Steel (15 page)

He paused. How to continue, he wondered, how go on with this concluding ledger of man's account? It demanded bite, a trenchant instantaneity and yet deceptive calm like forty fathom sea when gales are shrieking overhead. As there, so here, he thought, I must suggest the titanic with polished and well-mannered couplets. As for instance:

Tell me here

What difference there

To burn in bias

Or burn in fires.

I have no audience nor hope of one yet I go on composing till what needs be said is said. And then I go—my own way.

He reached into his pocket for the twenty-seventh time and drawing out the pistol, rolled its chamber with reflective finger. One bullet there he knew, his key to final rest. He gazed into the barrel's dark eye and did not quail. Yes, when it ends, he thought, when I have savored to the dregs this dark wine of most utter ruination, I shall press this to my head and blow away the last of man's complaints.

But now, he thought, back to my work. I have not done with mankind yet. A few words still remain, several discourteous racks of poesy. Shall I dispose so soon of what men always wanted most—the last word?

He flourished stylus, wrote:

Be this the final entry

In mankind's book of psalms

He knit his shroud with atoms

And dug his grave with bombs.

No. No, that did not catch the temper. He scratched it out. Let me see, he tapped a nail upon eroded teeth. What can I say? Ah!

Man the better

Man the higher

Man the pumps

The world's on fire.

But is this all quite fair, he mused amid chuckling, that I, as sole survivor, make such light of this unnatural tragedy which is the fall of man. Should I not instead sing out of mountainous regrets and summon tidal panegyrics which would wash away all bitterness with one great, cleansing surge. Should I not?

Man, man, he brooded, what have you done with your so excellent a world? Was it so small that you should scorn it, so drafty you should heat it to an incandescence, so unsightly you should rearrange its mountains and its seas?

“Ah,” he said, “oh …
ah!
”

His hands fell limp. A tear, two tears ran down his beak-shape nose to quiver on the tip, then fall upon the ground. And hiss.

What portent this, his mind groaned on, that I should be the last of Man's embittered tribe. The very last! Portent this, vast moment this—to be alone in all the world!

It is too much, he cried aloud within his head. I reel at the significance. He fingered the gun. How can I bear to hold this crushing weight upon my shoulders? Are my words appropriate, my sentiments all fit for this immensity of meaning?

He blinked, released the pistol. He was insulted by the question. What,
I
not up to it; what,
my
words inappropriate? He straightened up and bristled at the ash-envapored sky.

It is
fitting
, he declared, that these last measures be composed by a man alone. For shall a pack of masons clamor round the stone, entangling arms in clumsy eagerness to chisel out man's epitaph? And shall a host of scriveners haggle endlessly on man's obituary, muttering and wrangling like a coachless football team in huddle?

No this is best—one man to suffer beautiful agonies, one voice to speak the final words, then dot the i's and cross the t's and so farewell to Man's domain—ending, if not sustaining, in gentle poetry.

And
I
that man,
I
that voice! Blessed with this final opportunity, my words alone without a million others to dilute them, my phrases only to ring out through all eternity, uncontradicted.

He sighed, he wrote again.

It took this to make me individual

The killing of all men

Yea …

His head jerked up, alarmed, as, from far across the rubbled plain there came a sound.

“Eh?” he muttered. “What be that?”

He blinked, re-focused blood-streaked eyes, shook his head, squinted. And then his lower jaw slipped down and down until his mouth became a yawning cave.

A man was hobbling across the plain, waving a crooked arm at him. He watched the ashes rise in clouds of powder around the limping man and, in his mind, a great numbness struck.

A fellow creature! A comrade, another voice to hear, another …

The man stumbled up.

“Friend!” cried the man from out his startled face.

And abrubtly, hearing this human voice usurp the mountainous, brooding silence, something suddenly snapped within the poet's brain.

“I shall not be robbed!” he cried. And he shot the man neatly between the eyes. Then he stepped across the peaceful body and went over to another rock of fused sidewalk.

