John D. MacDonald

That Mess Last Year

This is Bud Lide’s story and I heard it in a Third Avenue bar and it is pretty obvious that Bud will never put it in his terse journalese because he, as much as anyone, wants to avoid one of those quilted cells that they give you for writing about that sort of thing.

We were in a booth, four of us, and it was that afternoon last week when little Jimmy Derider swung on Walker, the City Editor, and was tossed out. Bud Lide, who had been out west for several months doing something or other, sat and listened while the conversation turned from Jimmy Derider and became general — the topic being all of the people in the world who are small, weak, afraid and ineffectual. Jimmy was one of those. After fifteen years of being bullied by Walker, he had finally made a weak attempt to punch Walker’s face in.

One of the things that none of us mentioned was the way Bud Lide was drinking. He had been drinking ever since he got back from his extended stay in the mesa country. It worried the rest of us and we had the idea that by ignoring him, he’d be helped to fight his way up out of his alcoholic haze.

Bud Lide is maybe forty — a gaunt dark man with hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes, stringy limbs and a perpetual slouch. He does a lot of special assignment work.

Anyway, in the middle of our little talk, Bud Lide came up for air and said, “You fellows better be thankful that you’ve never seen what happens when one of the little guys of this world gets unlimited power.”

“Like Hitler?” I asked.

“No. I mean unlimited physical power. Individual power.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Bud,” Joe said. “If a man is a weakling, how’s he going to get unlimited physical power? It’s a contradiction of terms.”

Bud drained the rest of his drink and yelled for a refill. He put his sharp elbows on the table and looked around at us, his deep-set eyes glowing in a way that made me uncomfortable.

“Any of you guys ever hear of Los Ojos, New Mexico?” he asked.

“Some place where they got government projects,” Danny said. “Secret stuff.”

“That’s the place,” Lide said. “Stay away from that spot, boys. I wish I had. You go out there now and right in the middle of town you’ll find boulders too big to fit through the streets. The population is a lot smaller than it was a year ago. Everybody in town has a look in their eye like they got bodies home in the closet. It’s that kind of a place now. And all because one of the little guy gets muscles.”

“Tell us about it, Bud,” Joe said.

He sighed. “Sure, I’ll tell you. I’m safe telling you. You won’t believe me. You’re too smart. You’re all big city boys. You don’t go for fairy tales.”

He took a big gulp of his fresh drink. “About eight months ago the publisher of the sheet I work for is having a drink with a pal in D.C. and gets a telegram that something big will pop on a secret research project called Walrus, which is being handled by a science shark named Dr. Garson Partridge. The publisher tells the managing editor to subtract one good reporter and send him out to Los Ojos to be on the spot when the news breaks. I am the guy they send.

“You know how it is out there in New Mexico. The sun is a mile wide and it hangs about three hundred feet in the air and everything is white and it is like living inside a bake-oven. Everything is built of dried mud and the women look like they got skin made of nice brown corduroy. The men they got those big hats and the soft voices and out of every beer joint comes noises of cowboys moaning with guitar music — juke box stuff, courtesy Hollywood.

“I like going out as there is a local dolly who is getting those forever ideas about me, and a change is always a good thing, and lately the subways have been giving me a headache. I find a room in town for a twenty bribe on the side which goes on the expense account. The same day I find that the lab where this Walrus arrangement is going on is two miles outside of town up kind of a little notch in the rocks. It has barbed wire around it and maybe twenty people work in there all under the orders of this Doc Partridge. My orders are to smell around these twenty people and find out what goes on, so when the news breaks I’ll know what to expect and maybe I can give the sheet a little warning so that the head can be locked up anyway.

“For three days I tramp around trying to be agreeable to a tall dark dolly named Katherine, who works there and, from all the return play I get, I can be one of those tumbleweeds. She is stacked and she walks it around good and, even though my interest is somewhat more than professional, I get no place. When she does happen to notice me, the board says Tilt and the lights go out.

“While I am considering methods of attack on this tall dark and lush dish I notice another citizen who gets the same reaction I do and when I shake the dazzle out of my eyes and take a good look, I see the little guy also is one of the twenty.

