The Essential Ellison Part 97

" You' re very beautiful."

Thank you. With female amus.e.m.e.nt.

" But why me? Why let it happen to me? Are you the girl who- are you the one that was sick- the one who- ?"

I' m Maggie. And you, I picked you, because you need me. You' ve needed someone for a long long time.

Then it unrolled for Kostner. The past unrolled and he saw who he was. He saw himself alone. Always alone. As a child, born to kind and warm parents who hadn' t the vaguest notion of who he was, what he wanted to be, where his talents lay. So he had run off, when he was in his teens, and alone always alone on the road. For years and months and days and hours, with no one. Casual friends.h.i.+ps, based on food, or s.e.x, or artificial similarities. But no one to whom he could cleave, and cling, and belong. It was that way till Susie, and with her he had found light. He had discovered the scents and aromas of a spring that was eternally one day away. He had laughed, really laughed, and known with her it would at last be all right. So he had poured all of himself into her, giving her everything; all his hopes, his secret thoughts, his tender dreams; and she had taken them, taken him, all of him, and he had known for the first time what it was to have a place to live, to have a home in someone' s heart. It was all the silly and gentle things he laughed at in other people, but for him it was breathing deeply of wonder.

He had stayed with her for a long time, and had supported her, supported her son from the first marriage,. the marriage Susie never talked about. And then one day, he had come back, as Susie had always known he would. He was a dark creature of ruthless habits and vicious nature, but she had been his woman, all along, and Kostner realized he had been used as a stop-gap, as a bill-payer till her wandering terror came home to nest. Then she had asked him to leave. Broke, and tapped out in all the silent inner ways a man can be drained, he had left, without even a fight, for all the fight had been leached out of him He had left, and wandered west, and finally come to Las Vegas, where he had hit bottom. And found Maggie. In a dream, with blue eyes, he had found Maggie.

I want you to belong to me. I love you. Her truth was vibrant in Kostner' s mind. She was his, at last someone who was special. was his.

" Can I trust you? I' ve never been able to trust anyone before. Women, never. But I need someone. I really need someone. "

It' s me, always. Forever. You can trust me.

And she came to him, fully. Her body was a declaration of truth and trust such as no other Kostner had ever known before. She met him on a windswept plain of thought, and he made love to her more completely than he had known any pa.s.sion before. She joined with him, entered him, mingled with his blood and his thought and his frustration, and he came away clean, filled with glory.

" Yes. I can trust you. I want you. I' m yours." he whispered to her, when they lay side by side in a dream nowhere of mist and soundlessness. " I' m yours. "

She smiled, a woman 's smile of belief in her man; a smile of trust and deliverance. And Kostner woke up.

The Chief was back on its stand. and the crowd had been penned back by velvet ropes. Several people had played the machine, but there had been no jackpots.

Now Kostner came into the casino, and the " spotters" got themselves ready. While Kostner had slept, they had gone through his clothes, searching for wires, for gaffs, for spoons or boomerangs. Nothing.

Now he walked straight to the Chief. and stared at it.

Hartshorn was there. " You look tired," he said gently to Kostner, studying the man' s weary brown eyes.

" I am, a little." Kostner tried a smile; it didn' t work. " I had a funny dream."

"Oh?"

" Yeah...about a girl..." He let it die off.

Hartshorn' s smile was understanding. Pitying, empathic and understanding. " There are lots of girls in this town. You shouldn' t have any trouble finding one with your winnings."

Kostner nodded, and slipped his first silver dollar into the slot. He pulled the handle. The reels spun with a ferocity Kostner had not heard before and suddenly everything went whipping slantwise as he felt a wrenching of pure flame in his stomach, as his head was snapped on its spindly neck, as the lining behind his eyes was burned out. There was a terrible shriek, of tortured metal, of an express train ripping the air with its pa.s.sage, of a hundred small animals being gutted and torn to shreds, of incredible pain, of night winds that tore the tops off mountains of lava. And a keening whine of a voice that wailed and wailed and wailed as it went away from there in blinding light Free! Free! Heaven or h.e.l.l it doesn' t matter! Free!

The sound of a soul released from an eternal prison, a genie freed from a dark bottle. And in that instant of damp soundless nothingness, Kostner saw the reels snap and clock down for the final time: One, two, three. Blue eyes.

But he would never cash his checks.

The crowd screamed through one voice as he fell sidewise and lay on his face. The final loneliness...

