“Buffalo,” Buddy said.
So the two studied and dreamed about all the food they would name to the man, if he ever came back.
Buddy knew why he wanted buffalo fish. Less than a year ago he had gone to a church social along the river bottoms and there had stuffed himself on sweet potatoes and fresh buffalo. Across the table from him was a pretty little girl. Buddy kept looking at her all afternoon, thinking how good it would be to have her all by his side. Sure enough it worked out the way he hoped, and they went walking along the river side. She let Buddy hold her hand as they walked. They came to a grove of pecan trees and Buddy picked up a pocketful and cracked pecans in his fist for the girl to eat.
“I never held a girl’s hand,” Jim complained, when Buddy was telling him about it, “let alone anything else.”
Buddy couldn’t brag about much of anything else either. He and the girl had not said much. They just walked along holding hands and in the early evening light they could hear the people singing, back at the picnic.
Oh death! Oh death! Spare me over to another year!
The way the music sounded over the river waters, it might have been angels singing over people who knew they had to die but didn’t want to. But Buddy told Jim it was the prettiest singing he had ever heard.
All these remembered things made Buddy insist on naming buffalo fish and sweet potatoes, at the head of the list.
Now the reason why Jim thought of roast leg of lamb and oranges and a malted milk was simply that he had never tasted any of these things before.
“I looked in a book,” he said, and by book he meant magazine, “and they had a roast leg of lamb in there that looked so pretty it made me almost taste it.”
Buddy said, “I bought me an orange once.”
As to the malted milk, Jim said he had once talked to a fellow who had actually had one. This fellow got it by working a couple of hours in a drug store in town and he said it was the best tasting thing he had ever had.
Buddy said, “I used to go to town and look at all the billboards on the road, selling good things to eat. And the store windows full of things nobody ever heard of. Seems to me some people don’t do anything but eat.”
Their list grew longer. It was such a fine list that they actually got to believing that the man would return.
When he did come back, with pencil and paper, he didn’t get a chance to say one word before Buddy was rattling off in one breath things like buffalo fish and sweet potatoes, cornbread, biscuits, store bread and butter, pork chops, fried hominy. The man had to ask him to slow down.
Jim took more time in telling the man what he wanted, savoring the name of each dish as he spoke it. Roast leg of lamb, chicken a la king, baked beans, fried peach pie. Then he wanted a whole head of lettuce, some bell peppers, and a dill pickle out of a barrel.
Jim wanted a lobster, remembering the name though not certain what it was. The man said he doubted whether he could find a lobster in the whole state and suggested a can of tuna fish instead. Jim said that would be fine.
When the man went away Jim said, “What are we going to do with all that?”
“Eat it down to the plate,” Buddy said, “and then sop the plate with store bread.”
It was late at night when the man returned. Other men were with him, pushing a small steam table on wheels. To the boys it looked huge, loaded with pots and dishes full of food, the smells of which made them dizzy with hunger.
They could not eat.
For all those men stood watching them, and making jokes. One of the men was a reporter. The man gave him the long list of dishes. “I didn’t actually get everything on the list,” the man said. “No leg of lamb to be had, for one thing. I didn’t even try to get some of the things. But they’ll have plenty.”
The table looked smaller to Buddy, now. The man had not brought everything, but Buddy observed that the reporter copied the original list, as it stood, without checking it against the actual dishes on the table.
The men went away, tired of their jokes, leaving the table for the boys.
After a while Jim said, “You got your buffalo fish, anyhow.”
“A man can go all his life wanting something and then he gets it and don’t want it,” Buddy said.
“I want it all right,” Jim said, “and I aim to eat it!” He reached for a piece of fish. “Eat some, Buddy,” he pleaded.
“No,” Buddy said. “No sir, I wouldn’t touch it!”
He shook his head.
“Please, Buddy!”
“No,” Buddy said, turning away. “You go ahead if you want to. I won’t touch it. I been hungry all my whole life and tomorrow morning I’m going to sit down and die hungry!
Jim was looking at the piece of buffalo fish in his hand but when he heard the way Buddy said the word hungry he reached through the bars of the death cell and put the fish back on the plate.
Duello
by Stephen Barr
Although we had not intended it, this issue of EQMM has turned into a sort of ’tec tour — a cross-country crime excursion, a private-eye pilgrimage, a ratiocinative ramble round the world. In the United States you will detect in Boston, New York, and other points west and south; and in the rest of this travel issue you will visit Hawaii, an island in the Mediterranean, Greece, Monte Carlo — and now you are about to climb a dangerous peak in the Swiss Alps. Be careful!
The less high mountains of Switzerland have a special kind of loneliness and quiet in summer, far from snow, abandoned by skiers, full of warm distant sounds or closer insect humming. The stillness of an English moor, but with a thinner silence, and a vista unblurred by haze.
The fields of late alpine daffodils lay far below us, our hotel a tiny thing we could have touched. Above was the winding path to the summit, hiding and reappearing, and a far-off chalet. My companion Couts and I walked easily, still cool at this early hour, still concerned with our mutual revelation of the night before. I was in love with his wife and she with me, and when Couts found out about this he fell in love with her himself. At least, he knew that he must kill me; and so I knew that I must kill him.
Nothing appeared above the surface to hint that our old friendship was replaced by a fierce and dogged rivalry. No change in look or intonation disclosed the submerged nine-tenths of ice. Indeed, I had had no hint of his intention until a trifling incident at the hotel the night before brought it out.
The terrace where we had dined, watching the valley darken beneath us, had a black iron railing. We finished our coffee and went over to it. Couts took off his big jacket and d raped it on a table behind us; and I placed my two hands on the rail to find that it had been freshly painted. I pulled back so quickly that I bumped into the table. My hands, groping behind me, came to rest on his jacket.
In an instant his rage, so well locked in, came up volcanically. One would have thought that I had besmirched not his jacket but his wife, and of course in a sense I had. He calmed down almost at once, apologizing; but we both knew.
So we went up the path the next morning as we had planned in all friendliness, ignoring the dreadful intimation of the night before, and I knew what was in his mind. At about 10 o’clock we stopped to rest and drink from a hollowed log watering-trough. Then we ate our bread and chocolate, and looked at the distant, newly risen peaks.
“Meredith.”
“Yes?” I said.
“Let’s go another way. Through the woods.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’ll be slower, of course, but I rather hate this path. We can get back to it above the ridge.”