“You can’t forget it, Epikt!” Aloysius cried in alarm. “The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!” And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube.
“Oh yes, now I remember,” Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. “The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife’s nose. So things were the way they had been before.”
“But we don’t want it the way it was before!” Valery howled. “That’s the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins.”
“Take me as a mystic or don’t take me at all,” Epikt signed off.
“Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things,” Gregory said. “What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?”
“Willy McGilly was the folk hero,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, “and he made it out of slippery elm wood.”
“Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?” Aloysius asked.
“We gotta,” said Epikt.
“Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into—”
“Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?” Gregory asked excitedly.
“We sure will try,” said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. “I never did like those Avatars.”
You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec machine.
“Give me the word, Epikt,” Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slinger.
“Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!” Epikt howled.
Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery elm dart in his heart.
“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. “It must have. I’m here. I wasn’t in the last one.”
“Let’s look at the evidence,” Gregory suggested calmly.
“Damn the evidence!” Willy McGilly cussed. “Remember where you heard it first.”
“Is it started yet?” Glasser asked.
“Is it finished?” Audifax O’Hanlon questioned.
“Push the button, Epikt!” Diogenes barked. “I think I missed part of it. Let’s try it again.”
“Oh, no, no!” Valery forbade. “Not again. That way is rump of skunk and madness.”
IN OUR BLOCK
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
This was not the first short story of Lafferty’s I read, nor even the first I fell in love with.
It was, however, the first story I ever took apart, as best I could, to try and work out how he did it.
I would have been about eleven. I didn’t know what an American city block actually was—it was an indeterminate word that meant simply a region, as far as I was concerned. I came from towns and cities with winding, random streets. But I loved the story. It was a shaggy dog story without a punch line, a tall tale without apparent conflict in which all that happened was that two friends walked around a block, and talked to people they found. A letter was dictated. It was about new people coming in, about immigrants, about people working hard and moving on. It was about taking the extraordinary for granted. And I loved the way the words worked.
So I read it, and I reread it, and I read it aloud, and I tried to understand it. I would never know what a Dort Glide was (nor, I suspected, did Lafferty), but I felt that, if I could understand how this short story was built and constructed, I would understand how to write.
I loved the way the people in the shanties spoke. I wanted to speak like the typist, or her sister in the bar. I hoped one day to be able to say, “See how foxy I turn all your questions,” but I never had an opportunity to. I only had one tongue, so to reply, “With my other tongue” was also right out.
Coming back to it as an adult, and I have read it every year or so, I find that I love it as much as I ever did. It’s cockeyed and joyful, but it’s also a glorious, blue-collar, low-rent story about a block in Oklahoma where the people arriving just want to fit in. It’s about immigration, and about what people bring to the places they visit. It’s about revealing secrets.
And it’s a writer’s story, too, about the places that ideas come from. I imagine Ray Lafferty walking past a tin shack he had not noticed before, on his way to a local bar, and having a story in his head by the time that he returned home that night.
In Our Block
There were a lot of funny people in that block.
“You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.
“Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street’s just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”
“Jim, I’ve been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”
“What’s wrong with that, Art?”
“Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that’s two thousand cartons.”
“Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays; they don’t enforce it very well.”
“Jim, that shack’s no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn’t get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”
“Let’s measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.
“Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.
“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.
Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”
“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousand lots.”
“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.