Clifford Simak: Out of Their Minds

I shut-off the motor and got out, standing a moment, listening to the pauses between the rolls of thunder, for any sound that might denote some great beast lurking in the dark. There was nothing to be heard.

I started walking up the road, not too brave about it— downright scared, in fact—ready to break and run at the slightest movement in the dark, or the smallest sound.

Up ahead of me I saw the house I had spotted. The light still shone out of the single window, but the rest of the house was dark. A lightning flash lit the land with a bright blue glow and I could see that the house was small and tumbledown, crouched close against the land, with a crazy chimney that leaned against the wind. Up the hill beyond the house a ramshackle barn staggered drunkenly against a haystack that stood at one corner of it and beyond the barn was a peeled-pole corral that shone like a curious arrangement of bare and polished bones in the lightning flash. A large woodpile loomed at the back of the house and alongside it was an ancient car with its rear end held up by a plank placed across a couple of sawhorses.

In that single lightning flash, I recognized the place. Not this specific place, of course, but the kind of place it was. For when I had been a boy in Pilot Knob, there had been places such as this—hardscrabble acreages (one would hesitate to call them farms) where hopeless families broke their hearts, year after endless year, to keep food upon the tables and clothes upon their bodies. Such places had been in this country twenty years ago and they still were here and times had not really changed. No matter what might happen in the world outside, the people here, I realized, still lived much as they had always lived.

With the way lighted by the lightning flashes, I followed the path up toward the lighted window and finally stood before a door. I mounted the rickety stairs up to the stoop and knocked.

I didn't have to wait. The door came open almost instantly. It was as if the people inside had been waiting for me, had, indeed, been expecting me.

The man who opened the door was small and grizzly. He wore a hat and pipe. The teeth that clenched the pipe were yellow; the eyes that looked out from under the drooping brim of the big black hat were a washed out blue.

"Well, come on in," he yelled at me. "Don't stay gawking there. The storm is about to break and it will wet your hide."

I stepped in and he closed the door behind me. I was in a kitchen. A large woman, with her body proportionately larger than her head, dressed in a shapeless Mother Hub-bard sort of garment and with a piece of cloth tied about her head, stood in front of the wood-burning stove on top of which supper was in the process of being cooked. A rickety table covered by a piece of green oilcloth was set for the meal and the light in the room came from a kerosene lantern set in the center of the table.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," I said, "but I'm stuck just down the road. And I would guess that I am lost as well."

"These here be tangly roads," said the man, "for one who ain't used to them. They wind about a lot and some of them end up going nowhere. Where might you be headed, stranger?"

"Pilot Knob," I said.

" He nodded sagely. "You took the wrong turning just down the road a piece."

"I was wondering," I said, "if you could hitch up a horse and pull me back onto the-road. The car skidded and the back wheels went into the ditch. I'll be more than willing to pay you for your trouble."

"Here, stranger, sit," he said, pulling a chair out from the table. "We're just about to eat and there's enough for three and we'd be proud to have you join us."

"But the car," I reminded him. "I'm in something of a hurry."

He shook his head. "Can't be done. Not tonight, at least. The horses aren't in the barn. They're out in the pasture somewhere, probably up atop the hill. Couldn't pay me enough, no one could, to go out hunting them with it about to rain and the rattlesnakes."

"But rattlesnakes," I said, somewhat foolishly and to no great point, "aren't out at night."

"Let me tell you, son," he said, "no one ever rightly knows about a rattlesnake."

"I forgot myself," I said. "My name is Horton Smith." I was getting tired of his calling me «son» and "stranger."

The woman turned from the stove, a big fork held in her hand.

"Smith," she said, excited. "Why, that is our name, too! Could it be that you are kin?"

"No, Maw," said the man. "There is a passel of Smiths. Just because a' man's named Smith don't signify that he'd be related to us. But," he said, "it seems to me that this fortunate similarity of names might call for a snort."

He reached down under the table and brought up a gallon jug. From a shelf behind him he picked up a couple of glasses.

"You look to me like a city feller," he said, "but I hear that some of them are fairly good at drinking. Now this stuff ain't what you'd rightly call first class likker, but it is top grade corn squeezings and it is guaranteed not to poison you. Don't take too big a slug to start with or it might strangle you. But along about the third gulp that you take you don't need to worry none, because by that time you will be acclimated to it. I tell you there ain't nothing cozier on a night like this than to cuddle up alongside a jug of moonshine. I got it off Old Joe Hopkins. He makes it on an island in the river…"

He had hoisted the jug to pour, but now a startled look ran across his face and he looked sharply at me. "Say, you ain't a revenooer, are you?"

"No," I said, "I'm not a revenuer." He resumed the pouring operation. "You never can be sure," he said. "They come pussyfooting around and there ain't no way to know them. Used to be a man could spot them a country mile, but now they're getting tricky. They fix themselves up to look like almost anybody."

He shoved one of the glasses across the table at me. "Mr. Smith," he said, "I am downright sorry about not being able to oblige you. Not right away, at least. Not tonight, not with this storm coming up. Come morning, I'll be purely tickled to hitch up a horse and drag your car out of there."

"But the car is across the road. It is blocking traffic." "Mister," said the woman standing at the stove, "that needn't bother you. That road don't go nowhere. Just up the hill a piece to an old abandoned house and then it peters out."

"They do say," said the man, "that the house is haunted."

"Perhaps you have a phone. I could call…" "We ain't got a phone," the woman said. "What a man wants with a phone," said the man, "is more than I can cipher. Jingling all the time. People calling up just to jaw at you. Never gives a person a purely peaceful moment."

"Phones cost money," said the woman. "I suppose I could walk down the road," I said. "There was a farm down there. They might be able…"

The man wagged his head. "Go ahead and grab that glass," he said, "and put a snort inside you. Worth your life to go walking down that road. I ain't one to say much against a neighbor, but no one should be allowed to keep a pack of vicious dogs. They guard the place, of course, and they keep the varmints off, but a man's life ain't worth a hoot should he stumble on them in the dark."

I picked up the glass and sampled the liquor and it was pretty bad. But it did light a little fire down inside of me.

"You don't want to go nowhere," said the woman. "It is about to rain."

I took another drink and it didn't taste half bad. It tasted better than the first one had and it stoked up the fire.

"You'd best sit down, Mr. Smith," the woman said. "I'm about to take up the victuals. Paw, you hand him down a plate and cup…" "But I…"

"Shucks," said the man, "you won't refuse to eat with us, now will you? The old woman has cooked up a mess of hog jowls with some greens and they'll be licking good. There ain't no one in the world can cook up better hog jowls. I been sitting here fair drooling for them to be done." He looked at me speculatively. "I'll bet you never yet have sunk a tooth into real hog jowls. They ain't city food."