Madball by Fredric Brown Page A

lot. His watch told him it was ten o'clock in the morning and his aching head told him there was no use in trying to go back to sleep.
    Slowly his mind began to work through the fog, to pick up the threads of living. I am Dr. Magus, mentalist, working my own mitt camp. It is Wednesday. Wednesday of the second last week of the season. Now in Bloomfield. One more week after this one. Something important happened yesterday. What? Oh, yes, Mack Irby was killed, only it was night before last instead of yesterday. And Maybelle spent the rest of the night with me. Rain sounds like an all-day rain. Mud. Not much chance we'll open today. But I'd better get up. This hangover and headache are hell and won't start to go away until I make myself get up and force myself to take a drink of dog hair and to eat some breakfast. My God, did I leave myself a drink?
    Laboriously and painfully he lifted his head and looked around. The whisky bottle stood on the footlocker. No cap on it but there was half an inch of whisky still in it. Groaning, he threw back the covers and crawled the length of them until he could reach the bottle. He downed the drink. It was horrible tasting and for a full minute he wasn't sure whether it was going to stay down but it did.
    By the time he was sure of that he was shivering, for he was wearing only shorts and the air was cool. He pulled on clothes, dug out a hat, slicker and galoshes from the foot locker, and went to the chow top for eggs and coffee to make him feel human again. It helped, but not much. He'd have to cut down on his drinking, he decided. Almost every night this season he'd gone to sleep either drunk or not too far from it. Almost every night? He tried to think of one single night when he hadn't had at least a few drinks, and he couldn't. That much drinking couldn't be good for him. At that rate, he'd never live to see sixty. But why the hell did he want to see sixty? What had sixty ever done for him?
    Gloomy morning. He looked around the chow top for someone to talk to. But there were only four others there. The Quintanas but with Leon looking so sullen it was obviously not a good idea even to say hello to him. And Dr. Magus knew better than even to look at the wife of so psychopathically jealous a man as Leon; he was really over the borderline. The other two people were Barney King and Maybelle. But they were sitting together and seemed engrossed in one another and he didn't feel he should butt in. He slogged through mud and rain back to the mitt camp. Days like this he wondered why he bothered to exist at all.
    And when he felt that way there was only one answer.
    He slogged through mud again - the rain was slackening - over to Pop Wilson's trailer. Pop ran a little private liquor store, strictly for the carneys because he didn't bother about a license. His main stock was smoke, in unlabeled pint b o ttles, and it was powerful stuff. But for those who were finicky, he also kept on hand-at slightly more than regular prices, since he had to buy it retail himself - a case or two of standard brand whisky. Dr. Magus had drunk the smoke often enough but today he didn't feel up to it. He felt finicky. He bought a fifth of the finest and oldest whisky Pop had, Seagram's Seven.
    Back in the mitt camp he had himself a drink of it and this time, with a breakfast under his belt, it tasted all right. And it took away the cobwebs and he sighed with contentment and lay down again with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the canvas top.
    What was it, he wondered, that had bothered him about Mack Irby? Certainly it wasn't surprising that he'd been killed and rolled when it had been all over the lot that he was coming back from the hospital loaded with dough from an insurance settlement. Even if whoever had killed him had guessed that the bulk of it would be either in non-negotiable form such as traveler's checks or stashed away somewhere, he'd know Irby would probably carry a fair amount in cash too,