Little Big Man Read Online Free Page A

and all I will sell my story for 50 Thousand dollar which I figure to be cheap considering I am probly the last of the oldtimers
    Yr Friend
      Jack Crabb
    The handwriting was vile (though not in the least feeble) and took me all day to decipher; the redaction published here can be described as only probable. The letter was written on a sheet bearing the rubric of the Marville Center for Senior Citizens, which as we have seen had been my first port of call and yielded negative results. The request for fifty thousand dollars suggested the work of a potential confidence man.
    Yet the next day found me, at the end of a hundred-mile drive through scattered cloudbursts, maneuvering my Pontiac into one of the spaces marked “Visitors” in the asphalt parking lot at Marville. It was early afternoon. The administrative director looked slightly vexed to see me again, and downright contemptuous when I showed him the letter. He put me in the hands of the chief of the psychiatric section, forthwith: a whey-faced person named Teague, who impassively studied the gnarled calligraphy on my document, sighed, and said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s one of ours. They occasionally get a letter past us. I am sorry that you were inconvenienced, but be assured this patient is altogether harmless. His suggestion of violence in the last paragraph is fantasy. Besides, he is physically debilitated to the degree that he cannot leave his chair without an attendant’s help, and his apperceptive faculties have degenerated. So have no fear that he can make his way to the city and do you hurt.”
    I pointed out to the doctor that Mr. Crabb’s threat, if so it could be called, was directed at the staff of the Marville Center and hardly towards me, but of course he merely smiled compassionately. I am not without experience of these gentry, having done my stint at fifty dollars an hour, twice a week, for several years when I was a decade younger, without the least diminution of my nightmares and migraine headaches.
    “Nevertheless,” I added, “I must insist on seeing Mr. Crabb. I have just driven a hundred miles and given up a morning that had more profitably been spent with my tax accountant.”
    He instantly acquiesced. Members of his profession are very easy to impose one’s will upon, so long as one does so in economic rather than emotional terms.
    We went up one flight and walked a good half mile, corridor upon corridor; the psychiatric section was the newest part of Marville, all tile and glass and philodendrons: indeed, it resembled a greenhouse, with here and there a clump of old bald heads like mushrooms among the foliage. We reached a glassed-in balcony full of geraniums. Early December had established itself outside, but by means of the thermostat Marville maintained an internal summer all year round. I was suddenly shocked by a dreadful illusion: in a wheelchair, with its back to us, stood an abominable black bird—the largest turkey buzzard I had ever seen. Through the window it directed a raptorial surveillance on the grounds below, as if in search of lunch, its naked, wrinkled little head trembling ever so slightly.
    “Mr. Crabb,” said Dr. Teague to the bird, “you have a visitor. Whatever your feeling towards me, I’m sure that you will be very polite to him.”
    The buzzard turned slowly and looked over its sloping shoulder. My horror decreased at the sight of a human face rather than a beak—withered, to be sure, and covered in Mrs. Burr’s wornout oilcloth with many seams, but a face, indeed a furious little face, with eyes as hot and blue as the sky above a mesa.
    “Boy,” said the old man to Dr. Teague, “I took a slug in the ham once near Rocky Ford and cut it out myself with a bowie and a mirror, and the sight of my hairy behind was a real pleasure alongside of looking at what you carry on top of your neck.”
    He spun the chair around. If as a bird he had been large, as a man he was distinctly undersized. His