Troublemakers (38 page)

   
A foot short of the beast the speeding webbing lost all drive, fluttered in the still cave for a moment, then fell like a flaccid length of rope. On the floor it quickly contracted itself, Worm-like, into a tight, small ball.

   
The
fetl
licked its chops, the tongue swirling down and across and up and in again.

   
Before he could pull the trigger again, Claybourne felt the gun tremble in his hands. At the same moment he saw the beast’s flanks quiver again.

   
An instant later the gun ripped itself from his grasp and sent itself crashing into the wall. Parts spattered the cave floor as the seams split, and capsules tumbled out. The molasses-gun’s power compartment emitted a sharp, blue spark, and the machine was gone.

   
He was defenseless.

   
He heard the roar again.
Telekinetic!
After he had done what he wished, the animal would leave by the hole in the rear of the cave. Why bother untumbling the rocks!

   
The
fetl
began moving again. Claybourne stumbled back, tripped on a jutting rock, fell heavily to the floor.

   
The man backed away across the floor of the cave, the seat of his suit scraping the rock floor. His back flattened against the wedged rock in the cave mouth. He was backed as far as he could go.

   
He was screaming, the sound echoing back and forth in his hood, in the cave, in the night.

   
All he could see, all there was in the universe, was the
fetl.
advancing on him, slowly, slowly, taking all the time it needed. Savoring every instant.

   
Then, abruptly, at the precise instant he gazed deep into that ring of hate-filled green eyes coming toward him, he realized that even as he had tracked the
fetl,
even as he had been tracking Garden-so the
fetl
had been tracking him!

   
The
fetl
licked
his lips again, slowly.

   
He had all the time in the world...

   
His
world.

This next story, and the one after that are very dear to me. I suppose because there is just a whole lot of me in each of them. They come out of my own life, the last one straight out of my first big run-in with the law (and we’ll get to that in due measure), and this one because it stars the me who was once five and has never really outgrown that age, in some very major ways. I’m not going to get all dopey and chickflick about it, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Jeffty (with
two
“f”s, kindly note) because he’s such a sweet kid, and he embodies all my memories of the books and radio programs and movies and comics I loved as a kid. The secret lesson in this story, however, is a different matter. When I wrote this story the ending seemed very clear to me, seemed so obvious I never figured anyone would be confused by it. But damned if every college course that teaches this story wound up with the students and the prof arguing over what happens to Jeffty in the end. And if I
tell
you, if I explain it to you, well, that would be delivering the punchline before you hear the set-up. So, I
can’t
tell you what life lesson for troublemakers lies in wait for you at the end of this sad and maybe-a-little-complex tale about how the Present always eats up the Past and leaves you adrift. You cannot know, at your age, what it is like to not be able to run that fast, jump that high, hit a note that pure, work all night and boogie all day (or boogie all night and work all day). At your age you can only see the surface of someone my age, and try not to think about what it must be like to see the night coming on faster than you’d care to think about. Look: this story says some troubling stuff about how fast our world moves, how unfairly it treats innocence, and about what people sometimes have to do in the name of kindness. I am
aching
to explain the ending of this story to you, but I’m trapped, like a magician who cannot reveal the trick. Just remember this, because you’re probably too young to know about one giveaway telltale clue. It used to be, up until circuit breakers in the electrical panels of modern homes, that when a short occurred, all the lights in the house would flicker and dim for a moment. When they strapped a guy into the electric chair of some penitentiary, and they threw the switch on him, and the juice went through him, the lights would flicker and dim allover the joint. You can stick that in the back of your head and you’ll catch it when it comes up in the denouement. The other clue is this: pay attention to the palest creatures in this story, Jeffty’s mother and father, who are decent people. More than that, if I keep babbling, well, I’ll just be cheating you. And that I am forbidden by the Storyteller’s Creed to do.

W
hen I was five years old, there was a little kid I played with: Jeffty. His real name was Jeff Kinzer, and everyone who played with him called him Jeffty. We were five years old together, and we had good times playing together.

   
When I was five, a Clark Bar was as fat around as the gripping end of a Louisville Slugger, and pretty nearly six inches long, and they used real chocolate to coat it, and it crunched very nicely when you bit into the center, and the paper it came wrapped in smelled fresh and good when you peeled off one end to hold the bar so it wouldn’t melt onto your fingers. Today, a Clark Bar is as thin as a credit card, they use something artificial and awful-tasting instead of pure chocolate, the thing is soft and soggy, it costs fifteen or twenty cents instead of a decent, correct nickel, and they wrap it so you think it’s the same size it was twenty years ago, only it isn’t; it’s slim and ugly and nasty-tasting and not worth a penny, much less fifteen or twenty cents.

   
When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years. My father was going through “bad times” and Aunt Patricia was very beautiful, and had married a stockbroker. They took care of me for two years. When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.

   
I was seven. Jeffty was still five. I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.

   
When I was seven years old I used to lie on my stomach in front of our Atwater-Kent radio and listen to swell stuff. I had tied the ground wire to the radiator, and I would lie there with my coloring books and my Crayolas (when there were only sixteen colors in the big box), and listen to the NBC red network: Jack Benny on the
Jell-O Program, Amos ‘n’ Andy,
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the
Chase and Sanborn Program, One Man’s Family, First Nighter;
the NBC blue network:
Easy Aces,
the
Jergens Program
with Walter Winchell,
Information Please, Death Valley Days;
and best of all, the Mutual Network with
The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow
and
Quiet Please.
Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.

   
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”

   
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.

   
When I was fourteen years old, I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons and a matinee was ten cents and they used real butter on the popcorn and I could always be sure of seeing a western like Lash LaRue, or Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder with Bobby Blake as Little Beaver, or Roy Rogers, or Johnny Mack Brown; a scary picture like
House of Horrors
with Rondo Hat ton as the Strangler, or
The Cat People,
or
The Mummy,
or
I Married a Witch
with Fredric March and Veronica Lake; plus an episode of a great serial like
The Shadow
with Victor Jory, or
Dick Tracy
or
Flash Gordon;
and three cartoons; a James Fitzpatrick TravelTalk; Movietone News; a sing-along and, if I stayed on till evening, Bingo or Keeno; and free dishes. Today, I go to movies and see Clint Eastwood blowing people’s heads apart like ripe cantaloupes.

   
At eighteen, I went to college. Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.

   
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.

   
Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new, color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them... that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. You can make a dent in a car fender with only a sneaker. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and McDonald’s and 7-Elevens and Taco Bells and motels and shopping centers. Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past?

   
What I mean by five years old is not that Jeffty was retarded. I don’t think that’s what it was. Smart as a whip for five years old; very bright, quick, cute, a funny kid.

   
But he was three feet tall, small for his age, and perfectly formed: no big head, no strange jaw, none of that. A nice, normal-looking five-year-old kid. Except that he was the same age as I was: twenty-two.

   
When he spoke it was with the squeaking, soprano voice of a five-year-old; when he walked it was with the little hops and shuffles of a five-year-old; when he talked to you it was about the concerns of a five-year-old... comic books, playing soldier, using a clothespin to attach a stiff piece of cardboard to the front fork of his bike so the sound it made when the spokes hit was like a motorboat, asking questions like
why does that thing do that like that,
how high is up, how old is old, why is grass green, what’s an elephant look like? At twenty-two, he was five.

   
Jeffty’s parents were a sad pair. Because I was still a friend of Jeffty’s, still let him hang around with me, sometimes took him to the county fair or miniature golf or the movies, I wound up spending time with
them.
Not that I much cared for them, because they were so awfully depressing. But then, I suppose one couldn’t expect much more from the poor devils. They had an alien thing in their home, a child who had grown no older than five in twenty-two years, who provided the treasure of that special childlike state indefinitely, but who also denied them the joys of watching the child grow into a normal adult.

   
Five is a wonderful time of life for a little kid... or it
can
be, if the child is relatively free of the monstrous beastliness other children indulge in. It is a time when the eyes are wide open and the patterns are not yet set; a time when one has not yet been hammered into accepting everything as immutable and hopeless; a time when the hands can not do enough, the mind can not learn enough, the world is infinite and colorful and filled with mysteries. Five is a special time before they take the questing, unquenchable, quixotic soul of the young dreamer and thrust it into dreary schoolroom boxes. A time before they take the trembling hands that want to hold everything, touch everything, figure everything out, and make them lie still on desktops. A time before people begin saying “act your age” and “grow up” or “you’re behaving like a baby.” It is a time when a child who acts adolescent is still cute and responsive and everyone’s pet. A time of delight, of wonder, of innocence.