“That makes it simple. I buy a bottle and entice him to my room and get him loaded by talking about how we both think this Katherine is the most wonderful thing walking around on wonderful legs. It seems the little guy is named Joe McGee, though it maybe should have been Hector Truelove. His is a stalwart five three, maybe a hundred and twenty and pale as the underside of a hoptoad. I never before saw such a pallid skin. On his temples you can see the little blue veins under his hide. He is half bald, and has scruffy brown hair like what the cat claws out of the mattress.

“After three rough jolts out of my bottle he opens up like a book called „Forever Amber“ and soon I know all. It seems he is what is called a lab technician and he is on civil service and spent the war in Washington and he has adored Katherine, who can spot him half a head and twenty pounds, for maybe a year. She has no time for him, as she prefers another lab technician, one with muscles.

“I prime him in my delicate fashion to let me know what goes on with this Operation Walrus project, and in a bored way he says that it is an idea of Partridge’s whereby you take a certain space and give it a big jolt of some special kind of electricity and it upsets the time stream or something and knocks the area where you point it back to yesterday or maybe the day before.

“It is a defense against atomic bombs because you jolt the area where the bomb is back to the day before yesterday and it isn’t there any more. You figure out where it comes from and send something up there to explode it and then you let the area fit back into the normal time stream and boom, you knock it off before it does damage. Joe McGee looks at me with his sad little blue eyes and says it is something even Partridge doesn’t know a lot about. It is discovered by accident and they are getting set to try it on a laboratory scale.

“He acts so mysterious that I pump him until he tells me that, in order to impress this Katherine, he has volunteered to step into the laboratory area they are going to jolt back to the day before yesterday and he has signed all the Government releases and Partridge has told him he is a very brave man but his Katherine still looks at him with nothing but indifference, and that is why he is drinking. I find out that the experiment goes on in three days, at eight o’clock in the morning.

“When he finally passes out, I get him down into my rented car and take him on out to the project area and leave him on the doorstep, so to speak. That same night I write a letter to the managing editor and I am about to mail it when I think how silly I look if this Joe McGee is kidding me. I don’t send it. You can’t tell what these pale little guys will do for a laugh.

“I loaf around and at eight in the morning on the right day, I am sitting in the rented car parked on the shoulder staring out toward the white buildings which have a nasty glare in the sun, even at eight in the morning. I don’t know what I expect to see, but when you are on a newspaper, you always take the long chances.

“I wish this one hadn’t worked out. I sat in the car and smiled about little McGee becoming the scientific hero in order to impress a babe like Katherine. Anyway, a few minutes after eight, as I am watching the main building which McGee has told me is the lab, there is one devil of an explosion.

“The flat roof goes flying off, and the sides bust out and a great white column rises up toward the sky. Poor McGee, I am thinking, when I notice that there is something pretty solid about this white column. I squint at it and suddenly my heart is going poom, poom, poom!

“The white thing is Joe McGee and he is about two hundred feet tall. I squint into the sun and see that he is shaking his head, as though dazed. The only answer I can think of is that when Partridge jolted the area with his electricity — field of force, I think McGee called it — maybe he knocked McGee back a day or two, but he knocked him out of balance with the rest of the world. McGee expanding like that was sort of like blowing up a life raft in your vest pocket. Something had to give quickly.

“I glance down at the buildings that are left and I see McGee’s feet planted among them and people running like crazy to get away from the place. Each of his feet is maybe thirty feet long and they take up a lot of room. McGee sways a little, then I see him look down. On a face that big you can’t read expression. He picks up his feet, one at a time, and gingerly steps out of the area, out into the open desert. The steps he takes are about a hundred feet long.

“I have seen enough to last me forever. I am suddenly filled with a great desire to be back here in New York. It is the first time I ever forget I work for a newspaper. My hands are shaking so bad I can’t get the car started. I have stopped only a hundred yards or so from the main gate. I got a big U turn on my mind when I see Katherine coming down the road. In front of her by a good ten feet, is the fellow I know from McGee’s description as being the lab technician with muscles. The eyes of both of them are like marbles glued to white plaster walls. Before I can get the car rolling, the technician claws the back door open and the two of them pile into my car.

