The Ultimate Egoist (17 page)

Marjorie, as usual, got all the details out of him; but she didn’t stop there. She cited instance after instance when he had done the same thing. Her kick, it developed, was not so much the poker, but the fact that he had lied to her about it. Well, and why should a man brag to his wife about losing twenty-four bucks? If only she’d take his simple little explanations without all those fireworks, life would be more worth living. At least he wouldn’t have to retreat into the garden and take out his fury on a pick and shovel.

He had reached about this stage in his mental monologue when his shovel rang dully against old Rakna.

Of course, he didn’t know then that it was Rakna. He might well have stopped digging altogether if he had known. And then again, he might not. It didn’t work out so badly in the end.

At any rate, all he knew was that there was an unyielding mass, and a large one, in his way, and he couldn’t finish digging the little lily pool until he moved it. That
would
have to happen now, he thought bitterly. Everything’s going wrong today.

He threw down his shovel and stamped up the garden path toward
the house. Sore as he was, he still found room in his sulking mind to admire that garden. It began at the house, almost as if it were part of it, and led downward into a little gully. Kenneth had, by ranking trees and shrubs carefully, built a small lot up to look like something twenty times as big.

The sunken rockery, well out of sight, was the hidden theme of the whole; you stumbled on it, that rock garden; and yet because of the subtle placing of the trees and plants around it, you knew that it had been there all the time. There was a miniature bridge, and a huge pottery teapot—all the fixings. And once you were in the rock garden, you and your eye were led to the shrinelike niche by the lily pool.

For months Kenneth had been searching for an old idol ugly enough for that niche; he wanted it there so that it would frighten people. Something nice and hideous, to be a perfect and jarring foil for the quiet and beautiful effect of all that surrounded it. Kenneth determined to leave that niche empty until he found a stone face ugly enough to turn an average stomach—not wrench it, exactly; Kenneth was not altogether fiendish in his humorous moments!—but plumb ugly.

He went into the back kitchen—it served as a tool shed as well—and took down a crowbar. His wife came to the door when she heard him.

“How’s it going?” she asked in the dutifully interested tone of a wife whose most recent words to her husband were violent ones.

“Swell,” he said, his casualness equally forced.

“See?” she cried in feminine triumph. “You even lie to me about a little thing like that. If everything was swell down there, you wouldn’t need a crowbar to dig with. This ground isn’t rocky. Why can’t you tell the truth just
once
?” Then she fled into her own territory, to be alone with her indignation.

Kenneth shrugged. Fight all morning with your wife, and you’re up against things like that. He hesitated. She was probably crying, after that blowup. That’s a woman for you. Fire and water all at once. Oh, well. He shrugged again and started back with his crowbar. The tears would wait, he reflected callously. There were more where they came from.

His conscience bothered him a little, though. Maybe she had something there. It did seem as if he couldn’t tell her—or anyone—the absolute truth. It was just a conversational habit, that lying; but it did make trouble. But what could a man do? Maybe he’d be a little more careful in future—but, damn it, why did she have to be so picky?

As usual, he took it out in work, picking and prying and heaving. Well, this lump of brownstone or whatever it was, was something worthwhile working on. Not like digging in the soft earth around it. He began to forget about Marge and her annoyances in the task on hand.

Slipping the bar well under the brown mass, he heaved strongly and lifted it a few inches at the corner. Kicking a rock under it, he stepped back for a look at the thing, and was confronted by quite the most hideous imaginable face. He stared, shook his head, stared again.

“Well, I’ll be … here’s my idol, right where I need it. Now where the devil did that thing come from?” he asked no one in particular.

Yes, it was an idol, that brown mass in the half-finished lily pool. And what a face! Hideous—and yet, was it? There was a certain tongue-in-cheek quality about it, a grim and likable humor. The planes of that face were craggy and aristocratic, and there was that about the curve of the nostril and the heavily lidded eyes that told Kenneth that he was looking at a realistic conception of a superiority complex. And yet—again; was it? Those heavy eyelids—each, it seemed, had been closed in the middle of a sly wink at some huge and subtle joke. And the deep lines around the mouth were the lines of authority, but also the lines of laughter. It was the face of a very old little boy caught stealing jam, and it was also the face of a being who might have the power to stop the sun.

