The Avram Davidson Treasury (62 page)

This
was why Abelardo had seemed familiar from the start, and if Abelardo was not Eliseo’s brother than he was certainly his nephew or his cousin…in the spirit, anyway.

Out of a polite desire that Fred Hopkins not be bored while waiting to be served, Abelardo discussed various things with him—that is, for the most part, Abelardo discussed. Fred listened. La Bunne Burger was very busy.

“Now, the real weakness of the Jesuits in Paraguay,” Abelardo explained.

“Now, in western South America,” said Abelardo, “North American corporations are disliked less for their vices than for their virtues. Bribery, favoritism, we can understand these things, we live with them. But an absolute insistence that one must arrive in one’s office day after day at one invariable hour and that frequent prolonged telephone conversations from one’s office to one’s home and family is unfavored, this is against our conception of personal and domestic usement,” Abelardo explained.

He assured Fred Hopkins that the Regent Isabella’s greatest error, “though she made several,” was in having married a Frenchman. “The Frankish temperament is not the Latin temperament,” Abelardo declared.

Fred’s food eventually arrived; Abelardo informed him that although individual enterprise and planned economy were all very well in their own ways, “one ignores the law of supply and demand at peril. I have been often in businesses, so I know, you see.” Said Abelardo.

Abelardo did not indeed wear eyeglasses with one dark or opaque lens, but one of his eyes was artificial. He had gold in his smile—that is, in his teeth—and his white coverall was much washed but never much ironed. By and by, with polite words and thanks for the pleasure of Fred’s company, Abelardo vanished into the kitchen; when Fred strolled up for his bill, he was informed it had already been paid. This rather surprised Fred. So did the fact, conveyed to him by the clock, that the noon rush was over. Had
been
over.

“Abelardo seems like—Abelardo is a very nice guy.”

Rudolfo’s face, hands, and body made brief but persuasive signal that it went without saying that Abelardo was indeed a very nice guy. “But I don’t know how he stay in business,” said Rudolfo, picking up a pile of dishes and walking them off to the kitchen.

Fred had no reason to remain to discuss this, as it was an unknown to him how anybody stayed in business. Merely he was well aware how week after week the price of paints and brushes and canvases went up, up, up, while the price of his artwork stayed the same, same, same. Well, his agent, though wrong, was right. No one to blame but himself; he could have stayed in advertising, he might be an account executive by now. Or—Walking along The Street, he felt a wry smile accompany memory of another of Abelardo’s comments: “Advertisage is like courtship, always involve some measure of deceit.”

This made him quickstep a bit back to the studio to get in some more painting, for—he felt—tonight might be a good one for what one might call courtship; “exploitation,” some would doubtless call it: though why? if ladies (“women!”) did not like to come back to his loft studio and see his painting, why did they do so? And if they did not genuinely desire to remain for a while of varying length, who could make them? Did any one of them really desire to admire his art, was there no pretense on the part of any of them? Why was
he
not the exploited one? You women are all alike, you only have one thing on your mind, all you think of is your own pleasure… Oh well. Hell. Back to work.—It was true that you could not sleep with an old building, but then they never argued with you, either. And as for “some measure of deceit,” boy did that work both ways! Two weeks before, he’d come upon a harmonious and almost untouched, though tiny, commercial block in an area in between the factories and the farms, as yet undestroyed by the people curiously called “developers”; he’d taken lots of color snaps of it from all angles, and he wanted to do at least two large paintings, maybe two small ones as well. The date, 1895, was up there in front. The front was false, but in the harmony was truth.

A day that found him just a bit tired of the items staple in breakfast found him ordering a cup of the soup du jour for starters. “How you like the soup?”—Rudolfo.

Fred gave his head a silent shake. How. It had gone down without exciting dismay. “Truthful with you. Had better, had worse. Hm. What was it. Well, I was thinking of something else. Uh—chicken vegetable with rice? Right? Right. Yours or Campbell’s?”

Neither.

“Half mine, half Abelardo’s.”

“
I beg
your pardon.”

But Rudolfo had never heard the rude English story about the pint of half-and-half, neither did Fred tell it to him. Rudolfo said, “I make a stock with the bones after making chickens sandwiches and I mix it with this.” He produced a large, a very large can, pushed it over to Fred. The label said,
FULL CHICKEN RICHNESS
Chicken-Type Soup.

