Philip Dick: Time Out of Joint

From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department. In the almost empty bin he began dropping the new spuds, inspecting every tenth one for split skin and rot. One big spud dropped to the floor and he bent to pick it up; as he did so he saw past the check-out stands, the registers and displays of cigars and candy bars, through the wide glass doors and on to the street. A few pedestrians walked along the sidewalk, and along the street itself he caught the flash of sunlight from the fender of a Volkswagen as it left the store's parking lot.

"Was that my wife?" he asked Liz, the formidable Texas girl who was the checker on duty.

"Not that I know of," Liz said, ringing up two cartons of milk and a package of ground lean beef. The elderly customer at the check-out stand reached into his coat pocket for his wallet.

"I'm expecting her to drop by," Vic said. "Let me know when she does." Margo was supposed to take Sammy, their ten-year-old, to the dentist for x-rays. Since this was April -- income tax time -- the savings account was unusually low, and he dreaded the results of the x-rays.

Unable to endure the waiting, he walked over to the pay phone by the canned-soup shelf, dropped a dime in, dialed.

"Hello," Margo's voice came.

"Did you take him down?"

Margo said hectically, "I had to phone Dr. Miles and postpone it. About lunchtime I remembered that this is the day Anne Rubenstein and I have to take that petition over to the Board of Health; it has to be filed with them today, because the contracts are being let now, according to what we hear."

"What petition?" he said.

"To force the city to clear away those three empty lots of old house foundations," Margo said. "Where the kids play after school. It's a hazard. There's rusty wire and broken concrete slabs and--"

"Couldn't you have mailed it?" he broke in. But secretly he was relieved. Sammy's teeth wouldn't fall out before next month; there was no urgency about taking him. "How long will you be there? Does that mean I don't get a ride home?"

"I just don't know," Margo said. "Listen, dear; there's a whole flock of ladies in the living room -- we're figuring out last-minute items we want to bring up when we present the petition. If I can't drive you home I'll phone you at five or so. Okay?"

After he had hung up he wandered over to the check-out stand. No customers were in need of being checked, and Liz had lit a cigarette for a few moments. She smiled at him sympathetically, a lantern-like effect. "How's your little boy?" she asked.

"Okay," he said. "Probably relieved he's not going."

"I have the sweetest little old dentist I go to," Liz chirruped. "Must be nearly a hundred years old. He don't hurt me a bit; he just scrapes away and it's done." Holding aside her lip with her red-enameled thumbnail, she showed him a gold inlay in one of her upper molars. A breath of cigarette smoke and cinnamon whisked around him as he leaned to see. "See?" she said. "Big as all get out, and it didn't hurt! No, it never did!" I wonder what Margo would say, he wondered. If she walked in here through the magic-eye glass door that swings open when you approach it and saw me gazing into Liz's mouth. Caught in some fashionable new eroticism not yet recorded in the Kinsey reports.

The store had during the afternoon become almost deserted. Usually a flow of customers passed through the check-out stands, but not today. The recession, Vic decided. Five million unemployed as of February of this year. It's getting at our business. Going to the front doors he stood watching the sidewalk traffic. No doubt about it. Fewer people than usual. All home counting their savings.

"We're in for a bad business year," he said to Liz.

"Oh what do you care?" Liz said. "You don't own the store; you just work here, like the rest of us. Means not so much work." A woman customer had begun unloading items of food onto the counter; Liz rang them up, still talking over her shoulder to Vic. "Anyhow I don't think there's going to be any depression; that's just Democratic talk. I'm so tired of those old Democrats trying to make out like the economy's going to bust down or something."

"Aren't you a Democrat?" he asked. "From the South?"

"Not any more. Not since I moved up here. This is a Republican state, so I'm a Republican." The cash register clattered and clanged and the cash drawer flew open. Liz packed the groceries into a paper bag.

Across the street from the store the sign of the American Diner Café started him thinking about afternoon coffee. Maybe this was the best time. To Liz he said, "I'll be back in ten or so minutes. You think you can hold the fort alone?"

"Oh sholly," Liz said merrily, her hands making change. "You go ahead on, so I can get out later and do some shopping I have to do. Go on, now."

Hands in his pockets, he left the store, halting at the curb to seek out a break in the traffic. He never went down to the crosswalk; he always crossed in the middle of the block, directly to the café, even if he had to wait at the curb minute after minute. A point of honor was involved, an element of manliness.

In the booth at the café he sat before his cup of coffee, stirring idly.

"Slow day," Jack Barnes the shoe salesman from Samuel's Men's Apparel said, bringing over his cup of coffee to join him. As always, Jack had a wilted look, as if he had steamed and baked all day in his nylon shirt and slacks. "Must be the weather," he said. "A few nice spring days and everybody starts buying tennis rackets and camp stoves."

In Vic's pocket was the most recent brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. He and Margo had joined several years ago, at the time they had put a down payment on a house and moved into the kind of neighborhood that set great stock by such things. Producing the brochure he spread it flat on the table, swiveling it so Jack could read it. The shoe salesman expressed no interest.

"Join a book club," Vic said. "Improve your mind."

"I read books," Jack said.

"Yeah. Those paperback books you get at Becker's Drugs." Jack said, "It's science this country needs, not novels. You know darn well that those book clubs peddle those sex novels about small towns in which sex crimes are committed, and all the dirt comes to the surface. I don't call that helping American science."

"The Book-of-the-Month Club also distributed Toynbee's _History_," Vic said. "You could stand reading that." He had got that as a dividend; although he hadn't quite finished it he recognized that it was a major literary and historical work, worth having in his library. "Anyhow," he said, "bad as some books are, they're not as bad as those teen-age sex elms, those drag-race films that James Dean and that bunch do."

His lips moving, Jack read the title of the current Book-of-the-Month selection "A historical novel," he said. "About the South. Civil War times. They always push that stuff. Don't those old ladies who belong to the club get tired of reading that over and over again?"

As yet, Vic hadn't had a chance to inspect the brochure. "I don't always get what they have," he explained. The current book was called _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. By an author he had never heard of: Harriet Beecher Stowe. The brochure praised the book as a daring exposé of the slave trade in pre-Civil War Kentucky. An honest document of the sordid, outrageous practices committed against hapless Negro girls.

"Wow," Jack said. "Hey, maybe I'd like that."

"You can't tell anything by the blurb," Vic said. "Every book that's written these days is advertised like that."

"True," Jack said. "There's sure no principles left in the world any more. You look back to before World War Two, and compare it to now. What a difference. There wasn't this dishonesty and delinquency and smut and dope that's going around. Kids smashing up cars, these freeways and hydrogen bombs... and prices going up. Like the price you grocery guys charge for coffee. It's terrible. Who's getting the loot?"