“I never believed in religion myself,” Barnes said. “But if they hurt you, I’m sorry.”
“You sacrifice to Kuvera, the Lord of Treasure,” the witch told him. “Also to Isis of Erech. And because you know nothing of them, they drive you as with scourges.”
Stubb said, “It doesn’t sound like you did so well yourself.”
“I did not. The worst thing is not to be ignorant of the gods. The worst is to mistake those who are not gods for them. At the very moment when I thought to be elevated, I found myself mocked and reviled. If it had been only the laughter of men and women, I should not have cared. I have heard that many times, and it is but the rattle of pebbles in an empty jar. But I heard the voices of the gods—of Mana and Skarl and Kib, and Sish, the Destroyer of Hours. Or of whatever the true gods may be.”
Barnes touched a finger to his lips. “Somebody’s coming.”
All three fell silent, listening to the footsteps. The door opened, and a middle-aged man in a duffel coat came in. He looked cold—there was snow on his shoes, and the white touch of winter on his cheeks, and a little frost had begun to form on the barrel of the Thompson submachine gun he carried.
“Good evening,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate an explanation of what’s happened to you and where you’re going.”
In Vino, Incertus
“It’s about time,” Stubb said. “Who was Free?”
Barnes snapped, “Where’s my kid?”
“I said I was going to explain,” the man in the duffel coat told them. “I didn’t say I was going to let you people quiz me, and I won’t.” The index finger of his right hand found the trigger of the Thompson.
Ignoring what he had just said, the witch asked, “Are you going to kill us?”
“We’re going to do what we’re told to do with you,” the man in the duffel coat answered a trifle wearily.
(Stubb polished his glasses and put them back on, leaning forward in his chair.)
“If our orders are to eliminate you, then you will be eliminated, yes. If we’re told to do something else with you, then we’ll do that.” He cleared his throat and spat into a corner. “The trouble with you people is that you won’t do what you’re ordered to. You can never see that when you do what the leader says, everything works out, and when you don’t, it all breaks down. Everything breaks down.”
“You are mad!” the witch said.
“I am the leader,” the man in the duffel coat told her.
“He’s just a little blasted,” Stubb said. “Don’t you smell the booze?” To the man in the duffel coat he added, “I wouldn’t mind a shot myself, sir. How about it?”
“You think you’re going to throw it in my eyes and take my gun.” The man in the duffel coat shook the Thompson, making the cartridges in its drum magazine rattle.
“Hell, I don’t want to throw it—I want to drink it.”
Barnes was shrugging into his checked jacket. “You said you were going to explain. Get on with it. I’d like to hear it.”
The man in the duffel coat chuckled. “So would I. I can’t wait to hear what I’m going to say. That’s Groucho, I think. Groucho Marx.”
“I know. I used to be a stand-up comic myself.”
“So you did. All right, I’ll start with you.” The man in the duffel coat looked from Barnes to the witch, and from her to Stubb, the muzzle of the Thompson following his eyes. “But first, I think it would be best if all three of you were sitting down.”
Barnes dropped into a chair.
“Good. Let me begin with the founding of our great nation—”
“Are you really crazy?” Stubb glared at him.
“No, I’m our leader, as I told you. Our country was founded on the principle of the destruction of the wild by the civilized. Let me—just for a moment, if Mr. Stubb will excuse it—go back thirty thousand years before Christ, when the ancestors of the Indians crossed what are now the Bering Straits to occupy what some people have called an empty land. Those Indians represented civilization. The beavers felled trees and built lodges, but the Indians killed the beavers and skinned them.”
Barnes said, “Then the whites came and skinned the Indians.”
“Precisely. But the frontiersmen who destroyed the Indians and their culture were destroyed themselves, with their culture, by the settlers who followed. Those settlers lost their farms to the banks, and the banks sold them to companies who have brought the advantages of corporate existence—immortality and amorality—to agriculture.
“In the cities, the same thing occurred. The early city of independent shops and restaurants is properly being displaced by one of chain outlets, so that progressively greater control is exercised. Perhaps none of you has ever understood before why they are called that—chain outlets.”
None of the three spoke.
“You see the progress? The old stores had to sell things their customers wanted. As they’re eliminated, the need for their kind of slavery is eliminated too, and the chains can sell whatever they want. Their customers have to buy it because there’s nothing else to buy. I ask you, all of you—how often have you gone into W. T. Grant’s and found there was nothing at all you wanted?”
They stared at him. Stubb said softly, “Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong movie. You’re Wolfe Barzell, and you’re about to turn us over to Mike Mazurki.”
“And you are Elisha Cook, Jr. in glasses,” the man in the duffel coat told him. “You don’t have to look at me like that, I’m sure you must have thought of it yourself. Where was I?”
The witch said, “You were about to tell us our part in all this.”
He laughed, throwing back his head and taking two unsteady steps to the rear until he leaned against the door jamb. “Your part? My dear, demonic, dumb bitch, I can’t have been about to tell you that. You don’t have one. Like Short there says, you’re in the wrong picture. There are no parts for any of you in this one. It’s the truth. You’ve been extras and bit players, all of you, all your lives. Now you can’t even do that.”
One hand left the Thompson and groped in the side pocket of his duffel coat. In a moment it reappeared holding a silver flask. Clamping the Thompson under his arm, he unscrewed the top and drank. “Who said he wanted some?”
“Me, sir,” Stubb told him. “Short.”
“Catch!” He tossed the open flask. It left a narrow streak of whiskey on the floor.
Stubb drank and handed the flask to Barnes, who offered it to the witch, then drank too when she refused.
“Let me put it like this,” the man in the duffel coat said. “The Indians used to be Americans—that’s what an American was. Then the trappers were Americans, the Americans of their day. Then the farmers, with their buggies and plow horses and white clapboard houses. Even today when you look at a picture of Uncle Sam, you’re seeing what those farmers were like dressed up to go to the county fair. Only farmers aren’t real Americans any more. Neither are Indians. Poor bastards of Indians aren’t even foreigners, and we like foreigners more than Americans, because foreigners are the Americans of the future. The trappers are gone, and pretty soon you’ll be gone too.”
He felt in his pocket for the flask, then seemed to remember he had thrown it to Stubb.
“You aren’t Americans either.” His voice grew angry and a little deeper. “There isn’t one of you, not a God-damned one, that owns a designer sheet. Or a set of matched towels. You don’t wear anybody’s jeans, and you don’t jog. You’re shit. You’re just shit.”
“I would sooner die!” The witch’s vehemence startled all three men. “I would sooner die than wear your blue jeans and be seen!”
“You’re not American,” the man in the duffel coat repeated. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”