Number 94 was a crumbling, soot-encrusted building with ancient green shades pulled down over its windows. To Richards the house looked like a very old man who had died with cataracts on his eyes.
He pulled to the curb and got out. The street was dotted with abandoned air cars, some of them rusted down to almost formless hulks. On the edge of the park, a Studebaker lay on its side like a dead dog. This was not police country, obviously. If you left your car unattended, it would gain a clot of leaning, spitting, slate-eyed boys in fifteen minutes. In half an hour some of the leaning boys would have produced crowbars and wrenches and screwdrivers. They would tap them, compare them, twirl them, have mock swordfights with them. They would hold them up into the air thoughtfully, as if 388
testing the weather or receiving mysterious radio transmission through them. In an hour the car would be a stripped carcass, from aircaps and cylinders to the steering wheel itself.
A small boy ran up to Richards as he was setting his crutches under himself.
Puckered, shiny burn scars had turned one side of the boy’s face into a hairless Frankenstein horror.
“Scag, mister? Good stuff. Put you on the moon.” He giggled secretly, the lumped and knobbed flesh of his burnt face bobbing and writhing grotesquely.
“Fuck off,” Richards said briefly.
The boy tried to kick one of his crutches out from under him, and Richards swung one of them in a low arc, swatting the boy’s bottom. He ran off, cursing.
He made his way up the pitted stone steps slowly and looked at the door. It had once been blue, but now the paint had faded and peeled to a tired desert sky color. There had once been a doorbell, but some vandal had taken care of that with a cold chisel.
Richards knocked and waited. Nothing. He knocked again.
It was late afternoon now, and cold was creeping slowly up the street. Faintly, from the park beyond the end of the block, came the bitter clacking of October branches losing their leaves.
There was no one here. It was time to go.
Yet he knocked again, curiously convinced that there was someone in there.
And this time he was rewarded with the slow shuffling of house slippers. A pause at the door. Then: “Who’s out there? I don’t buy nothin. Go away.”
“I was told to visit you,” Richards said.
A peephole swung open with a minute squeak and a brown eye peeked through. Then the peephole closed with a snap.
“I don’t know you,” Flat dismissal.
“I was told to ask for Elton Parrakis.”
Grudgingly: “Oh. You’re one of those-”
Behind the door locks began to turn, bolts began to be unbolted, one by one. Chains dropped. There was the click of revolving tumblers in one Yale lock and then another.
The chunk-slap of the heavy-duty Trap-Bolt being withdrawn.
The door swung open and Richards looked at a scrawny woman with no breasts and huge, knotted hands. Her face was unlined, almost cherubic, but it looked as if it had taken hundreds of invisible hooks and jabs and uppercuts in a no-holds-barred brawl with time itself. Perhaps time was winning, but she was not an easy bleeder. She was almost six feet tall, even in her flat, splayed slippers, and her knees were swollen into trees-tumps with arthritis. Her hair was wrapped in a bath turban. Her brown eyes, staring at him from under a deep ledge of brow (the eyebrows themselves clung to the precipice like desperate mountain bushes, struggling against the aridity and the altitude), were 389
intelligent and wild with what might have been fear or fury. Later he understood she was simply muddled, afraid, tottering on the edge of insanity.
“I’m Virginia Parrakis,” she said flatly. “I’m Elton’s mother. Come in.”
Minus 051 and COUNTING
She did not recognize him until she had led him into the kitchen to brew tea.
The house was old and crumbling and dark, furnished in a decor he recognized immediately from his own environment: Modern junkshop.
“Elton isn’t here now,” she said, brooding over the battered aluminum teapot on the gas ring. The light was stronger here, revealing the brown waterstains that blotched the wallpaper, the dead flies, souvenirs of summer past, on the windowsills, the old linoleum creased with black lines, the pile of wet wrapping paper under the leaking drain pipe.
There was an odor of disinfectant that made Richards think of last nights in sickrooms.
She crossed the room, and her swollen fingers made a painful search through the heaped junk on the countertop until they found two tea bags, one of them previously used. Richards got the used one. He was not surprised.
“He works,” she said, faintly accentuating the first word and making the statement an accusation. “You’re from that fellow in Boston, the one Eltie writes to about pollution, aintcha?”
“Yes, Mrs. Parrakis.”
“They met in Boston. My Elton services automatic vending machines.” She preened for a moment and then began her slow trek back across the dunes of linoleum to the stove. “I told Eltie that what that Bradley was doing was against the law. I told him it would mean prison or even worse. He doesn’t listen to me. Not to his old mom, he doesn’t.” She smiled with dark sweetness at this calumny. “Elton was always building things, you know . . . . He built a treehouse with four rooms out back when he was a boy.
That was before they cut the elm down, you know. But it was that darky’s idea that he should build a pollution station in Portland. ”
She popped the bags into cups and stood with her back to Richards, slowly warming her hands over the gas ring. “They write each other. I told him the mails aren’t safe.
You’ll go to prison or even worse, I said. He said but Mom, we do it in code. He asks for a dozen apples, I tell him my uncle is a little worse. I said: Eltie, do you think they can’t figure that Secret Spy stuff out? He doesn’t listen. Oh, he used to. I used to be his best friend. But things have changed. Since he got to pooberty, things have changed. Dirty magazines under his bed and all that business. Now this darky. I suppose they caught you testing smogs or carcinogens or something and now you’re on the run.”
“I-”
“It don’t matter!” She said fiercely at the window. It looked out on a backyard filled with rusting pieces of junk and tire rims and some little boy’s sandbox that now, many years later, was filled with scruffy October woods.
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“It don’t matter!” she repeated. “It’s the darkies.” She turned to Richards and her eyes were hooded and furious and bewildered. “I’m sixty-five, but I was only a fresh young girl of nineteen when it began to happen. It was nineteen seventy-nine and the darkies were everywhere! Everywhere! Yes they were!” she nearly screamed, as if Richards had taken issue with her. “Everywhere! They sent those darkies to school with the whites.
They set em high in the government. Radicals, rabble-rousing, and rebellion. I ain’t so-”
She broke off as if the words had been splintered from her mouth. She stared at Richards, seeing him for the first time.
“OhGodhavemercy,” she whispered.
“Mrs. Parrakis-”
“Nope!” she said in a fear-hoarsened voice. “Nope! Nope! Oh, nope!” She began advancing on him, pausing at the counter to pick up a long, gleaming butcher knife out of the general clutter. “Out! Out! Out!” He got up and began to back away slowly, first through the short hall between the kitchen and shadowy living room, then through the living room itself.
He noticed that an ancient pay telephone hung on the wall from the days when this had been a bona fide inn. The Blue Door, Guests. When was that? Richards wondered Twenty years ago? Forty? Before the darkies had gotten out of hand, or after?
He was just beginning to back down the hall between the living room and the front door when a key rattled in the lock. They both froze as if some celestial hand had stopped the film while deciding what to do next.
The door opened, and Elton Parrakis walked in. He was immensely fat, and his lackluster blond hair was combed back in preposterous waves from his forehead to show a round baby face that held an element of perpetual puzzlement. He was wearing the blue and gold uniform of the Vendo-Spendo Company. He looked thoughtfully at Virginia Parrakis.
“Put that knife down, Mom.”
“Nope!” she cried, but already the crumbling of defeat had begun to putty her face.
Parrakis closed the door and began walking toward her. He jiggled.
She shrank away. “You have to make him go, son. He’s that badman. That Richards.