Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

I stumbled away. “It’s four o’clock,” he yelled after me. “They’ll be here at five. Don’t bother packing — you won’t need nothing!”

An hour like that, I never want to pass again. I hid here and hid there, till I was sweaty and dirty as never before. But I didn’t trust any place. By and by I got so thirsty that I had to come out and get to the pump. I could hear the old man muttering to himself.

His warning about not leaving the yard didn’t matter to me worth a poke of peas — he, well, what could he’ve done to me for disobeying? Sell me to the Goobers? He was going to do that anyway…he said. Of course, he’d said it before and he’d changed his mind before, too. I knew only one thing for sure, and that was that I couldn’t stand any more of it. Anything was likely to be better.

I’d never been to George Wolf’s place, but I knew where it was, and it wasn’t all that far away. About a mile or so off, on the old dirt road along the creek. It was an ugly old shack, never had a lick of paint on it, I guess, though I barely noted that any more than I did the broken windows or the roof falling in on one side and the weeds and underbrush choking up the front yard.

If George Wolf had been the original local acquaintance of the Goobers, then the Goobers couldn’t’ve lived too far away from his place. That was the way my thoughts were running — and I was running, too — right into the woods and down the hill and almost into the swamp that stopped me going further.

“Goobers!” I yelled. “Goobers! You old Goobers! You hear me?” I screamed.

There was nothing but the echo of my voice. It was darkish there, and clammy, and it smelled bad and I was hot and cold and sweaty and I took a big breath and went on yelling again.

“I don’t care if he sells me! I don’t care if you buy me! He isn’t going to go on scaring me like this! You want to buy me? You just come on and do it!”

Something was buzzing when I stopped again. Maybe just a dragon fly. Something moved in the gray underbrush. Maybe just the wind. I could see a hole in the ground not far off. Maybe it was just a plain, ordinary hole. But I didn’t wait to find out about any of this. I turned and ran and stumbled away.

Where? Why, where but back to the old man’s house, back to the only sort of home I knew. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen there. It had to.

I slowed down to a soft walk before I got to the yard. Probably he didn’t even know I’d gone, didn’t think I’d’ve dared to. And I could still hear him muttering to himself for a while. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

So did I. Stopped breathing, I mean. I guess. The bell in the old church was striking, and while I’d missed the start, there was no need for me to count the chimes. It only struck the hours. So it had to be five o’clock.

I darted a quick look at the vines hiding his chair from where I was standing. Chair, no, I couldn’t see it. But I could see him— see his head, anyway, for he’d gotten up, sort of and had poked his face forward. It had gone the most horrible ugly sort of putty color. His eyes had a glaze over them like cold fried eggs. I had to turn to see what he was looking at, though of course I knew.

There were the Goobers, coming up the back path.

They were under my height. There were three of them and they had dirty yellow-colored wrinkled old shells on, with even a few hairs. And dirt was clinging to them.

“Where Boy?” asked the first.

“Here Boy,” said the second.

“You sell Boy?” asked the third.

They walked up and squeezed my arms and felt my legs. They pulled on my nose and grabbed hold of my tongue. They spun me around and thumped me on the back. Then they quit.

“No,” said the first.

“No good,” said the second.

“No buy Boy,” said the third.

They turned around and walked off. I watched them go, not even turning around when I heard my grandfather keel over and thump the porch floor.

After that, of course, I made his life a living Hell until I ran off two years later at the age of twelve, and there wasn’t a damned thing the old bastard could do about it.

In 1964, having been an official SF writer for all of two years, I set off for Mexico to write my first novel. There I moved into the shell lately emptied by my sometime editor at F&SF, Avram Davidson. I had never met Avram, but having inherited his home, garden, landlady, and friends in Mexico City, I came to feel a peculiar intimacy, quite as though I were leading his life as much as my own, a sense that would be heightened when, later, I learned in a letter from Avram that a young woman who’d been his traveling companion in Belize had run off with Tony, a dashing young con man whom I’d earlier befriended at a beach on the Pacific coast, where he was selling solid gold watches to gas station attendants.

Like Avram, I fell in love with the raffishness of the Mexico that opened its doors and its cantinas to visiting gringos. Unlike Avram, I never became so well assimilated that I could make that love yield an homage as affectionate and closely observed as “The Power of Every Root.” Reading it again, now that my expatriate days are over (and Avram’s, too), I can smell all the spices and fetors of the marketplace he inventories so lovingly in this tale — and remember the heady freedoms of being a penny-a-word writer living high off the hog in a lush garden between two great volcanoes.

CARLOS RODRIGUEZ NUÑEZ, A police officer of the municipality of Santo Tomas, sat in the private waiting room of Dr. Olivera considering his situation. Perhaps he ought not to be there at all.

Not the private waiting room in particular: it was usually empty except during the week following major fiestas, when it was likely to be much occupied by the younger sons of prosperous families who had (the younger sons) visited the Federal Capital, touring the libraries and theaters and museums and other buildings of the national patrimony…but never, never las casitas . The reason, therefore, why they were here?

“A strain, Sir Doctor. Without doubt, nothing more than a strain …! Woe of me, Sir Doctor! What an enormous needle! Surely — just for a tiny, little strain?”

The physician would smile benignly, speak soothingly, continue charging his syringe with penicillin.

None of this was applicable to the police officer Carlos. In fact, it was not applicable to the younger sons of the non -prosperous families, who — for one thing — could only afford to visit the District Capital (or, at most, the State one) on fiestas; and — for another — did not take their subsequent difficulties to a physician: they took them to the curandero. Carlos now wondered if he should not do the same. No… No… The social status of a government employee, a civil servant, might be imperiled by visiting a native herbalist and wizard. Besides, the physician’s public waiting room was just that: public. Let him be seen there, word would get around, Don Juan Antonio would ask questions. Don Juan Antonio was jefe de policia, and it seemed to Carlos that his superior’s manner to him of late had lacked cordiality. But, then, it seemed to Carlos that everybody’s attitude toward him of late lacked cordiality. He could not understand why this should be. He was a very gentle policeman; he took only the customary little bites of graft; he did not hit drunks hard; he gave cigarettes to prisoners. Often.

Why, therefore, people should — suddenly, sometimes only for matters of a few seconds — change, become hideous, diabolical, when they looked at him, he could not know. Their faces would swell, become even more horrible than those of the masked moros or the judases in the fiesta parades had seemed to him as a child. The air would become hot; voices would croak and mutter ugly things; he had difficulty breathing, sometimes. And his head—