Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

The Kemps turned their glances to the massive, leonine head of Colonel Jack Freeport, and a wash of fear marred the placid features of Ruth Kemp for an instant. Asa was just behind, as though the wave had found him an instant later.

Then they composed themselves, their fear of the big town strangers sublimated. “How do ya do, suh,” Ruth Kemp beamed a gingerbread smile at Freeport.

“Mrs. Kemp.” Freeport angled his head in that peculiarly charming and disarming manner only three kinds of people can manage: true aristocrats, well-bred cavaliers, and con artists.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Asa Kemp extended his gnarled and oil-stained hand. Freeport took it without hesitation. Shelly noted the stepping-down to the common man’s level with approval. His admiration and fear of Freeport’s amazing way with all types continued to grow as their association lengthened.

“Mr. Kemp, it’s more than a pleasure to meet you. Luther here has been telling us what a wonderful thing you did for him, getting him his start, and now that he’s on his way, we had to come along and say thank you, thank you very much.” Freeport piped his snake-charming tune while Shelly made a silent background accompaniment of nods and reassuring smiles.

Ruth Kemp’s face began to alter, subtly. Shelly watched.

There was something afoot here, and while her bumpkin husband might get laid out in his grave and have the dirt dumped in his face, smiling and unaware all the while, this woman knew the slickers were here to rob her. She may not have been Polish by descent, but there was the hard, lined look of the babushka-wearing, shopping bag-toting peasant about her. Suddenly. Her voice was no longer its rhythmic pleasured style. “What are you heah foah, Mr. Freeport?” she asked.

“Nothing, really, Mrs. Kemp.” Freeport tried to smooth out the surface of the discussion, sensing intuitively that a true light had begun to shine through his words.

Shelly interjected, “When we heard Luther sing and play, Mr. Kemp—” trying to draw Asa Kemp further into the dealings, rather than leaving them in the mouth and hands of the suddenly-too-competent Ruth, “—we felt he was destined for better things than Louis…”

“My husband manages Luther,” Ruth Kemp inserted flatly.

“Yes, we under stand that,” Freeport said, almost obsequiously, “and that’s why we’ve come to—”

“Are you taking Luther to New York, is that it?” Asa asked gently.

Shelly felt a pang. He neither acknowledged nor identified it. This was big gravy now, no time for sentiment.

“Well, we—” Shelly began.

“They’re taking him away, and they’re here to jew us out of our share!” There was a snap in Ruth Kemp’s words. At the word “jew” Shelly’s head came up with anger. He stared at the woman, knowing she had not heard his name, for it had not been given. Jew us, huh, lady … is that the word … well, you’ve never seen jewing till you’ve seen Morgenstern .

Now all the compassion he had felt for these unaffected people fled, and Shelly was ready to do battle, his eyes cleared of impairing, foolish sentimentality.

“Mr. Freeport,” Asa Kemp said gently, “you have to forgive my wife. Ruth gets upset sometimes.” He turned to the fiercely belligerent little woman and touched her shoulder. “Ruth, please. I’m sure Mr. Freeport is here to do the best for Luther. After all we can’t give him—”

“We gave him love, and we gave him our home to live in, and we found work for him, and singing jobs for him, and you’d just stand there, Asa Kemp, and let them take him away, prob’ly make a fortune with him, while we smile and say, ‘It’s all the best for little Luther.’ Well, you’ve done it too many times in the past, Asa, and it’s not going to happen this time.

“If they want to have Luther, they got to pay us for our share of his contract, or we don’t have to—”

Luther’s voice was as soft as a chloroformed rag: “We don’t have no contract, Miz Kemp.”

There was abrupt, smothering silence in the bicycle shop.

Everyone realized what the boy had done. He had left the bag open purposely, and the alley cat had crawled out to be smelled by everyone. Silence would have meant perhaps a little more dickering, and the remote possibility that Freeport and Morgenstern would cool on taking Luther with them—but it would have meant money to the Kemps. He had denied them their stranglehold, showed they were screaming into the wind, and had insured his position with Colonel Freeport.

It was the calculated move of a very smart operator.

It smelled bad, even to Shelly, so anxious to see this woman with her inadvertent prejudice stomped into the linoleum. It smelled very bad.

Ruth Kemp’s face disintegrated. She sobbed once, lightly, and turned away. What she had counted on as an ally had turned out to be the enemy who had destroyed her; she vanished behind the curtains.

Asa Kemp stared with empty eyes. He was suddenly a very old man.

“Well, I feel you people are entitled to something for all the time and good will you’ve spent on Luther,” Jack Freeport said. He reached into his inner jacket pocket for his checkbook.

Luther’s hand stopped him. “You don’t owe them nothin’,” he said flatly. His voice was very even, much lower than his singing voice, almost unreal. “They did what they wanted to, and they wouldn’t of, if they hadn’t wanted to. So I’m all squared with them. They had from me, an’ I had from them. That finishes it.” He turned to go.

Shelly and Freeport stood rooted for a long moment, then turned to follow. As the tinkle of the little brass bell over the door filled the bicycle shop, Asa Kemp’s voice stopped Luther in the doorway.

“Ah hope you’ll be happy, Luther.” There was no veiled meaning in his voice. He said what he meant.

The boy turned and walked out onto the street. Shelly was the last to leave; he looked around the shop. Something had happened here. Something important. What it was, he was not quite sure; but something dreadfully important had occurred, and he knew he would think about it.

When the plane climbed above the clouds, Shelly saw that Luther was staring intently out the window, across the wing and down into the massed cotton candy of the banks. He watched the boy for a while, then turned to snub out the cigarette in the armrest ashtray. He heard the vague murmur of words beside him, and turned back to the boy.

Luther’s hand was pressed against the Plexiglas. His face was close to the port.

He was saying, over and over, very softly, but very distinctly, “Goodbye, you sonofabitch poor, goodbye.”

Shelly wondered if something hadn’t happened to the air conditioning.

He was, all at once, quite cold.

Athena sprang full-blown from the forehead of Zeus, and it was later said that Stag Preston had sprung in a like manner from the forehead of Colonel Jack Freeport. It wasn’t exactly like that, but close enough not to matter. Stag Preston emerged full-grown from the cast-off eighteen-year-old shell of Luther Sellers.

Once in New York, Freeport began molding the raw material he had acquired into a marketable commodity. First came the contracts, many contracts, all sized and planed and pruned and riveted at the loopholes. Freeport owned thirty percent of the boy, Shelly owned thirty percent and—much to everyone’s surprise—Luther owned forty percent. How had it happened? Well:

Luther’s face at sight of the massed grayness that was Manhattan might easily have been done by Rockwell for the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post . It was tanned, upturned, astounded. Shelly had thought it impossible in an age when any large city—Louisville included—was a small surrogate for New York, but Luther goggled and boggled and swept his head around in wide circles of enjoyment.