Mr. Scott saw the scene of the freak accident before anything was moved, even the body—except there was now, of course, no power in the heavy corroded wire wrapped tight as a bullwhip around the skinny
shanks with only the browned and blackened fabric of cotton pyjamas between.
The police, and the power-and-light men reconstructed the accident this way: At the height of the storm one of the high-tension lines had snapped a hundred feet away from the house and the end, whipped by the wind and its own tension, had struck back freakishly through the open bedroom window of Peak House and curled once around the legs of Mr. Leverett, who had likely been on his feet at the time, killing him instantly.
One had to strain that reconstruction, though, to explain the additional freakish elements in the accident —the facts that the high-tension wire had struck not only through the bedroom window, but then through the bedroom door to catch the old man in the hall, and that the black shiny cord of the phone was wrapped like a vine twice around the old man’s right arm, as if to hold him back from escaping until the big wire had struck.
The Good New Days
“THEY DON’T BUILD slums like they used to,” Whitey Edwards told me, reaching up for a loose corner of the flexo and pulling it down to prove his point. It domed springily over our dreg-bottomed coffee cups, revealing in the hidden space behind it the limp multicolored spaghetti of the utilities piping: gas, water, metered syntho-milk, sewage, coaxed TV, med-mist, Musik, robo-talk, robo-juice, tele, vele, elec, gelec, and such. Few of them running fat with their peculiar contributions to the good life, I judged.
“That may be so,” I answered, slapping aside the dodderer’s hands and thumbing the blue elastic panel back in place with a fast rub along its adhesive edge. Again it decently covered the flaccid tangle of what looked like rainbow-hued sheep’s gut and rubber unmentionables. “But they built Ma like a bull and she’ll gore and trample you if she finds you tearing down her kitchen. It’s bad enough what the giant centipedes are doing.”
The jumbo TV, jammed between sink and fridge, flickered weak and ghostly. A gaggle of five-job wives and eight-job men were having a closed-end discussion of everything in creation on the executive patio edge of a swimming pool big enough to hide a space-to-seabottom cruiser. Their sweet eldritch cackle was unintelligible, but their state of undress was a slight counter-irritant to boredom.
Whitey Edwards sighed, not looking at these suburban goddesses, but squinting his rheumy eyes against the Monday sun coming up like doom over the dusty flats between Beatsville and the Henleys’ happy if fragile little family castle. Earth’s spotted, spitting, seething star shot its angry rays under the great awning rigged in front of our windows and door.
“Once,” the old boy said, shaking the head-topping that gave him his name, “they built slums solid with steel beams and heavy lath and great bloody pipes of iron and tile and lead that made ‘em think twice before they tore ’em down. But now.” He sighed his wheezy grief. Whitey’d used to be a con-and- destruction worker decades back, before the robots took that over, before I was born.
The TV zoomered in on a taut little job in bolero jacket and loincloth. The sound cleared for her fast, happy words “... caring for this pool put my husband and I in the pool-counselor raquette...” and died.
I started to tell Whitey I had even more current job sorrows than his. Since Thursday I’d been terminated from my street-smiler’s job for competing with the psychiatrists, robot and human, and for all I know with the giant centipedes. Just then my brother Dick erupted from the bed-closets, throwing clothes over his sallow nakedness like a Gypsy escaping from a Nazi gas chamber—or as if he were a sprint-in-the- gutter one-jobber. And with that job only since Friday night after being three weeks on probationary relief.
I called sweetly at him, “Are you scared a customer will put a gush of quarters into one of your metal bandits with her own little pinkies if you’re a minute late?”
Dick scowled, gyrating around a stubborn trouser leg. “Don’t you worry, Dickie,” I kept on. “All the women I illicitly psyched were as nervous of machinery as sex; they wanted a man to do it for them.”
Society, graciously, used to let people work vending and other coin-operated machines, like laundromats. But now, like laundromats too, you have to pay an attendant to do it for you—because machines are temperamental and individual enterprise is almost as holy as money and anyway, there aren’t enough jobs to go around more than two or three times.
Dick groggled something at me and got the door open, all set for a spring-heel takeoff. But there in his way was a tiny man, dressed like a respectable beetle, with dimpled fist raised to knock. He had glasses with zoomer lenses; silver antennae quivered out of his gray hat; a flat black belly-box was his ventral carapace. He looked around, especially at the cluttered floor, as if we were a touch unsavory, but he held his ground.
As Dick paused at this coleopterous apparition, Ma came charging out of the bed-closets, red in the face and black was the rest of her. She grappled Dick around the elbows and roared, “Stop! No son of mine is going out to give battle to the 21st Century on an empty stomach.” Grabbing a quarter orange she shoved it between his teeth like a boxer’s mouthpiece and then snatching this way and that she slammed a sandwich in his one hand and a cup in the other and on the next time around poured it steaming full.
No one can deny that Ma stands squarely in back of her four sons, like the manager of a quartet of fistic champions, conscious of our genius and determined that it get recognition in the form of seven-or eight- job careers. Though at the moment Dick was the only one of us with any job at all, except for Tom, who lives away with his wife and two kids. But obstructions and setbacks never daunt Ma. It’s not the money she’s after, mostly, it’s the glory of the House of Henley pitted against the whole bloody world.
Pricked by tender filial warmth, I eyed her—a murderous son-punishing behemoth but my blessed
mother—while Whitey gave her an unseen wave. He’s an old admirer she tolerates ever since Pa recognized her superior nuclear power and died.
Dick bit out and swallowed the meat of the orange and tongued aside the peel so as to yell that the coffee was burning his hand and what would it do to his throat? Ma ripped the fridge open against the pull of the great spring I’d fixed outside to keep it shut since the latch broke. She whisked out an ice-cube and tucked it in Dick’s cup. The fridge door thudded shut and the spring whirred like a rattlesnake about to jump loose and strike, but it didn’t.
Then Dick gulped his coffee while Ma held him and screeched in his ear about using lunch hour to scout for a second job and not stalk girls. When he’d finished his drink, she gagged him with his sandwich and let him go.
The beetle-man dodged aside. Dick took off with a straight-line velocity that would have broken his neck and scattered his bones if we’d still been living on the twentieth floor and not in this ground-level flat they tricked us into exchanging for.
The TV blinked and—presto—there was a soldierly file of eight-job men (tabbed for that by the digit on their left shoulder) single-footing with pleasant monotony past the golden plastic statue of a twelve- jobber. Each as he reached screen-center turned head and shouted an inaudible but optimistic something at me and bared all his perfectly tended teeth in a dazzling grin.