Dangerous Visions (42 page)

He spat out what was in his mouth and pegged the rest of the bit of giant-popover skull across the street.

He fished in his left pocket. Most of the pale poker chips had been mashed in the fight, but he found a whole one and explored its surface with his fingertips. The symbol embossed on it was a cross. He lifted it to his lips and took a bite. It tasted delicate, but delicious. He ate it and felt his strength revive. He patted his bulging left pocket. At least he'd start out well provisioned.

Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world.

Afterword:

The story of the bogeyman is the oldest and best in the world, because it is the story of courage, of fear vanquished by knowledge gained by plunging into the unknown at risk or seeming risk: the discovery that the terrifying white figure is nothing but a man with a sheet over his head, or perhaps a black man smeared with white ashes. Primitive tribes such as the Australian aborigines ritualized the bogeyman story in their initiation ceremonies for boys and today we need it as much as ever. For the modern American male, as for Joe Slattermill, the ultimate bogey may turn out to be the Mom figure: domineering-dependent Wife or Mother, exaggerating their claims on him beyond all reason and bound. Science itself is a battle against such bogeys as Cancer Is Incurable, Sex Is Filthy, Backbreaking Toil Is Man's Lot Forever, People Can't Fly, the Stars Are Out of Reach, Man Was Not Meant to Know (or Do) This, That, or the Other. At least that was how I was feeling when I wrote "Gonna Roll the Bones."

I chose the American tall tale as a form (or it chose me) because the space age precision-fits the wild credulity-straining exploits of legendary figures such as Mike Fink, Pecos Pete, Tony Beaver, the steel-driving John Henry, and the space-striding though dubious Paul Bunyan, one quarter genuine north-woods article, three quarters twentieth century invention. I got a kick out of making a final story point out of the elementary proposition in solid geometry that between any two points on a sphere like Earth there are always two straight or direct great-circle routes, even if one is only a mile long and the other 24,000. A wild talent for crap shooting isn't just a gambler's dream; psychokinesis exercised on dice has long been a field of experimental inquiry among university researchers into extrasensory perception. I enjoyed pumping the lingo of dice for its poetry and mixing space flight with witchcraft, which is just another word for the powers of self-hypnotism, prayer, suggestion and the whole subconscious mind. It's a mistake to think that science fiction is an off-trail and posted literary area; it can be an ingredient of any sort of fiction, just as science and technology today enter into our lives at every point.

We were plunging
up
a dangerously twisting valley road in Madison, Indiana. The tires squealed like shoats and I cowered in a far-right corner of the front seat. It was a
big
car, and he continually executed four-wheel drifts around curves that sent the back wheels over the edge. I got one clear view down into the green and handsome valley in which Madison nestled as we tipped precariously, and he accelerated going into another turn. Behind us, I suddenly heard the growler of an Indiana State Trooper as his gumball machine flashed a warning red. He was coming up on us fast. The speed limit was twenty on these lunatic curves, but the lunatic behind the wheel was doing almost seventy. I was grateful for the fuzz coming up on us; I might spend the night in the slammer as unwilling accomplice to the driver, but by God I'd be alive to be arraigned. The driver could clearly see the fuzzmobile in his rear-view, but he didn't seem to give a damn. He floored the accelerator and the big sedan surged around another curve. I think I screamed. (Most unusual for me. I used to drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina, than whose roads there are none twistier, and I'm not easily shook. But aside from Norman Spinrad's driving, I'm a good passenger, also having raced sports cars. But
this
time . . .)

Finally we mounted the crest of the hill and the big sedan let out full. Around 110 I yowled for the driver to stop before that bloody Indiana cop sailed right up our tailpipe. He grinned lopsidedly—which is the
only
way he can smile—and hit the brakes. We slewed to a stop, half into the oncoming lane, and I collapsed against the seat. The fuzzmobile jazzed in and around us, barely missing us, and locked brakes. The whipcord cop came on the run, his face spotted with fury. He took seven-league strides and was shrieking even before he got his head in the window. His gun was drawn. "You dumb sonofabitch!" he yelled, the throat cords standing out in cunning relief. "You know how fast you were goin', you ignorant goddam clown? You know you coulda killed me and you and everybody else on this goddam road, you god-dam dumb . . .oh, hi, Joe."

He grinned and holstered the big-barreled weapon. "Sorry, Joe, didn't recognize you." He grinned hugely, shrugged his shoulders as if he knew it was the Natural Order, and walked away. He pulled out fast, Joe slipped it into drive and burned rubber following him. "Friend of mine," said Joe L. Hensley. Grinning lopsidedly. I think I fainted.

Carol Carr says Joe L. Hensley is a teddy bear. Sure he is.

Change of scene: Fort Knox, Kentucky, 1958. I am standing in front of the Captain, CO of my infantry company. He is very unhappy with me. I have hornswoggled him. I have been living out of the barracks in a trailer for the past six months though I'm no longer married, which he has only recently found out. He is furious with me. I have broken every rule imaginable in his company. He hates me a lot. He is yelling that he will see my ass in Leavenworth, and he means it. I suddenly break and run, dashing out of his office, through the orderly room, down the hall, and into the dayroom. I get into the phone booth and close the door, pulling the receiver with me. I dial long distance and ask for Madison, Indiana. They are looking for me. The slat-wood lower half of the booth hides me from sight. I get my number in Madison. "Joe!" I howl. "They're tryin' to railroad me . . . . HALP, JOE!" They have located me now, they are trying to get into the booth. I have my leg locked in position, holding it closed. They take a fire ax and break the glass. They drag me out; I'm still clutching the receiver screaming, "HALP, JOE!" They haul me back into the Captain's office. He puts me under armed guard until the court-martial papers can be drawn up. "Your ass will die in Leavenworth!" shouts the Captain, becoming apoplectic.

Within two hours there are three, count 'em,
three
Congressional Inquiries on the Captain's desk. Why are you annoying Pfc Ellison? one of them says. Leave Pfc Ellison alone, a second one says. Pfc Ellison has
friends
, the third one warns. Then Stuart Symington's inquiry comes in, and the Captain knows he has been outgunned. He sentences me to one week washing barracks windows. My ass never sees the inside of Leavenworth. The Captain has a nervous breakdown and is sent to the Bahamas to recover, if possible. Joe L. Hensley is out there in Madison, Indiana, grinning lopsidedly.

Carol Carr says Joe L. Hensley is a pussycat. Better believe it.

Hensley is not to be believed. Legend-in-own-time kind of thing. He is one of the most gigantic men I've ever seen. Well over six foot six, he is solid meat from top to bottom, with a fuzzy crew cut that makes his head look like one of those plaster gimcracks you used to be able to buy in Woolworth's that you plant the grass seed in, and it grows out to look like Joe's crew cut. He has a face made of Silly Putty and he loves to twist it into imbecilic expressions, giving the impression he is a waterhead. It only serves to lull the opposition into a false sense of security. One night in a bar in Evansville, Indiana, Joe and I were braced by a pair of
lummoxen
who wanted to brawl. Joe got that cockeyed grin on his face, began making guttural sounds like Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
and burbled, "Sure I'd like t'fight, uh-huh, sure, sure I would," and he went over to a brick wall and started pounding it with his "dead" hand—the one with the nerve ends dulled from having been scorched in a fire—until the bricks shattered and his hand was ripped and torn and bits of bone were sticking out through the torn skin and blood was all over the place. The two bully boys suddenly went very green, one of them murmured, "This guy is a nut!" and they fled in horror. I think I vomited.

All of which only begins to shade in the incredible personality of Hensley the Runamuck. Despite the fact that he is the very incarnation of Morgan/McMurphy/Yossarian/Sebastian Dangerfield/Gully Jimson all hoisted up into one petard, Hensley is a pillar of the community, a highly respected attorney whose political record reads as follows:

County attorney for Jefferson County, Indiana, in 1960; attorney for the Madison City Plan Commission from 1959 to 1962; elected to Indiana General Assembly in 1960, serving in 1961—62; chairman of the Governor's Traffic Safety Advisory Commission from 1961 to 1965; member of the Criminal Code Commission of the state of Indiana; elected prosecuting attorney of the Fifth Judicial Circuit of the state of Indiana. In 1966 he ran for the legislature again in a five-county area and was shabbily defeated by 70 votes. It was possibly his coming out in favor of smut and pornography that turned the tide. It was called Bluenose Backlash.

