Riverworld and Other Stories Page 12

  Poor old Blotch didn’t know what was going on.

  Me, though, I seen enough science-fiction movies to guess that these two was opposing secret agents from far-off planets operating on this world. It was easier to believe that than what Blotch believed. As it turned out, before J.C. left—in a UFO, I suppose—he verified the whole thing, though he was cagey about details.

  He excused himself then and manhandled Bub up into the hills where he stashed him some place while waiting for the spaceship. And there was a happy ending like they had in the good old grade-B western movies I loved when I was a kid and wish they was still making. It’s true J.C. didn’t marry the ranch-owner’s daughter, which was a shame if he was equipped anything like Bub. As for Mrs. Lott, she begged something pitiful to be taken away with Bub. I think she had visions of a whole planetful of humdingers with double-pillared electrical piledrivers ripe for the plucking, or whatever.

  She said she’d give Rich her whole fortune if she could go along. I never did hear how that came out. But I know Rich got his money and she never came back to the ranch.

  Maybe Lott’s wife did turn into a pillar of salt. More likely, assault of pillars.

  J.C. didn’t swear us to silence. He said we could tell everybody the story ’cause nobody was going to believe it. ’Cept maybe some flying-saucer nuts, and who cared about them?

  Like Grandpa said, “Truth will out, but it’s generally got no place to go.”

  Blotch just couldn’t believe them two was only aliens from other planets. He’d built up a whole world that didn’t exist, one in which even if he got killed he was going to be a big-shot sheep and go to heaven while us goats went to hell. He run off without waiting to be introduced to J.C., shaking his head and screaming about speaking in brass tongues and the clash of simples. Something from the Bible, I suppose.

  J.C. not leaving until the next night, he took me to the Last Chance for a little talk over drinks. He told me something about his spread out in the stars but not what he was doing here on Earth. I figured I was better off not knowing.

  We was on our fifth—glass, not bottle—when all of a sudden the hubbub dies down. I look up and seen what the hush was about, the unthinkable. Blotch was standing inside the doorway, the batwings swinging behind him. It was the first time he ever set foot in a saloon and maybe the last time, though I ain’t so sure about that. What followed was sheer pathetic.

  He was white as toilet paper and shaking like an outhouse in a hurricane. At first I thought maybe he’d come in for a showdown, was going to call J.C. out into the street. I seen too many Westerns, I guess. But he wasn’t wearing guns. Anyway, no matter how screwed-up he was, even with a posse behind him he wasn’t going to tackle anybody that wore a halo under his hat and who knows what under his Levis.

  Blotch walks up stiff-legged to the bar and planks down a five-dollar bill.

  “Drinks for Soapy, Mr. Marison, and me.”

  That almost knocked me flat. Whoever would of thought the preacher would do such a thing? Aside from his other principles, he was a cheapskate.

  Everybody started buzzing then, wondering what’d happened. We downed the redeye, and after Blotch quit choking, he looked with his watery eyes straight into J.C.’s sad eyes. Then, as if the booze’d given him Dutch courage, he speaks.

  “You’re the son of God!”

  J.C. looked grim-faced.

  “Smile when you call me that, stranger.”

  The Volcano

  Foreword

  This is one of my fictional-author stories. Just what a “fictional author” is is explained in the foreword to “The Phantom of the Sewers.” Suffice it here that this tale was originally bylined by “Paul Chapin.” The editorial preface below explains just who Chapin was.

  Writing as Chapin, I made his private-detective character, Curtius Parry (note the initial letters of the name), a cripple. I imagined that all of Chapin’s protagonists would be handicapped in some fashion.

