Good Neighbor Sam Read online

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  INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

  COPYRIGHT © 1963 BY JACK FINNEY

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.

  ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 20, N.Y.

  FIRST PRINTING

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 63-15365

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  BY BOOK PRESS, INC., BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT

  JACK FINNEY

  Good Neighbor Sam

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER

  NEW YORK • 1963

  FOR MARG

  1

  Call me Sam.

  I'm not going to say what kind of work I do in the offices of Burke & Hare on Montgomery Street to which I drive each weekday morning. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings so I'll only say that if I and my fellows ever stopped what we do there each day, something terrible might happen, such as you buying another brand of toothpaste. On Friday nights when I leave, I play that if I can drive across Golden Gate Bridge without being forced to the side by a car — company name on the door panel, siren going, red light flashing — that I have escaped into Marin County which has no extradition treaty with San Francisco, and that I don't ever have to go back to the office.

  Tonight I just made it, a company car shooting at my tires, Mr. Burke leaning out the driver's window shaking his fist as my wheels touched the blessed Marin County soil, and now I swung off the main highway and onto the road that winds down through the hills and then along the Bay to the sea-level main street of Sausalito. This is a straight narrow street, and for nearly a mile before you reach the shopping area, it is separated by only a sidewalk from the Bay beside it; across the water San Francisco lies spread out on its hills. But nice as the view was, and I never got tired of it, I hadn't taken the long way home through Sausalito for the view but to stop at the dump just north of town.

  It wasn't actually a dump but a narrow peninsula of fill pushed out into the Bay for what would presently become a small-boat landing; no garbage allowed, only earth fill and hard junk such as car bodies. But it still looked and smelled like a dump, and I pulled off the road onto it. It was August, plenty of daylight left, sunny and warm, but I kept my suit coat, tie, and hat on. I always enjoyed the puzzled looks from other commuters driving past and seeing me — dressed as they were and apparently one of them — loading junk into the back of a station wagon. My scavenging took on the purifying quality of an act of rebellion, however small, and if I'd owned a rolled umbrella I'd have brought it along.

  Tonight I made a particularly good haul; six battered hub caps, the cogs from a little portable cement mixer, and the axle from a kid's wagon with two wheels attached. The tires were gone, but that suited me because the grooves in which they'd been would take a movable belt.

  I drove on, rejoining the main highway for several miles, then turned off it onto a paralleling service road, and then off that onto the street I live on. Marin County is all valleys and hills, one of them actually being a small mountain — Tamalpais — visible from all over the county. My street winds between two rows of hills along a little valley that was once a creek bed. There is only a single row of houses on each side of the street, none up on the hills, though I expect to wake up any morning and find the hills bulldozed level and replaced with apartments. But it hasn't happened yet, and it's a nice place to live, the street lined with big evergreens along the curbs.

  Driving along it now past the shingle-roofed houses, kids' bikes, parked cars, and people watering lawns, waving at those I knew, it seemed to me that, statistically speaking, this street ought to be about ready to produce a good murder, rape, aggravated assault, or at least a divorce, attempted arson, or a fine case of adultery. These are just a few of the fascinating shenanigans that go on all the time in the tract-housing developments I read about in books from the drugstore, and by any reasonable test Treasure Island is a tract. Instead of a downtown with a main street, we have an enormous shake-shingled shopping center in the middle of an asphalt desert; and we have a developer's idea of a cute place name, even the street names being mildly sickening. We live on Admiral Benbow Boulevard, so I tend to put off writing letters requiring a return address on the envelope, and I know a guy over on Long John Lane who rents a post-office box for just that reason. But it's mostly a lights-out-at-ten-on-weekdays, watch-the-late-show-Saturday-night place, and not a hell of a lot ever happens here. Little did I know, turning into my driveway, that even now a spectacular scandal was brewing, and that Fate was looking me over for one of the lead roles.

