In Milton Lumky Territory Page 24

  And, too, this was still Milton Lumky territory.

  One afternoon Lumky dropped by with his leather satchel, on his official rounds for the Whalen Paper Company.

  “Where’s your car?” Susan said. “I don’t see it.”

  “I sold it,” Milt said. “Too hard to get service for it out on the road.” He pointed out the window at a foreign sedan parked at the curb. “I traded it in on a Swedish car.”

  “Won’t you have trouble getting service on a Swedish car?” Bruce asked. They walked outdoors, to the far side of the street, to view the car.

  “It’s new,” Milt said. “It won’t need service.”

  From where they stood they could see Susan inside the office, at work behind one of the desks.

  “How’d you happen to locate yourselves in a dinky out-of-the-way town like Montario?” Milt asked him.

  Bruce said, “I was born here. I grew up here.”

  “That’s right. You’re an Idaho boy. I keep picturing you as a big-city man. Wasn’t that discount place of yours down in Reno?” Pondering, Milt said, “Somebody else lived here for a while. Yes, it was Susan. She told me once she used to teach grammar school here.”

  “I was in her fifth grade class,” Bruce said.

  A slow expression appeared on Milt’s face, a register of disbelief. “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I never know when to believe you. You get a big boot out of saying things to shock people.”

  “I don’t see what’s shocking about that,” Bruce said.

  They meandered back toward the store, and then Lumky, still battling away inside himself with his emotions, said, “Did you know that when you married her?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “How about her?”

  “Sure,” he said. And then a malicious delight seized him; he could not restrain himself. “That’s why we got married,” he said.

  With horrified suspicion, Milt said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we fulfilled our childhood attachment for each other. At the time it wasn’t possible since she was in her twenties and I was only eleven.”

  “What sort of attachment?” They had by now entered the store. The posture that Milt had taken caused Susan to look up from her work. Milt said to her, “Is it true you were his fifth grade teacher?”

  “Oh yes,” Susan said. She glanced at Bruce, and they exchanged an irresponsible amusement. Without hesitation she took up where he had left off; she saw the whole situation. “He was my favorite pupil. I don’t mean because he was bright. I mean because he was so mature, and by that I mean he was so sexually attractive.”

  Milt could say nothing.

  “I still have a picture of him when he was eleven,” Susan said, in her calm, reasonable voice. “When it was possible, I had him sit up at my desk with me while I taught the class. But even so we had to wait. We saw each other secretly over the years. He used to visit me at my house when he was in high school. That was almost old enough; we came very close to consummating it then. But we still had to wait just a little longer. Do you want to see the picture?”

  “No,” Milt muttered.

  “It was worth waiting,” Susan said. “The longer you hold off the better it is. Isn’t that right, Bruce?” she said.

  Milt’s discomfort had become so obvious that they stopped. But Milt remained gloomy and taciturn, hanging around the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave but not able to converse any more with them. Finally he said good-bye and went out to his parked Swedish car. Waving, but not looking in their direction, he started up and drove off.

  “We shouldn’t have teased him,” Bruce said. But it had been fun. They had enjoyed doing it, and now they smiled at each other. If we had a chance, he realized, we would do it again.

  Later on in the month he got wind of something from a salesman who had driven up from Colorado. In Denver a typewriter shop was up for sale, a small place the owner of which had been killed in an auto accident. The man’s relatives had no taste for the business and they hadn’t set much of a price on it. According to the salesman, there were several good franchises that came along with it, plus a modern front and fixtures, and not too moldy an inventory. And Denver was expanding every day.

  If the place was any kind of buy it might get snapped up by someone else, he realized. So now he did not drive; he took a plane. A relative of the deceased owner met him at the Denver airport and they drove to the store together. It had a neon sign, and the rather new cash register alone was worth four hundred dollars. Most of the inventory was made up of expensive office model machines, but he did not doubt that he could trade them back to the manufacturers for lower priced models. He liked the location; of course he did not know Denver, but the business district seemed active, and he saw plenty of traffic. And the other stores, especially those on the same side of the street, seemed quite modern and well-tended.

  He flew back to Boise, picked up his car and drove to Montario, and discussed the Denver store with Susan. With him he had brought back pictures of it; he showed them to her and she agreed that it looked good. And they did need something else. The Montario store was not enough.

  “Should I sell my house in Boise?” she asked. They had rented it out, thinking that they might someday decide to go back there.

  “Sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell everything here. It’s too far to transport anything from here to Denver. Anyhow, the place has better fixtures than we have here.”

  “Won’t we take a loss if we sell out here?”

