Tales of the Penny God

As the sun set before them, lighting them in silhouette, two men could be seen walking down a dusty country road. The one on the left was crippled, it seemed, leaning on a stick and drawing his left leg stiffly along. Something was a bit wrong with his left shoulder, too, lifted up above the other, and with his neck, for every now and then his head would shift swiftly from one side to another. Yet he walked very briskly and as though he felt no pain. His companion, of a lighter, smaller build, walked easily with a natural grace to his movements, yet seemed just able to keep up.

Just as the sun sank below the hills, the two men came upon an isolated farmhouse. Without a word, they turned off the road at the same brisk pace and went up to its door.

The door was opened rather slowly by the farmer, surprised by visitors on a weekday night. His daughter came forward as well, to see who it might be.

"We’re on our way to the town of L_____. Will this road take us all the way? And how many miles do we have to go?"

“You won’t make it tonight, not with no moon to light your way. You’d best make a bed for yourself in the barn. It’s a warm night and you’ll be comfortable enough."

“Won’t you join us for dinner?” said the daughter. “We were just sitting down.”

By the harsh, flickering light of the kerosene lamp on the table, the two men could be seen much better, but not quite well enough.

The face of the crippled stranger was deeply bronzed and weathered. You might have thought him an old sailor or soldier, except he wasn’t old, not really. Not old, not young. His features were handsome but stern, even grim, yet animated at intervals by spasms of wild mirth around the eyes and the mouth. Or maybe it was a trick of the kerosene lamp.

His companion—who did most of the talking—was entirely different in appearance, with smooth, delicate features and a perfectly molded body. He was endowed with such absolute grace that even the common gestures of his hands, working the knife and fork, had a beauty suggestive of dancers on a stage or of birds taking flight. His lashes were long and lustrous and his lips uncommonly full and red for a man, if he was a man. The daughter thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, in life or in pictures, or could ever imagine to exist. The farmer thought he looked like a bit of a sneak, and decided to keep his eye on him.

One would wonder how two such men came to be companions, what they could have in common, but some deep harmony or understanding seemed to bind them. At times their movements mirrored each other. It was an illusion of the lamplight, of the late evening hour and the tiredness that follows a long day, but to the daughter’s eyes they blurred into one, into a two-headed creature with four arms, pointing up, down, left, right. Then they rose together, at just the right moment, to say good night to the farmer and his daughter.

After breakfast the next morning, as they went to the door to resume their journey, the handsome man said, with a grand flourish of his arm: “You have been generous and kind to us as strangers. Therefore, if you make a wish, it shall be granted!”

The farmer spoke quickly, with pride and a tinge of anger. “We have everything we need right now. All we wish for is to keep our simple, happy life of honest hard work.”

The two men laughed uproariously. “You ask for a great deal—a very great deal! But you shall have it!” said the crippled stranger.

When the farmer had wished them a good day and shut the door, a bit too hard, behind them, the crippled stranger, still laughing softly, put a copper penny on the threshold. Then, arm in arm, the two men disappeared down the road.

“Blasted uppity city folk—what nerve!” muttered the farmer, as he gathered up greasy papers in the kitchen and threw them into the smoldering fire.

A sheet of crumpled newspaper burst into flame and rose on the draft all the way up the chimney, onto the roof of cedar shingles. One shingle began to smolder but then, unaccountably, went out. A few small sheets of blackened ash drifted down on the yard, where some silly chickens pecked them apart.

Inside, the daughter sat musing for a few minutes. She knew well enough what she would have asked for, if only her father hadn’t answered so fast and so harshly. But she was an active, cheerful girl: she shook herself out of her reverie and went down to the lake to meet her girlfriends for an early morning swim. An epidemic of polio would strike the county that summer, stunting or crippling many of the young people, but she and her friends, who were all unaffected, could not know that then.

Her memories of the beautiful stranger quickly faded into a vague happy yearning. Her skin glowed from within; she moved with a soft, swollen grace that was new to her. A young man in town noticed. She noticed him back. He was from a family of farmers and was happy to work side by side with his father-in-law. When children came, they put an addition on the old cedar-shingled farmhouse.

The old farmer continued to work the fields, liking to brag that he had scarcely missed a dozen days of work in his entire adult life. But then he was sick for day or two, just some cold or flu or passing ailment, nothing serious, he insisted. On the third day, he went out and put in a full afternoon in his small vineyard, carefully pruning and tying up the vines, skilled work he did not quite trust to the grandchildren, though they were now full-grown men and women.

Walking back to the barn, his shears in his hand and his hoe on his shoulder, the farmer felt dizzy. His vision failed, and he had only a moment to realize that it was something more than a cold or flu or passing ailment, when he fell down to the earth from which he came.

Everyone knew that Master Richard Saunders had arrived in the thriving colony of P_____ as a young man with but twopence in the pocket of his tattered coat and had subsequently risen to considerable wealth and even more considerable fame. Everyone knew because he was always reminding them. Not of his wealth or fame—Master Saunders was enough of a gentleman not to boast of that—but he did brag of his humble origins, his thrift and his industry.

