DEATH OF A DAMNED GOOD MAN, by Avram Davidson

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January, 1991.

Steuart had a poor memory for names. Lawson collected bugs and lizards and things. Hughes couldn’t jump. There you have it all.

Lawson’s broad old house had its single floor high off the ground on posts in order to catch the breeze in hot summers and avoid extra-high tides or storm-driven waves; and like other such houses the underneath had eventually been boarded up to “protect” (as it might be) such items as a couple of old dories or dinghies or skiffs, lots of broken traps and eel-pots, a couple of failed generators, a chancy heater, a kerosene refrigerator or two, several automobile engines, and God knows what else; I never looked. If this cut off some of the cool breezes it also cut off some of the cold winds, and if it didn’t, there was probably a pile of coal, and a cord of wood. And various flotsam and jetsam.

A visit to Lawson’s house was a visit to an antique state of amateur science, and the smells of kerosene, old lamps, old newspapers, old books, old socks, old birds, and other things musty and musky and presumably also old. A vast brass microscope held down a heap of yellow and dirty Smithsonian Reports. Skins of things moldered on the wall next to ancient calendars. Out of a small hole in a wooden box, once, poured a thing with a head like a bat, body like a cat, and hands like a bird-eating spider; it had orange fur: I forget what Lawson said it was. He spoke baby-talk to it, fed it bits of banana, and told me it could have cuddled up in a tea-cup when he first got it. “I’m a widely traveled man,” he assured me. “I have a great interest in native dialects and customs and odd corners of the world. Look at this ceremonial mask,” he invited in a hortatory voice which implied that you had better look; “I got that in Celebes; Sulawasi they call it now. Look at the wing-span on those butterflies. I fit twenty of its cocoons into a common matchbox.” Something went bump underneath the house and Lawson banged on the floor with his foot and the noises stopped.

So might the house of John Bartram or Louis Agassiz have seemed, I thought; though minus of course the kerosene; did any living man or woman still know what whale-oil lamps smelled like? “For Christ’s sake feed it,” the old lady said, speaking for the first time, the holy name suddenly shocking from that sagging flowing old face. “All right, Aggie Brown,” Lawson said, not bothered or in haste. I suppose the huge wooden ice-box had come once upon a time from an old restaurant, and when Lawson opened it a wave of cold and corruption came rolling out. I was tempted to use again Aggie’s word of emphasis, but—

“For God’s sake what is that, Laws?” is what I cried.

A faint simper as he dislodged some log-sized hunks of god-knows-what, ice crystals on the dark-red-and-blue-green; the simper never faltered. “That is horse-meat I buy wholesale from the mink ranch for my German Shepherd police guard-dogs, this neighborhood is not at all what it was,” he fumbled with his foot and raised a small trap-door and thrust the frowzy flesh through it and slipped the bolt back all in a few seconds; the odors of the snake house at the zoo were added to everything else in that close fuggy air. A dead boa constrictor smells a lot like a dead fish. But whatever he had just fed was not dead. That is not dead which does eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die—who had said that? Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History was surely not in verse, was it? Well, it wasn’t Edgar Guest. The old lady flapped her skirts; they could have done with a washing, too. I said that I hadn’t noticed any Shepherd dogs, Laws; and he said (I think he said) that he was “getting some more tomorrow.”

Fact, fascination, curiosity, or not, I moved rapidly. “Well, I’ve got to be going now, Laws—”

The old woman was at my heels going down the stairs and I turned to ask if he were all there but she moved off in another direction as we went out the thick-wired gate which swung back on its weights with a heavy sound behind us. My mind provided me with a picture of an anaconda or a python and Lawson’s voice assuring me that it had been no bigger than a garter snake when he had gotten it (but only my mind); then a gust of wind from the not-distant-sea slapped at my face and I realized that I was holding my breath. The air, when I breathed it in again, was salty and fresh. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.