  I came in through the kitchen from the driveway, and then into the living room, which is at the back of the house away from the street. My wife, Minerva, was sitting on the davenport, feet up on the coffee table, skirt up over her knees, and when she saw me looking she rolled her eyes lewdly. My name, by the way, is Samuel L. Bissell. I'm twenty-nine years old, average height, weight, looks, and color of hair. Min is twenty-five, and a hot-looking brunette. In her own opinion she's too heavy, but that isn't true. What she is is buxom, which is a hell of a lot different; she has a fine, full, womanly figure, including excellent legs, and her face is amiable and intelligent. She stood up and I kissed her, my arms around her busy tucking her skirt up under her girdle, a threadbare joke which she now expects; she'd probably be offended if I quit doing it. I said, "Lie down; I have an indecent proposal."

  "What is an indecent proposal, anyway?"

  "It's when a man asks a girl to marry him, and his fly is open."

  She was sniffing my suit coat. "Goodie, you've been to the dumps," she said. Min had been against my project at first, but now she liked it. "We can work on it for a while right now, if you're not too hungry. I thought we'd eat out later; just somewhere around here." I said fine, and went back to our bedroom to change clothes.

  The project was something I'd read about a couple of weeks earlier, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The next night I'd stopped at the dump on my way home from work, picked up whatever I could find to start my own, including a big double bedspring, and the thing had been growing ever since. Our living room opened, through sliding glass doors, onto a concrete-paved patio, and the bed-spring lay at the far edge of the patio forming a sort of platform for dozens of rusting objects of junk fastened to it. They were lashed to the spring with wire, or wedged into its broken coils, or in some instances welded to it. This jungle of objects rose above the bedspring for heights varying from a few inches to over seven feet. They were odd lengths of steel such as concrete-reinforcing rods and rusted-out car mufflers and exhaust pipes; they were parts of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, various other machinery, and toys; they were wheels and cogs and odd lengths of wire; they were the glass door from a washing machine, a busted stringless tennis racket, and a large sepia photograph of a mustached man in a lodge uniform. Several hundred pounds of junk like that were fastened to the bedspring, and connected complexly to each other by a network of old fan and motor belts, sections of inner tube, ropes, and in one place, an old elastic corset.

  All this was joined to a big black ½-horsepower motor, one of the few things I'd had to buy. It sat lashed to the center of the bedspring like a round black spider down in the center of the junk, and was connected to a wall socket in the living room by an extension cord across the patio. I'd run thin steel wires from its toggle switch out to the corners and edges of the bedspring, so that from anywhere near it you could just reach into that forest of junk with a hand or foot, push or pull one of the wires, and the motor would come on and the whole weird structure would begin to move.

  Wheels revolved which turned belts which moved other wheels which operated cogs, shafts and eccen
tric gears — so that shafts rose and fell, and things wobbled, whirled, lurched, and spun. The tennis racket flapped back and forth at an old ball suspended from a string so that it passed right through the string-less frame over and over again. The mustached photograph jounced up and down, appearing and disappearing behind the glass-paneled washing-machine door. And the whole thing clattered and shook, clanked, vibrated, scraped, and banged to make the goddamned-est noise you ever heard. It was an enormous mobile, the kind of anything-goes art which is a boon to talentless people like me with a frustrated creative urge. And once it had begun shaping up Min loved it and had even worked on it herself daytimes. When it was finished and I'd found a good name for it, we were going to have a cocktail party out here, and I figured the thing would be a sensation.

