Orbit 14 Read online

  Isn’t it a lovely world?

  And so it is. It is.

  For reasonable people.

  ROYAL LICORICE

  You too can live forever. The formula is simple— if you know which is the true licorice.

  R. A. Lafferty

  1

  From catfish crop and mud-goose tears

  And Cimmaron mud river:

  For fifty cents a thousand years,

  And for a buck forever.

  Boomer Flats Ballads

  Black Red had been sixteen years at stud. This was after a strict colthood and eight years of competitive horse-racing. Now he had become a very slow and undependable stud. He was one old horse.

  He gnawed a clump of prickly pear. He had been a stupid and rock-headed horse from his youth, and now that his eyes were shot he would eat anything. His owner chewed on a length of big blue-stem grass and contemplated him. It was too bad to sell, for nine dollars for cat meat, a horse that had earned five million dollars. But what else could be done with the old animal?

  But Black Red smelled a brother horse, an old flyer like himself, and he raised his head. So did the owner, and he saw in the distance a rare contraption: an ancient horse pulling an ancient medicine wagon that had once known gay paint. And the driver was more than ancient; he was timeless.

  Then the contraption had bridged the distance too quickly to be believed, and it came to a halt in that grassy lane across the rail fence from Black Red and his owner.

  “I, sir,” said the driver of the contraption, “am selling Royal Licorice, the concoction that will halt and reverse aging in any creature. Buy it and use it, and you can have for your horse restored youth and great length of days. I sell it for fifty cents a small jug and a dollar a large.”

  “Why don’t you use it yourself, old man?” the owner of Black Red asked.

  “I do. Would you believe that I am more than a thousand years old?”

  “No, I wouldn’t, but you look as if you were. And your own horse?”

  “Would you believe that he also is more than a thousand years old? Why do you hesitate? I don’t make a lot of this, and I offer it only by chance as I go. It’s by your happy chance that I’ve met you here today, sir.”

  Black Red neighed hopefully.

  “See,” said the peddling man. “He wants it. Your horse is smarter than yourself, sir.”

  “Not at all. Some of my horses may be, but Black Red is a rock-head. In his own day he made his way by his great speed and strength. He’d never have made it by his wits.”

  Black Red reached a very long neck through the rail fence, grasped the small jug of Royal Licorice in his uneven teeth, and then swallowed the whole thing in one brave, horsy gulp.

  “Will it hurt him, do you think?” the owner asked. “It won’t matter really, for he’s about at the end of his line. But I like the Roman-nosed fool, and I’d not have him suffer a choking death.”

  “It will hurt him not at all,” the timeless peddling man said. “The clay of the jug dissolves at once when it reaches the stomach. Watch now! The change is startling if you’ve never seen it before. You have the finest and fastest colt in the world here, sir. Watch.”

  Black Red gave a great snort, a youthful snort. He took off through the short cropped bluestem with a clatter of hoofs. He ran, and he changed. His was a great coltish gallop, and he now had the movements and appearance of a fine colt. When he was a half-mile off, he half turned as if going into the backstretch. He stretched and he ran, and the owner was seized with the shouting madness. That man knew speed when he saw it, real speed, winning speed. And the big colt was growing more glossy and more beautifully muscled by the second. He was dark cherry color. He was heroically swift.

  “You owe me fifty cents for the small jug he took,” the peddler said.

  “Yes, here,” said the owner. “I don’t believe it, but my eyes have never lied to me before. Where can I find you if I want some more of it?”

  “Oh, I’ll be around before he needs it again.”

  “What’s your name, old fellow? Or should I say thousand-year-young fellow?”

  “They call me the Licorice Man.”

  Old Cyrus Slocum was throwing rocks at a fencepost. This was up in the gypsum hills where old Cy had his ranch. It wasn’t much of a ranch, but the rocky, bitter gypsum of it was in accord with the man himself.

  Slocum wasn’t really unhappy. He had money; he had his stingy land (as stingy as he used to be with a bingle); he had his memories; he had his good right arm, a little mellow now, it’s true; he had a few cattle.

  Cy Slocum (you may not remember it about him if you are young, young for the first time) had been about the greatest baseball pitcher ever. But the end of his. career had been more than forty years before. He had been a six-hundred-game winner. He had once pitched ninety-nine consecutive scoreless innings; he had maintained an earned-run average of .92 over a five-year period. He had had it all.

  And even now, as an old man, Slocum was hitting that fencepost resoundingly. He would angle off a knee-high slider that just caught a bit of the post. He would hit it dead center with a shoulder-high fast rock. And when he threw his change-up, that fencepost seemed to lean weakly toward him in frustration.

  “I could have been halfway to second, and you skylarking there on the mound,” came a voice, friendly but full of timeless authority. “What? Do you no longer use the eyes in the back of your head?”

  “I remember you from somewhere,” Slocum said as he turned to see the ancient man with the venerable horse and medicine wagon. How could it have slipped up on him when it had to clatter up that rough and rocky gypsum road?