“Whah-haht?” asked Fred, half-laughing. He read on.
Ingredients: Water, Other Poultry and Poultry Parts, Dehydrated Vegetables, Chickens and Chicken Parts, seasoning …
the list dribbled off into the usual list of chemicals. The label also said,
Canned for Restaurant and Institutional Usement.

“Too big for a family,” Rudolfo observed. “Well, not bad, I think, too. Help me keep the price down. Every little bit help, you know.”

“Oh. Sure. No, not bad. But I wonder about that label.” Rudolfo shrugged about that label. The Government, he said, wasn’t going to worry about some little
chico
outfit way down from the outskirt of town. Fred chuckled at the bland non-identification of “Other Poultry”—Rudolfo said that turkey was still cheaper than chicken—“But I don’t put it down, ‘chicken soup,’ I put it down, ‘soup du jour’; anybody
ask
, I say,”Oh,
you
know, chicken and rice and vegetable and, oh, stuff like that; try it, you don’t like it I don’t charge you.’ Fair enough?—Yes,” he expanded. “Abelardo, he is no businessman. He is
a filosofo.
His mind is always in the skies. I tell him, I could use more soup—twice, maybe even three times as many cans. What he cares. ‘Ai! Supply and demand! ’ he says. Then he tells me about the old Dutch explorers, things like that.—Hey! I ever tell you about the time he make his own automobile? (“Ab
elar
-do did?”) Sure! Abelardo did. He took a part from one car, a part from another, he takes parts not even from cars,
I
don’t know what they from—”

Fred thought of Don Eliseo and the more perfect tortilla making-and-baking machine. “—well, it work! Finally! Yes! It start off, yooom! like a rocket! Sixty-three mile an hour! But oh boy when he try to slow it down! It stop! He start it again. Sixty-three mile an hour! No other rate of speed, well, what can you do with such a car? So he forget about it and he invent something else, who knows what; then he go into the soup business.—Yes, sir! You ready to order?” Rudolfo moved on.

So did Fred. The paintings of the buildings 1895 were set aside for a while so that he could take a lot of pictures of a turn-of-the-century family home scheduled for destruction real soon.
This Site Will be Improved With a Modern Office Building
, what the hell did they mean by
Improved
? Alice came up and looked at the sketches of the family home, and at finished work. “I like them,” she said. “I like you.” She stayed. Everything fine. Then, one day, there was the other key on the table. On the note:
There is nothing wrong
, it said.
Just time to go now. Love
. No name. Fred sighed. Went on painting.

One morning late there was Abelardo in the Bunne. He nodded, smiled a small smile. By and by, some coffee down. Fred said, “Say, where do you buy your chickens?” Abelardo, ready to inform, though not yet ready to talk, took a card from his wallet.

While Fred was still reading this, Abelardo passed him over another card, this one for the Full Chicken Richness Canned Soup Company. “You must visit me,” he said. “Most time I am home.”

Fred hadn’t really cared where the chickens were bought, but now the devil entered into him. First he told Abelardo the story about the man who sold rabbit pie. Asked, wasn’t there anyway maybe some horsemeat in the rabbit pie, said it was fifty-fifty: one rabbit, one horse. Abelardo reflected, then issued another small smile, a rather more painful one. Fred asked, “What about the turkey-meat in your chicken-type soup? I mean, uh, rather, the ‘Other Poultry Parts?’”

Abelardo squinted. “Only the breast,” he said. “The rest not good enough.—For the
soup
, I mean. The rest, I sell to some mink ranchers.”

“How’s business?”

Abelardo shrugged. He looked a bit peaked. “Supply,” he said. “Demand,” he said. Then he sighed, stirred, rose. “You must visit me. Any time. Please,” he said.

Abelardo wasn’t there in the La Bunne Burger next late morning, but someone else was. Miles Marton, call him The Last of the Old-Time Land Agents, call him something less nice: there he was. “Been waiting,” Miles Marton said. “Remember time I toll you bout ol stage-coach buildin? You never came. It comin down tomorrow. Ranch houses. Want to take its pitcher? Last chance, today. Make me a nice little paintin of it, price is right, I buy it. Bye now.”