  Editorial Preface:

  Though no biography of Paul Chapin has yet been published, millions know of the man and his works. The most complete account of him is given in The League of Frightened Men, the second volume in the biography of the great detective, Nero Wolfe. We do know that Paul Chapin was born in 1891, that he early showed signs of both brilliance and a Swiftian attitude toward the world, and that he was crippled for life during a hazing incident at Harvard. The critics claim that this event markedly influenced his fictional works, which have been described as hymns to the brute beauty of violence. Chapin’s first novel was published in 1929; his best known are The Iron Heel (dramatized on Broadway) and Devil Take the Hindmost. The latter was a best-seller in 1934, perhaps because of the publicity caused by its suppression during a court trial. Its alleged obscenity would seem innocuous today. It was at this time that he became a murder suspect but was proved innocent by Wolfe. Chapin repaid Wolfe by putting him in his next novel under the name of Nestor. Whale and killing him off in a particularly gruesome fashion. The Volcano is, like all of Chapin’s stories, about murder, savagery, and physical and psychic violence. But this tale differs in that it has little of the rhetoric found in his novels, and in that it may be—though we can’t be sure—a fantasy.

  1.

  It was easier to believe in ghosts than in a volcano in a Catskills cornfield.

  Curtius Parry, private detective, believed in the volcano because the newspapers and the radio stations had no reason to lie. For additional evidence, he had a letter from his friend, the Globe reporter, Edward Malone. As he sat in the rear of his limousine traveling over the Greene County blacktop, he was holding in his hand the letter that Malone had sent him two days before.

  It was dated April 1, 1935, and it was from Bonnie Havik.

  Dear Mr. Parry,

  I got to talk a few minutes with Mr. Malone without my pa and brothers hearing me. He said he’d send a note from me to you if I could slip it to him. Here it is. I don’t have much time, I am writing this down in the basement, they think I’m getting some pear preserves. Please, Mr. Parry, help me. The sheriff here is no good, he’s dumb as a sheep. They say Wan ran off after my pa and brothers beat him up. I don’t think so, I think they did something worse to him. I don’t dare tell anybody around here about Wan because everybody’d hate me. Wan is a Mexican. Please do come! I’m so afraid!

  According to Malone’s accompanying note, “Wan” was Juan Tizoc. He’d come up from Mexico a few years before, probably illegally, and had wandered around the country, either begging or working on farms. When last heard of, he’d been a hired hand for the Haviks for three months. He’d slept in a little room in the loft of the barn. Malone had tried to look into it, but its door was padlocked. The sheriff, Huisman, when asked by Malone about Tizoc, had replied that he seemed to have been scared off by the volcano.

  Tizoc, Parry thought. That name did not come from Spain. It was indigenous to Mexico, probably Aztec, undoubtedly Nahuatl. Bonnie’s description of him had been passed on by Malone. He was short and stocky and had obviously Nahuatl features, a sharp nose with wide nostrils, slightly protruding blocky teeth, and a wide mouth. When he smiled, Bonnie had said, his face lit up like lightning in the sky.

  Bonnie was crazy about him. But Tizoc must have been crazy, in the original sense, to have messed around with a white girl in this isolated Catskills community. It was only three years ago, outside a village ten miles away, that a Negro hitchhiker had been murdered because he had ridden in the front seat with the white woman who’d picked him up.

  Malone had enclosed a note with Bonnie’s note and a preliminary report from the geologists on the scene.

  This girl has been, and is being, brutalized by her father and brothers. Her mother also maltreated her, but she, as you know, was killed four days ago by a rock ejected from the volcano. Bonnie has a hideous scar on her face which local gossip says resulted from a red-hot poker wielded by her father. And I saw some bruises on her arms that looked pretty fres
h.

  On the other hand, some of the yokels say that she might have “it” coming. They cite the strange phenomena which allegedly took place on the Havik property when Bonnie was eleven. Apparently, spontaneous fires sprang up in the house and the barn, and she was blamed for this. She was beaten and locked up in the basement, and after a year the phenomena ceased. Or so the villagers say.

  There are some here who’ll tell you, whether or not you ask them, that Bonnie is at “it” again. It’s plain they think that Bonnie is psychically responsible for the volcano, that she has strange powers. And some nonlocal nuts, visitors from Greenwich Village and Los Angeles and other points south of sanity, go along with this theory. It’s all nonsense, of course, but be prepared for some wild talk and maybe some wild action.

