Slow Sculpture (26 page)

I had a girl, I mean I meant to have her, who had a mother who had a cow who had a calf who didn’t like me, I mean the mother; and I knew I’d never so much as get up to the barricades, let alone cross them, unless I could make the mother glad at me. Well she sold this calf to a farmer over to West Fork who wouldn’t come for it and she wouldn’t bring it without two dollars extra, so there it stood, her wanting the money and him wanting the calf and her saying to come for it and him saying bring it and her saying for two dollars and him saying no, so I borrowed the truck.

I borrowed Uncle Fremmis’ truck, and you know I never did get that calf over to West Fork. I never got the calf. I didn’t get but halfway to her mother’s place and then turned that thing around somehow and got it back to Uncle Fremmis. You see, it had a gas pedal on it that was hinged at the back, down on the floor, and the pin had long ago worked out of the hinge. With a working hinge the pedal would push a wire which would feed the gas. With the pin out the pedal would layover sideways every time you put your foot down, and if you were in anything higher than low gear, the motor would stall. You’ve balanced a broom on the end of your finger—everybody has. Well that’s what you had to do with your foot on that gas pedal, except you don’t move your foot around with the precision of a finger. It might seem like a small thing the way I say it, but you just try it with a big V-8 up front and a 2-speed axle behind and a banging, swaying zombie (remember a zombie is the walking dead) of an obsolete panel truck all around you, and your head full of plans about doing the calf bit and collecting your just reward. I was like frustrated.

Uncle Fremmis just laughed a lot. But I began to realize what I guess I had known for a long time—Uncle Fremmis was not like other people. I mean he didn’t even have a lock on that truck, just a toggle switch. He just had a—

He had a way of making things work.

Don’t think that means he could fix things. It doesn’t mean that. He couldn’t fix anything but dinner. Well, here’s what I mean: he had an old radio in the house, a car radio he ran off a spare battery he would switch every now and then with the one in the truck. Sometimes
the radio would hang onto a station all right but something had got old in its guts, and it would drop down to a whisper and then when you turned it up so you could hear it, it would suddenly cut in so loud it would make you bite your tongue. Uncle Fremmis would run his hand over it, back and forth and up and back again, and then the hand would stop, and maybe move over a quarter inch, and then whammo, he’d fetch it a stinging blow with the heel of his hand, and it would be all right again for a month.

Which is also why he had so many friends, and a number of real bad enemies. Uncle Fremmis was just not quite like other people.

It was around this time—the girl with the mother and the cow and the calf and all that—that I started to get into trouble. Life was so simple and good then that I didn’t know how simple and good it was. I guess it began when I borrowed twenty dollars from Sam Pritchard and promised to pay him in two weeks and couldn’t. I borrowed thirty from old Joe at the barbershop so I could pay Sam, but I had to have a little for myself. When it came time to pay Joe, I went to Sam again. He was willing, but he only had twenty, so I was ten short. I needed a little for myself so I borrowed twenty from Hank Johanssen, and about then things began to get complicated. I somehow got Sam and Joe down to thirty apiece after a while, and carried it back and forth between them for about six weeks. Then I couldn’t pay Hank and he got real mad at me and told Joe to watch out for me, so the next time I asked Joe for twenty he just said no. I thought that over for a while and then had a bright idea, and I still think it was a good one: I said to Joe he should give Sam thirty dollars, and in two weeks Sam could give him thirty dollars, and I’d just be out of it and could concentrate on Hank. And he threw me out of the barbershop.

So then I thought of Uncle Fremmis, and I thought this: (a) there was no way of knowing how much Uncle Fremmis had, so maybe he would have fifty bucks; (b) he didn’t really need anything, so it would probably be all right if he didn’t get it back; and (c) he’d lent me his truck once, hadn’t he, so why wouldn’t he lend me money? I went straight up to the hogback and the pole-and-shake house made of one hundred percent repairs on a tar-paper lean-to from
thirty years ago, and it was there all right but he wasn’t, and neither was the I-NC. I asked around and found he’d left in it and nobody knew where, and he never came back at all that I know of. I remember feeling real mad at Uncle Fremmis, deserting me like that.