My neighbor, Wilfred Steuart, was retired from I don’t know what; asking him a question was a pleasure because, for one thing, he usually knew the answer, and, for another, he never, ever, insisted on Why do you want to know? before he answered. It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that anyone would want to know anything. And he saw no reason why, if he knew, he should not say; not for him the sad scowl of suspicion: to the pure, all things are pure. “Her name is Agnes Overholt, used to be Agnes Brown. O-ver-holt? Ab-er-crom—” He tasted the syllables. “I got a poor memory for names. She and Art Lawson they used to be childhood sweet-hearts.” They did? something cried out within me. Lawson, with the face of a withered monkey and non-too-well-scrubbed, either—and old Agnes, whose own face had loosened out of all confinement, and who perhaps was not fanatically clean, either: childhood sweethearts? Rejoice, young man…and young woman, too…ere the evil days draw nigh—that Preacher knew what he was talking about. Even if Lawson showed no signs of knowing that the evil days had drawn more than nigh. And Hughes?

Lew Hughes had gone to the same school. What did he do now? Hung around other people’s houses, mostly. Didn’t actually come in, just hung around. Thus informed, I realized that I did know that Lew Hughes was a dedicated loiterer, had known this for longer than I had known I knew. Grey-faced Lewis Hughes, obviously a man with a grievance; and what was it? A general grievance, you may be sure, against anyone any less unhappy and discontented than Lewis Hughes. But specifically because he had some physical ailment for which the United States in Congress Assembled refused to allow him a pension. “Something the matter with his bones or his muscles or his tendons. ‘You can walk, can’t you?’ is what I asked him; ‘Oh…yeah…I can walk…but I can’t jump—’ ‘What do ya wanna jump for? You wanna be a delivery boy hopping on and off of wagons?’ But he keeps on mooning and moaning that he just can’t jump, and he calls it My Condition and he claims he got it sleeping in the wet trenches during the War and the Veterans won’t give him a pension because it’s not Service Connected…they claim…he claims, Yes it is…they say, then how come it took thirty years to find out? Also—”

Also, Hughes was jealous of Lawson on account of Aggie.

“On account of Aggie?”

Steuart said, “Why sure. Aggie goes to see Arty Lawson. She doesn’t go to see Lew Hughes. Nobody goes to see Lew Hughes.”

I supposed so; still…smelly old dirty addled old Art Lawson? profane, smelly old saggy old Aggie? and sullen old Hughes: jealous?

“Know what he says, Lew Hughes? Says that Lawson’s got a buried treasure and that when Aggie comes to visit, Lawson digs it up and lets her look at it!” Mr. Steuart laughed. I laughed, too, I didn’t know what he thought about, but I thought about the scene in the Quixote where Sancho Panza’s wife confronts him on his return.

What did you bring me, husband?

I brought you some precious jewels, wife.

Show them to me! Show them to me right now!

I will show them to you at home, wife.

Lawson?

Aggie?

You never know.

Not my business.

And Steuart told me that at one time he and Lawson had been “in the Merchants Marine together. We sailed on a couple of ships together. All through the South Pacific. All through the East Indias. All through the West Indias, too.”

Clem lived next door.

“I cleck clams,” intoned Clem, looking at me out of his intense and almost Indian-dark face. “I cleck clams. I cleck oysters. I cleck mussels. Believe me, I’m a citizen, and I earn my money,” he said, bitterly; implications of aliens lolling on federally funded opium couches. “What’s the matter a citizen can’t own a machine-gun if he so desires? Because the East Coast Liberal Uhstablishment wants to disarm the citizens! They think I doe know about them uh-legal orientals being smuggled in offa the boats in the dark a the moan, they think I doe’n observe them Lo-etians or whatever they are slipping and slapping around in the shadows, but I observe ’em!” said Clem, coming closer. I feared for my buttonholes. “I can smell ’em! They eat fish! They live on a fish-head and a handful of rice a day and that’s how come a citizen can’t compete with ’em!” I thought of asking if perhaps they ate oysters, mussels, or clams, but I desisted. Clem was widely known to possess a large number of items which the East Coast Liberal Establishment had not succeeded in outlawing; and I was by no means satisfied with my ability to move Faster Than a Speeding Bullet.

No indeed.

