Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“If my wife ever gets over her asthma, I’ll take you up on that,” Barnes said.

“Hats are my biggest problem. You want to wear one because they do cut the wind a little and help keep your head warm, but they can’t take the snow. Up until yesterday I had a coconut straw I liked a hell of a lot, but when I put it on this morning, half the brim came off in my hand. I had to dig this Panama out of the closet. You have to buy hats and everything in advance, you know. You can’t get this kind of a thing in the winter, at least not before Valentine’s.” Sheppard coughed.

“You have many guys working out of your agency?”

“Only three now. We started with seven before the weather turned cold. Winter is the best time to sell because that’s when everybody wishes he was the hell out of here. That’s what the manager tells us, and it’s God’s own truth. ‘When the weather gets cold, the bold gets going and the gold gets flowing.’ But as soon as it drops below freezing we’ll lose somebody sure as hell, and when it gets below zero we always lose one or two more.” He pulled a dirty handkerchief from the hip pocket of his shorts and blew his nose.

“You don’t happen to know a lady called Mrs. Baker?” Barnes asked.

“Yeah, I think so. Old lady that owns a cat, lives across the street. I was in her place yesterday. Why do you want to know?”

“Just wondered.” Barnes glanced again at the card he had been given. “Salary plus commission?”

Sheppard shook his head. “Straight commission.”

“Oh.” Barnes stuck the card into a pocket.

“You?”

“Stock Novelties Incorporated,” Barnes said. “Straight commission.”

“Times are tough, good buddy.”

Barnes nodded, and for a while they sat without speaking, each locked in his own private hell. The mutter of the doctor’s voice came faintly from the examination room beyond, rising and falling as though he lectured to a class of one.

Barnes found a tattered National Geographic . He did not feel like reading (he never did any more), but he opened it and flipped through the pictures. They showed an Africa without the clutter of cities and the oppression of murder. Wide, unpeopled plains swept down to sullen brown lakes; there were elephants and rhino.

A shriveled, white-haired woman came out of the examination room, and Sheppard leaned over to whisper, “I ought to tell her about our Eternity Cottages—a durable home for all of life, an eternal resting place when life is gone. The beds convert, so your kids can move back in with you if they want to, when their time comes.”

The old doctor looked out, glancing from Barnes to Sheppard. He wore a white surgical coat and had a doughnut-shaped reflector strapped to his head. Sheppard rose and went in. After a time, Barnes heard him cough.

The bus that had rounded the corner as Barnes and the sailor left the station stood silent and empty now beyond the wide glass doors. Inside, the passengers who had straggled from it were nearly gone, most of them having carried their luggage to taxis, to the cars of relatives, to city busses, or down the icy city streets. A boy of about seven, wearing black shoes, navy-blue trousers, a white shirt, and a navy blazer with a crest, stood forlornly beside his little suitcase. An old man in a dirty gray sweater slept on the bench where Reeder had sprawled.

Candy had paid her driver grandly with bills; now she discovered that she had no quarters with which to rent a locker. She crossed the station to the magazine stand and asked the concessionaire for change.

“Sure,” he said. Then, as he was scooping coins from the drawer of his register, “I never seen you around here so early.”

Candy thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess I have been here a few times, late. I was looking for somebody.”

“You usually found him,” the concessionaire said. He was a bald, wizened little man with a crooked nose, and on impulse Candy kissed his bald head as he gave her the change. The kiss left a distinct scarlet print on his scalp. “Hey!” he said. “What the hell?”

“I found him this morning too,” Candy told him. She leaned against the stand and tried to throw her hips to one side like the model of the cover of Cosmopolitan . “You’re him, Sugar. You’re going to take me out and buy me lobster and champagne, and afterwards we’ll go up to your place and listen to your record collection. All night.”

“Like hell,” the concessionaire said. “Anyway, doll, it’s too early for dinner. Only a little after ten.”

“Have it your way. A champagne lunch. Lunch from now till midnight.”

“You don’t look like you need it.”

“Sure, but you do.” Candy picked up an Almond Joy. “These free? For me, I mean?”

“Like hell. Fifty cents.”

As she returned two of his quarters, there was a tug at her skirt. “Ma’am, have you seen my dad?”

Candy glanced down at the boy. “No, ’fraid not. If I were you, kid—” She hesitated, staring. “Hey, maybe I have at that. What’s your name?”

“Osgood M. Barnes.”

“Oh, Lord,” Candy said. And then again, “Oh, Lord.” The concessionaire turned away, his back ostentatiously signaling that he had nothing to do with lost children in the bus station. Candy shrugged, took two more Almond Joys, and dropped them into her purse.

“Have you seen my dad?” the boy asked again.

“Uh huh. What’s your mother call you?”

“Ozzie or Little Ozzie.”

“Right. Well, you know, Little Ozzie, I call your dad Ozzie, so I’m going to call you Little Ozzie. That way I can keep the two of you straight. You want the other half of my candy?”

Little Ozzie nodded.

“Let’s go over and sit down on those benches for a minute. Did you get any breakfast today?”

The boy nodded. “Real early. It wasn’t even daylight outside.”

“What was it? Breakfast, I mean.”

“Cornflakes.”

“Uh huh. And then your mother took you down and put you on the bus, right? And she told you your dad would be meeting you here?”

The boy nodded.

“I know your dad, Little Ozzie.”

“You do?” His mouth was full of sugared coconut.

“I sure do. I’m Candy Garth, and I’m one of your dad’s best friends.”

“Did he tell you to come here and get me?”

“Huh uh. I just happened to come here because I wanted to check this big old suitcase in one of their lockers. In a minute we’ll do that, and we can put yours in with it so you won’t have to carry it around until you get settled someplace. Did your dad know you were coming?”

“I think so.”

“Well, I kind of wonder about that because he never mentioned it to me at all, and I think he would have. We were talking just this morning about what we were going to do today. Did your mamma write him a letter?”

“She said she’d phone him after I was on the bus,” the boy said. “She didn’t want to wake him up, and it was real early.”

“Uh huh. Only she thought he still lived at Mr. Free’s, I bet. The phone got taken out of there. It sounds like she had something pretty important to do, if she put you on the bus alone without making sure first there’d be somebody here to meet you.”

“She was going someplace with Uncle Mike.”

“Uh huh. Did she say when they’d be back?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Uh huh.” Candy sat silently, looking at the boy out of blank, china-blue eyes, a fat, pink girl in a white plastic raincoat and a good wool dress that seemed a bit too old for her.

The boy stared back at her from dark eyes like his father’s. There was much of his father, too, in his high, square forehead and expression of innocent cunning.