The Man Who Lost the Sea (32 page)

The general store has passed into the hands of the chains. It, and they, pursue the grail of
everything
, and since to be able to sell everything is on the face of it impossible, they are as impermanent as a military dictatorship that must expand or die, and that dies expanding. But there is another kind of store that sells, not everything, but
anything
. Its hallmark is that it has no grail at all, and therefore no pursuit. It emphatically does not expand. Its stock is that which has been useful or desirable to some people at some time; its only credo, that anything which has been useful or desirable to some people at some time will again be useful to someone—anything. Here you might find dried flowers under a glass dome, a hand-cranked coffee mill, a toy piano, a two-volume, leather-bound copy of
Dibdin’s Journey
, a pair of two-wheel roller skates or a one tube radio set—the tube is a UX-
II
and is missing—which tunes with a vario-coupler. You might—you probably would—also find in such a place, a proprietor who could fix almost anything and has the tools to do it with, and who understands that conversation is important and the most important part of it is listening.

Such a town was North Nyack, New York, barely twenty miles from Manhattan, yet—but for superficial scratches—untouched and unchangeable. It contained such a business, the Anything Shoppe—a title that constituted one of the scratches, being a concession to the transient trade, but one that did not bleed—and such a proprietor. His name was Noat, George Noat. G-Note, naturally, to his friends, who were all the people who knew him. He was the ugliest man in town, but that, like the silliness of his concern’s name, was only skin-deep.

Why such a trade should be his, or why he was its, might make for some interesting discussion of cause and effect. The fact—which would contribute nothing to the discussion—remained that there was an
anythingness
about G-Note; not only would he buy anything,
sell anything or fix anything, he would also listen to anyone, help anyone and, from the depths of a truly extraordinary well of the quality called empathy—the ability to feel with another’s fingertips, look out through another pair of eyes—he could understand.

To George Noat, Prop., then, at twenty minutes to three one stormy morning, came Gorwing.

“G-Note!” Gorwing roared, pounding on the front door of the Anything Shoppe with force enough to set adance the two sets of pony harness and the cabbage grater that hung against it. “G-Note, Goddammit!”

A dim light appeared in the back of the shop, and G-Note’s grotesque face and one T-shirted shoulder, over which a big square hand was pulling a gallus-strap, appeared at the edge of the baize curtain that separated G-Note’s working from G-Note’s living—the most partial of barriers, which suited him. He called, “It’s open!” semaphored and withdrew.

Gorwing, small, quick, black hair, snapping black voice and eyes, sharp white teeth, slammed into the shop. The vibration set a clothing-dummy, atop which was perched a rubber imp carnival mask, teetering, and it turned as it teetered, bearing round on Gorwing indignantly. He and it stared one another in the eye for an angry moment, and then he cursed and snatched off the head and threw it behind the counter. “G-Note!” he barked.

G-Note shuffled into the shop, shrugging into a shawl-like grey cardigan and, with his heavy lids, wringing sleep out of his eyes. “I got that toilet you wanted yesterday,” he mumbled. “Real tall, with pink rosebuds on. I bet there wouldn’t be another like it from here to—”

“The hell with it,” said Gorwing. “That was yesterday. Come on, willya?”

G-Note blinked at him. “Come?”

“The car, in the car!” Gorwing half cried, in the tones of excessive annoyance applied usually to people who should know by now. It was unfair, because by now G-Note did not know. “Hurry up, willya? What do I hafta do to make you hurry up?”

Gorwing flung open the door, and G-Note peered out into sodden blowing black. “It’s raining out.”

Gorwing’s tight lips emitted a single sibilant explosion, and he raced out, leaving the door open. A moment later there came the sound of a car door slamming. G-Note shrugged and followed, closing the door behind him, and, hunching his shoulders against the driving rain, made his way out to the car. Gorwing had started it and switched on the lights while he was negotiating the puddles, then flung open the door on the driver’s side and slid over into the passenger’s seat. He shouted something.

“Huh?” G-Note grunted as he came poking and dripping into the car.

“I said Essex Street and Storms Road, right by the traffic light, and get
goin’
, willya?”

G-Note got himself settled and got going. “Gosh, Gorwing,” he said, protesting gently.

“Quitcher bitchin’,” said Gorwing through clamped teeth and curled lips. “Tromp down on that thing.”

“Where we goin’?”

