The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Mack said fine. There was always a good chicken rumor going around somewhere. That or someone saw a horse or a pack of dogs. Miss Aubrey Gain of Alvin swore on Jesus there was a pride of Siamese cats in Liberty County.

  Mack wolfed down his food. He didn’t look at his plate. If you didn’t look close, you maybe couldn’t figure what the hot peppers were covering up.

  When he got up to go he said, “Real tasty, Henry,” and then, as if the thought had suddenly occurred, “All right if you and me talk for a minute?”

  Henry followed him out. Mack saw the misery in his face. He tried on roles like hats. Humble peon. An extra in Viva Zapata! Wily tourist guide with gold teeth and connections. Nothing fit. He looked like Cesar Romero, and this was his cross. Nothing could rob him of dignity. No one would pity a man with such bearing.

  Mack took out the roll of posters and gave them back. “You know better than that, Henry. It wasn’t a real good idea.”

  “There is no harm in this, Mack. You cannot say that there is.”

  “Not me I can’t, no.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Come on. I got Huang Hua coming first thing tomorrow.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “Jesus, Henry.”

  “I am afraid that I forgot.”

  “Fine. Sure. Look, I appreciate the thought, and so does everyone else. This Chink, now, he hasn’t got a real great sense of humor.”

  “I was thinking about a flag.”

  “What?”

  “A flag. You could ask, you know? See what he says. It would not hurt to ask. A very small and insignificant flag in the window of the diner. Just for the one day, you understand?”

  Mack looked down the road. “You didn’t even listen. You didn’t hear anything I said.”

  “Just for the one day. The Fourth and nothing more.”

  “Get all the posters down, Henry. Do it before tonight.”

  “How did you like the George Washington?” Henry asked. “I did all of those myself. Rose did the lettering, but I am totally responsible for the pictures.”

  “The Washington was great.”

  “You think so?”

  “The eyes kinda follow you around.”

  “Yes.” Henry showed his delight. “I tried for inner vision of the eyes.”

  “Well, you flat out got it.”

  Jase and Morgan came out, Jase picking up the rubber fishing boots he’d left at the door. Morgan looked moody and deranged. Mack considered knocking him senseless.

  “Look,” Mack told him, “I don’t want you on my boat. Go with Panagopoulos. Tell him Fleece’ll be going with me and Jase.”

  “Just fine with me,” Morgan said.

  “Good. It’s fine with me, too.”

  Morgan wasn’t through. “You take a nigger fishing on a day with a r in it, you goin’ to draw sharks certain. I seen it happen.”

  “You tell that to Fleece,” Mack said. “I’ll stand out here and watch.”

  Morgan went in and talked to Panagopoulos. Jase waited for Fleece, leaning against the diner, asleep or maybe not. Mack lit an Agricultural Hero and considered the after-taste of breakfast. Thought of likely antics with Jenny’s parts. Wondered how a univalve mollusk with the mental reserve of grass could dream up a wentletrap shell and then wear it. This and other things.

  Life has compensations, but there’s no way of knowing what they are.

  * * *

  Coming in was the time he liked the best. The water was dark and flat, getting ready for the night. The bow cut green, and no sound at all but a jazzy little counterbeat, the crosswind snapping two fingers in the sails. The sun was down an hour, the sky settling into a shade inducing temporary wisdom. He missed beer and music. Resented the effort of sinking into a shitty evening mood without help.

  Swinging in through the channel, Pelican Island off to port, he saw the clutter of Port Bolivar, the rusted-out buildings and the stumps of rotted docks, the shrimpers he used to run heeling drunkenly in the flats. South of that was the chain-link fence and the two-story corrugated building. The bright red letters on its side read SHINING WEALTH OF THE SEA JOYOUS COOPERATIVE 37 WELCOME HOME INDUSTRIOUS CATCHERS OF THE FISH.

  This Chinese loony-tune message was clear a good nautical mile away; a catcher of the fish with a double cataract couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.

  Panagopoulos’s big Irwin ketch was in, the other boats as well, the nets up and drying. Fleece brought the sloop in neatly, dropping the sails at precisely the right moment, a skill Mack appreciated all the more because Morgan was scarcely ever able to do it, either rushing in to shore full sail like a Viking bent on pillage or dropping off early and leaving them bobbing in the bay.

