"I’ll let them in," Margo said. "Since neither of you are willing to bestir yourselves." Scrambling up from the couch she hurried to the front door and opened it. "Hello!" Ragle heard her exclaim. "What’s this? What is it? Oh—it’s hot."
Bill Black’s youthful, assured voice: "Lasagne. Put on some hot water—"
"I’ll fix café espresso," Junie said, passing through the house to the kitchen with the carton of Italian food.
Hell, Ragle thought. No more work for tonight. Why, when they get on some new kick, do they have to trot it over here? Don’t they know anybody else?
This week it’s café espresso. To go with last week’s fad: lasagne. Anyhow, it dovetails. In fact it probably tastes very good... although he had not gotten used to the bitter, heavy Italian coffee; to him it tasted burned.
Appearing, Bill Black said pleasantly, "Hi, Ragle. Hi, Vic." He had on the ivy-league clothes customary with him these days. Button-down collar, tight pants ... and of course his haircut. The styleless cropping that reminded Ragle of nothing so much as the army haircuts. Maybe that was it: an attempt on the part of sedulous young sprinters like Bill Black to appear regimented, part of some colossal machine. And in a sense they were. They all occupied minor status posts as functionaries of organizations. Bill Black, a case in point, worked for the city, for its water department. Every clear day he set off on foot, not in his car, striding optimistically along in his single-breasted suit, beanpole in shape because the coat and trousers were so unnaturally and senselessly tight. And, Ragle thought, so obsolete. Brief renaissance of an archaic style in men’s clothing... seeing Bill Black legging it by the house in the morning and evening made him feel as if he were watching an old movie. And Black’s jerky, too-swift stride added to the impression. Even his voice, Ragle thought. Speeded up. Too high-pitched. Shrill.
But he’ll get somewhere, he realized. The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises. In the banks, in insurance companies, big electric companies, missile-building firms, universities. He had seen them as assistant professors teaching some recondite subject -survey of heretical Christian sects of the fifth century—and simultaneously inching their path up with all their might and main. Everything but sending their wives over to the administration building as bait...
And yet, Ragle rather liked Bill Black. The man— he seemed young to him; Ragle was forty-six, Black no more than twenty-five-had a rational, viable outlook. He learned, took in new facts and assimilated them. He could be talked to; he had no fixed store of morals, no verities. He could be affected by what happened.
For instance, Ragle thought, if TV should become acceptable in the top circles, Bill Black would have a color TV set the next morning. There’s something to be said for that. Let’s not call him "non-adaptive," just because he refuses to watch Sid Caesar. When the H-bombs start falling, conelrad won’t save us. We’ll all perish alike.
"How’s it going, Ragle?" Black asked, seating himself handily on the edge of the couch. Margo had gone into the kitchen with Junie. At the TV set, Vic was scowling, resentful of the interruption, trying to catch the last of a scene between Caesar and Carl Reiner.
"Glued to the idiot box," Ragle said to Black, meaning it as a parody of Black’s utterances. But Black chose to accept it on face value.
"The great national pastime," he murmured, sitting so that he did not have to look at the screen. "I’d think it would bother you, in what you’re doing."
"I get my work done," Ragle said. He had got his entry off by six.
On the TV set, the scene ended; a commercial appeared. Vic shut off the set. Now his resentment turned toward advertisers. "Those miserable ads," he declared. "Why’s the volume level always higher on ads than on the program? You always have to turn it down."
Ragle said, "The ads usually emanate locally. The program’s piped in over the co-ax, from the East."
"There’s one solution to the problem," Black said.
Ragle said, "Black, why do you wear those ridiculous-looking tight pants? Makes you look like a swabbie."
Black smiled and said, "Don’t you ever dip into the New Yorker? I didn’t invent them, you know. I don’t control men’s fashions; don’t blame me. Men’s fashions have always been ludicrous."
"But you don’t have to encourage them," Ragle said.
"When you have to meet the public," Black said, "you’re not your own boss. You wear what’s being worn. Isn’t that right, Victor? You’re out where you meet people; you agree with me."