  “It was the year you first tried out with the St. Louis Browns,” the timeless man said, “and what antiquarian remembers the old Browns now? You ran athwart a barnstorming bunch of bearded men.”

  “The House of David!” said Slocum with friendly awe in his voice. “Now they were ball players, and they beat many of the major-league teams. But we took them three to nothing that afternoon. I two-hit them.”

  “It’s another and more outsized bunch of bearded blokes that I meant,” said the ancient traveler.

  “Now you open an angry wound,” Slocum almost moaned. “That afternoon-mare of a game has stuck in my undermind for more than half a century. They called themselves the Flats, I believe it was. Odd name, odd bunch. They had half a dozen real giants; must have been over eight feet tall, some of them. The Flats, the Boomer Flats they called themselves.”

  “Yes, we had some pretty good-sized fellows on our team,” the traveling man said. “They were the Uncles, the Old Bachelors, the Bashful and Silent Ones.”

  “You’d unwind pretty long,” Slocum said, “but not that long.”

  “I’m six six,” said the traveler. “I was a little taller then but I’m not one of the Uncles. I’m the little shrimp who played third base.”

  “Eighteen runs they tagged me for in that first inning,” Slocum remembered blackly, “and the man kept me in there and let me suffer.”

  “It was fortuitous,” said the traveler. “You made every mistake that a young pitcher could make. But most of them you never made again. ’Twas luck you met us. Slocum, how would you like to have your arm back again, at its strongest, and at the same time keep your wits at their wisest? How would you like your youth back without losing a drop of your later-acquired wisdom and savvy?”

  “Wouldn’t that be something, fellow? Who are you?”

  “I’m the Licorice Man. This horse here is named Peegosh. He’s better than my regular horse. He belongs to the Comet: but the Comet isn’t traveling this year, and Peegosh wanted to amble the country with me a bit. What I sell is Royal Licorice: fifty cents a small jug, a dollar a large.”

  “I’ll take a small one,” Cy Slocum said. They transacted. Then Slocum took a great swig of the stuff. He began to throw rocks at a fencepost again, but now he was throwing at the fourth post down the line. Hitting it, too. And he
was throwing like a young man.

  “It works, doesn’t it,” Slocum said.

  “Sure it works. Always does. And your hair is turning black again.”

  “I know it. I can feel it.” He continued to throw. How that young fellow could throw those rocks!

  The indomitable old dame had been driving an indomitable old Dusenberg. Both of them had been restored, polished, and groomed in amazing fashion, and both looked good. The old dame and her old car had received a special award at the Antique Auto Festival Southwestern Division show. And the award read: For class, which doesn’t have to be defined. There was no money attached to this award as there was to the first and second and third prizes. That didn’t matter. The old dame didn’t need it. She was pleased about the whole thing. She purred along in the sporty Dusie on a fine little country road, she remembering, and the snazzy little old car remembering.

  Then they were passed by a long-legged, fast-ambling horse that pulled a flake-painted medicine wagon. Listen, nobody passed the old dame and the old Dusie*like that! A horse and wagon sure did not.

  She noticed, however, that while the hoofs of the stilt-legged striding horse struck sparky fire at every step, these hoofs did not quite touch the roadway. That horse was going along six inches in the air. (Don’t mention it, though: there would have to be explanations or denials.)

  Then the horse was reined in ahead, and the old dame stopped the Dusie beside the wagon. An old, tall, raffish gentleman got out of the wagon and came over to her.

  “Ma’am,” he asked, “aren’t you Flambeau La Flesche?”

  “Sir,” she said, “I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord, a fancier of antiques and myself an antique.”

  “No, no,” the man insisted. “You used to be in vaudeville. After that, you were a movie star.”

  “And now I am an old character actress,” she said, “playing that old character, myself. You really remember?”

  “Sure. Some of us used to dress up and take the train out of Boomer over to Tulsa whenever you played at the Orpheum. You are Flambeau La Flesche, are you not?”

  “I was. The publicity man who coined that name for me is buried in a potter’s field somewhere, I hope. He couldn’t even spell Flesh. But now I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord. What are you chewing?”

  “Royal Licorice Plug Tobacco.”

  “Well, don’t be ungallant. Cut a plug for me too. I’m a country girl originally. You’re from Boomer, are you? That dump!”

  “No. No. I said we used to take the train out of Boomer. But I’m really from Boomer Flats.”

  “I apologize. They’re as different as dusk and darkness, are they not? And the elixir you are selling, is it also called Royal Licorice?”

  “Yes. Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder. You catch on fast, Flambeau.”

  “I always did,” she said, and she spat a beautifully straight stream of black Royal Licorice tobacco. The Licorice Man almost hesitated to offer her the benison of returning youth. She was one dame who had grown old gracefully. But he was a peddler deep in the long bones of him, so he didn’t hesitate very much.

  “Flambeau, it goes at fifty cents a small jug, a dollar a large one,” he said with his easy finesse.

  “All right, I’ll take a small one then.” She took a thoughtful drink of it. “What’s it made out of?”

