Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

“Oh man, you’ve really gone over the edge. Sampling too much of your own product again? Even if we did decide to get married, we’d just go to Vegas or something.”

  Nick starts to reply, then stops, letting his grin fade, while he stares at her so long without blinking that her own eyes begin to ache. She rubs them with the back of her hand.

  “Well, try this on for size,” Nick says at last. “You’ve been deserted.”

  “Say what?”

  “You wanna know where Lucky is? He’s balling another chick, that’s where. I saw him pick her up, and he went home with her.”

  Maggie lets out her breath in a long sigh. Suddenly tired, she walks to the end of the room and flops into a chair, while Nick stands in front of her, grinning like a fiend—unless of course he actually is a fiend. His eyes are so pale, the irises grey, the whites dead white without a trace of vein or blood that she wonders if Nameless Girl might have been right after all.

  “I should have seen that coming,” she says. “John’s been so weird lately. Distant, you know? And he started spending all his time in the damn lab again.”

  “You bore him, that’s what he told me.”

  “You little bastard! You’re enjoying this! What’s wrong, you in love with him yourself? Guys like you do that all the time, you know, fall in love with their buddies.”

  “You bitch!”

  “Hah. It’s true.”

  “It is not!”

  “Bet it is. You’re nothing but a hanger-on anyway, aren’t you, Nick? John’s little groupie, that’s you.”

  Nick hisses and flings his head back. Rather than let him tower over her, Maggie gets to her feet.

  “If it weren’t for him cooking in the lab, you’d have nothing to push, would you?” Maggie goes on. “You make me sick.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, listen here—you’re gonna be a lot sicker once you’re on your own, all by yourself with your little bastard.”

  “Who’s gonna be on her own? I’ve got my family.”

  “Oh yeah sure. They’ll kick a piece of dirt like you out into the gutter where you belong.”

  Maggie laughs. All at once it strikes her as profoundly funny, that she would be standing here exchanging insults with the Devil, and all over a man she’s already made up her mind to leave. Nick steps back sharply and flings up one hand, as if protecting his face.

  “Well, can’t you see the joke?” Maggie says. “Here we are, and there’s Lucky off somewhere screwing some dumb chick, and it’s like we’re fighting over him. You know what, Nick? I don’t care anymore. If you want him, you take him.”

  Nick makes a choking sort of noise deep in his throat and steps back again, toward the door. Automatically she follows.

  “You really don’t care, do you?” he says. “You really don’t give a shit.”

  “Of course I care. It’ll hit me tomorrow, probably. I’ll miss him. He could be real sweet when he wanted to be.”

  “But what about the baby?”

  “What about it? It’s just not a big deal. I mean, come on, Nick, this is the Revolution, y’know. Nobody’s going to get down on me except my mom, and she’ll get over it.”

  “She’ll get over it.” Nick says each word very slowly.

  “Yeah, of course she will. Oh, I know she’s gonna chew me out, but it’s not the end of the world. The next thing you know she’ll be knitting little sweaters and stuff.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “I am not. It’s going to be lousy for a while, but hey, time passes.”

  Reflexively Nick glances at his watch, a gesture that makes Maggie laugh again. She’s hysterical, she supposes. She doesn’t particularly care.

  “Would you stop laughing?” Nick snarls.

  Maggie shakes her head and goes on giggling. The laughter seems to have taken over her entire body, shaking her, rocking her, making her giggle and chuckle and howl with tears in her eyes, while Nick’s face flushes a dangerous shade of red.

  “Stop it!”

  She tosses her head and laughs the louder.

  “I said stop it!”

  Nick screams the words, then swings at her open-handed. Hysteria gives way to reflex. Maggie grabs his wrist, drops to one knee, and flips him over her head. With a doglike yelp he falls flat on his back on the floor. She spins round and considers him, lying spread-eagled and gasping for breath.

  “You’re damn lucky that rug was there,” she says. “It would have hurt worse if you’d hit the plain old floor.”

  Nick tries to speak but only gasps.

  “Don’t you ever mess with me again, man. You hear me?”