Vic said, "I wear a plain white shirt as I have for ten years, and an ordinary pair of wool slacks. It’s good enough for the retail-produce business."
"You also wear an apron," Black said.
"Only when I’m stripping lettuce," Vic said.
"Incidentally," Black said, "how’s the retail sales index this month? Business still off?"
"Some," Vic said. "Not enough to matter, though. We expect it to pick up in another month or so. It’s cyclic. Seasonal."
To Ragle, his brother-in-law’s change of tone was clear; as soon as business was involved—his business -he became professional, close-mouthed, tactical in his responses. Business was never really off, and always on the verge of improving. And no matter how low the national index dropped, a man’s personal individual business was unaffected. Like asking a man how he feels, Ragle thought. He has to say he feels fine. Ask him how business is, and he either automatically says terrible or improving. And neither means anything; it’s just a phrase.
To Black, Ragle said, "How’s the retail sale of water? Market holding firm?"
Black laughed appreciatively. "Yes, people are still bathing and washing dishes."
Entering the living room, Margo said, "Ragle, do you want café espresso? You, darling?"
"None for me," Ragle said. "I had all the coffee I can drink for dinner. Keeps me awake as it is."
Vic said, "I’ll take a cup."
"Lasagne?" Margo asked the three of them.
"No thanks," Ragle said.
"I’ll try some," Vic said, and Bill Black wagged his head along with him. "Need any help?"
"No," Margo said, and departed.
"Don’t tank up too heavily on that Italian stuff," Ragle said to Vic. "It’s rich. A lot of dough and spices. And you know what that does to you."
Black chimed in, "Yeah, you’re getting a little bulgy around the middle, there, Victor."
Jokingly, Ragle said, "Well what do you expect from a bird who works in a grocery store?"
That seemed to nettle Vic. He glared at Ragle and murmured, "At least it’s a real job."
"Meaning what?" Ragle said. But he knew what Vic meant. At least it was a salaried job, to which he set out every morning and returned home from every night. Not something he did in the living room. Not a puttering about with something in the daily newspaper... like a kid, Vic had said one day during an argument between them. Mailing in boxtops from cereal packages and a dime for his Magic Decoder Badge.
Shrugging, Vic said, "I’m not ashamed to work in a supermarket."
"That’s not what you meant," Ragle said. For some obscure reason he savored these insults directed toward his preoccupation with the Gazette contest. Probably because of an inner guilt at frittering his time and energies away, a wanting to be punished. So he could continue. Better to have an external source berating him than to feel the deep internal gnawing pangs of doubt and self-accusation.
And then, too, it gave him a kick that his daily entries earned him a higher net income than Vic’s slavery at the supermarket. And he didn’t have to spend time riding downtown on the bus.
Walking over beside him, Bill Black lowered himself, pulled up a chair, and said, "I wondered if you saw this, Ragle." He unfolded, in a confidential manner, a copy of the day’s Gazette. Almost reverently he opened it to page fourteen. There
, at the top, was a line of photos of men and women. In the center was a photo of Ragle Gumm himself, and under it the caption:
Grand all-time winner in the Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest, Ragle Gumm. National champion leading for two straight years, an all-time record
The other persons shown were lesser greats. The contest was national, with newspapers participating in strings. No local paper could afford to pay the tab. Costs ran higher—he had figured one day—than the famous Old Gold contest of the mid-thirties or the perennial "I use Oxydol soap because in twenty-five words or less" contests. But evidently it built circulation, in these times when the average man read comic books and watched...
I’m getting like Bill Black, Ragle thought. Knocking TV. It’s a national pastime in itself. Think in your mind of all the homes, people sitting around saying, "What’s happened to this country? Where’s the level of education gone? The morality? Why rock-and-roll instead of the lovely Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy May time music that we listened to when we were their age?"
Sitting close by him, Bill Black held on to the paper, jabbing at the picture with his finger. Obviously he was stirred by the sight of it. By golly, old Ragle Gumm’s picture in newspapers coast to coast! What honor! A celebrity living next door to him.
"Listen, Ragle," Black said, "You’re really making a mint out of this ’green man’ contest, aren’t you?" Envy was rampant on his face. "Couple of hours at it, and you’ve got a week’s pay right there."
With irony Ragle said, "A real soft berth."
"No, I know you put in plenty of work at it," Black said. "But it’s creative work; you’re your own boss. You can’t call that ’work’ like working at a desk somewhere."
"I work at a desk," Ragle said.
"But," Black persisted, "it’s more like a hobby. I don’t mean to knock it. A man can work harder on a hobby than down at the office. I know when I’m out in the garage using my power saw, I really sweat at it. But-there’s a difference." Turning to Vic, he said, "You know what I mean. It’s not drudgery. It’s what I said; it’s creative."
"I never thought of it like that," Vic answered.
"Don’t you think what Ragle’s doing is creative?" Black demanded.
Vic said, "No. Not necessarily."
"What do you call it, then, when a man carves his own future out by his own efforts?"
"I simply think," Vic said, "that Ragle has an ability to make one good guess after another."
"Guess!" Ragle said, feeling insulted. "You can say that, after watching me doing research? Going over previous entries?" As far as he was concerned, the last thing to call it was "guessing." If it were a guess he would merely seat himself at the entry form, close his eyes, wave his hand around, bring it down to cover one square out of all the squares. Then mark it and mail it. And wait for the results. "Do you guess when you fill out your income tax return?" That was his favorite analogy for his work on the contest. "You only have to do it once a year; I do it every day." To Bill Black he said, "Imagine you had to make out a new return every day. It’s the same thing. You go over all your old forms; you keep records, tons of them— every day. And no guessing. It’s exact. Figures. Addition and subtraction. Graphs."
There was silence.
"But you enjoy it, don’t you?" Black said finally.
"I guess so," he said.
"How about teaching me?" Black said, with tension.
"No," he said. Black had brought it up before, a number of times.
"I don’t mean so I can compete with you," Black said. Ragle laughed.
"I mean just so I can pick up a few bucks now and then. For instance, I’d like to build a retaining wall in the back, so in the winter that wet dirt doesn’t keep slopping down into our yard. It would cost me about sixty dollars for the materials. Suppose I won -how many times? Four times?"
"Four times," Ragle said. "You’d get a flat twenty bucks. And your name would go on the board. You’d be competing."
Vic spoke up. "Competing with the Charles Van Doren of the newspaper contests."
"I consider that a compliment," Ragle said. But the enmity made him uncomfortable.
The lasagne did not last long. They all dipped into it. Because of Bill Black’s and Ragle’s remarks, Vic felt impelled to eat as much as possible. His wife watched him critically as he finished.
"You never eat what I cook the way you ate that," Margo said.
Now he wished he hadn’t eaten so much. "It was good," he said gamely.
With a giggle, Junie Black said, "Maybe he’d like to live with us for a while." Her pert, miniature face took on a familiar knowing expression, one that was sure to annoy Margo. For a woman who wore glasses, Vic thought, Junie Black could look astonishingly depraved. Actually, she was not unattractive. But her hair, black, hung down in two twisted thick braids, and he did not like that. In fact he was not drawn to her at all. He did not like tiny, dark, active women, especially those who giggled, and, like Junie, who insisted on pressing against other women’s husbands on the strength of a single gulp of sherry.
It was his brother-in-law who responded to Junie Black, according to Margo’s gossip. Both Ragle and Junie, being home all day, had plenty of free time on their hands. That was a bad business, Margo said now and again. A man being home all day in a residential neighborhood, where all the other husbands were away at the office and only the wives remained behind. So to speak.
Bill Black said, "To confess, Margo-she didn’t whip this stuff up. We got it on the way home. At some catering place on Plum Street."
Junie Black not embarrassed, laughed.
