Fredrick Brown - Night of the Jabberwock

"Who the devil said I wanted to sell it?" I asked him. "I just asked if you wanted to buy it."

Smiley looked baffled.

"Doc," he said, "I never know whether you're serious or not. Seriously, do you really want to sell out?"

I'd been wondering that. I said slowly, "I don't know, Smiley. Right now, I'd be damn tempted. I think I hate to quit mostly because before I do I'd like to get out one good issue. Just one good issue out of twenty-three years."

"If you sold it, what'd you do?"

"I guess, Smiley, I'd spend the rest of my life not editing a newspaper."

Smiley decided I was being funny again, and laughed.

The door opened and Al Grainger came in. I waved the bottle at him and he came down the bar to where I was standing, and Smiley got another glass and a chaser of water; Al always needs a chaser.

Al Grainger is just a young squirt — twenty-two or -three — but he's one of the few chess players in town and one of the even fewer people who understand my enthusiasm for Lewis Carroll. Besides that, he's by way of being a Mystery Man in Carmel City. Not that you have to be very mysterious to achieve that distinction.

He said, "Hi, Doc. When are we going to have another game of chess?"

"No time like the present, Al. Here and now?"

Smiley kept chessmen on hand for screwy customers like Al Grainger and Carl Trenholm and myself. He'd bring them out, always handling them as though he expected them to explode in his hands, whenever we asked for them.

Al shook his head. "Wish I had time. Got to go home and do some work."

I poured whisky in his glass and spilled a little trying to fill it to the brim. He shook his head slowly. "The White Knight is sliding down the poker," he said. "He balances very badly."

"I'm only in the second square," I told him. "But the next move will be a good one. I go to the fourth by train, remember."

"Don't keep it waiting, Doc. The smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff."

Smiley was looking from me of us to the other. "What the hell are you guys talking about?" he wanted to know.

There wasn't any use trying to explain. I leveled my finger at him. I said, "Crawling at your feet you may observe a bread-and-butter fly. Its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body a crust and its head is a lump of sugar. And it lives on weak tea with cream in it."

Al said, "Smiley, you're supposed to ask him what happens if it can't find any."

I said, "Then I say it would die of course and you say that must happen very often and I say it always happens."

Smiley looked at us again and shook his head slowly. He said, "You guys are really nuts." He walked down the bar to wash and wipe some glasses.

Al Grainger grinned at me. "What are your plans for tonight, Doc?" he asked. "I just might possibly be able to sneak in a game or two of chess later. You going to be home, and up?"

I nodded. "I was just working myself up to the idea of walking home, and when I get there I'm going to read. And have another drink or two. If you get there before midnight I'll still be sober enough to play. Sober enough to beat a young punk like you, anyway."

It was all right to say that last part because it was so obviously untrue. Al had been beating me two games out of three for the last year or so.

He chuckled, and quoted at me:

Well, since Carroll had the answer to that, so did I:

Al said, "Maybe you got something there, Doc. But let's quit alternating verses on that before you get to `Be off, or — I'll kick you down-stairs!' Because I got to be off anyway."

"One more drink?"

"I — think not, not till I'm through working. You can drink and think too. Hope I can do the same thing when I'm your age. I'll try my best to get to your place for some chess, but don't look for me unless I'm there by ten o'clock — half past at the latest. And thanks for the drink."

He went out and, through Smiley's window, I could see him getting into his shiny convertible. He blew the Klaxon and waved back at me as he pulled out from the curb.

I looked at myself in the mirror back of Smiley's bar and wondered how old Al Grainger thought I was. "Hope I can do the same thing when I'm your age," indeed. Sounded as though he thought I was eighty, at least. I'll be fifty-three my next birthday.

But I had to admit that I looked that old, and that my hair was turning white. I watched myself in the mirror and that whiteness scared me just a little. No, I wasn't old yet, but I was getting that way. And, much as I crab about it, I like living. I don't want to get old and I don't want to die. Especially as I can't look forward, as a good many of my fellow townsmen do, to an eternity of harp playing and picking bird-lice out of my wings. Nor, for that matter, an eternity of shoveling coal, although that would probably be the more likely of the two in my case.

Smiley came back. He jerked his finger at the door. "I don't like that guy, Doc," he said.

"Al? He's all right. A little wet behind the ears, maybe. You're just prejudiced because you don't know where his money comes from. Maybe he's got a printing press and makes it himself. Come to think of it, I've got a printing press. Maybe I should try that myself."

"Hell, it ain't that, Doc. It's not my business how a guy earns his money — or where he gets it if he don't earn it. It's the way he talks. You talk crazy, too, but — well, you do it in a nice way. When he says something to me I don't understand he says it in a way that makes me feel like a stupid bastard. Maybe I am one, but—"

I felt suddenly ashamed of all the things I'd ever said to Smiley that I knew he wouldn't understand.

I said, "It's not a matter of intelligence, Smiley. It's merely a matter of literary background. Have one drink with me, and then I'd better go."

I poured him a drink and — this time — a small one for myself. I was beginning to feel the effects, and I didn't want to get too drunk to give Al Grainger a good game of chess if he dropped in.

I said, for no reason at all, "You're a good guy, Smiley," and he laughed and said, "So are you, Doc. Literary background or not, you're a little crazy, but you're a good guy."

And then, because we were both embarrassed at having caught ourselves saying things like that, I found myself staring past Smiley at the calendar over the bar. It had the usual kind of picture one sees on barroom calendars — an almost too voluptuous naked woman — and it was imprinted by Beal Brothers Store.

It was just a bit of bother to keep my eyes focused on it, I noticed, although I hadn't had enough to drink to affect my mind at all. Right then, for instance, I was thinking of two things at one and the same time. Part of my brain, to my disgust, persisted in wondering if I could get Beal Brothers to start running a quarter page ad instead of an eighth page; I tried to squelch the thought by telling myself that I didn't care, tonight, whether anybody advertised in the Clarion at all, and that part of my brain went on to ask me why, damn it, if I felt that way about it, I didn't get out from under while I had the chance by selling the Clarion to Clyde Andrews. But the other part of my mind kept getting more and more annoyed by the picture on the calendar, and I said, "Smiley, you ought to take down that calendar. It's a lie. There aren't any women like that."

He turned around and looked at it. "Guess you're right, Doc; there aren't any women like that. But a guy can dream, can't he?"