Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 9

  ‘Little and weedy.’ Well, better that than a great fat lout.

  Mortimer, as the closest living relative of the stick insect, received an even lower approval rating. Ruth and Ruby were clearly A-l in the weight department, but they had the great disadvantage, for a men’s doubles, of being females.

  That left…

  I saw Pharaoh’s eye rest on Waldo, who was fighting the good fight for his share of the victuals.

  I watched the wheels turn. Adequate weight, certainly. Apparently in good health, as anyone must be who could hold his own with Ruth and Ruby in the struggle to be at the top of the food chain. Available tomorrow, since lawyers never did any useful work.

  “Waldo!”

  My business partner, distracted in his tug-of-war with Aunt Ruth over a dish of sliced green beans, turned to face Pharaoh.

  “What?”

  “You. You can be my tennis partner tomorrow.”

  “I cannot!” Waldo, in an excess of emotion, lost his grip on the plate of food.

  “Of course you can, Waldo,” Aunt Ruby said firmly. “You know how to play. I’ve seen you.”

  “When I was a child!”

  “It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.”

  “I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Nonsense. You can take a day off.” Aunt Ruth turned to me. “Can’t he, Mr. Carver? You can spare him, can’t you?”

  It was time to come to the aid of my old friend and colleague. But I could not forget that I was supposed to attend a funeral tomorrow, where more than likely people would be trying to kill me. Compared with that, a tennis tournament was nothing. And Waldo had been more than happy to throw me to the wolves who had murdered Carlo Moolman, so long as he didn’t have to face them himself.

  I nodded. “I can spare him.”

  “I don’t have a tennis outfit.” Waldo was grasping at straws.

  “As it happens, I have one in the next room.” Pharaoh stood up. “I bought it for my old partner, but for some reason he refused to wear it. He’s just about your size, too.”

  He was back in half a minute. In his hand he held a tennis outfit. Waldo gave it one appalled glance.

  “You can’t expect me to wear that! Look at the color.”

  “What’s wrong with it? A nice, warm brown.”

  I realized at this point that Pharaoh Potter must be color-blind. What he was holding was the most hideous shade of hot pink I had ever seen. If Waldo wore that, he ought to be arrested for multiple offenses against society.

  Waldo thought so, too. “It’s hideous,” he said. “Isn’t it, Henry?”

  “It is. But you can have it dyed.”

  “Mmph?” Mortimer jerked into life at my side. “Who died?”

  He was awake at last. I had found the magic word. Leaving Waldo to fight on alone, I seized my chance, and threw at Mort a snappy series of questions on the theory and practice of embalming.

  In five minutes, as Waldo’s weakening howls of protest rose from the other end of the table, I knew I had Mortimer C. Wilberforce eating out of my hand. Certainly he knew the right funeral home directors. Surely I would be welcomed at the final rites for my friend Carlo Moolman. He would arrange it. What a pleasure it was to meet a man with a proper interest in funerals. All he asked was that I not embarrass him by wearing inappropriate dress.

  I was able to reassure him. On that sort of detail, Imre Munsen was infinitely reliable. I promised that I would actually arrange for the outfit to be delivered to Waldo’s home tomorrow, so that Mortimer could review it personally if he so chose. He didn’t seem to think that would be necessary. When I described the promised clothing to him, he nodded approval of every last stitch.

  For his part, Mortimer assured me, if he was not present himself when I arrived to change into my funeral garb, he would make sure that directions to get to the funeral home—one of Luna City’s biggest and most prestigious—would be written on a little yellow card and left on the hall table.

  Dinner was over, the evening’s work was done. I made an earlier than usual departure. Waldo was still fighting a rear-guard action, but I knew already that he had lost his argument. He would be Pharaoh Potter’s tennis partner tomorrow. It served him right for abandoning me to Imre Munsen. Still, I had to leave. It gave me no pleasure to see a grown man’s misery.

