Harlan Ellison: Spider Kiss

He looked down at Stag Preston. The boy was covered to the chin with the white sheet, almost unruffled by crease or wrinkle, solemn in silence. His head was completely swathed in linen, a male nun in a Bedouin’s headwrap, bound tightly closed, sealed in, a cocoon, deepest quiet, the breathing out of a painfully white face as regular as soft breaths lightly drawn could be.

And the eyes were open.

Those dark, piercing eyes that said, I am me; I am always me; if I close my eyes, me ceases for a moment, so I keep them open; I am watching you .

The sight of the dark eyes staring up shocked the older man. For a moment he thought Stag Preston might have died, the eyes reflexing open, remaining that way, studying for an eternity the cracks in the ceiling. But then the eyes blinked moistly.

Shelly moved closer, made a pistol with thumb and forefinger, and fired it in salutation. Stag moved his head imperceptibly in recognition.

Then he spoke.

If the croak of a frog can be called speech, then he spoke. If the moan of a strangling baby can be called speech, then he spoke. If a crippled and struggling thing on its back, trying to turn over, can be called speech, then by all means Stag Preston spoke.

He rasped. He ratcheted. He croaked. And he spoke:

“I want to tell you,” he said. It took him the better part of a minute to utter those five words; they were almost totally incomprehensible, and Shelly understood him instantly. It was painful to watch the boy. He had to talk; whatever else happened in this room, this night, right now he had to tell someone he trusted, had always trusted, as much as he could trust anyone. But the sound was a bubbling, broken-gear thing.

Shelly kneeled beside the bed and listened. It took Stag Preston nearly fifteen minutes to say it:

“They owned me, all of me. I had to borrow real heavy from them. I—I had to keep up a front, couldn’t go back to that friggin’ poor. Had to, don’tcha know? Then when they—”

He rattled it out like lengths of chain.

He had borrowed till he was into the syndicate of small-time operators up to his eyebrows. Then when his records were gathering dust in the distributor’s bins, when Am-Par and Universal and The Palace and all the big clubs refused to book him, when his drawing power was so low they couldn’t sell him even as a minor act on a twenty-bill tour, they knew they had to sell short, had to get out, but not till they’d collected their money. They demanded it. They demanded it from a person incapable of being ordered about, a human being who had twisted himself so much in five years that he could no more be demanded at than he could hold his breath till expiration. Stag—arrogantly clinging to the emotional vestiges of his popularity in a world that suddenly wanted no part of him—refused to pay. He had called them the names they called themselves, among themselves; names they could use to one another but names no one else could use with impunity. He had called them schmucks , he had called them kikes , he had called them sheenies and mockies and wops and dagos and spaghetti-headers ; he had called them finks and crooks and bastards . And motherfuckers . Oh, yes, that too. They were not gangsters, these little men with small goals and tiny ambitions. They were not “The Combine” and they were not “The Mafia” and they were not “The Syndicate” as the tabloids think of The Syndicate. They were only what they had always been, a consortium of small-time operators (in lower case) and they were not familiar with beatings and killings and vengeance; but this money-losing property with his vile language, his snotty manner, his big mouth, had called them the names they could not be called openly (not to mention motherfucker); and had taken their money— their money! their blood !—and had refused to pay them back. Unacceptable behavior, the little putz !

So they did something they had never done before. They hired two men, for a price, and those two men took revenge for no financial expedient, but only by transmitting to knife, boot and cleaving fist the fury and helpless revenge of small men with small desires … and large insecurities.

They had left Stag Preston bleeding and unconscious on a lonely Connecticut road, with the debt still unpaid, but satisfaction extracted. Pound of flesh, an incision for every smart-aleck word he had called them.

They had managed to save Stag Preston’s life, but he would never sing again.

“I can barely … barely talk … Shelly…” The boy ended his relating of the facts. “Get them for me, Shelly. Tell the p-police, huh?”

Shelly stood up, then, and looked, as deeply as he could force himself to look, into the face of Stag Preston. Time rolled back, thoughts rolled back, the light and the sense and the immediacy of it rolled back. He was standing on a deep, empty plain, charcoal-gray and only a lance in his hands, with all the windmills gone. He was there by himself, and as the wind came up, swirling the sand and the bits of rotting leaves too tired to make fertilizer, he heard the voices of emptiness. Voices reciting the kaddish in Hebrew the way only his father could speak Hebrew, with the S’s sibilant and tiny bits of spittle flying; the goodbye that was mouselike and passing away as the bus left home going out to the big city; he heard the first voice of the first hipster he had ever known with the “Hey, now! Like I cert’ny don’t wanna put you on, fella, but if you wanna make it in this city you got to put somethin’ down … you got to say somethin’, man. That way everyone knows you are with it and on the scene. Do I make myself clear, I mean, do you understand?” and his own voices so many voices answering fading into one another, “Yeah, uh, yessir, uh, yeah, I under—I understand I dig , right? I dig !” And his voice changing, changing so subtly, he could never tell just when the change had come, except perhaps it was the first day he said a word he had previously only read on the walls of toilets, and said it without being self-conscious. That word with the first letter an F, the one he had always shied from, he now said without feeling chilly inside about it. Was that the moment?

Whenever it had been, now he said the word again, softly under his breath, hungry to know, just that one word that began with an F, and he felt chilly again … and he knew he was free.

It can happen that simply.

It can happen, just with a word that begins with an F and nothing more profound. It only takes something small.

“Goodbye, Stag,” he said. He smiled, a very thin smile, the grin of the razor; and then so resigned, half-sorry, because he could not help it; a smile that was just a pressing together of the lips. He did that, saying, “And goodbye, say goodbye to Luther for me. I heard him sing once, a long time ago in a hotel in Louisville, and I liked it very much. Goodbye.”

He left the hospital room, and found the doctor in charge of Stag’s case and asked him how much the bill would be. The doctor did not know, and tried to refer Shelly to the cashier’s office, but Shelly asked the doctor to estimate, so he did, and Shelly wrote a check for one hundred dollars over that amount and gave it to the doctor to pay the bill.

Not because it was Stag Preston in there.

Not because he had known his ordeal by fire with Stag in there.

Not because he had come out of this terrible thing a person whose life was worth living.

For none of those reasons, but simply because in there was someone he had once known, and a right guy doesn’t turn down a buddy when he’s in need.

Then he went out into the night, and went looking for his muscles. He had found his soul, now all he needed was to burn off the fat of guilt, and get some muscles.