  “We didn’t take a loss when we sold the R & J Mimeographing Service,” he said.

  She nodded. “Do you want to make an offer on the Denver place, then? I haven’t seen it, but if you think it’s what we want, and you think we can get rid of our place here -” She smiled at him. “I’ll leave it up to you.”

  “I’ll make them an offer,” he said. We’ll see what comes of it.”

  Through their attorney Fancourt they offered the Denver people twelve thousand dollars for the inventory, fixtures, franchises, lease, and location. After weeks of quibbling, the Denver people accepted their offer.

  Toward the end of the year they completed arrangements to sell the Montario Typewriter Center and take over the Denver place. The whole thing dragged on, since the Denver store - called the Colorado Office Equipment Company - comprised part of an estate divided between a number of heirs. But finally everything had been untangled. He and Susan made a final trip back to Montario, and then they took up the proprietorship in Denver. And that was that.

  BUSINESS, in Denver, worked out well and they could see that if they kept at it long enough they would have what they wanted. By degrees Susan retired from the store and he took it over on his own. He bought what he felt he could sell, and the store’s policies were his; she did not complain about his handling and each of them was able to take a relaxed position with the other when they were home together at night. They bought a house in Denver; Taffy entered the Denver public school system; they came to realize that they had done the right thing and that probably there would be no basic changes from now on. They would continue in the retail typewriter business in Denver, and they would live in terms of each other as they were doing as long as nothing happened to either of them, or, for that matter, to the country and the society around them. If the world in which they were living managed to maintain itself, they could probably maintain their store and house and family. Their doubts, over the months, diminished and were gone. At no particular time the last anxiety left them. They were not even conscious of it; it occurred naturally, in the course of the regular working day.

  The following summer Bruce heard from a roundabout source that Milt Lumky had died.

  He still had Cathy Hermes’ address in Pocatello, so he and Susan wrote her. A week or so passed and then they got a letter from her, giving them some of the details about his death.

  According to Cathy he had died of his Bright’s
disease. She thought that it could have been avoided if he had taken care of himself. In the letter Bruce read an oblique bitterness directed toward him, but probably directed toward everyone else as well, everything that had to do with Milt, including Milt himself. Several times in the letter she upbraided Milt and herself in retrospect. Milt should have given up traveling around his territory, first of all. He should have taken a desk job somewhere, so he could go to the bathroom when he needed to, and rest when he needed to. Her fixation on those points showed up again and again in her letter. The best thing would have been if she could have gotten a divorce and then Milt and she could have married and settled down in Pocatello. After Bruce and Susan had gotten married, she said, Milt had talked about it, but at last he had stopped talking about it. And it had never come up again.

  Other than that the letter was filled with formal phrases. She seemed matter-of-fact about his death.

  A day or so later their telephone at home rang, and when Susan answered it he heard her say, “Maybe you better talk to Bruce.”

  “Who is it?” he said, getting up from his chair.

  With an odd expression on her face, Susan said, “It’s Cathy Hermes, calling long-distance from Pocatello.” As he started into the hall toward the phone she said, “It’s something about money.”

  “What money?” he said.

  “You better talk to her,” she said.

  He picked up the receiver and said hello. This is Mrs. Hermes,” a woman’s voice said in his ear. “I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Stevens.” After beating around the bush, Cathy at last said that Milt, before his death, had told her about different people who owed him money, and that he had mentioned several times that Bruce owed him five hundred dollars.

  “Did he say what for?” he asked, with mixed reactions.

  Cathy said, “He told me he loaned it to you to buy something. I don’t want to pester you for it, but if you want to do something for him now that he’s gone, maybe you could give it to me.” She explained to him at great length how close she and Milt had been.

  “Let me talk to my wife,” Bruce said. “Can I call you in a day or so or write you?”

  With the obvious conviction that she would never see the money, Cathy said, “Anything you and Susan do is perfectly satisfactory with me. You understand there’s nothing written down about it.”

  “Yes,” he said. He told her he was glad to hear from her, and then he hung up.

  “Does she say you borrowed it?” Susan said. “He gave it to you, didn’t he?”

  “He gave it to both of us,” he said. “As a wedding gift.”

  “Do you suppose he told her it was just a loan? Maybe he forgot he gave it to us, or he changed his mind. You know how he was.”

  Getting out the bills that had come in during the last week, he sat down and began figuring out their immediate financial obligations. “We can do it,” he decided finally. “But it would be a lot easier on us if we could divide it into two portions, a month apart. Two-fifty this month and the rest next month.”

  “Do what you want,” Susan said, with a tremor of uneasiness. “If you feel it won’t put us in a bad situation. I’ll let you decide.”

