Terri Windling

by Borderland

  No note. And no sign of a struggle. Much of what looters would have taken was still here. Most looters wrecked the places they plundered, just because they now had the freedom to, but the place was largely undisturbed. And only Roxanne could open the safe; only she and he knew where the gun was kept.

  Gone, then. And no note.

  He felt afraid then, began to tremble in a way he never had when stalked on his way home at night, or when Dennis had died. He simply did not know what to do.

  He stood there in the book room, lamp in hand, turning this way and that, looking for some sign, something on the wall, some message from inside himself. He remembered his bike with the guitar on the back and brought it in. He locked the door, leaned the bike against the wall, removed the guitar case, took out the Martin, and returned with it to the living room where the lone flame burned beside the air mattress. He stood looking down on it, holding the guitar by the neck like a throttled, fat-bodied bird, and wondered what to do.

  He thought briefly about going out to look for her, but dismissed it. It had been hours—as many as seven; she could have gone anywhere. He didn’t know where to start looking, anyway; not at night.

  Finally he sat in bed with his arms folded across the guitar in his lap, and he waited for her to come home.

  He awoke with puffy eyes and throbbing head and realized he had been crying in his sleep. The Martin lay beside him. There was something vaguely obscene about it being there, in bed next to him, and he turned away from it and stood stiffly.

  He was still in his clothes.

  He tramped, bleary-eyed, to the black curtains, and pulled them open. Sunlight stabbed his pupils; he clenched his lids and threw a hand across his brow, cowering vampirelike in the late-morning brightness.

  His mouth tasted foul.

  He tramped to the bathroom, groped in the dimness for the tube of Crest, squeezed a chalky blue inch onto his toothbrush, began brushing—and stopped.

  Roxanne’s toothbrush was gone.

  “Gaw fu’ing dammit,” he said, and Crest-tainted saliva ran down his chin. He wiped it away with a Finger and continued brushing, staring at the empty place in the holder where Roxanne’s brush—it had been a red brush, curved in a narrow S, he remembered, one of those Swedish, high-tech things some people used to order from expensive catalogs for their executive friends. And now it wasn’t there, and Roxanne wasn’t there, and she wouldn’t be coming back and her god damn toothbrush wouldn’t be coming back with her.

  He watched his face in the mirror as he finished brushing, rinsed with water from a plastic jug, spat, rinsed again, spat again. He made hateful faces at himself, caught himself, and felt foolish.

  He tossed his toothbrush into the sink and left the bathroom. Not bothering to unsnarl the tangled mass of his hair with a brush, he dried the lower half of his face against the sheet on the air mattress, pushed his bike outside, got on, and pedaled onto Woodman, turning west on Derrida.

  He didn’t lock the door behind him. He didn’t give a fuck.

  Some people now referred to the Galleria as trader’s heaven. Certainly it was never called that before, back when it was a large indoor shopping mall in an area of town that had been fairly expensive to live in, and when cash and not barter had been its stock in trade.

  Times change.

  Most of the stores had been looted long ago; everything worth taking, taken; all worth breaking, broken; all better left behind, abandoned. Records littered the floor in the Musicland, bins overturned atop them. In the B. Dalton, books were heaped in scattered piles with appalling lack of concern as to genre. Both stores looked to be ready for some straight-thinking, right-minded, God-fearing American to torch them at any minute. Glass fronts had been smashed, though the glass was swept away now. Mannequins in display windows were piled atop each other in plastic orgies. Inside, the stores were dark even during the day.

  Whoever had designed the three-level mall, however, had wanted a sunny, open-air feeling along the walkways promenading the storefronts, so the ceiling was many triangular glass panels framed by aluminum and the central sections of the mall—the midway, it might be called—were bright, yet cool on all but the hottest days. Traders arranged their bins, tables, sacks, and whatnot, along the midway in the early morning, and by ten o’clock, when most of the locals were up and about, the “shoppers”—the term the regular traders used—were at full strength with bags or boxes in hand, and the trading went hard and fast.

  Scooter got there at ten-thirty. He carried his Schwinn up a long flight of steps beside a frozen escalator until he reached the long, pebble-set walkway lined with dead trees in granite holders. He biked along until he reached the entrance between a onetime restaurant called Kerwin’s and a McDonald’s, and he locked his bike beside the dozen-odd already in the rack.

  The glass doors stood open, and Scooter went inside.

  Most traders were on the bottom floor; the bulk of them were in the center of the mall, a small court with a platform stage. There had once been a lot of greenery here; now it was all brown. Scooter leaned over the rail at the edge of the walkway, looking down on the bartering crowd for some sign of Roxanne. He saw none.

  As he walked down the escalator to the court his stomach let out a loud growl. He patted it self-consc-iously. Later, he thought.