The Chief was pulled. Bad luck. Too many gamblers resented its very presence in the casino. So it was pulled. And returned to the company, with explicit instructions it was to be melted down to slag. And not till it was in the hands of the ladle foreman, who was ready to dump it into the slag furnace, did anyone remark on the final tally the Chief had clocked.

" Look at that. ain' t that weird." said the ladle foreman to his bucket man. He pointed to the three gla.s.s windows.

" Never saw jackpot bars like that before," the bucket man agreed. " Three eyes. Must be an old machine. "

" Yeah, some of these old games go way back," the foreman said. hoisting the slot machine onto the conveyor track leading to the slag furnace.

" Three eyes. huh. How about that. Three brown eyes...And he threw the knife-switch that sent the Chief down the track. to puddle in the roaring inferno of the furnace.

Three brown eyes.

Three brown eyes that looked very very weary. That looked very very trapped. That looked very very betrayed. Some of these old games go way back.

A Boy And His Dog

I.

I was out with Blood, my dog. It was his week for annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty d.a.m.ned funny. Payson Terhune: ha ha.

I' d caught a couple of water rats for him, the big green and ocher ones, and someone' s manicured poodle, lost off a leash in one of the downunders.

He' d eaten pretty good, but he was cranky. " Come on, son of a b.i.t.c.h," I demanded, " find me a piece of a.s.s."

Blood just chuckled, deep in his dog-throat. " You' re funny when you get h.o.r.n.y," he said.

Maybe funny enough to kick him upside his sphincter a.s.shole, that refugee from a dingo-heap.

" Find! I ain' t kidding!"

" For shame, Albert. After all I' ve taught you. Not 'I ain' t kidding.' I' m not kidding."

He knew I' d reached the edge of my patience. Sullenly, he started casting. He sat down on the crumbled remains of the curb, and his eyelids flickered and closed, and his hairy body tensed. After a while he settled down on his front paws, and sc.r.a.ped them forward till he was lying flat, his s.h.a.ggy head on the outstretched paws. The tenseness left him and he began trembling, almost the way he trembled just preparatory to scratching a flea. It went on that way for almost a quarter of an hour, and finally he rolled over and lay on his back, his naked belly toward the night sky, his front paws folded mantislike, his hind legs extended and open. " I' m sorry," he said. " There' s nothing."

I could have gotten mad and booted him, but I knew he had tried. I wasn' t happy about it, I really wanted to get laid, but what could I do? " Okay," I said, with resignation, " forget it."

He kicked himself onto his side and quickly got up.

" What do you want to do?" he asked.

" Not much we can do, is there?" I was more than a little sarcastic. He sat down again, at my feet, insolently humble.

I leaned against the melted stub of a lamppost, and thought about girls. It was painful. " We can always go to a show," I said. Blood looked around the street, at the pools of shadow lying in the weed-overgrown craters, and didn' t say anything. The whelp was waiting for me to say okay, let' s go. He liked movies as much as I did.

" Okay, let' s go."

He got up and followed me, his tongue hanging, panting with happiness. Go ahead and laugh, you egg sucker. No popcorn for you!

Our Gang was a roverpak that had never been able to cut it simply foraging, so they' d opted for comfort and gone a smart way to getting it. They were movie-oriented kids, and they' d taken over the turf where the Metropole Theater was located. No one tried to bust their turf, because we all needed the movies, and as long as Our Gang had access to films, and did a better job of keeping the films going, they provided a service, even for solos like me and Blood. Especially for solos like us.

They made me check my .45 and the Browning .22 long at the door. There was a little alcove right beside the ticket booth. I bought my tickets first; it cost me a can of Oscar Mayer Philadelphia Sc.r.a.pple for me, and a tin of sardines for Blood. Then the Our Gang guards with the bren guns motioned me over to the alcove and I checked my heat. I saw water leaking from a broken pipe in the ceiling and I told the checker, a kid with big leathery warts allover his face and lips, to move my weapons where it was dry. He ignored me. " Hey you! Motherf.u.c.kin' toad, move my stuff over the other side...it goes to rust fast...an' it picks up any spots, man, I' ll break your bones!"

He started to give me jaw about it, looked at the guards with the brens, knew if they tossed me out I' d lose my price of admission whether I went in or not, but they weren' t looking for any action, probably understrength, and gave him the nod to let it pa.s.s, to do what I said. So the toad moved my Browning to the other end of the gun rack, and pegged my .45 under it.

Blood and me went into the theater.

" I want popcorn."

" Forget it."

" Come on, Albert. Buy me popcorn."

" I' m tapped out. You can live without popcorn."