  “Catfish crops, mud-goose tears, Cimmaron river water, Royal Licorice chewing tobacco.”

  “Mud-goose tears? Tell me, Licorice, what can make a mud-goose cry? What’s the one thing that can do it? This had better be good.”

  The Licorice Man looked around furtively, though there was no one else within a mile. Long-faced drollery had taken over his phiz.

  “It’s a little raunchy, Flambeau,” he said then. “I’d better whisper it to you.”

  “I’ll use it,” she said a while later as she wiped the smeared remnants of laughter from her face. “Raunchy, I’ll say. But lots of times we used words in my skits and movies, and raunchy tales go well with me.” She took another thoughtful drink of the elixir.

  “Yes, I do feel something,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I could come back that way, all the way? I’d give them all fits if I had my girlhood again. And never was the competition shabbier. The little babes these days, they have so little talent that all they can do is peel it down to the buff. Me, I had class, so I never had to do that. I always kept my garters on. They called me the Golden Garter Girl.”

  “I remember, Flambeau.”

  “Oh, it’s working all right. I can feel it. Say, Licorice, pour a big jug of that into Dusie’s tank. He’d like to be young again too, not merely restored.”

  The Licorice Man poured a big jug of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder into the tank of the snazzy little car. Flambeau paid him. Then she took off in the Dusie, leaving the smell of burning rubber and returning youth to drift above that fine little country road.

  Tell all the boys that Flambeau La Flesche is back.

  Did you tell them all?

  Sure, tell those in the graveyard too. Them especially. It will give them a lift, and those who have proper clothes will come to see her.

  Ex-President Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson was fishing along Exendine Creek on the Ex-Presidential Ranch in Kaw County, Oklahoma. He was himself of a dead-fish complexion now, and so shrunken that the great cowboy hat and the sharkskin boots fitted him ill.

  The Exendine Creek was only four feet wide at this place, but old Ex had cast his line far beyond its banks and had tangled it in some sumac bushes sixty feet on the other side of the creek.

  Old Ex believed that the sumac bushes were Republican congressmen out to thwart him. He cursed them, and he chopped off their appropriations. Some days this would intimidate the bushes and cause them to release the line, but today they held it fast.

  A man with an animal and wagon came bumping along.

  “Are you registered, friend, and will you vote right?” Ex asked the man in what had once been a great voice.

  “I am and I will,” said the man. He was the Licorice Man: no use keeping it a secret from you; you’d find out anyhow. And the Licorice Man was untangling Ex’s line from the bushes.

  “And the donkey, is he registered?” Ex asked.

  “He’s a horse and not a donkey,” the Licorice Man said. “He is registered, but how he votes is his own secret. Reel in, man.”

  “I know that a donkey will always vote my way,” Ex said, reeling in his line, “but I never trusted a horse. What did you do with the fish that was on my hook?”

  “Don’t you one-up me, Hiram Andrew Clayborne,” the Licorice Man said. “How would you like to be restored to your youth and to your faculties? Then you could run again. You have just nine days to file for the first primary.”

  “There’s no restoring needed for me,” old Ex said. “My wits are as they always were.”

  “True, true,” said the Licorice Man. “Sad but true.”

  “And I still have my same fund of fine stories, and I still have my great name. I always say that I am the only Apostle who ever became President. There was an earlier President Andrew Johnson, it’s true, but he wasn’t the apostolic type. But I have the Andrew Johnson in my name somewhere. Andrew, as you know, was the brother of Peter. Boy, look up chapter and verse for me quickly! I wonder where that boy has gone. He’s never around anymore. And Christ once said ‘Peter, Son of John,’ so that was his name, ‘Son of John’—‘Johnson,’ get it? And I, as Peter’s brother, am Andrew Johnson, the only Apostle who ever became President.”

  “Yes, you still have your same fund of stories,” the Licorice Man agreed. “And you still have your great name. But there are restorations needed. Your voice is cracked and broken. Your eyesight is about gone. You are stooped and old and toothless and hairless and deaf, and you smell like a goat. As you are, you just don’t inspire confidence.”

  “Have I aged? Is it true that I
have aged?” old Ex asked.

  “It’s true. Now, what I can do is . . .”

  “How much?”

  “Yours is a hard case. Nothing short of a big jug will do it. One dollar.”

  “Have you figured excise tax in that? Ex-Presidents are exempt from excise taxes, you know. I had that regulation passed myself.”

  “Seventy-one cents then.”

  Old Ex fished out the seventy-one cents from somewhere. He took a jolt from the jug; then another; then another. He began to fill out to the size of the great cowboy hat and the sharkskin boots. He began to talk in the high manner.

  The horse Peegosh was restive. So horse, man, and wagon took their bumpy farewell. Behind them the apostolic voice of Hiram Andrew Clayborne rose in cracked and broken thunder. And then the cracks were healed by the miracle of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder.

  The strength and timbre came back to that voice. The power came back. It was a restoration, a resurrection. It was a new manifestation in all its former glory. It was itself again: the Golden Guff. Country, look out!