His servants and the employees of his many enterprises certainly heard it all rather too often. While overseeing their labors, for he watched them closely for slackness or idleness, he delivered his many pithy adages extolling the virtues of thrift and hard work:

It was not by following those maxims himself but by urging them on others, in a highly popular almanac he published at his print shop, that Master Saunders had attained the greater part of his wealth and reputation. Certainly, he worked hard and lived frugally, but ostentatiously so, taking great care that others should notice. He wore his oldest clothes and made an occasional show of doing menial labor, though he had workers who could do it for him. But others believed in him, in his thrift, honesty and industry, primarily because he believed so completely in himself, the self-made man.

To be fair, Master Saunders did not realize he was a humbug. He could not see how the colony had changed in the decades since he arrived, how the grand opportunities of his youth had diminished or disappeared. There were no more huge tracts of arable land to be given away or sold for a pittance. All the obvious business opportunities had been seized upon, and many tradespeople fared but poorly under the keen competition. Nor did he pause to think (for he saw nothing wrong with this shameful fact) that those whose skin was too dark, whose accent too foreign or too uncouth, would never have had the same lucky chances as he to succeed in the colony. In fact, Master Saunders did not believe in luck. “Diligence is the mother of good luck,” said he.

Although Master Saunders claimed to have conquered his natural vices by dint of hard work and daily effort, he failed to see, and almost all around him failed to see, his greatest failing: a genial but arrogant complacency. Nor did he see that all his wise maxims of efficiency and industry simply preached a genteel and idealized greed.

Master Saunders looked over the two men who had just come to apply as typesetters at his printing house. The taller, stronger-looking one was slightly deformed or crippled, afflicted as well with a tic that twisted his head side to side at odd moments. Master Saunders did not hold mere physical flaws against any man, but something about him made Saunders uneasy. His skin was tanned a rich bronze, almost the color of the Indians whom Saunders so despised. And he had a proud, almost sardonic, demeanor that did not suggest he would be an easy worker to control. The other, in Saunders’ estimation, was a commoner type: soft, far too comely for a man, fair in complexion, but with a sensuality about him that suggested an origin too far east and south for Saunders’ tastes. Still, they seemed highly capable, intelligent, with an admirable readiness to work for the small wages Saunders proposed to them. Tom Pence and Will Lovecraft, they said they were. He hired them.

In the weeks that followed, he found nothing amiss with their work. Both were able compositors and careful proofreaders. Strangely, they seemed to get even more work done when Saunders was not there to supervise them than when he was. Accustomed to watching his men closely—“The eye of the master will do more work than his hand” was another of his sayings—he soon found it very agreeable to come in later in the morning, and then to enjoy a longer and larger midday meal than he usually permitted himself.

Coming back one afternoon swollen and somnolent from a large dinner, Master Saunders commanded Lovecraft to read out loud, by way of proofing them, some pages from his latest almanac.

“If thou eatest so much as makes thee unfit for study, or other business, thou exceedest the due measure.

“If thou art dull and heavy after meat, it’s a sign thou hast exceeded the due measure; for meat and drink ought to refresh the body, and make it cheerful, and not to dull and oppress it.”

“It is well said, yes, very well said,” mumbled Saunders, as he dozed off under the spell of Lovecraft’s silky-toned voice. Soon he was spluttering dreamily, his huge Falstaffian belly rising up and down rhythmically under his opened waistcoat.

And dream he did, a strange dream. In it he saw Pence and Lovecraft working with an industry not attainable by mortals, moving so rapidly and purposefully that they were an indistinguishable blur—two heads, four arms, emptying cases, setting type, inking and pulling the press, stitching and binding the books—doing a fortnight’s work in an hour.

When he awoke at last in the gathering twilight, Master Saunders found himself alone in his print shop, surrounded by an enormous stack of freshly printed pamphlets—his almanac to all appearances, but with a new title and other unauthorized revisions. Interspersed with the usual moralizing proverbs were his private maxims, those that he truly followed.

His heart thumping spasmodically as he turned the pages, Saunders’ emotions shifted as rapidly as his dream workers’ four hands had flown up and down over his press: pure, simple shock; righteous outrage at the prank; grief for the loss of his stock, for every bit of paper and cloth in his shop seemed to have been consumed; and, finally, awe and fear at something inexplicable, beyond nature, beyond his overconfident speculations and experimentations—the first such awe and fear he had ever felt in his life.

Soon, however, more practical concerns triumphed. Like a self-made widower with a corpse to dispose of, Master Saunders had roughly three thousand pamphlets that needed to disappear, quickly and quietly.

Several wheelbarrows full were secretly carted off to the river in the dead of the night. But Master Saunders’ girth and gout ruled out many more such expeditions—and he feared the curiosity and gossip of the night watchmen. Several hundred more he ripped and pulped himself—dropping them one by one into a boiling vat—but this too was such difficult and painful toil that Master Saunders felt as if several pounds of his precious flesh had melted and dripped into the pot along with the embarrassing almanacs. He settled for secreting the rest in odd corners of his house, where, he finally realized, they would be safe enough. He congratulated himself for his wisdom and prudence in taking to wife an illiterate woman who could not pry into his secret.

