While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

  “We’re going out for supper,” said Ella.

  Earl straightened up. “Oh—for gosh sakes. That’s right, we were.”

  “Listen to this,” said Harry, and the locomotive blew its horn, loud and dissonant.

  Earl shook his head in admiration. “Monday,” he called to Ella. “We’ll go out Monday. Something big has just come up, Sweetheart. Wait’ll you see.”

  “Earl, we haven’t got anything much in the house for supper,” said Ella desolately.

  “Sandwiches, soup, cheese—anything at all,” said Earl. “Don’t knock yourself out on our account.”

  “Now, get a load of the reserve power, Hotbox,” said Harry. “She’s taking that grade without any trouble at half-throttle. Now watch what happens.”

  “Whoooooooey!” said Earl. He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Oh—hi Mom.” He pointed at the new locomotive. “What do you think of that, eh? That’s the new era in railroading you see there, Mom. Turbine job.”

  “Earl, you can’t do that to Ella,” she said. “She was all dressed up and excited, and then you let her down like this.”

  “Didn’t you hear me give her a rain check?” said Earl. “We’re going out on Monday instead. Anyway, she’s nuts about the pike now. She understands. We had a whale of a time down here, this afternoon.”

  “I’ve never been so disappointed in anyone in all my life,” said his mother evenly.

  “It’s just something you aren’t in a position to understand.”

  She turned her back without another word, and left.

  Ella brought Earl and Harry sandwiches, soup, and beer, for which they thanked her gallantly.

  “You wait until Monday,” said Earl, “and we’re going out and have us a time, Sweetheart.”

  “Fine,” said Ella spiritlessly. “Good. Glad.”

  “You and Mom going to eat upstairs?”

  “Mom’s gone.”

  “Gone? Where?”

  “I don’t know. She called a cab and went.”

  “She’s always been like that,” said Earl. “Gets something in her head, and the next thing you know, bing, she’s gone ahead and done it. Any crazy darn thing. No holding her. Independent as hell.”

  The telephone rang, and Ella excused herself to answer it.

  “For you, Harry,” she called down. “It’s your wife.”

  When Harry Zellerbach returned, he was smiling broadly. He put his arm around Earl’s shoulder, and, to Earl’s surprise, he sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

  “Happy birthday, dear Hotbox,” he concluded, “happy birthday ta-hoo yooooooooou.”

  “That’s sweet,” said Earl, “but it’s nine months off.”

  “Oh? Huh. That’s funny.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Well—your mother was just over at the hobby shop, and bought you a present. Told my old lady it was for your birthday. Maude called me so I could be the first to congratulate you.”

  “What’d she buy?” said Earl.

  “Guess I better not tell you, Hotbox. Supposed to be a surprise. I’ve said too much already.”

  “Scaled to HO?” wheedled Earl.

  “Yeah—she made sure about that. But that’s all I’m going to tell you.”

  “Here she comes now,” said Earl. He could hear the swish of wheels through the gravel of the driveway. “She’s a sweet old lady, you know, Harry?”

  “She’s your mother, Hotbox,” said Harry soberly.

  “She used to have a heck of a temper, and she could run like the wind, and every so often she used to catch me and wallop me a good one. But, you know, I had it coming to me every time—in spades.”

  “Mum knows best, Hotbox.”

  “Mother,” said Ella at the top of the stairs, “what on earth have you got? For heaven’s sakes, what are you going to do? Mother—”

  “Quick,” Earl whispered to Harry, “let’s be fooling around with the pike, so she won’t know we know something special is going on. Let her surprise us.”

  The two busied themselves with the trains, as though they didn’t hear the footsteps coming down the stairs. “OK,” said Earl, “let’s try this for a situation, Harry. There’s a big Shriners’ convention in Harrisonburg, see, and we’ve got to put on a couple of specials to—” He let the sentence die. Harry was looking in consternation at the foot of the basement steps.

  The air was rent with a bloodcurdling cry.

  Earl, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end, faced his mother.

  She loosed the cry again. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeoooowwwwrrrr!”

  Earl gasped and recoiled. His mother was glaring at him through the goggles of an aviator’s helmet. She held a model H-36 at arm’s length, and, with terrifying sound effects, was making it dive and climb.

