Thanatos on Wheels
THE IDEA OF A SKELETAL STEED HAD GROWN RATHER QUAINT ever since the flesh-and-blood ones were displaced by motors, and he was much too dignified to use a bicycle, so Death sat down and ordered an automobile from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It seemed proper enough for Death to have a machine of his own now; after all the newspapers were full of people being run over by these dreadful things,
tearing through towns at thirty miles an hour. It had gotten where the chickens didn’t stand a chance when they were feeding in the streets. Boys no longer had to tie tin cans to dogs’ tails—now the tin cans went down the streets on wheels with the dogs chasing them. They ran over their owners when they were being cranked,
they stalled on hills and rolled backwards onto railroad tracks, they fell through wooden bridges and seemed to target perambulators willfully and generally did quite a bit of damage, not to mention the horses which, being rendered obsolete, were taken out and shot, that they might be rendered into something else in the
adhesive and bonemeal line.
Surely this was doing his work for him, Death mused. There were a couple classes of cars: big heavy ones, twin-six Packards and White steamers and the like; smaller ones like the Overland and the Nybergs and Maxwells, then the Ford (which was in a class of its own; specifically the cheap and slow variety.) Then after that, in
the bottom-of-the-barrel category of cheapness, were some tin-pot little machines that made Fords look like Cadillacs. Roofs were optional, engines came out of motorcycles, and they didn’t have horns but still looked like the devil anyway. Death had equipped himself with something of the nice six-cylinder sliding-gearbox variety, seven-passenger touring, quite adequate for the professional who might want to take some friends along on a surprise outing. When the thing had been delivered, he had put gasoline in, had the deliveryman crank it for him, and then proceeded to experiment like an unskillful organist on the pedals. Making a great deal of noise the car took off like a skyrocket.
At this point Death began to see some certain troubles with the plan; namely, the automobile was too loud for him to come quietly to his appointments with the professional aplomb and poise expected, but it was easy enough. There were signs on the side of the road telling him what to do with the car, which eased things considerably.
STEEP HILL AHEAD
CLIMB IN SECOND GEAR
Easy enough, thought Death, confusing the shift-lever with the service brake. He had to ascend the hill in disgrace (and in reverse) but felt himself quite prepared for the next one.
BLIND CURVE
PLEASE SOUND KLAXON
Death, mindful of proper etiquette, pressed the button on the dashboard, and the squall of the electric horn sent someone off into the ditch on his bicycle. Looking back in the rearview mirror he saw that it had not killed him and that he was waving at him cheerfully. He felt very sorry for him, of course, but continued on round the
next bend. (He was not a callous soul, Death was, to go back & make sure that he was dead.)
There was a little town up there, one of those spreading-chestnut-tree joints you see in Currier-and-Ives prints, and it appeared Leonidas Spurtclabber was campaigning for office. Leon was not unpopular in the community; he had gotten the local Grangers on his side with promises to help the farmer and many quotes cribbed directly from William Jennings Bryan, and should have been named after the Montgolfiers because of his propensity for hot air. Death took one last lingering look back to the little pavilion festooned with bunting and banners, looked back to the road as he was driving out of town and saw:
NO GAS NEXT SIXTY-FIVE MILES.
“Well, I know a thing or two about that,” said Death, executing a perfect three-point turn and heading back--
The Sun-Telegram, April 17, 1913
Regrettably our own Leonidas Spurtclabber, friend of the American agriculturalist, was run over and killed by an automobile as he left the bandshell in Sherman Park last Saturday, having spoken to the Horse Breeders’ Union on the declining market of light horses suitable for draft purposes; his tragic death marks the end of an era for the town of Greenfield, and for the local politicians….
And so the editorial turned itself into an obituary before piously expiring on the fifth page. But that was no matter. On the road out of town the automobile was bowling along rapidly and Death now had a passenger. Leonidas’ soul had been judged and found a grafter and a cad, so naturally he was giving a two-day
filibuster, which was plenty of “gas” for Death to continue on. He would even have enough left over for the Mt. Parnassus Hill Climb next year entering in the 40-horsepower class.
In the sitting room of an undersized and over-furnished house, two old maids in curl-papers and Mother Hubbards were talking as the cat quietly ripped up the back of a sofa.
“What has come over you in these last days?” said one of them.
“I am growing old. Eudocia. We’re all growing old.”
“I am forty-eight now.”
“Yes, death seems to come faster for all of us these days.” And on the highway, a streak of enameled iron and polish and flying dust, the car blasted past a sign that read:
SPEED LIMIT SIXTY PER HOUR
(underneath which a wag had painted: Fords do your damdest.)
On the turnpike, the officer at the tollbooth opened the gate for the man in the big seven-passenger car.
“I would have had better service at the Styx,” said the driver, “and the toll is less.”
“Listen, have you macadamized a road lately? Took us all month to get this one done, and of course the tolls are cheaper out in the sticks; the roads there are abominable.”
“Away with thee; Charon is a better conversationalist.”
“I’m sure she is, but don’t call me Sharon, or else—“
“You would be playing with Death.”
“I’d heaps rather see Susan. You know they almost put her in the Follies?”
“You would know plenty about follies,” said the driver.
“Go on, dry up.”
“Like bones,” he said, letting out the clutch, “like old bones.” The car jerked once and took off again. The sarcastic laugh was lost in the inexpertly shifted grind from the gearbox.
Death was becoming quite proficient at the visitations by motor. There was a scythe rack neatly attached to the running-board now, but he preferred a collapsible one that stored in a fitted leatherette case (a boon to all auto fanciers, the advertisement read) and he had plenty of room for souls on board the car, even if one of them, consistent to the last, had stolen the lap-robe out of the back seat. Having picked up the man at the tollbooth six months later, in keeping with the genteel tendency never to forget a friend, Death was continuing on down a
mountain road when he saw the sign ahead:
USE PLEXO SOON.
And it was this that baffled Death.
“Plexo, plexo!” he stammered, trying a varied series of controls with no effects. “Where in the name of Cerberus’ three half-chewed hambones did they put the plexo control at? I must have forgotten something—“
Traveling at fifty miles per hour, the automobile ran directly into the side of a covered bridge, knocking out most of the planks, and plunged into a stream where it landed upside down with a terrible crash in eight feet of water. And before the impact he remembered that one of his customers had mentioned Plexo once: an excellent brand of cold-cream, which, being the Grim Reaper, was entirely useless to him as he had nowhere really to put it on.
(continued)
