Leiber, Fritz - Gonna roll the bones

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2024-11-24 0 0 108.71KB 20 页 5.9玖币

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to generation, without supernatural overtones.

I'll be damned if I know how to categorize the following Story.

Maybe that's why it won a Nebula, however. "... The sky was

dark, the moon was yellow, the leaves came tumbling down." I am

reminded of Stagalee and Red Hanrahan, and of all the people half

of light and half of darkness who pass in the night, fight with the

Devil on the banks of the Brazos, crash in their U-2's and cling to

coffins while white whales destroy their ships.

Here is a piece of future myth/legend/folklore - maybe. It is

timeless, though, and like all such things, timely.

Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he'd have to get out quick

or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the

props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a

house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the

huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him.

Those were stone-solid enough, though. The fireplace was chin-

high at least twice that long, and filled from end to end with roaring

flames. Above were the square doors of the ovens in a row - his Wife

baked for part of their living. Above the ovens was the wall-long

mantelpiece, too high for his Mother to reach or Mr. Guts to jump

any more, set with all sorts of ancestral curios, but any of them

that weren't stone or glass or china had been so dried and darkened

by decades of heat that they looked like nothing but shrunken

human heads and black golf balls. At one end were clustered his

Wife's square gin bottles. Above the mantelpiece hung one old

chromo, so high and so darkened by soot and grease that you

couldn't tell whether the swirls and fat cigar shape were a

whaleback steamer plowing through a hurricane or a spaceship

plunging through a storm of light-driven dust motes.

As soon. as Joe curled his toes inside his boots, his Mother knew

what he was up to. "Going bumming," she mumbled with

two long, flat, narrow, fluted loaves and one high, round-domed

one. She was thin as death and disease in her violet wrapper.

Without looking, she reached out a yard-long, skinny arm for the

nearest gin bottle and downed a warm slug and smiled again. And

without word spoken, Joe knew she'd said, "You're going out and

gamble and get drunk and lay a floozy and come home and beat me

and go to jail for it," and he had a flash of the last time he'd been in

the dark gritty cell and she'd come by moonlight, which showed the

green and yellow lumps on her narrow skull where he'd hit her, to

whisper to him through the tiny window in back and slip him a half

pint through the bars.

And Joe knew for certain that this time it would be that bad and

worse, but just the same he heaved up himself and his heavy,

muffledly clanking pockets and shuffled straight to the door,

muttering, "Guess I'll roll the bones, up the pike a stretch and

back," swinging his bent, knobby-elbowed arms like paddlewheels

to make a little joke about his words.

When he'd stepped outside, he held the door open a hand's

breadth behind him for several seconds. When be finally closed it, a

feeling of deep misery struck him. Earlier years, Mr. Guts would

have come streaking along to seek fights and females on the roofs

and fences, but now the big torn was content to stay home and hiss

by the fire and snatch for turkey and dodge a broom, quarreling

and comforting with two housebound women. Nothing had followed

Joe to the door but his Mother's ohomping and her gasping breaths

and the clink of the gin bottle going back on the mantel and the

creaking of the floor boards under his feet.

The night was up-side-down deep among the frosty stars. A few

of them seemed to move, like the white-hot jets of spaceships. Down

below it looked as if the whole town of Ironmine had blown or

buttoned out the light and gone to sleep, leaving the streets and

spaces to the equally unseen breezes and ghosts. But Joe was still

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Leiber, Fritz - Gonna roll the bones

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