“Or a clock,” thought Kenneth. He shook himself from his apathy—the thing nearly hypnotized by its ugliness—and walked around it, knocking off clods of dirt with his hands.

The face was lying on its side. Yes, he discovered, it was more than a face. A body, about half the size of the head, was curled up behind it. Kenneth shuddered. The body looked like an unborn fetus he had seen at the Fair, floating in alcohol. The limbs were shriveled,
and the trunk was big-bellied with an atrophied chest, jammed up against the back of that enormous head. The whole thing was, maybe, five feet high and three wide, and weighed a good ton.

Kenneth went back to the house shrugging off an emotional hangover, and called up Joe Mancinelli. Joe had a two-ton hoist at his “Auto Fixery” that would do the trick.

“Joe,” he said when he got his connection, “I want you to come right over with your truck and the two-ton lift. And listen. What I’ve got to lift will knock your eye out. Don’t let it scare you.”

“Hokay, Kan,” said Mancinelli. “I feex. I no scare. You know me, boy!”

Kenneth had his doubts.

“Who are you calling, dear?” Marjorie called.

“Joe Mancinelli. I’ve got to have help. I ran across a … a big rock in the lily pool.” There it was again. Now, why did he have to say that?

Marjorie came across the room and put her hands on his shoulders. “That’s so much better, sweetheart. It isn’t terribly hard to tell the truth, now, is it?”

Her eyes were a little red, and she looked very sweet. He kissed her. “I … I’ll try, kiddo. You’re right, I guess.” He turned and went out to the shed, muttering to himself.

“Can you beat that? Tell her a lie and she raises hell. Tell her another and everything’s all right. You can’t win.”

He rigged a set of shear poles so that the chain hoist would have some kind of a purchase, and dragged them down to the rock garden. The sight of the half-buried idol gave him another fascinated shock. He looked at it more closely. It seemed old as time itself and carved—was it carved? Its execution made him think that if nature had carved rock into idols, then this was a natural work. And yet, it was so flawless! What human artist could do such macabre sculpture? Kenneth had seen the
striges
on the carved galleries on Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and had thought that they were tops in
outré
art. But this— He shrugged and went back to the shed for a wire strap to slip under the thing, meeting Joe halfway to the house. Joe was staggering under the coils of chain over his shoulders.

“Hi, keed! Ware you got heem, thees beeg theeng?”

“Down at the bottom of the garden, Joe. What made you come over here so fast?”

“I like to see thees theeng make scare Joe Mancinelli,” wheezed Joe.

“Well, look it over for yourself. It’s half buried. I’ve got shear poles rigged. Be with you in a jiffy.”

As he reached the shed, Kenneth smiled at the roar of polylingual profanity which issued from the rock garden. Joe was evidently impressed. Coming to the door with the wire strap in his hand, Kenneth called: “Scared, Joe?”

The answer came back hollowly: “I no scare. I sorry I come. But I no scare!”

Kenneth laughed and started down. He had taken about five steps when he heard a sound like a giant champagne cork, and Joe Mancinelli came hurtling up the path as if he were being chased by one of the devil’s altar boys.

“Hey! Whoa there!” Kenneth called, laughing. “What happened? Hey!”

He surged forward and tackled the Italian low. They slid to a stop in a cloud of dust. “Easy, now, boy. Easy.”

“The ’oist is down dere. You do you work, calla me, I come back, get heem. I don’
never
touch that theeng.”

“All right, all right. But what happened?”

“You don’ tell nobody?”

“No, Joe. Course not.”

“So I see thees face. Thees not so gooda face. Maybe I scare, maybe no. I tell this face, ‘I no lika you. So. I speet on you. So.
Ptui
.’ ” Joe turned white at the recollection, and swallowed hard. “Thees thing shake all over like wan piece jelly, is make the mouth like dees”—Joe pursed his lips—“an’… 
ptow!
Is speet on me. So. Now, I go.”

“You dreamed it,” Kenneth said unconvincingly.

“So, I dream. But I tella you, boy, I go now to church. I take wan bat’ in holy water. I light wan dozen candles. An I bring you tomorra plenty dynamite for feex that thing.”

Kenneth laughed. “Forget it, Joe,” he said. “I’ll take care of old funnyface down there. Without dynamite.”

