XVII
“But you justcannotgo off like that, Guy,” said Agnes, truly impatient with the boy now when he rose to leave. “Surely you shan’t!”
“Canandmust, my dears,” Guy explained, kissing them both. “Flux, motion, growth, change—those are your great life principles. Best keep pace while we can.”
He bent forward and took fat Ginger’s hand in his own. “Yes, I’ll be moving on, Ginger,” he said with a warm smile for her, expansive now, perhaps in anticipation, “pushing down to Canaveral and out Los Alamos way!”
“Good Heavens,” said Agnes, “in this dreadful heat? How silly!”
“Always on the go,” purred Esther.
“It’s wise to keep abreast,” said Guy seriously. “I’ll just nip down to Canaveral and see what’s shaking on the space-scene, so to speak.”
“Same old six-and-seven, Guy?” teased big Ginger, flashing up at him.
“Well, who can say?” admitted Guy frankly. “These are odd times—are, if I may say, times that try men’s souls. Yet each of us does hisbest—who can say more?”
“Guy,” said Ginger, squeezing his hand and sparkling up again on one monstrous surge of personality, “ithasbeen fun!” Good-byes were her forte.
Guy gave a courtly nod, before turning to go, in deference, it seemed, to her beauty.
“My dear,” he whispered, with a huskiness that made all the ladies tingle, “it has been ...inspiring.”
*****
The S.S.Magic Christianwas Grand’s last major project—at least it was the last to be brought into open account. After that he began to taper off. However, he did like “keeping in touch,” as he expressed it,and, for one thing, he bought himself a grocery store in New York City. Quite small, it was more or less indistinguishable from the several others in the neighborhood, and Grand put up a little sign in the window.
New Owner—New PolicyBig Get-Acquainted Sale
Grand was behind the counter himself, wearing a sort of white smock—not too unlike his big Vanity lab smock—when the store opened that evening.
His first customer was a man who lived next door to the store. He bought a carton of Grape-Ade.
“That will be three cents,” said Grand.
“How much?” asked the man, with a frown.
“Three cents.”
“Threecents? For six Grape-Ade? Are you kidding?”
“It’s our two-for-one Get-Acquainted on Grape-Ade,” said Grand. “It’s new policy.”
“Boy,I’llsay it’s new,” said the man. “And how! Threecents? Okay by me, brother!” He slapped three cents on the counter. “There it is!” he said and still seemed amazed when Grand pushed the carton towards him.
“Call again,” said Grand.
“That’s some policy all right,” said the man, lookingback over his shoulder as he started for the door. At the door, however, he paused.
“Listen,” he said, “do you sell it ... uh, you know, by thecase?”
“Well, yes,” said Grand, “you would get some further reduction if you bought it by the case—not too much, of course; we’re working on a fairly small profit-margin during the sale, you see and—”
“Oh, I’ll pay the two-for-one all right. Christ! I just wanted to know if I couldgeta case at that price.”
“Certainly, would you like a case?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I couldusemore than one case....”
“How many cases could you use?”
“Well, uh ... how many ... how many have yougot?”
“Could you use a thousand?”
“Athousand?!?A thousand cases of Grape-Ade?”
“Yes, I could give you ... say, ten percent off on a thousand ... and at twenty-four bottles to the case, twelve cents a case ... would be one hundred and twenty dollars, minus ten percent, would be one hundred and eight ... call it one-naught-five, shall we?”
“No, no.I couldn’t use a thousand cases. Jesus! I meant, say,tencases.”
“That would be a dollar twenty.”
“Right!” said the man. He slapped down a dollar twenty on the counter. “Boy, that’s some policy you’ve got there!” he said.
“It’s our Get-Acquainted policy,” said Grand.
“It’s some policy all right,” said the man. “Have you got any other ...specialson? You know, ‘two-for-one,’ that sort of thing?”
“Well, most of our items have been reduced for the Get-Acquainted.”
The man hadn’t noticed it before, but price tags were in evidence, and all prices had been sharply cut: milk, two cents a quart—butter, ten cents a pound—eggs, eleven cents a dozen—and so on.
The man looked wildly about him.
“How about cigarettes?”
“No, we decided we wouldn’t carry cigarettes; since they’ve been linked, rather authoritatively, to cancer of the lung, we thought it wouldn’t be exactly in the best of taste to sell them—being aneighborhoodgrocery, I mean to say.”
“Uh-huh, well—listen, I’m just going home for a minute now to get a sack, or a ... trunk, or maybe a truck ... I’ll be right back ...”
Somehow the word spread through the neighborhood and in two hours the store was clean as a whistle.
The next day, a sign was on the empty store:
MOVED TO NEW LOCATION
And that evening, in another part of town, the same thing occurred—followed again by a quick change of location. The people who had experienced the phenomenon began to spend a good deal of their time each evening looking for the new location. And occasionally now, two such people meet—one who was at the big Get-Acquainted on West 4th Street, for example, and the other at the one on 139th—and so, presumably, they surmise not only that it wasn’t a dream, but that it’s still going on.
And some say it does, in fact, still go on—they say it accounts for the strange searching haste which can be seen in the faces, and especially the eyes, of people in the cities, every evening, just about the time now it starts really getting dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRY SOUTHERN was born in Alvarado, Texas. His first short stories were published in Paris in 1949 byNew-Storyand in 1953 by theParis Review. A novel,Flash and Filigree, appeared in England in 1958 and was acclaimed by theObserveras one of the “twenty-one outstanding novels of the year.”
Mr. Southern’s short stories have recently been anthologized by David Burnett, editor of theBest American Short Stories. A portion ofThe Magic Christianreceived the Vanderbilt Prize for Humorous Fiction given in 1959 by theParis Review.
Mr. Southern is married and lives in Connecticut.
Transcriber’s Notes:Blank pages have been removed.Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
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