  “Bitch.” He hauls himself up to a sitting position. “I’ll get you for this. One day. You just wait.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If it takes me a hundred years.”

  “I won’t be alive in a hundred years, you jerk.”

  He snarls, exposing a long canine, but he looks so pitiful, gasping and choking for breath, barely able to sit, much less stand, that Maggie breaks out laughing again. With a howl that clangs like a bronze gong Nick disappears. He does not melt, he does not vaporize in smoke; he merely disappears, precisely and neatly gone. Maggie stops laughing.

  “Oh my God! She was right.”

  For a long moment Maggie stares at the rug. She would like to believe that she’s imagined this entire incident, but her shoulder and elbow still ache from the strain of throwing the Devil over her back. With a shudder she goes over to the bed, sits down, and picks up the phone to call Rosie. She’s determined to get out of this house before John comes home from his cheap trick.

  o~O~o

  It seems to John that years have passed while he dwelt in marble halls and ruled a far kingdom with Helen at his side, but even as he hallucinates vast armies, battling at his command, he knows perfectly well that they spring from his own creation, those two tabs of purple mist that he ingested before leaving the house. It seems to him that he stands on a high hill to watch the battle rage; then he wonders if he’s perhaps asleep and dreaming. With that thought the battle disappears. He finds himself lying on a pile of other people’s clothing, heaped up in the corner of a theatrical dressing room. Distantly, music sounds, and chanting.

  What Helen may be thinking as she lies naked in his arms he cannot begin to guess. Since she doesn’t seem to speak English, he can’t ask.

  “Uh, hey,” John says. “You okay?”

  She smiles and stretches in his arms, then sits up, pushing her golden hair back from her face. He notices a small tattoo on her breast, fondles her, leans closer for a look, and sees a swastika. She giggles at his touch and kisses him, her mouth wet and eager. He catches her by the shoulders and holds her at arm’s length.

  “The tattoo,” he says. “Hell’s Angels lady?”

  Those words she seems to know. She laughs, nodding, laying one finger on the mark.

  “Oh shit!” John lets her go. “Hey, look, it’s been swell, but I’m, uh—I’ve got to go home.”

  Zipping up his jeans John ducks out fast. Dr. Lucky he still is—neither security guard, their Angels’ colors prominent on broad backs, pays him much attention when he trots through the stage door and down the steps into the auditorium. There’s no sign of Nick, but John’s not inclined to wait for him, not when he could get beaten into dog meat for screwing an Angel lady. Now that he’s coming down he feels sick-tired and shaking, and the world’s gone flat, as if it were painted on canvas like a stage set. Sleep. I’ve got to sleep, and jeez, I could drink Lake Michigan I’m so damned thirsty.

  Outside a foggy dawn turns the street to painful silver. John shuts his eyes to the sight of magenta and turquoise spirals, drifting across his inner view, opens them fast and walks on home, his hands in his jeans pockets, his head aching, pulsing with each step. Trash swirls across the sidewalk round his feet.

  “Young man? Young man? Are you all right?”

  John looks up sharply, finds the speaker standing in front of him, a little ma
n, slightly stooped, wearing a black suit over a white shirt and a black vest, and a plump black skullcap of great age. With a tilt of his head he looks John over with bright black eyes.

  “Yeah, sure, Rabbi.”

  “Really all right?”

  “Really, yeah.”

  “But what we might wonder is the real, eh?” The rabbi laughs and waggles one gnarled finger. “It’s too early to talk philosophy.”

  “Sure is.”

  Chortling under his breath the rabbi hurries off, heading, oddly enough for the movie theater. With a shrug, John walks on. By the time he reaches the house he can think only of sleep. As he staggers into his room, he’s already unbuttoning his shirt. He gets all the way to the bed before he realizes that things are missing. Maggie’s things—the closet door stands open on an empty rack, a dresser drawer sits empty on the floor, the felt rug gone and the Navajo hangings, too.