Joe snorted and went back to his truck, starting it with a violence that set its gears’ teeth on edge. Kenneth grinned and picked up the wire strap. “I no scare,” he said, and laughed again.

He was not, evidently, the only one who was amused by the episode. Old funnyface, as Ken had called the idol, really seemed to have deepened the humorous lines around his tight-lipped, aristocratic mouth. A trick of the light, of course. “You know,” said Kenneth conversationally, “if you
were
alive you’d be a rather likable dog.”

He burrowed under the idol and pushed the end of the strap as far under as he could reach. He was flat on his stomach, reaching out and down, with his shoulder against the mass of the thing, when he felt it settle slightly. He pulled his arm out and rolled clear, to see old funnyface settling steadily back into the hole.

“You old devil!” he said. “You almost had me that time. Bet you did that on purpose.”

The idol’s face seemed to have taken on a definite smirk.

“—is speet on me,” Joe had said. Well, he was no better than Joe. He picked up a clod of earth, held it poised, and expectorated explosively, following up by ramming the clod into the sardonic lips of the idol. There was a small but powerful explosion and Kenneth found himself flat on his back six feet away.

Now Kenneth Courtney was no storybook hero. He was just an ordinary driver for an ordinary trucking firm. But in his unbrilliant but satisfying past, he had found that the best thing to do when he had this cold, crawling feeling at the pit of his stomach was to smile at his antagonist. Nine times out of ten, said antagonist was floored by it. So he reared up on his elbow and smiled engagingly at the idol.

The smile faded quickly; one glance at the idol’s mouth took care of that. The lower lip was quivering, like an angry child’s, or like a railroad bull about to take a poke at a tramp. Suddenly it snapped shut. The jaws bulged and contracted, and little bits of earth fell into the hole around its cheeks.

More than a little shaken, Kenneth got his feet under him and
walked over to the idol. “I’d bury you where you are, tough guy, but you’re in my lily pool. Come up out of there!”

He went furiously to work, rigging the hoist over the idol. In a remarkably short time he had the ends of the strap hooked into the chain-fall, and was heaving merrily. To his surprise, he found that the idol came up easily—there could not have been more than three or four hundred pounds’ load on the hoist. He stopped hauling and stood off a bit.

“Why, you son of gun!” he exclaimed. “So you’ve decided to cooperate, hey?”

It was true. The idol’s emaciated legs and arms straddled the pit, and were lifting the massive head steadily. Even as he watched, the chain-fall began to slacken as the weight came off it. By this time Kenneth was almost beyond surprise at anything.

“O.K., buddy,” he cried, and heaved away. Higher and higher rose the idol, until the shear poles creaked and their bases began to sink deeper into the soft earth. Finally it swung clear. Gauging the distance nicely, Kenneth toppled the shear poles and the idol swung face forward into the niche, landing with a rubbery thump. Kenneth grinned.

“Stay that way, old boy,” he told the idol. “You’re no uglier behind than you are face-outward.” He threw the strap over his shoulder, lifted the shear poles at the lashing and dragged them back up to the shed.

When he came back with a spouting garden hose, the idol was facing outward.

“On second thought,” said Kenneth conversationally, as he busily sluiced down that hideous humorous face, “I don’t blame you. You are a little more presentable stern-foremost; but then you’re a damnsite more likable this way.” Kenneth was scared stiff, but he wouldn’t show it, not even to an old graven image.

“That’s much better,” said the idol, blinking the mud out of its eyes. Kenneth sat down weakly on the nozzle of the hose. This was the payoff.

“Don’t sit there looking so stupid!” said the idol irritably. “Besides, you’ll catch cold, holding down that hose.”

Kenneth’s breath came out in a rush. “This is too much,” he gasped. He was more than a little hysterical. “I … I … in just a minute I’ll wake up and smell coffee and bacon. I don’t believe there
is
a crusty old idol, or that it talked, or that—”

“Get off that hose,” said the idol, and added meaningly, “and dry up.”

Kenneth rose and absently began wringing his clothes. “What sort of a critter are you?”

“I’m a god,” said the idol. “Name’s Rakna. What’s yours?”

“K-Kenneth Courtney.”

“Stop stammering, man! I’m not going to hurt you. What’s the matter; didn’t you ever see a god before?”