Bagombo Snuff Box (34 page)

He raised his right hand, looked at a spot on the wall, gave
a hoarsely wretched chuckle. “Present,” he said.

“Oh, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz, “I didn’t see you.”

“The invisible man,” said Wehling.

“They just phoned me that your triplets have been born,”
said Dr. Hitz. “They’re all fine, and so is the mother. I’m on my way in to see
them now.”

“Hooray,” said Wehling emptily.

“You don’t sound very happy,” said Dr. Hitz.

“What man in my shoes wouldn’t be happy?” said Wehling. He
gestured with his hands to symbolize the carefree simplicity. “All I have to
do is pick out which one of the triplets is going to live, then deliver my
maternal grandfather to the Happy Hooligan, and come back here with a receipt.”

Dr. Hitz became rather severe with Wehling, towered over
him. “You don’t believe in population control, Mr. Wehling?” he said.

“I think it’s perfectly keen,” said Wehling.

“Would you like to go back to the good old days, when the
population of the earth was twenty billion—about to become forty billion, then
eighty billion, then one hundred and sixty billion? Do you know what a drupelet
is, Mr. Wehling?” said Hitz.

“Nope,” said Wehling, sulking.

“A drupelet, Mr. Wehling, is one of the little knobs, one of
the little pulpy grains, of a blackberry,” said Dr. Hitz. “Without population
control, human beings would now be packed on the surface of this old planet
like drupelets on a blackberry! Think of it!”

Wehling continued to stare at the spot on the wall.

“In the year 2000,” said Dr. Hitz, “before scientists
stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn’t even enough drinking water to go
around, and nothing to eat but seaweed—and still people insisted on their right
to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever.”

“I want those kids,” said Wehling. “I want all three of
them.”

“Of course you do,” said Dr. Hitz. “That’s only human.”

“I don’t want my grandfather to die, either,” said Wehling.

“Nobody’s really happy about taking a close relative to the
Catbox,” said Dr. Hitz sympathetically.

“I wish people wouldn’t call it that,” said Leora Duncan.

“What?” said Dr. Hitz.

“I wish people wouldn’t call it the Catbox, and things like
that,” she said. “It gives people the wrong impression.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Dr. Hitz. “Forgive me.” He
corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a
title no one ever used in conversation. “I should have said ‘Ethical Suicide
Studios,’” he said.

“That sounds so much better,” said Leora Duncan.

“This child of yours—whichever one you decide to keep, Mr.
Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz. “He or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean,
rich planet, thanks to population control. In a garden like in that mural
there.” He shook his head. “Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a
hell that nobody thought could last another twenty years. Now centuries of
peace and plenty stretch before us as far as the imagination cares to travel.”

He smiled luminously.

The smile faded when he saw that Wehling had just drawn a
revolver.

Wehling shot Dr. Hitz dead. “There’s room for one—a great
big one,” he said.

And then he shot Leora Duncan. “It’s only death,” he said to
her as she fell. “There! Room for two.”

And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his
children.

Nobody came running. Nobody, it seemed, had heard the shots.

The painter sat on the top of his stepladder, looking down reflectively
on the sorry scene. He pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be
born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as
long as possible—to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last
forever.

All the answers that the painter could think of were grim.
Even grimmer, surely, than a Catbox, a Happy Hooligan, an Easy Go. He thought
of war. He thought of plague. He thought of starvation.

He knew that he would never paint again. He let his
paintbrush fall to the dropcloths below. And then he decided he had had about
enough of the Happy Garden of Life, too, and he came slowly down from the
ladder.

He took Wehling’s pistol, really intending to shoot himself.
But he didn’t have the nerve.

And then he saw the telephone booth in a corner of the room.
He went to it, dialed the well-remembered number: “Federal Bureau of
Termination,” said the warm voice of a hostess.

“How soon could I get an appointment?” he asked, speaking
carefully.

“We could probably fit you in late this afternoon, sir,” she
said. “It might even be earlier, if we get a cancellation.”

‘All right,” said the painter, “fit me in, if you please.”
And he gave her his name, spelling it out.