After the two women had cleared the table, Bill suggested a few hands of poker. They haggled for a while, and then the chips were brought out, and the deck of cards, and presently they were playing for a penny a chip, all colors worth the same. It was a twice-weekly matter between them. Nobody could remember how it had gotten started. The women, most likely, had originated it; both Junie and Margo loved to play.
While they were playing, Sammy appeared. "Dad," he said, "can I show you something?"
"I wondered where you were," Vic said. "You’ve been pretty quiet this evening." Having folded for the round, he could take a moment off. "What is it?" he asked. His son wanted advice most likely.
"Now keep your voice down," Margo warned Sammy. "You can see we’re playing cards." The intense look on her face and the tremor in her voice indicated that she held a reasonably good hand.
Sammy said, "Dad, I can’t figure out how to wire up the antenna." Beside Vic’s stack of chips he set down a metal frame with wires and electronic-looking parts visible on it.
"What’s this?" Vic said, puzzled.
"My crystal set," Sammy said.
"What’s a crystal set?" he said.
Ragle spoke up. "It’s something I got him doing," he explained. "One afternoon I was telling him about World War Two and I got to talking about the radio rig we operated."
"Radio," Margo said. "Doesn’t that take you back?"
Junie Black said, "Is that what he’s got there, a radio?"
"A primitive form of radio," Ragle said. "The earliest."
"There’s no danger he’ll get a shock, is there?" Margo said.
"None whatever," Ragle said. "It doesn’t use any power."
"Let’s have a look at it," Vic said. Hoisting the metal frame he examined it, wishing he knew enough to assist his son. But the plain truth was that he knew nothing at all about electronics, and it certainly was obvious. "Well," he said haltingly, "maybe you have a short-circuit somewhere."
Junie said, "Remember those radio programs we used to listen to before World War Two? ’The Road of Life.’ Those soap operas. ’Mary Martin.’ "
" ’Mary Marlin,’ " Margo corrected. "That was— good lord. Twenty years ago! I blush."
Humming Clair de Lune, the theme for "Mary Marlin," Junie met the last round of raises. "Sometimes I miss radio," she said.
"You’ve got
radio plus vision," Bill Black said. "Radio was just the sound part of TV."
"What would you get on your crystal set?" Vic asked his son. "Are there any stations still transmitting?" It had been his impression that radio stations had folded up several years ago.
Ragle said, "He can probably monitor ship-to-shore signals. Aircraft landing instructions."
"Police calls," Sammy declared.
"That’s right," Ragle said. "The police still use radio for their cars." Holding out his hand he accepted the crystal set from Vic. "I can trace the circuit later, Sammy," he said. "But I’ve got too good a hand right now. How about tomorrow?"
Junie said, "Maybe he can pick up flying saucers."
"Yes," Margo agreed. "That’s what you ought to aim for."
"I never thought of that," Sammy said.
"There’s no such thing as flying saucers," Bill Black said testily. He fiddled with his cards.
"Oh no?" Junie said. "Don’t kid yourself. Too many people have seen them for you to dismiss it. Or don’t you accept their documented testimony?"
"Weather balloons," Bill Black said. Vic was inclined to agree with him, and he saw Ragle nodding. "Meteors. Meteorological phenomena."
"Absolutely," Ragle said.
"But I read that people had actually ridden in them," Margo said.
They all laughed, except Junie.
"It’s true," Margo said. "I heard it over TV."
Vic said, "I’ll go as far as admitting that there seems to be some sort of odd-ball stuff going on up there." He remembered one experience of his own. The summer before, during a camping trip, he had watched a bright object flash across the sky at such velocity that no plane, even a jet-propelled plane, could have matched it. The thing had more the manner of a projectile. In an instant it had whisked off over the horizon. And occasionally, at night, he had heard rumblings, as if heavy vehicles were passing at reduced velocity across the sky. Windows had vibrated, so it had not been head-noises, as Margo had decided. In an article in a digest medical magazine she had read that head-noises indicate high blood pressure, and after that she had wanted him to visit their health-plan doctor for a checkup.