny-handed farmer sat down on these shores to eat his lunch, feeling the good warm earth and smelling the clean wind – then along came lakeside cottages and water-skiers and the Welby-Bangfield Leisure Complex, profit heaped on profit, fat men in silk hats and striped pants puffing their cigars and laughing themselves sick at the idea of poor honest men standing in breadlines in cities where the buildings were heaped up like piles of gold – but one day the gold would trickle away into the dust, the cities tumble down, the silk hats rot as tatters of striped pants flapped in a new wind of change, as the expropriators got expropriated to pieces. Only that didn’t sound much like Ma either. Probably she just wanted to join Pa.