“We don’t need words at that point, and who could have said any? I yank the bus around in a screaming turn and hunch over the wheel with the gas pedal flat on the floor. The dish looks out the back and screams. A few minutes later the gas pedal is still on the floor and the scenery isn’t going by. It stands still. But not for long. All of a sudden it drops away and the car goes up so fast that I am pushed down into the seat like I hear happens when airplane drivers pull out of dives.

“Katherine has no more breath for screaming and her boy friend is trying to eat the fingers off both hands. When we stop I look out my window and see nothing but space. I look out the other side and see the big white expanse which is the chest of our boy McGee. You notice funny things at such a time. I notice that he has three hairs on his chest, each about the diameter of a good fly rod.

“What I figure is the tip of his little finger comes in through the window and when it goes out, it takes the door with it. The same procedure goes on in the back and we have no doors on one side of the car. It tips up and I hang onto the wheel. It makes one little shake and the wheel is torn out of my hands. I slide out and land on this wide pink wrinkled thing which is, of course, the palm of his hand. Katherine and her boy friend and I land all in a heap. She has passed out cold.

“I look up at his huge face and see that he holds the car up to his eye level and peers in. When he sees that he has emptied it, he throws it away like a guy throws away a butt. I giggle now when I try to think of what I put on the insurance questionnaire. McGee apparently sees that Katherine is out like a light so he blows on her, gently like. Her boy friend and I drop flat or else the wind would have blown us off into space.

“There is a noise like thunder, and for a moment I can’t figure it. I look up and see his lips moving. By watching them and listening, I can make out that he is telling me to revive the lady. I crawl over to her and start rubbing her wrists, and patting her cheeks, while McGee picks the boy friend up between thumb and finger and holds him in the other hand.

“When Katherine begins to moan, I look over and notice that the boy friend has taken out a little pocket knife, opened the blade and is about to stab McGee in the thumb with all his strength. I look over and yell at him, but he ignores me. McGee is watching Katherine. When the blow lands, McGee gives a grunt that sounds like a cliff being blasted. He jerks so bad that Katherine and I go about three feet in the air. McGee gives a little flicking motion with his hand and the boy friend sails off toward town. I find out later that he lands flat against the front of the bank on the main drag. The later publicity does McGee no good at all.

“Katherine is quite a kid. She turns white when she sees the boy friend sail away, but she looks up into McGee’s face and smiles. It is the same kind of a smile you give out when you break your leg. McGee lifts us up close to his lips and tries to kiss Katherine. Luckily he only catches her on the shoulder. The suction rips the shoulder out of her blouse. With Katherine in one hand and me in the other, he walks toward town.

“The way he holds me. I can see behind us. With every step he takes his heels go down into the asphalt like a baby walking across a pie crust. He is smart enough to hold us loosely, but there is no way I can make him hear me so I can tell him to stop swinging his arms. Each swing spins my stomach into an outside loop and leaves it hanging behind us in space.

“At the edge of town he stops and looks down. People disappear off the street as though they are rubbed out with an eraser. McGee squats on his heels and giggles. The giggle sounds like a field howitzer with a rapid fire attachment. He dumps me back into the same hand with Katherine, reaches out and lifts the flat roof off a store. The people race out into the street and disappear into other buildings. He scales the roof off into the desert and giggles again. He reaches out and pulls down all the phone lines and electric cables.

“I begin to understand why he does all these things. Here he is a fellow who hasn’t ever made anybody look at him twice and all of a sudden he has become pretty important to everybody in the vicinity. He is just about the most important thing there is. He’s got his gal in the palm of his hand. Naturally he has expanded out of his clothes, but the sort of cosmic nakedness McGee possessed was actually not nakedness at all.

