The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories Read online

  “No, I don’t suppose he is.”

  “You’ll never get in then. He’s got it solid-fenced. And he’s got a guard at the gate—even got a little house for the guard to stay in. ‘Less Metcalfe wants you in, you don’t get in.”

  “I’ll have a try at it.”

  “I wish you well, stranger, but I don’t think you’ll make it. Now, why in the world should Metcalfe act like that? This is friendly country. No one else has got their farms fenced with eight-foot wire and barbs on top of that. No one else could afford to do it even if they wanted to. He must be powerful scared of someone.”

  “Wouldn’t know,” said Doyle. “Tell me how to get there.”

  The old man found a paper sack underneath the counter, fished a stub pencil out of his vest pocket and wet it carefully with his tongue. He smoothed out the sack with a liver-spotted hand and began drawing painfully.

  “You cross the bridge and take this road—don’t take that one to the left, it just wanders up the river—and you go up this hollow and you reach a steep hill and at the top of it you turn left and it’s just a mile to Metcalfe’s place.”

  He wet the pencil again and drew a rough rectangle.

  “The place lies right in there,” he said. “A sizeable piece of property. Metcalfe bought four farms and threw them all together.”

  Back at the car Mabel was waiting irritably.

  “So you was wrong all the time,” she greeted Doyle. “He hasn’t got a farm.”

  “Just a few miles from here,” said Doyle. “How is the rolla doing?”

  “He must be hungry again. He’s banging on the trunk.”

  “How can he be hungry? I bought him all of them bananas just a couple hours ago.”

  “Maybe he wants company. He might be getting lonesome.”

  “I got too much to do,” said Doyle, “to be holding any rolla’s hand.”

  He climbed into the car and got it started and pulled away into the dusty street. He clattered across the bridge and instead of keeping up the hollow, as the storekeeper had directed, turned left on the road that paralleled the river.

  If the map the old man had drawn on the sack was right, he figured, he should come upon the Metcalfe farm from the rear by following the river road.

  Gentle hills turned into steep bluffs, covered with heavy woods and underbrush. The crooked road grew rougher. He came to a deep hollow that ran between two bluffs. A faint trail, a wagon-road more than likely, unused for many years, angled up the hollow.

  Doyle pulled the car into the old wagon road and stopped. He got out and stood for a moment, staring up the hollow.

  “What you stopping for?” asked Mabel.

  “I’m about,” Doyle told her, “to take Metcalfe in the rear.”

  “You can’t leave me here.”

  “I won’t be gone for long.”

  “And there are mosquitos,” she complained, slapping wildly.

  “Just keep the windows shut.”

  He started to walk away and she called him back.

  “There’s the rolla back there.”

  “He can’t get at you as long as he’s in the trunk.”

  “But all that banging he’s doing! What if someone should go past and hear all that banging going on?”

  “I bet you there ain’t been anyone along this road within the last two weeks.”

  Mosquitos buzzed. He waved futile hands at them.

  “Look, Mabel,” he pleaded, “you want me to pull this off, don’t you? You ain’t got nothing against a mink coat, have you? You don’t despise no diamonds?”

  “No, I guess I don’t,” she admitted. “But you hurry back. I don’t want to be here alone when it’s getting dark.”

  He swung around and headed up the hollow.

  The place was green—the deep, dead green, the shabby, shapeless green of summer. And quiet—except for the buzzing of mosquitos. And to Doyle’s concrete-and-asphalt mind there was a bit of lurking terror in the green quietness of the wooded hills.

  He slapped at mosquitos again and shrugged.

  “Ain’t nothing to hurt a man,” he said.

  It was rough traveling. The hollow slanted, climbing up between the hills, and the dry creek bed, carpeted with tumbled boulders and bars of gravel, slashed erratically from one bluff-side to the other. Time after time, Doyle had to climb down one bank and climb up the other when the shifting stream bed blocked his way. He tried walking in the dry bed, but that was even worse—he had to dodge around or climb over a dozen boulders every hundred feet.

  The mosquitos grew worse as he advanced. He took out his handkerchief and tied it around his neck. He pulled his hat down as far as it would go. He waged energetic war—he killed them by the hundreds, but there was no end to them.

  He tried to hurry, but it was no place to hurry. He was dripping wet with perspiration. He wanted to sit down and rest, for he was short of wind, but when he tried to sit the mosquitos swarmed in upon him in hateful, mindless numbers and he had to move again.

  The ravine narrowed and twisted and the going became still rougher.

  He came around a bend and the way was blocked. A great mass of tangled wood and vines had become wedged between two great trees growing on opposite sides of the steep hillsides.

  There was no possibility of getting through the tangle. It stretched for thirty feet or more and was so thickly interlaced that it formed a solid wall, blocking the entire stream bed. It rose for twelve or fifteen feet and behind it rocks and mud and other rubble had been jammed hard against it by the boiling streams of water that had come gushing down the hollow in times of heavy rain.

  Clawing with his hands, digging with his feet, Doyle crawled up the hillside to get around one end of the obstruction.

