Strangers and beggars, p.1
Strangers and Beggars, page 1
Strangers and Beggars
A Fairwood Press Book
July 2002
Copyright © 2002 by James Van Pelt
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Ct E
Bonney Lake WA 98391
www.fairwoodpress.com
Cover art and design © Getty Images/The Image Bank
ISBN: 0-9668184-5-8
eISBN: 978-1-61824-975-3
First Fairwood Press Edition: July 2002
Printed in the United States of America
Digital version by Baen Books
http://www.baen.com
To my first readers (and there are a lot of you), to Gary and Mike for keeping me sane or at least not completely crazy, to my family for supporting and encouraging me, but most of all to Tammy who confirms that all things are possible with love.
Acknowledgements
The stories in this anthology first appeared as follows:
Altair:
“Voices”
Adventures in Sword & Sorcery:
“Nine Fingers on the Flute”
After Shocks:
“Parallel Highways”
Analog:
“What Weena Knew”
“The Comeback”
“Nor a Lender Be”
“Ressurection”
Asimov’s:
“The Infodict”
First Publication Anywhere:
“Finding Orson”
Pulphouse:
“Eight Words”
Realms of Fantasy:
“Happy Ending”
“Home”
Talebones:
“Miss Hathaway’s Spider”
“The Death Dwarves”
“The Yard God”
Transversions:
“The Diorama”
Weird Tales:
“Shark Attack: A Love Story”
Introduction:
New Maps Out of Hell
by Bruce Holland Rogers
Welcome to the world of James Van Pelt, a world of invisible shotgun-toting dwarves, psychic baseball consultants, sharks under the carpet, and giant spiders. The world of “imaginative literature.” Or, to put it another way, welcome to heaven, hell and assorted realms in between.
Of all the territories you’re about to enter, the ones that may linger longest in your memory are the infernal ones. That’s not because Van Pelt is a particularly dark writer. In fact, it’s his treatment of light-in-darkness that makes him so worth reading.
Thus, it’s thoroughly unfair of me to stand at the gates of Van Pelt’s fiction with the word hell on my lips. First, the territory that I have in mind is more akin to Ray Bradbury’s October Country than Dante’s Inferno. Second, most of these stories aren’t the least bit infernal. “The Death Dwarves” may be darkly funny, but funny it is. “The Comeback” is a baseball tall tale. “Nor a Lender Be” is about that rare sort of teacher who makes the classroom a little bit of heaven for the lucky few who find themselves enrolled with him. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that reading these stories is going to be a torment. No, you have hours of pleasure ahead of you. But some of your enjoyment may come from the special pleasures of Things Gone Very Wrong.
One of the first important critical works about science fiction was a collection of lectures-turned-essays by Kingsley Amis called New Maps of Hell. Up until this 1960 book, the thinking was that science fiction was a literature about technology. Amis pointed out that science fiction was more a literature about society, especially about society gone wrong. SF is largely dystopian. It is the literature of alienation, changes for the worse.
Most of the stories in this collection are more fantasy than SF (and some are neither). And not every story in this collection is about things gone very wrong. But by my count nearly half of them are—things gone wrong in a great variety of ways. “What Weena Knew” borrows its dystopia from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. The dystopia of poor Miss Hathaway and her spider is a bureaucratic one. The purgatories of “Happy Ending,” “Eight Words” and “Voices” are the interior realms created from regret. Owen’s unhappy neighborhood in “The Diorama” is unhappy because Owen is unhappy and does his best to drag his neighbors down with him. Of these dystopias, “Parallel Highways” is the one nearest to a true hell of demons and brimstone, but the demons drive big rigs and the brimstone vapors are really diesel exhaust. These stories may have a common dystopian theme, but it’s a theme worked with variety and surprise—the sort of variety and surprise that Ray Bradbury dished up. In fact, “The Diorama” reminds me a great deal of Bradbury’s classic story, “The Veldt,” but with one key difference.
That difference is where Van Pelt shines. Lots of writers explore the territory of dystopia, but don’t imagine that all you get with Van Pelt is a tour of hell. While there may be some value in simply mapping the infernal regions, where would that leave the reader? No, Van Pelt cares about his readers too much to just give us a tour of the dark places. Ultimately, this collection is more about emerging from the darkness.
One of the great movie moments of all time is in the biopic, Ghandi. In the midst of the violence surrounding India’s partition, a distressed Hindu man tells Ghandi, “As for me, I am going to hell.”
“Why are you going to hell?” the mahatma asks him.
“I killed a Muslim child. A little child!”
“There is a way out of hell,” Ghandi says. He instructs the man to find another Muslim child, one who has been orphaned in the violence, and bring him up in his own home as a Muslim. And the man leaves to find that child. He recognizes the road to redemption when it is pointed out to him.