" You' re just being a s.h.i.+t."

I shrugged: sue me.

We went in. The place was jammed. I was glad the guards hadn' t tried to take anything but guns. My spike and knife felt rea.s.suring, lying-up in their oiled sheaths at the back of my neck. Blood found two together, and we moved into the row, stepping on feet. Someone cursed and I ignored him. A Doberman growled. Blood' s fur stirred, but he let it pa.s.s. There was always some hardcase on the muscle, even on neutral ground like the Metropole.

(I heard once about a get-it-on they' d had at the old Loew' s Granada, on the South Side. Wound up with ten or twelve rovers and their mutts dead, the theater burned down and a couple of good Cagney films lost in the fire. After that was when the roverpaks had got up the agreement that movie houses were sanctuaries. It was better now, but there was always somebody too messed in the mind to come soft.) It was a triple feature. Raw Deal with Dennis O' Keefe, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr and Marsha Hunt was the oldest of the three. It' d been made in 1948, eighty-six years ago; G.o.d only knows how the d.a.m.n thing' d hung together all that time; it slipped sprockets and they had to stop the movie all the time to re-thread it. But it was a good movie. About this solo who' d been j.a.pped by his roverpak and was out to get revenge. Gangsters, mobs, a lot of punching and fighting. Real good.

The middle flick was a thing made during the Third War, in '92, twenty-seven years before I was even born, thing called Smell of a c.h.i.n.k. It was mostly gut-spilling and some nice hand-to-hand. Beautiful scene of skirmisher greyhounds equipped with napalm throwers, jellyburning a c.h.i.n.k town. Blood dug it, even though we' d seen this flick before. He had some kind of phony shuck going that these were ancestors of his, and he knew and I knew he was making it up.

" Wanna burn a baby, hero?" I whispered to him. He got the barb and just s.h.i.+fted in his seat, didn' t say a thing, kept looking pleased as the dogs worked their way through the town. I was bored stiff.

I was waiting for the main feature.

Finally it came on. It was a beauty, a beaver flick made in the late 1970s. It was called Big Black Leather Splits. Started right out very good. These two blondes in black leather corsets and boots laced all the way up to their crotches, with whips and masks, got this skinny guy down and one of the chicks sat on his face while the other one went down on him. It got really hairy after that.

All around me there were solos playing with themselves. I was about to jog it a little myself when Blood leaned across and said, real soft, the way he does when he' s onto something unusually smelly, " There' s a chick in here."

" You' re nuts," I said.

" I tell you I smell her. She' s in here, man."

Without being conspicuous, I looked around. Almost every seat in the theater was taken with solos or their dogs. If a chick had slipped in there' d have been a riot. She' d have been ripped to pieces before any single guy could have gotten into her. " Where?" I asked, softly. All around me, the solos were beating-off, moaning as the blondes took off their masks and one of them worked the skinny guy with a big wooden ram strapped around her hips.

" Give me a minute," Blood said. He was really concentrating. His body was tense as a wire. His eyes were closed, his muzzle quivering. I let him work.

It was possible. Just maybe possible. I knew that they made really dumb flicks in the downunders, the kind of c.r.a.p they' d made back in the 1930s and' 40s, real clean stuff with even married people sleeping in twin beds. Myrna Loy and George Brent kind of flicks. And I knew that, once in a while, a chick from one of the really strict middle-cla.s.s downunders would c.u.m up, to see what a hairy flick was like. I' d heard about it, but it' d never happened in any theater I' d ever been in.

And the chances of it happening in the Metropole, particularly, were slim. There was a lot of twisty trade came to the Metropole. Now, understand, I' m not specially prejudiced against guys corning one another...h.e.l.l, I can understand it. There just aren' t enough chicks anywhere. But I can' t cut the jockey-and-boxer scene because it gets some weak little boxer hanging on you, getting jealous, you have to hunt for him and all he thinks he has to do is bare his a.s.s to get all the work done for him. It' s as bad as having a chick dragging along behind. Made for a lot of bad blood and fights in the bigger roverpaks, too. So I just never swung that way. Well, not never, but not for a long time.

So with all the twisties in the Metropole, I didn' t think a chick would chance it. Be a toss-up who' d tear her apart first: the boxers or the straights.

And if she was here, why couldn' t any of the other dogs smell her...?

" Third row in front of us," Blood said. " Aisle seat. Dressed like a solo."

" How' s come you can whiff her and no other dog' s caught her?"

" You forget who I am, Albert."

" I didn' t forget, I just don' t believe it."

