The Nail and the Oracle (6 page)

This has been a difficult review to write.

Ted never told me what he thought of that piece. We had no bitterness over it, but we never sat down to bagels and lox about it, either. We were friends, and both of us knew that meant unshakeable trust in the truth that we loved each other, that we respected and admired the best of each other’s work in such a way that to blow smoke and/or sunshine up each other’s kilt would have been to poison that trust. Unlike many writers who expect their friends to write blurbs and dispense encomia on the basis of camaraderie rather than the absolute quality of the work, Ted and I understood that we could lie to others that way, but never to each other.

So. Enough.

I have more, endless more that I could set down about Ted, about abiding with Ted, about the chill wind blowing through the burlesque houses of both of our lives, but enough is enough.

Noël has suggested that I take the eulogy I wrote for Ted in 1985, that appears near the beginning of this essay, and move it back here, because every time she reads it, she cries.

And she thinks it is a proper end for this love letter to my friend now dead more than two decades.

No, dear Noël, it has to stay where it is; and I’ll tell you my thinking here.

Ted wanted me to write his eulogy. He made me promise. And I did it. But I was so wracked by loss at the time, it was brief, far briefer than
this
eulogy. And thus I left out most of what’s set down here in print for the first—and last—time. It is the for-real eulogy Ted probably wanted, and which I have perceived is being read over my shoulder as I’ve written it, by Ted’s ghost. Not for you, Noël, not for any of Ted’s other kids, not for Marion, not for the publisher who is herewith getting a major piece unexpectedly, and sure as hell not for admirers, fans, readers of Ted’s work.

I have written this because Ted needs to read it, and because it is a picture of The Great Artist that cannot exist via
hoi polloi
. It had to be done by me, kiddo; and if you think this is all of it …

Most
of what I know about Theodore Sturgeon I cannot tell you.
I haven’t told you about the two times we fought, the first being the imbroglio over that meanspirited piss-ant, the toweringly talented British novelist Anthony Burgess, who was a nasty little shit; and the second time subsequent to Ted doing one of the most awful things I’ve ever known of a human being doing to others, resulting in my telling him to get the fuck outta my house, now, tonight, this minute!

I haven’t told you about Ted and the Meatgrinder; Ted and the Tongue-Tied Germans; Ted and the Apollo Trip; Ted and Chuck Barris in Movieland; Ted and the Wing-Walker; Ted and the Naked Monkey. Oh, trust me, I could go on for days. But …

Enough.

I would have liked to’ve written more extensively about how Ted and I wrote together, but Paul Williams has covered some of that in the story-notes, and the rest is whispers and memories. So, at last, after more than twenty years, Ted, I’ve kept my promise. In full.

To say, at finish, only this. I miss my friend. I miss Ted’s charm, his chicanery, his talent, his compassion. I miss them because they will never, not ever, not embodied in anyone or anything, never ever exist on any plane we can perceive. Those of you who never met him, who have only read him, can know what an emptiness there will forever be in your life. Because I know the emptiness in mine.

Harlan Ellison
^®
30 January 2007
Sherman Oaks, CA

Midafternoon and he came to a fork in the road. Just like the rest of us in all our afternoons, whether we know it at the time or not.

Younger Macleish liked the left fork. His horse’s sleepy feet preferred the right, a bit downgrade as it was, and Macleish thought what the hell, he was ready to like the right fork too. He liked the country right, left, and whatever, from the white peaks feeding snow water to high timber and good grama range, across and down through the foothills where the low curly bunch-grass grew, and on to the black-earthed bottomland. But then it didn’t need to be all that good to please Younger Macleish today. He was of a mind to like salt-flat or sage, crows, cactus or a poison spring, long as the bones lay pretty there.

Around the mountain (right fork, left fork, it’s all the same) and three hundred miles beyond lay fifteen thousand well-fenced acres and a good warm welcome. Ninety-nine times Younger Macleish had said no to his cousin’s offer, for he had some distances to pace off and some growing up to do on his own. Now he’d said yes and was ambling home to a bubbling spring and an upland house; not too far away lived a pair of the prettiest blue-eyed sisters since crinolines were invented, while down the other way—if a man found he couldn’t choose—lived an Eastern school-marm with a bright white smile and freckles on her nose. Right now he had four months pay in his poke, his health, a sound horse, a good saddle, and no worriments. If a man likes where he’s been and where he’s headed, he’s fair bound to like where he is.

As the shadows grew longer, this horse, he thought approvingly, has the right idea, for the trail is good and the passes this side of the
mountain might make a little more sense after all. And if things are as they should be, there’ll be a settlement down yonder, maybe big enough for a hotel with a sheet on the bed and a bite of something other than trail bacon and boiled beans.

With the thought came the settlement, opening up to him as the trail rounded a bluff. It was just what he had in mind, plus a cut extra—a well-seasoned cowtown with a sprinkling of mining. It had two hotels, he saw as he rode in, the near one with a restaurant and a livery right handy to it. There was a mercantile, more cow than plow, and half the barber shop was an assay office.

Younger Macleish rode up to the livery and slid off. He hooked an elbow around the horn and arched his back hard.

“Ridin’ long?”

Macleish turned around and grinned at the tubby little old bald-head who stood in the carriage door. “My back says so … Treat hosses po’ly here, do you?”