He sat, shook back his sleeve. And, just before he bent to work again, he spun the empty chambers in his hand.

Ah, well, he sighed, for this moment, to have this glorious, shining doom alone—it was worth it.

Sonnet to a Parboiled Planet
, he began …

THE SPLENDID SOURCE

Then spare me your slanders, and read this rather at night than in the daytime, and give it not to young maidens, if there be any … But I fear nothing for this book, since it is extracted from a high and splendid source, from which all that has issued has had a great success.

—Balzac:
Contes Drolatiques
, Prologue

It was the one Uncle Lyman told in the summer house that did it. Talbert was just coming up the path when he heard the punch line: “‘My God!' cried the actress, ‘I thought you said
sarsaparilla!
'”

Guffaws exploded in the little house. Talbert stood motionless, looking through the rose trellis at the laughing guests. Inside his contour sandals his toes flexed ruminatively. He thought.

Later he took a walk around Lake Bean and watched the crystal surf fold over and observed the gliding swans and stared at the goldfish and thought.

“I've been thinking,” he said that night.

“No,” said Uncle Lyman, haplessly. He did not commit himself further. He waited for the blow.

Which fell.

“Dirty jokes,” said Talbert Bean III.

“I beg your pardon?” said Uncle Lyman.

“Endless tides of them covering the nation.”

“I fail,” said Uncle Lyman, “to grasp the point.” Apprehension gripped his voice.

“I find the subject fraught with witchery,” said Talbert.

“With—?”

“Consider,” said Talbert. “Every day, all through our land, men tell off-color jokes; in bars and at ball games; in theater lobbies and at places of business; on street corners and in locker rooms. At home and away, a veritable deluge of jokes.”

Talbert paused meaningfully,

“
Who makes them up?
” he asked.

Uncle Lyman stared at his nephew with the look of a fisherman who has just hooked a sea serpent—half awe, half revulsion.

“I'm afraid—” he began.

“I want to know the source of these jokes,” said Talbert. “Their genesis; their fountainhead.”

“
Why?
” asked Uncle Lyman. Weakly.

“Because it is relevant,” said Talbert. “Because these jokes are a part of a culture heretofore unplumbed. Because they are an anomaly; a phenomenon ubiquitous yet unknown.”

Uncle Lyman did not speak. His pallid hands curled limply on his half-read
Wall Street Journal.
Behind the polished octagons of his glasses his eyes were suspended berries.

At last he sighed.

“And what part,” he inquired sadly, “am I to play in this quest?”

“We must begin,” said Talbert, “with the joke you told in the summer house this afternoon. Where did you hear it?”

“Kulpritt,” Uncle Lyman said. Andrew Kulpritt was one of the battery of lawyers employed by Bean Enterprises.

“Capital,” said Talbert. “Call him up and ask him where
he
heard it.”

Uncle Lyman drew the silver watch from his pocket.

“It's nearly midnight, Talbert,” he announced.

Talbert waved away chronology.

“
Now
,” he said. “This is important.”

Uncle Lyman examined his nephew a moment longer. Then, with a capitulating sigh, he reached for one of Bean Mansion's thirty-five telephones.

Talbert stood toe-flexed on a bearskin rug while Uncle Lyman dialed, waited and spoke.

“Kulpritt?” said Uncle Lyman. “Lyman Bean. Sorry to wake you but Talbert wants to know where you heard the joke about the actress who thought the director said sarsaparilla.”

Uncle Lyman listened. “I said—” he began again.

A minute later he cradled the receiver heavily.

“Prentiss,” he said.

“Call him up,” said Talbert.

“
Talbert
,” Uncle Lyman asked.

“Now,” said Talbert.

A long breath exuded between Uncle Lyman's lips. Carefully, he folded his
Wall Street Journal.
He reached across the mahogany table and tamped out his ten-inch cigar. Sliding a weary hand beneath his smoking jacket, he withdrew his tooled leather address book.

