Brad Ferguson: The World Next Door (A Short Story)

Jess told me today his sugar beet crop seems to be doing pretty well.

Time was when nobody could get anything at all to grow, much less something as tricky as sugar beets, so Jess deserves a lot of credit… and it’ll be awful nice to have real table sugar again, the white, grainy stuff you could buy at the store. (What was it called? Dominoes? Something like that.) We’re all sick of maple sugar, and the women say you can’t cook with it, except for ham — and we don’t have any pigs around here anymore. It surprised me a little last spring, when the town decided it wanted real sugar so bad, it allowed Jess to turn two acres over to it. Jess raises some of the best corn in the county, and we need all we can get — the eating kind and the drinking kind, both. But sugar is calories, too.

More dreams last night, the crazy kind a lot of people around here have been having. Didn’t sleep all that well myself. Doc says it’s more wish-fulfillment stuff than anything else, like right after the war. I don’t know; these seem different. I remember them better, for one thing. I hardly ever remember dreams at all; now I can remember whole bits of them — colors and smells, too. In fact, in last night’s dream I was watching color television, but I forget what was on.

A singer named Wanderin’ Jake came through today; he’s from the Albany area. I wrote his news on the chalkboard at Town Hall, and the mayor’s wife fed him well. The news: There were floods in Glens Falls last month, eleven people dead; there’s a new provisional state government in Rensselaer (that makes four that I know of, if that preacher in Buffalo hasn’t been assassinated yet); the governor in Rensselaer wants to send a state delegation to next year’s American Jubilee at Mount Thunder; and there’s been no word from an expedition that set out six months ago from Schenectady, bound for the atomic power plant at Indian Point to see if it can be made useful again. The party is presumed dead.

Wanderin’ Jake led a sing-along in the square just after sunset tonight, and we had a good time, even though there wasn’t much on hand to picnic with and won’t be until we get the crops in. With this climate, we can’t harvest until maybe late October, and only then if we’re lucky and there’s been no rain from the south.

Today I remembered that it was Domino sugar, singular. There was a jingle about how grandmothers and mothers know the best sugar is Domino, which is how I remembered it. It’s strange how those jingles come back to haunt you. Twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty wonderful Kings. Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat. I like Ike, you like Ike, everybody likes Ike. And you get a lot to like with a Marlboro.

The town got together tonight to discuss what, if anything, we’re going to do about the American Jubilee. No decision, of course — we’ve only talked it over once — but the thrust of tonight’s meeting was, the hell with Rensselaer and the governor there, just like we said the hell with the governors in Buffalo, Syracuse and Watertown. What if Rensselaer decides to tax us? We don’t have the crops to spare for taxes, and our town has been doing a good job of hiding away nice and quiet in these mountains.

I also asked if we were going to be doing something about getting me a new typewriter ribbon. The mayor says he wants typed minutes — he says they mean we’re still civilized and a going concern, and he’s not wrong about that — but I’ve been re-inking this same damn ribbon for more than ten years, and it’s got big holes in it, especially at the ends where the keys hammer away before the typewriter catches its breath and reverses the ribbon. I’m also running out of ink. I said I’d be willing to go with some people into a big town like Tupper Lake to see if there’s a few ribbons left in the stores there, but the mayor said he can’t spare the people; there’s bandits all over the place and it would be dangerous to go into a big, empty town like Tupper. He said maybe somebody could make a new ribbon for me. I said fine, but where are you going to get a long piece of cotton that’s not falling apart? If I’m going to be town scribe, I told him, I have got to have something to scribe with.

At least we don’t have to try and make paper, which I think would be impossible. The old school’s still got a lot of paper in it. The Hygiene Committee’s been doing a good job of keeping the building free of vermin, so the paper should last. If I don’t have a newspaper anymore, at least I have this journal and the Town Hall chalkboard, so I’m still a newspaperman.

Another meeting on that Jubilee. Half the town now seems to want to do something — send a representative, hold a picnic, whatever. Maybe they think Camelot’s going to come back. The other half agrees (with me) that the Jubilee is just an excuse to blow the President’s horn for him, and that if it hadn’t been for the war, the President would have been out of office in ’68, maybe even ’64. Giving him a toot for still being in office is an unnecessary reminder of the war, and maybe even a reward for having half-caused it.

I wonder who the ass-kisser was that came up with the idea for the Jubilee? Some general in charge of public relations? At least we know it wasn’t a congressman. If we’ve lost a lot, we at least got rid of the goddamn congressmen.

Jess, the fool, went out in a pouring rain today to check on his beet crop. The poor idiot. At least the winds were from the northwest, up Montreal way. It’s pretty clean up there; maybe Jess is okay, but we’ve got no way to check. Jess’ wife is frantic. I don’t blame her. I also wonder if we’ve lost that beet crop, not to mention his corn and everyone else’s crops, too. Damn, damn, damn.

Funny thing happened. I was talking to Dick LeClerc this morning, just passing the time at his trading post. Dick mentioned he hasn’t been sleeping well lately. He says he had a dream last night in which he’s in his store, but it’s not the trading post. It’s bigger and cleaner, for one thing, and there are electric lights and freezers and shopping carts, like in those city supermarkets from before the war. The thing he remembers best from the dream is his cash register. It’s a little white thing, he says, but it had funny numbers on it… green, glowing ones, made up of sharp angles. The thing hardly made any noise at all, except for some beeping whenever you hit a key — and you really didn’t hit keys, but numbers on a pad that felt like a thin sponge. Dick says when he woke up, he was real disappointed that he didn’t still have the cash register in front of him to play with. That’s just like Dick; I’ve seen him fool with a rat trap for hours, trying to make it work better. He’s always been one for a gadget.

Another weird dream. (I feel a little guilty about using up ribbon and ink recording all these dreams, but I think it’s important.) This time I wrote down what I could of it before I forgot. Couldn’t remember much, anyway. I was back at the paper and there were a lot of people around, people I’d known for years (but haven’t ever met, waking). There was all kinds of stuff around the office. Electric lights (no, fluorescent lights; they were different) and a few desks had typewriters better than this one, but most of the desks had little TVs on them — except the TVs didn’t show pictures, but words… hundreds of little green words on a dead black screen. Maybe Dick LeClerc planted this in my head with his tale of the cash register with the little green numbers on it. Crazy how your mind works.