Short Fiction · Bullet with His Name (2/5)

He hesitated. At his feet, the garden hose gurgled noisily over the curb into the gutter; it had vindicated his midnight estimate, proving just long enough. He looked uneasily up and down the dawning street and was relieved to find it still empty. He wished fervently, not for the first time this Saturday morning, that he had a garage. Then he sighed, squared his shoulders a little, and lifted the box out of his pocket.

Making to check the directions the umpteenth time, he received a body blow. The white lettering on the box had disappeared. The box didn’t proclaim itself sodium bicarbonate again⁠—there was just no lettering at all, only blue background. He turned it over several times.

Right there died his tentative plan of eventually sharing his secret with some friend who knew more than himself about motors (he hadn’t decided anyway who that would be). It would be just too silly to approach anyone he knew with a more-than-wild story and featureless blue box.

For a moment, he came very close to dropping the box between the wide-set bars of the street drain and pouring the pink gas back in the tank. It had hit him, in a way for the first time, just how crazy this all was, how jarringly implausible even on such hypotheses as practical jokes, secret product perhaps military, or mad inventor (except himself).

For how the devil should the stuff get into his bathroom disguised as bicarb? That circumstance seemed beyond imagination. Green flames⁠ ⁠… vanishing letters⁠ ⁠… “torque-twisters, translators”⁠ ⁠… a box that talked⁠ ⁠…

At that point, simple faith came to Ernie’s rescue: in the same bathroom, he had seen the green flame; it had burned his fingers.

Quickly he dipped up a little of the white powder on the edge of a fifty-cent piece, dumped it in the gas tank without quibbling as to quantity, rapped the coin on the edge of the opening, closed and pocketed the blue box, and picked up the spurting hose and jabbed it into the round hole.

His heart was pounding and his breath was coming fast. That had taken real effort. So he was slow in hearing the footsteps behind him.

His neighbor’s gate was open and Mr. Jones stood open-mouthed a few feet behind him, all ready for his day’s work as streetcar motorman and wearing the dark blue uniform that always made him look for a moment unpleasantly like a policeman.

Ernie swung the hose around, flipping his thumb over the end to make a spray, and nonchalantly began to water the little rectangle of lawn between sidewalk and curb.

The first things he watered were the bottoms of Mr. Jones’s pants legs.

Mr. Jones voiced no complaint. He backed off several steps, stared intently at Ernie, rather palely, it seemed to the latter. Then he turned and made off for the streetcar tracks at a very fast shuffle, shaking his feet a little now and then and glancing back several times over his shoulder without slowing down.

Ernie felt lightheaded. He decided there was enough water in the gas tank, capped it, and momentarily continued to water the lawn.

“Ernie! Come on in and have breakfast!”

He heeded his sister’s call, telling himself it would be a good idea “to give the stuff time to mix” before testing the engine.

He had divined her question and was ready with an answer.

“I’ve just found out that we’re supposed to water our lawns only before seven in the morning or after seven in the evenings. It’s the law.”

It was the day for their monthly drive out to Wheaton to visit Uncle Fabius. On the whole, Ernie was glad his sister was in the car when he turned the key in the starter⁠—it forced him to be calm and collected, though he didn’t feel exactly right about exposing her to the danger of being blown up without first explaining to her the risk. But the motor started right up and began purring powerfully. Ernie’s sister commented on it favorably.

Then she went on to ask, “Did you remember to buy gas yesterday?”

“No,” he said without thinking; then, realizing his mistake, quickly added, “I’ll buy some in Wheaton. There’s enough to get us there.”

“You didn’t think so yesterday,” she objected. “You said the tank was nearly empty.”

“I was wrong. Look, the gauge shows it’s half full.”

“But then how⁠ ⁠… Ernie, didn’t you once tell me the gauge doesn’t work?”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Look, there’s a station. Why don’t you buy gas now?”

“No, I’ll wait for Wheaton⁠—I know a place there I can get it cheaper,” he insisted, rather lamely, he feared.