  He reached the clump of trees against which one end of it rested and hauled himself among them, bracing himself with aching arms and legs. The mosquitoes came at him in howling squadrons and he broke off a small branch, heavy with leaves, from one of the trees, and used it as a switch to discourage them.

  He perched there, panting and sobbing, drawing deep breaths into his lungs. And wondered, momentarily, how he’d ever managed to get himself into such a situation. It was not his dish, he was not cut out for roughing it. His ideas of nature never had extended any further than a well-kept city park.

  And here he was, in the depths of nowhere, toiling up outlandish hills, heading for a place where there might be money trees—row on row of money trees.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” he told himself, “for nothing less than money.”

  He twisted around and examined the tangle of wood and vines and saw, with some astonishment, that it was two feet thick or more and that it carried its thickness uniformly. And the uphill side of it was smooth and slick, almost as if it had been planed and sanded, although there was not a tool mark on it.

  He examined it more closely and it was plain to see that it was no haphazard collection of driftwood that had been built up through the years, but that it was woven and interlaced so intricately that it was a single piece—had been a single piece even before it had become wedged between the trees.

  Who, he wondered, could have, or would have, done a job like that? Where would the patience have been mustered and the technique and the purpose? He shook his head in wonderment.

  He had heard somewhere about Indians weaving brush together to make weirs for catching fish, but there were no fish in this dry stream bed and no Indians for several hundred miles.

  He tried to figure out the pattern of the weaving and there was no pattern that he could detect. Everything was twisted and intergrown around everything else and the whole thing was one solid mass.

  Somewhat rested and with his wind at least partially restored, he proceeded on his way, trailing a ravaging cloud of mosquitos in his wake.

  It s
eemed now that the trees were thinning and that he could see blue sky ahead. The terrain leveled out a bit and he tried to hurry, but racked leg muscles screamed at him and he contented himself with jogging along as best he could.

  He reached more level ground and finally broke free into a clearing that climbed gently to the top of a grassy knoll. Wind came out of the west, no longer held back by the trees, and the mosquitos fell away, except for a small swarm of diehards that went part way up the knoll with him.

  He reached the top of the knoll and threw himself in the grass, lying flat, panting like a tuckered dog.

  And there, not more than a hundred yards away, was the fence that closed in Metcalfe’s farm.

  It marched across the rolling, broken hills, a snake of shining metal. And extending out from it was a broad swath of weeds, waist-high, silver-green in the blasting sunlight—as if the ground had been plowed around the fence for a distance of a hundred feet or so and the weeds sown in the ground as one might sow a crop. Doyle squinted his eyes to try to make out what kind of weeds they were, but he was too far away.

  Far on the distant ridge was the red gleam of a rooftop among many sheltering trees and to the west of the buildings lay an orchard, ordered row on row.

  Was it, Doyle wondered, only his imagination that the shapes of those orchard trees were the remembered shape of the night-seen tree in the walled garden in the rear of Metcalfe’s town-house? And was it once more only his imagination that the green of them was slightly different than the green of other leaves—the green, perhaps of mint-new currency?

  He lay in the grass, with the fingers of the wind picking at his sweat-soaked shirt, and wondered about the legal aspects of money that was grown on trees. It could not be counterfeit, for it was not made but grown. And if it were identical with perfectly legal, government-printed money, could anyone prove in any court of law that it was bogus money? He didn’t know much law, but he wondered if there could be any statute upon the books that would cover a point of law like this? Probably not, he concluded, since it was so fantastic that it could not be anticipated and thus would require no rule to legislate against it.

  And now, for the first time, he began really to wonder how money could be grown on trees. He had told Mabel, off-handedly and casual, so she wouldn’t argue, that a botanist could do anything. But that wasn’t entirely right, of course, because a botanist only studied plants and learned what he could about them. But there were these other fellows—these bio-something or other—who fooled around with changing plants. They bred grasses that would grow on land that would grow no more than thistles, they cross-pollinated corn to grow more and bigger ears, they developed grains that were disease-resistant, and they did a lot of other things. But developing a tree that would grow letter-perfect money in lieu of leaves seemed just a bit farfetched.

  The sun beat against his back and he felt the heat of it through his drying shirt. He looked at his watch and it was almost three o’clock.

  He turned his attention back to the orchard and this time he saw that many little figures moved among the trees. He strained his eyes to see them better, but he could not be sure—although they looked for all the world like a gang of rollas.

  He crawled down the knoll and across the strip of grass toward the weeds. He kept low and inched along and was very careful. His only hope of making a deal, any kind of deal, with Metcalfe, was to come upon him unawares and let him know immediately what kind of hand he held.

  He started worrying about how Mabel might be getting along, but he wiped the worry out. He had enough to worry about without adding to it. And, anyhow, Mabel was quite a gal and could take care of herself.

  He began running through his mind alternate courses of action if he should fail to locate Metcalfe, and the most obvious, of course, was to attempt a raid upon the orchard. As he thought it over, he wasn’t even sure but what a raid upon the orchard might be the thing to do. He wished he’d brought along the sugar sack Mabel had fixed up for him.

  The fence worried him a little, but he also thrust that worry to one side. It would be time enough to worry about the fence once he got to it.

