Offbeat: Uncollected Stories Read online

  She didn’t budge or speak or nod even when the two little girls began screeching at each other and another one came bursting out of the bathroom to report a battle royal.

  At long last they were reassembled; like pieces of a vibrating machine that kept flying apart.

  She counted heads. All there. She pointed toward the animal hall directly at the head of the lobby and followed the tide of them as they moved forward.

  The children hopped and skipped and jumped through the hall entrance.

  “Walk right!” she specified in teeth-grinding belligerence. They filed into the hall as penitent as a line of monks.

  She looked at the words over the doorway as she passed beneath.

  George East Hall, the letters spelled.

  George East. She consulted the shelves of her memory. George East had been a famous explorer. Long ago. She recalled reading a book of his once when she was a child. Trapping Big Game in Africa. That was the title, she recalled, smiling pensively at a reflection of youth past.

  Inside, she had to blink several times before she could see at all. It was like entering a mosque or, at least, a darkened theater. It smelled like a mosque.

  The only lights were in the glass-enclosed exhibits on each side of the hall that flowed away into a shadowy blur.

  She was struck by the sudden cessation of sound from her pupils. They talked in solemn muted tones and, even those who could not restrain their giggles, throttled them rather effectively. In a church, in a museum, she thought; where it is dark and reeks of all things old, the children and the grown act like this; as if the darkness were something sacred in itself, not to be violated.

  The children were gazing into the first exhibit.

  She tried to read the guide book but it was too dark for that. She went up to the plastiglass front and leaned forward to read the descriptive metal plate on the wall.

  “Children, this is the Water Buffalo,” she said, rattling off the description.

  She glanced at them after her reading. They looked apathetic. They weren’t listening, she thought, and her mouth assumed a betrayed fixity. Well, why should I try then? she thought. Why should I go blind for pity’s sake when they don’t even care. I won’t, she decided; that’s all.

  Thinking militant thoughts, she stared in at the stuffed and posed animals. It was well done, she managed to appreciate despite her peeve.

  They seemed almost alive, frozen in time, ready at the touch of a wand to go on with their battle.

  She tried to imagine that; tried to visualize the thick hooves spraying the hot musky air with black soil, the green-surfaced pool splattering water up their heaving flanks, the air ringing with the clash of their saber horns.

  Impossible, she concluded. How could I possibly imagine it? The dead are dead.

  Into her ears slipped a whisper apparently meant to be secretive but which echoed. What is noisier than a child trying to be quiet? she thought, glancing aside in slowly churning anger.

  The pupils had drifted again, the structure of her class shattered. The parts were stretched out over the next four exhibits.

  Her hiss vibrated in the air like the warning of a truculent viper. They all recognized her distinctive summons and came back pettishly to take their places in the group again.

  “For pity’s sake, stay together!” she commanded, her voice rising with a passion. “Stop wandering around without my permission!”

  “May I only go and . . .”

  “Stay together!” she groaned, her voice frayed to a string. Stay together. The words collapsed in her mind. She had to concentrate for a long moment to remember what they meant.

  She stopped before the next exhibit, standing behind all of them so none could make a getaway.

  “That’s an elephant,” she announced with bellicose assurance.

  “Rhinoceros,” corrected a little boy loudly. “It says.”

  She cleared her throat, vaguely wishing that the rhinoceros would plunge out through the glass plate and trample the little boy to a grease spot.

  “That’s right,” she amended, “I’m glad to see that one of you, at least, is awake when I test your observance.”

  She glared menacingly at the charging black-hided monster whose ears stood eternally on end and whose nostrils would be flaring until the trumpet blew.

  For a brief moment she tried to imagine again. She tried to hear the thunder of the hoofs, the crackling of the grasses.

  Impossible. She kicked it aside. Why bother trying to resurrect something never even known?

  “Let’s go to the next one,” she said in a tired voice, the vision of acres and acres of exhibits creeping disconcertingly into her mind. The groan in her was audible only to those children closest to her and it was nothing strange to them.

  They went down the hall and across the hall and up the hall and in and out all the hall’s side extensions. They looked at lions and elephants and gazelles and zebras and giraffes and wildebeests. To her it seemed as if they looked at everything George East had ever come across in his life including fungus and his first wife.

  She got sick of stuffed immobility. What are they anyway? she thought. Relics of a past so dead that it’s worthy of nothing but strict privacy.

  These things were no longer interesting to her or the children or anyone. Fleshed or unfleshed, they were just heaps of bone that would never never move again.

  Now they were away from George East’s taxidermied exploits, back in the lobby.

  She ached. She wanted to sit down and call it a day for the rest of the year.

  But I can’t, she thought. I have to plunge on with this hellish safari through the halls of the better forgotten. It was her job. No one cared. Not really. But here they were and they had to go through with it.

  They all flooded into the next wing like raging water seeking its level. I have never in my entire life, she thought, seen a weary child. I think that I could die happy if I could only be assured that children do get tired sometime, anytime.

  Deep Sea Fish, read the huge lettered sign sagging a trifle lopsided on the wall.