  I thought that I had allowed plenty of time to get dressed after I arrived at Waldo’s home the next day. But there must be a special technique for getting into funeral clothes, one that I didn’t have, and Uncle Mort was not around to help. I struggled with the shirt, with the tight collar of the shirt, with the studs of the shirt, with the tie, with the shoes, with the laces on the shoes. When I finally had the shoes on and tied, I had to take them off and start again, because I couldn’t get into the trousers unless I was barefoot.

  I was already late when I ran downstairs, grabbed Uncle Mort’s little yellow card from the hall table, and hurried out. Then it was bad luck again. It was ten more minutes before I could flag a groundcar cab to take me through the complex multiple domes of Luna City toward my destination. I had never heard of the address of the funeral home, but that was no surprise. Luna City just grew and grew, bigger and more difficult to navigate around every year.

  Traffic was hell, and half the time we didn’t seem to be moving at all. When I at last paid off the cab, I glanced at my watch. I should have been here twenty minutes ago. Did funerals run on schedule? As I hurried inside and along a dimly lit and seemingly endless tunnel, I wondered if funeral reporters had a special word to describe people like me, who did not arrive on time for the ceremony. “The late Henry Carver” would be too confusing.

  The tunnel made a final right-angle turn, and abruptly ended. I dashed the last ten yards and emerged into a large open space.

  Suddenly I had trouble breathing.

  Perhaps it was the tightness of my collar, cutting off the blood supply to my brain. Perhaps it was the light, far brighter than I had expected.

  Or perhaps it was the fact that everyone standing close to me was dressed in tennis clothes, while all around me a crowd of maybe two thousand people roared with delight at my appearance.

  In my surrealist daze, I saw one familiar face: Pharaoh Potter. I went to him.

  “There’s been a mix-up,” I said. “I got the wrong address card. I’m going now. I’m supposed to be at a funeral.”

  I started to edge away, but Potter grabbed my arm.

  “Are you trying to tell me that Waldo’s not coming?”

  “I guess not.”

  “But he’s my partner!”

  “I’m sorry about that. I have to go.” I tried to pull away again.

  But Pharaoh still held my arm. He stuck his red face close to mine. “I didn’t travel fifty million miles, and get this far in the tournament, not to play. You stay. You’re going to be my partner. You said that you know how to play tennis.”

  “That was twenty years ago! I’ve forgotten.”

  “Then you’d better learn again, real quick.” He raised his racket, and his muscles bulged. “Unless you want to leave here with a couple of broken arms and a concussion, and your liver tied in knots.”

  Pharaoh certainly had a way with words. Five minutes later I had been equipped with a racket and stood waiting to receive service.

  It had not been an easy few minutes. The crowd, pleased already by my initial appearance, was ecstatic to learn that I would stay to play. The wits among them went to town.

  “Five to two against Gravedigger Jim and Fat Jack Sprat!”

  “Done! They’re bound to win once their reinforcements get here—you know pallbearers always come in sixes.”

  “Ashes to ashes and deuce to deuce.”

  “Hey, Mister Undertaker, don’t ask me to stay for your service.”

  Our opponents also did not escape the notice of the masses. They were Mason and Mulligan Coot, two shiningly bald-headed and bow-legged brothers of like age and physique, once presumab
ly athletic, but now only slightly less creaking and musclebound than Pharaoh Potter. They seemed to blame me for the unwanted attention, and they seethed at us across the net while the crowd gave them their moment of glory.

  “New balls, umpire. Those two have lost all their fuzz.”

  “Come on, the bandy-Coots. Show a bow leg there.”

  “What did Gravedigger Jim say to the Cootie brothers? ‘Who’ll inherit your money, when you’ve got no hair apparent?’”

  Even bad things must come to an end.

  “Play,” called the umpire. Mulligan lifted his racket. One second later, a head-high serve that I only just saw went like a bullet past my right ear and on into the crowd without touching the ground.

  “Out,” called a line judge.

  “Well left!” cried Pharaoh Potter.

  “Second service,” said the umpire.

  Mulligan raised his racket again.