  Out on the patio now, in wash pants and a patterned cotton shirt, I took one of the metal disc wheels I'd brought home off its axle. Min came out with a couple of drinks, we each took a gulp, then she held the wheel on the patio cement while I punched holes near the rim with a small twelve-pound sledge and a big spike. Then I heaved up one corner of the bedspring, and shoved the other wheel, which was still on its axle, underneath the spring so that it lay on its side on the concrete. The weight of the spring held it in place, and the axle stuck up through the spring and protruded a foot or so above it. I fastened the other wheel back onto the axle, Min went into the house to find some string, and I punched a hole near the edge of each of the hub cups I'd found. Then, with short lengths of heavy string, we tied the hub caps to the wagon wheel. I cut off a narrow circle of inner tube to make a belt, and ran it from the groove of the wagon wheel to a shaft, then Min pushed down on one of the wires to the toggle switch, and the insane clanking movement began, the bed-spring heaving and squeaking, and the hub caps rose like a flight of birds and fanned out into a marvelous flashing whirligig. It was a spectacularly successful addition, one of the best so far, and Min and I sat there on the pavement staring at it, sipping our drinks, turning to grin at each other, and from the corner of my eye I was watching the house next door.

  Because an unexpected bonus from this contraption was that the sight of it delighted, and the sound of it frequently attracted, Janet Ebbett who lived there. She was an old friend of Min's, a college classmate at Mills, and a couple of months ago they'd run into each other at Blum's lunch counter on Union Square. Janet had just gotten a divorce and was looking for a new place to live, and since the house next door was for rent, Min suggested it to Janet. She took it, and the revival of her friendship with Min was helping her through a lousy time.

  Most everything about her interested me strangely; I think I'd have had some small interest in just listening to her grocery list, item by item. For one thing, while she had no money of her own except a small monthly alimony check, she was a genuine heiress, the only one I was ever likely to know, standing to inherit some eleven million dollars from a grandfather. I'd find myself staring at her sometimes, just thinking about that. She was also a magnificently long-legged, honey-haired, good-looking girl, a confection for the eyes, and sometimes I'd find myself staring at her and thinking about that. There must have been times when Min wondered what the hell she'd been thinking of to induce this creature to move in next door.

  Sure enough, my trained ears detected, above the clattering of the contraption beside us, the sound of Janet's patio doors rolling back, and I cleverly looked the other way. This meant that Min would see her step out first and that it would be Min, not me, who invited Miss Longlegs over. "Yoo-hoo!" Min called. "Come on over!" and I started in simulated surprise, and turned, hoping Janet was wearing shorts.

  She was indeed. Below a red-white-and-blue middy blouse, she was wearing white shorts with a red stripe down their splendidly brief sides, revealing, as she crossed the strip of lawn between the two patios, a spectacular length of long rounded limb whose shape would tempt a bronze Civil War general to desert the army. I waited, smiling up at Janet's face as she approached till Min glanced at me to see if I was watching Janet's legs and saw that I wasn't; then I watched Janet's legs for the rest of the way. We all said "Hi," Janet admired and exclaimed over the new addition to the mobile, and Min invited her to come along with us for supper. It seemed strange, but this good-looking heiress to eleven million bucks was often a little lonely. She'd only just been divorced, and very few of her friends knew it or even knew where she was living right now.

  We ate at Sabella's, a large pleasant restaurant out on the highway. Janet went home first and, regrettably, came back with a wrap-around skirt added to her outfit, but we sat three in the front seat on the way to Sabella's, Janet in the middle. This is a seating arrangement prescribed, in this situation, by local custom and there's no use fighting it, though the tight fit, thigh against firm rounded thigh, makes it a little hard to drive, especially if you take the long scenic way there as I did.

  At the restaurant we had what I think was once called a prophetic conversation. Our waitress was a short fat woman, every movement an effort, her breathing audible, yet she was genuinely concerned with our comfort. When she set our plates down, she carefully rearranged our silverware, moved the salt and pepper shakers an inch closer to my reach, and when Min bumped her coffee cup and spilled a little in the saucer, she hurried away for a cloth and came waddling back to wipe it spotless, even drying the bottom of the cup, too, her round pink face anxious that no least drop be left. "Amazing," I said when she'd left.

  Janet said, "Isn't she? Makes me feel like a child visiting a wonderfully nice aunt who's anxious that I have a nice supper. I'll be afraid to leave anything on my plate."

