Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  “No, ma’am. I ain’t—”

  “Don’t try to deny it. I know you coloreds have a weakness for it. That’s why Mr. Whittaker and I keep the cabinet in the den locked. For your own good. But when I went in there, just now, I found the cabinet door open. I cannot have servants in my house that I do not trust. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mary Louise waits for Ruby to say something else, but there is silence.

  “I will pay you through the end of the week, but I think it’s best if you leave after dinner tonight.” There is a rustling and the snap of Kitty’s handbag opening. “There,” she says. “I think I’ve been more than generous, but of course I cannot give you references.”

  “No, ma’am,” says Ruby.

  “Very well. Dinner at six. Set two places. Mary Louise will eat with me.” Mary Louise hears the sound of Kitty’s heels marching off, then the creak of the stairs going up. There is a moment of silence, and the basement door opens.

  Ruby looks at Mary Louise and takes her hand. At the bottom of the stairs she sits, and gently pulls Mary Louise down beside her.

  “Miss Mouse? You got somethin you want to tell me?”

  Mary Louise hangs her head.

  “You been in your Daddy’s liquor?”

  A tiny nod. “I didn’t drink any. I just gave my bag a little. The Vernor’s was flat and I was afraid the magic wouldn’t work. I put the key back. I guess I forgot to lock the door.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “I’ll tell Kitty it was me,” Mary Louise says, her voice on the edge of panic. “You don’t have to be fired. I’ll tell her.”

  “Tell her what, Miss Mouse? Tell her you was puttin your Daddy’s whiskey on a conjure hand?” Ruby shakes her head. “Sugar, you listen to me. Miz Kitty thinks I been drinkin, she just fire me. But she find out I been teachin you black juju magic, she gonna call the police. Better you keep quiet, hear?”

  “But it’s not fair!”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.” Ruby strokes Mary Louise’s hair and smiles a sad smile, her eyes as gentle as her hands. “But, see, after she talk to me that way, ain’t no way I’m gonna keep workin for Miz Kitty nohow. It be okay, though. My money hand gonna come through. I can feel it. Already startin to, maybe. The Ford plant’s hirin again, and my husband’s down there today, signin up. Maybe when I gets home, he’s gonna tell me good news. May just be.”

  “You can’t leave me!” Mary Louise cries.

  “I got to. I got my own life.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “I can’t, sugar.” Ruby puts her arms around Mary Louise. “Poor Miss Mouse. You livin in this big old house with nice things all ’round you, ’cept nobody nice to you. But angels watchin out for you. I b’lieve that. Keep you safe till you big enough to make your own way, find your real kin.”

  “What’s kin?”

  “Fam’ly. Folks you belong to.”

  “Are you my kin?”

  “Not by blood, sugar. Not hardly. But we’re heart kin, maybe. ’Cause I love you in my heart, and I ain’t never gonna forget you. That’s a promise.” Ruby kisses Mary Louise on the forehead and pulls her into a long hug. “Now since Miz Kitty already give me my pay, I ’spect I oughta go up, give her her dinner. I reckon you don’t want to eat with her?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’ll tell her you ain’t feelin well, went on up to bed. But I’ll come downstairs, say good-bye, ’fore I leave.” Ruby stands up and looks fondly down at Mary Louise. “It’ll be okay, Miss Mouse. There’s miracles every day. Why, last Friday, they put a fella up in space. Imagine that? A man up in space? So ain’t nothin impossible, not if you wish just hard as you can. Not if you believe.” She rests her hand on Mary Louise’s head for a moment, then walks slowly up the stairs and back into the kitchen.

  Mary Louise sits on the steps and feels like the world is crumbling around her. This is not how the story is supposed to end. This is not happily ever after. She cups her tiny hand around the damp, sticky bag under her arm and closes her eyes and thinks about everything that Ruby has told her. She wishes for the magic to be real.

  And it is. There are no sparkles, no gold. This is basement magic, deep and cool. Power that has seeped and puddled, gathered slowly, beneath the notice of queens, like the dreams of small awkward girls. Mary Louise believes with all her heart, and finds the way to her mouse self.

