Job: A Comedy of Justice (26 page)

When I woke up it was pitch dark.

I came wide awake. Margrethe was still snoring softly on my arm. I shook her a little “Honey. Wake up.”

“Mrrrf?”

“It’s late. We may have missed dinner.”

She came quickly awake. “Can you switch on the bed lamp?”

I fumbled at the bedside table, nearly fell out of bed. “Can’t find the pesky thing. It’s dark as the inside of a pile of coal. Wait a sec, I’ll get the overhead light.”

I got cautiously off the bed, headed for the door, stumbled over a chair, could not find the door—groped for it, did find it, groped some more and found a light switch by it. The overhead light came on.

For a long, dismal moment neither of us said anything. Then I said, inanely and unnecessarily, “They did it again.”

The room had the characterless anonymity of any cheap motel room anywhere. Nevertheless it was different in details from the room in which we had gone to sleep.

And our hoarded silver dollars were gone.

Everything but the clothes we were wearing was gone—knapsack, clean socks, spare underwear, comb, safety razor, everything. I inspected, made certain.

“Well, Marga, what now?”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

“Mmm. I don’t think they’ll know me in the kitchen. But they still might let me wash dishes.”

“Or they may need a waitress.”

The door had a spring lock and I had no key, so I left it an inch ajar. The door led directly outdoors and looked across a parking court at the office—a corner room with a lighted sign reading OFFICE—all commonplace except that it did not match the appearance of the motel in which we had been working. In that establishment the manager’s office had been in the front end of a central building, the rest of that central building being the coffee shop.

Yes, we had missed dinner.

And breakfast. This motel did not have a coffee shop.

“Well, Marga?”

“Which way is Kansas?”

“That way… I think. But we have two choices. We can go back into the room, go to bed properly, and sleep until daylight. Or we can get out there on the highway and try to thumb a ride. In the dark.”

“Alec, I see only
one
choice. If we go back inside and go to bed, we’ll get up at daylight, some hours hungrier and no better off. Maybe worse off, if they catch us sleeping in a room we didn’t pay for—”

“I washed an awful lot of dishes!”

“Not here, you didn’t. Here they might send for the police.”

We started walking.

That was typical of the persecution we suffered in trying to get to Kansas. Yes, I said “persecution.” If paranoia consists in believing that the world around you is a conspiracy against you, I had become paranoid. But it was either a “sane” paranoia (if you will pardon the Irishism), or I was suffering from delusions so monumental that I should be locked up and treated.

Maybe so. If so, Margrethe was part of my delusions—an answer I could not accept. It could not be
folie à deux;
Margrethe was sane in any world.

It was the middle of the day before we got anything to eat, and by then I was beginning to see ghosts where a healthy man would see only dust devils. My hat had gone where the woodbine twineth and the New Mexico sun on my head was not helping my state.

A carload of men from a construction site picked us up and took us into Grants, and bought us lunch before they left us there. I may be certifiably insane but I am not stupid; we owe that ride and that meal to the fact that Margrethe in shorts indecently tight is a sight that attracts the attention of men. That gave me plenty to think about while I enjoyed (and I did enjoy it!) that lunch they bought us. But I kept my ruminations to myself.

After they left us I said, “East?”

“Yes, sir. But first I would like to check the public library. If there is one.”

“Oh, yes! Surely.” Earlier, in the world of our friend Steve, the lack of any sort of air travel had caused me to suspect that Steve’s world might be the world where Margrethe was born (and therefore the home of “Alec Graham” as well). In Gallup we had checked on this at the public library—I had looked up American history in an encyclopedia while Marga checked on Danish history. It took us each about five minutes to determine that Steve’s world was not the world Marga was born in. I found that Bryan had been elected in 1896 but had died in office, succeeded by his vice president, Arthur Sewall—and that was all I needed to know; I then simply raced through presidents and wars I had never heard of.

Margrethe had finished her line of investigation with her nose twitching with indignation. Once outside where we didn’t have to whisper I asked her what was troubling her. “This isn’t your world, dear; I made sure of that.”

“It certainly isn’t!”

“But we didn’t have anything but a negative to go on. There may be many worlds that have no aeronautics of any sort.”