  Suddenly wide awake, he walks back and forth across the room, looking at the empty places, occasionally picking up one of the items that remain, his things—his boots, his books, his records, still there untouched where he last left them. Swearing, he trots out to the hall, trots downstairs to the lab—everything still there, just where he left it.

  “Nick! Hey, Nick!”

  Silence, a dead and empty silence, answers him. John walks out into the empty ballroom and stands for a moment looking round at torn carpeting and a pair of old speakers, lying on the bandstand. The room smells bitter with old dope.

  “What’s she done? Run off with my best friend?”

  “No.”

  With a yelp John spins round to find Nameless Girl standing on the stairs and watching him. She’s yawning, pushing her tangle of hair back from her face with one hand. Barefoot, she wears her usual jeans but a man’s blue shirt, a couple of sizes too large and buttoned wrong, as if she grabbed the first piece of clothing she found by her bed and threw it on.

  “I heard you come in,” she says. “Thought I should tell you. Maggie’s left you.”

  “I could figure that out, thanks. Why?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”

  “Okay. What about Nick?”

  “He went back to Hell where he belongs. They can’t stand being laughed at, you know. Devils, I mean. Maggie told me what happened before she left.”

  In utter bewilderment John can only shake his head.

  “You better get to bed, man,” Nameless Girl says. “You’re crashing.”

  Epilogue in San Francisco

  The year that her daughter turns eight, Maggie comes back to San Francisco. Aunt Linda has died of cancer and left in her will a trust fund for the child’s education; there are papers to sign, a lawyer to listen to while Maggie perches on the edge of a wooden chair in an overheated office on Sutter Street. The reek of tobacco in the dark-panelled room threatens her with headache. The lawyer, a round man with thin hair, chews gum as he sits behind his desk, reading terms aloud in a pool of electric light. Behind him a window shows nothing but grey as fog rolls across an afternoon sky.

  “Now am I to understand,” he says at last, “that the child’s legal name is Meadow Sunlight?”

  “That’s correct.”

  He pauses with a look of distaste.

  “She can always change it when she’s older,” Maggie says. “If she doesn’t like it.”

  “If she does, I’ll have to be notified. You’ll need to fill out the proper forms and have them notarized.”

  “Of course.”

  He says nothing, his fat lips pursed. Maggie glances at his engraved card, then slips it into her shirt pocket. She has put on her best clothes for this visit, a white shirt, a blue hopsacking blazer, a pair of new jeans.

  “If you’re sure you understand everything,” he says at last. “That will be all.”

  Dismissed, Maggie hurries out and takes the elevator down into the gold and glass lobby of a building decorated like an Aztec temple. Men in wool suits stride past, talking in low voices of baseball scores. Outside the air is cold, the fog lies thick over sky and roof. She has forgotten how cold San Francisco can be in August. Traffic inches past, blaring. She will be glad to get back to the mountains. Tonight, though, she’s staying at her mother’s house, where Meadow has spent the day.

  Turning downhill Maggie walks fast, heading for the parking garage where she’s left her beaten-up Volkswagen van. She can see what seems to be a disturbance on the corner ahead and hear the sound of a bullhorn, though the words tear apart in the traffic noise. Caught in memories of her past she suspects a political rally, stops at the edge of the crowd to listen, and finds an evangelist instead, resplendent in gray polyester, waving scripture in one hand while he bellows through the mike held in the other. Laden with tracts, two men stand to either side.

  One of them is John Wagner. Maggie can feel herself gaping like an idiot as she stares, wondering how he could have aged so much in such a few years—well, eight years, really now, and some while past she heard that he’d been busted and sent up to federal prison. Perhaps it’s the prison that has streaked his thin hair with so much grey and left his eyes so pouched and lifeless. He wears a blue suit, a white shirt, a narrow tie. She begins to back away, to slip into the stream of pedestrians flowing by, but too late. Tucking his tracts under one arm he bursts through the crowd of hecklers.

  “Maggie!” His voice cracks with sadness. “Hey, it is you! I saw you walk up, couldn’t believe it.”

  “Well, yeah, it’s me. Uh, well, how are you?”