Prentiss heard it from George Sharper, CPA Sharper heard it from Abner Ackerman, MD. Ackerman heard it from William Cozener, Prune Products. Cozener heard it from Rod Tassell, Mgr., Cyprian Club. Tassell heard it from O. Winterbottom. Winterbottom heard it from H. Alberts. Alberts heard it from D. Silver, Silver from B. Phryne, Phryne from E. Kennelly.

By an odd twist Kennelly said he heard it from Uncle Lyman.

“There is complicity here,” said Talbert. “These jokes are not self-generative.”

It was four a.m. Uncle Lyman slumped, inert and dead-eyed, on his chair.

“There has to be a source,” said Talbert.

Uncle Lyman remained motionless.

“
You're not interested
,” said Talbert, incredulously.

Uncle Lyman made a noise.

“I don't understand,” said Talbert. “Here is a situation pregnant with divers fascinations. Is there a man or woman who has never heard an off-color joke? I say not. Yet, is there a man or woman who knows where these jokes come from? Again I say not.”

Talbert strode forcefully to his place of musing at the twelve-foot fireplace. He poised there, staring in.

“I may be a millionaire,” he said, “but I am sensitive.” He turned. “And this phenomenon excites me.”

Uncle Lyman attempted to sleep while retaining the face of a man awake.

“I have always had more money than I needed,” said Talbert. “Capital investment was unnecessary. Thus I turned to investing the other asset my father left—my brain.”

Uncle Lyman stirred; a thought shook loose.

“What ever happened,” he asked, “to that society of yours, the S.P.C.S.P.C.A.?”

“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? The past.”

“What about that sociological treatise you were writing…”

“
Slums: A Positive View?
” Talbert brushed it aside. “Inconsequence.”

“Isn't there anything left of your political party, the Pro-antidisestablishmentarianists?”

“Not a shred. Scuttled by reactionaries from within.”

“What about Bimetallism?”

Talbert smiled ruefully. “Passé, dear Uncle. I had been reading too many Victorian novels.”

“Speaking of novels, what about your literary criticisms?
The Use of the Semicolon in Jane Austen? Horatio Alger: The Misunderstood Satirist?
To say nothing of
Was Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare?
”

“
Was Shakespeare Queen Elizabeth
,” corrected Talbert. “No, Uncle, nothing doing with them. They had momentary interest, not more…”

“I suppose the same holds true for
The Shoe Horn: Pro and Con
, eh? And those scientific articles—
Relativity Re-Examined
and
Is Evolution Enough?
”

“Dead and gone,” said Talbert, patiently. “Those projects needed me once. Now I go on to better things.”

“Like who writes dirty jokes,” said Uncle Lyman.

Talbert nodded.

“Like that,” he said.

*   *   *

When the butler set the breakfast tray on the bed Talbert said, “Redfield, do you know any jokes?”

Redfield looked out impassively through the face an improvident nature had neglected to animate.

“Jokes, sir?” he inquired.

“You know,” said Talbert. “Jollities.”

Redfield stood by the bed like a corpse whose casket had been upended and removed.

“Well, sir,” he said, a full thirty seconds later, “once, when I was a boy I heard one…”

“Yes?” said Talbert eagerly.

“I believe it went somewhat as follows,” Redfield said. “When—uh—
When
is a portmanteau not a—”

“No, no,” said Talbert, shaking his head. “I mean
dirty
jokes.”

Redfield's eyebrows soared. The vernacular was like a fish in his face.

“You don't know any?” said a disappointed Talbert.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Redfield. “If I may make a suggestion. May I say that the chauffeur is more likely to—”

“You know any dirty jokes, Harrison?” Talbert asked through the tube as the Rolls Royce purred along Bean Road toward Highway 27.

Harrison looked blank for a moment. He glanced back at Talbert. Then a grin wrinkled his carnal jowls.

“Well, sir,” he began, “there's this guy sittin' by the burlesque runway eatin' an onion, see?”

Talbert unclipped his four-color pencil.