“I’m glad this isn’t my world! Alec, in this world
Denmark is part of Sweden.
Isn’t that terrible?”

Truthfully I did not understand her upset. Both countries are Scandinavian, pretty much alike—or so it seemed to me. “I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know much about such things.” (I had been to Stockholm once, liked the place. It didn’t seem a good time to tell her so.)

“And that silly book says that Stockholm is the capital and that Carl Sixteenth is king. Alec, he isn’t even royal! And now they tell me he’s
my
king!”

“But, sweetheart, he’s not your king. This isn’t even your world.”

“I know. Alec? If we have to settle here—if the world doesn’t change again—couldn’t I be naturalized?”

“Why, yes. I suppose so.”

She sighed. “I don’t want to be a Swede.”

I kept quiet. There were some things I couldn’t help her with.

So in Grants we again went to a public library to see what the latest changes had done to the world. Since we had seen no
aeroplanos
and no dirigibles, again it was possible that we were in Margrethe’s world. This time I looked first under “Aeronautics”—did not find dirigibles but did find flying machines…invented by Dr. Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil early in this century—and I was bemused by the inventor’s name, as, in my world, he had been a pioneer in dirigibles second only to Count von Zeppelin. Apparently the doctor’s aerodynes were primitive compared with jet planes, or even
aeroplanos;
they seemed to be curiosities rather than commercial vehicles. I dropped it and turned to American history, checking first on William Jennings Bryan.

I couldn’t find him at all. Well, I had known that this was not my world.

But Marga was all smiles, could hardly wait to get outside the no-talking area to tell me about it. “In this world Scandinavia is all one big country…and København is its capital!”

“Well, good!”

“Queen Margrethe’s son Prince Frederik was crowned King Eric Gustav—no doubt to please the outlanders. But he is true Danish royalty and a Dane right down to his skull bone. This is as it should be!”

I tried to show her that I was happy, too. Without a cent between us, with no idea where we would sleep that night, she was delighted as a child at Christmas…over an event that I could not see mattered at all.

Two short rides got us into Albuquerque and I decided that it was prudent to stay there a bit—it’s a big place—even if we had to throw ourselves on Salvation Army charity. But I quickly found a job as a dishwasher in the coffee shop of the local Holiday Inn and Margrethe went to work as a waitress in the same shop.

We had been working there less than two hours when she came back to the scullery and slid something into my hip pocket while I was bent over a sink. “A present for you, dear!”

I turned around. “Hi, Gorgeous.” I checked my pocket—a safety razor of the travel sort—handle unscrews, and razor and handle and blades all fit into a waterproof case smaller than a pocket Testament, and intended to be carried in a pocket. “Steal it?”

“Not quite. Tips. Got it at the lobby notions stand. Dear, at your first break I want you to shave.”

“Let me clue you, doll. You get hired for your looks. I get hired for my strong back, weak mind, and docile disposition. They don’t care how I look.”

“But I do.”

“Your slightest wish is my command. Now get out of here; you’re slowing up production.”

That night Margrethe explained why she had bought me a razor ahead of anything else. “Dear, it’s not just because I like your face smooth and your hair short—although I do! These Loki tricks have kept on and each time we have to find work at once just to eat. You say that nobody cares how a dishwasher looks…but
I
say looking clean and neat helps in getting hired for
any
job, and can’t possibly hurt.

“But there is another reason. As a result of these changes, you’ve had to let your whiskers grow once, twice—I can count five times, once for over three days. Dearest, when you are freshly shaved, you stand tall and look happy. And that makes me happy.”

Margrethe made for me a sort of money belt—actually a cloth pocket and a piece of cloth tape—which she wanted me to wear in bed. “Dear, we’ve lost anything we didn’t have on us whenever a shift took place. I want you to put your razor and our hard money into this when you undress for bed.”

“I don’t think we can outwit Satan that easily.”

“Maybe not. We can try. We come through each change with the clothes we are wearing at the time and with whatever we have in our pockets. This seems to fit the rules.”

“Chaos does not have rules.”

“Perhaps this is not chaos. Alec, if you won’t wear this to bed, do you mind if I do?”

