THE AIR OF CASTOR OIL
BY JIM HARMON
Illustrated by WALKER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine August 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Let the dead past bury its dead?
Not while I am alive, it won't!
It surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't havebeen more safe. In the window of the radio store a color televisionset was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was thenewspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in theblooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemedhardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my owntime. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I achedto do.
I turned the corner.
The breaks were against me from the start. It didn't come as anysurprise. I could never get away with it. I knew that all along.
There was a Packard parked just beyond the fire plug.
The metal and glass fronts of the buildings didn't show back here, onlyseasoned brick glued with powdering chalk. The line of the block seemedto stretch back, ever further away from the glossy fronts into thecrumbling stone.
A man brushed past me, wearing an Ivy League suit and snap-brim hat,carrying a briefcase. And, reassuringly, he was in a hurry.
I decided to chance it. I certainly wanted to do it in the worst way.
My footsteps carried me on down the block.
A little car spurted on past me. One of those foreign jobs, I decided.Only it wasn't. I fixed the silhouette in my mind's eye and identifiedit. A Henry J.
Still, I wasn't worried. It was actually too early in the day. Itwasn't as if it were evening or anything like that.
The little store was right where I left it, rotting quietly to itself.The Back Number Store, the faded circus poster proclaimed in red andgold, or now, pink and lemon. In the window, in cellophane envelopes,were the first issue of Life, a recent issue of Modern Man witha modern woman fronting it, a Big Big Book of Buck Rogers and theSilver Cities of Venus, and a brand-new, sun-bleached copy of DoctorZhivago.
There was a little car at the curb. This time I recognized that itwasn't an import, just a Crosley.
I went in, the brass handle making me conscious of the sweat on my palm.
The old man sat behind a fortress of magazines and books, treacherouslyreading the funnies in a newspaper. His bald head swiveled on thehunched shoulders of his sweater which was azuring toward white. Hegrinned, toothless.
"Came back for more of the stuff, did you?"
He laid down the newspaper. (That subheadline couldn't really bemaking so nasty a suggestion to a noted general, could it?)
"Yes," I laughed, not very true.
"I know what a craving can be. I shouldn't smoke, but I do. I've triedto stop but I lie there thinking about cigarettes half the night. Longones, short ones, smoked ones, ones unlit. I feel like I could smokeone in each hand. It like that with you?"
"Not that bad. To me it's just—"
"Don't tell me reading isn't a craving with some of you fellows. I'veseen guys come in here, hardly two threads stuck together on them, andgrab up them horror magazines and read and read, until sweat startsrolling off the end of their nose. I've hardly got the heart to throw'em out."
Horror magazines. Ones with lovely girls