  I saw this one coming clearly enough, but I failed to hit it.

  “Out!” shouted Pharaoh optimistically.

  “Got to move faster, Gravedigger Jim!” cried someone in the crowd. “Stop imitating your clientele.”

  “Fifteen-love,” the umpire said. “Quiet, please.” But he spoke without much hope in his voice.

  Things did not improve as the match went on. I had dispensed with my top hat at the outset. After a couple of minutes of running about in stiff black leather shoes, I was forced to take those off, too, or blister my feet beyond bearing. Soon after that, the heat of battle led me to remove my jacket and tie, and to open my shirt all the way down my chest.

  At that point the coarser elements of the crowd, for whatever reason, changed their line of attack. They now affected the conceit that I was neither a tennis player nor a pallbearer, but a male stripper.

  “Let’s see them flowered undies!” they called. And “Don’t be shy, sweetheart, give us a peep at your wedding tackle,” and “Take ’em off, take ’em all off!”

  With such distractions, it is not easy to play one’s best. It is, in fact, not even easy to play one’s worst. Pharaoh Potter and I began disastrously, four games without a single point, and we would surely have continued that way had not I, in the middle of the fifth game, stuck my racket in the way of a speeding topspin forehand, mishit it, and accidentally popped the ball way up into the air for an easy midcourt smash.

  Mason was standing waiting, in a perfect position.

  “Mine!” he shouted to his partner watching at the net.

  “Hit it ha-a-a-a-rd,” Mulligan roared.

  Mason did. Stepping back a couple of paces, he drove the ball with supernatural force and accuracy straight into Mulligan Coot’s open mouth.

  The line judges pried it out all right, with a little bit of effort; but after that the Mason/Mulligan combination was never the same.

  Mulligan, you see, was convinced that brother Mason had done it on purpose. The next time Mason was up at the net, Mulligan took careful aim and sent his rocket first serve smack into the back of his partner’s bald head. The ball rose about a hundred feet in the air before it came down—on our side of the court and in play, oddly enough, but of course the point was already over.

  Their game went rather downhill from there. With neither of them willing to approach the net for fear of flesh wounds, and each trying to make sure that he stood at all times safely behind the other, anything of ours that managed to creep over the net to their side of the court became a near-automatic winner.

  Even so, it was far from a rout. They still had power, and when they could not aim at each other their shots came screaming across the net like artillery shells. On our side, we swung and sweated and cringed and sliced and hacked. Pharaoh lashed out in a ferocious half volley at one ball right at his feet, then had to take a break to pry his mutilated left big toe from between the strings of his racket.

  I was not without my own problems of timing. I flailed at one of Mulligan’s whizzing forehands and missed it completely. The ball flashed past my questing racket and vanished inside my open shirt. No one—partner, opponents, umpire, or onlookers—had any idea where it had gone. It was not until I wriggled and squirmed, and the ball to the crowd’s delight appeared from the bottom of my black trousers, that the point was decided.

  Even that infuriated Pharaoh Potter. “You should have kept it hid,” he growled at me. “They hit it last. It would have been called out.”

  Pharaoh wanted to win in the worst way. As we went on, I realized that might be exactly the way we would do it. On the other side of the net, Mulligan and Mason cursed and hollered at each other, ran backward far more than they ran forward, and tried to return the ball only when their brother and preferred target was nowhere in the field of view.

  We lost the first set but we won the second one easily.

  The third and final set, however, was something else. Pharaoh Potter was too fat for sustained running and I, while trim, had the muscles and stamina of one whose daily exercise seldom went beyond lifting a restraining order.

  Mulligan and Mason had started in better shape, but since the fifth game they had been continuously running to get behind each other, and shouting brotherly oaths and accusations as they did so. They were also peppered with round pink impact marks, and they sat at courtside longer and longer between games.

  The match in its third set went the way that I rather imagine the heat-death of the universe will go, entropy increasing to a maximum and everything gradually running down.