  She didn’t care. She looked with complete disinterest at the stripe-bellied whale stretching half the length of the hall. She gazed in patient apathy at the crescent-mouthed shark gobbling up his neighbors. She looked up wearily as she passed under the huge grotesque turtle straddling the air over her.

  The children didn’t care either. They glanced at, passed over, ignored; always rushing on, flashing to the next case, the next room, the next wing. As long as they can move and move and move, that’s all that matters, she thought.

  At odd moments, she tried to tighten up their columns. Mostly she let them wander.

  She stood before it.

  It was long and tarnished and it looked like a gigantic bullet from some long ago conflict.

  It was opened, cut lengthwise as though severed cleanly with a lone blow.

  Next to it was a huge glass case. Various articles were arranged in the case. They had all been taken out of the metal shell once. It said so on the plate.

  She looked at the cards under each article and read about it in the guide book.

  Makeup kit, read the card. For the face, explained the guide book.

  Watch. (For chronological computation) Tobacco. (A primordial vice) Golf tees. (An element of another primordial vice) Lock and key. (For protecting of valuables) Toothbrush and powder. (For the teeth)

  She shook her head and glanced aside to see if her tribe was on the warpath. They were widely dispersed but otherwise behaved. She looked back at the case.

  Shaving Kit. Football Rules. $1. 50¢. 25¢. 10¢. 5¢. 1¢.

  She didn’t bother reading the explanations for these things. She didn’t care what they signified. If they signified anything, she thought.

  She glanced down at a brown-edged magazine. Life, it read. She looked at the face of a man long dead and gone, smiling up from the cover.

  “Errol Flynn,” she said, testing
the sound of the words. She shrugged then. No matter.

  For the face, for the teeth, a primordial vice, a primordial vice element, football rules.

  She sighed. What a sad lot, she thought. These people were a sorry heap of pettiness and hauteur.

  She turned away from the case. She rounded up her herd.

  “Come on children,” she said. “We’re leaving this room now.”

  Another hall. It smelled a little cleaner. It was a little more modern; if you considered all things modern that were under two thousand years old.

  She consulted the guide book, shifting her weight in tired movements.

  “Automobiles,” she read to herself, “common vehicles in the twentieth through the thirty-sixth centuries.”

  She looked over the book top at the flimsy sagging structure. It looked pathetic compared to present achievement, she decided.

  It was yellow and it had only four wheels and the seats inside were, of all things, covered with the hides of animals that were as dead as everything else.

  She looked at the stained metal parts, ran an examining touch over the dried up glass that she supposed had been designed to keep the wind from those who sat attempting to steer with that odd thick spoked wheel angling up from the cracked floorboards.

  “Oh my,” she muttered to herself, unable to appreciate the quaintness of outmoded custom.

  She turned away from it and looked at her dispersed army with a slight moan. She moved about, consolidating and ordering, brought up to the solid present by the necessity of preventing her charges from tearing down the building.

  Floor by floor, they moved, higher and higher. Through an endless array of dim halls, wide stretches of assembled bone meant, it appeared, to remind someone long ago that something called a dinosaur once was affluent if now it was just a wired junk heap.

  Rooms and chambers and halls and miles of display that smelled of the ancient. Cases and cases of pottery, glasswork, gems, machines, cars. “Everlasting laid out corpses,” she said to herself, “made of bone and stone and crusted steel.”

  They were on another floor. She forgot which one it was. She’d lost track of them. It seemed she’d been climbing stairs all her life and the next flight would lead to heaven.

  They were moving through a great somber hall. The children’s voices fluttered up like frail bats and were lost in the massy silence. Soon it has to be over, she thought, they can’t make this building much higher.

  She moved to the wall and slumped down on a seat. Her eyes moved wearily to the center of the room.

  A great silvery coated rocket ship stood there, fenced in and motionless, its stubby nose pointing toward the sky. Only the ceiling blocked the sky away and there was something depressing in the sight of the silvery ship walled in forever.

  She flipped open the guide book. There was a small illustration of the ship. Luna I. First Ship to Reach the Moon, read the picture caption.

  “How nice,” she muttered, bored, glancing aside as a little girl came up to her.

  “Are we going to eat soon?” asked the little girl.

  “As soon as we finish on this floor,” she decided all at once. The little girl went away, skipping.

  She leaned against the wall. It’s hot in here, she thought, closing her eyes. Hot and stuffy and weary. A museum is a hot stale shell of information. She nodded and snapped back to attention, her eyes opened wide and peering at the silent ship.

  “All old things are funny.”

  She said it to herself and they were. Spacesuits and rocket engines and guided missiles and atom bombs. They were all funny and old and useless.

  For a moment she slipped into the first moment of peaceful reverie she had managed to effect all day. It was pleasant to forget, eyes closed and body limp.

  Then, abruptly, her eyes swept open and the old beset expression narrowed her face.

  Two boys were wrestling on the floor.

  She got up with a hiss of rage and hurried over to them.

  “Stop it!” she snapped in a rage, dragging them up from tumbling combat, “Don’t you have any sense at all?”

  The boys eyed each other with sullen threatening expressions.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll get you,” said one to the other.

  “One more outbreak like this and I’ll send a nice long note to your parents,” she threatened. “Would you like that?”

  They looked up hastily.

  “Would you?”

  “No,” they said. They both shook their heads.

  “Then behave,” she ordered. “Pity’s sake. Always this fighting, fighting. Don’t you ever learn?”

  They started into the last room on the floor, a little room tucked away in one corner.

  Another girl mentioned hunger and they all murmured restively.

  “As soon as we finish here!” she said.

  “Yay!” said the boys.

  “Quiet!” she said. “Now go look around. And, just for once, appreciate all this wonderful knowledge kept here for you.” She looked for another bench.

  There weren’t any. So she moved around the room. The children were all sweeping around like windblown leaves, glancing once at each case and rushing on. Some of them were back at the door already, waiting for the descent to the cafeteria.

  “Well, look at things,” she muttered angrily under her breath.

  She stood obdurately in front of a case, determined to read every word on the placard before she budged back to the class.

  She gazed in irritated disdain at the exhibit in the case. What a sorry sight, she thought. Her gaze moved down.

  Homo Sapiens. Man, read the plate. Bulk of species destroyed after invasion of Earth in year 4726.

  Now extinct.

  She looked back. They were assembled tightly, all by themselves; driven to a desperate orderliness by their appetites.

  “Oh, I give up,” she groaned, moving back to them.

  And, as they started out, she spoke again, half to them and half to herself.

  “We’re not staying after lunch either,” she said. “There’s nothing in the rest of the museum anyway but more dead animals.”

  Blunder Buss

  It was the thousandth day. He had started in September of 1952, and here it was, June of ’55. He had counted the days, making tiny checks on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet.

  A thousand days in love with Marilyn Taylor.

  For the thousandth time he slipped the cover over his adding machine, plucked off his cellophane cuffs, and locked up his desk. He was in the office but he was really in Hollywood immersed in a fancy, wallowing in cinemascopic delights. Instinct alone put the coat over his sparse frame, the Panama on his semi-bald skull. Habit took him to the elevator, out the main door of the Lane Building, and down the steps into the steamy dimness of the subway, where he was shoehorned into the heat-laden train by a horde of nine-to-fivers. He hardly felt the bony elbows, though, the grunts of agony, the snarled complaints.

  Henry Shrivel was dreaming.

  The thousandth day. That was a record. Never had such love been so faithful, he thought as he swayed with the motion of the train. Sweat dripped off his face as he thought of her.

  Then, two stations after he’d gotten on, the mass of people wedged him further into the car. He grabbed a vacant strap and slipped back into reverie. The train was halfway across the bridge before his eyes lighted on the advertisement at his left. His mouth popped open, his pale blue eyes grew wide.

  It was Her.

  She was standing on a tennis court smiling fondly at a cigarette which she held in the V of her two shapely fingers. Her eyes peered into Henry Shrivel’s soul.

  “Charnel Cigarettes,” she was commenting, “are milder and tastier. They are my brand.” Signed: “Marilyn Taylor, Classic Studios. Now appearing in The Karamazov Boys.”

  Henry Shrivel gazed adoringly at her. Her hair was blond and fluffy. Her eyes were cat green, sultry, inviting him to blood-curdling pleasures. Her scarlet
lips implored to be taken.

  The illustration was cut off where the line of her shoulders began the inexorable slope into her internationally famed bosom. Hollywood’s most lavish bust; the columnists had voted her that signal honor. And, oh, ’tis true, ’tis true, thought Henry Shrivel as he hung glassy-eyed from the subway strap.

  All the way home he watched her standing on the tennis court, cool, unruffled, frozen in beauty. “Marilyn is quite the tennis player.” Screen Magazine had said it. She must be; here was incontrovertible evidence.

  Suddenly a bolt of prescience struck Henry Shrivel square between the eyes. It was a sign, a most definite sign. A clear indication that tonight his efforts would be crowned with success.

  Tonight he would hold Marilyn Taylor in his arms.

  He got off at the last stop and walked slowly up the steps onto the noisy avenue. He stepped lightly over the trolley tracks, ignoring the taxicab which almost knocked him down. Slowly he strolled away from the noise, turned a corner, and started up the quiet, tree-lined street. The thousandth day, he thought.

  Or—to be explicit—the thousandth night.

  It was muggy in the apartment. It smelled of boiled cabbage and drying diapers. For the moment, Henry Shrivel forced reality into his mind. For the last time he would play the role of doting spouse.

  Bella was in the kitchen ladling pabulum into the gurgling baby. Hair stringed down over Bella’s forehead and temples; there was sweat on her gaunt features. Marilyn Taylor would never look like that, he thought; no, not even in this apartment.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, “It’s you.” She raised a damp forehead, and reluctantly he brushed his lips across it. “You’re late,” she said.

  You always say that, Henry thought, even when I’m early.

  “Yes, dear,” he said. “Are we eating soon?”

  “I have to finish feeding Lana,” Bella said. “Then I’ll start supper.”

  “Oh, you haven’t started yet.”

  “No, I haven’t started yet! What do you think I’ve been doing all day—loafing? Why, I’ve been—”