His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing drivers only knew!

Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated, was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry. Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if he’d ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline or some usable fuel.

“Who’s been getting at you?” Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie’s surprise and embarrassment. “That’s one of the oldest swindles. They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then disappeared. You’re supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil companies got rid of him. It’s just another of those malicious legends, concocted⁠—by Russia, I imagine⁠—to weaken your faith in American Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never gets dull. You’re looking pale, Ernie⁠—don’t tell me you’ve already put money in this white powder? I suppose someone’s approached you with a proposition, though?”

With considerable difficulty, Ernie convinced his uncle that he had “just heard the story from a friend.”

“In that case,” Uncle Fabius opined, “you can be sure some fuel-powder swindler has been getting at him. When you see him⁠—and be sure to make that soon⁠—tell him from me that⁠—” and Uncle Fabius began an impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business, prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was wholly normal when Ernie’s sister returned.

As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to Chicago, she reminded him about the gas.

“Oh, I’ve already done that,” he assured her. “Made a special trip so I wouldn’t forget. It was while you were out of the room. Didn’t you hear me?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t,” and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving.

Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. “I knew that for some reason you lied to me when⁠—” The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn’t press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say.

To tell the truth, Ernie wasn’t feeling as elated about today’s fifty-mile drive as he’d imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason: It was the completely⁠ ⁠… well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession.

If he’d concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he’d have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I.

But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn’t going crazy⁠ ⁠… oh, it is rough when you can’t share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding.

Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively.

When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities.

From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He’d wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff⁠—perhaps he’d bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he’d put the water in some other car’s gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones’s. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing.

Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn’t somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o’clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones’s house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter’s doorsteps, which unsettled him further.

He couldn’t decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him “the sculptor.”

Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn’t know that) from the other Gifts⁠—and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots.

Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon.

Ernie couldn’t figure out the reason and wasn’t at all sure he liked it⁠—except for Vivian.

She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip.

She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie’s, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn’t got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself.

Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did.

“Don’t you know?” she countered. “I mean what makes you attractive to people?”

“Me attractive? No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you then, Ernie, and I’ve got to admit it’s something quite out of the ordinary. I’ve never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I’m sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it’s clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones⁠—not in style now⁠—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there’s one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes.”

“Flashing eyes? Me?”

She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the verge of a grin, but he couldn’t be sure.

“How do you mean, flashing eyes?” he protested. “How can eyes flash, except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they’d seem to ‘flash’ more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot. Is that what I do?”

“No, Ernie, though you’re doing it now,” she told him, shaking her head. “No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, barely bright enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of course I’ve never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn’t flash in the dark.”

“You’re joking.”

Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself.

“Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” she said. “In any case, don’t get conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I’m sure you’ll never know how to take advantage of them.”

When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk away with feline majesty, he muttered “Flashing Eyes!” with a shrug of the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply.

Afternoons, hurtling home in the five o’clock rush, it was not Vivian but Verna who frequently occupied the seat beside him, taking up rather more space in it than the Panther Princess. Verna was another of his newly acquired and not altogether welcome conversation-pals, along with Jacob the barber, Mr. Willis the druggist and Herman the health-food manufacturer, inventor of Soybean Mush⁠—conquests of his Flashing Eyes or whatever it was.

Verna was stocky, pasty-faced, voluble (with him), coy, and had bad breath⁠—he could see the tiny triangles of pale food between her incisors and canines whenever her conversations became particularly vehement and confidential, which was often. She always had a stack of books hugged to her stomach. She worked in a fur-storage vault, she said, and could snatch quite a bit of time for reading⁠—rather heavy reading, it seemed.

It wasn’t very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!) infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had lost her fear of the world’s ridicule and opened her hulking heart to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering, especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls’ Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a fiendish caricature of Vivian.

He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were times when he seriously wished he’d never acquired whatever power it was⁠—except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for the nth time, could that power be?

That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more intently.

After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes.