Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Waldo swore. Then he laughed. “Let’m,” he said. “It’s their last morning.”

Jenkins woke up first. Waldo stirred to wakefulness as he heard the other dressing. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Jenkins said. “But it feels to me like gettin-up time… You hear them go just a while back? No? Don’t know how you could miss it. Singing got real loud — seemed like a whole lot of new voices joined in. Then they all got up and moved off. Wonder where they went… I’m going to have a look around outside.” He switched on his flash-light and left the house. In another minute Waldo joined him, knocking on Scott’s door as he passed.

The ashes of the fire still smoldered, making a dull red glow. It was very cold. Jenkins said, “Look here, Waldo — look.” Waldo followed the flash-light’s beam, said he didn’t see anything. “It’s the grass…it was green last night. It’s all dead and brown now. Look at it …”

Waldo shivered. “Makes no difference. We’ll get it green again. The land’s ours now.”

Scott joined them, his overcoat hugging his ears. “Why is it so cold?” he asked. “What’s happened to the clock? Who was tinkering with the clock? It’s past eight by the clock — it ought to be light by now. Where did all the Tickisalls go to? What’s happening? There’s something in the air — I don’t like the feel of it. I’m sorry I ever agreed to work with you, no matter what you paid me—”

Waldo said, roughly, nervously, “Shut up. Some damned Indyin sneaked in and must of fiddled with the clock. Hell with um. Govermint’s on our side now. Soons it’s daylight we’ll clear um all out of here f’r good.”

Shivering in the bitter cold, uneasy for reasons they only dimly perceived, the three white men huddled together alone in the dark by the dying fire, and waited for the sun to rise.

And waited…and waited…and waited…

This story has for thirty years had a double life. As a text it has been extensively anthologized and admired as one of Avram’s best and most beguiling. It has also entered urban folklore, told as an anecdote by people who have never read it or heard of Avram Davidson. Newspaper columnists like to recount its crazily plausible concept that safety pins are the pupae and coat hangers the larvae of bicycles. In some plagiarisms that turn up regularly in Creative Writing classes, paper clips (more familiar to young unmarried writers) become the pupal stage. A colleague once told me he had a genius among his students, giving a garbled version of this story as evidence. The student, it turned out, had not read Avram but admitted that he had taken the idea from the academic air. Avram himself did a brisk business in setting the record straight with letters to newspapers and magazines.

The story had its first inception when Avram once noticed two bicycles, male and female, seemingly abandoned by a path in a woody park, and heard, from behind nearby bushes, the bikes’ owners involved in mutual esteem. But he knew his Samuel Butler, whose Erewhon has in its chapters called “The Book of the Machines” the theory that the evolution of things occurs at a faster rate than that of organisms. Hence Avram’s title, from the Sherlock Holmes story “ The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” in which Holmes, feigning dementia, raves that any unchecked species is programmed by natural law to fill all available biological space. “I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem.”

Avram’s bike-shop owners Oscar the sensualist and Ferd the intellectual are an urban Don Giovanni and Samuel Butler. Their conjunction and the tension between them might have turned up in an H. G. Wells fantasy, and he might have tapped the demonic undertones as well as Avram has, but, though he is of all writers (except, perhaps, Kipling) the most likely to insert the marvellous into the everyday, he could not have managed Avram’s deft transformation of an American ordinariness into so sinister a fable of man and his losing battle with the machine.

WHEN THE MAN CAME in to the F & O Bike Shop, Oscar greeted him with a hearty “Hi, there!” Then, as he looked closer at the middle-aged visitor with the eyeglasses and business suit, his forehead creased and he began to snap his thick fingers.

“Oh, say, I know you,” he muttered. “Mr. — um — name’s on the tip of my tongue, doggone it …” Oscar was a barrel-chested fellow. He had orange hair.

“Why, sure you do,” the man said. There was a Lion’s emblem in his lapel. “Remember, you sold me a girl’s bicycle with gears, for my daughter? We got to talking about that red French racing bike your partner was working on—”

Oscar slapped his big hand down on the cash register. He raised his head and rolled his eyes up. “Mr. Whatney!” Mr. Whatney beamed. “Oh, sure . Gee, how could I forget? And we went across the street afterward and had a couple a beers. Well, how you been , Mr. Whatney? I guess the bike — it was an English model, wasn’t it? Yeah. It must of given satisfaction or you would of been back, huh?”

Mr. Whatney said the bicycle was fine, just fine. Then he said, “I understand there’s been a change, though. You’re all by yourself now. Your partner …”

Oscar looked down, pushed his lower lip out, nodded. “You heard, huh? Ee-up. I’m all by myself now. Over three months now.”

The partnership had come to an end three months ago, but it had been faltering long before them. Ferd liked books, long-playing records and high-level conversation, Oscar liked beer, bowling and women. Any women. Any time.

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman, and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”

“Why… I guess so.”

Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily. He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”

“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

And Oscar usually flared up. “Okay, then, next time you go and leave me stay here. See if I begrudge you a little fun.” But he knew, of course, that Ferd — tall, thin, pop-eyed Ferd — would never go. “Do you good,” Oscar said, slapping his sternum. “Put hair on your chest.”

Ferd muttered that he had all the hair on his chest that he needed. He would glance down covertly at his lower arms; they were thick with long black hair, though his upper arms were slick and white. It was already like that when he was in high school, and some of the others would laugh at him — call him “Ferdie the Birdie.” They knew it bothered him, but they did it anyway. How was it possible — he wondered then; he still did now — for people deliberately to hurt someone else who hadn’t hurt them? How was it possible?

He worried over other things. All the time.

“The Communists—” He shook his head over the newspaper. Oscar offered an advice about the Communists in two short words. Or it might be capital punishment. “Oh, what a terrible thing if an innocent man was to be executed,” Fred moaned. Oscar said that was the guy’s tough luck.