The old man grinned in return and took the bridle. “Misable,” he asserted. “Whup ’em every hour.”

“Well, whack this’n with a oat or two an’ give him water if he wants it or not.”

“He’ll rue the day,” said the oldster, his eyes twinkling.

Macleish followed him far enough inside for a glance to assure him that water really was there and that the hay was hay. Then he unbuckled his saddlebags and heaved them over his shoulder. “Which one o’ them hotels is best?”

“One of ’em ain’t rightly a hotel.”

“I’ll start out at the other.”

“The near one, then. Miz Appleton, now, she
feeds.”
The old man colored his information by casting his eyes upward most devoutly.

“Now, you know I ain’t et since my last meal?” Chuckling, Younger Macleish humped his saddlebags and stepped out into the street. It was only a step to the hotel porch, barely time enough to say howdy twice to passers-by. Macleish mounted the steps and thudded inside. It was small in there, but it had a stairway with a landing up the left and across the back, and under the landing, just like
in the city but littler, a regular hotel kind of desk. He knew something was cooking right now, somewhere in the place, with onions and butter both, and he knew that not long ago something had been baked with vanilla in it. Everything was so clean he wanted to go out and shine his boots and come in again. Behind the desk was a doorway covered by nothing at all but red and blue beads. These moved and fell to again behind a little lady fat as the old livery man, but half his age and not the least bit bald. Her face was soft and plump as a sofa pillow and she had a regular homecoming smile.

“You’ll be Miz Appleton.”

“Come in. Put down those bags. You’ve come a ways, the looks of you. You hungry?”

Macleish looked around him, at the snowy antimacassars and the doilies under the vases of dried ferns and bright paper flowers, all of it spotless. “I feel dirtier’n I do hongry, but if I git any hongrier I’ll be dead of it. My name’s Younger Macleish.”

“You hurry and wash,” she ordered him like kinfolk, “while I set another something on the stove. You’ll find water and soap on the stand in your room, first right at the head of the stairs.” She gave him a glad smile and was gone through the wall of beads before he could grin back.

He shouldered his saddlebags and climbed the stairs, finding the room just where she had said, and just what the immaculate downstairs had led him to expect. He stood a moment in it shyly, feeling that a quick move would coat the walls with his personal grime, then shrugged off the feeling and turned to the washstand.

He had no plan to get all that fancied up; he just wanted to be clean. But clean or not, just plain shirtsleeves didn’t feel right to him in that place, and all he had to put over it was his Santiago vest. It had on it some gold-braid curlicues and a couple extra pockets and real wild satin lapels that a puncher might call Divin’ W if it was a brand. He put it on after he’d shaved till it hurt and reamed out his ears; he had half an idea Miz Appleton would send him back upstairs if they weren’t clean. He took off his pants and whacked off what dust he could, and put them on again and did his best to prettify the boots. When he was done he cleaned up from his cleaning up,
setting the saddlebags in a corner and folding away his dirty shirt. He hung up his gunbelt, never giving it a second thought, or much of the first one either, bent to look in the mirror and paste down a lock of hair which sprang up again like a willow sapling, and went downstairs.

Miz Appleton clasped her hands together and cried out when she saw him: “Glo-ry! Don’t he look nice!” and Younger Macleish looked behind him and all around to see who she was talking about, until he saw there was no one there but himself and the lady. “It ain’t me, honest, ma’am,” he said. “It’s only this here gold braid.”

“Nonsense! You’re a fine-looking, clean-cut youngster. Wherever did you get that curly hair?”

He felt his ears get hot. He never had figured an answer to that. Women were always asking him that. Next thing you know she’d be saying he’d ought to be an actor. But she was asking him if he was ready to eat. He grinned his answer and she led him through a door at the end of the little lobby into the restaurant.

The restaurant had a door also into the street, which Macleish thought was pretty clever. It was a rectangular room, just big enough for three square tables and one long one. On each was a bowl of the dried flowers he had seen in the lobby. The big table had two of them. The whole place smelled like Sunday supper in the promised land. At one of the tables, two punchers and a man in a black coat were shoveling away silently as if the promise was being kept.

Along the back wall was a doorway covered with the same kind of bead curtain. Through it he could just barely make out another table, smaller than the others, covered with blinding white linen. He saw glasses there and a silver vase and a silver candlestick that matched it.

“Just you set,” said Miz Appleton, waving at one of the bare square tables, “and I’ll be right with you.”

Macleish said, “Real nice place here.” He pointed at the bead-screened alcove. “Who’s that for?”

“You want to see it?” Proudly beaming, she went to the alcove, took a wooden match from a box in her apron pocket, leaned in and lit the candle in the silver candlestick.

“Well, hey,” breathed Younger Macleish.

The alcove was just big enough for two people and the table. The seats were built right on to the wall like a window box. They had velour cushions and backs on them. Two places were set. At each place were three forks, two knives, four spoons, three glasses, and a starched napkin folded in a circle like a king’s crown, with the eight points sticking straight up. The cutlery looked all mismatched, but the handles were all the same: wide fork, narrow fork, thin knife, wide knife. The same with the glasses, all different shapes but with identical bases. He had never seen anything like it.