Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

Bedsprings creaked. The door swung back, the ugly sounds of the radio grew louder, and the fat girl appeared in the doorway. She was heavily powdered and rouged, but she wore the pink robe.

Barnes could see a little of the unmade bed beyond her; it was empty, but something flat and furry and larger than any cat lay there. “I don’t like to bother you,” he said stiffly. “But do you know where Mr. Free is?”

“Not any more. I was taking a nap.” The fat girl yawned as though to prove it, then glanced at Sergeant Proudy. “I’m broke, remember? You were here yesterday.”

Barnes cleared his throat. “He says they’re going to make everyone leave at noon.”

“Not me. I won’t be up then.” The slam of the fat girl’s door was followed by the snick of a night bolt.

“Ozzie, the wrecking. It will be today?”

Across the stairwell, Sergeant Proudy saw a slender, darkhaired woman in a black dress.

“At noon,” Barnes said. “We have to be out by noon.” There was an unspoken appeal in his voice.

“I will try,” the dark woman said. “It will depend, perhaps. Where is Stubb?”

Sergeant Proudy broke in. “The hell with that. I got to serve this paper. Where’s Free?”

“Stubb couldn’t do anything.”

“One never knows, my Ozzie. He might help you.”

“Help me do what?”

“You are intelligent and resourceful. What you will think of to do.” The dark woman opened the door behind her and slipped through it.

Stubb was in the Sandwich Shop, with the telephone, an ashtray, and a half-empty coffee cup before him. He sat listening intently to the telephone while drawing on a Camel, his head cocked. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Who would know?”

A heavy, middle-aged woman stood behind the counter staring at him.

He covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “What’s eating you?”

The woman looked down the counter at the young man who had waited on Stubb the night before. “Murray, you gave him more credit?”

“He paid up, Mom.”

“Okay, switch me,” Stubb said. “Let me talk to him.”

“So help me God as I live and breathe, Mom, he paid up. He paid for that coffee there, too.”

“Hello, Charlie, this is Jim Stubb. You remember me? I’m a friend of Tinker’s … . Charlie, I need a little favor, just a two-bit thing. Tinker’d do it for me in a minute, but he’s down in Florida reeling ‘em in, and I don’t want to bother him … . Yeah, I do too, haven’t done any fishing in a year. Too busy, you know how it is … . Charlie, what it is, is this place over on the south side where they’re putting the new freeway through. It’s scheduled for demo, but the old guy that owns it is a friend of mine. He hasn’t had time yet to get his stuff out. I was wondering if you couldn’t—Hell, Charlie, there’s got to be something else they could do for a couple of months anyway. They’ve been planning the God-damned freeway for eight years … . Sure, I understand. What’s the number? I’ll try him.”

“You want more coffee?”

“Thanks, Murray.”

“Do me a favor, huh?”

Stubb had hung up the telephone. He picked up the handset again and began to dial. “What’re you whispering for, Murray?”

“So I’m whispering. Order a doughnut.”

“Commissioner Carson’s office, please.”

“You’re asking them for a favor, I’m asking you for one. Order a doughnut. I bet you didn’t eat breakfast. What can it hurt?”

“My name’s Jim Stubb, and I’m active on the south side. I’m a very good friend of Tinker Bell’s. Will you tell Commissioner Carson I’d like to talk to him? What the hell, Murray, you gone crazy?”

“A little favor I’m asking. You ask me for favors all the time.”

“Hello, Commissioner? … I believe we did meet last summer at the picnic … . No, no, I was just in the audience, you probably wouldn’t remember me, but I heard your speech. We shook hands afterward … . Yeah, you gave ’em hell, everybody loved it. That’s why I’m calling, Commissioner. You know how it is, you have the party’s interests at heart, maybe you stick your nose in sometimes where it doesn’t belong. But you say to yourself, the party’s been good to me, maybe I should stick my neck out and pay back. The thing is, Commissioner, they’re going to knock down this old house here on the south side. It’s full of people who’ve got nowhere else to live and the whole neighborhood’s pretty steamed … . Sure, the snow and all … . It’s going to hurt us with these people, and the way I figure it, just a little cooling down period, just a few weeks maybe, could make all the difference … . No, white. Not Polish or anything … .Okay, Commissioner, I’m not going to argue, there isn’t a white vote. But whites vote … . Okay, I’ll call him. Maybe you could call him too?”

Stubb hung up and stared into space for a moment. Into nothingness. Then he took a torn dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the counter. “Hey, Murray, give me some more coffee and a couple doughnuts, huh? Not them, the big greasy kind.”

Murray took two from a plastic canister on the counter and stacked them on a saucer for Stubb, then took the dollar and rang up ninety cents on the cash register. As he brought his dime to Stubb, he whispered, “So she could see you paying. It’ll get me off the hook later.”

“Sure.”

“One would have been okay. The twenty-cent kind would have been okay.”

“You do me a favor, I do you a favor. Nobody can say Jim Stubb cheated him unless he cheated Jim Stubb or his friends first.”

“Well, thanks anyway. Who’d this commissioner want you to call?”

“Charlie, the guy I talked to first.” Stubb picked up a doughnut and broke it in two. “I thought I asked for more coffee. Holy Jesus, Murray, aren’t I ever going to get some more coffee?”

In the room belonging to the witch, a foot or two to one side of the area visible through Barnes’s peephole, stood a machine consisting of a keyboard that was like a typewriter’s, except that it lacked provision for the lower-case letters, and a screen like a television’s. The witch pressed a switch on the keyboard, and the screen glowed palely green. She pressed keys. A succession of letters appeared at the bottom of the screen:

This line was lifted by another appearing below it:

The witch glanced at them, then pressed an additional sequence. The next line read:

She nodded to herself and began to undress, tossing her clothes onto the bed. Naked, she removed her contact lenses. Taking a black glass bottle from a dresser drawer, she poured a small quantity of unguent into the palm of her left hand and smeared herself with it, beginning at her feet and giving special attention to her vulva, rectum, and breasts. It smelled as weeds do crushed beneath the tires of a truck in spring.

The anointing completed, she turned off the light. Dull winter sun leaked around the blind, yet left the room nearly dark. The screen pulsed yellow-green:

The witch herself now possessed a slight luminescence. She replaced the bottle and took a yellow pastel from the same drawer. This pastel, if it glowed at all, did so only feebly, but when she scribed a circle on the floor, the line seemed almost a trench of flame.

Leaning to reach the drawer without leaving her circle, she took out a small drum. Its body was of blackened metal; its head carried a blurred picture of a rose, executed in blue and red. The witch placed this instrument in the center of the circle, then with the pastel inscribed the words ADAM TE DAERAM around the interior of the circle, and outside it: AMRTET, ALGAR ALGASTNA . That done, she tossed the pastel back into the open drawer.