  The Chinks greatly enjoyed this spectacle, the round-eyes paddling the forty-three-foot Hinckley in to shore.

  Mack and Jase secured the lines, and then Jase went forward to help Fleece while the Chinks came aboard to look at the catch. The guards stayed on the dock looking sullen and important, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. Fishing Supervisor Lu Ping peered into the big metal hold, clearly disappointed.

  “Not much fish,” he told Mack.

  “Not much,” Mack said.

  “It’s June,” Fleece explained. “You got the bad easterlies in June. Yucatan Current kinda edges up north, hits the Amarillo Clap flat on. That goin’ to fuck up your fishing real good.”

  “Oh, yes.” Lu Ping made a note. Jase nodded solemn agreement.

  Mack told Jase and Fleece to come to the house for supper. He walked past the chain-link fence and the big generator that kept the fish in the corrugated building cooler than anyone in Texas.

  The routine was, the boats would come in and tack close to the long rock dike stretching out from the southeast side of the peninsula, out of sight of the Chinks, and the women and kids would wave and make a fuss and the men would toss them fish in canvas bags, flounder or pompano or redfish if they were running or maybe a rare sack of shrimp, keeping enough good fish onboard to keep the Chinese happy but mostly leaving catfish and shark and plenty of mullet in the hold, that and whatever other odd species came up in the nets. It didn’t matter at all, since everything they caught was ground up, steamed, pressed, processed, and frozen into brick-size bundles before they shipped it.

  Mack thought about cutting through the old part of the port, then remembered about Henry and went back. There were still plenty of posters on fence posts and abandoned bait stands and old houses, and he pulled down all he could find before dark.

  * * *

  They ate in front of the house near the dunes, a good breeze coming in from the Gulf strong enough to keep mosquitoes and gnats at bay, the wind drawing the driftwood fire nearly white. Henry brought a large pot of something dark and heady, announcing it was Acadia Parish shrimp creole Chihuahua style, and nobody said it wasn’t. Mack broiled flounder over a grill. Jase attacked guitar. Arnie Mace, Mack’s uncle from Sandy Point, brought illegal rice wine. Not enough to count but potent. Fleece drank half a mason jar and started to cry. He said he was thinking about birds. He began to call them off. Herons and plovers and egrets. Gulls squawking cloud-white thick behind the shrimpers. Jase said he remembered pink flamingos in the tidal flats down by the dike.

  “There was an old bastard in Sweeny, you know him, Mack,” George Panagopoulos said. “Swears he had the last cardinal bird in Texas. Kept it in a hamster cage long as he could stand it. Started dreaming about it and couldn’t sleep, got up in the middle of the night and stir-fried it in a wok. Had a frazzle of red feathers on this hat for some time, but I can’t say that’s how he got ’em.”

  “That was Emmett Dodge,” Mack said. “I always heard it was a jay.”

  “Now, I’m near certain it was a cardinal.” Panagopoulos looked thoughtfully into his wine. “A jay, now, if Emmett had had a jay, I doubt he could’ve kept the thing quiet. They make a awful lot of noise.”

  Mack helped Fleece throw up.

  “Ge
orgia won’t talk to me,” Fleece said miserably. “You the only friend I got.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  “You watch out for Morgan. He bad-talkin’ you ever chance he get.”

  “He wants to be pissant mayor, he can run. I sure don’t care for the honor.”

  “He says your eyes beginnin’ to slant.”

  “He said that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, fuck him.” Fleece was unsteady but intact. Mack looked around for Henry and found him with Rose and Jenny. He liked to stand off somewhere and watch her. A good-looking woman was fine as gold, you caught her sitting by a fire.

  He took Henry aside.

  “I know what you are going to say,” Henry said. “You are angry with me. I can sense these things.”

  “I’m not angry at all. Just get that stuff taken down before morning.”

  “I only do what I think is right, mi compadre. What is just. What is true.” Henry tried for balance. “What I deeply feel in my heart. A voice cries out. It has to speak. This is the tragedy of my race. I feel a great sorrow for my people.”

