The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Whaddaya think?” asked Quentin.

  “I think somuddy buried somethin,” Bubba replied. “And when he set them ferns back on top, he smooshed the whole thing down tight. Probly, just did it. A week from now, they’d all be growed up again, and we wouldn’a seen it.”

  “You think maybe money?” asked Josh, thoughtfully.

  Bubba looked around. “Nah. I think more likely a body. It’s too wet here for money or paper. Most likely a body.”

  “We gonna dig it up?” asked Quentin.

  “Why’n hell we do that?” his brother replied. “Get all messed up in somethin none of our binness! Let dead bodies lie, that’s what I say.”

  They returned to their work, making considerable progress by early afternoon, when they stopped work, parked the machines, and got into Bubba’s pickup to drive to the nearest town for sandwiches and beer. After some jollity between them and Dolly, the clerk at the convenience store, they took an extra sixpack, got into their car and drove back the way they’d come. At least so Dolly told the police when they came asking, having found a receipt with the store’s name on it in the empty seat of the pickup.

  That was the last she saw of them, she said, driving off down the road, waving at her.

  “They were okay?” asked the police, “not fighting among themselves?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” said Dolly. “Those boys’d have to be sober to fight about anything, and they ain’t been sober since high school. I’ve knowd ’em forever, since then, anyhow. They’re just happy drunks.”

  If so, they’d died happy. The backhoe was right where somebody left it, and the front loader. The truck the men had arrived in was parked by the road. Scattered around the machines were six empty beer cans, two shoes (unmatching), one shirt sleeve, a pair of dark glasses and a blood-soaked item later identified as a hernia truss. Trodden into the muck were the missing men’s bones, all three skeletons, the medical examiner said, when he’d had a chance to sort them out and reassemble them. No flesh. Just bones.

  The local paper carried the sheriff’s musings on the subject, which were largely focused on the likelihood of satanic rites or upon greens who had gone mad with enviro-rage and blood lust.

  4

  benita

  MONDAY

  First thing Monday morning, Benita phoned Congressman Alvarez’s office, then took a cab to the Congressional Office Building. The young woman at the desk in the outer office looked at her curiously, then invited her to sit while she went into an inner office. The door wasn’t shut all the way, and through the crack Benita could see into the office where her namesake representative sat behind his desk, going through a stack of messages. The young woman handed him a note, and he looked up, saying in an annoyed voice,

  “Who is this Alvarez woman, Susan?”

  “She said she’s your cousin, Congressman. Benita Alvarez, Joe Alvarez’s daughter. She says she’s not a nut, not a hysteric, not looking for money or to get any kind of bill introduced, but she has something that was given to her to put into the hands of authority, and she thought you would be the one to decide who authority was because she is one of your constituents, and even though she didn’t vote for you, you still represent her interests.”

  He barked laughter. “All that?”

  Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves. Benita flushed and turned her head away from the door, but she didn’t stop listening.

  The young woman went on, “When she called, I suggested she bring whatever it is by and leave it, and she said no. It had been entrusted to her to put into someone’s hands, and she was going to put it into someone’s hands she could trust and she didn’t know me from Eve.”

  “Lord save us. She could have mailed it. That’s a long way to come.”

  “She’s waiting outside. What do I tell her?”

  Benita could visualize him, looking up at the ceiling. He did that during debates, looked up at the ceiling, as though hoping for a sign.

  He said, “I don’t remember Joe Alvarez, though I don’t doubt he was some kind of cousin, umpteen times removed, and so far as I can remember, I’ve never heard of Benita. Better err on the side of kindliness than go the other way and have her turn out to be the widowed sister of the state Democratic chairman. I can see her now. I should have about five minutes before the lumbermen get here, or is it the tree-huggers?”

  “That’s tomorrow. Today it’s General Wallace and the Forest Service.”

  Benita straightened. She’d actually met General Wallace, well, heard him speak, at a conservation seminar she’d attended. He had made a big name for himself at the Pentagon before retiring to the family ranch in Arizona. Evidently he felt his years of service entitled him to be heard on a whole range of civilian topics. Range being the operative word among cattlemen. In Benita’s part of the country, the people who ran cattle in the national forests did not like laws protecting the environment, or protecting endangered wildlife. If it wasn’t something a human being could eat or make money off of, it wasn’t important.

  The congressman said, “Why don’t retired generals fade away like they’re supposed to? Why is he so involved in this grazing issue? He’s working me into a real bind. If I vote to protect the land, my constituency will howl, because they prefer to do things the way they’ve done them for three hundred years, despite the fact that three hundred years ago there were only a few hundred people cutting timber and running cows where several thousands want to do it now!”

  “I’m sure it’s very difficult, sir.”

  “Oh, no, hell, as one recent visitor rancher told me, the world is coming to an end soon, so it won’t matter whether there is any range or rivers left or not.”

  There was a long silence. Benita visualized the young woman standing patiently, saying nothing. She’d probably heard it all before.

  “End of speech,” said the congressman in a tired voice. “I’ll see Ms. Alvarez.”

