The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories Read online

  “Don’t tell me. You got a job for me. You’ll pay me in a day or two. How many jobs do you think I do for you without being paid?”

  “You do this job for me, Chuck, and I’ll pay you everything I owe you. Not only for this one, but for all the others, too. This is one that I need real bad and I need it fast. You see, this car went off the road and into this lake and the insurance company claims—”

  “Where is the car now?”

  “It’s still in the lake. They’ll be pulling it out in a day or two and I need the pictures—”

  “You want me, maybe, to go down into the lake and take pictures underwater?”

  “That’s exactly the situation. I know that it’s a tough one. But I’ll get the diving equipment and arrange everything. I hate to ask it of you, but you’re the only man I know…”

  “I will not do it,” Doyle said firmly. “My health is too delicate. If I get wet I get pneumonia and if I get cold I have a couple teeth that begin to ache and I’m allergic to all kinds of weeds and more than likely this lake is filled with a lot of water lilies and other kinds of plants.”

  “I’ll pay you double!” Jake yelled in desperation. “I’ll even pay you triple.”

  “I know you,” said Doyle. “You won’t pay me nothing.”

  He hung up the phone and shuffled back up the bar, dragging the bottle with him.

  “Nerve of the guy!” he said, taking two drinks in rapid succession.

  “It’s a hell of a way,” he said to Benny, “for a man to make a living.”

  “All ways are,” said Benny philosophically.

  “Look, Benny, there wasn’t nothing wrong with that bill I give you?”

  “Should there been?”

  “Naw, but that crack you made.”

  “I always make them cracks. It goes with the job. The customers expect me to make them kind of cracks.”

  He mopped at the bar, a purely reflex action, for the bar was dry and shiny.

  “I always look the folding over good,” he said. “I’m as hep as any banker. I can spot a phoney fifty feet away. Smart guys want to pass some bad stuff, they figure that a bar is the place to do it. You got to be on your guard against it.”

  “Catch much of it?”

  Benny shook his head. “Once in a while. Not often. Fellow in here the other day says there is a lot of it popping up that can’t be spotted even by an expert. Says the government is going crazy over it. Says there is bills turning up with duplicate serial numbers. Shouldn’t be no two bills with the same serial number. When that happens, one of them is phoney. Fellow says they figure it’s the Russians.”

  “The Russians?”

  “Sure, the Russians flooding the country with phoney money that’s so good no one can tell the difference. If they turned loose enough of it, the fellow said, they could ruin the economy.”

  “Well, now,” said Doyle in some relief, “I call that a dirty trick.”

  “Them Russians,” said Benny, “is a dirty bunch.”

  Doyle drank again, morosely, then handed the bottle back.

  “I got to quit,” he announced. “I told Mabel I would drop around. She don’t like me to have a snootful.”

  “I don’t know why Mabel puts up with you,” Benny told him. “There she is, working in that beanery where she meets all sorts of guys. Some of them is sober and hard working—”

  “They ain’t got any soul,” said Doyle. “There ain’t a one of them truck drivers and mechanics that can tell a sunset from a scrambled egg.”

  Benny paid him out his change.

  “I notice,” he said, “that you make your soul pay off.”

  “Why, sure,” Doyle told him. “That’s only common sense.”

  He picked up his change and went out into the street.

  Mabel was waiting for him, but that was not unusual. Something always happened and he was always late and she had become resigned to waiting.

  She was waiting in a booth and he gave her a kiss and sat down across from her. The place was empty except for a new waitress who was tidying up a table at the other end of the room.

  “Something funny happened to me today,” said Doyle.

  “I hope,” said Mabel, simpering, “that it was something nice.”

  “Now I don’t know,” Doyle told her. “It could be. It could, likewise, get a man in trouble.”

  He dug into his watch pocket and took out the bill. He unfolded it and smoothed it out and laid it on the table.

  “What you call that?” he asked.

  “Why, Chuck, it’s a twenty-dollar bill!”

  “Look at that thing on the corner of it.”

  She did, with some puzzlement.

  “Why, it’s a stem,” she cried. “Just like an apple stem. And it’s fastened to the bill.”

  “It comes off a money tree,” said Doyle.

  “There ain’t no such thing,” objected Mabel.

  “Yes, there is,” Doyle told her, with mounting conviction. “J. Howard Metcalfe, he’s got one growing in his back yard. That’s how he gets all his money. I never could get it figured out how all these big moguls that live in them big houses and drive those block-long cars could manage to make all the money it would take to live the way they do. I bet you every one of them fellows has got money trees growing in their yards. And they’ve kept it a secret all this time, except today Metcalfe forgot to pick his money and a wind came along and blew it off the tree and over the wall and—”

  “But even if there was such a thing as a money tree,” persisted Mabel, “they could never keep it secret. Someone would find it out. All of them have servants and the servants would know …”

  “I got that all figured out,” said Doyle. “I been giving this thing a lot of thought and I know just how it works. Them servants in those big mansions aren’t just ordinary servants. They’re all old retainers. They been in the family for years and they’re loyal to the family. And you know why they’re loyal? It’s because they’re getting their cuts off the money trees. I bet you they salt it all away and when it comes time for them to retire they live the life of Riley. There wouldn’t nobody blab with a setup like that.

