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Old Man’s fist slammed the table.
“Name me no names like that! That’s a G’yaga name for us Paleys—Real Folkers. Don’t let me never hear that other name again! It don’t mean a man; it means somethin like a high-class gorilla.”
“Quit looking in the mirror!” shrieked Deena.
There was more squabbling and jeering and roaring and confusing and terrifying talk, but Dorothy Singer had closed her eyes and fallen asleep again.
Some time later, she awoke. She sat up, found her glasses on a little table beside her, put them on, and stared about her.
She was in a large shack built of odds and ends of wood. It had two rooms, each about ten feet square. In the corner of one room was a large kerosene-burning stove. Bacon was cooking in a huge skillet; the heat from the stove made sweat run from her forehead and over her glasses.
After drying them off with her handkerchief, she examined the furnishings of the shack. Most of it was what she had expected, but three things surprised her. The bookcase, the photograph on the wall, and the birdcage.
The bookcase was tall and narrow and of some dark wood, badly scratched. It was crammed with comic books, Blue Books, and Argosies, some of which she supposed must be at least twenty years old. There were a few books whose ripped backs and water-stained covers indicated they’d been picked out of ash heaps. Haggards Allan and the Ice Gods, Wellss Outline of History, Vol. I, and his The Croquet Player. Also Gog and Magog, A Prophecy of Armageddon by the Reverend Caleb G. Harris. Burroughs’ Tarzan the Terrible and In the Earth’s Core. Jack London’s Beyond Adam.
The framed photo on the wall was that of a woman who looked much like Deena and must have been taken around 1890. It was very large, tinted in brown, and showed an aristocratic handsome woman of about thirty-five in a high-busted velvet dress with a high neckline. Her hair was drawn severely back to a knot on top of her head. A diadem of jewels was on her breast.
The strangest thing was the large parrot cage. It stood upon a tall support which had nails driven through its base to hold it to the floor. The cage itself was empty, but the door was locked with a long narrow bicycle lock.
Her speculation about it was interrupted by the two women calling to her from their place by the stove.
Deena said, “Good morning, Miss Singer. How do you feel?”
Deena took a pitcher of cold water out of the refrigerator, and from it filled up a tin cup. “We don’t have any ru
Dorothy looked dubious, but she closed her eyes and drank. “I think I’m going to get sick,” she said. “I’m sorry.” ‘Til take you to the outhouse,“ said Deena, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulder and heaving her up
with surprising strength. “Once I’m outside,” said Dorothy faintly, “I’ll be all right.” “Oh, I know,” said Deena. “It’s the odor. The fish, Gummy’s cheap perfume, Old Man’s sweat, the
beer. I forgot how it first affected me. But it’s no better outside.” Dorothy didn’t reply, but when she stepped through the door, she murmured, “Ohh!” “Yes, I know,” said Deena. “It’s awful, but it won’t kill you…” Ten minutes later, Deena and a pale and weak Dorothy came out of the ramshackle outhouse. They returned to the shanty, and for the first time Dorothy noticed that Elkins was sprawled face-up on
the seat of the truck. His head hung over the end of the seat, and the flies buzzed around his open mouth.
“This is horrible,” said Deena. “He’ll be very angry when he wakes up and finds out where he is. He’s such a respectable man.” “Let the heel sleep it off,” said Dorothy. She walked into the shanty, and a moment later Paley clomped
into the room, a smell of stale beer and very peculiar sweat advancing before him in a wave. “How you feel?” he growled in a timbre so low the hairs on the back of her neck rose. “Sick. I think I’ll go home.” “Sure. Only try some a the hair.” He handed her a half-empty pint of whiskey. Dorothy reluctantly downed a large shot chased with cold
water. After a brief revulsion, she began feeling better and took another shot. She then washed her face in a bowl of water and drank a third whiskey.
“I think I can go with you now,” she said. “But I don’t care for breakfast.” “I ate already,” he said. “Let’s go. It’s ten-thirty accordin to the clock on the gas station. My alley’s prob’ly been cleaned out by now. Them other ragpickers are always moochin in on my territory when they think I’m stayin home. But you kin bet they’re scared out a their pants every time they see a shadow cause they’re afraid its Old Man and he’ll catch em and squeeze their guts out and crack their ribs with this one good arm.”
Laughing a laugh so hoarse and unhuman it seemed to come from some troll deep in the caverns of his bowels, he opened the refrigerator and took another beer.
“I need another to get me started, not to mention what I’ll have to give that damn balky bitch, Fordiana.”
“He’s a big boy; he kin take care a hisself. We got to get Fordiana up and goin.”
Fordiana was the battered and rusty pickup truck. It was parked outside Paley’s bedroom window so he could look out at any time of the night and make sure no one was stealing parts or even the whole truck.
“Not that I ought a worry about her,” grumbled Old Man. He drank three-fourths of the quart in four mighty gulps, then uncapped the truck’s radiator and poured the rest of the beer down it.
“She knows nobody else’ll give her beer, so I think that if any a these robbin figurers that live on the dump or at the shacks aroun the bend was to try to steal anythin off’n her, she’d honk and backfire and throw rods and oil all over the place so’s her Old Man could wake up and punch the figurin shirt off a the thievin figurer. But maybe not. She’s a female. And you kin’t trust a figurin female.”
He poured the last drop down the radiator and roared, “There! Now don’t you dare not turn over. You’re robbin me a the good beer I could be havin! If you so much as backfire, Old Man’ll beat hell out a you with a sledgehammer!”
Wide-eyed but silent, Dorothy climbed onto the ripped open front seat beside Paley. The starter whirred, and the motor sputtered.
“No more beer if you don’t work!” shouted Paley.
There was a bang, a fizz, a sput, a whop, whop, whop, a clash of gears, a monstrous and triumphant showing of teeth by Old Man, and they were bumpbumping over the rough ruts.
“Old Man knows how to handle all them bitches, flesh or tin, two-legged, four-legged, wheeled. I sweat beer and passion and promise em a kick in the tailpipe if they don’t behave, and that gets em all. I’m so figurin ugly I turn their stomachs. But once they get a whiff a the out-a-this-world stink a me, they’re done for, they fall prostrooted at my big hairy feet. That’s the way it’s always been with us Paley men and the G’yaga wimmen. That’s why their menfolks fear us, and why we got into so much trouble.”
Dorothy did not say anything, and Paley fell silent as soon as the truck swung off the dump and onto U.S. Route 24. He seemed to fold up into himself, to be trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. During the three minutes it took the truck to get from the shanty to the city limits, he kept wiping his sweating palm against his blue workman’s shirt.
But he did not try to release the tension with oaths. Instead, he muttered a string of what seemed to Dorothy nonsense rhymes.