I was around town for a while after that but things got much too complicated. I never could figure out how it all happened, but it got so I couldn’t borrow anything anymore, and if I couldn’t borrow, how was I going to pay anyone? It was a lot simpler to go to the city and let them all work it out for themselves.

I did much better in the city, by which I mean in three years I owed about twelve thousand. I kept thinking about the guy who founded one of the most successful motel chains in the United States. When he was a teenager he made up his mind to owe a million by the time he was twenty-five. He made it and became a big wheel. I guess I just didn’t have his class. It was taking me a lot longer and the world seems to be kind of intolerant of guys who take long.

So I was at a party, brought there by a chick who thought some other people might think I was funny (because you can’t get the country out of the boy) and I zeroed in on a guy in a silk suit who had an office in this skyscraper. It was in the part of a skyscraper they call Towers, which is up on top where they have these thick carpets in all the hallways and you have to change elevators before you get there and the Tower elevator has a plug-ugly running it and you better have a reason. I had a reason but I also had Silk Suit’s card which I hoped he was still drunk enough to remember how drunk he was when he gave it to me, and I got into his office and hit him for half a G, and when he asked me what for, I couldn’t think of a good enough reason so he threw me out. Which was what was happening and why I was there when I ran into Uncle Fremmis. “What,” I said to him, “the hell are you doing here, Uncle Fremmis?” He was dressed in blue Lee work pants and shirt with keys on a belt clip. He wasn’t carrying a broom or wheeling a waxing machine but he might as well. But it really was Uncle Fremmis, all those miles and years away from the hogback, the valley full of morning mist, the crooked pond; most of all away from town where all those people used to like him so much. Need him.

“Don’t have time to tell you, son,” he said. “Come along and I’ll show you.”

He hurried me along the corridor. His hand on my arm was rock-hard and his movements quick and definite; the years hadn’t changed him one bit. I don’t mean the years since he had left town; I mean the years since I first toddled up to his kneecap and I looked up at that quick smile.

We passed doors with polite little names on them—most of them I’d seen in the papers at one time or another, you know, dollar-a-year men called in to advise the President, men’s names that have become trademarks like Eveready or Birdseye, and then the ones I hadn’t seen before doubtless because of my own ignorance or because they were so big and powerful nobody even knew they existed—they just ran things. One name I did know, though, and it stopped me cold and I said “Wow.” Semlar E. Warburg, M.D., A.P.A. “Wow. He’s the one who—”

“That’s the one,” said Uncle Fremmis. We were talking about the most famous psychiatrist in the whole entire world, a shrink who had written books and who had a “school” —that means a special way of doing his thing where whole colleges full of graduates go out and hang up shingles and do the same—or try to. Years back he would be called once in a while in law cases; he was far above that now, you might as well call in the Pope or J. Edgar. Uncle Fremmis unhooked his keys and turned those bright eyes on me: you could feel it when he did that, they like had points like a fence staple. “Now you listen to me, son,” he said, in the way that made you listen to him, “what you’re goin’ to see you keep to yourself, right? And if you have to talk, keep your voice down.”

I said I would, and he unlocked a narrow door next one down from Dr. Warburg’s. I thought it was a broom closet until we were inside and he reached past me and closed the door. It locked with a heavy click. It was dark as the inside of a coal miner’s lunch box. “Wait a bit until you can see,” he said quietly, and I did, and sure enough, pretty soon I could make out that we were in a dark narrow corridor with what felt like foam rubber underfoot. “Wait now,” he said when I was about to ask a question; he seemed to know it.

Suddenly there was a blaze of light a few feet ahead. It made me jump. Uncle Fremmis said, “As the cigar said to the cigarette, son, we got here just in the nicotine.” He nudged me painfully in the ribs and then said, “No foolin’, I cut that too fine. He likes me to be here a half hour ahead.” He waved me toward the light.

It looked like a square window of plate glass set in the wall.

Through it I saw a woman seated in an armless easy chair, half-turned toward me, and not three feet away. I couldn’t help myself, I ducked back out of the way before she could see me. Uncle Fremmis chuckled quietly. “Don’t let that worry you, son. That there’s one of those one-way mirrors. Long as it’s dark in here it looks like a mirror in there. She can’t see you.” Reassured, I looked again.

