I knew what he meant. If the word "loser" applied to anybody, it was Alfred Ten Eyck. You know the term "Midas touch"? Alfred had the opposite, whatever that is.
He could turn gold into dross by touching it.
Alfred's father died while Alfred was at Princeton, leaving him several thousand acres of Adirondack land but hardly any real money to live on. So Alfred had dropped out of college and come to Herkimer County to try to make a go of the country-squire business. Either he lacked the right touch, however, or he had the most extraordinary run of bad luck. He sold most of the land, but usually on unfavorable terms to some smarter speculator, who thereupon doubled or tripled his money.
Alfred also dabbled in business of various kinds in Gahato. For example, he went partners with a fellow who brought in a stable of riding horses for the summer-visitor trade. It turned out that the fellow really knew very little about horses and imported a troop of untrained crowbaits. One of his first customers got bucked off and broke her leg.
Then Alfred put up a bowling alley, the Iroquois Lanes, with all that expensive machinery for setting up the pins after each strike. He did all right with it and sold out at a handsome profit to Morrie Kaplan. But Morrie was to pay in installments. He had not had it a month when it burned up; and Morrie, who was no better a businessman than Alfred, had let the insurance lapse. So Morrie was bankrupt, and Alfred was left holding the bag.
Then came the war. Full of patriotic fire, Alfred enlisted as a private. He promptly came down with tuberculosis in training camp. Since antibiotics had come in, they cured him; but that ended his military career. Maybe it was just as well, because Alfred was the kind of fellow who would shoot his own foot off at practice.
"Okay," said Alfred, "let me show you to your room. Mike and I just rattle around in this big old place."
When he had settled me in, he said: "Now what would you really like to do, Willy? Drink? Swim? Hike? Fish? Or just sit in the sun and talk?"
"What I'd really like would be to go for a row in one of those wonderful old guide boats. Remember when we used to frog around the swamps in them, scooping up muck so we could look at the little wigglers under the microscope?"
Alfred heaved a sigh. "I don't have any more of those boats."
"What happened to them? Sell them?"
"No. Remember when I was in the Army? I rented the island to a family named Strong, and they succeeded in smashing every last boat. Either the women got into them in high heels and punched through the hulls, or their hell-raising kids ran them on rocks."
"You can't get boats like that any more, can you?" I said.
"Oh, there are still one or two old geezers who make them through the winter months. But each boat costs more than I could afford. Besides the outboard, I have only an old flatbottom. We can go out in that."
We spent a couple of very nice hours that afternoon, out in the flatbottom. It was one of those rare days, with the sky crystal-clear except for a few puffy little white cumulus clouds. The old rowboat tended to spin in circles instead of going where you wanted it ot. When, not having rowed for years, I began to get blisters, I gave my place to Alfred, whose hands were horny from hard work.
We caught up on each other's history. I said: "Say, remember the time I pushed you off the dock?" and he said: "Whatever happened to your uncle—the one who had a camp on Raquette Lake?"
And I said: "How come you never married my cousin Agnes? You and she were pretty thick ..."
I told Alfred about my inglorious military career, my French fiancée, and my new job with the trust company. He looked sharply at me, saying:
"Willy, explain something to me."
"What?"
"When we took those tests in school, my IQ was every bit as high as yours."
"Yes, you always had more original ideas than I ever did. What about it?"
"Yet here you are, landing on your feet as usual. Me, I can't seem to do anything right. I just don't get the hang of it."
"Hang of what?"
"Of life."
"Maybe you should have gone into some line that didn't demand such practicality—so much realism and adaptability. Something more intellectual, like teaching or writing."
He shook his graying head. "I couldn't join the professorate, on account of I never finished college. I've tried writing stories, but nobody wants them. I've even written poems, but they tell me they're just bad imitations of Tennyson and Kipling, and nobody cares for that sort of thing nowadays."
"Have you tried a headshrinker?" (The term had not yet been whittled down to "Shrink.")
He shook his head. "I saw one in Utica, but I didn't like the guy. Besides, chasing down the line to Utica once or twice a week would have meant more time and expense than I could afford."
A little breeze sprang up, ruffling the glassy lake. "Oh, well," he said, "time we were getting back."
The island was quiet except for the chugging, from the boathouse, of the little Diesel that pumped our water and charged the batteries that gave us light and power. Over drinks before dinner, I asked:
"Now look, Al, you've kept me dangling long enough about that damned lamp. What is it? Why should I have nightmares while bringing the thing back from Europe?"
Alfred stared at his scotch. He mostly drank a cheap rye, I learned, but had laid in scotch for his old friend. At last he said:
"Can you remember those nightmares?"
"You bet I can! They scared the living Jesus out of me. Each time, I was standing in front of a kind of chair, or maybe a throne. Something was sitting on the throne, only I couldn't make out details. But, when it reached out toward me, its arms were—well, kind of boneless, like tentacles. And I couldn't yell or run or anything. Each time, I woke up just as the thing got its snaky fingers on me. Over and over."
"Ayup, it figures," he said. "That would be old Yuskejek."
"That would be what?"
"Yuskejek..Willy, are you up on the mythology of the lost continent of Atlantis?"
"Good lord, no! I've been too busy. As I remember, the occultists try to make out that there really was a sunken continent out in the Atlantic, while the scientists say that's tosh; that Plato really got his ideas from Crete or Egypt or some such place."
"Some favor Tartessos, near modern Cadiz," said Alfred. (This happened before those Greek professors came up with their theory about the eruption of the volcanic island of Thera, north of Crete.) "I don't suppose a hard-headed guy like you believes in anything supernatural, do you?"
"Me? Well, that depends, I believe what I see—at least most of the time, unless I have reason to suspect sleight-of-hand. I know that, just when you think you know it all and can see through any trick, that's, when they'll bamboozle you. After all, I was in Gahato when that part-time medium, Miss—what was her name? Scott—Barbara Scott—had that trouble with a band of little bitty Indian spooks, who threw stones at people."
Alfred laughed. "Jeepers Cripus, I'd forgotten that! They never did explain it."
"So what about your goofy lamp?"
"Well, Ionides has good connections in esoteric circles, and he assures me that the lamp is a genuine relic of Atlantis."
"Excuse me if I reserve my opinion. So what's this Yuskejek? The demon-god of Atlantis?"
"Sort of."
"What kind of name is Yuskejek,' anyway? Eskimo?"
"Basque, I believe."
"Oh, well, I once read that the Devil had studied Basque for seven years and only learned two words. I can see it all— the sinister Atlantean high priest preparing to sacrifice the beautiful virgin princess of Ongabonga, so the devil-god can feast on her soul-substance—"
"Maybe so, maybe not. You've been reading too many pulps. Anyway, let's go eat before I get too drunk to cook."