True to his trademark thriftiness, Saunders could not bring himself to break up all the galleys Pence and Lovecraft had composed, only weeding out the more damning pages. Some cynical and self-interested maxims slipped by him into the finished almanac, but his devoted readership never noticed, or simply accepted them as new instances of his honest, homespun humor. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to believe!

As the evening sky darkened to an unnatural pinkish red glow, Token and Eros were walking through a wasteland of parking lots and superstores on the outskirts of a vast, ugly city. No one else walked. Cars, vans and SUVs sped past them or cut nastily across their path at intersections and strip mall entrances. Being gods, Token and Eros could have easily have rented, bought, or created a car if they chose to do so. But, being gods, they were tireless and immortal, with nowhere in particular to go and eternity to get there. So they walked.

Ahead of them in the distance, though, they saw two other walkers, locked in argument and moving much more slowly. As Token and Eros approached, they caught a few words.

“We’re in for it now,” Eros hissed with a grimace that only enhanced his astonishing beauty. Raising his voice, he called out gaily, “Jesus, Satan,—well met! How goes it with you?”

“Same old shit,” Satan answered with a shrug, “Going to and fro the earth and walking up and down it.” Token and Eros nodded, and a momentary depression afflicted all four gods.

That was the problem with Satan and Jesus. They got you down. Either god alone could be pleasant company: Satan could be wickedly funny; and it was hard not to admire Jesus for his sincerity and his abiding belief—despite all the evidence against them—in the innate goodness of humanity. Together, though, they were simply tedious. They argued constantly and each goaded the other into taking an extremist position. Of course, they were inseparable—possibly because they were both too stubborn to walk away and give up the eternal debate—or possibly each felt compelled to keep a watch on the other. So their deeds among mortals canceled each other out, with Jesus returning good for evil and Satan causing trouble wherever he might. No doubt that contributed to their mutual frustration and to the occasional bitterness of their debates.

Neither Token nor Eros wanted to hear what this one was about. Eros, who was a wonderful storyteller, launched into an amusing anecdote about an aging woman, determined to appear other than what she was, who underwent every imaginable cosmetic procedure—breast implants, collagen injections, Botox, waxing, peeling, liposuction. In the dim light of a bar, the youngish man she attracted pleased her very much, and pleased her still more in bed. Then she awoke the next morning to discover that, while he was still sleeping at her side, his teeth and his hair were resting on her night table. But it was clear that Satan and Jesus were distracted and were waiting only until Eros paused for breath to start up their argument again.

“A diner,” said Token suddenly, “I like diners.” Eros screwed up his eyes and darted a look but could read nothing in his friend’s impassive face.

In passing, Token stooped to pick up a penny in the parking lot, looking at it thoughtfully and turning it over and over between his long fingers.

To mortal eyes, the diner was completely filled, but a corner booth opened up just as the gods walked toward it. Almost as miraculously, a waitress appeared as soon as they had checked the menu.

The gods could read her creased and badly made-up face at a casual glance and knew instantly of her mother, her daughter and her current boyfriend, all of whom she supported. They also knew, as she did not, what her daughter and boyfriend were doing while she worked her second job waitressing.

Satan, who despised the downtrodden, regarded her with contemptuous indifference, while Jesus gazed at her with a divine pity and acceptance that was more radiantly beautiful than Love himself, at that moment staring apathetically out the window. A return look of recognition, an acceptance of the divine love being offered to her, would have redeemed her from her narrow existence full of lurking rage, envy and dejection. But being a waitress, and a downtrodden one at that, she looked steadily down at her pad and avoided eye contact.

“Right,” said Satan, flipping through the menu. “I’ll have the fried mozzarella sticks, large order; french fries with cheesy melt, small order; cup of french onion soup, hold the onions; a toasted English muffin with jam not butter; half a grapefruit; oh yes, and a liverwurst hoagie and a banana split.”

“Bring me what you will,” said Jesus earnestly. “If an order has been returned to the kitchen as too hot or too cold, too raw or too done, I will have it. And, if the manager has ordered you to push something that is going bad, I will have that too.”

“Oh, never mind them,” said Token. “Just bring us four cheesesteaks and a large order of onion rings—only with provolone, not Cheez Whiz, on the cheesesteaks.”

“Jesus and I were just discussing our plans for Job II,” Satan said, between mouthfuls. “Jesus is of the opinion that Job I was inconclusive because we had the wrong premise and the wrong man. Rather than testing whether extreme poverty will turn a virtuous fat cat bad, we should see how some impoverished loser deals with sudden success and wealth.

“I take the position that human morality, such as it is, is a bourgeois facade. Those who have everything they need find it socially expedient to make a pharisaical display of goodness and charity. As my old friend Richard Saunders once said, ‘It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.’ Jesus is of the contrary view that riches corrupt, period.”

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” said Jesus sententiously.

“So all we need now is to find the right experimental subject—poor but good—then proceed to the test.”

“Her?” said Satan. “Bah! I know her type. She is the meek who couldn’t inherit the earth if you gave it to her on a silver platter. Whatever she got, she’d lose. Either some con would set her up, or her boyfriend and daughter would make off with it.”

Sensing another divine squabble about to break out, Eros and Token scanned the diner. The great majority of its patrons were neither rich nor poor, neither good nor evil, but as bland and characterless as the food they were obliviously gobbling.