  He opened the door himself. The way he pushed it back, fully open, told Benita he didn’t plan for her to stay long. If the door was open, he could walk people out, chatting, arm around the shoulders of whoever it was, casually reaching down from his six-foot-four-inch height to take a visitor’s hand, to murmur something about nice of you to have come by, you take care now, have a nice day, bye-bye. She’d seen him do that at campaign rallies. Congressman Gregorio Alvarez was actually Greg Kempton on his birth certificate, but he ran for election on his mother’s maiden name, and that side of the family had always called him Gregorio. He really was a sort of cousin, through a many times great-grandfather. His mother had been short, like most of the Hispanics of the Southwest, but his father, Brad Kempton, had been six foot five.

  She got up, putting on her careful smile, wondering what he was thinking. She had taken pains to dress like a woman who deserved to be taken seriously. She’d gone to the hairdresser at the hotel first thing this morning, her suit was well made, and so were her shoes. The cube was in a shopping bag, so she could look like any ordinary shopper, except for the bruise greening one cheek, just under her dark glasses. She saw Representative Alvarez’s eyes settle on it, just for a moment, and his lips tightened.

  “Mrs. Alvarez?” He smiled very nicely and kept his voice gentle. Well, he’d sponsored a lot of anti-abuse legislation, and the public knew all about how his mother had died. “I’m intrigued by your message.”

  “Are you, really?” She was pleased. “I tried to make it intriguing. I know you must be pestered to death, and the last person you want to talk to is some mujer loca from back home.” She looked around his office, a little flustered, summoning up her daytime, working-woman self, the one who dealt with people all the time.

  She went to the chair he gestured toward and seated herself when he did, just across from him, with no desk between.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he asked, smiling. “You’re from New Mexico? Married? With children?”

  “Two. They’re both in college in California.”

&
nbsp; He started to say something then caught himself. She guessed he was going to say she didn’t look old enough. People often said that. The truth was, she wasn’t old enough. There were still too many Hispanic girls like her, having babies at fifteen or sixteen, more among Hispanics than any other group. Among her people, familia had always been more important than anything, and babies born too soon, though grieved over, were accepted.

  “Now, what brings you to Washington?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath and said firmly, “I was hired. They paid me to bring this thing to someone in authority.”

  She bent toward the shopping bag, unwrapped the tissue and came up with the shiny cube, reached over and handed it to him. He took it as though it might be a bomb and almost dropped it when it immediately turned firecracker red. He was old enough to remember when kids played with firecrackers, and he held it, feeling it.

  Benita knew it felt like leather. Not soft, precisely, but yielding. Not like plastic or wood. He turned it over, and it screamed at him. He almost dropped it.

  She reached for it and turned it over, at which point it stopped yelping. “It has a right side up,” she told him. “And it yells if you upset it or leave it alone. So long as you’ve got it near you, it stays quiet. When it turns blue, it’s okay. You can feel it kind of buzzing? On your fingers?”

  He stared at the thing. She knew he could feel the vibration, and the color had faded somewhat toward the purple. “What does it do?” he asked.

  “They didn’t say. They just said it would do all the convincing and explaining that was necessary. I kind of expected it to do it when I gave it to you. Maybe not, though. Maybe it won’t turn on until it gets to the president or somebody like that?”

  He snorted. “I can picture that. The Secret Service would just love it. A sealed container with who knows what in it!”

  “I thought it might be a bomb,” she agreed, nodding. “Except it went through all the machines at the airport. There was even a sniffer dog, and he didn’t twitch.”

  “Probably looking for cocaine,” he muttered. “Who gave this to you?”

  “They were strangers to me,” she said, using the phrase she had decided upon during the plane trip. Strangers were acceptable. Aliens might not be. “They came up to me in the mountains, where I was hunting mushrooms, and they gave me that cube and some money, and they asked me to take it to someone in authority over our country.”

  He started to ask the sensible questions, like where, and when, and how many of them had there been, when a loud voice in the outer office made him turn in that direction.

  “…never mind, I’ll just go on in,” the voice boomed, and in he came, tall and bulky, straight up and down as a post, white hair and broad shoulders, a drill-sergeant Santa Claus, seeming to take up all the air in the room just by saying hello. She recognized him at once, both from having heard him speak and from the constant news coverage he received. He crossed to the congressman, who was gaping, one hand holding the cube, the other raised in surprised greeting.

  “Good to see you, son, and what the hell’s that?” the general asked, grasping the congressman’s free hand. He gave it one quick pump, then took the cube from the other hand, like a child finding a surprise…

  And they all went somewhere else.