  He slithered through the grass and he was doing swell. He was almost to the strip of weeds and no one apparently had seen him. Once he got to the weeds, it would be easier, for they would give him cover. He could sneak right up to the fence and no one would ever notice.

  He reached the weeds and wilted at what he saw.

  The weeds were the healthiest and thickest patch of nettles that had ever grown outdoors!

  He put out a tentative hand and the nettles stung. They were the real McCoy. Ruefully, he rubbed at the dead-white welts rising on his fingers.

  He raised himself cautiously to peer above the nettles. One of the rollas was coming down the slope toward the fence and there was no doubt now that the things he’d seen up in the orchard was a gang of rollas.

  He ducked behind the nettles, hoping that the rolla had not seen him. He lay flat upon the ground and the sun was hot and the place upon his hand that had touched the nettles blazed with fire, although it was hard to decide which was the worst—the nettle sting or all the mosquito lumps that had blossomed out on him.

  He noticed that the nettles were beginning to wave and toss as if they were blowing in the wind and that was a funny deal, for there wasn’t that much wind.

  The nettles kept on blowing and all at once they parted right in front of him, running in a straight line, making a path between him and the fence. The nettles on the right blew to the right so hard they lay flat upon the ground and those to the left blew to the left so hard they were likewise on the ground and the path was there, without a thing to stop one walking to the fence.

  The rolla stood just beyond the fence and he spelled out a message in large capital letters upon his blackboard chest:

  COME ON

  OVER, HEEL!

  Doyle hesitated, filled with dismay. It was a rotten break that he had been discovered by this little stinker. Now the cat was out the bag for sure, and all his toiling up the hollow, all his sneaking through the grass stood for absolutely nothing.

  He saw that the other rollas were waddling down the slope toward the fence, while the first rolla still stood there, with the invitation on his chest.

  Then the lettering on the rolla flickered out. The nettles still stayed down and the path stayed open. The rollas who had been coming down the slope reached the fence and all of them—all five of them—lined up in a solemn row. The first one’s chest lit up with words:

  WE HAVE THREE

  MISSING ROLLAS

  And the chest of the second one:

  DO YOU BRING

  WORD TO US?

  And the third:

  WE WOULD LIKE

  TO TALK TO YOU

  The fourth:

  ABOUT THE

  MISSING ONES

  The fifth:

  PLEASE COME

  TO US, HEEL.

  Doyle raised himself from where he had been lying flat upon the ground and squatted on his toes.

  It could be a trap.

  What could he gain by talking with the rollas!

  But there was no way to retreat without losing what little advantage he might have—there was no choice but to do his best at brazening it out.

  He rose to his feet and ambled down the nettle-path with as slight a show of concern as he could manage.

  He reached the fence and hunkered down so that he was almost level with the rollas.

  “I know where one of the missing rollas is,” he said, “but not the other two.”

  YOU KNOW

  ABOUT THE

  ONE WHO

  WAS IN TOWN

  WITH METCALFE?

  “That’s right.”

  YOU TELL

  US WHERE

  HE IS
r />   “I’ll make a deal,” said Doyle.

  All five of them asked, DEAL?

  “I’ll tell you where he is; you do something for me. You let me up into that orchard for an hour tonight, then let me out again. Without letting Metcalfe know.”

  They huddled, conferring, their blackboard fronts a-squiggle with the queer, confusing symbols Doyle had seen on the rolla’s chest back in Metcalfe’s garden.

  Then they turned to face him again, the five of them lined up, shoulder to shoulder:

  WE CANNOT DO THAT

  WE MADE AN AGREEMENT

  AND WE GAVE OUR WORD

  WE GROW THE MONEY

  METCALFE DISTRIBUTES

  IT

  “I wouldn’t distribute it,” said Doyle. “I promise that I wouldn’t. I’d keep it for myself.”

  NO SOAP, spelled out rolla No. 1.

  “This agreement that you have with Metcalfe. How come you made it?”

  GRATITUDE, said No. 2.

  “Don’t mind my snickering, but gratitude for Metcalfe …”

  HE FOUND US

  AND HE RESCUED

  AND PROTECTED US

  AND WE ASKED HIM

  WHAT CAN WE DO?

  “And he said, grow me some money.”

  HE SAY THE PLANET

  NEEDED MONEY

  HE SAY MONEY

  MAKE HAPPY ALL

  POOR HEELS LIKE YOU

  “The hell you say,” said Doyle, aghast.

  WE GROW IT

  HE DISTRIBUTE IT

  BETWEEN US WE

  MAKE ALL THE

  PLANET HAPPY

  “Just a bunch of missionaries!”

  WE DO NOT

  READ YOU, CHUM

  “Missionaries. People who do good.”

  WE DO GOOD

  ON MANY PLANETS

  WHY NOT DO

  GOOD HERE?

  “But money?”

  THAT WHAT METCALFE

  SAY.

  HE SAY PLANET HAS

  PLENTY OF ALL ELSE

  BUT IS SHORT ON MONEY.

  “What about the other two rollas that are missing?”

  THEY DISAGREE