At the counter one man sat alone, slowly eating a bowl of chili and as many free crackers as he could get from the surly counterman. Leon Blakely: laid off from his job and now separated from his wife, with enough money to pay for his chili (or he would have gone hungry) but not a whole lot more.

“Perfect,” said Satan, after Token pointed him out. “Rapidly approaching the down-and-out stage; honest, generous, but proud and quick to anger.”

“I still like the . . . oh, all right. You’re on. What will it be, the lottery?”

Stirring the chili with his spoon, making it last, Leon thought things over. He’d been ten years in that company, ten!, with good performance reviews, hardly ever even taking a sick day. But he’d been the one laid off.

His wife and her brothers had been at him at once, saying it was racism; he had to sue the bastards. He had refused. He’d never liked the sort of people who bring lawsuits, and he wasn’t going to be one of them. They argued and argued. Then Vivian, “to bring him to his senses,” had packed up and moved in with her family. He forwarded her his unemployment checks.

Was it racism? Maybe. The guy who should have gotten the pink slip was white, but was also a cousin of the manager. Leon knew well enough what trouble family could be. Cowardice and nepotism, then? It hardly mattered. A good lawyer might win that case for him, but it just felt ugly. He’d rather move on. But how was he going to move on without Vivian in his life?

He opened his last packet of crackers. Something came out of it. A ticket, a lottery ticket. Now how the hell did that get in there?

It was just on 7 p.m. The counterman turned up the volume on the TV, and the rumble of conversation died down to a hush as all around the diner, people clutched their tickets, crossed their fingers, mumbled hasty prayers, then lifted their eyes hopefully to the screen.

“It can’t be,” said Leon loudly, “It can’t be.” Several pairs of eyes were instantly over his shoulder, looking down at his ticket. The news spread through the diner and everyone crowded up to get a look at the ticket and the winner. Hoping to make a party of it, complete strangers called out their raucous congratulations and tried to slap him on his back. But the lucky winner seemed frozen to the spot in shock.

“It ain’t right,” said Leon hoarsely. Others hastened to reassure him. No, really, that’s it, that’s the number! You won the jackpot!

“No. It just isn’t right. This is not my ticket. I just found it here.” His throat dry, his pulses pounding, Leon could barely get the words out. But they had to be spoken.

In the ensuing pandemonium, Leon tried to explain that he had found the ticket inside a packet of crackers, but realizing how ridiculous that sounded, he gave up and just gestured vaguely at the counter.

“It’s my ticket,” shouted a man from the table behind him. “I dropped it—you picked it up!”

Leon had barely started to protest when someone else shouted. “What are you talking about? I was sitting right next to him. It’s my ticket!”

The counterman, who was a slow thinker, got into it then. “Hey, wait, where’d my ticket go? I had it stuck up my sleeve, see, so I wouldn’t forget to check it. Then it must have slid right out when I gave this guy his chili!”

Their various friends and relations took up their causes, and the shouting and threats were getting uglier. Someone would be dialing 9-1-1 soon, if they hadn’t already.

“With my luck,” Leon thought grimly, “I’ll be arrested as a thief.” As the shoving and punching began, he left the ticket on the counter and moved slowly and unsteadily towards the door, sick and faint with an agony that only a fallen god could fully understand—the agony of a noble, necessary, but completely futile self-sacrifice.

The gods did understand it. Token and Eros exchanged a nod, then followed Leon out of the diner.

Jesus and Satan followed them out more slowly, arguing hotly over the outcome, with Jesus claiming he had won and Satan insisting that the bet was null.

After the cops arrived, the ticket was confiscated and eventually voided, since none of the claimants could prove their stories. When the place had finally cleared out, the counterman and the waitress put in a late night cleaning up. Two parties had managed to slip out without paying, but the counterman figured he could stick the waitress with the blame for that.

Back on that corner table, Token had left the penny as a tip for the waitress, who threw it angrily on the floor—a mistake, for not only had it been touched by the Penny God himself, but it was a 1943 copper penny in extremely fine condition.

“Two, please” said Token, handing over a dollar in script. Limping slightly and leaning on an intricately carved cane, he passed through the gates of the Centennial Exhibition with Eros on his arm.

Assuming the wounded god to be a war veteran, people respectfully moved aside, although they might not have done so as readily if he had not been dressed as a gentleman with a particularly charming lady at his side. Eros was fascinated by Victorian undergarments and rarely passed up a chance to wear them. Even the most lovely and graceful of the ancient gods was entertained by the challenge of moving naturally in a whalebone corset and crinoline.

Here and there in the crowd, some young men and women, who moments before had been proudly self-conscious in their starched and elegant clothes, felt a terrible pang as Eros moved sinuously past them—a pang of grief for something they had never known, for running lightly through woods down to a lake, laughing with the shock of the cold, then basking in the sun like the happy young animals they were not. All this flashed as a vision as Eros passed, and then the inner gleam of nature flickered out again. They complained peevishly that their shoes were too tight, that something was wrong with this collar, then went home early and bullied the servants in a fit of pique and obscure envy.