  “Okay.”

  “I shall bow to your wishes, of course.”

  “Good. Just bow before Huang gets here in the morning.”

  “I will take them down. I will go and do it now.”

  “You don’t have to do it now.”

  “I feel I am an intrusion.”

  “I feel like you’ve had enough to drink.”

  “Do you know what I am thinking? What I am thinking at this moment?”

  “No, what?”

  “I am thinking that I cannot remember tequila.”

  “Fleece has already done this,” Mack said. “I don’t want you doing it, too. One crying drunk is enough.”

  “Forgive me. I cannot help myself. Mack, I don’t remember how it tastes. I remember the lime and the salt. I recall a certain warmth. Nada. Nothing more.”

  Tears touched the Cesar Romero eyes, trailed down the Gilbert Roland cheeks. If Jase plays “La Paloma,” I’ll flat kill him, thought Mack. He left to look for Rose.

  * * *

  Jenny told him to come out on the porch and look at the beach. Crickets crawled out of the dunes and made for the water. The sand was black, a bug tide going out to sea. The crickets marched into the water and floated back. In the dark they looked like the ropy strands of a spill.

  “The ocean scares me at night,” Jenny said.

  “Not always. You like it sometimes.” He wanted to stop this but didn’t know how to do it. She was working up to it a notch at a time.

  “It’s not you,” she said.

  “Fine, I’ll write that down.” He worked his hand up the T-shirt and touched the small of her back. She leaned in comfortably against him.

  “Things are still bad, you get too far away from the coast. I don’t want you just wandering around somewhere.”

  “I haven’t really decided, Mack. I mean, it’s not tomorrow or anything.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to find anyone, Jenny.” He said it as gently as he could. “Folks are scattered all about.”

  She didn’t answer. They stood a long time on the porch. The house already felt empty.

  * * *

  The chopper came in low out of the south, tilted slightly into the offshore breeze, rotors churning flat, snappy farts as it settled to 87 stirring sand. Soldiers hit the ground. They looked efficient. Counterrevolutionary acts would be dealt with swiftly. Fleece and Panagopoulos leaned against the diner trading butts. Henry came out for a look and ducked inside. The morning was oyster gray with a feeble ribbing of clouds. Major Huang waved at Mack. Then Chen came out of the chopper and started barking at the troops. Mack wasn’t pleased. Huang was purely political—fat and happy and not looking for any trouble. Chen was maybe nineteen tops, a cocky little shit with new bars. Mack was glad he didn’t speak English, which meant Jase wouldn’t try to sell him a shark dick pickled in a jar or something worse.

  The Chinese uniforms were gallbladder green to match the chopper. Chen and three troopers stayed behind. The troopers started tossing crates and boxes to the ground. One followed discreetly behind the major.

  “Personal hellos,” Huang Hua greeted Mack. “It is a precious day we are seeing.”

  Mack looked at the chopper. “Not many supplies this time.”

  “Not many fishes,” Huang said.

  It’s going to be like this, is it? Mack followed him past the diner down the road to Shining Wealth Cooperative 37. He noticed little things. A real haircut. Starched khakis with creases. He wondered what Huang had eaten for breakfast.

  Sergeant Fishing Supervisor Lu Ping greeted the major effusively. He had reports. Huang stuffed them in a folder. The air-conditioning was staggering. Mack forgot what it was like between visits.

  “I have reportage of events,” Huang began. He sat behind the plain wooden table and folded his hands. “It is a happening of unpleasant nature. Eddie Mendez will not mayor himself in Galveston after today.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Offending abuse. Blameful performance. Defecation of authority.” Huang looked meaningfully at Mack. “Retaining back of fishes.”

  “What’ll happen to Eddie?”

  “The work you do here is of gravity, Mayor Mack. A task of large importance. Your people in noncoastal places are greatly reliant of fish.”

  “We’re doing the best we can.”

  “I am hopeful this is true.”

  Mack looked right at him.

