Case and the Dreamer (12 page)

“You don’t have to tell me or anyone about it. But you were under stress, right? And VIP took your
antipodes
as
antipathies
and gave Marketing a psychiatric lecture instead of a trade report.”

“And the other time, the abscissas. That was when he threatened me that if I didn’t—”

“Shh,” he interrupted. “I don’t have to know as long as you do.” He waved a hand. “Type.”

Ejler Edgar Aylmer (nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer) had this inheritance and this basement workshop. They had come to him in that order and both were enormous. I dropped in one day to borrow a turret lathe and there he was, fiddling with the controls of a Z-shaped console. I had to thump him before he could answer me, because of the helmet. “Oh, hi,” he said. “It’s my reorganizer.”

“What’s it do?”

“I’ll show you.” Replacing the helmet, he punched rapidly on a terminal keyboard. Then he pulled a knobbed stick marked
REORG
, and it was lights-out for the machine. He took off the helmet and looked around. “How about that!” he said, mighty pleased.

“How about what?” I said, which made him roar with glee. He then asked me how many hours there are in a day. I looked down at my fingers and said, “Fourteen.”

“Okay. And who rules the United States?”

“The Royal Council, of course,” I said, correctly bobbing from the knees.

“And if I told you that when you walked in here you had eight fingers and two thumbs, and General Superfudd was Our Leader?”

I counted my fingers. “You better explain that to me, Ejler Edgar.”

“Well, I can’t, not really. But I can give you an analogy. Consider the whole universe a kind of computer bank. The computer can make every bit of information in it consistent with every other bit, by rearranging them. When you come up with an impossible bit—pigs with wings, say—it is ordinarily rejected as impossible nonsense. But if you put it into this terminal, the universe has to accept it no matter what, and will reorganize the whole universe, if necessary, to make it a fact. Pull the handle, and you’ll be living with real winged pigs.”

I looked at the machine and didn’t believe it. “Try it yourself,”
said Ejler Edgar. “But put on the helmet, otherwise you won’t be able to remember how the universe was before you reorganized it.”

I put on the helmet, thought a moment, then typed out on the console the most impossible thing I could think of: M
IRRORS REVERSE IMAGES RIGHT TO LEFT BUT NOT UP TO DOWN
. At his nod, I pulled the big handle.

Everything kind of
blinked
, and I was standing in an empty cellar wearing that stupid helmet. I looked at my hands, I still had eight fingers and two thumbs, but now they’re on two hands, for God’s sake, and there are 24 hours in a day, and what’s-his-name’s in the White House, and every time I look in a mirror it reverses everything right to left, but not up to down. Try it yourself.

And there’s nobody to explain it to me. As I said, nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer. Nobody.

The town came out of its houses, the propped-up weathered ones and the ones with the newly planted white pickets, out of the mercantile and the livery and even the Bat’s Wing, and stood in the wide flat dusty street to watch the cloud in the southeast. They’d known for a week it would come, but it should have come yesterday, and they couldn’t understand that. Billy Willow, who ran the mercantile, said so to the sheriff.

Ev Charger was the sheriff of Chayute, a gangly, ice-eyed man with the knack of keeping his heartbeat slow. He contemplated the cloud and couldn’t understand either why it was a day late. “But anyhow, no use hopin’ they won’t come,” he said, and with those words set himself like a clock, knowing what the message would have to be as the hours went by.

A lady stopped and called out from the duckboards: “You, Ev Charger, mind you keep a sharp eye on those—those ruffians. Chayute isn’t what it was, and they’d best learn that. We will not tolerate—”

“Yes ma’am,” the sheriff said evenly. From between Mrs. Finnan’s bright china teeth, and out of her dried-apricot face, had come the same public speech a week ago, and this would be the eleventh time since. Billy said sharply, “Now, Martha, when the sheriff comes into your place an’ tells you how much a yard to sell dimity, you’ve a right to tell him how to run his business. Did he do that yet?”

