Case and the Dreamer (14 page)

“She’s comin’ out or I’m comin’ in.” He stepped his horse a pace closer.

Billy hung his hand over his holster. His voice was thick, and the veins at the sides of his neck stood out like fence-posts. “Try getting’ past me an’ you’re dead.”

Upstreet, the sound of hooves galloping in.

The window above was empty.

“If that’s really it, then,” said the boy, and went for his gun. There was a hoarse grating shout just behind Charger, but he paid it no mind. He drew and shot Hank Shadd out of his saddle. He put away his gun before he turned and saw the Old Man spring down from a wheezing mount and run to the boy. He wasn’t there ahead of Priss Willow, though. The girl was down beside him, his head in her lap, and she had a fine proud glare of disgust for Ev Charger and all the world besides.

Shadd knelt briefly by the wounded man and then stood up and turned to face the sheriff.

“Shoulder,” he said. And he said to the girl, “Will you watch over him?”

She put her arms around Hank’s head. Behind her, Ev could see a shocked-sober Billy Willow raise his hands and drop them in defeat. Then he grinned a little—thank the Powers, Billy Willow’s own old smile. He came over to where Charger and the Old Man were standing and though nobody asked him, he said, “I sent her off to bed and it’s the first time she ever disobeyed me, she slipped away to talk to him there in the doorway but I didn’t know where she was.”

Nobody asked Shadd to explain either, but he said, “Made him ride drag. Don’t know why I thought to come back and look, but he was gone and I knowed he’d come here.”

Charger knew that was as far as either would ever go in the way of apology. He said, “You raise a young’un to mind you, and one day he don’t, why, it must be pretty important.”

They all looked at the young couple. The doctor had come out.
The Old Man said, “He’s in good hands. I’ll be by after the drive.”

He mounted his horse and looked down on them. “Hey, Ev,” he said. “I knew we could make it be just like old times, a shootin’ an’ everything, and that sheriff we was always lookin’ for, that would back up one of my boys.” Then he smiled: it was the first Ev Charger had ever seen on that face. He said something that explained why he had taken the old trail and scorned the bright easy scar of the railroad right-of-way. “I knew we could do it—one more time.”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Billy Willow, and did, and for the trail drivers, that was the last of the good old days.

“Metaphysics,” said the newsboy, “is a misnomer to begin with, and has been misunderstood, misused and unappreciated ever since.”

“Ever since what?” demanded the Bump. (She had two aspects, depending. The other one was the Grind.)

“Ever since a librarian called Andronicus of Rhodes called it that.” He threw me an aside: “Andronicus was a sort of Köchel to Aristotle.” Always explaining the obscure with the incomprehensible.

“What’s a cookle?” I asked.

“Not ‘cookle,’ dummy—Köchel,” said the Bump. She had to make her mouth like kissing to say the name. Nice. “He’s the one that catalogued all of Mozart’s work.” She turned back to the newsboy. “So about metaphysics.”

“Oh, Aristotle wrote this book called
Physics
. Then he wrote another book, and Andronicus called it—” he spoke a word which I can’t write down here, because it was Greek—“which means ‘The treatises after the treatises on physics.’ The ‘meta-’ means ‘after’—like ‘one thing after another,’ that’s all. And ever since then people have made it some kind of foggy set of laws and systems parallel to physics, and’ve mixed it all up with spiritualism and psychic phenomena and I don’t know what all. Aristotle’s book wasn’t about any of that.”

“Well, what was it about?”

“Reality.”

I heaved a noisy sigh. “Familiar ground at last.” I hate it when he and the Bump talk about what I don’t know about and they do.

“Sure,” said the newsboy. He held up two fingers. “Is there a single thing everything else comes from, or many? Is there a single idea or, he called it, Spirit, that all ideas come from? That’s what it was about.”

“Sure,” I responded, and it sounded ’way different. None of that sounded very real to me.

The Bump said, “That … is … 
heavy
. Covers about all the philosophy there is, doesn’t it?”

He gave her that surprised-pleased look at this like when he gulped the glass of milk only it was eggnog. “Right!” he said, and went off to peddle his papers.

“Bastard,” said the Bump. She mimicked him: “Right! … right, you bubble-headed female, who’d ever think
you’d
understand anything—any of you.” She hit the top of her typewriter so hard it went ding. “How is it we have a moon dome and a cure for nine kinds of cancer and we still have to put up with male chauvinist piggery like that?”

“I guess because we still have papers and paper boys,” I said. “He bugs me too.”