For someone in a living hell, what gift could be greater than a map with the escape routes marked? Whatever the ultimate realities of heaven and hell may be, hell can be present for us here and now. One of the things fiction does is help us understand the path to here-and-now redemption. My favorite stories in this collection do just that. They aren’t new maps of hell. They are new maps out of hell.
Not half of these stories are about the dark regions of imagination. Of that minority, not every one ends with redemption. (Some characters who have made terrible choices are still living with the darkness of those decisions at the story’s end, but there’s a least a hint that the exit light is visible —if not to the character, then to the reader.) But these maps out of darkness are the essential James Van Pelt, the trait that makes him an inheritor of Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.” Both the Bradbury story and Van Pelt’s “The Diorama” cover similar imaginary ground, but Bradbury’s story ends in terror. Van Pelt’s tale ends in hope.
There are other pleasures on these pages. Van Pelt can dazzle with technique or tantalize us with a mystery, but there’s more to his stories than showmanship. Experimental fiction is too often only about experimentation itself, but “Happy Ending” is a morality play that is effective because of its experimental form. “Voices” is a mystery about more than solving a puzzle.
So welcome to these assorted territories of James Van Pelt’s imagination. Here you’ll encounter the popcorn and peanuts smell of the stadium, the perfume of a beautiful woman you can’t get out of your mind, the chalk dust of classrooms, and an office that smells of the sea. Don’t mind the occasional tang of brimstone. You’ll be glad you came.
“All strangers and beggars are from Zeus,
and a gift, though small, is precious.”
—Homer, The Odyssey
Teaching
Miss Hathaway's Spider
-knowledge-
Miss Hathaway first noticed the spider on a cool September morning, before the students arrived, as she dusted the chalk trays with her canary-yellow feather duster. No other teacher cleaned the chalk trays, but she knew that was a reflection of their lack of professionalism, for no one was as meticulous, as orderly, as conscientious as she. Not that she considered cleaning the chalk trays a part of her job, but the janitor never did them. She had written a memo to him once, folded it neatly into thirds and placed it in his box in the faculty mail room.
Dear Mr. Clean,
I would like to commend you on the appearance of my classroom, but would it be possible for you to pay closer attention to the chalk trays? They do become awfully dusty. High school students are acutely aware of an untidy environment, don’t you think?
Sincerely,
Miss Hathaway
But even after her letter, in the morning the trays were dirty, and, annoyed, she cleaned them out.
She saw the spider clinging to the underside of a web a foot above the carpet in the corner of the room farthest from the door when she bent to drop broken pieces of chalk into the trash can. She jumped back, a tidy little jump; her hands flew to her face below her wire-rim glasses and cupped her cheeks. “Oh,” she said.
Miss Hathaway, who at five-foot-one and a hundred-and-two pounds and filled with the authority of her fifteen years of teaching experience, who had broken up fights between football players, who faced lunch room duty with the bravery of any soldier on Iwo Jima, who had at the beginning of this school year moved a cabinet full of books from one side of her room to the other, was afraid of
She knelt cautiously to observe it and realized that someone coming into her classroom at that moment would see her crouched in a corner at the front of the class and might think she was praying. But the presence of the remarkable spider pushed that thought from her head, and she scooted closer. Its size struck her first; at least three inches from toe-tip to toe-tip. And then its color: black and spit-shine shiny. The spider’s body and the black, metallic legs reflected the fluorescent light from the ceiling in tiny star bursts.
But even a remarkable spider, she thought, had no place in a classroom. She pushed herself up from the floor, smoothed the front of her skirt, then pressed her intercom switch and asked for the unhelpful Mr. Clean.
When he arrived, she said, “Class begins in one half hour, and I do not believe the spider should be here.”
He crouched down next to the web. The spider vanished into a hole in the wall. “It’s a big one... ” He poked a greasy, chewed pencil into the hole. A crumbling of rotten sheetrock drifted to the carpet. “ ...and we probably ought to call the exterminators... ”
“Well?” Miss Hathaway crossed her arms across her chest, wrapping her fingers around her elbows. She could feel the sharp crease she had ironed into her blouse sleeves.
“ ...but we’re out of funding.” He stood up and pushed his pencil into his shirt pocket. “You’ll have to kill it yourself.”
She squeezed her elbows. “But this is why I called you.”
He sniffed.“Our job’s floors, boards and desks.”
“You can’t take care of the spider?”
“The exterminators are union; janitors are union, just like teachers. You wouldn’t want me to scab, would you?”
“Of course not. Wouldn’t dream of it. I understand our positions exactly.” She picked up her feather duster, turned her back to him and began dusting an already clean chalk tray with short, brisk strokes. “Thank you for your attention.”
Mr. Clean paused at the door on his way out. “I’ll suck her right up, if I catch her on the carpet.”
-comprehension-
Two weeks later Miss Hathaway sat on the front three inches of a chair before Vice Principal Book’s desk. The chair came from the elementary school and forced her to sit with her knees higher than her hips and her eyes level with the top of the desk.