Joe was born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1926 and grew up there, and grew up and up and up and up. He attended Indiana University for both undergrad and law school work. He served two years overseas during Nastiness No. 2 in the South Pacific, and was recalled for sixteen delightful months during WW II 1/2, Korea. He is married to the lovely Charlotte (and she
gotta
be lovely for me to like her with a name like that, which was the name of my first wife, which is another story en
tire
ly) and has one child, Mike, age twelve.

I first met Hensley at a Midwestern Science Fiction Convention in the middle Fifties, and we have been chums ever since. There are those who contend we are the contemporary incarnation of the Rover Boys. Them as says it refuse to present themselves for personal attention by the deponents. Joe does not write nearly as much as he should. His talent is a natural, free-wheeling delight, kept in check chiefly by his analytical lawyer's mind. The emotional content of a Hensley story, however, is usually several points higher than most of the current scriveners' crop. I will let the madman speak in his own defense at this point:

"I began writing in 1951 and sold one of my early efforts to
Planet Stories
. Thereafter, I entered into an agreeable and interesting relationship with them. I would write a story, and
Planet
would buy it. I began selling to other magazines and have had sales to such magazines as
Swank
(with Harlan Ellison),
Rogue
(with Harlan Ellison),
Amazing Stories
(with Harlan Ellison), and to most of the science fiction and men's magazines, such as
Gent, Dapper
and others (without Harlan Ellison). A novel,
The Color of Hate
, was published in 1960; another,
Deliver Us to Evil
, is making the rounds; and a third,
Privileged Communication
(title suggested by Harlan Ellison), is under way and will be completed this year.

"The story that follows I consider to be the best short story that I have written, ever.
Other than that, deponent saith not
."

 
He rebelled on the night the call came to leave the warm and liquid place; but in that way he was weak and nature was strong. Outside, the rains came; a storm so formidable that forecasters referred to it for all of the time that was left. He fought to remain with the mother thing, but the mother thing expelled him and in fear and rage he hurt the mother thing subtly. Black clouds hid the stars and the trees bent only to the wind
.
 

The night before, Sam Moore had let his son Randall play late in the yard—if "play" it was. The boy had no formal games and the neighborhood children shunned the area of the Moore house. Sometimes a child would yell at the boy insultingly from some hidden place, but mostly now they stayed away.

Sam sat in the chaise longue and watched dully, trapped in the self-pity of writing his own obituary, asking the timeless questions: Who were you? What did you ever do? And why me? Why me now?

He watched the child with concealed revulsion. Randall moved quietly along the back line of hedges, his small boy eyes watchful of the other yards that bordered his own. There had been a time when it was a fetish with the neighbor children to fling a rock when passing, before the two Swihart boys, running away after disposing of their missiles, had fallen into a well no one had even known existed in the corner lot. Too bad about them, but Randall lived with the remembrance of the rocks and appeared to distrust the amnesty. Sam watched as the boy continued his patrol.

The pain within had been worse on that day and Sam longed for the forgetfulness of sleep.

Finally it was time.

 
The first one came in silence and the memories of that night are lost in time. That one grew easily and alone, for only later life is chronicled. His people migrated and memory flickered into a mass of legends. But the blood was there
.
 

Item: The old man had gardened in the neighborhood for several years. He was a bent man with a soft, broken-toothed smile, bad English, and a remembrance of things past: swastikas, yellow stars, Buchenwald. Now and then he wrote simple poems and sent them to the local newspaper and once they had printed one. He was a friendly old man and he spoke to everyone, including one of the teenage, neighborhood queens. She chose to misunderstand him and reported his friendliness as something more.

On that day, a year gone now, the old man had been digging at rose-bushes in the front yard of the house across the street. Randall had watched, sucking at a peppermint stick the old man had given him, letting the juice run from the corners of his mouth.