  “And if all those big shots haven’t got something to hide, why has every one of them big houses got big walls or thick hedges around the back of them?”

  “But they have garden parties,” Mabel protested. “I read about them in the society section all the time—”

  “You ever been to one of them garden parties?”

  “No, of course I haven’t.”

  “You bet your boots you haven’t. You ain’t got no money tree. And they don’t invite no one except other people who likewise have money trees. Why do you think all them rich people are so snooty and exclusive?”

  “Well, even if they have got money trees, what difference does it make? What are you going to do about it?”

  “Mabel, would you maybe be able to find me a sugar sack or something?”

  “We have a lot of them out back. I could get you one.”

  “And fix up a drawstring in it so once I got it full, I could jerk the string and tighten it up so the money wouldn’t all spill out if I had to—”

  “Chuck, you wouldn’t!”

  “There’s a tree outside the wall. I can shinny up it. And there’s a branch sticking out into the yard. I could tie a rope to that…”

  “But they’d catch you!”

  “Well, we’ll know if you get that sack for me. I’ll go out, hunt up some rope.”

  “But all the stores are closed by now. You can’t buy a rope.”

  “Know just where to get some,” said Doyle. “Fellow down the street has eighteen, twenty feet of it fixed up for a swing out back. Took pictures of a kid swinging there just a day or two ago.”

  “You’ll have to drive
me over to my place. I can’t fix the sack in here.”

  “Just as soon as I get back with the rope.”

  “Chuck?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It isn’t stealing, is it—this money tree?”

  “Naw. If Metcalfe has one, he hasn’t any right to it. It’s fair game for anyone. It’s more than fair—it ain’t right for a man to have a thing like that all to himself.”

  “And you won’t be caught for having counterfeit…”

  “Now, how could it be counterfeit?” demanded Doyle, just a bit aghast that she should suggest it. “Nobody’s making it. There ain’t no plates and there isn’t any press. The stuff just grows, hanging on that tree.”

  She hunched over the table toward him. “But, Chuck, it’s so impossible! How could a tree grow money?”

  “I don’t pretend to know,” said Doyle. “I ain’t no scientist and I don’t catch the lingo, but some of them botany fellows, they can do some funny things. Like that man named Burbank. They can fix it so plants will do most anything they want. They can change the kind of fruit they bear and they can change their size and their growing habits and I haven’t got no doubt at all if someone put his mind to it, he could make a tree grow money.”

  Mabel slid out of the booth.

  “I’ll get the sack,” she said.

  II

  Doyle shinnied up the tree that grew outside the high brick wall. Reaching the big branch that extended over the wall, invading the air space over the Metcalfe garden, he crouched quietly.

  He tilted his head skyward and watched the scared fleeing of light clouds. In another minute or two, a slightly larger cloud, he saw, would close in on the moon and when that happened was the time to drop into the garden.

  He crouched and watched the garden and there were several trees but there was nothing he could make out that was peculiar about any one of them. Except it seemed, when he listened closely, that the rustling of the leaves of one of them was crisper than the other rustlings.

  He checked the rope looped in his hand and the sack tucked beneath his belt and waited for the heavier cloud to move across the moon.

  The house was quiet and still and only showed one faint glimmer of light in an upstairs room. And the night was quiet as well, except for the rustling of the leaves.

  The edge of the cloud began to eat into the moon and Doyle moved out on cat feet along the branch. Swiftly he knotted the rope around the branch and let it down.

  And having accomplished that, having come this far, he hesitated for an instant, listening hard, straining his eyes for any trace of motion in the darkened rectangle of the garden.

  He could detect none.

  Quickly, he slid down the rope and stole toward the tree which had seemed to rustle more crisply than the others.

  He reached it and thrust up a cautious hand.

  The leaves had the size and feel of bills and he plucked at them frantically. He jerked the sack from his belt and thrust the handful of leaves into it and then another handful and another.

  Easy, he exulted. Just like picking plums. Just like being in a plum thicket. As easy as picking….

  Just five minutes, he told himself. That is all I need. Just five full minutes with no one pestering.

  He didn’t get five minutes. He didn’t get a minute, even.

  A whirlwind of silent anger came in a quiet rush out of the darkness and was upon him. It bit him in the leg and it slashed him in the ribs and it tore his shirt half off him. It was as silent as it was ferocious, and he glimpsed it in that first startled second only as a floating patch of motion.

  He stifled the hurt yip of surprise and fear that surged into his throat and fought back as silently as the thing attacking him. Twice he had his hands upon it and twice it slipped away and swarmed to the attack again.

  Then, finally, he got a grip upon it that it could not shake and he lifted it high to smash it to the ground. But as he lifted it, the cloud sailed off the moon and the garden came alight.

  He saw the thing, then, really saw it, for the first time, and clamped down his gurgle of amazement.

  He had expected a dog of some sort. But this was not a dog. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was nothing he had ever heard of.