  He walked among stalls and seated people hawking their wares: rechargeable batteries, car batteries cleaned and filled with electrolyte (sulfuric acid solution in plastic-lined cartons), solar batteries, homemade candles, matches, butane, breads, vegetables, meats (not many of those: rabbit, venison, a little chicken, and something that Scooter suspected was dogmeat), drugs (some salvaged, some homemade; some medicinal, some recreational), home-brewed beer and wines (someone with whiskey was making a killing), generators and alternators (small bicycle generators, powerful car generators and alternators, and a popular generator meant for motorcycles, hooked up to a bicycle to pedal for power), pistols, bullets (mostly homemade), and a great deal more. Scooter threaded his way among them, looking for Roxanne, or someone he knew who might have seen her. But his search, as he had half expected, yielded nothing.

  He turned around and began working his way toward the escalator when someone called, in thickly accented English, “Scooter? Yoohoo, Mister Scooter?”

  He looked back. A heavy woman in a floral print dress, her long, graying hair tied back, beckoned to him. She stood by the marble facade decorating the elevator shaft that rose in the middle of the mall. She did not look familiar, but Scooter headed back to her anyhow.

  “You Scooter, ah?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I was—”

  “Your girl, Roxanne, she tol’ me about you.”

  “Roxanne—have you—?”

  She tugged on her hair, jangling a gold teardrop hanging from one earlobe. “I recognized you from those. I didn’t see her this morning, so I guess you came instead.” She held out a white paper sack; Scooter took it and looked inside. Bread. Fresh bread.

  His stomach growled loud enough for both of them to hear.

  “Mrs. . . . Hernandez?” Scooter said.

  She nodded. “I owe her one more loaf, tomorrow, for the medicine she give my baby.”

  “Your . . . ? How is your baby, Mrs. Hernandez? Roxanne said she was pretty sick.”

  “He.” The woman smiled. “Better, Mr. Scooter. I’m still worried, but every day he get better. Those pills, they help. Your Roxanne, she a good lady. You tell her I said that.”

  Scooter hesitated. “Mrs. Hernandez . . . I’m sort of looking for Roxanne. We—we had a fight last night, and she ran out, and I’m trying to find out where she is. You haven’t seen her?”

  “She run out on you?” Scooter saw Mrs. Hernandez glance at the sack of bread he held, saw her think about taking it back. He found himself moving the sack slightly out of her reach and clutching it tighter. He nodded at her question. “Have you seen her?” he asked again.

  She shook her head. “Not today. Mos
t days, she’s here. Today . . .” She shrugged.

  “Well, if you do see her, would you tell her I’m looking for her? Tell her—tell her I just want to talk to her. Please?”

  She said nothing.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Hernandez,” said Scooter, backing away a bit. “And thank you for the bread.”

  She frowned.

  Scooter left the mall.

  Outside was the community bulletin board, which functioned the same way bulletin boards always had and probably always would—people needing and offering services, people requiring and selling items, announcements that the Borderlands was a communist-backed experiment endorsed by the pope, a faded and weather-beaten prediction that The End is Near. The only noticeable difference was that almost all the notices, announcements, and signs were hand-lettered, and because of that Roxanne’s printing jobs stood out—one of the major reasons she managed to barter for any work at all.

  But the bulletin board told him nothing new, gave him no evidence of Roxanne’s whereabouts. He thought she might have posted a notice looking for work, or to share a squat, or even a note to him, but there was nothing but her usual advertisements for her own business and for others.

  Scooter carred his bike down the long run of stairs and headed farther east on Derrida.

  The Holiday Inn was pretty much the same. Scooter hadn’t been here in almost a year.

  He wasn’t sure why he had come.

  In the lobby he looked around. He didn’t recognize anyone—most of them were still asleep on mattresses dragged from rooms into the foyer, or were sprawled on worn-out couches or chairs—but it still looked almost exactly the same. The smell still came from the bathroom down the hall. Empty cans, wrappers, dirty paper plates, and worse littered the floor.

  Down the hall the bathroom door shut and footsteps approached.

  Still buckling his torn, faded orange cords, he turned the corner. He zipped up his pants and stopped, eyes widening. “Hey,” he drawled, a hand going up to scratch fresh gauze at his head. “What’re you—hey!” And that was him recognizing Scooter. His arms waved as though finishing his sentence in semaphore.

  Scooter said nothing.

  “What brings you up here, huh?” asked Richie, stepping closer. His toe caught the corner of a mattress, brushed someone’s elbow, elicited a sleepy “Fuck you.” Richie glanced back, seemed about to utter an apology, looked back at Scooter instead. “This place,” he said, “Shee-it. Hey, they told me you used to live here. That right?”

  Scooter nodded. “If you can call this living,” he said.

  Richie laughed. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad, ain’t it. I seen worse, though. Heck, I been in worse.” Richie looked around the room, and Scooter wondered how different the room looked to him. “It’s all right, though,” Richie said decisively. “I mean, this is a good bunch. It’s people that make a place, you know?” His gaze returned to Scooter. “Still, I’d leave in a minute if I had somewhere else to go.”

  “What about your friend?” Scooter asked. “The redheaded guy.”

  Richie looked down at his feet and shrugged. He looked up. “Hey, you want something to eat?” he asked.

  Scooter shook his head. “I got bread,” he said, and held up the sack.