  The three of them seemed to be standing in space, far, far out in space, with galaxies whirling and dust clouds gently surging and a godlike voice speaking from the center of the universe, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen of the human race, may we introduce ourselves. We are of the Pistach people, originally of a double star system toward the center of your galaxy and ours, long-time space farers, who have recently become aware of the interest your race has expressed in the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

  The scene changed abruptly to a mountain trail, where the three of them stood on an outcropping of rock watching two uniformed persons who looked only slightly exotic handing the cube to Benita, then bowing and departing. The godlike voice went on: “It is our habit to approach a single member of a new race to receive our initial contact. Despite your recent spate of fables concerning alien abduction, no one from your planet has been abducted. We can find out all we need to know about any creature without kidnapping or vivisecting it. We choose this method of introducing ourselves to limit the risk which always comes with surprise. We are happy that our message has been brought to (…click, click, click…) General Wallace and (…click, click, click…) Congressman Alvarez by (click, click) his kinswoman, Benita Alvarez, and we ask that you take this message to the highest authorities of your nation.”

  They were abruptly back in the congressman’s office.

  “What in the hell,” breathed the general, staring down at the cube in his hands, which hummed softly inside its deep blue self.

  “Don’t ask me,” cried the congressman, sinking into his chair. “She brought it!”

  “I gathered as much,” snapped the general. “I’m not blind.”

  He turned on Benita with his brows drawn together, obviously ready to pounce. “When, madam? And where?”

  “Well, actually,” she said weakly, “it was Saturday. Day before yesterday. And I thought of taking it to the governor, but he’s really such a flake. And then I decided the congressman, only evidently he wasn’t authority enough, because it didn’t say a word to him…”

  “I’d only held it for a moment,” murmured the congressman defensively, flushing angrily.

  “…and they didn’t look like that, either,” she concluded, rather annoyed at the fact.

  “What do you mean?” the general demanded.

  “The ones who spoke to me didn’t look like people, and their ship was in the background, and they had a reference machine they used all the time when they talked to me.”

  “What do you mean they didn’t look like people,” snarled the general.

  Her annoyance grew. “The beings who spoke to me were not humans, sir. I think they must change their appearance to be acceptable to whomever they are addressing.”

  “Meaning you would accept nonhumans?”

  She simmered down, thinking. “Well, I guess that’s true, yes. I would. I watch a lot of crazy things on TV, so I’ve become used to the idea. And I’ve never been afraid of animals or bugs or things.”

  “Don’t move,” said the general, crossing to the congressman’s desk, picking up the phone and punching in strings of numbers. He turned his back on them and mumbled into the mouthpiece, covering his mouth with his hand. The cube, left behind on the low table, began to squeal.

  Benita picked it up and patted it into quiet.

  “How much did they pay you?” asked the congressman.

  “Five thousand dollars,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. If they searched her purse or her hotel room, that’s what they’d find, or what was left of it after she had paid for the airfare and the cabs and the hotel and three meals yesterday and one today. The other ninety-five thousand was in a safety deposit box rented first thing that morning, and the receipt and the key were hidden in her bra. It had occurred to her that all that money might be confiscated by the powers that be and she might not get it back.

  The general turned away from the phone and seated himself in the congressman’s chair. “They’re on the way over.”

  “They? Who?” asked the congressman.

  “People from the Pentagon. They’ll call the president’s office and the FBI.”

  “Well,” Benita said, heaving a sigh, “since you’ve got it all in order, I think I’ll go get myself some lunch. I was so worried about putting this in the right hands, I hardly touched my breakfast…”

  “Sit down,” said the general.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. If you’re starving, we can send out for some sandwiches or something, but I want you here when the others arrive. They’re going to have questions. I have questions.”

  “The people said the cube would giv
e you all the answers and explanations. Certainly I can’t.”

  “We’ll still have questions. Just sit.”

  He was a man very accustomed to being obeyed, and Benita sat, annoyed at herself for doing so, no matter how important he was. She got annoyed like this with her relatives who were always telling her what she ought to do or had to do, because sometimes she said things to them that were rude, or things she thought in retrospect might have been rude, and the memory of rudeness made her cringe inside even when no one else remembered whatever it had been. Where did all that come from? She hadn’t a clue, but it was why she liked the bookstore, the routines she knew best, customers who didn’t know her from Eve and wouldn’t presume to order her around or comment on her daily life.

  Now, however, she was evidently to submit to being ordered. People arrived in waves, most of them wearing suits, some of them wearing uniforms. Sandwiches were provided, along with coffee and iced tea. The questions went on for the rest of that afternoon, well into the evening, moving from place to place depending upon the number of simultaneous questioners. Where had she hunted mushrooms? Find the place on this map. What kind had she found? What time of day? Where had she found the agaricus? Was anyone else around? What had the ship looked like? Where did pleurotus grow? On and on. She drew maps of the place and sketches of mushrooms. Someone provided dinner, hastily catered in a meeting room.

  Finally she was allowed to go back to the hotel to sleep, though they put someone on guard outside in the corridor. They took away the money she had left, just as she’d suspected, though they gave her a receipt.

  On Tuesday, the questions continued at an office somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

  “The money is good,” the general told her at one point. “Not counterfeit. We’re keeping the bills you were given just in case the lab people can come up with anything, but here’s replacement currency. Everyone seems to feel you’re telling the truth. I don’t suppose you’d mind taking a polygraph?”