  Pharaoh and the Coot brothers were built for short sprints, not for endurance events. Rocket serves became light zephyrs that drifted over the net. Returns, if they happened at all, floated through the air like summer thistledown. Protests at line calls became increasingly feeble.

  As the pace slowed, the crowd quieted. Only our anguished sighs and despairing groans punctuated the gentle ping of ball on racket.

  It went on for an endless age, and I knew it would go on forever. So it was a great shock to look up at last at the scoreboard, and find that Pharaoh and I were leading by five games to four, with my serve to come next. I was in a position to win the match.

  At that point, the crowd became totally silent. I think they realized that they were witnessing something unique in tennis history. After all, how many other final games of a tournament match have been played with three of the four contestants sitting down?

  It had been hard on all of us, but the other three were carrying twice my weight. For the final game, Mason Coot sat in the middle of the court. His brother slumped a few feet in front of him, all fear of violence from behind long since past. On my side Pharaoh was close to the net, lying facedown on the center line.

  All I had to do was serve to the right part of the court and we would win, because no one else would move no matter where the ball went. It gives some idea of the quality of my play when I confess that the game went to deuce seven times, before the umpire could at last proclaim, “Game, set, and match to Potter and Carver.”

  The crowd swept onto the court and carried us off. They had to. The victory ceremony was conducted with all parties lying down.

  Pharaoh and I not only won our match, we won another prize, too. It was a special award, given for the contest that in the opinion of the crowd was the most enthralling of the day. No one else, I gather, came even close.

  I thought that Pharaoh Potter might be offended about that, once he had somewhat recovered. But not at all; to him, a tennis trophy was a tennis trophy, however won. He was thrilled, and when he could again stand up he insisted on taking us to the pavilion and buying me and the Coot brothers, our good buddies now, as many drinks as we chose to take in.

  In our depleted condition, that turned out to be rather a lot. It was maybe four hours later that I was buttoning my shirt, seeking my shoes, and reflecting to myself that it had been, despite a bad beginning, a perfect day for me as well as Pharaoh. I had never before, in my whole life, won anything in an athletic event. It is strange what such an exp
erience can do to a man’s mind.

  A perfect day, I thought.

  I wrinkled my brow.

  Perfect?

  That didn’t seem quite right. Shouldn’t it be almost perfect?

  Something started to drift back into my muddled consciousness. Hadn’t I been supposed to go to a funeral?

  I had. Carlo Moolman’s funeral. What about that, and what about the immortality serum? If I had come to a tennis match instead of a funeral, then was it possible that…

  For the first time in many hours, I wondered what had happened to Waldo.

  Waldo had been late for his appointment, too, but for quite different reasons. The bleach had worked reasonably well on his tennis outfit, enough to mute shocking hot pink to a pale, fleshy tone. However, the washing process had produced an unforeseen side effect.

  The tennis outfit had shrunk. A lot. Waldo managed to squeeze his bulk into it, but only with enormous effort. It was like a second skin. When he caught a glimpse of himself in a full-length mirror, the combination of tight fit and fleshy tones produced the momentary illusion that he was staring at a stark naked Waldo Burmeister.

  He shuddered, but there was no time to change. Not that he was sure he could; getting those clothes off promised to be even harder than putting them on.

  He glanced at a clock. He was late, late as he could be. Uncle Pharaoh would kill him.

  He grabbed socks and tennis shoes, picked up the little yellow card that Pharaoh Potter had left on the hall table giving directions how to reach the tournament, rushed barefoot out into the street, and hailed the first cab that he could find.

  He held out the card. “This address, fast as you can get there.”

  The cabby, Waldo insists, was struck dumb by his appearance. This, if true, does much to support Waldo’s claim of looking something well beyond the mundane, since Luna City cabbies are not easily silenced. However, the cab made excellent speed, and when Waldo was dropped off in front of a huge circular building he gave the driver a big tip. It was only as the taxi vanished from view that he realized that he had left his socks, tennis shoes, and wallet on the cab seat.