DR. VICKERS’ CAR

Originally appeared in Infinity, October 1957.

Saturday, July 28, 1945.

It was six in the evening, but a hot sun still shone down on Spouters’ Corner in Hyde Park. After shopping the other speakers a bit, the largest number of people had clotted around Texas Bill.

He was standing on the narrow top step of a small folding ladder and having trouble holding his balance. He was either tired or drunk.

“I’ll give you ten minutes more,” he said in a loud hoarse voice, “then I’m going home to the little woman and our six kids.” And he showed in a grin two upper and three lower teeth so spaced they meshed like gears.

Two or three days’ beard darkened his cheeks and jaws. The wide-brimmed high-crowned straw hat that had moved the hecklers to name him Texas Bill shadowed the rest of his face. His once tan jacket hung open—not because the afternoon was hot but because the buttons were missing. The sleeves had raveled; threads fluttered as he gestured with grimy hands. His soiled collarless shirt, open at the throat, tucked into faded gray trousers. The end of the belt dangled from the buckle, and the trousers bagged at knees and seat. The toes of his shoes had cracked, the laminated leather soles had separated into flapping tongues.

A girl with a saucy face tugged at the ragged cuffs of his trousers.

“Texas Bill, did you hear that Mr. Churchill went to his doctor this morning? He had Labour pains!”

Texas Bill kept a poker face while the crowd laughed. He waited quietly long after the laughter had died out.

A man pointed to a pigeon that was buzzing the crowd.

“Look out, Texas Bill!” he shouted, “he thinks yer a bloody statue.”

Texas Bill ducked and swayed and almost toppled. With tremendous dignity he steadied himself, took off his straw hat, and with a dirty rag mopped his brow and the inside of the hat. He scratched through a tangle of graying brown hair, then replaced the hat. He surveyed the crowd and cleared his throat.

“Mr. Speaker,” a man called out. “What is your subject?”

Texas Bill hooked his thumbs in his lapels and rocked back on his heels. He grabbed air to regain his balance.

“I’m for bigger and better gaols,” he said. He scratched his ribs.

A man took a pipe from his mouth to shout, “Mr. Speaker, I’m engaged to a woman with a wooden leg. Shall I break it off?”

Texas Bill scratched his ribs again. “Why aren’t you alive?” he snapped.

“Alive?” the man with the pipe said. “The only thing alive about you is on your clothes.”

“Be a man,” Texas Bill said.

“I’m more a man than you,” the man with the pipe said. “The trouble with you is you’re too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work.”

“I can handle your sort,” Texas Bill said.

“Step down,” the man with the pipe said. “The last man I hit was arrested in Paris for flying without a license.”

Texas Bill drew himself up after a dangerous moment and magnificently ignored the man with the pipe, who after a few baiting attempts wormed his way out of the crowd.

“I’m for bigger and better gaols,” Texas Bill said. “Now when I was in God’s own country—America, to you—”

The girl said, “If you like America so much, why did you come here?”

“I came to Edinburgh to go to the University—” He bent from the waist, and held the position until the mocking clamor his words evoked died down. When he straightened, his bombed-out mouth gaped in smiling appreciation of the reaction. “But I wound up in gaol for a year. And that’s what I’m for—bigger and better gaols. America has gaols worth seven-and-a-half million dollars; you haven’t got an hotel worth that. And look at Boulder Dam and Grand Coulee Dam and Hood River Dam—”

“What about Potsdam, Texas Bill?”

“Look, girlie, why don’t you get yourself a Yank? They know how to do things right.”

“I’ve never gone out with a Yank. Tell me about it, Texas Bill. What would you do on a date with a girl in America?”

Texas Bill’s face pleated with thought. He looked past the girl and projected his voice across the crowd. “Well, you go calling on a girl and you say, ‘Where’ll we go, sugar?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. Where do you think?’ ‘Oh, wherever you want, sugar.’ ‘Well, let’s go for a ride on Long Island—’”

“Long Island is shorter since you were there last,” a man said.

“—And you say, ‘Oh, no, sugar, we can’t go riding.’ And she says, ‘Well, either we go riding or it’s no date.’ And you say, ‘Okay, sugar.’ So you borrow Dr. Vickers’ car—you just take it; whenever anybody wants to use a car in America they just take the nearest one. So there you are, riding in Dr. Vickers’ car, and you stop at a bar. Now, you order drinks, say rum and Coca Cola. But you don’t notice that while you’re drinking rum she’s just drinking the Coca Cola. That’s the way American girls are—they’re on their guard. And you, girlie, ought to be on your guard.”