“Oh, I’ll wear it. It won’t stop Satan if he really wants to take it away from us. Nor does it really worry me. Once he dumped us mother naked into the Pacific and we pulled out of it—remember? What
does
worry me is—Marga, have you noticed that every time we have gone through a change we’ve been holding each other? At least holding hands?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Change happens in the blink of an eye. What happens if we’re not together, holding each other? At least touching? Tell me.”

She kept quiet so long that I knew she did not intend to answer.

“Uh huh,” I said. “Me, too. But we
can’t
be Siamese twins, touching all the time. We have to work. My darling, my life, Satan or Loki or whatever bad spirit is doing this to us, can separate us forever simply by picking any instant when we are not touching.”

“Alec.”

“Yes, my love?”

“Loki has been able to do this to us at any moment for a long time. It has not happened.”

“So it may happen the next second.”

“Yes. But it may not happen at all.”

We moved on, and suffered more changes. Margrethe’s precautions did seem to work—although in one change they seemed to work almost too well; I barely missed a jail sentence for unlawful possession of silver coins. But a quick change (the quickest we had seen) got rid of the charge, the evidence, and the complaining witness. We found ourselves in a strange courtroom and were quickly evicted for lacking tickets entitling us to remain there.

But the razor stayed with me; no cop or sheriff or marshal seemed to want to confiscate that.

We were moving on by our usual method (my thumb and Margrethe’s lovely legs; I had long since admitted to myself that I might as well enjoy the inevitable) and had been dropped in a pretty part of—Texas, it must have been—by a trucker who had turned north off 66 on a side road.

We had come out of the desert into low green hills. It was a beautiful day but we were tired, hungry, sweaty, and dirty, for our persecutors—Satan or whoever—had outdone themselves: three changes in thirty-six hours.

In one day I had had two dishwashing jobs in the same town at the same address…and had collected nothing. It is difficult to collect from The Lonesome Cowboy Steak House when it turns into Vivian’s Grill in front of your eyes. The same was true three hours later when Vivian’s Grill melted into a used-car lot. The only thing good about these shocks was that by great good fortune (or conspiracy?) Margrethe was with me each time—in one case she had come to get me and was waiting with me while my boss was figuring my time, in the other she had been working with me.

The third change did us out of a night’s lodging that had already been paid for in kind by Margrethe’s labor.

So when that trucker dropped us, we were tired and hungry and dirty and my paranoia had reached a new high.

We had been walking a few hundred yards when we came to a sweet little stream, a sight in Texas precious beyond all else.

We stopped on the culvert bridging it. “Margrethe, how would you like to wade in that?”

“Darling, I’m going to do more than wade in it, I’m going to bathe in it.”

“Hmm—Yes, go under the fence, along the stream about fifty, seventy-five yards, and I don’t think anyone could see us from the road.”

“Sweetheart, they can line up and cheer if they want to; I’m going to have a bath. And—That water looks clean. Would it be safe to drink?”

“The upstream side? Certainly. We’ve taken worse chances every day since the iceberg. Now if we had something to eat—Say, your hot fudge sundae. Or would you prefer scrambled eggs?” I held up the lower wire of the fence to let her crawl under.

“Will you settle for an Oh Henry bar?”

“Make that a Milky Way,” I answered, “if I have my druthers.”

“I’m afraid you don’t, dear. An Oh Henry bar is all there is.” She held the wire for me.

“Maybe we’d better stop talking about food we don’t have,” I said, and crawled under—straightened up and added, “I’m ready to eat raw skunk.”

“Food we do have, dear man. I have an Oh Henry in my tote.”

I stopped abruptly. “Woman, if you’re joking, I’m going to beat you.”

“I’m not joking.”

“In Texas it is legal to correct a wife with a stick not thicker than one’s thumb.” I held up my thumb. “Do you see one about this size?”

“I’ll find one.”

“Where did you get a candy bar?”

“That roadside stop where Mr. Facelli treated us to coffee and doughnuts.”

Mr. Facelli had been our middle-of-the-night ride just before the truck that had just dropped us. Two small cake doughnuts each and the sugar and cream for coffee had been our only calories for twenty-four hours.