On a low table six feet away from the woman—a well-dressed woman with that harried look that people with money seem to carry like a club membership—was a black box with three knobs and a shiny reflector about the size of a salad plate standing on edge. In the center of the reflector was what looked like a radio tube. Adjusting the dials, with a note pad in his hand, was a middle-aged man.

“That’s him,” said Uncle Fremmis.

“That’s who?”

“The great man,” grinned Uncle Fremmis. “Doctor Warburg.”

I stared with disbelief. No goatee, no Austrian pipe, no funny European clothes. Just a man. “What’s that gadget?”

“A BWS. Brain-wave synchronizer. It flashes. You turn those knobs, it makes it flash however often you want it to, as bright as you want it to.”

“What’s it for?”

“The way he explains it to me, everybody’s brain has a certain kind of pulsebeat. The first time somebody comes here, he spends an hour or so finding out what it is. He writes that down, and sets the machine for it. After that, all he has to do is switch it on and it switches the person off.”

“You mean like hypnotizes them?”

“Not ‘like,’ son—it does hypnotize ’em, in thirty, forty seconds instead of the thirty, forty minutes of hocus-pocus-your-eyes-are-gettin’-heavy.”

“Then what?”

“Once they go under, Doc tells ’em they’re goin’ to dis-remember everything that happens until he says to wake up.”

“And what happens?”

“Me,” said Uncle Fremmis with some enjoyment. Before I could say anything to this, the man in the other room switched on the little machine. The tube lit up, not too bright, in a series of flashes of orange light. Each flash was probably no more than a hundredth of a second and the flashes came … I don’t know how frequently. Something slower than a steady light, something faster than a flicker. I became aware that Uncle Fremmis was watching me intently. “Son?”

“What?”

“It’s all right. Just wondered if it had got to you. Isn’t much chance that you and her, or any two people, have exactly the same frequency with the brain wave, but if you did, that thing would put you under ’fore you could say Boo. ’Course, you’re not gettin’ what she’s gettin’—the reflector’s givin’ it to her head on. Whup! There she goes.”

In the other room, we could see the woman’s eyelids droop.

They didn’t quite close. She sat relaxed with her hands on her lap, staring straight in front of her. Dr. Warburg passed his hand close to her eyes and she didn’t blink. He leaned close and appeared to be telling her something; at length she nodded slowly.

The doctor looked straight at us and beckoned.

“Back off out of the way,” said Uncle Frcmmis, “both when I go in there and when I come out. I don’t think the doc’d be too happy about somebody in here with me,” and he gave me a little shove back and turned a knob under the “window,” which was my first intimation that it was really a door. It opened and let him into the room with the lady and the doctor, and he closed it behind him. I got where I could see again.

The doctor waved a hand and Uncle Fremmis answered something; they both laughed. I could see this was a very familiar thing to them. The doctor made a “she’s-all-yours” kind of gesture and Uncle Fremmis stepped over to the lady. She didn’t seem to notice him at all—just kept staring at the little machine. Or maybe she
didn’t even see it any more. It made no difference when Uncle Fremmis passed between it and her.

He moved around her, looking at her, looking for something. Then he began to put his hands on her, or so close to her that he was almost touching; I couldn’t be sure. I thought she might hit him for it or draw back, or the doctor would stop him, but no. After a while—oh, a minute and a half—his hands settled around her head and face, and finally over her left ear. He moved his left fingertips back and forth an inch or so, and they settled on a certain spot and rested there, and then shifted just a little, little bit. Uncle Fremmis seemed to be concentrating real hard. When he found exactly what he seemed to be looking for, he raised his right hand up and back … the whole thing reminded me of something I’d seen before, but I didn’t know what … then he fetched her such a lick alongside of the head I bit my tongue, and with the pain came the memory of that old car radio he had in his shack that wouldn’t work right till he hit it a certain way in a certain place.

The lady’s head rocked a bit but otherwise she just sat there, looking at the blinking light. Uncle Fremmis made the O sign for “OK” with his thumb and forefinger, grinned at the doctor and came back to me. I got out of the way as he opened the little door and came back into the secret corridor and shut it again. The whole thing hadn’t taken more than two minutes.