"The Screwiest Job in the World" by Bill Pronzini (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1969; reprinted in High Concepts, 2023)
Phineas T. Fensterblau is an eccentric gajillionaire with an equally eccentric hobby: he collects freaks of nature. One of the freaks he "collected" was his assistant, Elroy McNeil, who was born with no ears. (Roy is able to hear very well, directionally, like radar.) It is Roy's job to chase down reports of freaks of nature and cryptids whenever Fensterblau hears of one. Because his employer is willing to pay obscene amounts of money for these freaks, Roy is apt to come across many con men and fakes, such as the tapir that could "recite" Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a spider that "sang", or the chimpanzee that could "whistle" the closing aria from La Boheme Sometimes things would pan out, as with a striped piranha, or Grodnik, the three-legged man who became Fensterblau's butler. Now Fensterblau has heard of a supposed talking Kodiak bear in Alaska.
The bear is owned by a trapper named Oglethorpe, whose lonely cabin is some ten miles from a highway about halfway between Fairbanks and the town of Circle on the Yukon River. Roy is met by the trapper's daughter, Christina, who introduces him to her taciturn father. The cabin is a shack, redeemed by a warm fireplace and an goodly supply of homemade liquor. The bear's name is Bruno and was found at a very young age while the trapper walking through the muskegs. Oglethorpe took the cub home as a pet. The bear is now just into puberty and had begun to talk about four months earlier. Bruno's vocabulary and knowledge came from Christina reading to him from books.
Bruno is very bright (although he believed Henry Miller to be a children's author) and very polite and well-mannered. There did not seem to be trickery involved, such a ventriloquism or a hidden microphone. But Roy is paid a large amount of money to do his job and he eventually manages to find out the fantastic truth about Bruno before being sent to the British West Indies to investigate the old joke about a supposed cross betwenn a faun and a duck...
In reviewing Pronzini's High Concepts in Locus, Paul Di Fillipo called this tale a "Ron Goulart-like comic fantasy," which in my book is a strong recommendation. In fact, the remainder of the 34 stories in High Concepts are recommended without reservation.
Have you ever been to the Mutter Museum in Philly. It's a museum of medical oddities. Pretty scary stuff.
ReplyDeleteNo, but it sounds really interesting, Patti. I was in Philly only once, briefly; it was about two o'clock in the morning and I was dropping off a college friend during a cross-country trip. I'd love to see what the city looks like in the daytime. The only medical museum I was ever in was the one in D.C. that had part of Lincoln's hair and skull on display. Ugh.
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DeletePlenty of Ugh at the Mutter, too. IIRC, the MegaColon, et al.
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