Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

happened. He laughed at me. Henry always laughs at me.
    “Don’t look so solemn about it, Gus!” he said, and slapped me on the back. “A little excitement is good for the blood. Laugh it off. The Duke didn’t sue you, did he?”
    “No,” I said, “not exactly. But that squirrel of his ate the olive out of that cocktail that fell into his cage and got awful sick. And the Duke went and had the doctor send his bill to me. Stomach pump.”
    Henry had been eating salted nuts, and when I said that he snorted half a mouthful of chewed nuts up into his nose. I’ve done that and it hurts. In a way I was glad to see Henry suffer.
    “I need some help,” I told him after he got his health back. “Maybe that girl’s crazy, but I think she’s in trouble.”
    “She most certainly is,” said Henry. “But I don’t see what you could do about it.”
    “Oh, I’d figure out something.”
    “I also don’t see why you want to help her out.”
    “That’s a funny thing,” I said slowly. “You know me, Henry—I got no use for wimmen unless they leave me alone. Every time one of ’em does something nice, it’s because she’s figgerin’ to pull something lousy a little later.”
    Henry swallowed some cashews carefully and then laughed. “You’ve summed up at least seven volumes of male objectivism,” he said. “But what has that got to do with your silver-haired Nemesis?”
    “Nemesis? I thought maybe she was Polish. Her? Well, she’s never done anything to me that wasn’t lousy. So I figure maybe she’s different. I figure maybe she’s going to work it the other way around and pull something nice. And I want to be around when that happens.”
    “Your logic is labored but dependable.” He said something else, about what’s the use of being intelligent and educated when all wisdom rests on the lips of a child of nature, but I didn’t catch on. “Well, I’m rather interested in whether or not you can do anything for her. Go ahead and stick your neck out.”
    “I don’t know where she lives or nothing.”
    “Oh—that.” He pulled out a little notebook and a silver pencil and wrote down something. “Here,” he said, tearing it off and handing it to me. It said, “Iola Harvester, 2336 Dungannon Street.”
    “Who’s this?”
    “Your damsel in distress. Your dark-eyed slapper of faces.”
    “How the devil do you know her name?”
    “She was a patient of mine for quite a while.”
    “She was? Why you son-of-a-gun! Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Why didn’t you ask me?”
    I started for the door, reading over the name and address. “You know what, Henry?”
    “What?”
    “Iola’s a pretty name.”
    Henry laughed. “Let me know how you make out.”
    I went up and rang the bell. It was a big apartment house; Iola lived on the fourth floor. The foyer door belched at me and I pushed it open and went in. They had one of those self-service elevators so I went up the stairs. Those things make me nervous.
    She was waiting up on her floor to find out who had rung the bell. She was wearing a black housecoat that touched the floor all the way around and was close around her throat. It had a stiff collar that stuck up and out and seemed to sort of cradle her head. There was a zipper all down the front and two silver initials on the left breast. I couldn’t get my wind right away and it wasn’t the stairs.
    “Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”
    “Yup!”
I looked at her for a minute. “Gee! I didn’t know you were so
tiny!”
There was something about her that made me want to laugh out loud, but not because I saw anything funny. When I said that she got pink.
    “I … don’t know whether I should ask you in,” she said. “I don’t even know your name.”
    “My name is Gus. So now you can ask me in.”
    “You’re the only man I have ever met who can be fresh without being fresh,” she said, and stood aside. I didn’t know what she meant, but I went in, anyway. It was a nice place.