  “Major, we’re taking all the fish we can net. We got sails and no gas and nothing with an engine to put it into if we did. You’re not going to help any shorting us on supplies. I’ve got forty-one families on this peninsula eating nothing but fish and rice. There’s kids here never saw a carrot. We try to grow something, the bugs eat it first ‘cause there’s no birds left to eat the bugs. The food chain’s fucked.”

  “You are better off than most.”

  “I’m sure glad to hear it.”

  “Please to climb down from my back. The Russians did the germing, not us.”

  “I know who did it.”

  Huang tried Oriental restraint. “We are engaging to help. You have no grateful at all. The Chinese people have come to fill this empty air.”

  “Vacuum.”

  “Yes. Vacuum.” Huang considered. “In three, maybe four years, wheat and corn will be achieved in the ground again. Animal and fowl will be brought. This is very restricted stuff. I tell you, Mayor Mack, because I wish your nonopposing. I have ever shown you friendness. You cannot say I haven’t.”

  “I appreciate the effort.”

  “You will find sweets in this shipment. For the children. Also decorative candles. Toothpaste. Simple magic tricks.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I knew this would bring you pleasure.”

  Huang looked up. Lieutenant Chen entered politely. He handed Huang papers. Gave Mack a sour look. Mack recognized Henry’s posters, the menu from the diner. Chen turned and left.

  “What is this?” Huang appeared disturbed. “Flags? Counterproductive celebration? Barbecue pork?”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing,” Mack explained. “It’s just Henry.”

  Huang looked quizzically at George Washington, turning the poster in several directions. He glanced at the cardboard menu, at the KC Sirloin Scrambled Eggs Chicken-Fried Steak French Fries Omelet with Cheddar Cheese or Swiss Coffee Refills Free. He looked gravely at Mack.

  “I did not think this was a good thing. You said there would be no trouble. One thing leads to a something other. Now it is picnics and flags.”

  “The poster business, all right,” Mack said. “He shouldn’t of done that. I figure it’s my fault. The diner, now, there’s nothing wrong with the diner.”

  Huang shook his head. “It is fanciment. The path to discontent.” He appeared deeply hurt. The poster was an affront. The betrayal of a friend. He walked to the w
indow, hands behind his back. “There is much to have renouncement here, Mayor Mack. Many fences to bend. I have been lenient and foolish. No more Henry Ortega Diner. No picnic. And better fishes, I think.”

  Mack didn’t answer. Whatever he said would be wrong.

  Huang recalled something of importance. He looked at Mack again.

  “You have a black person living here?”

  “Two. A man and a woman.”

  “There is no racing discrimination? They are treated fairly?”

  “Long as they keep picking that cotton.”

  “No textiles. Only fishes.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  * * *

  Mack walked back north, past a rusted Chevy van waiting patiently for tires, past a pickup with windows still intact. Rose hadn’t seen Henry. She didn’t know where he was. “He didn’t mean to cause trouble,” she told Mack.

  “I know that, Rose.”

  “He walks. He wanders off. He needs the time to himself. He is a very sensitive man.”

  “He’s all of that,” Mack said. He heard children. Smelled rice and fish, strongly seasoned with peppers.

  “He respects you greatly. He says you are muy simpático. A man of heart. A leader of understanding.”

  A woman with fine bones and sorrowful eyes. Katy Jurado, One-Eyed Jacks. He couldn’t remember the year.

  “I just want to talk to him, Rose. I have to see him.”

  “I will tell him. He will come to you. Here, take some chilies to Jenny. It is the only thing I can grow the bugs won’t eat. Try it on the fish. Just this much, no more.”

  “Jenny’ll appreciate that.” A hesitation in her eyes. As if she might say something more. Mack wouldn’t ask. He wasn’t mad at Henry. His anger had abated, diluted after a day with Major Hua. He left and walked to the beach. Jase and Fleece were there. Jase had a mason jar of wine he’d maybe conned from Arnie Mace.

  “Tell Panagopoulos and some of the others if you see ’em,” Mack said, “I want to talk to Henry. He’s off roaming around somewhere; I don’t want him doing that.”

  “Your minorities’ll do this,” Jase reflected. “I’m glad I ain’t a ethnic.”

  “It’s a burden,” Fleece said. “There going to be any trouble with the Chinks?”