  One end of it was all mouth and the other end of it was blunt and square. It was terrier-sized, but no terrier. It had short, yet powerful legs and its arms were long and sinuous and armed with heavy claws and somehow he had managed to grab it in such a manner that the arms and murderous claws were pinned against its body.

  It was dead white and hairless and as naked as a jaybird. It had a sort of knapsack, or what appeared to be a knapsack, strapped upon its back.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  Its chest was large and hard and gleaming, like the thorax of a grasshopper and the chest was like a neon-lighted billboard, with characters and pictures and dots and hooks and dashes flashing off and on.

  Rapid-fire thoughts snaked their way through the fear and horror that tumbled in Doyle’s brain and he tried to get them tracking, but they wouldn’t track. They just kept tumbling round and wouldn’t straighten out.

  Then all the dots and dashes, all the hooks and symbols cleared off the billboard chest and there were words, human words, in capitals, glowing upon it:

  LET GO

  OF ME!

  Even to the exclamation point.

  “Pal,” said Doyle, not a little shaken, but nevertheless determined, “I will not let you go. I got plans for you.”

  He looked swiftly around for the sack and located it on the ground nearby and reached out a foot to pull it closer.

  YOU SORRY, spelled the creature.

  “Not,” said Doyle, “so that you could notice.”

  Kneeling, he reached out swiftly and grabbed the sugar sack.

  Quickly he thrust the creature into it and jerked the drawstring tight.

  He stood up and hefted the sack. It was not too heavy for him to carry.

  Lights snapped on in the first floor of the house, in a room facing on the garden, and voices floated out of an open window. Somewhere in the darkness a screen door slapped shut with a hollow sound.

  Doyle whirled and ran toward the dangling rope. The sack hampered him a little, but urgency compensated for the hindrance and he climbed swiftly to the branch.

  He squatted there, hidden in the shadow of the leaves, and drew up the rope, coiling it awkwardly with his one free hand.

  The thing inside the sack began to thrash about and he jerked the sack up, thumped it on the branch. The thing grew quiet at once.

  Footsteps came deliberately down a shadow-hidden walk and Doyle saw the red glow of a cigar as someone puffed on it.

  A man’s voice spoke out of the darkness and he recognized it as Metcalfe’s voice.

  “Henry!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Henry from the wide verandah.

  “Where the devil did the rolla go?”

  “He’s out there somewhere, sir. He never gets too far from the tree. It’s his responsibility, you know.”

  The cigar-end glowed redder as Metcalfe puffed savagely.

  “I don’t understand those rollas, Henry. Even after all these years, I don’t understand them.”

  “No, sir,” said Henry. “They’re hard things to understand.”

  Doyle could smell the smoke, drifting upward to him. He could tell by the smell it was a good cigar.

  And naturally Metcalfe would smoke the very best. No man with a money tree growing in his garden need worry about the price of smokes.

  Cautiously, Doyle edged a foot or two along the branch, anxious to get slightly closer to the wall and safety.

  The cigar jerked around and pointed straight at him as Metcalfe tilted his head to stare into the tree.

 
“What was that!” he yelled.

  “I didn’t hear a thing, sir. It must have been the wind.”

  “There’s no wind, you fool. It’s that cat again!”

  Doyle huddled closer against the branch, motionless, yet tensed to spring into action if it were necessary. Quietly he gave himself a mental bawling-out for moving.

  Metcalfe had moved off the walk and clear of the shadow and was standing in the moonlight, staring up into the tree.

  “There’s something up there,” he announced pontifically. “The leaves are so thick I can’t make out what it is. I bet you it’s that goddam cat again. He’s plagued the rolla for two nights hand running.”

  He took the cigar out of his face and blew a couple of beautiful smoke rings that drifted ghost-like in the moonlight.

  “Henry,”’ he shouted, “bring me a gun. I think the twelve-gauge is right behind the door.”

  Doyle had heard enough. He made a dash for it. He almost fell, but he caught himself. He dropped the rope and almost dropped the sack, but managed to hang onto it. The rolla, inside the sack, began to thrash about.

  “So you want to horse around,” Doyle said savagely to the thing inside the sack.

  He tossed the bag toward the fence and it went over and he heard it thump into the alley. He hoped, momentarily, that he hadn’t killed it, for it might be valuable. He might be able, he thought, to sell it to a circus. Circuses were always looking for crazy things like that.

  He reached the tree trunk and slid down it with no great ceremony and very little forethought and as a result collected a fine group of abrasions on his arms and legs from the roughness of the bark.

  He saw the sack lying in the alley and from beyond the fence he heard the ferocious bellowing and blood-curdling cursing of J. Howard Metcalfe.

  Someone ought to warn him, Doyle told himself. Man of his age, he shouldn’t ought to allow himself to fly into such a rage. Someday he’d fall flat upon his face and that would be the end of him.

  Doyle scooped up the sack and ran as hard as he could to where he’d parked the car at the alley’s end. Reaching it, he tossed the sack into the seat and crawled in himself. He took off with a rush and wound a devious route to throw off any possible pursuit—although that, he admitted to himself, was just a bit fantastic, for he’d made his getaway before Metcalfe could possibly have put someone on his tail.