RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS , there would beABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED .
A number of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan
was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it in the
SacramentoBee .
“Holy crap!” Jake cried. “That’s the same paper Pere Callahan was reading when he found
out his friend George Magruder—”
“Hush,” Roland said. “Listen.”
They listened.
Six
The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few
weeks—not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algul). The
interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a
great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly
themasksthey wear, are not good, not when you’re up close and personal. Up close and
personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their
becomingwith a religious fervor. The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man
bearhug with a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver
that the only two things they are becomingis older and uglier. The red marks on their
foreheads—the Eye of the King—usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up,
like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except
for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the
nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’s snot-gutters?
Whatever they think, up close and personal there’s something definitely wrong with them
even when they’re America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s
properly in place. So it’s humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they find it
demeaning, like “nigger” or “vamp”) at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing
but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways
and come out in Thunderclap.
Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the
one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks
(wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round
iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing—a
ninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabulary questions—half of them are
empty. After the second round, it’s three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty
weird questions, highlysubjectivequestions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in
which he does not believe, because he thinks—maybe knows—that the people giving the
test want a different answer from the one he (and most people) would ordinarily give. For
instance, there’s this little honey:
23. You come to a stop near an over-turned car on a little-traveled road. Trapped in the car
is a Young Man crying for rescue. You ask, “Are you hurt, Young Man?” to which he
responds, “I don’t think so!” In the field nearby is a Satchel filled with Money. You:
1. Rescue the Young Man and give him back his Money
2. Rescue the Young Man but insist that the Money be taken to the local Police
3. Take the Money and go on your way, knowing that although the road may be little
traveled, someone will be along eventually to free the Young Man
4. None of the above
Had this been a test for the Sacramento PD, Ted would have circled “b” in a heartbeat. He
may be little more than a hobo on the road, but his mama didn’t raise no fools, thank you oh
so very much. That choice would be the correct one in most circumstances, too—the
play-it-safe choice, the can’t-go-wrong choice. And, as a fall-back position, the one that
says “I don’t have a frigging clue what this is about but at least I’m honest enough to say
so,” there’s “d.”
Ted circles “c,” but not because that is necessarily what he’d do in that situation. On the
whole he tends to think that he’d go for “a,” presuming he could at least ask the “Young
Man” a few questions about where the loot came from. And if outright torture wasn’t
involved (and he would know, wouldn’t he, no matter what the “Young Man” might have
to say on the subject), sure, here’s your money,Vaya con Dios.And why? Because Ted
Brautigan happens to believe that the owner of the defunct candystore had a point: THEIR
KILLING THE LITTLE MAN.
But he circles “c,” and five days later he finds himself in the ante-room of an
out-of-business dance studio in San Francisco (his train-fare from Sacramento prepaid), along with three other men and a sullen-looking teenage girl (the girl’s the former Tanya
Leeds of Bryce, Colorado, as it turns out). Better than four hundred people showed up for
the test in the gym, lured by the honeypot ad. Goats, for the most part. Here, however, are
four sheep. One per cent. And even this, as Brautigan will discover in the full course of
time, is an amazing catch.
Eventually he is shown into an office markedPRIVATE . It is mostly filled with dusty
ballet stuff. A broad-shouldered, hard-faced man in a brown suit sits in a folding chair,
incongruously surrounded by filmy pink tutus. Ted thinks,A real toad in an imaginary
garden.
The man sits forward, arms on his elephantine thighs. “Mr. Brautigan,” he says, “I may or
may not be a toad, but I can offer you the job of a lifetime. I can also send you out of here with a handshake and a much-obliged. It depends on the answer to one question. A
question about a question, in fact.”
The man, whose name turns out to be Frank Armitage, hands Ted a sheet of paper. On it,
blown up, is Question 23, the one about the Young Man and the Satchel of Money.
“You circled‘c,’ ”Frank Armitage says. “So now, with absolutely no hesitation
whatever,please tell me why.”
“Because‘c’was what you wanted,” Ted replies with absolutely no hesitation whatever.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I’m a telepath,” Ted says. “And that’s what you’rereallylooking for.” He tries to
keep his poker face and thinks he succeeds pretty well, but inside he’s filled with a great
and singing relief. Because he’s found a job? No. Because they’ll shortly make him an
offer that would make the prizes on the new TV quiz shows look tame? No.
Because someone finally wants what he can do.
Because someone finally wantshim.
Seven
The job offer turned out to be another honeypot, but Brautigan was honest enough in his
taped memoir to say he might have gone along even if he’d known the truth.
“Because talent won’t be quiet, doesn’t knowhow to be quiet,” he said. “Whether it’s a
talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it
screams to be used. It never shuts up. It’ll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night,
screaming, ‘Use me, use me, use me! I’m tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use
me!’ ”
Jake broke into a roar of pre-adolescent laughter. He covered his mouth but kept laughing through his hands. Oy looked up at him, those black eyes with the gold wedding rings
floating in them, grinning fiendishly.
There in the room filled with the frilly pink tutus, his fedora hat cocked back on his
crewcut head, Armitage asked if Ted had ever heard of “the South American Seabees.”
When Ted replied that he hadn’t, Armitage told him that a consortium of wealthy South
American businessmen, mostly Brazilian, had hired a bunch of American engineers,
construction workers, and roughnecks in 1946. Over a hundred in all. These were the South
American Seabees. The consortium hired them all for a four-year period, and at different
pay-grades, but the pay was extremely generous—almost embarrassingly so—at all grades.
A ’dozer operator might sign a contract for $20,000 a year, for instance, which was tall
tickets in those days. But there was more: a bonus equal to one year’s pay. A total of
$100,000. If, that was, the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work,
and you don’t come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two days
off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year, just like in America, but in the pampas. You couldn’t go back to North America (or even Rio) until your
four-year hitch was over. If you died in South America, you got planted there—no one was
going to pay to have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up
front, and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest it, or