Arm and arm, Token and Eros strolled through the pompous halls of exhibits boosting the nouveau nation’s first century of cultural attainments and commercial products—soaps, medicines, canned foods, religious tracts and guns, some very large and very bad historical paintings and sculptures, along with early prototypes of the electric light, the typewriter and the telephone.

“It takes some hubris,” remarked Token, as they paused before the Indian exhibit, “to destroy an entire people and then make a public spectacle of their artifacts.”

“This nation has never lacked it,” said Eros. “They would probably even claim to have invented it, if they knew the word.”

Then Token and Eros both froze. They heard laughter—divine laughter, a voiceless lyric tremor of the air. For the few mortals who have ever perceived it, an ethereal vibration both beautiful and terrifying. Those who have heard it go mad, very artistically mad, it is true, and sometimes famously so, imperfectly mimicking the laughter in tentative but grand sketches of symphonies and poems that can never be finished, not by mortals. For the laughter of the fallen gods is more madness than joy, like the song of a caged and solitary bird. And this laughter was mad indeed, bitter and painful.

“Oh, yes, I see you now.” From a Navajo sand painting of Coyote Stealing Fire, the coyote rose up and grinned coldly, while at the top of a Tlingit totem pole, the carved raven tossed the moon in the air and flapped his great wooden wings.

“The traps are set and baited. The predators shall be the prey,” proclaimed the coyote of sand.

“The birds of the air will dine on their flesh,” quoth the carved raven. “When all that remains of the white man’s evil are the vine-covered mounds of his bleached bones, then shall the great forests return to restore the ruined land.”

The moment their prophecies had been spoken, Coyote leapt upon Raven’s broad wings and the two gods took flight over the unseeing throng. Some small children shrieked; a pregnant woman fainted; and a few others suddenly stumbled to the ground in instinctive terror and adoration. But when the uproar had died down, their panic was thought to be merely a reaction to the jostling crowd.

Eros and Token stood still, taking in the implications of the native gods’ enigmatic threats.

“I do not like to interfere with the work of other gods,” said Token with a sigh. “Nevertheless, I think we must. Too many innocent ones will suffer, and nothing can bring back the native peoples now. Let the world revolve another thousand years and some new race will arrive to replace both the Indians and the Europeans.”

“Must we, really?” said Eros, idly twitching her parasol. “Oh, I suppose. I hear the bustle is coming back and will be simply enormous. I wouldn't want to miss that. Although I don’t know how we are going to find these traps. Coyote and Raven are famously clever.”

“Yes, and that’s how we’ll find them. Clever gods won’t pick something arbitrary: An earthquake is not going to split this faux Gothic exhibit hall in two. The skies will not rain blood. No, it will be something appropriate, an eye for an eye retribution. Now think—how did the settlers exterminate the Indians?”

“Smallpox,” said Eros, giving it a bit of thought. “That charming gift of smallpox-infected blankets. Also typhoid, dysentery and other white man diseases. Habitat destruction, starvation, forced marches, alcohol . . .”

“Alcohol . . . let me see that exhibition catalog again.” Eros took it from her reticule and Token, turning the pages, read out: “‘The Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain.’”

“‘Location: West end of exposition grounds,’” Token read. “Eros, I think that is a clue. Let’s take a look at this fountain.”

“Well, after all, I didn’t drop out of the sky to save these fools from themselves.”

“No, you didn’t, did you,” said Token softly, taking Eros by the hand and gazing into her eyes. And they laughed together, a laugh of mingled love and irony. “But we should hurry.”

Something clearly was happening at the fountain. Several men were staggering with a wild, demented look. Others, drawn by curiosity or thirst or some more powerful force, were approaching for a drink. Token raised his cane to stop them, then cupped his hand into the brimming fountain.

“Eros! It can’t be! The nectar of the gods—how did Raven and Coyote steal it from Olympus?”

“You’re right,” said Token, inspecting the shimmering elixir. “It’s some sort of bathtub gin imitation, clearly irresistible and very dangerous to mortals, judging by the condition of those men.”

Carefully selecting a penny from the dozens in his pockets, Token whispered, “Heads I win, tails you lose, Make pure water of impure booze,” and tossed it into the fountain.

“Bullets,” Eros reminded him. “There is a large nasty exhibit of firearms in the U.S. Government Building. Perhaps we should take a closer look at it.”

“‘Colt’s Single Action Army Revolvers—Called the Peacemaker, destined to win the West for the White Man. Special Centennial Long Barrel Model’ ... ‘The new Winchester 1876 Large Caliber Repeating Rifle, especially desirable for the regions in which the grizzly bear and other large game are found, as well as the plains where absence of cover and shyness of game require the hunter to make his shots at long range. ...’” said Token, reading the placards. “All evil and deadly enough, but these, I believe, are the white man’s own doing, not Coyote and Raven’s.”

“Look at this, though,” said Eros, pointing to an open bin of cartridges: “A special commemorative bullet, bearing the dates 1776-1876. That’s certainly an appropriate, if tactless, way to celebrate the violent first century of United States history. How could Raven and Coyote have resisted tampering with those?”

“Most likely they have been rigged to explode in the gun or on the slightest impact,” said Token, selecting another penny. “Heads or tails, luck of the toss, Let these bullets cause no loss,” he murmured, sending the penny spinning into the bin.