“I told you.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You’ll see when we get there. There’s some money in it. You think I’d come out on a night like this if there wasn’t some money in it? Listen, G-Note—” He paused with a mechanical abruptness, as if the machine gun with which he fired his words had jammed.

“What?”

Unjammed as suddenly, Gorwing shot: “You wouldn’t let me down.”

“No, I won’t do that, but I wish I knew what I was ’sposed to do.”

They sloshed over the high crown of Storms Hill and down the winding slope on the other side. The slick blacktop showed the loom of lights ahead before they saw the lights themselves—gold tinged with green, suddenly with ruby; the intersection and the traffic signal.

“Cut him out.
Quick!
Don’t let’m pick up that guy.”

Peering ahead, G-Note saw a car slowing for a waving figure who stood at the far side of the intersection. G-Note seemed not to have heard Gorwing’s crackling order, or to have understood; yet it was as if his hands and feet had. The car lurched forward, cut in to the curb at the right of the other, and almost alongside. Startled, the other driver shifted and pulled away up the hill. At Gorwing’s grunted order, G-Note stopped at the curb by the sodden and obviously bewildered pedestrian who had been trying to flag the other car. The man bent and tried to peer into the dark interior. Gorwing rolled down his window.

The man said, “Can you give me a lift?”

Gorwing reached back and opened the rear door, and the man plunged in. “Thank God,” he panted, slamming the door. “I’ve got to get home, but I mean quick. You going near Rockland Lake?”

“We’re going anywhere you say, mister,” said Gorwing. “But it’ll cost.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’re a taxi, hm?”

“We are now.” Gorwing’s hard hand took G-Note’s elbow, squeezed, warned; but, warning or no, G-Note gasped at what came next: “Rockland Lake costs one hundred bucks from here.”

G-Note’s gasp was quite lost in the newcomer’s wordless and indignant sound.

“What’s the matter,” Gorwing rasped, “can’t raise it?”

“What kind of a holdup is this?” squeaked the man.

For the second time Gorwing reached back and swung the rear door open. Then he stretched across G-Note and shut off the motor. In the sudden silence, the sluicing of rain across the roof and the passenger’s angry breath seemed too loud. Gorwing said, at a quarter the volume and twice the rasp, “I don’t much go for that holdup talk.”

The man plunged up and out-half out. He stood, with one foot still in the car, and looked up the road and down the road. Nothing moved but the rain. Clearly, they heard the relay in the traffic light saying
clock, chuck!
as the dim sodden shine of the intersection turned from green to red. To anyone thinking of traffic and transport, it was a persuasive sight. At three in the morning, chances of
anything passing before daylight were remote.

He put his head back in. “Look, whoever you are, I’ve just got to get to Rockland Lake.”

“So by now,” said Gorwing, “we would be past Hook Mountain Road more’n halfway there. But you want to talk.”

The man made his inarticulate sound and got back in. “Go ahead.”

Gorwing, with a touch, checked G-Note’s move toward the ignition. “A hundred bucks?”

“Yes, damn you!”

Gorwing turned the dome light on. “Take a good careful look at him,” he said. Since he might have said it to either of them, they necessarily looked at one another, G-Note twisting around in his seat to look back, the passenger huddled sullen and glaring in the rear corner. G-Note saw a softhanded petulant man in his early thirties, with very fine, rather receding reddish hair and surprisingly bright blue eyes.

G-Note’s great ugly head loomed over him like an approaching rockfall. The domelight, almost directly overhead, accentuated the heavy ridges of bone over his eyes, leaving the eyes themselves all but invisible in their caves. It gleamed from the strong fleshy arches that walled his wide nostrils and conceal the soft sensitivity of his thin upper lip while making the most of the muscular protruding underlip.

“You’ll pay,” said Gorwing, grinning wolfishly and switching off the light. “Drive,” he said, nudging G-Note. He laughed. “I got a witness and you ain’t,” he said cheerfully.

“Just hurry,” said the passenger.

G-Note, wondering more than anything else at the first laugh he had ever heard from Gorwing, drove. He said, unhappily, “This ain’t a fun one, this time.”

“Shut up,” Gorwing said.

“Can’t you go any faster?” cried the passenger.

He got no response. Only the anxious would feel that this skilled hurtling was not fast enough. No object, including an automobile, was inanimate with G-Note’s big hands upon it; this one moved as if it knew its own way and its own weight.