The man with the pipe had wormed himself back into the inner rim of the crowd. He held up a paper bag to Texas Bill.

Texas Bill took it, opened it, and pulled out a plum. He turned the plum around and around in one hand, examining all its surface impassively.

“He’s got a bellyful,” he said, “now he gives me his slops.”

He let the bag parachute to earth and placed the plum in his mouth. He sucked half the plum down his gullet. As he brought the half plum away from the bite in a sweeping movement, his little finger delicately extending, plum drippings showered a man. The man, quiet-looking, wiped his face as someone shouted, “It’s you needs the bath, Dirty Dick.” Texas Bill drew a sleeve along his mouth and then dovetailed his five teeth in a grin.

“I’ll give you ten minutes more,” he said, “then I’m off to the little woman and our six kids,” An old man took over the job of baiting now as Texas Bill launched into an account of his travels in America. The old man tried continually to trap him—not so much because he doubted that Texas Bill had been there as to prove that he had been there. He kept asking Texas Bill if he had been in the Imperial Valley, if he knew what greasers and gringos were, and if he had ridden the rods. “I have,” he kept saying, turning to those around him and looking for favor in their eyes.

“Go away, sonny,” said Texas Bill finally.

Not only sonny but most of the gathering went away soon, with the coming of darkness, and Texas Bill stepped down and folded his ladder and started off slowly into the no-longer-blackout of post-VE London.

He got no farther than Marble Arch.

Ladder and all, Texas Bill vanished into space.

Thursday, November 29, 1956.

It was five in the cold gray afternoon when Texas Bill reappeared. No one noticed or would admit to noticing the reappearing. A wondering look around showed Texas Bill that whatever else had changed Marble Arch itself had not.

He exhumed a dustbinned Daily Mail. The writing above the fold told him the date and that some bloke name of Khrushchev attended a Yugoslav National Day reception in Moscow and laughed when he heard the reason for Prime Minister Eden’s rest cure in Jamaica was inflammation of the Canal. Nasty sense of humor this Khrushchev had.

Eden Prime Minister? Forty-five from fifty-six. Eleven years. Have to expect changes in eleven years. All the same, Texas Bill felt no change in himself. This faster-than-light business, he supposed.

He whirled at a tap.

“Thought it was you, Texas Bill. Where’ve you been?”

Texas Bill stared. It was the man with the pipe, eleven years older.

“I said, ‘Where’ve you been?’”

Texas Bill’s head swam against an undertow. Where had he been?

It came flooding back to him on waves of memory. First a dreamlike flight through space, a strange kind of flight in which he knew himself to be at rest in a safe warm enveloping aura while the universe itself streamed by. Then what he took to be a laboratory, from which he could look out on an eerie but not unpleasant world, where eerie but not unpleasant beings showed more interest in his clothes than in him. And last the dreamlike return flight.

“I know where you’ve been,” the man with the pipe said.

Texas Bill gaped. “You do?”

The man puffed away, nodding authoritatively. He took the pipe from his mouth. “America.” He raised an eyebrow and looked Texas Bill up and down. “For all the good it’s done you, eh?”

Just you wait till I tell you where I’ve really been, Texas Bill thought swellingly, and you won’t think yourself so clever.

“I know something more about you.”

Texas Bill smiled tolerantly. “And what might that be?”

“You’ve not been back long.”

Texas Bill’s smile faded. “How’d you know that?”

“You’d have a free pair of choppers by now, that’s how.” Maliciously, “There’s something you didn’t get in your precious American paradise.”

“That’s all you know.”

“But I’ll soon know more, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

The man pointed the pipestem and Texas Bill became aware that his left arm was hefting the ladder.

“Oh, yes.” Bet your life you’ll soon know more, Texas Bill thought, the like of which was never heard on Earth. And he strode to Spouters’ Corner, the man puffing after him, and set up his ladder and mounted it.

With pride of ownership the man with the pipe said to those around him, “That’s Texas Bill, you know.”

Texas Bill gazed upon the gathering. He had a real adventure to tell.

A man called out, “Mr. Speaker, what’s your subject?”

Tell them. Wondrous beings had transported him to a wondrous world. Suddenly, a terrifying thought. Why?

Texas Bill eyed the waiting faces and felt awkward. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. All at once, a shocking realization. He wasn’t scratching himself. There was nothing to scratch for.

Had those beings transported him merely as host for—?

Texas Bill cleared his throat, “I’m for bigger and better gaols.” He put up his coat collar. “I can give you only ten minutes. Got to get back to the little woman—and our nine kids. Now I’ve just seen gaols in America worth—”