Damon Knight - Orbit 14

“I’ll take a small one,” Cy Slocum said. They transacted. Then Slocum took a great swig of the stuff. He began to throw rocks at a fencepost again, but now he was throwing at the fourth post down the line. Hitting it, too. And he was throwing like a young man.

“It works, doesn’t it,” Slocum said.

“Sure it works. Always does. And your hair is turning black again.”

“I know it. I can feel it.” He continued to throw. How that young fellow could throw those rocks!

The indomitable old dame had been driving an indomitable old Dusenberg. Both of them had been restored, polished, and groomed in amazing fashion, and both looked good. The old dame and her old car had received a special award at the Antique Auto Festival Southwestern Division show. And the award read: For class, which doesn’t have to be defined. There was no money attached to this award as there was to the first and second and third prizes. That didn’t matter. The old dame didn’t need it. She was pleased about the whole thing. She purred along in the sporty Dusie on a fine little country road, she remembering, and the snazzy little old car remembering.

Then they were passed by a long-legged, fast-ambling horse that pulled a flake-painted medicine wagon. Listen, nobody passed the old dame and the old Dusie like that! A horse and wagon sure did not.

She noticed, however, that while the hoofs of the stilt-legged striding horse struck sparky fire at every step, these hoofs did not quite touch the roadway. That horse was going along six inches in the air. (Don’t mention it, though: there would have to be explanations or denials.)

Then the horse was reined in ahead, and the old dame stopped the Dusie beside the wagon. An old, tall, raffish gentleman got out of the wagon and came over to her.

“Ma’am,” he asked, “aren’t you Flambeau La Flesche?”

“Sir,” she said, “I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord, a fancier of antiques and myself an antique.”

“No, no,” the man insisted. “You used to be in vaudeville. After that, you were a movie star.”

“And now I am an old character actress,” she said, “playing that old character, myself. You really remember?”

“Sure. Some of us used to dress up and take the train out of Boomer over to Tulsa whenever you played at the Orpheum. You are Flambeau La Flesche, are you not?”

“I was. The publicity man who coined that name for me is buried in a potter’s field somewhere, I hope. He couldn’t even spell Flesh. But now I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord. What are you chewing?”

“Royal Licorice Plug Tobacco.”

“Well, don’t be ungallant. Cut a plug for me too. I’m a country girl originally. You’re from Boomer, are you? That dump!”

“No. No. I said we used to take the train out of Boomer. But I’m really from Boomer Flats.”

“I apologize. They’re as different as dusk and darkness, are they not? And the elixir you are selling, is it also called Royal Licorice?”

“Yes. Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder. You catch on fast, Flambeau.”

“I always did,” she said, and she spat a beautifully straight stream of black Royal Licorice tobacco. The Licorice Man almost hesitated to offer her the benison of returning youth. She was one dame who had grown old gracefully. But he was a peddler deep in the long bones of him, so he didn’t hesitate very much.

“Flambeau, it goes at fifty cents a small jug, a dollar a large one,” he said with his easy finesse.

“All right, I’ll take a small one then.” She took a thoughtful drink of it. “What’s it made out of?”

“Catfish crops, mud-goose tears, Cimmaron river water, Royal Licorice chewing tobacco.”

“Mud-goose tears? Tell me, Licorice, what can make a mudgoose cry? What’s the one thing that can do it? This had better be good.”

The Licorice Man looked around furtively, though there was no one else within a mile. Long-faced drollery had taken over his phiz.

“It’s a little raunchy, Flambeau,” he said then. “I’d better whisper it to you.”

“I’ll use it,” she said a while later as she wiped the smeared remnants of laughter from her face. “Raunchy, I’ll say. But lots of times we used words in my skits and movies, and raunchy tales go well with me.” She took another thoughtful drink of the elixir.

“Yes, I do feel something,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I could come back that way, all the way? I’d give them all fits if I had my girlhood again. And never was the competition shabbier. The little babes these days, they have so little talent that all they can do is peel it down to the buff. Me, I had class, so I never had to do that. I always kept my garters on. They called me the Golden Garter Girl.”

“I remember, Flambeau.”

“Oh, it’s working all right. I can feel it. Say, Licorice, pour a big jug of that into Dusie’s tank. He’d like to be young again too, not merely restored.”

The Licorice Man poured a big jug of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder into the tank of the snazzy little car. Flambeau paid him. Then she took off in the Dusie, leaving the smell of burning rubber and returning youth to drift above that fine little country road.

Tell all the boys that Flambeau La Flesche is back.

Did you tell them all?

Sure, tell those in the graveyard too. Them especially. It will give them a lift, and those who have proper clothes will come to see her.

Ex-President Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson was fishing along Exendine Creek on the Ex-Presidential Ranch in Kaw County, Oklahoma. He was himself of a dead-fish complexion now, and so shrunken that the great cowboy hat and the sharkskin boots fitted him ill.

The Exendine Creek was only four feet wide at this place, but old Ex had cast his line far beyond its banks and had tangled it in some sumac bushes sixty feet on the other side of the creek.

Old Ex believed that the sumac bushes were Republican congressmen out to thwart him. He cursed them, and he chopped off their appropriations. Some days this would intimidate the bushes and cause them to release the line, but today they held it fast.

A man with an animal and wagon came bumping along.

“Are you registered, friend, and will you vote right?” Ex asked the man in what had once been a great voice.

“I am and I will,” said the man. He was the Licorice Man: no use keeping it a secret from you; you’d find out anyhow. And the Licorice Man was untangling Ex’s line from the bushes.

“And the donkey, is he registered?” Ex asked.

“He’s a horse and not a donkey,” the Licorice Man said. “He is registered, but how he votes is his own secret. Reel in, man.”

“I know that a donkey will always vote my way,” Ex said, reeling in his line, “but I never trusted a horse. What did you do with the fish that was on my hook?”

“Don’t you one-up me, Hiram Andrew Clayborne,” the Licorice Man said. “How would you like to be restored to your youth and to your faculties? Then you could run again. You have just nine days to file for the first primary.”

“There’s no restoring needed for me,” old Ex said. “My wits are as they always were.”

“True, true,” said the Licorice Man. “Sad but true.”

“And I still have my same fund of fine stories, and I still have my great name. I always say that I am the only Apostle who ever became President. There was an earlier President Andrew Johnson, it’s true, but he wasn’t the apostolic type. But I have the Andrew Johnson in my name somewhere. Andrew, as you know, was the brother of Peter. Boy, look up chapter and verse for me quickly! I wonder where that boy has gone. He’s never around anymore. And Christ once said ‘Peter, Son of John,’ so that was his name, ‘Son of John’—‘Johnson,’ get it? And I, as Peter’s brother, am Andrew Johnson, the only Apostle who ever became President.”