Vice Principal Book, a large man with beefy upper arms that strained the sleeves of his battleship-gray jacket, gazed down on her. Behind him, six certificates, their frames butting up one to the other and lined up so precisely that they looked like one long brass and glass display, hung from the green cinder block wall. “So, let me see if I can put this in a nutshell. You have a spider problem in your room, and therefore you can’t teach?”
“I’m sorry to bother you with this, and I wouldn’t, but I talked to the janitor, and he said it wasn’t his job. I don’t see how it is properly mine either.” She kept her neatly manicured hands still. Vice Principal Book made her nervous, even though he was once only a Driver’s Ed instructor.
He smiled. “Miss Hathaway, Miss Hathaway, you are one of our best teachers.” He consulted an open manila folder on the desk. “Spotless record. Perfect paperwork. Up to date lesson plans. Never tardy to faculty meetings. And, most important, you don’t send students up to me for discipline problems.” He chuckled. “How distracting can a spider be?”
It wasn’t distracting at all, at first, thought Miss Hathaway; the only reason she didn’t kill it was because the janitor should kill it; he didn’t clean the trays; at least he could get rid of the spider. Miss Hathaway thought of the web, now a yard wide, that clouded the corner of the room, the eight inches of glistening spider that hung there, and the mysteriously larger hole in the wall. She thought of the three times in the last two days, while lecturing on the funnel paragraph, she had pirouetted in mid-sentence, convinced the black spider was creeping up on her. “Maybe if you came down and looked at it?”
“I don’t think we’ll need to go that far. There isn’t an educational challenge that can’t be solved, if we put our heads together, right in this office, Miss Hathaway.”
“This does seem to be an extraordinary situation, though.” She wanted to squirm forward on the chair because her blouse had come untucked from the back of her skirt, but she was perched on the edge already. The thought of tucking the blouse in with Vice Principal Book watching made her queasy.
He leaned back in his chair, squeaking the springs, and laced his fingers across his stomach. His jacket pulled into a series of wrinkles radiating away from the single button holding it closed. “Remember the Miracle Worker?” He continued without waiting for her to answer. “She taught that little girl who couldn’t see, hear or talk. The Miracle Worker didn’t have a beautiful classroom, did she?”
He looked at Miss Hathaway expectectantly. “Uh, no, she didn’t.”
“She didn’t have class-sets of brand new expensive Harcourt Brace Jovanovich English texts, did she?”
“No,” she answered. He was caught in his rhythm now.
“No, she didn’t! She didn’t have video tapes or record players or computers to help her. Think of the primitive conditions she worked in, and think of your own situation. Why, if she had the advantages you have, she could have really done something with that little girl. So, I believe that what you need to do is to reconsider your situation. Believe in your own abilities. Do you believe, Miss Hathaway?”
“Yes,” Miss Hathaway whispered. He beat the top of the desk with his fist to emphasize his words.
“Believe in the school. Believe that the principal and I are behind you all the way. Believe that the school board knows what it’s doing. Believe in the goal of every child in its place. I have that dream.” He lunged out of his chair and loomed above her. “Sure, you have a spider, but you have so many positives. You can stand tall in your classroom, like a pillar of fire, like a burning bush, like a tower of Babel. Can you do that?”
“Oh, yes!”
“In the teaching profession we can’t dwell on the negatives; we have to accentuate the positives. Be a team player. Keep a tight lid on the boat, and your ship will come in.”
He slapped her folder closed. “Be a Helen Keller for us Miss Hathaway. You can be a miracle worker like her, if you’ll put your mind to it.”
Momentarily engulfed in his enthusiasm, she rose. She said, “I think I can,” and marched down to her classroom.
-application-
Monday, the week after Homecoming. Melba Toast raised her hand, and Miss Hathaway thought, as she often did, of how cruel parents can be.
“There is web on my desk,” Melba said. The web stretched from ceiling to floor now, and its intricate structure of thick threads anchored to points as far as ten feet from the corner of the room, including Melba’s desk. Its form sprang from the corner without order, random, not a neat lattice work of geometry, but a chaotic mess of lines and darkness.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Miss Hathaway said. “But I don’t believe we need to consider that now. What we should think about is a topic for our next essay.” Miss Hathaway felt distracted, unfocused. She knew what the next essay should be—the lesson plans she had used for the last fifteen years were perfectly clear—a comparison/contrast essay on abortion, but she didn’t want to assign it. The whole idea of thirty essays like essays from years past exhausted her. But this attitude put her in a weird position, she realized: for the first time in her teaching career, she didn’t know exactly what she was going to do next. It disturbed her. She paced the front of the classroom, her hands behind her back, avoiding the mass of web to the left of her podium. The two-foot long spider crawled along the ceiling of the room. Students under it watched warily. “Your essays on gun control were fine. Really, they were. But they lacked something... immediacy perhaps. If we wrote about a topic closer to home your writing might be livelier.”