  Mouse sits on the bottom step for a minute, a tiny creature with a round pink tail and fur the color of new rust. She blinks her blue eyes, then scampers off the step and across the basement floor. She is quick and clever, scurrying along the baseboards, seeking familiar smells, a small ball of blue flannel trailing behind her.

  When she comes to the burnt-orange coat hanging inches from the floor, she leaps. Her tiny claws find purchase in the nubby fabric, and she climbs up to the pocket, wriggles over and in. Mouse burrows into a pale cotton hankie that smells of girl tears and wraps herself tight around the flannel ball that holds her future. She puts her pink nose down on her small pink paws and waits for her true love to come.

  Kitty sits alone at the wide mahogany table. The ice in her drink has melted. The kitchen is only a few feet away, but she does not get up. She presses the buzzer beneath her feet, to summon Ruby. The buzzer sounds in the kitchen. Kitty waits. Nothing happens. Impatient, she presses on the buzzer with all her weight. It shifts, just a fraction of an inch, and its wire presses against the two lye-tipped nails that have crossed it. The buzzer shorts out with a hiss. The current, diverted from its path to the kitchen, returns to Kitty. She begins to twitch, as if she were covered in stinging ants, and her eyes roll back in her head. In a gesture that is both urgent and awkward, she clutches at the tablecloth, pulling it and the dishes down around her. Kitty Whittaker, a former Miss Bloomfield Hills, falls to her knees and begins to howl wordlessly at the Moon.

  Downstairs, Ruby hears the buzzer, then a crash of dishes. She starts to go upstairs, then shrugs. She takes off her white uniform for the last time. She puts on her green skirt and her cotton blouse, leaves the white Keds under the sink, puts on her flat black shoes. She looks in the clothes chute, behind the furnace, calls Mary Louise’s name, but there is no answer. She calls again, then, with a sigh, puts on her nubby orange outdoor coat and pulls the light string. The basement is dark behind her as she opens the door and walks out into the soft spring evening.

  WILLIAM SANDERS

  William Sanders makes his home in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but his formative years were spent in the hill country of western Arkansas, where this story is set. He appeared on the SF scene in the early eighties with a couple of alternate-history comedies, Journey to Fusang (a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award) and The Wild Blue and the Gray. Sanders then turned to mystery and suspense, producing a number of critically acclaimed titles. He credits his old friend Roger Zelazny with persuading him to return to SF, this time via the short-story form; his stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies, earning himself a well-deserved reputation as one of the best short-fiction writers of the last decade, and winning him two Sidewise Awards for Best Alternate History story. He has also returned to novel writing, with books such as The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan and The Bernadette Operations, a new SF novel, J., and a mystery novel, Smoke. Some of his acclaimed short stories have been collected in Are We Having Fun Yet? American Indian Fantasy Stories. His most recent book is a historical study, Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians: 1539-1543. Coming up is a new collection, Is It Now Yet? (Most of his books, including reissues of his earlier novels, are available from Wildside Press, or on Amazon.com.)

  About “Dry Bones,” he says:

  “I can’t think of anything that needs to be said about this story. Either it works on its own or it doesn’t.

  “About the only thing I would point out is that this is an example
of a long-established but seldom-seen subcategory of science fiction: the Great Lost Scientific Discovery. Kipling did it with ‘The Eye of Allah’; Waldrop did it with ‘The Ugly Chickens. ’ In between, examples have been pretty rare; I can’t think why.

  “I would like to thank those people who voted for the story, and assure them that the videotapes will be destroyed as promised.”

  DRY BONES

  WILLIAM SANDERS

  It was a hot summer day and I was sitting under the big tree down by the road, where we caught the bus when school was in, when Wendell Haney came up the road on his bike and told me somebody had found a skeleton in a cave down in Moonshine Hollow.

  “No lie,” he said. “My cousin Wilma Jean lives in town and she came by the house just now and told Mama about it.”