  “Mother! What are you doing?”

  “Hobby? Hrrrrrrrowowowow. Pilot to bombardier. Bombardier to pilot. Roger. Wilco. Rumrumrumrum.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  She circled the oil burner noisily, putting the ship through loops and barrel rolls. “Roger. Wilco. Owrrrr. Rattattattatt! Got ’em!”

  Earl switched off the power to the layout, and waited limply for his mother to emerge from behind the furnace.

  She appeared with a roar, and, before Earl could stop her, she climbed onto the layout with amazing agility, and put one foot on a mirror lake, the other in a canyon. The plywood quaked under her.

  “Mother! Get off!”

  “Bombs away!” she cried. She whistled piercingly, and kicked a trestle to splinters. “Kaboom!”

  The plane was in a climb again. “Yourrrowrrrourrrrrr. Pilot to bombardier. Got the A-bomb ready?”

  “No, no, no!” begged Earl. “Mother, please—I surrender, I give up!”

  “Not the A-bomb,” said Harry, aghast.

  “A-bomb ready,” she said grimly. The bomber’s nose dropped until it pointed at the roundhouse. “Mmmmmmeeeeeeeeeewwwwtttrr! There she goes!”

  Earl’s mother sat with all her might on the roundhouse. “Blamme!”

  She stepped down from the table, and before Earl could order his senses, his mother was upstairs again.

  When Earl finally came upstairs, shocked and weary, he found only his wife, Ella, who sat on the couch, her feet thrust straight out. She looked dazed.

  “Where’s Mom?” said Earl. There was no anger in his voice—only awe.

  “On her way to a movie,” said Ella, not looking at Earl but at a blank place on the wall.

  “She had the cab waiting outside.”

  “Blitzkrieg,” said Earl, shaking his head. “When she gets sore, she gets sore.”

  “She isn’t sore anymore,” said Ella. “She was singing like a lark when she came upstairs.”

  Earl mumbled something and shuffled his feet.

  “Hmm?” said Ella.

  He reddened, and squared his shoulders. “I said, I guess I had it coming to me.” He mumbled again.

  “Hmm?”

  He cleared his throat. “I said, I’m sorry about the way I double-crossed you tonight. Sometimes my mind doesn’t work too hot, I guess. We’ve still got time for a show. Would you go out with me?”

  “Hey, Hotbox!” cried Harry Zellerbach, hurrying into the room. “It’s the nuts. It’s terrific!”

  “What is?”

  “It really looks like it’s been bombed. No kidding. You photograph it the way it is, and show people the picture, and they’d say, “Now there’s a battlefield.” I’ll go down to the shop and get some gun turrets from model airplane kits, and tonight we can convert a couple of your trains into armored trains, and camouflage ’em. And I’ve got a half-dozen HO Pershing tanks I could let you have.”

  Earl’s eyes grew bright with excitement, like incandescent lamps burning out, and then dimmed again. “Let’s run up white flags, Harry, and call it a night. You know what Sherman said about war. I’d better see what I can do about making an honorable peace.”

  GIRL POOL

/>   My good, beloved wife, née Amy Lou Little, came to me from the girl pool. And there’s an enchanting thought for lonely men—a pool of girls, teeming, warm, and deep.

  Amy Lou Little was a pretty, confident, twenty-year-old girl from Birmingham, Alabama. When my wife-to-be graduated from secretarial school in Birmingham, the school said she was fast and accurate, and a recruiter from the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company, way up north, offered her a very good salary if she would come to Pittsburgh.

  When my wife-to-be got to Pittsburgh, they put her in the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company’s girl pool, with earphones and a Dictaphone and an electric typewriter. They put her at a desk next to Miss Nancy Hostetter, leader of section C of the girl pool, who had been in the girl pool for twenty-two years. Miss Hostetter was a great elk of a woman, righteous, healthy and strong, and inconceivably fast and accurate. She said Amy was to look upon her as a big sister.

  I was in the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company, too, a rootless pleaser of unseen customers. The customers wrote to the company, and twenty-five of us replied, genially, competently. I never saw the customers, and the customers never saw me, and no one suggested that we exchange snapshots.

  All day long, I talked into a Dictaphone, and messengers carried off the records to the girl pool, which I’d never seen.

