The Avram Davidson Treasury (41 page)

Maybe they were another kind of Authorities. State, maybe, instead of County. Mr. Smith, Chief Goober of the State…? And of course his helpers. Anyway, whatever it was they might want to buy me for, it couldn’t be good. I knew that. But I wanted to know more. So I asked Rodney Sloat. He wasn’t a friend of mine, I had no friends, but he was a non-enemy at least, and he was known to read books.

“Rodney, is there any such a thing as Goobers?”

He nodded his head. “They live in holes in the ground,” he said.

It must’ve been about ten years ago that all of a sudden it came to me that what he must’ve been thinking of was, of course,
gophers
—and I spilled my coffee all over myself and scalded my legs. All that time it was a mystery what he had in mind. But right just then, when he told me they lived in holes in the ground, it never occurred to me that this was the thing he meant.
They lived in holes in the ground!
Oh, this was worse than anything ever imagined.

The old dog saw how he’d gotten to me, and it was like the smell of blood. He never let up. It was, Do this, Do that, Don’t you dast do this or that, or I’ll sell you to the Goobers, sure as I’m alive… And I went about in fear of my life, almost, because although he’d never said that the Goobers would kill me—or even harm me—why, how did I know they wouldn’t?
They lived in holes in the ground
, didn’t they?

The old man didn’t have any friends any more than I had friends, but he had cronies, which was more than I had. One of them was a big ruined old hulk of a man with a long fat face all sunken in the middle and white stubble on it, but two little clumps of black eyebrow like curled-up caterpillars. And his name was Barlow Brook. Never just Barlow and never Brook or Mr. Brook.

I broke a plate.

“Got the dropsy,” said Barlow Brook.

Grandfather went into his song and dance. “Barlow Brook, the Boy is a torment to me by day and by night.”

“Take the hide off of him.”

“I swear, Boy, my patience is running out. There’s a show-down coming, do you hear me, Boy? It’s coming to that. I won’t whip you like Barlow Brook says, nooo. I’m too soft-hearted for that. But I warn you, Boy, and I call Barlow Brook to my witness, unless you mend your ways and mighty quick, I will sell you to the Goobers.”

Barlow Brook hooked open the door of the cold old dusty wood stove with his foot and spit into it. “George Wolf used to talk about the Goobers.” He reached himself a hunk of bread and one of our six hundred cans of bacon grease and smeared it on with his fingers and gobbled at it.

“George Wolf,” said my grandfather. “He was a bad one.”

“Bad as they come. Used to talk about the Goobers. Remember that girl at George Wolf’s?”

“Sassy girl?”

“Sassy as they come. You can’t make me, used to say. You ain’t my father, used to say. Ain’t even married to my mother. Try to catch her, he would. Couldn’t do it. Take care, he’d tell her. The Goobers will get hold of you one a these days.” Bread crumbs, greasy bread crumbs, coming out of his mouth, but I never missed a word, thick as he was speaking, about the sassy girl at George Wolf’s.

Barlow Brook washed down his dinner from the smoky-looking bottle, didn’t wipe it or his mouth either.

“She says to him, there ain’t no such of a thing as any Goobers. Goobers is peanuts, she says to him. George Wolf, he told her. That’s
why
they call’m Goobers, he says, they
look
like that. Only not so small. Not near so small. Got wrinkled old shells on. Dirty yellow colored. Even sometimes a couple of hairs. Watch out, sassy. They’ll git ahold of you. George Wolf.”

Barlow Brook put his moldering shoes up to the kerosene stove.

“You hear, now, Boy,” said my grandfather, smirking at me.

I swallowed. I asked what, what happened to the sassy girl at George Wolf’s. A quick, secret look passed between those two evil old men.
Some
thing had happened to her, I knew that. I know it now. And I’ve got my own idea as to what. But, then… When Barlow Brook said, “Came and
got her
,” I had no idea except for sure that the Goobers were the
they
.

You can be sure that I did my best not to break any more plates. I fetched and I carried. When my grandfather said “Come here, Boy,” I came a running. But he was a bully, and there is no satisfying of bullies. He knew I was in mortal terror of being sold to the Goobers and he never let up. There were hickory trees back in the thicket and one day he sent me to get some nuts. I didn’t mind at all and I went quick.