Mrs. Finnan sniffed and did not respond to that, but said, “A blessing when the railroad goes through,” and walked on. Charger wondered about that. The railroad wouldn’t come within forty miles of Chayute, and the word had been around for years now that more and more cattle were riding to market, arriving rested and soft. It would mean the end of the big drives for sure. Chayute would survive
with farms and maybe the mine but it would be a very different breed of town. Well it already was. Billy was saying, “I’d be a devil’s damfool to call that a blessing.” A cattle drive meant a lot to the mercantile and the saloon and a couple other kinds of places, though a lot of the rest would keep their doors open only out of a sort of defiance. And given their druthers, half the houses in Chayute would like to have boarded up their shutters or gophered clear underground. Then “Priss,” snapped Billy Willow, “you come here.”

The prettiest girl in town, yes and prettier than anything in the next four towns north and three east, stepped off the duckboards and came to her daddy. Billy was a laughter-beaten, weather-wrinkled little hickory stick of a man, and for all his endless good nature, his kids obeyed him in a way that would be the envy of a colonel in the cavalry. Ev Charger was going to ask Billy one day how that was done. “Yes, Daddy.”

Billy peered into the glowing face. Priss Willow had skin smooth as a new-blown magnolia and there’s a western tree called jacaranda which blooms a unique blue with lavender in it: Priss Willow’s eyes. “You got color on, girl?”

She got some then. “Oh no, Daddy.”

Billy peered close again. “Well good then. Go help your maw.”

“Yes, Daddy.” She smiled shyly at the sheriff, which made him want to blink his eyes, and they watched her move away—a pleasure. She’d a way of moving unlike other folk, who just have to move up and down a little with each step. She did not.

Ev Charger thought to ask then and there, “How do you get your kids to mind you so, Billy? For sure it wasn’t with a willow switch.”

“Oh, I been known to wave one,” said Billy, and laughed. Then he saw it was a straight question. Younguns grow yeast in their veins at a certain time, and the bubbles come in a lot of ways, not all of them good. The town had had its fair share of this in recent days as cattle became less to it and crops and the mine more, and they had to put a third room on the schoolhouse and those neat little pickets began to show along the street. Some of this yeasting became sheriff’s business, and what to do was forever a puzzler.

Billy said, “No kid’s a bad kid, whatever they say about blood. If you believe that, they know it and don’t get bad. Only other thing you got to do is give ’em something that says ‘thus far you can go, an’ no farther.’ It really don’t make no difference what it is, you know. There’s got to be a wall around ’em somewhere. Somepin for ’em to kick against. They call it a wall but they know it’s a shelter.” He came closer to talk privately, laughed again and said, “I don’t give a hoot owl’s holler if Priss powders up a bit, leastwise not more’n her maw does, but she don’t know that.”

They stood together watching the loom of the dust cloud over the late-lit southwest hills. Charger knew from the talk that they were both thinking the same thing, talking about the same thing—in the middle of that cloud was a hard-jawed kid name of Hank Shadd, yes and the old man who had made him what he was. Nobody ever built a wall around Hank, unless it was all those things that go to make a man out of a boy. And it was Olman Shadd’s idea of what makes a man—that is, to know what you want and go for it in straight lines. Two years ago they’d driven through here and Hank had first seen Priss Willow. Last year he had first
seen
her: a sizable difference; and she certainly saw him at the same time, which was why the color on her face just now, whether or not it was rouge pot or yeast.

Ev Charger knew the Shadds well and from way back. Olman Shadd was only a loose handful of years older than Charger, but even when Charger was a wet-eared calfling they were calling Olman Shadd “the Old Man.” Like a lot of other lawmen of the time, Charger had cows in his history. His first drive, and that was a long while back, had been under Olman Shadd—and Shadd had already bossed four of them, handling a crew of rannies older, and some bigger than he was. You did what he said because he never gave an order that didn’t make sense; he knew his country and his cows and his men. If you couldn’t figure out the sense you did it anyway, and right now, because he was a man who would back up an order with fists or feet or bullets if need be, no matter what, even “please pass the salt.” Ev Charger never ran afoul with him but once, and that was on his first drive, when he had maybe more enthusiasm than
knowledge or care, and one night tiredly hobbled his roan with a granny knot. It took him forty daylight minutes to catch his mount the next morning, and the Old Man waved him up from where he had been riding flank—a real kindness to an apprentice. “Ride drag,” was all the Old Man said, and young Ev dropped back and for five days drank dust with his nostrils and chewed it with his eyelids and spat it out in gritty tears, wading through cowflop the whole time, and contemplating the craft of carefulness.