Luigi had the contract to remove garbage and he removed it at his own rate of speed in an ancient truck which no appeals to civic pride had ever persuaded him to replace. Luigi’s truck was parked one day very nearly outside the small police station, but even if I hadn’t been able to identify it I would have known he was inside the station. First I became aware of a high shrill sound as I approached, then I recognized it as a voice, then I realized whose voice, then I began to understand elements of what he was saying. Can’t jump he says I can’t jump he says Oh my God I was driving along real slow to save my tires and I hear him screaming he was screaming and I seen him running and I seen this thing chasing him; by this time I was inside and saw O’Dowd the Chief of the two-man police force leaning his heavy hands on Luigi’s shoulders. He was running and he was screaming and I lean over the seat and I hold the door open and I yell jump Lew jump up and he yells I can’t jump he screams I can’t I can’t jump Oh my God oh my God and I slam the door shut; and then Luigi began to stamp his feet upon the floor and though his voice stopped speaking words, articulate words, his voice did not stop and O’Dowd wrestled him back down into the chair and just then Dr. Stanyan the Health Officer came in walking very fast and in his hand was something I recognized from the War as a morphine syrette and then I saw something else I recognized from the War namely that Luigi was splashed with blood evidently emitted under pressure— —and then Petey the other policeman took hold of me by the elbow and walked me rapidly to the door; and even when I heard Clem say almost in my ear, “It was a steel-jacketed bullet, I’m a citizen and I had a right—” I kept on going, I did not insist upon my own right as a citizen, but even when the noise of the door stopped slamming Luigi’s voice kept on going on and then by and by it sank to a drone and I leaned against a tree and first I was very cold and then I was very sick.

Steuart made a gesture at home when he saw me and began to talk. “Well what a terrible thing, two men dead,” he said. “I suppose it was one of those alligators that maybe come up out of the sewer—”

“—that wasn’t no alligator and it didn’t come up out of no sewer,” said Clem.

Steuart yielded the point entirely, “Well, then probably Hughes was poking around looking for Art Lawson’s buried treasure but I don’t believe Art had any buried treasure; did it get out or did Hughes let it out, oh of course by accident? well maybe I suppose we’ll never know. Art went quick, that’s a blessing, he went just like that,” Steuart snapped his fingers. “We were boys together, him always climbing the trees to get the birds’ eggs and such things like that: and now he’s gone.”

Someone else was in the kitchen, Aggie had made tea and she poured it out and it was strong dark tea and she poured rum into it and it was strong dark rum and it was hot in the kitchen and perhaps that was sweat on her eroded old face and then again perhaps it wasn’t.

Clem gulped without blowing hardly at all. He must have had a mouth of iron. “It probably come ashore with them aliens from the boats,” he said. “What would a citizen want with something like that? Of course it’s all hushed up, your big moneyed interests, Safeway, 7-11, they doe want no bad publicity, here. I didn’t want any reward,” he said, gulp. “I didn’t want any Carnegie Medal. I just wanted the skin, Jesus I could of made some lovely holsters out of that skin. But you think the Police and the Public Health they even let me have a piece of it? They’re Relks,” he said, bitterly, gulp. “The Chiefs a Nelk, the Doctor’s a Nelk: all of them Melks they stick together. That’s your East Coast Liberal Uh-stablishment for you,” he said.

“Oh will you shut the Hell up,” said Aggie Brown. “Your goddamn grandfather he was no goddamn good either. Lew Hughes he was no goddamn good either.”

“Sealed coffin,” said Clem. Then he held up his cup for more.

“Arty Lawson and me we were in the Merchants Marine,” Steuart said. “We went everywhere. Like, couple times we went all through the East Indias. Jamoke, where the good coffee comes from? Sullivan’s that a great big island, no I can’t spell it, I ain’t got no memory for names, everywhere we went he come back aboard with like natural history samples: bugs: lizards: Monkeys, lemurs; he used to smuggle them ashore. Bali—”

“Did your ship call at Komodo?” I asked.

Steuart’s lips moved, he was trying out the word. After a moment he shrugged. “It could very well be,” he said. “I dunno for sure. Well, a sudden death. Art Lawson I mean, we all—”

“He was a damned good man,” said Aggie Brown.

Steuart had a poor memory for names. Lawson collected bugs and lizards and things. Hughes couldn’t jump. There you have it all.