  I put down the Plastic Man comic book I had been reading. “You mean a human skeleton?” I said, not really believing it.

  Wendell made this kind of impatient face. “Well, of course a human one,” he said. “What did you think?”

  He was a skinny kid with a big head and pop eyes like a frog and when he was excited about something, like now, he was pretty funny-looking. He was only a year younger than me, but I’d just turned thirteen last month and a twelve-year-old looked like a little kid now.

  He said, “Gee, Ray, don’t you want to go see? Everybody’s down there, the sheriff and all.”

  Sure enough, when I looked off up the blacktop I saw there was a lot of dust hanging over the far end of Tobe Nelson’s pasture, where the dirt road ran down toward Moonshine Hollow. Somebody in a pickup truck was just turning in off the road.

  I stood up. “I’ll go get my bike,” I told him. “Go on, I’ll catch up with you.”

  I went back to the house, hoping Mama hadn’t seen me talking to Wendell. She didn’t like for me to have anything to do with him because she said his family was trashy. They lived down a dirt road a little way up the valley from us, in an old house that looked about ready to fall down, with a couple of old cars up on blocks in the front yard. Everybody knew his daddy was a drunk.

  Mama was back in the kitchen, though—I could hear her through the window, singing along with Johnny Ray on the radio—and I got my bicycle from behind the house and rode off before she could ask me where I was going and probably tell me not to.

  I caught up with Wendell about a quarter of the way across Tobe Nelson’s pasture. That wasn’t hard to do, with that rusty old thing he had to ride. When I came even with him, I slowed down and we rode the rest of the way together.

  It was a long way across the field, with no shade anywhere along the road. Really it wasn’t much more than a cow path, all bumpy and rutty and dusty, and I worked up a good sweat pedaling along in the sun. On the far side of the pasture, the ground turned downhill, sloping toward the creek, and we could ease off and coast the rest of the way. Now I could see a lot of cars and trucks parked all along the creek bank where the road ended.

  At the bottom of the hill I stopped and got off and put the kick-stand down and stood for a minute looking around, while Wendell leaned his bike against a tree. A good many people, men and women both, were standing around in the shade of the willows and the big sycamores, talking and looking off across the creek in the direction of Moonshine Hollow.

  Moonshine Hollow was a strange place. It was a little like what they call a box canyon out west, only not as big. I guess you could call it a ravine. Anyway it ran back into the side of the ridge for maybe half a mile or so and then ended in this big round hole of a place with high rock cliffs all around, and a couple of waterfalls when it was wet season.

  I’d been up in the hollow a few times, like all the kids around there. It was kind of creepy and I didn’t much like it. The trees on top of the bluffs blocked out the sun so the light was dim and gloomy even on a sunny day. The ground was steep and rocky and it was hard to walk.

  It wasn’t easy even getting there, most of the year. First you had to get across the creek, which ran strong and fast through this stretch, especially in the spring. It was only about thirty or forty feet across but you’d have had to be crazy to try to swim it when the water was high.

  And that was just about the only way in there, unless you wanted to take the road up over the ridge and work your way down the bluffs. A few people had done that, or said they had.

  In a dry summer, like now, it was no big deal because you could just walk across without even getting your feet wet. Except that right now Deputy Pritchard was standing in the middle of the dry creek bed and not letting anyone cross.

  “Sheriff’s orders,” he was saying as I moved up to where I could see. “Nobody goes in there till he comes back.”

  There was a little stir as somebody came pushing through the crowd. Beside me, Wendell said softly, “Uh oh,” and a second later I saw why.

  Wendell’s daddy was tall and lean, with black hair and dark skin—he beat a man up pretty bad once, I heard, for asking him if he was part Indian—and mean-looking eyes. He stopped on the edge of the creek bank and stared at Deputy Pritchard. “Sheriff’s orders, huh?” he said. “Who’s he think he is?”

  Deputy Pritchard looked back at him. “Thinks he’s the sheriff, I expect,” he said. “Like he did the last couple of times he locked you up.”

