The October Country

the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don't care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good, God knows. No, sir, he wouldn't dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain't got no friends, and even if he did he couldn't ask them to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I'm practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him-he ain't got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin' up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses.'

'I feel awful. I feel sad.' Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. 'Where does he live?'

'Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?'

'I'm madly in love with him, if you must know.'

He grinned around his cigar. 'Aimee,' he said. 'You and your very funny jokes.'

A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass. Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun- bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door and called into hot darkness. 'Ralph?' She picked her way through the black hall behind the mirrors, her heels tacking the wooden floor. 'Ralph?'

Someone stirred sluggishly on the canvas cot. 'Aimee?'

He sat up and screwed a dim light bulb into the dressing table socket. He squinted at her, half blinded. 'Hey, you look like the cat that swallowed a canary.'

'Ralph, I came about the midget!'

'Dwarf, Aimee honey, dwarf. A midget is in the cells, born that way. A dwarf is in the glands…'

'Ralph! I just found out the most wonderful thing about him!'

'Honest to God,' he said to his hands, holding them out as witnesses to his disbelief. 'This woman! Who in hell gives two cents for some ugly little -'

'Ralph!' She held out the magazines, her eyes shining. 'He's a writer! Think of that!'

'It's a pretty hot day for thinking.' He lay back and examined her, smiling faintly.

'I just happened to pass the Ganghes Arms, and saw Mr. Greeley, the manager. He says the typewriter runs all night in Mr. Big's room!'

'Is that his name?' Ralph began to roar with laughter.

'Writes just enough pulp detective stories to live. I found one of his stories in the secondhand magazine place, and, Ralph, guess what?'

'I'm tired, Aimee.'

'This little guy's got a soul as big as all outdoors; he's got every- thing in his head!'

'Why ain't he writin' for the big magazines, then, I ask you?'

'Because maybe he's afraid-maybe he doesn't know he can do it. That happens. People don't believe in themselves. But if he only tried, I bet he could sell stories anywhere in the world.'

'Why ain't he rich, I wonder?'

'Maybe because ideas come slow because he's down in the dumps. Who wouldn't be? So small that way? I bet it's hard to think of anything except being so small and living in a one-room cheap apartment.'

'Hell!' snorted Ralph. 'You talk like Florence Nightingale's grandma.'

She held up the magazine. 'I'll read you part of his crime story. It's got all the guns and tough people, but it's told by a dwarf. I bet the editors never guessed the author knew what he was writing about. Oh, please don't sit there like that, Ralph! Listen.'

And she began to read aloud.

'I am a dwarf and I am a murderer. The two things cannot be separated. One is the cause of the other.

'The man I murdered used to stop me on the street when I was twenty-one, pick me up in his arms, kiss my brow, croon wildly to me, sing Rock-a-bye Baby, haul me into meat markets, toss me on the scales and cry, 'Watch it. Don't weigh your thumb, there, butcher!'

'Do you see how our lives moved toward murder? This fool, this persecutor of my flesh and soul!

'As for my childhood: my parents were small people, not quite dwarfs, not quite. My father's inheritance kept us in a doll's house, an amazing thing like a white-scrolled wedding cake-little rooms, little chairs, miniature paintings, cameos, ambers with insects caught inside, everything tiny, tiny, tiny! The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents' psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp's nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!

'It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, 'I want you to meet the little woman!'

Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. 'You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It's all right. But don't you see? That little man. That little man.'

Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. 'I like Westerns better.'

'Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.'

Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. 'And guess who's going to do it? Well, well, ain't we just the Saviour's right hand?'

'I won't listen!'

'Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he'll think you're handing him pity. He'll chase you screamin' outa his room.'

She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it from every side. 'I don't know. Maybe you're right. Oh, it's not just pity, Ralph, honest. But maybe it'd look like it to him. I've got to be awful careful.'

He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers. 'Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you'll get nothing but trouble for your dough. God, Aimee, I never seen you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me, let's make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little town-to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I been savin' a coupla bucks.'

'It's because I know he's different,' she said, looking off into darkness. 'It's because he's something we can never be-you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It's so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he's good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn't have to work in the camy shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he's got the brains and can think things we'll never even guess?'

'You haven't even been listening to me!' said Ralph.

She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.

'I don't like that shrewd look you're getting on,' he said, finally.

She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. 'Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I'm going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr. Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am!'

'What!'

'Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone?'

'Go ahead, be nutty.'

Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.

Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath, shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to he small in the world, and then one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can hide away with