  There were sixty girls in the girl pool, ten to a section. Bulletin boards in every office said the girls belonged to anyone with access to a Dictaphone, and almost any man would have found a girl to his taste among the sixty. There were maidens like my wife-to-be, worldly women made up like showgirls, moon-faced matrons, and erect and self-sufficient spinsters, like Miss Hostetter.

  The walls of the girl pool were eye-rest green, and had paintings of restful farm scenes on them, and the air was a rhapsody of girls’ perfumes and the recorded music of André Kostelanetz and Mantovani. From morning until night, the voices of Montezuma’s men, transcribed on Dictaphone records, filled the girls’ ears.

  But the men sent only their voices, never their faces, and they talked only of business. And all they ever called a girl was “operator.”

  “Molybdenum, operator,” said a voice in Amy’s ear, “spelled m-o-l-y-b-d-e-n-u-m.”

  The nasal Yankee voice hurt Amy’s ears—sounded, she said, like somebody beating a cracked bell with a chain. It was my voice.

  “Clangbang,” said Amy to my voice.

  “The unit comes with silicone gaskets throughout,” said my voice. “That’s s-i-l-i-c-o-n-e, operator.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to spell silicone for me,” said Amy. “Isn’t anything I don’t know about silicones after six months in this bughouse.”

  “Yours truly,” said my voice, “Arthur C. Whitney, Jr., Customer Relations Section, Boiler Sales Department, Heavy Apparatus Division, Room 412, Building 77, Pittsburgh Works.”

  “ACW:all,” Amy typed at the bottom of the letter. She separated the letter and copies from the carbon paper, dropped them into her out-basket, and slipped my record from the spindle of her Dictaphone.

  “Why don’t you bring your face around to the girl pool sometime, Arthur?” said my wife-to-be to my record. “We’d treat you like Clark Gable, just any man at all.” She put another record from her in-basket onto her spindle. “Come on, you old devil, you,” she said to the new record, “thaw out this half-frozen Alabama girl. Make me swoon.”

  “Five carbons, operator,” said a new, harsh voice in Amy’s ear. “To Mr. Harold N. Brewster, Thrust-Bearing Division, Jorgenson Precision Engineering Products Corporation, Lansing 5, Michigan.”

  “You are a hot-blooded old thing, aren’t you?” said Amy. “What makes you men up here so passionate—the steam heat?”

  “Did you say something to me, Amy?” said Miss Hostetter, removing her earphones. She was a tall woman, without ornaments, save for her gold twenty-year-service pin. She looked at Amy with bleak reproach. “What’s the trouble now?”

  Amy stopped her Dictaphone. “I was talking to the gentleman on the record,” she said. “Got to talk to somebody around here, or go crazy.”

  “There are lots of nice people to talk to,” said Miss Hostetter. “You’re so critical of everything, when you haven’t really had time to find out what everything’s about.”

  “You tell me what this is about,” said my wife-to-be, including the girl pool in a sweep of her hand.

  “There was a very good cartoon about that in the Montezuma Minutes,” said Miss Hostetter. The Montezuma Minutes was the company’s weekly newspaper for employees.

  “The one with the ghost of Florence Nightingale hovering over a stenographer?” said Amy.

  “That was a good one,” said Miss Hostetter. “But the one I had in mind showed a man with his new Thermolux furnace, and there were thousands of women all around him and the furnace, kind of ghostly. ‘He doesn’t send orchids, but he should,’ the caption said, ‘to the ten thousand women behind every dependable Montezuma product.’ ”

  “Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts,” said my wife-to-be. “Everybody’s ghosts up here. They come out of the smoke and the cold in the morning, and they rush around and worry about boilers and silicone gaskets and molybdenum all day, then they disappear at five, plain fade away without a word. I don’t know how anybody up here ever gets married or falls in love or finds anything nice to laugh about, or anything. Back home in high school—”

  “High school isn’t life,” said Miss Hostetter.

  “God help women, if this is life—cooped up all together, with a floor all to themselves,” said my wife-to-be.

  The two women faced each other with antipathies they’d been honing to razor sharpness for six months. The little blades glinted in their eyes, while they smiled politely.