He saw the shape and place of the cloud and said to Billy Willow, “They’ll be camping by the ford and they should have the cows put to bed by just past sundown. Reckon they’ll blow in about nine o’clock.”

Yes, nine o’clock, full dark, thirsty and all the rest that goes with it—and it was Shadd’s way to make up for a tight rein by discarding bridle and bit when the time came. “It’ll be a noisy night,” said Billy Willow, with absolute understanding, and went to see to his store.

And it was ten after nine in the darkening town when they first heard the gunshots—pinpricks of sound lengthening into crooked-y hollow tubes of it, laying out along the echoing foothills, yes, and hoofbeats and a lot of idiot yipping. Ev Charger came out of his office and walked quietly up the boards to the Bat’s Wing, while the townsfolk popped out of their doors to listen and back in again to hide, like a whole row of those wooden cuckoos on a Bavarian clock. Charger stepped out into the street and hung one of his shoulderblades on the high hitching rail in front of the Bat’s Wing Saloon and waited. Shadd’s men raced in in a sort of barely controlled stampede, probably because of some brainless poke’s wager about the last man buying the first drink. That game somehow got lost at the sight of the sheriff, though all he did was get his shoulder off the rail and stand up straight.

He looked up at them and nodded. “Howdy, Shadd.”

The Old Man reined close but didn’t begin to dismount. A mounted man has special advantages. His view is better and his range is wider and it’s natural (except for a smoothbore bird-killer) to shoot
straight or down rather than upwards. But most of all, he’s looking down on you, specially if he’s slab-jawed, grizzled, cold-eyed Olman Shadd. “Howdy, Ev,” he said in a voice like granite sliding on granite. He called the sheriff by his name, which was a kindness, for after losing his horse that time Ev Charger had been known as Granny for a hard-fought season.

Charger looked around at the others. Some he knew, had ridden with ’way back. Billy Oats was there, face blowtorched and hair frosted by the years, Injun John, Juice Jaw (did he ever have another name? Awake or asleep he carried a great bulge of tobacco-cud in one side of his face, and he had a whole vocabulary of spits), Neil was there, absolutely untouched by all those years, and Adams who had taught him that when you point your finger at something, even over your shoulder or behind your back, you do it with surprising accuracy, so that if you lay your index finger along the barrel of your gun and point, you can shoot off the back doorknob of a barroom from a batwing doorway. And tight-lipped young Hank Shadd, of course, looking for someone. Then there were some more men he didn’t know, and didn’t have to, really, to understand that they were the same hard riders, hard drinkers, and hardnosed brawlers as the rest. “Howdy, boys. Juicy. Neil. Hey Injun. Billy …” They grunted their greetings. Juicy spat pleasure. Then Charger added, “I’ll want your guns.”

It got very quiet. But for the half-lathered horses, it got so quiet for so long that Charger had the crazy idea that nobody would move or say a word at all forever and ever. And the funny thing was, nobody looked at him. They were all looking at Old Man Shadd. Looking to him.

Shadd said, “What’s that you say?” So the sheriff said it again.

“Why is that, Ev?” the Old Man asked too quietly.

Juicy spat wonderment.

“It’s the law,” said Charger. “Nobody totes iron here after sundown.”

“Wasn’t so last year,” said Shadd.

“Right, sir. Town ordinance. You want to see the book?”

“No, I don’t want to see the book. Take your word.” A sudden
something lit up Shadd’s steady eyes. Juicy recognized it for what it was, and spat fury. Shadd thumbed a dollar out of his Levi’s and flicked it ringing into the air and caught it. “Tell you what I’ll do, so we don’t git into no outnumbered argymint here. You call it, Sheriff, and if you win the toss we’ll do as you say.”