  The geologists’ report had been made two days after the field had cracked open and had vomited white-hot lava and white-hot steam. The report was intended for the public but would not be released until the governor had given his permission. Apparently, he did not want to have anything published which would panic downstate New York. Malone had lifted (read: stolen) a copy of it.

  The report began in informing the public that the Catskills were not of volcanic origin. The underlying rock was mainly of sedimentary origin, massive beds of sandstone and conglomerates. Under the sandstone were shales.

  Yet, unaccountably, the sandstone and the shale were being so heated by some fierce agency that they flowed white-hot and spewed forth from the vent in the cornfield. Pieces of sandstone, heated to a semiliquid, were being hurled outward across the field. Much of the propulsive force seemed to be steam, water of meteoric origin, which exploded beneath the rocks and cannoned them out.

  The geologists, after analyzing the gases and the ashes expelled from the cone, had shaken their heads. Based on the analysis of volcanic gases collected at Kilauea, Hawaii, in 1919, the following average composition, or something like it, should have been found: water 70.75 percent, carbon dioxide 14.07 percent, carbon monoxide 0.40 percent, hydrogen 0.33 percent, nitrogen 5.45 percent, argon 0.18 percent, sulfur dioxide 6.40 percent, sulfur trioxide 1.92 percent, sulfur 0.10 percent, and chlorine 0.05 percent.

  The composition of the gases from the Havik volcano, by parts per hundredweight, was: oxygen 65, carbon 18, hydrogen 10.5, nitrogen 3.0, calcium 1.5, phosphorous 0.9, potassium 0.4, sulfur 0.3, chlorine 0.15, sodium 0.15, magnesium 0.05, iron 0.006, and other traces of elements 0.004.

  Suspended in the hot H2O ejected, which formed the bulk of the gases, were particles of sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium bicarbonate. There was also much carbon dioxide, and there were particles of charred carbon.

  The sandstone lava flowed from the cone at a temperature of 710 degrees C.

  Parry read the list three times, frowning until he had put the paper down. Then he smiled and said, “Ha!”

  The chauffeur said, “What, sir?”

  “Nothing, Seton,” Parry said. But he muttered, “The geologists are so close to it that they don’t see it, even if it’s elementary. But, surely, it can’t be! It just can’t!”

  2.

  A few minutes after 1 p.m., the limousine entered Roosville. This looked much like every other isolated agricultural center in southeastern New York. It reminded Parry of the Indiana village in which he had been raised except that it was cleaner and much less squalid. He made some inquiries at the gas station and was directed to Doom’s boardinghouse. Rooms were scarce due to the deluge of visitors attracted by the volcano, but Malone had arranged for Parry to double up with him. Seton was to sleep on a cot in the basement. Mrs. Doorn, however, was obviously smitten by the tall, hawkishly handsome stranger from Manhattan. His empty left coat-sleeve, far from embarrassing her, intrigued her. She asked him if he had lost the arm in the war, and she excused her bluntness with the remark that the recent death of her husband was the long-term effect of a wound suffered at St.-Mihiel.

  “I was wounded, too,” Parry said. “At Belleau Wood.” He did not add that it was two .45 bullets from a hood’s gun which had severed his arm four years ago in a Bowery dive.

  A few minutes later, Seton and Parry rode eastward out on the gravel road that met the blacktop in the center of town. It twisted and turned as if it were a snake whose head was caught in a wolf’s jaws. It writhed up and down hills thick with a mixture of needle-leaf and broad-leaf trees. It passed along a deep rocky glen, one of the many in the Catskills.

  Violence long ago had created the glens, Parry thought. But that was violence which resulted naturally from the geologic structure of the area. The volcano had also been born of violence, but it was unexpected and unnatural. Its presence in the Catskills was as unexplainable as a dinosaur’s.

  The limousine, rounding a corner of trees, was suddenly on comparatively flat ground. A quarter-mile down the road was the Havik farm: a large two-story wooden building, painted white, and a large red barn. And, behind it, a plume of white steam mixed with dark particles.

