The next day Charley spoke to Jensen.
“I got a few days coming,” he said, “from that time I worked six-day weeks last fall, and I still got a week of last year’s vacation you couldn’t find the room for …”
“Sure, Charley,” Jensen said. “We’re in good shape right now.”
Two days later Charley stepped off the milk-run train in the little resort town in Wisconsin. He went to one of the several cabin camps down on the lake that fronted the town and got himself a small, miserable cabin for which he paid an exorbitant price. And it wasn’t until then that he dared let himself think—really think—of the reason he had come there.
In the evening he went uptown and spent an hour or two standing around in the general store and the pool room. He came back with the information that he had set out for, and another piece of information he had not been prepared to hear.
The first piece of information, the one he had gone out to get, was that Dr. Erik Ames was the man to see. Doc Ames, it appeared, was not only the doctor and the mayor of the town, but the acknowledged civic leader, sage and father confessor of the whole community.
The second piece of information, one which had served the town as a conversation piece for the last two months, was that Cooper Jackson, after years of keeping to his bed as a helpless invalid, now was on his feet. He had to use a cane, of course, but he got around real well and every day he took a walk down by the lake.
They hadn’t said what time of day, so Charley was up early in the morning and started walking up and down the lakeshore, keeping a good lookout. He talked with the tourists who occupied the other cabins and he talked with men who were setting out for a day of fishing. He spent considerable time observing a yellow-winged blackbird that had its nest somewhere in a bunch of rushes on a marshy spit.
Cooper Jackson finally came early in the afternoon, hobbling along on his cane, with a peaked look about him. He walked along the shore for a ways; then sat down to rest on a length of old dead tree that had been tossed up by a storm.
Charley ambled over. “Do you mind?” he asked, sitting down beside him.
“Not at all,” said Cooper Jackson. “I’m glad to have you.”
They talked. Charley told him that he was a newspaperman up there for a short vacation and how it was good to get away from the kind of news that came over the teletypes, and how he envied the people who could live in this country all the year around.
When he heard Charley was a newspaperman, Cooper’s interest picked up like a hound dog cocking its ears. He began to ask all sorts of questions, the kind of questions that everyone asks a newspaperman whenever he can corner one.
What do you think of the situation and what can be done about it and is there any chance of preventing war and what should we do to prevent a war … and so on until you think you’ll scream.
Except that it seemed to Charley that Cooper’s questions were a bit more incisive, backed by a bit more information than were the questions of the ordinary person. He seemed to display more insistence and urgency than the ordinary person, who always asked his questions in a rather detached, academic way.
Charley told him, honestly enough, that he didn’t know what could be done to prevent a war, although he said that the quieting of the Iranian situation and the British monetary announcement might go a long way toward keeping war from happening.
“You know,” said Cooper Jackson, “I felt the same way, too. That is, after I read the news, I felt that those were two good things to happen.”
At this point, perhaps, a couple of things should be considered.
If Charley Porter had been a regular newspaperman instead of copyreader, he might have mentioned the plane wreck and the little girl who hadn’t died, and how it was a funny thing about that coon dog getting out of the cave and how he knew of a man who’d made a mint of money riding in on Midnight.
But Charley didn’t say these things.
If Charley had been a regular newspaperman, he might have said to Cooper Jackson: “Look here, kid, I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. I got it figured out. Maybe you better straighten me out on a point or two, so I’ll have the story right.”
But Charley didn’t say this. Instead he said that he had heard uptown the night before about Cooper’s miraculous recovery, and he was Cooper Jackson, wasn’t he?
Yes, Cooper answered, he was Cooper Jackson, and perhaps his recovery was miraculous. No, he said, he didn’t have the least idea of how it came about and Doc Ames didn’t either.
They parted after an hour or two of talk. Charley didn’t say anything about seeing him again. But the next day Cooper came limping down to the beach and headed for the log, and Charley was waiting for him.
That was the day Cooper gave Charley his case history. He had been an invalid, he said, from as far back as he could remember, although his mother had told him it hadn’t happened until he was three years old.
He liked to listen to stories, and the stories that his parents and his brothers and sisters told him and read to him were what had kept him alive, he was certain, during those first years. For he made the stories work for him.
He told how he made the characters—Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man and Little Bo Peep and all the rest of them—keep on working overtime after he had heard the stories. He would lie in bed, he said, and relive the stories over and over again.
“But after a while, those stories got pretty threadbare. So I improved on them. I invented stories. I mixed up the characters. For some reason or other Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man always were my heroes. They would go on the strangest odysseys and meet all these other characters, and together they would have adventures that were plain impossible.
“Except,” he added, “they never seemed impossible to me.”
Finally he had got to be the age where kids usually start off to school. Cooper’s Ma had begun to worry about what they should do for his education. But Doc Ames, who was fairly sure Cooper wouldn’t live long enough for an education to do him any good, had advised that they teach him whatever he might be interested in learning. It turned out that about all Cooper was interested in was reading. So they taught him how to read. Now he didn’t have to have anyone read him stories any more, but could read them for himself. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Lewis Carroll’s works and a lot of other books.
So now he had more characters and Peter Rabbit had some rather horrible moments reconciling his world with the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mock Turtle. But he finally worked in, and the imagined adventuring got crazier and crazier.
“It’s a wonder,” said Cooper Jackson, “that I didn’t die laughing. But to me it wasn’t funny. It was dead serious.”
“What do you read now, Cooper?” Charley asked.
“Oh, the newspapers,” Cooper said, “and the news magazines and stuff like that.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Charley explained. “What do you read for relaxation? What takes the place of Peter Rabbit?”
Cooper hemmed and hawed a little and finally he admitted it.
“I read science fiction. I ran onto it when someone brought me a magazine six or seven years ago … no, I guess it’s more like eight.”
“I read the stuff myself,” said Charley, to put him at his ease.
So they sat the rest of the afternoon and talked of science fiction.