  “I’ve never been better.” His mouth twitches to portray a smile. “Did you hear I got busted?”

  “Yeah, I did, but no details or anything, just through the grapevine. You know?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I had this big delivery back east, and God wouldn’t let me find a courier. He sent me back to DC myself with it so that his officers of the law could find me and save me.”

  “Say what?”

  “I was arrested,” he says. “Arrested and sent to prison, where I found the gospel. I met a man there who’d fallen from a high place. He was one of the president’s advisors, but he too was a sinner like me. So we prayed together and found Jesus. He’s studying to be a minister now, and I spread the gospel where I can.”

  Maggie feels suddenly sick to her stomach. John is smiling again, his mouth turned briskly up at the corners, his eyes still dead. It seems he looks past, not at, her.

  “Ah well,” she says. “That’s cool, yeah.”

  “Maggie?” He steps a little closer. “Maggie, you know I really loved you, don’t you?”

  “Sure, but hey, that was a long time ago, and I’m, like, married now.”

  “Wonderful! I hope it was a church wedding, a real wedding. But Maggie, because I loved you once, I’ve got to ask. Are you saved? If something happened, if you died tomorrow—have you ever thought about what would happen to you?”

  Maggie steps back sharply.

  “I just wanted to ask.” The smile disappears. “I know it’s a turn-off. But I just had to ask.”

  Tears form and rim beyond her power to stop them.

  “Ah jeez!” She wipes her eyes hard on her sleeve. “Lucky, John, to see you like this!”

  “Why are you crying? I’ve never been happier in my life.”

  “Really? Are you really happy?”

  “Of course.” He looks honestly bewildered that she would ask.

  The crowd has turned to listen, to stare. The evangelist himself, standing on a blue upturned milk crate, is watching with a benign little smile, holding his Bible in one hand and resting it against his heart.

  “I’ve got to go,” Maggie says. “My mom’s waiting for me.”

  “Well, sure. Are you still in the city? Maybe we can have coffee?”

  “No, I’m living up in the Sierras now. In a little town call Goldust. With my husband.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Your husband. Well, give him my best. God go with you.”

  “Thanks. Same t
o you.”

  Maggie works her way free of the listeners, dashes across the street on the yellow light, keeps running and dodging other pedestrians till she reaches the parking garage. There, hidden in shadows she stops to pant for breath, to weep a little more, too, for the wreckage of a mind and man that she has just spoken with. I never told him about the baby, she thinks. I shoulda. Meadow’s half his, but ohmigawd, how could I? He’d want to see her. He’d want to see me. She shudders convulsively with a toss of her head, then fishes in her pocket and finds the car keys, runs her fingers over them for the comfort of cold metal. Before her honor forces her to weaken and tell John the truth, she fetches her car and drives out, turning an extra block out of her way to avoid the evangelists on the corner.

  After that day, Maggie and John never meet again. In 1997, John dies of a massive heart attack during a revival meeting just outside of Tupelo, Mississippi. The consensus is that Jesus has taken him at the best possible moment a man can be taken. At his funeral red roses heap his coffin and spill round upon the floor.

  The Stargazer

  Leslie gets behind the wheel of her two-seater Honda and leaves the door hanging while she turns the engine over. The car starts with a chunk and growl, but it starts. Lights glow on the dash, needles quiver on dials—ethanol just above empty. She turns the key and watches the needles sag back. With one last growl the car falls silent. She bites her lower lip while she does some fast figuring. Maybe a gallon left, enough to get into town and reach the only fuel station, about two miles west of town near the entrance of +hat used to be a state park before the government stopped paying the rangers. If they’ve had a delivery, no problem. But if they’re out? It doesn’t pay to count on ethanol deliveries up here in Goldust. Most of the time, about once a week, the pressurized tankers still chug their way up the highway and turn off onto the two-lane road to make their deliveries; often enough the price per gallon’s gone up again. There are times, though, when the trucks haven’t come, when Big Rick, the station owner, won’t pump any more eth for fear of draining the tanks. Empty tanks rise in the ground, and as they rise, they buckle and crack.