And I came back quick. There was a bad family by the name of Warbank lived outside of town, so bad that even my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with them. They were meaner than he was and they had a bunch of big yellow dogs meaner than they were. When I got to the hickory trees with my bucket, there was Ding Warbank and Cut Warbank with their own buckets, and their dogs.

“You get the Hell out of here,” said Ding.

“It ain’ your thicket,” I said.

“Get him,” said Cut. The dogs came after me and I ran. One of them got hold of my pants and it came away in his teeth. Behind me, Cut called them back.

“We better not see you here again,” yelled Ding.

My grandfather took on fierce. No trashy Warbanks, he yelled, were going to tell him he couldn’t have nuts from “his own” thicket.

“You go on back there,” he ordered. “Go on, now.”

I didn’t move.

“Go
on
, I tell you! Go on, go on, go on! You want me to sell you to the Goobers?”

Oh, I was afraid of that, all right. I was afraid of the Goobers. But I’d never really seen any. And I
had
seen those Warbanks’ yellow dogs, felt their white shiny teeth pulling that bite out of my pants legs. And I wouldn’t go.

He yelled and he raged. Then, all of a sudden, he quit. “All right, Boy,” he said. “All right, then. I am through warning you. In one hour’s time, as I live and as my name’s Dade Harkness, in one hour’s time I swear that I will sell you to the Goobers. Now git out my sight—but don’t you leave the yard!”

What he figured on, I guess, was that the Warbanks would be gone by then and I’d rush out and get his old hickory nuts and then he’d pardon me…for the time being.

I stumbled away. “It’s four o’clock,” he yelled after me. “They’ll be here at five. Don’t bother packing—you won’t need nothing!”

An hour like that, I never want to pass again. I hid here and hid there, till I was sweaty and dirty as never before. But I didn’t trust any place. By and by I got so thirsty that I had to come out and get to the pump. I could hear the old man muttering to himself.

His warning about not leaving the yard didn’t matter to me worth a poke of peas—he, well, what could he’ve done to me for disobeying? Sell me to the Goobers? He was going to do that anyway…he said. Of course, he’d said it before and he’d changed his mind before, too. I knew only one thing for sure, and that was that I couldn’t stand any more of it. Anything was likely to be better.

I’d never been to George Wolf’s place, but I knew where it was, and it wasn’t all that far away. About a mile or so off, on the old dirt road along the creek. It was an ugly old shack, never had a lick of paint on it, I guess, though I barely noted that any more than I did the broken windows or the roof falling in on one side and the weeds and underbrush choking up the front yard.

If George Wolf had been the original local acquaintance of the Goobers, then the Goobers couldn’t’ve lived too far away from his place. That was the way my thoughts were running—and I was running, too—right into the woods and down the hill and almost into the swamp that stopped me going further.

“Goobers!” I yelled. “Goobers! You old Goobers! You hear me?” I screamed.

There was nothing but the echo of my voice. It was darkish there, and clammy, and it smelled bad and I was hot and cold and sweaty and I took a big breath and went on yelling again.

“I don’t care if he sells me! I don’t care if you buy me! He isn’t going to go on scaring me like this! You want to buy me? You just come on and do it!”

Something was buzzing when I stopped again. Maybe just a dragon fly. Something moved in the gray underbrush. Maybe just the wind. I could see a hole in the ground not far off. Maybe it was just a plain, ordinary hole. But I didn’t wait to find out about any of this. I turned and ran and stumbled away.

Where? Why, where but back to the old man’s house, back to the only sort of home I knew. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen there. It had to.

I slowed down to a soft walk before I got to the yard. Probably he didn’t even know I’d gone, didn’t think I’d’ve dared to. And I could still hear him muttering to himself for a while. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

So did I. Stopped breathing, I mean. I guess. The bell in the old church was striking, and while I’d missed the start, there was no need for me to count the chimes. It only struck the hours. So it had to be five o’clock.