Down Fred went. Heartbreaking to think its weathered timbers, its mellowed red brick chimney and stone fireplace, were coming down; but Fred Hopkins was very glad he’d had the favor of a notice. Coming down, too, the huge trees with the guinea-fowl in them.
Lots
of photographs. Be a good painting. At least one. Driving back, lo! a sign saying E. J. BINDER PRIME POULTRY FARM; absolutely by a big oak. Still, Fred probably wouldn’t have stopped if there hadn’t been someone by the gate. Binder, maybe. Sure enough. Binder. “Say, do you know a South American named Abelardo?”

No problem. “Sure I do. Used to be a pretty good customer, too. Buy oh I forget how many chickens a week. Don’t buy many nowdays. He send you here? Be glad to oblige you.” Binder was an oldish man, highly sun-speckled.

“You supply his turkeys and turkey-parts, too?” The devil still inside Fred Hopkins.

Old Binder snorted. “‘Turkeys,’ no we don’t handle turkeys, no sir, why chickens are enough trouble, cost of feeding going up, and—No, ‘guinea-fowl,’ no we never did. Just chickens and of course your cornish.”

Still civil, E. J. Binder gave vague directions toward what he believed, he said, was the general location of Mr. Abelardo’s place. Fred didn’t find it right off, but he found it. As no one appeared in response to his calling and honking, he got out and knocked. Nothing.
Pues
, “My house is your house,” okay: in he went through the first door. Well, it wasn’t a
large
cannery, but it was a cannery. Fred started talking to himself: solitary artists often do. “Way I figure it, Abelardo,” he said, “is that you have been operating with that ‘small measure of deceit in advertising, as you so aptly put it.
I
think that in your own naive way you have believed that so long as you called the product ‘Chicken-Type Soup’ and included
some
chicken, well, it was all right. Okay, your guilty secret is safe with me; where are you?” The place was immaculate, except for. Except for a pile of…well…shit…right in the middle of an aisle. It was as neat as a pile of shit can be. Chicken-shits ? Pigeon-poops? Turkey-trots? ¿
Quien sabe
?

At the end of the aisle was another door and behind that door was a small apartment and in a large chair in the small apartment lay sprawled Abelardo, dead drunk on mescal,
muzhik-
grade vodka, and sneaky pet…according to the evidence. Alcoholism is not an especially Latin American trait? Who said the poor guy was an alcoholic? Maybe this was the first time he’d ever been stewed in his
life
. Maybe the eternally perplexing matter of supply and demand had finally unmanned him.

Maybe.

At the other end of
that
room was
another
door and behind that other door was
another
room. And in that
other
room was…

… something else…

That other room was partly crammed with an insane assortment of machinery and allied equipment, compared to which Don Eliseo’s more perfect make-and-bake tortilla engine, with its affinities to the perpetual motion invention of one’s choice, was simplicity. The thing stood naked for Fred’s eyes, but his eyes told him very little: wires snaked all around, that much he could say. There was a not-quite-click, a large television screen flickered on. No. Whatever it was at the room’s end, sitting flush to the floor with a low, chicken-wire fence around it, it was not television, not even if Abelardo had started from scratch as though there had been no television before. The quality of the “image” was entirely different, for one thing; and the color, for another, was
wrong …
and wrong in the way that no TV color he had ever seen had been wrong. He reached to touch the screen, there was no “screen,” it was as though his hand met a surface of unyielding gelatin. The non-screen, well, what the hell,
call
it a screen, was rather large, but not gigantically so. He was looking at a savannah somewhere, and among the trees were palms and he could not identify the others. A surf pounded not far off, but he could not hear it. There was no sound. He saw birds flying in and out of the trees. Looking back, he saw something else. A trail of broken bread through the room, right up to the, mmm, screen. A silent breeze now and then rifled grass, and something moved in the grass to one side. He stepped back, slightly. What the hell could it mean? Then the something which was in the grass to one side stepped, stiff-legged, into full view, and there was another odd, small sound as the thing—it was a bird—lurched through the screen and began to gobble bread. Hopkins watched, dry-mouthed. Crumb by crumb it ate. Then there was no more bread. It doddled up to the low fence, doddled back. It approached the screen, it brushed the screen, there was a Rube Goldberg series of motions in the external equipment, a sheet of chicken wire slid noisily down to the floor. The bird had been trapped.