  “I’ll write her a check and stick it in the mail right away,” he said. That was the only way he could bring himself to hand out any money to anyone; in the last year or so he had picked up a stern habit of keeping a tight control on all expenses.

  “She must need it,” Susan said, “or she wouldn’t have done a thing like that. Calling up and asking for it.”

  In the end he mailed off a check to Cathy Hermes for the full five hundred dollars. But it brought him no sense of relief.

  Death, he thought, has always been remote from me. My parents are both alive. My brother, too. The closest it ever came, in the past, was when Mrs. Jaffey became ill, left the Garret A. Hobart Grammar School, and finally passed on. And then of course we got this store in Denver because a man we never saw died in an auto accident. But it’s never had a decisive influence on anything affecting me.

  For a moment he thought, Is it possible that Milt went around complaining about money? Complaining because I didn’t pay it back?

  Anyhow, he thought, now it’s only a plain flat sum that somebody I barely know wants and that has to come out of our books, like any other five-hundred-dollar outlay. His reasons for giving it to me -those are gone. Vanished. I never knew; Cathy Hermes doesn’t care; and Milt himself is in no position to think about it one way or another.

  But it’s too bad, he thought, that I’ll always have that hanging over me. Never having known what it was that Milt really meant or felt; whether he changed his mind, or whether he simply did not mean what he said. I didn’t understand him. There was not enough contact.

  It occurred to him, then, that outside of Milton Lumky he had never had any friends at all, and certainly he had none now. Susan and the store made up his entire existence. Was that intentional on his part? Or had he allowed it to drift into that?

  As far as I’m concerned, he decided, they’re enough. Whether it’s right or not. It’s what I want.

  In the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes, Susan said, “Bruce. I want to ask you something. Don’t you miss him?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  He said, “I’ve got too much to think about to miss anybody.”

  “I’ll try to make it up to you,” she said. “Tying you down while you’re so young. It’s a dreadful thing when an older woman does that.”

  He considered that.

  “You could have plowed through one state after another, you and Milt in your cars,” she said. “Had different women; you know.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And here you are, at twenty-six, with a wife ten years older than you, and a step-daughter, and a house and a business to manage. I woke up the other night and I had to get out of bed and go off by myself; I was shivering all over. I sat up for an hour or so. Did you notice that?”

  “No,” he said. He had not awakened.

  Susan said, “Do you still think you might walk off and leave me someday?” She gazed at him. “I don’t think I could stand that. In fact I know I couldn’t.”

  “You mean,” he said, “am I going to die of a kidney ailment because I don’t go to the bathroom often enough during the working day?”

  “When you drove down to Reno to sell the Japanese machines to Mr. von Scharf,” she said. “I was positive you wouldn’t come back.”

  “Is that why you called?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “I was so glad to see you when you came back,” she said. “I didn’t care if you had the machines with you or not.”

  “I see,” he said. But he did not believe her. But it wasn’t important. He had come back, and he was here now.

  “I had my good times,” he said. “Before we were married. Or don’t you remember Peg Googer?”

  Still gazing at him she said, “Are you happy with me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  At that moment Taffy rushed into the kitchen in her bathrobe and slippers, pleading to be allowed to watch a television program to its end. And after that, she informed them, she would go to bed.

  The program had to do with action aboard submarines, and he went in to look at it with her. They sat together on the couch, facing the television set. In the peacefulness of the living room he basked and relaxed and half-dozed. The adventures beneath the water, the submarine fighting for its life against dim sea monsters and Soviet atomic mines, and, later on, the cowboys and spacemen and detectives and all the endless thrilling noisy western adventures, retreated from him. He heard his wife in the kitchen and he was aware of the child beside him, and that brought him his happiness.

  Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. His twin sister, Jane, died in infancy. He started his writing career publishing short stories in magazines. The first of these was ‘Beyond Lies
the Wub’ in 1952. While publishing science fiction prolifically during the 1950s, Dick also wrote a series of mainstream novels, only one of which, Confessions of a Crap Artist, was published during his lifetime. These included titles such as In Milton Lunky Territory. During the 1960s, Dick produced an extraordinary succession of novels, including The Man in the High Castle, which won a Hugo award, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and UBIK. In the 1970s, Dick started to concern himself more directly with metaphysical and theological issues, experiencing a moment of revelation - or breakdown - in March 1974, which became the basis for much of his subsequent writing, in particular Valis, as he strove to make sense of what had happened. He died in 1982, a few weeks before the film Blade Runner opened and introduced his vision to a wider audience.