I darted a quick look at the vines hiding his chair from where I was standing. Chair, no, I couldn’t see it. But I could see
him—
see his head, anyway, for he’d gotten up, sort of and had poked his face forward. It had gone the most horrible ugly sort of putty color. His eyes had a glaze over them like cold fried eggs. I had to turn to see what he was looking at, though of course I knew.

There were the Goobers, coming up the back path.

They were under my height. There were three of them and they had dirty yellow-colored wrinkled old shells on, with even a few hairs. And dirt was clinging to them.

“Where Boy?” asked the first.

“Here Boy,” said the second.

“You sell Boy?” asked the third.

They walked up and squeezed my arms and felt my legs. They pulled on my nose and grabbed hold of my tongue. They spun me around and thumped me on the back. Then they quit.

“No,” said the first.

“No good,” said the second.

“No buy Boy,” said the third.

They turned around and walked off. I watched them go, not even turning around when I heard my grandfather keel over and thump the porch floor.

After that, of course, I made his life a living Hell until I ran off two years later at the age of twelve, and there wasn’t a damned thing the old bastard could do about it.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
T
HOMAS
M. D
ISCH

In 1964, having been an official SF writer for all of two years, I set off for Mexico to write my first novel. There I moved into the shell lately emptied by my sometime editor at
F&SF,
Avram Davidson. I had never met Avram, but having inherited his home, garden, landlady, and friends in Mexico City, I came to feel a peculiar intimacy, quite as though I were leading his life as much as my own, a sense that would be heightened when, later, I learned in a letter from Avram that a young woman who’d been his traveling companion in Belize had run off with Tony, a dashing young con man whom I’d earlier befriended at a beach on the Pacific coast, where he was selling solid gold watches to gas station attendants.

Like Avram, I fell in love with the raffishness of the Mexico that opened its doors and its cantinas to visiting gringos. Unlike Avram, I never became so well assimilated that I could make that love yield an homage as affectionate and closely observed as “The Power of Every Root.” Reading it again, now that my expatriate days are over (and Avram’s, too), I can smell all the spices and fetors of the marketplace he inventories so lovingly in this tale—and remember the heady freedoms of being a penny-a-word writer living high off the hog in a lush garden between two great volcanoes.

THE POWER OF EVERY ROOT

C
ARLOS RODRIGUEZ NUÑEZ
, A police officer of the municipality of Santo Tomas, sat in the private waiting room of Dr. Olivera considering his situation. Perhaps he ought not to be there at all.

Not the private waiting room in particular: it was usually empty except during the week following major fiestas, when it was likely to be much occupied by the younger sons of prosperous families who had (the younger sons) visited the Federal Capital, touring the libraries and theaters and museums and other buildings of the national patrimony…but never, never
las casitas
. The reason, therefore, why they were here?

“A strain, Sir Doctor. Without doubt, nothing more than a strain …! Woe of me, Sir Doctor! What an enormous needle! Surely—just for a tiny, little strain?”

The physician would smile benignly, speak soothingly, continue charging his syringe with penicillin.

None of this was applicable to the police officer Carlos. In fact, it was not applicable to the younger sons of the
non
-prosperous families, who—for one thing—could only afford to visit the District Capital (or, at most, the State one) on fiestas; and—for another—did not take their subsequent difficulties to a physician: they took them to the
curandero.
Carlos now wondered if he should not do the same. No… No… The social status of a government employee, a civil servant, might be imperiled by visiting a native herbalist and wizard. Besides, the physician’s public waiting room was just that: public. Let him be seen there, word would get around, Don Juan Antonio would ask questions. Don Juan Antonio was
jefe de policia,
and it seemed to Carlos that his superior’s manner to him of late had lacked cordiality. But, then, it seemed to Carlos that everybody’s attitude toward him of late lacked cordiality. He could not understand why this should be. He was a very gentle policeman; he took only the customary little bites of graft; he did not hit drunks hard; he gave cigarettes to prisoners. Often.

Why, therefore, people should—suddenly, sometimes only for matters of a few seconds—change, become hideous, diabolical, when they looked at him, he could not know. Their faces would swell, become even more horrible than those of the masked
moros
or the judases in the fiesta parades had seemed to him as a child. The air would become hot; voices would croak and mutter ugly things; he had difficulty breathing, sometimes. And his head—