“Thank you, sir,” said the hostess. “Your city thanks you,
your country thanks you, your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all
is from future generations.”

Herb White keeps books for the various businesses around our
town, and he makes out practically everybody’s income tax. Our town is North
Crawford, New Hampshire. Herb never got to college, where he would have done
well. He learned about bookkeeping and taxes by mail. Herb fought in Korea,
came home a hero. And he married Sheila Hinckley, a very pretty, intelligent
woman practically all the men in my particular age group had hoped to marry. My
particular age group is thirty-three, thirty-four, and thirty-five years old,
these days.

On Sheila’s wedding day we were twenty-one, twenty-two, and
twenty-three. On Sheila’s wedding night we all went down to North Crawford
Manor and drank. One poor guy got up on the bar and spoke approximately as
follows:

“Gentlemen, friends, brothers, I’m sure we wish the newlyweds
nothing but happiness. But at the same time I have to say that the pain in our
hearts will never die. And I propose that we form a permanent brotherhood of
eternal sufferers, to aid each other in any way we can, though Lord knows there’s
very little anybody can do for pain like ours.”

The crowd thought that was a fine idea.

Hay Boyden, who later became a house mover and wrecker, said
we ought to call ourselves the Brotherhood of People Who Were Too Dumb to
Realize That Sheila Hinckley Might Actually Want to Be a Housewife. Hay had
boozy, complicated reasons for suggesting that. Sheila had been the smartest
girl in high school, and had been going like a house afire at the University of
Vermont, too. We’d all assumed there wasn’t any point in serious courting until
she’d finished college.

And then, right in the middle of her junior year, she’d quit
and married Herb.

“Brother Boyden,” said the drunk up on the bar, “I think
that is a sterling suggestion. But in all humility I offer another title for
our organization, a title in all ways inferior to yours except that it’s about
ten thousand times easier to say. Gentlemen, friends, brothers, I propose we
call ourselves ‘Lovers Anonymous.’”

The motion carried. The drunk up on the bar was me.

And like a lot of crazy things in small, old-fashioned towns,
Lovers Anonymous lived on and on. Whenever several of us from that old gang
happen to get together, somebody is sure to say, “Lovers Anonymous will please
come to order.” And it is still a standard joke in town to tell anybody who’s
had his heart broken lately that he should join LA. Don’t get me wrong. Nobody
in LA still pines for Sheila. We’ve all more or less got Sheilas of our own. We
think about Sheila more than we think about some of our other old girls, I
suppose, mainly because of that crazy LA. But as Will Battola, the plumber,
said one time, “Sheila Hinckley is now a spare whitewall tire on the
Thunderbird of my dreams.”

Then about a month ago my good wife served a sordid little
piece of news along with the after-dinner coffee and macaroons. She said that
Herb and Sheila weren’t speaking to each other anymore.

“Now, what are you doing spreading idle gossip like that
for?” I said.

“I thought it was my duty to tell you,” she said, “since you’re
the lover-in-chief of Lovers Anonymous.”

“I was merely present at the founding,” I said, “and as you
well know, that was many, many years ago.”

“Well, I think you can start un-founding,” she said.

“Look,” I said, “there aren’t many laws of life that stand
up through the ages, but this is one of the few: People who are contemplating
divorce do not buy combination aluminum storm windows and screens for a
fifteen-room house.” That is my business—combination aluminum storm windows
and screens, and here and there a bathtub enclosure. And it was a fact that
very recently Herb had bought thirty-seven Fleetwood windows, which is our
first-line window, for the fifteen-room ark he called home.

“Families that don’t even eat together don’t keep together
very long,” she said.

“What do you know about their eating habits?” I wanted to
know.

“Nothing I didn’t find out by accident,” she said. “I was collecting
money for the Heart Fund yesterday.” Yesterday was Sunday. “I happened to get
there just when they were having Sunday dinner, and there were the girls and
Sheila at the dinner table, eating—and no Herb.”

“He was probably out on business somewhere,” I said.