“Did he give you the money this month?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.” She was genuinely disappointed. For reasons too complicated and too trivial to explain, his office utilities were on our bill and he was supposed to give us the cash every month. If he didn’t get around to it the Bump would climb his back about it. In addition she never thought it was enough. She suspected him of living in his office as well as working in it. She would stop in the middle of some complicated wheelie-dealie and demand to know if I smelled bacon cooking. Sometimes I thought I did too, but I always said no. I didn’t give a damn about that or the utility money either. She didn’t, I don’t think, not really, but somehow or other she had to get one-up. What she really wanted was for me—me!—to jimmy into his place when he wasn’t there and look for dirty dishes. Or like the woman-immemorial: march right in to him and say.… None of which I dare voice to her. One male chauvinist pig in her sights was enough. The Bump exploding all over my office at me, I did not need. Given a little slack (let her call me dummy once in a while if it did her good) she was what’s called a valuable employee. “Back to work.”

“I was working.”

“When I walked in here you were gumming with Smiley about
metaphysics.” Smiley was not his name. He was the surliest and most ill-mannered man I ever met, so behind his back we used to call him Smiley.

She gave me the exasperated look and started an album. The eight-foot wide tank emitted two thumping discords and a shriek and exploded into a mass of whirling colors which fuzzed and resolved themselves into the Catalyst, which is my heaviest group and my biggest headache. Number four on the charts, which is great. Number four for nine weeks now without moving—that’s spooky. They blared and tinkled and whomped until I put my hands over my ears. I don’t know anything about music, but I know what I like. I also know that whether or not I like something has nothing to do with whether I can sell it. That was a hard thing to learn and the secret of my success. I’m the best woodstocker that ever was. “What the hell is that?”

The Bump yanked out the holo-cube in mid-honk. The silence almost made me bite my tongue. The Bump squinted at the label. “ ‘Metaphysical Mope.’ ”

“Oh. So he came in while you were playing it and that started the argument.”

“He says it’s Scriabin.”

“Let me work my own way through that. Archaic Moldavian slang meaning both ‘scream’ and ‘scratch.’ He’s right.”

“No, dummy,” she said, and then, I think in spite of herself, laughed and nodded. “I think you have a point there. Scriabin was a composer.”

“I know. But that’s not Scriabin, it’s pure Catalyst. Jomo Delahanty writes everything for the group and he wrote that. Anyone who ever heard the Cat and hears this new one would tell you that.”

“Right,” agreed the Bump—but ominously. “Just what the newsboy said. They’re
all
Scriabin.”

“What!”

“Except for ‘Moongut.’ ” (‘Moongut’ was Catalyst’s first million seller.) “That was Dvorak.” She picked up a note from her desk. “Quartet in D minor.” She was enjoying this. She has a very evil sense of humor.

I sat down mostly because I had to. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Right. I didn’t say it—the newsboy did.”

As if on cue he kicked the door open and shoved something flat into my hands. I said Hey! and he said Later and left. It all went just that fast. I looked at the something flat. I hadn’t seen one in years. Not a new one, anyway. I have eleven of them and they’re priceless. Audio discs, twelve inches, 33 1/3 rpm. This one was monophonic.
“Mono!”
I must have shouted it. Now this I had never seen before, though I’d heard of them.

“What is it?” the Bump demanded.

“Scriabin.” I got up and started back for my display. “Mono, by God.” My display is my pride and joy. Among the plaques and trophies in gold cubes are replicas of every kind of record player that ever was, from Edison’s hand-cranked wax cylinder to the big eight-footer with its holograph tank and octophonic surround. There’s a hand-wound clockwork Victor acoustic with a horn like a lily-flower and a deadly looking Atwater Kent with an S-shaped megaphone and fourteen knobs. I went to the Magnavox. It used to have glass “tubes”—sort of electronic valves with a hot filament, absolutely unobtainable now, so the amp was solid-state, but otherwise it was perfect. I switched it on and put the disk on the turntable and did the thing that made the stylus swing over and lower itself to the spiral groove. Very quaint, very camp. It had a rumble and a hum and a wow and a hiss, all at once, and the sound was peculiarly flat, a single source split eight ways through my speakers. It was a piano solo, it was called “Sonata Number Two,” and sure as hell it was “Metaphysical Mope.”

“The dirty lying little grave-robber,” I said, meaning Delahanty. “Where is he?”

The Bump knew who I meant. “Where you sent him, woodstocking at the Groundhog Festival in Punxsutawney.”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Not while he’s in the top ten,” said the Bump reasonably. “Wait till he’s off the charts.”

