Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Mr. Whatney nodded. He glanced around the shop. “I see they’re still making drop-frame bikes,” he said, “though, with so many women wearing slacks, I wonder they bother.”

Oscar said, “Well, I dunno. I kinda like it that way. Ever stop to think that bicycles are like people? I mean, of all the machines in the world, only bikes come male and female.”

Mr. Whatney gave a little giggle, said that was right, he had never thought of it like that before. Then Oscar asked if Mr. Whatney had anything in particular in mind — not that he wasn’t always welcome.

“Well, I wanted to look over what you’ve got. My boy’s birthday is coming up—”

Oscar nodded sagely. “Now here’s a job,” he said, “which you can’t get it in any other place but here. Specialty of the house. Combines the best features of the French racer and the American standard, but it’s made right here, and it comes in three models — Junior, Intermediate and Regular. Beautiful, ain’t it?”

Mr. Whatney observed that, say, that might be just the ticket. “By the way,” he asked, “what’s become of the French racer, the red one, used to be here?”

Oscar’s face twitched. Then it grew bland and innocent and he leaned over and nudged his customer. “Oh, that one. Old Frenchy? Why, I put him out to stud!”

And they laughed and they laughed, and after they told a few more stories they concluded the sale, and they had a few beers and they laughed some more. And then they said what a shame it was about Ferd, poor old Ferd, who had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.

Attempting to write even a thousand words about a few thousand words is a spooky prospect. To go on at length about Davidson’s concision rapidly starts to resemble a Bob & Ray routine:

BOB: So these are the Niagara Falls?

RAY: Or, as some call them, the Falls of Niagara.

BOB: And this is all water passing over them?

RAY: Primarily water, yes, though the occasional barrel enters the flow.

At some point in the perusal of this collection, the alert reader must twig to Davidson’s apparently inexhaustible knowledge, worn as lightly as Astaire’s black patent pumps. Volumes could be written about the twists and burrowings of Davidson’s historical adventuring, and when they are, nobody will believe them.

But the knowledge isn’t the important point, though it is the fletching on the clothyard shaft leading up to the point, which is what gets done with that knowledge. With the inevitability of glaciers, one comes to understand that the demise of the wooden advertising figure led to the billboard and the bumper sticker and the radio jingle, and thence to the television commercial , which (if that were not disaster enough) gave us the little triphammers inside the aching head, created by the same man who advertised Eisenhower into the White House, bringing us the McCarthy hearings, the Interstate Highway System, and, uh, what’s his name, Ike’s vice president. Against that, the Burma-Shave signs were just straws in a Great Plains twister.

Perhaps the most direct way to “say something” about Davidson’s achievement is to look at what he didn’t do — what he didn’t, but others did.

Look for a moment at brother-in-law Walt. Forgive him, for that long at least, for being a little too much the postwar hustler-up-the-block, a man with dreams just as wide as the fenders of a used Studebaker, a Bilko demobilized before he could make sergeant. Recognize that there but for the grace of the woodcarver’s chisel goes the story’s hero.

Not could have been, was, in the consanguinity of the fiction magazines: you would not have had to turn many pages before finding Walters who, having earned the disfavor of their fellows by toiling alone on the garage time machine, take the blueprints of the two-stroke engine or the Zippo lighter or the Real Estate Investment Trust into the dark past, and retire in the fashion of an Eastern Potentate, or at least an August Belmont.

To be sure, these Walts Protagonistes would never walk away from their sisters (however often those sisters told them to stop playing with that warsurplus junk out back and take the job at Pump ‘n’ Wash).

Which points us down another turn in the crosstime subway, a tale-of-the-tale as might equally well have suited an editor’s needs: the version in which the Wooden Indian Society, far from being a crowd of off-center joiners bent on fixing history’s error with a Pure Vision and a case of forty-percent dynamite (not that we know anyone like that), but reasonable men driven forward by the good of humanity — as they see themselves in the story-that-is.

You can probably plot this one yourself. Alfred Nobel’s invention certainly figures, as this would come from the school of No Climax Without a Corresponding Explosion. There would be a thrilling chase through gaslit Brooklyn, pursued by such and sundry, with Mr. Rat Nolan involved (for indeed there is always he) ostensibly for the cause of Fenian liberation but with his true allegiance in doubt till the end. All fuses would burn to Demuth’s, and the vanishment of Dusty Benedict in the apocalyptic kaboom that stands in so eloquently for plot resolution. A wooden fly-figure of Dusty, chisel in its lowered hand, is erected on the site. If the author is in an ironical mood, Dusty watches the unveiling from a nearby alcove, and goes off whistling. Possibly a lady, not necessarily named Aura Lee, accompanies him, twirling a parasol. Did I forget to mention that the class system has exploded as well, without any naughty Bolshevism being required? Well, one does forget.

A good idea, that. Forget the other versions, for those writers are the waves of the sea. While we have only so much Davidson and no more, like the coast of Monterey, it is there in its length and breadth, let the waves do as they will.

DOWN FROM THE STREETS (morning air already gray and bitter with motor exhaust and industrial fumes), into the jampacked subway he passed. His clothes, though mildly incongruous in that unhappy throng, brought him no special measure of attention. Weary, wary, cynical, grim, displeasured indifference lying on each countenance like an oily film, the folk stared not so much at him as over and through him.

He fought to keep his feet, struggled to maintain his balance. This, merely the antechamber to everyday existence, was difficult enough. Add to it the need to be constantly on the lookout for the Wooden Indian Society and he felt he had reason to be tense and jumpy. “Benedict, a leading modern free-form sculptor in wood—” Ha!

Twice he had been aware that they had tailed him as far as Times Square. Twice he had lost them. A third time—

The man in the faintly funny-looking clothes (his name was Don Benedict, but some called him “Dusty”) paused for a minute under one of the red-lettered wooden signs, took a quick look at the paper in his hand (more, it almost seemed, to reassure himself that it was still there than to scan the contents), did an about-face and started back the way he had come. By and by he came to a stairway which he ascended for five steps, then turned around and went down. At the bottom—

At the bottom of it all was Elwell, and Elwell was dead: not from the cough which had been tearing him apart for years, but dead of a slippery little patch of ice no bigger than a man’s hand. Elwell, dying, with blood in the corners of his mouth, holding Don’s hand in a grip which the younger man could feel the heat going out of.