  Everything got quiet for a minute. Then, farther down the bank, Tobe Nelson spoke up. “What’s he doing,” he said, “asking the skeleton to vote for him?”

  He was a fat bald-headed man with a high voice like a woman, always grinning and laughing and making jokes. Everybody laughed now, even Wendell’s daddy, and things felt easier. I heard Wendell let his breath out.

  Somebody said, “There they are now.”

  Sheriff Cowan was coming through the trees on the far side of the creek, pushing limbs and brush out of his way. There was somebody behind him and at first I couldn’t see who it was, but then I said, “Hey, it’s Mr. Donovan!”

  “Well, sure.” Wendell said, like I’d said something dumb. “He was the one who found it.”

  Mr. Donovan taught science at the junior high school in town. Everybody liked him even though his tests were pretty hard. He was big and husky like a football player and the girls all talked about how handsome he was. The boys looked up to him because he’d been in the Marines and won the Silver Star on Okinawa. I guess half the men around there had been in the service during the war—that was what we still called it, “the war,” even though the fighting in Korea had been going on for almost a year now—but he was the only one I knew who had a medal.

  I always enjoyed his class because he made it interesting, showing us things like rocks and plants and even live animals. Sometimes he let me help when he did experiments. When he saw I liked science, he helped me pick out some books in the school library. He offered to loan me some science fiction magazines he had, but I had to tell him no because there would have been big trouble if Daddy had caught me reading them.

  Sheriff Cowan climbed down the far bank of the creek and walked over to stand next to Deputy Pritchard. His face was red and sweaty and his khaki uniform was all wrinkled and dusty. He looked up and down the line of people standing on the creek bank. “I don’t know what you all heard,” he said, “and I don’t know what you thought you were going to see, but you’re not going to see anything here today.”

  A couple of people started to speak and he raised his hand. “No, just listen. I’ve examined the site, and it’s obvious the remains are too old to come under my jurisdiction.” He tilted his head at Mr. Donovan, who had come up beside him. “Mr. Donovan, here, thinks the bones might be thousands of years old. Even I don’t go back that far.”

  After the laughter stopped he said, “He says this could be an important discovery. So he’s going to get in touch with some people he knows at the university, and have them come take a look. Meanwhile, since the site is on county land—”

  “Is not,” Wendell’s daddy said in a loud voice. “That’s our land, on that
side of the creek. My family’s. Always has been.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Sheriff Cowan said. “It used to be your family’s land, but the taxes weren’t paid and finally the county took over the property. And nobody ever wanted to buy it.”

  “I guess not,” Tobe Nelson said. “Just a lot of rocks and brush, not even any decent timber.”

  “I don’t care,” Wendell’s daddy said. “It was ours and they taken it. It ain’t right.”

  “That’s so,” Sheriff Cowan said. “It’s not right that you managed to throw away everything your daddy worked so hard for, while your brother was off getting killed for his country. Just like it’s not right that your own family have to do without because you’d rather stay higher than a Georgia pine than do an honest day’s work. And now, Floyd Haney, you just shut up while I talk.”

  Wendell’s daddy looked madder than ever but he shut up. “All right, then,” Sheriff Cowan said, “as I was saying, since it’s county property, I’m closing it to the public till further notice. Tobe, I want you to lock that gate up at the main road, and don’t let anybody cross your land to come down here without checking with me first. Or with Mr. Donovan.”

  A man said, “You mean we can’t even go look?”

  “Yep,” the sheriff said. “You hard of hearing?”

  Mr. Donovan spoke up. “Actually there’s not much to see. Just a hand and a little bit of the wrist, sticking out from under a pile of rocks and dirt, and even that’s partly buried. We’re just assuming that there’s a whole skeleton under there somewhere.”

  “Not that any of you could find that cave,” Sheriff Cowan said,

  “even if I let you try. I’d have walked right past it if he hadn’t been there to show me.”

  He started waving his hands, then, at the crowd, like somebody shooing a flock of chickens. “Go on, now. Everybody go home or back to the pool hall or something. Nothing to see down here.”