In a typically quirky piece, accompanying the photo of himself in Patti Perret’s book The Faces of Science Fiction, R. A. Lafferty said, of himself, “When I was forty-five years old, I tried to be a writer . . . I became the best short-story writer in the world. I’ve been telling people that for twenty years, but some of them don’t believe me.”
He was right. For a while in there, he was the best.
His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own—a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable. The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice. “This is how it is!” you tell yourself on discovering Lafferty, delighted, awed, changed.
His science fiction story “Slow Tuesday Night” (which, like “In Our Block” can be found in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Lafferty’s finest collection) seems more and more relevant as the rate of change in the world out there grows ever-faster, ever-weirder. But some things don’t change—and that’s what this story is about. Here Lafferty paints a blue-collar portrait of aliens (if that is what they are) in an American city. It’s a tale of immigration and integration, and it has a measure of sly humor and wonder in there with which to be getting by.
—Neil Gaiman
IN OUR BLOCK
by R. A. Lafferty
There were a lot of funny people in that block. “You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.
“Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street’s just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”
“Jim, I’ve been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”
“What’s wrong with that, Art?”
“Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that’s two thousand cartons.”
“Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowdays. They don’t enforce it very well.”
“Jim, that shack’s no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn’t get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”
“Let’s measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.
“Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.
“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.
Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”
“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred-thousand lots.”
“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.
“No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”
Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the rundown building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.
A dark, pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.
“I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.
“Oh, that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”
“What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”
“What are you think? I do it of course.”
“Could you type a letter for me?”
“Sure I can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp.”
“Ah, let’s see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”
“You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.”
Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”
“Ah—that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.
“Not P.S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.
“Hardly. It’s a business letter to a person I barely know.”
“I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can’t do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.
Then there was silence.
“What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.
“Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.
“But I don’t hear a typewriter going.”
“What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There as a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.
The girl opened the door and handed Art the three-page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.
“There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.
“Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”
“No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”
“He cuts prices.”
“Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”
“My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”
“There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.
“Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What’s the best Indian to be?”
“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.
“Okay then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”
“We’re already taken,” Boomer said. “I’m a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”
“Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That’s from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”
“I have two-bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.
“I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there’s a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”
“Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let’s go, Jim.”
“P.S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.
The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.
“We’d like a couple of Buds, but you don’t seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.
“Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.
“Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn’t hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.
“Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn’t take up space, like if he made it before time.”
“But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.
“No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”
“This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”
“Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn’t remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.”
She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.
“But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.
“Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in Schlitz bottle and the man didn’t like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle. ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don’t even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It’s hard to keep from making mistake when you’re stupid.”
“No, you don’t have a light or a window in here, and it’s light,” Slick said. “You don’t have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”
“Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”
“Yes, we will. And I’m interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.
“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried.
“Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”
But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.
“How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.
“Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”
“You’re not from around here,” Slick said. “You’re not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”
“Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”
“You wouldn’t be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.
“I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”
“What’s in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”
“My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she’s crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn’t be bald-headed in the first place.”
“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.
“Oh sure. Can’t you?”
There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn’t seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.
“I don’t remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.
“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.
Weathered boards, rusty nails . . . and he had just made it.
“Why didn’t you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.
“This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We’re new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I’m trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”
“What is that?” Slick asked.
“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh, well, I’ll put them in. I’ll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”
“No, I’ve already got a car,” Slick said. “Let’s go, Jim.” That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.
“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There’s a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”
“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”
They went by the public stenographer shack again.
“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.
“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.
“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.
“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”
“Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”
“You promise you won’t tell anybody.”
“I promise.”
“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.
They started slowly on up the block.
“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.
“With my other tongue,” the girl said.
There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers’ pipe coming out of the chute—in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.
“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.
“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let’s go over to the Red Rooster and see if there’s anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”