  The car pulled up at the end of a long line of vehicles parked with the left wheels on the gravel and the right on the soft muddy shoulder. Parry and Seton got out and walked along the cars to the white picket fence enclosing the front yard. Standing there. Parry could see over the heads of the crowd lining the cornfield and past the edge of the barn. In the middle of the broad field was a truncated cone about ten feet high, its sides gnarled and reddish, irresistibly reminding him of a wound which alternately dried up and then bled again, over and over. A geyser of steam spurted from it, and a minute after he had arrived, a glow appeared on the edges of the crater, was reflected by the steam, and then its origin crawled over the black edges. It was white-hot lava, sandstone pushed up from below, oozing out to spread horizontally and to build vertically.

  It seemed to him that the ground trembled slightly at irregular intervals as if the thumps of a vast but dying heart were coming through the earth from far away. This must be his imagination, since the scientists had reported an absence of the expected seismic disturbances. Yet—the people in the crowd along the field and in the yard were looking uneasily at each other. There was too much white of eye shown, too much clearing of throat, too much shuffling and backward stepping. Something had gone through the crowd, something that might spook them if the least thing untoward happened.

  The door of the county sheriffs car, parked by the gateway, opened, and Sheriff Huisman got out and waddled up to Parry. He was short but very fat, a bubble of fat which smoked a cheap stinking cigar and glared with narrow red eyes in a red face at Parry. Indeed, Parry thought, he was not so much a bubble of fat as a vessel of blood about to burst.

  The thin lips in the thick face said, “You got business here, mister?”

  Parry looked at the crowd. Some were obviously reporters or scientists. The majority just as obviously were locals who had no business beyond sightseeing. But the sheriff wasn’t going to antagonize voters.

  “Not unless you call curiosity a business,” Parry said. There was no need to identify himself as yet, and he could operate better if the Roosville law wasn’t watching him.

  “Okay, you can go in,” Huisman said. “But it’ll cost you a dollar apiece, if your man’s coming in, too.”

  “A dollar?”

  “Yeah. The Haviks been having a tough time, what with their silo burned down and old lady Havik killed only four days ago by a stone from that volcano and people stomping around destroying their privacy and getting in the way. They gotta make it up some way.”

  Parry gestured at Seton, who gave the sheriff two dollars, and they went through the gateway. They threaded through the crowd in the barnyard, passed a Pathé news crew, and halted at the edge of the field. This was mainly mud because of the recent heavy rains. Any weeds on it had been burned off by the large and small lava “bombs” hurled by the volcano. These lay everywhere, numbering perhaps several hundred. When ejected, they had been roughly spherical, but the impact of landing had flattened out the half-liquid rocks. A
s Seton remarked, these made the field look like a pasture on which stone cows browsed.

  The lava had ceased flowing and was slowly turning red as it cooled. Parry turned to look at the back of the barn, which was broken here and there and marked with a number of black spots. A few stones had evidently also struck the back of the house, since the windows were all boarded up except for those protected by the overhang of the porch roof.

  A man appeared from around the corner of the barn. Smiling, his hand extended, he strode up to Parry. “Son of a gun, Cursh!” he said. “I wasn’t really sure you’d come! After all, your client can’t pay you anything!”

  3.

  Parry, grinning and shaking his hand, said, “I donate one case a year to charity. Anyway, I’d pay my client in this case.”

  Ed Malone greeted Seton and then said, “I’ve found out some things I didn’t have time to report. The locals admit that the volcano is an act of God, but they still think that maybe God wrought it in order to punish the Haviks. They’re not much liked around here. They’re stand-offish, they seldom attend church, they’re drunk night and day, they’re slovenly. Above all, the villagers don’t like the way the family treats Bonnie, even if, as they say, she is ‘sorta strange’.”

  “What about Tizoc?”

  “Nobody’s seen him. Of course, nobody’s really looking for him. Bonnie hasn’t said anything to the sheriff because she’s afraid he’ll spill the beans to her family, and then she’ll suffer. She’ll be trying to get out today to see you but …”