“After picking up some empty trucks and putting them upside down in the main drag and putting a few others on top of the buildings and pulling the freight train that was standing in the station out into the main drag, he tired of the whole thing. I was yelling at him to put me down but apparently he couldn’t hear me.

“Just as he set me down of his own accord, there was a rattle of rifle fire and McGee jumped back about fifty feet. I looked up and saw the scowl on his face and the spots of blood on his cheek and rolled into a shallow ditch. McGee stamped once at the town with his foot, turned and headed off into the desert, staring at Katherine.

“I wandered into town. It was a mess. All communications with the outside world were gone. Only two people had been killed when McGee had stamped a building flat but that was enough to take him out of the joke category. We stood in the main drag and stared until at last his head and shoulders went out of sight around a high slope in the hills. Then at last it was as though the entire town had taken a deep breath.

“In fifteen minutes, after a wild ride to the next town, Washington knew about what had happened and had clapped a lid of censorship over the entire area. Technicians were flown out, and a motorized detachment of the Army, complete with bazookas and mountain howitzers arrived by noon. By then, of course, the fighter-bombers were looking for him.

“The town was a scene of wild confusion when McGee came running out of the desert a little after one. He still held Katherine. I saw him look back over his shoulder and duck to the right. A bomb crumped in the sand behind him. McGee was smart enough. He came right into the town, running right over the gun crews.

“At the last moment one of the 75’s made a direct hit on his forearm, breaking it and mangling the flesh. He stamped the crews to death and squatted in the park in the middle of town. The planes buzzed by but they couldn’t unload because they would be killing innocent people. One of them flashed down with fifties blazing, but he stood up suddenly, and smashed at it with his good fist. The plane crashed near the railroad station and McGee caught Katherine before she had a chance to get out of sight.

“Orders were given over a P.A. system for everybody to leave town, but McGee caught onto that. He flattened two cars that sped out the other side of town and they were the only two that tried. It was a stalemate.

“Late in the afternoon he began to look sort of wild and began to sing. His singing broke every window left in town, shattered dishes in cupboards and just about drove all of us mad. He reached up, yanked the tank off the top of a water tower, pulled the lid off of it and drained it. Once again he caught the fleeing Katherine before she could get away. The gal had spunk. She kept trying.

“As soon as it got dark, he stood up, staggering, and went off into the desert. The planes couldn’t find him. He stood at the edge of the mountains and threw big stones back into town. A lot of them are still there because no way has been found to get them out without tearing down a mess of buildings.

“People were buzzing around town all night and new and heavier artillery was brought in. But they didn’t need it. At dawn Katherine came staggering back to town. She was cut and bleeding. Stone deaf, too. Seems that she was too close to him during all the singing. We found him about eight miles from town. He was right on the edge of a pretty deep canyon and after they got enough mechanized equipment up there, they were able to topple him in. It took eight bulldozers working more than twelve hours to cover him with dirt. They had a funeral service for him, too.”

Bud Lide stopped talking, picked up his glass and finished it. I looked at Danny and Joe looked at me and Danny looked at Joe.

“You must be taking it in the leg, Bud,” Joe said laughing.

Bud looked at him curiously. “You guys don’t believe me? Just because the Government kept it from getting in the papers?”

Danny laughed. “Sure, Bud. We believe you. Every word of it.”

At that moment I looked up and saw a tall girl standing beside our table. She looked over at Bud Lide and said, “Here I am, darling.”

His lean face softened. “Hello, Katherine.”

She was a fine looking girl. I figured that the name thing was a coincidence and then I happened to notice the tiny rosette of the hearing aid, the white wire that went up under her dark hair. I felt suddenly cold.

Bud Lide stood up, threw some money on the table and said, “See you later, fellows. I got to run along.”

Maybe Joe had noticed the hearing aid too. He was pale and he licked his lips. He said, “Wait a minute, Bud. What did he die of? What killed off this McGee character?”

Maybe if Bud had answered him it would have been okay. Maybe if Bud had given the answer I wouldn’t be drinking so much these days.

The tall, good-looking girl named Katherine said, “Sunburn.”

Content

John D. MacDonald
That Mess Last Year