Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

The business I’d gone through with Joey outside was familiar because it had happened before, about six weeks back when Doc and I first parked our trailer at the Twin Palms court. I’d nearly stumbled over Joey that time too, but he wasn’t moving stars then. He was just staring ahead of him, waiting.

He’d been sitting in his wheelchair at the west end of the carpet-grass strip, staring out over the palmetto flats toward the highway. He was practically holding his breath, as if he was waiting for somebody special to show up, so absorbed in his watching that he didn’t know I was there until I spoke. He reminded me a little of a ventriloquist’s dummy with his skinny, knob-kneed body, thin face and round, still eyes. Only there wasn’t anything comical about him the way there is about a dummy. Maybe that’s why I spoke, because he looked so deadly serious.

“Anything wrong, kid?” I asked.

He didn’t jump or look up. His voice placed him as a cracker, either south Georgian or native Floridian.

“I’m waiting for Charlie to come home,” he said, keeping his eyes on the highway.

Probably I’d have asked who Charlie was but just then the trailer door opened behind him and his mother took over.

I couldn’t see her too well because the lights were off inside the trailer. But I could tell from the way she filled up the doorway that she was big. I could make out the white blur of a cigarette in her mouth, and when she struck a match to light it—on her thumb-nail, like a man—I saw that she was fairly young and not bad-looking in a tough, sullen sort of way. The wind was blowing in my direction and it told me she’d had a drink recently, gin, by the smell of it.

“This is none of your business, mister,” she said. Her voice was Southern like the boy’s but with all the softness ground out of it from living on the Florida coast where you hear a hundred different accents every day. “Let the boy alone.”

She was right about it being none of my business. I went on into the trailer I shared with Doc Shull and left the two of them waiting for Charlie together.

Our trailer was dark inside, which meant first that Doc had probably gone out looking for a drink as soon as I left that morning to pick up a job, and second that he’d probably got too tight to find his way back. But I was wrong on at least one count, because when I switched on the light and dumped the packages I’d brought on the sink cabinet I saw Doc asleep in his bunk.

He’d had a drink, though. I could smell it on him when I shook him awake, and it smelled like gin.

Doc sat up and blinked against the light, a thin, elderly little man with bright blue eyes, a clipped brown mustache and scanty brown hair tousled and wild from sleep. He was stripped to his shorts against the heat, but at some time during the day he had bathed and shaved. He had even washed and ironed a shirt; it hung on a nail over his bunk with a crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket.

“Crawl out and cook supper, Rip,” I said, holding him to his end of our working agreement. “I’ve made a day and I’m hungry.”

Doc got up and stepped into his pants. He padded barefoot across the linoleum and poked at the packages on the sink cabinet.

“Snapper steak again,” he complained. “Roy, I’m sick of fish!”

“You don’t catch sirloins with a hand-line,” I told him. And because I’d never been able to stay sore at him for long I added, “But we got beer. Where’s the opener?”

“I’m sick of beer, too,” Doc said. “I need a real drink.”

I sniffed the air, making a business of it. “You’ve had one already. Where?”

He grinned at me then with the wise-to-himself-and-the-world grin that lit up his face like turning on a light inside and made him different from anybody else on earth.

“The largess of Providence,” he said, “is bestowed impartially upon sot and Samaritan. I helped the little fellow next door to the bathroom this afternoon while his mother was away at work, and my selflessness had its just reward.”

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when Doc is kidding. He’s an educated man—used to teach at some Northern college, he said once, and I never doubted it—and talks like one when he wants to. But Doc’s no bum, though he’s a semi-alcoholic and lets me support him like an invalid uncle, and he’s keen enough to read my mind like a racing form.

“No, I didn’t batter down the cupboard and help myself,” he said. “The lady—her name is Mrs. Ethel Pond—gave me the drink. Why else do you suppose I’d launder a shirt?”

That was like Doc. He hadn’t touched her bottle though his insides were probably snarled up like barbed wire for the want of it. He’d shaved and pressed a shirt instead so he’d look decent enough to rate a shot of gin she’d offer him as a reward. It wasn’t such a doubtful gamble at that, because Doc has a way with him when he bothers to use it; maybe that’s why he bums around with me after the commercial fishing and migratory crop work, because he’s used that charm too often in the wrong places.

“Good enough,” I said and punctured a can of beer apiece for us while Doc put the snapper steaks to cook.

He told me more about our neighbors while we killed the beer. The Ponds were permanent residents. The kid—his name was Joey and he was ten—was a polio case who hadn’t walked for over a year, and his mother was a waitress at a roadside joint named the Sea Shell Diner. There wasn’t any Mr. Pond. I guessed there never had been, which would explain why Ethel acted so tough and sullen.

We were halfway through supper when I remembered something the kid had said.

“Who’s Charlie?” I asked.

Doc frowned at his plate. “The kid had a dog named Charlie, a big shaggy mutt with only one eye and no love for anybody but the boy. The dog isn’t coming home. He was run down by a car on the highway while Joey was hospitalized with polio.”

“Tough,” I said, thinking of the kid sitting out there all day in his wheelchair, straining his eyes across the palmetto flats. “You mean he’s been waiting a year?”

Doc nodded, seemed to lose interest in the Ponds, so I let the subject drop. We sat around after supper and polished off the rest of the beer. When we turned in around midnight I figured we wouldn’t be staying long at the Twin Palms trailer court. It wasn’t a very comfortable place.

I was wrong there. It wasn’t comfortable, but we stayed.

I couldn’t have said at first why we stuck, and if Doc could he didn’t volunteer. Neither of us talked about it. We just went on living the way we were used to living, a few weeks here and a few there, all over the States.

We’d hit the Florida west coast too late for the citrus season, so I went in for the fishing instead. I worked the fishing boats all the way from Tampa down to Fort Myers, not signing on with any of the commercial companies because I like to move quick when I get restless. I picked the independent deep-water snapper runs mostly, because the percentage is good there if you’ve got a strong back and tough hands.

Snapper fishing isn’t the sport it seems to the one-day tourists who flock along because the fee is cheap. You fish from a wide-beamed old scow, usually, with hand-lines instead of regular tackle, and you use multiple hooks that go down to the bottom where the big red ones are. There’s no real thrill to it, as the one-day anglers find out quickly. A snapper puts up no more fight than a catfish and the biggest job is to haul out his dead weight once you’ve got him surfaced.

Usually a pro like me sells his catch to the boat’s owner or to some clumsy sport who wants his picture shot with a big one, and there’s nearly always a jackpot—from a pool made up at the beginning of every run—for the man landing the biggest fish of the day. There’s a knack to hooking the big ones, and when the jackpots were running good I only worked a day or so a week and spent the rest of the time lying around the trailer playing cribbage and drinking beer with Doc Shull.