  “Life is what you make it,” said Miss Hostetter, “and ingratitude is one of the worst sins. Look around you! Pictures on the walls, carpets on the floor, beautiful music, hospitalization and retirement, the Christmas party, fresh flowers on our desks, coffee hours, our own cafeteria, our own recreation room with television and ping-pong.”

  “Everything but life,” said my wife-to-be. “The only sign of life I’ve heard of up here is that poor Larry Barrow.”

  “Poor Larry Barrow!” said Miss Hostetter, shocked. “Amy—he killed a policeman!”

  Amy opened her top desk drawer, and looked down at the picture of Larry Barrow on the front page of the Montezuma Minutes. Barrow, a handsome young criminal, had shot a policeman in a Pittsburgh bank holdup two days before. He had last been seen climbing over a fence to hide somewhere in the vast Montezuma works. There were plenty of places where he could hide.

  “He could be in the movies,” said Amy.

  “As a killer,” said Miss Hostetter.

  “Not necessarily,” said Amy. “He looks like a lot of nice boys I knew in high school.”

  “Don’t be childish,” said Miss Hostetter. She dusted her big hands briskly. “Well, we aren’t getting any work done, are we? Ten minutes to go until morning coffee break. Let’s make the most of them.”

  Amy turned on her Dictaphone. “Dear Mr. Brewster,” said the voice, “your request for estimates on modernization of your present heating plant with DM-114 Thermolux conversion condensers has been forwarded by company teletype to our Thermolux specialist in your district, and …”

  Amy, as her fingers danced expertly over the keys, was free to think about whatever she pleased, and, with her top drawer still open, with Larry Barrow’s picture still in view, she thought about a man, wounded, freezing, starving, hated, hunted, and alone, somewhere out in the works.

  “Considering the thermal conductivity of the brick walls of the buildings to be heated,” said the voice in Amy’s ear, “as five Btu—that’s abbreviation for British thermal unit, operator, with a capital B—per square foot per hour per degree Fahrenheit—capitalize Fahrenheit, operator—per inch …”

  And my wife-to-be saw herself in the clouds of pink tulle she’d worn on the June night
of the high school graduation dance, and, on her arm, limping, healing, free, was Larry Barrow. The scene was in the South.

  “And, taking the thermal diffusivity—d-i-f-f-u-s-i-v-i-t-y, operator—as, k over w,” said the voice in Amy’s ear, “it seems safe to say that …”

  And my wife-to-be was helplessly in love with Larry Barrow. The love filled her life, thrilled her, and nothing else mattered.

  “Ting-a-ling,” said Miss Hostetter, looking at the wall clock and removing her earphones. There was a coffee break in the morning, and another in the afternoon, and Miss Hostetter greeted each as though she were a cheery little bell connected to the clock. “Ting-a-ling, everybody.”

  Amy looked at Miss Hostetter’s craggy, loveless, humorless face, and her dream fell to pieces.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Amy,” said Miss Hostetter.

  “I was thinking about Larry Barrow,” said Amy. “What would you do if you saw him?”

  “I’d keep right on walking,” said Miss Hostetter primly. “I’d pretend I hadn’t recognized him, and I’d keep right on walking until I could get help.”

  “What if he suddenly grabbed you, and made you a prisoner?” said Amy.

  Miss Hostetter reddened over her high cheekbones. “That’s quite enough of that kind of talk,” she said. “That’s how panic gets started. I understand that some of the girls in the Wire and Cable Department got each other so upset about this man they had to be sent home. That isn’t going to happen here. The girls in the girl pool are a cut above that.”

  “Even so—” said Amy.

  “He isn’t anywhere near this part of the works,” said Miss Hostetter. “He’s probably dead by now, anyway. They said there was blood in that office he broke into last night, so he isn’t in any condition to go around grabbing people.”

  “Nobody really knows,” said Amy.

  “What you need,” said Miss Hostetter, “is a cup of hot coffee, and a fast game of ping-pong. Come on. I’m going to beat you.”

  “Dear Sir:” said a voice in the pretty ear of my wife-to-be that afternoon, “We would very much like to have you as our guest at a demonstration of the entire line of Thermolux heating equipment in the Bronze Room of the Hotel Gresham at four-thirty, Wednesday …” The letter was not to one man, but to thirty. Each of the thirty was to get an individually typed invitation.