Stranger in a Strange Land

“You mean I get a vote?”

“What? Jubal, it has to be your decision. We all know that.”

(Son, you’re a gent—and you’ve probably just told your first lie—I doubt if I could hold even Duke if you set your mind against it.) “I guess it ought to be Jill. But look, kids—This is still your home. The latch string is out.”

“We know that—and we’ll be back. Again we will share water.”

“We will, son.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Huh?”

“Jubal, there is no Martian word for ‘father.’ But lately I have grokked that you are my father. And Jill’s father.”

Jubal glanced at Jill. “Mmm, I grok. Take care of yourselves.”

“Yes. Come, Jill.” They were gone before he left the table.

XXVI

IT WAS THE USUAL SORT OF CARNIVAL in the usual sort of town. The rides were the same, the cotton candy tasted the same, the flat joints practiced a degree of moderation acceptable to the local law in separating the marks from their half dollars, whether with baseballs thrown at targets, with wheels of fortune, or what—but the separation took place just the same. The sex lecture was trimmed to suit local opinions concerning Charles Darwin’s opinions, the girls in the posing show wore that amount of gauze that local mores required, and the Fearless Fentons did their Death-Defying (in sober truth) Double Dive just before the last bally each night.

The ten-in-one show was equally standard. It did not have a mentalist, it did have a magician; it did not have a bearded lady, it did have a half-man half-woman; it did not have a sword swallower, it did have a fire eater. In place of a tattooed man the show had a tattooed lady who was also a snake charmer—and for the blow-off (at another half dollar per mark) she appeared “absolutely nude!.. clothed only in bare living flesh in exotic designs!”—and any mark who could find one square inch below her neckline untattooed would be awarded a twenty dollar bill.

That twenty dollars had gone unclaimed all season, because the blowoff was honestly ballyhooed. Mrs. Paiwonski stood perfectly still and completely unclothed—other than in “bare, living flesh”… in this case a fourteen-foot boa constrictor known as “Honey Bun.” Honey Bun was looped around Mrs. P. so strategically that even the local ministerial alliance could find no real excuse to complain, especially as some of their own daughters wore not nearly as much and covered still less while attending the carnival. To keep the placid, docile Honey Bun from being disturbed, Mrs. P. took the precaution of standing on a small platform in the middle of a canvas tank—on the floor of which were more than a dozen cobras.

The occasional drunk who was certain that all snake charmer’s snakes were defanged and so tried to climb into the tank in pursuit of that undecorated square inch invariably changed his opinion as soon as a cobra noticed him, lifted and spread its hood.

Besides, the lighting wasn’t very good.

However, the drunk could not have won the twenty dollars in any case. Mrs. P’s claim was much sounder than the dollar. She and her late husband had had for many years a tattooing studio in San Pedro; when trade was slack they had decorated each other—and, eventually, at some minor inconvenience to herself, the art work on her was so definitively complete from her neck down that there was no possible room for an encore. She took great pride both in the fact that she was the most completely decorated woman in the world (and by the world’s greatest artist, for such was her humbly grateful opinion of her late husband) and also in the certainty that every dollar she earned was honest.

She associated with grifters and sinners and did not hold herself aloof from them. But her own integrity was untouched. She and her husband had been converted by Foster himself, she kept her membership in San Pedro and attended services at the nearest branch of the Church of the New Revelation no matter where she was.

Patricia Paiwonski would gladly have dispensed with the protection of Honey Bun in the blow-off not merely to prove that she was honest (that needed no proof, since she knew it was true) but because she was serene in her conviction that she was the canvas for religious art greater than any on the walls or ceilings of the Vatican. When she and George had seen the light, there was still about three square feet of Patricia untouched. Before he died she carried a complete pictorial life of Foster, from his crib with the angels hovering around to the day of glory when he had taken his appointed place among the archangels.