“Which will be in about forty-eight hours if this gets out.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Stealing is so common in this lousy business it’s almost a virtue.”

“Not unless it’s public domain. It could get me into bad trouble.”

“Aristotle wrote a lot about ethics too,” said the Bump, “and I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think he’d go along with stealing even from public domain.”

“Aristotle never had to phase in with contracts and residuals and payola and media seduction.”

“Well what are you going to do?” asked the Bump, which was the head-on point which I was try to shout my way away from. What am I going to do. This Scriabin operated a long time ago—“Find out how long ago was this Scriabin.”—and maybe we’re home free with the public domain number. Maybe it would even help, give us class. Did any group ever get hurt stealing from Tchaikovsky? Chopin? Grieg? Leadbelly? “Maybe what we should do is nothing. And nobody ever bothers.”

At which the Bump did a delicate muscular thing with the architecture of her nostrils and snorted. With marvelous mimicry she unfolded an imaginary copy of the
Daily New Downbeat
(you could tell because the
DNB
has a funny way of folding page one) and read the imaginary headline: “ ‘C
AT
C
RIBS
C
LASSICS
. Jomo Delahanty a JD? Woodstocker claims ignorance of real music.’ Those are the headlines and subheads. Here’s the body copy: ‘Woodstocker Sol U. Rock, whose real name is reputed to be Edward Smith, conceded yesterday in the face of overwhelming evidence that the works of Jomo Delahanty, gangling nexus of the Catalyst, are lifted bodily from the century-old works of one Alexander N. Scriabin. The woodstocker protested that the theft was done without his knowledge and in the face of his complete innocence, or ignorance, of the nature of classical music or indeed the nature of any music.’ ”

“Stop.” I said it straight, with a good hard thump, but she went right on reading her imaginary paper. “Noted musicologist Harrisson Twixt, contacted at his ranch in the Mojave, claims to have had in preparation for a long time an exposé of the Delahanty fraud, and suggests that the Catalyst has gone as high as four on the charts by Comrade Scriabin’s excellence, and has failed to go any higher because of Delahanty’s interference with the original.’ Sol, you’re interrupting.”

And I was. “I said
stop!
”

She didn’t like to be yelled at. “Stop exactly what?”

“Enjoying this, for one. And my name never was Edward Smith. And he was never ‘comrade’ Scriabin, he did his thing before the revolution. And Harry Twixt is a superpresh who wouldn’t hold still for rock music if you strapped him to a board. Hey, you don’t think he really is preparing a blast on this, do you?”

“No, but he would if it got around, and he’d say exactly the same thing Smiley said.”

“Him again. You mean about getting to four and sticking there.”

“Right. He said pure Scriabin would send Catalyst right to the top.”

“What the hell does he know, a newsboy.”

“Yeah, what the hell does he know. Sol—what are you going to
do
?”

That again. I said, “If Delahanty’s done me that, and he did, and this gets out like you say, and it will, I—I—” I sat down. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

With total injustice the Bump (who after all was intensely loyal) said: “I know one damn newsboy ought to mind his own business.” With equal injustice I agreed with her.

And you must not think that at this time the newsboy was any special preoccupation of ours. For that matter neither was Delahanty or Catalyst. We had lots of other troubles. Catalyst wasn’t by any means my only account, and if you know anything at all about woodstocking you know there’s a hell of a lot more to it than a stage and audio towers set in some place they don’t belong, with upwards of a half-million people making themselves locally unwelcome. It begins with things you probably never thought about, like paid whispering campaigns and rumor, and it goes on to advance men and publicity and made-news until it gets to the hard chores of sugaring the heat (twice as bad if it’s overseas)—transport, customs, language, terrain and always, weather. Then there are the hitchhikers—legit ones like the record companies and the parasite press, and the baddies who think how great it is to ship dope and currency in instrument
crates. As if that isn’t Station One in any county or narc probe. And the groupies we always have with us. On the surface we beat them back, but there have been times when the performers have been so repulsive I’ve had to
hire
groupies. And oh, the scene, the scene. It’s going to happen to woodstocking like it did to football, I swear, where the half-time shows got so big and glittery they began to run them without a ball game. There’d been woodstocks on a continent of rafts in the Gulf, and in the crater of a rumbling volcano. (Hairy, that one.) A desert, a swamp (three deaths from moccasin bites, that time) and once on four blocks of Second Avenue, with the audience in all the windows and the stage on a temporary bridge on the 54th floor. It cost a lot of money to buy four blocks of Second Avenue for four days. But the scene, the scene … you had to have a scene. And the more kooky and tilted the scenes got, the harder it was to find a new one.