“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.
“Oh sure. Can’t you?”
There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn’t seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.
“I don’t remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.
“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.
Weathered boards, rusty nails … and he had just made it.
“Why didn’t you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.
“This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We’re new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I’m trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”
“What is that?” Slick asked.
“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh well, I’ll put them in. I’ll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”
“No. I’ve already got a car,” Slick said. “Let’s go, Jim.”
That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.
“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There’s a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”
“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”
They went by the public stenographer shack again.
“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.
“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.
“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.
“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”
“Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”
“You promise you won’t tell anybody.”
“I promise.”
“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.
They started slowly on up the block.
“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.
“With my other tongue,” the girl said.
There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute—in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.
“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.
“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let’s go over to the Red Rooster and see if there’s anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”
RIDE A TIN CAN
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
When I wrote to R. A. Lafferty as a very young man, I asked him about his favorite of his own short stories. He mentioned three stories that I had read and loved—“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” “Configuration of the North Shore,” and “Continued on Next Rock”—and one that I hadn’t. It was called “Ride a Tin Can.”
Shortly afterward, I bought a copy of Strange Doings, and read “Ride a Tin Can,” and was disappointed. It made me sad.
I think I wanted to be uplifted. I wanted the thing that Lafferty did where his apocalypses were joyful things one went into with delight. And here were the Shelni race going into an apocalypse with joyful delight, and I walked away from the story feeling that I might just have read the saddest story in the world. I felt manipulated, because it was an ending that called for tears, told in a way that did not allow for tears. I did not trust tears anyway. “Ride a Tin Can” left me disappointed in Humanity. It was a story I could admire, but I could not love, and which I did not look forward to rereading.
As an older reader, I can love it: I can love it for the shape of the story, the three tiny tales that hover at the end of understanding; I love it for the worldbuilding that is never fully described, for the relationship between the Shelni and the Skokie and the frogs and the trees. I love it for Holly Harkel, a human woman who is goblin enough to talk to goblins under their tree-root home, goblin enough to ride a tin can herself.
It’s a story nobody else could have written, pulled off in a way nobody else would have imagined, that describes a genocide that hurts, without a word wasted.
I think, “We are better than this. Surely we must be better than this?” And I think, “How do you write a story like that anyway? Write a story like that, and make it look easy?”
But he does. Somehow he does.
It’s OK if you cry.
Ride a Tin Can
These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.
Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy.
“After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,” Holmberg told me, “and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list. I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You’ll have to hurry. They’re about gone.
“And let me say in all compassion that anyone who looks like Miss Holly Harkel deserves her heart’s desire. That is no more than simple justice. Besides, the bill will be footed by the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. These companies are bitten by the small flea of remorse every now and then and they want to pitch a few coins into some fund for luck. It’s never many coins that they want to pitch; the remorse bug that bites them is never a very large one. You may be able to stretch it to cover your project though, Vanhoosier.”
So we had our appropriation and our travel, Miss Holly and myself.
Holly Harkel had often been in disrepute for her claims to understand the languages of various creatures. There was special outrage to her claim that she would be able to understand the Shelni. Now that was odd. No disrepute attached to Captain Charbonnett for his claim to understand the planetary simians, and if there was ever a phony claim it was this. No disrepute attached to Meyro-witz for his claim of finding esoteric meanings in the patterns of vole droppings. But there seemed something incredible in the claim of the goblin-faced Holly Harkel that not only would she be able to understand the Shelni instantly and completely but that they were not low scavenger beasts at all, that they were genuine goblin people who played goblin music and sang goblin songs.