  I said, "You're right, she's a natural-born aunt. I think I'll start some kind of agency, and she'll be my first employee; I'm going to rent her out to families who haven't got an aunt. You sign up for the service, and once a week she arrives at your house. When you answer the bell, there she'll be, smiling benignly and puffing a little from climbing the stairs. Even if you haven't got any stairs."

  Min said, "In her hand, carefully wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, is a jar of what looks like homemade jelly."

  "With a handwritten label," Janet said, "and sealed with paraffin."

  I said, "Right. And while she'll actually arrive by cab, she'll get out half a block away, and it's to be understood that she came by streetcar — not bus, but streetcar — having to change several times, the trip taking over two hours. She visits you, listens sympathetically to your troubles, helps with the dishes, then on to the next subscriber."

  "You could call the service 'Hertz-Rent-An-Aunt,'" Min said.

  "Wonderful. Only let's make it 'Hertz-Rent-A-Aunt.' That gives it just the little touch of grammatical flaw that makes great advertising."

  "Could you visit her?" Janet said.

  "Yeah, I think so; we'll maintain a little frame house surrounded by lilac bushes in permanent bloom; probably made of plastic. You have a half-hour visit once a week at a designated time, and she hurries to the screen door when you arrive, wiping her hands on her apron, and saying, 'Lands, but it's nice to see you!' A hidden secretary checks a typed list to make sure everyone gets the right aunt, because we'll have a staff of various types sitting around in a back room somewhere. Between each visit a uniformed employee, with 'Hertz-Rent-A-Aunt' stitched on the back of his coveralls, sprays the place with an aerosol can of brown-soap-and-cookie smell."

  "How about uncles?" Min said.

  "Sure. We may have to call this 'Hertz-Rent-A-Relative,' because we'll have all kinds; just look through our big leather-bound books, study the eight-by-ten glossy photographs, read the rates and descriptions, and pick what you want."

  "I'll take a rich uncle," Min said.

  "Okay, lady; we have a fine one. Waxed mustache, panama hat, double-breasted vest piped with white braid. A rascal, a roué, a gay dog. He always arrives unexpectedly from out of town, phones, and then the excitement starts. You cancel any other engagement and hurry to get ready to meet him, because Uncle Ben i
s flying on to Hong Kong in the morning. He takes you to the races in the afternoon, then to champagne cocktails in his hotel suite, to dinner at some fabulous restaurant, to a hit play, to a night club. You protest at the expense, but he laughs it away. You try to pay a check, but he simply won't allow it. Of course you get the entire bill a couple of weeks later plus a stiff rental charge for the uncle. But it's worth it; a wonderful evening on the town with your rich uncle, and ten times the fun you'd have had doing the same things on your own."

  Janet said, "What about renting a husband? It looks as though I might need one soon," and something in her voice wasn't kidding.

  "What do you mean?" I said.

  She shrugged a little. "My grandfather's pretty sick. I found out this afternoon; my attorney phoned me."

  We knew what that meant; Janet had told Min. Her grandfather's will left everything to Janet when he died, if she were married. If not, it all went to some cousins. She didn't know why; he was the kind of domineering old man who never explained anything he did and who had always tried to run other people's lives. He just thought women should be married, and that was final. I said, "Well, here's to a speedy recovery for the old boy. And a speedy remarriage for you, I guess."

  Janet smiled but shook her head. "I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't like to have the family money when he dies. But meanwhile he's not running my life, or ruining it either. I'll get married when I'm ready, not before."

  Somewhere or other I read that a research foundation has been established to scientifically investigate old medical superstitions. The doctors chuckled for years at the notion that spider webs applied to a cut could stop bleeding. Nonsense! Poppycock! Balderdash! But after enormous research they turned up a miracle drug that speeds up blood-clotting, and it turned out to be some stuff contained in spider webs. This kind of important new medical knowledge has been discovered often enough lately to make medicine finally realize the necessity of an all-out effort to catch up with the old ladies who've always known it, and I expect to read any day that in the treatment of sprains and bruises a significant breakthrough has just been made involving vinegar and brown paper.