“That’s what I told myself,” she said. “But then on my way
to the next house I had to go by their old ell—where they keep the firewood and
the garden tools.”

“Go on.”

“And Herb was in there, sitting on a box and eating lunch
off a bigger box. I never saw anybody look so sad.”

The next day Kennard Pelk, a member of LA in good standing
and our chief of police, came into my showroom to complain about a bargain
storm window that he had bought from a company that had since gone out of
business. “The glass part is stuck halfway up and the screen is rusted out,” he
said, “and the aluminum is covered with something that looks like blue sugar.”

“That’s a shame,” I said.

“The reason I turn to you is, I don’t know where else I can
get service.”

“With your connections,” I said, “couldn’t you find out
which penitentiary they put the manufacturers in?”

I finally agreed to go over and do what I could, but only if
he understood that I wasn’t representing the entire industry. “The only
windows I stand behind,” I said, “are the ones I sell.”

And then he told me a screwy thing he’d seen in Herb White’s
rotten old ell the night before. Kennard had been on his way home in the police
cruiser at about two a.m. The thing he’d seen in Herb White’s ell was a candle.

“I mean, that old house has fifteen rooms, not counting the
ell,” said Kennard, “and a family of four—five, if you count the dog. And I
couldn’t understand how anybody, especially at that time of night, would want
to go out to the ell. I thought maybe it was a burglar.”

“The only thing worth stealing in that house is the
Fleetwood windows.”

“Anyway, it was my duty to investigate,” said Kennard. “So I
snook up to a window and looked in. And there was Herb on a mattress on the
floor. He had a bottle of liquor and a glass next to him, and he had a candle
stuck in another bottle, and he was reading a magazine by candlelight.”

“That was a fine piece of police work,” I said.

“He saw me outside the window, and I came closer so he could
see who I was. The window was open, so I said to him, ‘Hi—I was just wondering
who was out here,’ and he said, ‘Robinson Crusoe.’”

“Robinson Crusoe?” I said.

“Yeah. He was very sarcastic with me,” said Kennard. “He
asked me if I had the rest of Lovers Anonymous with me. I told him no. And then
he asked me if a man’s home was still his castle, as far as the police were concerned,
or whether that had been changed lately.”

“So what did you say, Kennard?” “What was there to say? I
buttoned up my holster and went home.”

Herb White himself came into my showroom right after Kennard
left. Herb had the healthy, happy, excited look people sometimes get when they
come down with double pneumonia. “I want to buy three more Fleetwood windows,”
he said.

“The Fleetwood is certainly a product that everybody can be
enthusiastic about,” I said, “but I think you’re overstepping the bounds of
reason. You’ve got Fleetwoods all around right now.”

“I want them for the ell,” he said.

“Do you feel all right, Herb?” I asked. “You haven’t even
got furniture in half the rooms we’ve already made wind-tight. Besides, you
look feverish.”

“I’ve just been taking a long, hard look at my life, is all,”
he said. “Now, do you want the business or not?” “The storm window business is
based on common sense, and I’d just as soon keep it that way,” I replied. “That
old ell of yours hasn’t had any work done on it for I’ll bet fifty years. The
clapboards are loose, the sills are shot, and the wind whistles through the
gaps in the foundation. You might as well put storm windows on a shredded wheat
biscuit.”

“I’m having it restored,” he said.

“Is Sheila expecting a baby?”

He narrowed his eyes. “I sincerely hope not,” he said, “for
her sake, for my sake, and for the sake of the child.”

I had lunch that day at the drugstore. About half of Lovers
Anonymous had lunch at the drugstore. When I sat down, Selma Deal, the woman
back of the counter, said, “Well, you great lover, got a quorum now. What you
gonna vote about?”

Hay Boyden, the house mover and wrecker, turned to me. “Any
new business, Mr. President?”

“I wish you people would quit calling me Mr. President,” I
said. “My marriage has never been one hundred percent ideal, and I wouldn’t be
surprised that was the fly in the ointment.”

“Speaking of ideal marriages,” said Will Battola, the
plumber, “you didn’t by chance sell some more windows to Herb White, did you?”