Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

“Maybe they’re running a story about how it pays to go straight.”

Doyle tipped the bottle and sloshed liquor in his glass.

“It ain’t no skin off me,” he declared philosophically. “I’d go take pictures of an angleworm if they paid me for it.”

“Who would want pictures of any angleworm?”

“Lots of crazy people in the world,” said Doyle. “Might want anything. I don’t ask no questions. I don’t venture no opinions. People want pictures taken, I take them. They pay me for it, that is all right by me.”

Doyle drank appreciatively and refilled the glass.

“Benny,” he asked, “you ever hear of money growing on a tree?”

“You got it wrong,” said Benny. “Money grows on bushes.”

“If it grows on bushes, then it could grow on trees. A bush ain’t nothing but a little tree.”

“No, no,” protested Benny, somewhat alarmed. “Money don’t really grow on bushes. That is just a saying.”

The telephone rang and Benny went to answer it. “It’s for you,” he said.

“Now how would anyone think of looking for me here?” asked Doyle, astounded.

He picked up the bottle and shambled down the bar to where the phone was waiting.

“All right,” he told the transmitter. “You’re the one who called. Start talking.”

“This is Jake.”

“Don’t tell me. You got a job for me. You’ll pay me in a day or two. How many jobs do you think I do for you without being paid?”

“You do this job for me, Chuck, and I’ll pay you everything I owe you. Not only for this one, but for all the others, too. This is one that I need real bad and I need it fast. You see, this car went off the road and into this lake and the insurance company claims—”

“Where is the car now?”

“It’s still in the lake. They’ll be pulling it out in a day or two and I need the pictures—”

“You want me, maybe, to go down into the lake and take pictures underwater?”

“That’s exactly the situation. I know that it’s a tough one. But I’ll get the diving equipment and arrange everything. I hate to ask it of you, but you’re the only man I know…”

“I will not do it,” Doyle said firmly. “My health is too delicate. If I get wet I get pneumonia and if I get cold I have a couple teeth that begin to ache and I’m allergic to all kinds of weeds and more than likely this lake is filled with a lot of water lilies and other kinds of plants.”

“I’ll pay you double!” Jake yelled in desperation. “I’ll even pay you triple.”

“I know you,” said Doyle. “You won’t pay me nothing.”

He hung up the phone and shuffled back up the bar, dragging the bottle with him.

“Nerve of the guy!” he said, taking two drinks in rapid succession.

“It’s a hell of a way,” he said to Benny, “for a man to make a living.”

“All ways are,” said Benny philosophically.

“Look, Benny, there wasn’t nothing wrong with that bill I give you?”

“Should there been?”

“Naw, but that crack you made.”

“I always make them cracks. It goes with the job. The customers expect me to make them kind of cracks.”

He mopped at the bar, a purely reflex action, for the bar was dry and shiny.

“I always look the folding over good,” he said. “I’m as hep as any banker. I can spot a phoney fifty feet away. Smart guys want to pass some bad stuff, they figure that a bar is the place to do it. You got to be on your guard against it.”

“Catch much of it?”

Benny shook his head. “Once in a while. Not often. Fellow in here the other day says there is a lot of it popping up that can’t be spotted even by an expert. Says the government is going crazy over it. Says there is bills turning up with duplicate serial numbers. Shouldn’t be no two bills with the same serial number. When that happens, one of them is phoney. Fellow says they figure it’s the Russians.”

“The Russians?”

“Sure, the Russians flooding the country with phoney money that’s so good no one can tell the difference. If they turned loose enough of it, the fellow said, they could ruin the economy.”

“Well, now,” said Doyle in some relief, “I call that a dirty trick.”

“Them Russians,” said Benny, “is a dirty bunch.”

Doyle drank again, morosely, then handed the bottle back.

“I got to quit,” he announced. “I told Mabel I would drop around. She don’t like me to have a snootful.”

“I don’t know why Mabel puts up with you,” Benny told him. “There she is, working in that beanery where she meets all sorts of guys. Some of them is sober and hard working—”

“They ain’t got any soul,” said Doyle. “There ain’t a one of them truck drivers and mechanics that can tell a sunset from a scrambled egg.”

Benny paid him out his change.

“I notice,” he said, “that you make your soul pay off.”

“Why, sure,” Doyle told him. “That’s only common sense.”

He picked up his change and went out into the street.

Mabel was waiting for him, but that was not unusual. Something always happened and he was always late and she had become resigned to waiting.

She was waiting in a booth and he gave her a kiss and sat down across from her. The place was empty except for a new waitress who was tidying up a table at the other end of the room.

“Something funny happened to me today,” said Doyle.

“I hope,” said Mabel, simpering, “that it was something nice.”

“Now I don’t know,” Doyle told her. “It could be. It could, likewise, get a man in trouble.”

He dug into his watch pocket and took out the bill. He unfolded it and smoothed it out and laid it on the table.

“What you call that?” he asked.

“Why, Chuck, it’s a twenty-dollar bill!”

“Look at that thing on the corner of it.”

She did, with some puzzlement.

“Why, it’s a stem,” she cried. “Just like an apple stem. And it’s fastened to the bill.”

“It comes off a money tree,” said Doyle.

“There ain’t no such thing,” objected Mabel.

“Yes, there is,” Doyle told her, with mounting conviction. “J. Howard Metcalfe, he’s got one growing in his back yard. That’s how he gets all his money. I never could get it figured out how all these big moguls that live in them big houses and drive those block-long cars could manage to make all the money it would take to live the way they do. I bet you every one of them fellows has got money trees growing in their yards. And they’ve kept it a secret all this time, except today Metcalfe forgot to pick his money and a wind came along and blew it off the tree and over the wall and—”

“But even if there was such a thing as a money tree,” persisted Mabel, “they could never keep it secret. Someone would find it out. All of them have servants and the servants would know …”

“I got that all figured out,” said Doyle. “I been giving this thing a lot of thought and I know just how it works. Them servants in those big mansions aren’t just ordinary servants. They’re all old retainers. They been in the family for years and they’re loyal to the family. And you know why they’re loyal? It’s because they’re getting their cuts off the money trees. I bet you they salt it all away and when it comes time for them to retire they live the life of Riley. There wouldn’t nobody blab with a setup like that.

“And if all those big shots haven’t got something to hide, why has every one of them big houses got big walls or thick hedges around the back of them?”

“But they have garden parties,” Mabel protested. “I read about them in the society section all the time—”

“You ever been to one of them garden parties?”