“I don’t think we are done with this exhibit yet,” said Eros. “Look, the munitions exhibitors are leaving their booths to look at something in that corner.”

There, under the ornate banner of The Coyote and Raven Explosives Company, Solving All Your Mass Extermination Needs, was a poster describing the manufacture of a simple yet horrible bomb. Already several gun merchants were excitedly taking notes and sketching patentable variations on the design.

At a tap of Token’s cane, the poster and the notes burst into orange flame. As the merchants looked up in surprise and indignation, Eros appeared to them in the guise of the Eternal Feminine, alluring, yielding, maddening, devouring, drawing them sweetly into a labyrinth of desire and pain.

One rolled up into a ball and wept, clutching his groin. Another created an instant but short-lived scandal (he paid very heavily to avoid publicity and prosecution) by exposing himself to a troop of schoolgirls. The third awoke from his trance to find that he had just proposed marriage to the withered hag selling apples outside the hall—and had been accepted. His friends never understood, but it was a very successful marriage. For his bride was Morgan Le Fay, who gave him what men most desire: a beautiful mistress by night and a motherly housewife by day.

“Diseases,” said Token, when Eros had resumed the aspect of a proper, if spectacularly beautiful, Victorian lady. “How can you fail to have some risk of disease when millions of people congregate in one small area with uncertain sanitation? I suspect Coyote and Raven have made that risk a certainty.”

“Then perhaps we should visit the primly named Department of Public Comfort.”

Token and Eros moved discreetly to the front of the men’s and women’s queues to inspect the facilities. As Token had guessed, they were heavily contaminated, but it was a simple task to purify them with a tossed coin or a sweet glance. The gods were in and out of the comfort stations before the women’s lines had even moved.

“Phew!” said Eros, “Not quite a Herculean labor, but not a very nice chore either. Are we done yet?”

“I’m not sure,” Token answered. “I’d like to take another look at the Indian exhibit. Coyote and Raven may have left some clues for us there.”

They stood once again before the exhibit and took in its confused but calculated depiction of the native American as a primitive brute, armed with savage weapons and brandishing the scalps of hapless settlers he had cruelly murdered.

“You’ve done enough. We’ve done enough,” said Eros. “They should pay some price for what they have done, and for their disgusting sanctimony. Let the Indian gods have their revenge with whatever traps remain.”

“Eros, you are right.” Linked arm and arm, they left the exhibition. In the waning afternoon light, the long shadow they cast showed them as a single figure with two heads, four arms, gesturing up, down, left, right, as they considered where to resume their wanderings.

The Winchester 1876 Large Caliber Repeating Rifle quickly became a popular choice for hunters of the last great herds of buffalo on the northern plains. The Colt .45 Peacemaker was favored by the U.S. Cavalry in their drive to revenge their losses at Little Bighorn (which was Coyote’s destination when he left on Raven’s back). But Coyote and Raven’s final trap succeeded. An exotic little vine called kudzu, introduced to the United States at the 1876 Exposition, has spread itself, inch by inch, acre by acre, county by county—and may yet cover us all, until the great forests do return to restore the ruined land.

Heads or Tails—A Two-Sided Story

Tails or Heads—A Two-Sided Story

Perhaps it was the frustration and tedium of millennia spent wandering a world where none worshiped them and few recognized their power, but at one time Token and Eros fell into a debate about which god was a more powerful force in the fates of men and women.

They quarreled: neither would admit the force of the other’s arguments. Finally, they agreed to put it to a test. At a crossroads they parted, with a pledge to meet again in twenty years to compare their deeds. Token set out at once toward a city just visible on the horizon by the blue-black plumes of smoke rising up from its great smokestacks.

Glancing back at his friend strolling gracefully and aimlessly away towards a pleasant, pastoral setting of old farms and estates, Token smiled to himself, for he thought he knew well enough what Eros would do to prove his power. He would scatter his blessings broadside like a ploughman’s seed, not caring or noticing which fell on rocky ground and which took root and flourished. Eros could make any man or woman adorable, but he could not ensure their happiness. That, Token said to himself, required his own gifts, granted more thoughtfully and justly than Eros dispensed his amorous graces.

In the city, Token at first distributed his favors randomly. The pockets and purses of the rich and arrogant split at the seams; downtrodden maids and factory hands chased down a bounty of stray coins that for many made the difference between misery and joy, however fleeting.

But Token was all the while narrowly examining the men and women he encountered, looking for the one who would make best use of his blessings.

“Please, sir, a penny for an unfortunate,” cried a small ragged boy, timidly reaching up to a passerby’s sleeve. The man recoiled, wiping imaginary contagion from his coat, and raised his walking stick to strike the boy, who agilely evaded the blow.

At a crooked squint from the watching god, a carriage swerved suddenly into a puddle, sending up a spray of fetid mud. The man spun about quickly to avoid it, but losing his balance, fell heavily on his plump, prosperous behind.

A bigger boy lurking nearby made one quickly suppressed guffaw, then helped the gentleman to his feet. He was rewarded by a blow from the stick so hard that he half-dropped to his knees, clutching his arm. But he took the only revenge open to a penniless street urchin. He laughed.