“In here,” said the passenger.

“I always wondered,” said Gorwing. His meaning was clear. Many must have wondered just who lived behind these stone posts, these arresting NO ADMITTANCE and PRIVATE ROAD, KEEP OUT and NO TURNING and DEAD END ROAD signs. The drive climbed, turning, and in fifty yards one would have thought the arterial road below had ceased to exist. They came to a T. Neat little signs with arrows said SMITH on the left and POLLARD on the right. “Left,” said the passenger.

They climbed again, and abruptly the road was manicured, rolled, tended, neat. “This will do.”

There was a turn-around; the drive continued, apparently to a garage somewhere. In the howling wet, there was the shadowed white mass of a house. The man opened the door.

“A hundred bucks,” Gorwing said.

The man took out his wallet. Gorwing turned on the dome

“I have only twenty here. Twenty-one.”

“You got it inside.” It could have been a question.

“Damn it!” the man flared. “Four lousy miles!”

“You was in a awful hurry,” Gorwing drawled. He took the twenty, and the one, out of the man’s hand. “I want the rest of it.”

The man got out of the car and backed off into the rain. From about forty feet, he shrieked at them. He meant, undoubtedly, to roar like a lion, but his voice broke and he shrieked. “Well, I won’t pay it!” and then he ran like a rabbit.

“Yes you will!” Gorwing bellowed. He slammed the back door of the car, which, if heard by the fleeing man, must have doubled his speed.

“Don’t go out in that,” said G-Note.

“Oh, I ain’t about to,” said Gorwing. “He’ll pay in the morning. He’ll pay you.”

“Me?”

“You drop me off home and then come back and park here,” said Gorwing. “Don’t for Pete’s sake go back to bed. You want to sleep any more, you do it right here. When he sees you he’ll pay. You won’t have to say nothing. Just be here.”

G-Note started the car and backed, turning. “Oh, why not just let it go? You got more than it’s worth.”

Gorwing made a laughing noise. This was not the laugh that had amazed G-Note before; it was the one that G-Note had thought was all the laughter Gorwing had. It was also all the answer Gorwing would offer.

G-Note said, sadly, “You
like
doing this to that fellow.”

Gorwing glanced at the road-signs as they pulled out of the driveway. “Private Road,” he read aloud, but not very. It was as if to say, “He can afford it.”

“Well,” said G-Note again, as they neared North Nyack, “This ain’t a fun one, this time.”

There had been “fun ones.” Like the afternoon Gorwing had come roaring and snapping into his place, just as urgently as he had tonight, demanding to know if G-Note had a copy of
Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in The Show Business
, by P. T. Barnum; and G-Note had! And they had tumbled it, with a lot of other old books, into two boxes, and had driven out to the end of Carrio Lane, where Gorwing just knew there was somebody who needed the book—not who, not why, just that there was somebody who needed it—and he and G-Note had stood at opposite sides of the lane, each with a box of books, and had bellowed at each other, “You got the P. T. Barnum book over there?” and “I don’t know if I have the P. T. Barnum book here; have you got the P. T. Barnum book there?” and “What is the name of the P. T. Barnum book?” and
“Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in The Show Business,”
and so on, until, sure enough, a window popped open and a lady called down, “Do one of you men really have Barnum’s biography there?” and, when they said they had, she said it was a miracle; she came down and gave them fifteen dollars for it. And that other time, when at Gorwing’s urgent behest, G-Note had gone on a hot summer’s day to stand blinking in the sun at Broad and Main streets, with a heavy ancient hand-cranked music box unwrapped on his shoulder, and the city man had come running up to him to ask what it played:
“Skater’s Waltz,”
G-Note had told him, “and
My Rosary
.” “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” the man had said, and, when G-Note’s
jaw dropped and fumbled for an astonished word, he’d made it a hundred and a quarter and had paid it, then and there.

Fun ones, these and others, and it hadn’t mattered that the customers (or was it victims?) paid exorbitantly. They did it of their own free will, and they seemed really to
need
whatever it was. How Gorwing knew what was needed, and where—but never by whom or why—was a recurrent mystery; but after a while you stopped asking—because Gorwing wouldn’t stand catechizing on the subject—and then you stopped wondering; you just went along with it, the way you do with automatic shifting, the innards of an IBM machine, or, if you happen not to know, precisely what chemicals are put into the head of a match to make it light. You don’t
have
to know.