Actually, bottom-line, I guess I did believe it. When you' d been as dumb as I' d been and a dog like Blood' d taught me so much, a guy came to believe everything he said. You don' t argue with your teacher.

Not when he' d taught you how to read and write and add and subtract and everything else they used to know that meant you were smart (but doesn' t mean much of anything now, except it' s good to know it, I guess).

(The reading' s a pretty good thing. It comes in handy when you can find some canned goods someplace, like in a bombed-out supermarket; makes it easier to pick out stuff you like when the pictures are gone off the labels. Couple of times the reading stopped me from taking canned beets. s.h.i.+t, I hate beets!) So I guess I did believe why he could whiff a maybe chick in there, and no other mutt could. He' d told me all about that a million times. It was his favorite story. History he called it. Christ, I' m not that dumb! I knew what history was. That was all the stuff that happened before now.

But I liked hearing history straight from Blood, instead of him making me read one of those crummy books he was always dragging in. And that particular history was all about him, so he laid it on me over and over, till I knew it by heart...no, the word was rote. Not wrote, like writing, that was something else. I knew it by rote, means you got it word-for-word.

And when a mutt teaches you everything you know, and he tells you something rote, I guess finally you do believe it. Except I' d never let that leg-lifter know it.

II.

What he' d told me rote was: Over sixty-five years ago, in Los Angeles, before the Third War even got going completely, there was a man named Buesing who lived in Cerritos. He raised dogs as watchmen and sentries and attackers. Dobermans, Danes, schnauzers and j.a.panese akitas. He had one four-year-old German shepherd b.i.t.c.h named Ginger. She worked for the Los Angeles Police Department' s narcotics division. She could smell out marijuana. No matter how well it was hidden. They ran a test on her: there were 25,000 boxes in an auto parts warehouse. Five of them had been planted with marijuana sealed in cellophane, wrapped in tin foil and heavy brown paper, and finally hidden in three separate sealed cartons. Within seven minutes Ginger found all five packages. At the same time that Ginger was working, ninety-two miles farther north, in Santa Barbara, cetologists had drawn and amplified dolphin spinal fluid and injected it into Chacma baboons and dogs. Altering surgery and grafting had been done. The first successful product of this cetacean experimentation had been a two-year-old male Puli named Ahbhu, who had communicated sense-impressions telepathically. Cross-breeding and continued experimentation had produced the first skirmisher dogs, just in time for the Third War. Telepathic over short distances, easily trained, able to track gasoline or troops or poison gas or radiation when linked with their human controllers, they had become the shock commandos of a new kind of war. The selective traits had bred true. Dobermans, greyhounds, akitas, pulis and schnauzers had become steadily more telepathic.

Ginger and Ahbhu had been Blood' s ancestors.

He had told me so, a thousand times. Had told me the story just that way, in just those words, a thousand times, as it had been told to him. I' d never believed him till now.

Maybe the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d was special.

I checked out the solo scrunched down in the aisle seat three rows ahead of me. I couldn' t tell a d.a.m.ned thing. The solo had his (her?) cap pulled way down, fleece jacket pulled way up.

" Are you sure?"

" As sure as I can be. It' s a girl."

" If it is, she' s playing with herself just like a guy."

Blood snickered. " Surprise," he said sarcastically.

The mystery solo sat through Raw Deal again. It made sense, if that was a girl. Most of the solos and all of the members of roverpaks left after the beaver flick. The theater didn' t fill up much more, it gave the streets time to empty, he/ she could make his/her way back to wherever he/ she had come from. I sat through Raw Deal again myself. Blood went to sleep.

When the mystery solo got up, I gave him/her time to get weapons if any' d been checked, and start away. Then I pulled Blood' s big s.h.a.ggy ear and said, " Let' s do it." He slouched after me, up the aisle.

I got my guns and checked the street. Empty.

" Okay, nose," I said, " where' d he go?"

" Her. To the right."

I started off, loading the Browning from my bandolier. I still didn' t see anyone moving among the bombed-out sh.e.l.ls of the buildings. This section of the city was crummy, really bad shape. But then, with Our Gang running the Metropole, they didn' t have to repair anything else to get their livelihood. It was ironic; the Dragons had to keep an entire power plant going to get tribute from the other roverpaks; Ted' s Bunch had to mind the reservoir; the Bastinados worked like fieldhands in the marijuana gardens; the Barbados Blacks lost a couple of dozen members every year cleaning out the radiation pits all over the city; and Our Gang only had to run that movie house.