“Horatio Alger stories don’t often play out in real life, do they?” said Token, kindly. “But here’s a shilling and a penny for each of you. Spend the shillings but save the pennies, if you can, and they will bring you far more than a pennyworths of good. Are you brothers, perhaps?”

“Brothers by choice, sir,” said the older boy, “we’ve no family else. I’m Oliver, this is Timothy. We have no other names.”

“If you are wise, you will take your name from me. Be Oliver and Timothy Pence from this day forth.”

“What does it mean?” asked Timothy, after Token had strode away.

“I don’t know. But I believe in luck—and in little else. We’ll do as he said. So, Tim Pence, let’s buy ourselves dinner and some better clothes with one of the shillings, if we can stretch it so far.”

With new clothes, a full stomach, and fresh confidence in his luck, Oliver found a shop job with a greengrocer, who let Oliver and Timothy sleep in the cellar on top of the packing crates.

They prospered, and so did the shop. Oliver’s cheerful good manners won them loyal customers, despite the surly awkwardness of the grocer, who had never before had much success with the business. Although Timothy was of no real help, he gathered a few extra tips from ladies charmed by his cherubic face and curls.

Then their luck failed them, or so it seemed. The grocer was struck and killed by a runaway carthorse, and the two boys prepared to be evicted by his heirs. But, although he had never rewarded Oliver’s service with more than a grunt or a nod, the grocer had unaccountably left the shop and all his savings to the boy.

A distant relative sued and lost, while a popular journalist took up Oliver’s cause. The story of the boys’ rise from destitution, after a stranger presented them with two shillings, two pennies, and their surname, so enthralled the public that the shop became an immense success.

As the twenty years drew to a close, Token had reason to be proud of his protégé. Oliver Pence now presided over a chain of shops called The Grocer’s Boy, which he had staffed with boys from the street like himself whom he had trained in the business.

Token felt a pang of sadness, though, that Oliver had not married. A sensible, well-educated gentlewoman who would love Oliver for what he had accomplished and help him with what he lacked—that is what Token wished for his protégé. He found himself looking forward to his reunion with Eros, for he needed his help to bring it off.

Any number of eligible young women, attracted by the Pence fortune, had coyly flirted with Oliver. But his natural warmth and tenderness had only Timothy as an object, whom he loved beyond reason. As soon as he could set some money aside, Oliver had hired tutors to prep Timothy for the university.

But Timothy’s formal education had begun too late. Once at the university, he learned little more than how to play the part of a gentleman, spending too much money and being secretly ashamed of his name and his adoptive brother. He often wished Oliver had never told that embarrassing story about the shillings and pence they had begged in the streets.

He was near the end of his studies and unlikely to achieve a degree. He worried what Oliver would think, then was angry at Oliver for making him worry. He felt bored and wanted a change. A handsome woman from a genteel country family clearly found him fascinating. Oliver, he knew, would set them up. He proposed and was accepted. Oliver was quite delighted with Emily—a lovely, intelligent gentlewoman who would help Timothy settle down to something. Poor Timothy had never quite recovered from those early years of deprivation. Oliver happily sent them off on a honeymoon while he bought and furnished their house for them.

Not everything about the house pleased Timothy. Oliver, whose tastes ran to the sentimental and the merely comfortable, had brought several worn pieces from his father-in-law’s parsonage that would need to be discreetly replaced when he could wean his wife of them. Her naiveté and her earnestness were trying at times—but what beautiful eyes and endearing manners she had!

Although Timothy had certain shameful secrets of his own, none were so bad, from his perspective, as the one his wife now revealed to him, pulling a manuscript out of the old parsonage desk. A bluestocking for a wife—more embarrassing than a greengrocer for a brother! How his friends would laugh at him!

He looked at her sternly and begged her, please, to destroy this manuscript and never let anyone know her identity as the notorious novelist, Marianne Bell. He fervently hoped her former publisher would respect his marital right to privacy and keep her secret.

“She ought to have married Oliver,” said Token to Eros. “But it is my own fault for allowing Timothy to share in Oliver’s deserved good luck.”

“That is not the worst mistake that you and I have made,” Eros replied. “We’ve learned one thing from it all: Luck and love should always travel together.”

Perhaps it was the frustration and tedium of millennia spent wandering a world where none worshiped them and few even recognized their power, but at one time Eros and Token fell into a debate about which god was a more powerful force in the fates of men and women.

They quarreled: neither would concede a point to the other. Finally, they agreed to put it to a test. At a crossroads, they parted, with a pledge to meet again in twenty years to compare their deeds. Eros, who loved all things beautiful, was drawn toward a verdant landscape of rolling hills populated by old farms and estates just visible in the distance.

From the first hilltop he turned to look back at Token limping down his chosen path—toward a grimy factory town—already far along his way, for he moved fast despite his crippled gait. Eros felt a pang of pity and sadness. He had not wanted to quarrel. Yet how obstinate and foolish of Token not to admit that only love offered humans an intimation of the divine. Luck most often made them complacent or greedy or both. Token, he felt sure, would expend his graces transforming some begrimed foundling into a prime minister or potentate, who would never acknowledge or recognize the divine gifts he had received.

