Harlan Ellison: Street Scene

“Is that crummy, I ask you!” said Walter Knife-That-Gleams-In-Starlight.

“Yeah, first they zap alla the buffalo, bison, whatever the hell they was that they did in, and now this!” The lament was voiced by Teddy Bearclaw.

“Goddam white-eyes,” added Sidney G. Nine Fires.

“Red man’s burden,” said Walter.

“Is it not a sad pass what our people has come to, that we must erect for these shitty crummy pony soldiers a edifice of such nobility as we are at this precise moment in time erecting,” penultimated Teddy.

“What the hell is a bison?” asked Sidney G. Nine Fires. Mutual shrugs of confusion led to a prompt exit.

The Reverend Leroy L. Heal, arriving at the head of the Poke County, Mississippi, delegation to the First Annual Congress of the International Evangelical Brotherhood for the Promotion of Christian Love and Low Down Payments, paused, waving his flock to a halt, shaking his head sadly at the vast obstruction blocking the intersection ahead. His second-in-command moved up beside him. Together, they studied the crumpled, strutted, awning-winged apparition filling the street.

“Well, Leroy, what do you make of it?” the lieutenant inquired.

Rev. Heal sighed. “The expenditure of funds and ingenuity that went into constructing this hoax and placing it in our line of march could have supported three indigent families in fair comfort for a period of at least two months,” he stated.

The two men advanced; Rev Beal poked at the leathery hide with a finger.

“Plastic,” he said. ”A transparent fraud.”

“As I see it, Leroy, they intended to suspend the thing from wires and have it buzz us. But apparently the wires broke.”

“Obviously. Tsk. Sometimes I wonder at the curious picture the opposition seems to entertain of our gullibility. First the whole thing with the sheets over their heads; now this: big racist rubber chickens.”

“So—what do we do?”

“We make ourselves comfortable,” The Reverend said. “And wait.”

As the strains of We Shall Overcome rose on the afternoon air, a party of lobbyists for the All-American Society for the Preservation of Property Values (ASPPV) emerged from the gloom of Reilly’s Bar and Grille, summoned by the mingled cries of the wounded, the chatter of the spectators, and the exhortations of the cop, still in search of a recipient for the summons. The group blinked at the scene, noting the size and placement of the reptile with eyes accustomed to lightning assessment.

“By George, Charlie,” the head lobbyist said, around a cigar, “you couldn’t replace that thing for under twenty-eight-five or I’m a baboon’s nephew.”

Charlie was staring at the singers grouped by the monster’s stem.

“Tell me there’s no Commie money behind them Nigras,” he murmured.

Lilya looked at her watch for the thirty-first time. Ten more minutes and not a second more, and then by God she’d take a cab to Schrafft’s and order the expensivest item on the menu and if that skin-disease Melville ever dared to show that collection of acne scars he called a face again…

“Sorry, lady,” the man with the leather jacket said, not looking at Lilya as he bellied her aside. He planted his feet and looked the project over, from beak to tail-tip and back to beak.

“Hey, Jake,” a wiry man in overalls said. “You want I should get the rig in position.”

“Nix,” Jake said succinctly.

“Right,” the wiry man said. “This is outta our line—”

Jake whirled and grabbed a handful of the wiry man’s overall bib.

“There ain’t no wrecking job Ajax Wrecking can’t handle and doncha forget it, “ he growled. “Hold the headache ball. Tell the boys to break out the chain saws.”

“Sure, Jake. Only you got aholt of the hair on my chest—”

“Twenny minutes, that’s what the dude said. I don’t want to see nothing but hip pockets and elbows until we get this intersection clear, get me?”

A husband and wife team, tourists from Joplin, Missouri, making one of their rare p.a.’s in the Apple, stood near the forearm and metacarpus of the dead beast, the husband setting the automatic timer on his camera. Then he strolled nonchalantly to his spouse (indicating his ease and familiarity with matters photographic), struck an attitude, and waited, smiling, till the camera had clicked them off. “Do we have time to make it down to the Village for some shots with hippies, before dinner,” the wife asked. Her husband’s answer was lost on the wind as the mayor’s helicopter settled in the center of Sixth Avenue, just above 47th Street.

The riot police jog-trotted around the corner of 48th and Sixth and began breaking up into assault teams.

“Careful of that Mace!” Captain Schirmer bellowed through the bullhorn. Snipers in office windows began firing at streetlights. “All right, move it out!” shouted Captain Schirmer. The first wave of riot police lobbed their tear gas grenades, and began spraying high pressure hoses down the Avenue. The rabbinical students fled, still uncertain whether the pteranodon was kosher or trayfe— but dead certain the eggs were edible if the proper bruchah was said over them. The rescue squads pulled the last of the survivors out from under the dead beast, and carried them away from the line of combat.

Kiley was trapped at the neck of the creature, still trying to yank loose the garden amulet. He was cut off from escape by the insurrecting Columbia Law students and Black Panther Freedom Party members on the eastern flank, by the riot police using Mace and leadweighted truncheons on the west, by the roughneck warriors of the Ajax Wrecking Corporation (all ex-Seabees) on the North, and by the advancing wave of members of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local #39 on the South. He crouched down, hoping to go unseen, and continued yanking at the circle of gold.

More police on horseback clogged the scene, trying to aid their beat partner in establishing to whom the corpse in the street belonged. The ticket was written, it merely needed to be served.

Three hookers began working the uptown side of 47th Street, hoping some of the show biz crowd would stick to their fingers, or other portions of their anatomy.

“Oh!” cried Alice, awakening, “apparently it is all a dream!”

“You’re under arrest, “ said the cop with the ticket, to no one in particular. He said it again, softer, but no one paid any attention.

Lilya curse/wished plagues on gnats and nits on the acne-pocked head of Melville, and stalked off down the Avenue, passing the hip-girdle of the pteranodon, failing to look down where she would have seen her much-cursed Melville, much more crushed than cursed.

Near the hind limbs of the dead beast (what George “The Pot” Lukovich would have referred to as the ass-end), twelve members of The Pelham Privateers now worked diligently trying to get the beast erect so its hubcaps could be stolen. The pneumatic jacks they had installed merely sank into the flesh of the beast.

Big Louis Morono, seeing the gang at work, whistled up his men, and using the high pressure hoses, drove the juvies from the scene.

Even as they fled, the Pelham Privateers indicated their frustration at having been thwarted. They mugged Trenchard and Goilvey where they stood, leaving the two tottering scientists even more tottered: face-down in the gutter, arguing through split lips and cracked teeth, “It’s too big to be a pterodactyl from our past…it has to be from the past, you twit…no, it’s from another planet…don’t be an ass, they don’t have pterodactyls on any planet in our solar system…so it came from another Solar system…how did it get here…that’s not my problem…”