When he finally did arrive, there was a package clutched under one arm.
“What do you have in the package?” his wife inquired.
“Oh, just a little something to make life more pleasant around here,” he said cheerily. “Be patient. You’ll find out soon enough.”
He hustled off to the bedroom.
In the bedroom, Filmore stowed his package behind a number of parcels on the upper shelf of his clothes closet.
I’ll hook it up later tonight while Elvira is watching her insipid television programs, he said to himself. Then deciding that a bath would be refreshing, he traded his clothes for a bathrobe, procured towel and washcloth from the linen closet and marched briskly into the bathroom. He flung his bathrobe into a corner, stepped boldly into the bathtub, inserted the stopper, put his right hand under the spigot, and with his left hand turned on the hot water.
Scalding hot water tumbled out of the spigot onto Filmore’s right hand. There was little, if any, warming-up period. No one had touched the water heater since Filmore turned it up that morning.
Electrified, Filmore leaped back, lost his balance, and fell. His head hit the porcelain with a resounding crack. The scalding hot water continued to tumble out of the spigot, and very soon it covered his naked body.
The bathtub was nearly full when Mrs. Filmore knocked timidly on the bathroom door. She thought she would capitalize on Filmore’s good mood and ask him if he would save her a little hot Water. She got no response, of course.
In what was perhaps the boldest action of her life, she opened the door and peeked in. Instantly she recoiled in horror. She had never before seen the corpse of a man who has drowned in the bathtub.
Trembling with shock, she managed to enter the room and turn off the hot water. Then, pale and visibly shaken, she made her way slowly to the bedroom and sat down at her dressing table.
She sat for some time trying to stop her limbs from shaking. A person tries and tries to accomplish something, and then it is accomplished for him, quite by accident, in some surprising fashion. Such surprises can be emotionally upsetting. Finally, Mrs. Filmore seemed to regain some measure of control over herself.
“What should I do now?” she said to her hairbrush.
“Call the police and tell them there’s been a terrible accident,” the brush replied.
“The Plot” is my first published story, Herzog says. The basic idea came straight from an Ann Landers column. A wife wrote in to ask Ann’s advice about her husband. It seems that he wouldn’t eat her food because, he claimed, she was trying to poison him. He was tipped off to her scheme by his electric razor ... As I recall, Ann advised the woman to send her husband to a psychiatrist . . .
Which simply would not do.
Tom Herzog Is a graduate student of psychology at the University of Michigan: Professionally, my goal Is to teach psychology and to do research at the university level. My broad area of interest is perception and cognition, and I like to play with neural models of behavior. I am currently engaged in research on the uses of kinesthetic aftereffect In the Investigation of personality through perception. As a psychologist,. I have been heavily Influenced by the writings of D. O. Hebb. I only mention that because there an factions in modern psychology . . .
One quick query, and a remarkable seven-page reply later, I not only understood something of the faction lines in modern psychology, and a little bit about kinesthetic aftereffect, but I could see why a “Neo-Hebbian” (“an inveterate neural mechanistic theorist”) had to find a way around a trip to the headshrinker. (“Personality theorists” —-and that includes virtually all schools of psychiatry—”are mechanists, but not neural mechanists.”)
Not even Herzog’s letter, with its inspired three-dimensional (areas, schools and “father-Images”) analysis of the many-mansioned structure of contemporary psychology, leaves me exactly sure where the Bidwell sisters would fit—although I may be checking the wrong catalog. Possibly religion? Communications? Maybe cartography . . .
David Bunch, investigator of the Bidwells, is a most unlikely young man from Missouri who spends his days making maps for the Air Force, and (judging by output) every other minute turning out a unique brand of—well. Warren Miller, writing in Paperback Review, said: “He has the new eyes and new mouth we now demand of writers,” and perhaps that is as close as one comes to classifying the terrible lessons of Little Brother and Little Sister (“The Monsters” in Husk 1965, or “Training Talk” in the 10th Annual), or the flesh-and-metal people of tortured Moderan (“The Walking, Talking, I-Don’t-Care Man” in Amazing), or the gay-sad old people of “The Time Battler” in The Smith, and the “Bidwell Endeavors.”
A collection of Mr. Bunch’s work. Good Luck, Good Hanging and Good Kicking, will be published shortly by Windfall Press.
INVESTIGATING THE BIDWELL ENDEAVORS
DAVID R. BUNCH
Actually, for two crazy people, I thought they had a pretty good service, when I first heard about it. Not that I set too much store by it, naturally, being the way I am, scientific and realistic, but I regarded it as pleasant, thoughtful of others, unselfish, very very unusual, harmless and probably something to be entirely avoided by any sane normal person wherever he might be. But my curiosity was such that I couldn’t leave it alone. I had to see, had to investigate. And now that I’m back from seeing, I’m not so sure that any of my first, hearsay impressions of this business were valid, or even accurate.
You see the Bidwell twins, sisters, were the ones operating this little service. And when I say twins, sisters, I know you surely are going to get right down to thinking of cute little twin sisters you’ve known, as alike probably as two little twin China dolls might be, waiting all dressed up for a party or tripping down morning-glory paths toward school buses. But don’t think of anything like that. Think of the Bidwell sisters, old, wrinkled, spinsterish, gray, faded, one short, one about a foot taller than any woman ever should be—that kind of twins. And while you’re thinking of that kind of twins, think of them standing side by side looking like some great gaunt bird and its shrunken hairy egg, dressed in starchy white, on the clean white porch of their clean white mansion in a clean little mid-America mid-twentieth-century town. (No, they’ll not be taking a break from their self-appointed professional duties. Not exactly. They’ll be waiting for the mail.) And while you’re about it, don’t forget to think of their eyes, clear blue, like the blue of a December sky looking down on snow. Real evangel eyes, you’ll think at first, but on second guess you won’t know what to guess, probably, so you’ll just stall for time and think of other matters.
Like a first floor room all littered with papers, you’ll think of that. And a postman toiling hard up the street, leading with both hands a big postal bag on a cart, bringing the Bidwell mail, more dailies than the rest of the town all put together takes. Then if you look around back, in the backyard, you’ll see the mountains and foothills of stacked newspapers and the neat, wired bundles of clippings, all waiting for the Boy Scouts to come and haul them away. After a while, just looking at these tall hillocks and big peaks of paper, you’ll begin to get a little of the feel of the enormity of the Bidwell undertaking.