The Best of Gene Wolfe

Bobs could not sit still. The fear was on him, and he stalked out of the immense house that was Beech Hill, hardly caring where he was going. The ground sloped down, and ahead the clear water of the lake gleamed. Half a dozen guests were swimming there already: drama critic, heart surgeon, the madame of New York’s most exclusive brothel. Fashion designer, big-game hunter, test pilot. Bobs stood and watched them until Claude Brain, coming up behind him, said, “No dip today, Roberts?”

“I don’t usually,” Bobs replied, turning. Brain was in trunks. His arms were horribly scarred, and there were more scars on his chest and belly.

His eyes followed Bobs’s. “Tiger,” Brain said. “I was lucky.”

“I guess it’s hard to become a wild-animal man? Hard to get started?”

Brain nodded. “There aren’t many spots. A few places around Hollywood, and a few shows. You try and try, but most of them have already had so much trouble with greenhorns they won’t touch you.”

“I’ll bet,” Bobs said sympathetically.

“Hell, I did everything. For years. Sold shoes, worked in a factory. Bought my own animals. First one was a mountain lion. Cost me three hundred and fifty, and I’ve still got him.”

“I know how you must feel,” Bobs said. He watched Brain go down into the water. His back was scarred too.

There was a path along the water’s edge. Bobs walked slowly, head down, until he saw the girl; then she looked at him and smiled, and he said, “Sorry. Hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all,” the girl said. “I should be over with the others, but I’m afraid I’m shy.” She was beautiful, in the blond-cheerleader girl-next-door way.

“Your first season?”

She nodded.

“You’re the actress then. Bishop said something about you when I checked in last night.”

“Thanks for not saying starlet.” She smiled again.

“The star. That’s what Bishop called you. Have you made many pictures?”

“Just one—Bikini Bash. You didn’t—”

Bobs shook his head. “But I will, the next chance I get.”

“They say a lot of important people come here.”

Bobs nodded. “To look at the nuts.”

The girl laughed. “I get it. Beechnuts.”

“Yeah, Beechnuts. Listen, I want you to do me a favor.” He drew his pistol and handed it to her. “What’s this?”

Puzzled, she looked at it for a moment, then laughed again. “A toy pistol?”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course. It says right here on it: British Imperial Manufacture, and then: MADE IN HONG KONG.”

He took the gun and threw it as far as he could out into the lake. She stared at him, so he said: “Remember that. You may be called to testify later,” before he walked away.

AFTERWORD

This story was based, in one way, on the Milford Writer’s Conference. In another, on an academic I once knew. Dom (as I shall call him) is dead now, but when “Beech Hill” was written he was a major figure in the study of popular culture.

You may have heard of Baron von Steuben, one of George Washington’s most valued—and valuable— subordinates. To put it bluntly, von Steuben was a fraud in almost every respect. He said he was a Prussian nobleman and that he had been a general in the army of Frederick the Great. He was a commoner and had been a captain. But he could do what he said he could do. He could turn farm boys into soldiers, and he could do it fast; it was a talent our fledgling America needed desperately—a talent that von Steuben provided.

Dom was like that. He wore tweed jackets and smoked a pipe. He spoke with a dubious British accent and sounded pompous even when what he said was not. He gave you every reason to think him a lovable fraud. Yet he knew his subject backward and forward and cared deeply about it. I knew him, as I said, and in a way I based the story you have read upon him. We are the poorer for his passing.

THE RECORDING

 I

have found my record, a record I have owned for fifty years and never played until five minutes ago. Let me explain.

When I was a small boy—in those dear, dead days of Model A Ford touring cars, horse-drawn milk trucks, and hand-cranked ice-cream freezers—I had an uncle. As a matter of fact, I had several, all brothers of my father, and all, like him, tall and somewhat portly men with faces stamped (as my own is) in the image of their father, the lumberman and land speculator who built this Victorian house for his wife.

But this particular uncle, my uncle Bill, whose record (in a sense I shall explain) it was, was closer than all the others to me. As the eldest, he was the titular head of the family, for my grandfather had passed away a few years after I was born. My uncle’s capacity for beer was famous, and I suspect now that he was “comfortable” much of the time, a large-waisted (how he would roar if he could see his little nephew’s waistline today!) red-faced, good- humored man whom none of us—for a child catches these attitudes as readily as measles—took wholly seriously.

The special position which, in my mind, this uncle occupied is not too difficult to explain. Though younger than many men still working, he was said to be retired, and for that reason I saw much more of him than of any of the others. And despite his being something of a figure of fun, I was a little frightened of him, as a child may be of the painted, rowdy clown at a circus; this, I suppose, because of some incident of drunken behavior witnessed at the