In the countryside, Eros at first addressed himself seriously to the issue of what would best prove his powers to his obstinate friend. He came upon a parsonage where he presented himself as a long-lost and rather vaguely identified relation, a distant cousin from a distant land.

Eros’ elegance and charm soon brought the family social invitations from the neighboring gentry, who heretofore had paid them only slight attention.

In no time at all, to the astonishment of the parents, their four daughters and ne’er-do-well son had all married beyond any rational expectation, especially as the girls were portionless, intellectual, and only mildly pretty.

Left to his own inclinations, Eros was too giddy and pleasure-loving to pursue a set campaign for long. His sympathies were with those who were more passionate and graceful by nature than the parson’s prim daughters and pimply son.

Under Eros’ mischievous influence, milkmaids and governesses became suddenly irresistible to elder sons and widowed baronets, while ladies of distinguished fortune and family eloped with braggadocio soldiers and penniless students.

Conservative newspapers decried the immorality of the current generation, too pleasure seeking to respect the claims of tradition and family. From the pulpit and the backbenches, a few cranks proposed a ban on the romantic novels blamed for the degenerate behavior of the young, particularly those of the acclaimed “Marianne Bell.”

Highly amused, Eros added these new stories to his portfolio of press clippings from the society pages and the scandal sheets.

As the close of the twenty years approached, Eros retraced his steps to admire his work. A liberalization of the divorce laws had allowed many to escape their impetuous misalliances. No matter! He had shown his power nonetheless. Eros never expected passion to outlive the youthful beauty and grace that inspired it.

Revisiting the parsonage, Eros was pleased to see that the family’s happiness remained mostly intact. Although the son was now separated from his disillusioned wife, the four daughters, with their good sense and gentle manners, had managed to retain the respect, if not the passionate attentions, of their husbands.

Entering the drawing room, Eros surprised a drably groomed young woman at a writing desk, who quickly thrust a sheaf of papers into a drawer. “I see you do not remember Emily,” said his hostess. “I suppose she was still a little girl when you were last here and always a bit retiring.”

A blush at this critique stopped Emily at first from looking up or responding. When she did meet the god’s disdainful gaze, she exclaimed and almost fainted, though she was hardly the sort of young lady to practice the swoon.

Eros also was startled. Despite her plain appearance and ink-stained fingers, Emily was a priestess of his cult, one who knew and worshiped the god who stood before her. He raised her up, looking into her deep and (he now saw) very beautiful eyes, and murmured to her hearing only: “Be not afraid, little one! You are under my protection, and I will reward your devotion!”

Eros intended to take more than his usual pains in finding Emily a compatible mate, yet he was also ambitious in her behalf. A brilliant but threadbare scholar—not good enough! A prosperous good-hearted country gentleman who fell asleep over the farm journal every evening—not good enough!

Eros half-wished he had Token at his side to guide him, for he knew Token better understood humankind’s peculiar, though hardly universal, idealization of monogamy. He read in Emily’s eyes, if not in the secret writings she concealed from her family, that nothing else could give her happiness.

Eros adroitly persuaded her parents to let him escort Emily about society as her self-appointed guardian. The impropriety of it staggered them, once they were free of the spell cast by his presence—but it was too late to recall the couple. They comforted themselves that the legions of seducers who populated the greater world outside the rectory walls would surely not notice their Emily. No one ever had.

Emily had always been a keen, critical observer of men and women, amused by affectations and vanity. Now, with Eros as her patron, she was no longer the observer but the observed. Pleasantly bewildered by all the attention, she lost her keenness and her judgment. When a handsome, well-mannered student named Timothy Pence began to pay her court, she found him perfection itself. She accepted him. A wedding trip to the South of France—Emily had scarcely left her father’s parish until then—filled her heart and mind with a broader vision of the world.

On their return, Emily found that her new brother-in-law had tastefully arranged their house for them. Alone with her beloved, she went to the familiar desk that Oliver had thoughtfully brought from her parents’ home. She took out her latest manuscript, now ready for her publisher, which she had hastily concealed when Eros had surprised her at work just a few months ago. How much had changed and how long ago it seemed! She felt she would be a better writer now, for she could now speak of love as one who knew and not as one who merely yearned and imagined.

“Darling Timothy,” she said, “Let me show you something.” And she proudly held up to him her title page, “Passion and Fortune” by Marianne Bell, and her dedication, “To her own Timothy, more dear than light and life.”

He didn’t need to say anything. She saw the look in his eyes—bewilderment, then distaste and shock. But he did say something, quite a lot, in fact. He made a little speech about respectability, expectations, and social standing all needing to be maintained. It was not so much pompous as feeble, a hollow attempt to justify himself. “What do you want me to do, Timothy?” Emily interrupted him at last. And he told her.

She burned the manuscript, but her love for her new husband perished with it, and so did the light in her eyes that Eros had found so beautiful.

“She ought to have married the brother,” said Eros to Token. “It is my fault. By giving her loveliness, I tempted her to choose with her eyes and not her mind.”

“That is not the worst mistake that you and I have made,” Token replied. “We’ve learned one thing from it all: Love and luck should always travel together.”