Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (22 page)

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, watercress, 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, multivegetable 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 watercress. 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 backyard, 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.

The End

© 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Originally appeared in
Fantasy
and Science Fiction.
Reprinted with permission of the author's
estate represented by Don Congdon Associates.

Frank M. Robinson

Now, I'm not a hard man to get along with, and it usually takes quite a
bit more than overly bright remarks from the office boy to bother me. But
try as I might, I could never get along with McCleary. To be as disliked
as he was, you have to work at it.

What kind of guy was he? Well, if you came down to the office one day
proud as Punch because of something little Johnny or Josephine had said,
it was a sure cinch that McCleary would horn in with something his little
Louie had spouted off that morning. At any rate, when McCleary got
through, you felt like taking Johnny to the doctor to find out what made
him subnormal.

Or maybe you happened to buy a new super-eight that week and were bragging
about the mileage, the terrific pick-up, and how quickly it responded to
the wheel. Leave it to McCleary to give a quick rundown on his own car
that would make you feel like selling yours for junk at the nearest scrap
heap.

Well, you see what I mean.

But by far the worst of it was when vacation time rolled around. You could
forgive a guy for topping you about how brainy his kids are, and you might
even find it in your heart to forget the terrific bargain he drove to work
in. But vacation time was when he'd really get on your nerves.
You
could pack the wife and kids in Old Reliable and roll out to the lake for
your two weeks in August. You might even break the bank and spend the two
weeks at a poor man's Sun Valley. But no matter where you went, when you
came back, you'd have to sit in silence and listen to McCleary's account
of his Vacation in the Adirondacks, or his Tramp in the Canadian Wilds, or
maybe even the Old French Quarter.

The trouble was he always had the photographs, the ticket stubs, and the
souvenirs to prove it. Where he got the money, I'll never know. Sometimes
I'd tell the wife about it and she'd sniff and wonder what kind of shabby
house they lived in that they could afford all the other things. I never
looked him up myself. Tell you the truth, I was afraid I'd find the
McClearys lived on Park Avenue.

Now, you look forward to a vacation all year, but particularly during the
latter part of July, when, what with the heat and the stuffy office, you
begin to feel like a half-done hotdog at a barbecue. I was feeling even
worse than usual as I was faced with spending my two weeks in my own
backyard, most of my vacation dough having gone to pay the doctor. The
only thing I minded was having McCleary find out about it and seeing that
phony look of sympathy roll across his fat face while he rambled on about
the vacation
he
was going to have.

It was lunchtime, and we had just finished talking about the latest on
television and what was wrong with the Administration and who'd win the
pennant when Bob Young brought up the subject of vacations. It turned out
he was due for a trip to the Ozarks and Donley was going after walleyed
pike in northern Wisconsin. I could sense McCleary prick up his ears clear
across the room.