  Richie wiped his peach-fuzzed chin. Scooter might have found it comical if it hadn’t been so pathetic. “Oh, man. Hey, you think I could ... ?”

  Scooter opened the sack and tore off a hunk from the end of the loaf. He handed it to Richie, who grinned and ate it savagely, crumbs salting his fledgling beard. “That was pretty good,” he said after wolfing down the last bite. “Man, I haven’t had fresh bread in . . . shit.” He shrugged, then got that hungry look again. “Uh, would it be all right if I ... ?”

  Scooter stayed another hour, asking if anyone had seen Roxanne. Half the people he asked said they had, but no two descriptions matched. Scooter took to giving out phony descriptions—“Hey, you seen my girlfriend? She’s about five-even, a hundred-forty pounds, missing index finger on her right hand, patch over her right eye?”—and usually got a response like, “Naw, not today. But I think I seen someone looked like that yesterday, over by—

  When he left, as disgusted with himself as with them and their place, he took a half-full bottle of Jack Dan-id’s he’d found poking out from beneath a filthy paper plate under a chair.

  Home again, home again, Scene of the Crime.

  He went into the studio with the bottle of whiskey and every intention of getting shit-faced and playing until he passed out.

  He found the typed note tucked through the strings at the head of the Yamaha.

  Scooter—

  I put this where I thought you’d find it soonest. I’m going away, because I just can’t take it anymore. I love you, but I also have my pride, and you just aren’t pulling your weight. I won’t keep pulling it for you. The world doesn’t exist for you to play your guitar, Scooter. It’s selfish of you, and I’m tired of waiting around for you to get off your ass and be responsible for yourself.

  So I won’t be responsible for you anymore. You’re on your own. I know that sounds harsh. Maybe you don't believe it when I say I still love you, but I do. I just can’t live with you like this.

  Please don’t try to find me, because you won’t. I’m sorry to hurt you, but you’ll get over it, I know. We’ll see each other again, but not for a long time, I think.

  —Roxanne

  He read it three times, then turned it over to see if there was more, but there wasn’t.

  The Factory wasn’t open yet, but Tommy Lee answered his knock—his pounding, rather, since the place was big and the doors were huge.

  “Scooter,” he said in his pleasant baritone. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi, Tommy. Is Marti around?”

  “She’s in back, I think. You want me to go get her?”

  “Yeah, if you would.”

  Tommy Lee narrowed his eyes. “Bit early in the day to be drunk, isn’t it, Scooter?”

  Scooter flushed. “Just drinking, man. Not drunk.”

  Tommy Lee looked thoughtful a moment, then asked Scooter to wait while he went to get Marti.

  Scooter waited.

  Jesus, two sips of Jack Daniel’s and he tells me I’m drunk. Well, maybe a little more than two sips. But not enough to get drunk! Still, he hadn’t had more than a beer or two on the same night in at least a year. No tolerance.

  Marti opened the door. A smear of grease warpainted one cheek; matching smudges marred her jeans. Her face was sweaty and her thin brown hair tied back. She wiped her hands on a dirty rag she carried with her. “Yeah, Scooter?” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Roxanne left me,” he muttered.

  Her look softened a bit. “That’s a tough break, kid,” she said. She looked Scooter’s age; she was ten years older.

  “Yeah, well . . .” He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, hands in the front pockets of his pants.

  “You wanna talk about it?” she asked. “I’m kinda busy, but you can come in back with me, if you want. I can work and listen at the same time.” She opened the tall wood door a bit wider.

  “Naw, naw, Marti. That ain’t why I came here. I mean, I’d like to talk to you, but I got something I got to do.”

  “Well, then, what do you need, Scooter?”

  “It’s—” One hand came out of a pocket, turned palm up. “It’s sort of hard to explain. See, Roxanne left me and I’m really bummed, you know? And I just want to take my ax—my guitar, you know, my electric—”

  “I know,” she said. “I used to play in a band.”

  He looked up in surprise. “Yeah?” He shook his head. “You’re always full of surprises. But right now I just wanna play my ax, you know? Take my Les Paul up on the hill and just wail. That’s how I work stuff out, you know? Like this—” He mimed playing guitar. “I got a pig-snout amp, and I thought maybe you could . . .”

  She opened the door to let him in. “Follow me, Scoote
r. We’ll fix you up.”

  She led him through the empty, dimly lighted club— during the day they used as little power as possible—to the back room. It had once been the stockroom for the former clothing store; it had been converted to a generator room when the new management had acquired a propane generator. The door—with a hand-lettered sign that read martts room—keep out or I’ll kill you— was locked with a simple Yale lock. Marti unlocked it with a key from a crowded ring on a belt loop and opened it to let him in ahead of her.

  The generator throbbed loudly at the back of the room. Near it stood a few dozen bottles of propane.

  “Here,” said Marti over the thrum of the generator. Scooter followed her farther into the room, wanting to shield his ears from the noise. He was starting to get a headache. Marti led him to the generator. She pointed to a cylindrical object attached to it, with cables leading from that to a car battery on the floor.

  “You power this thing with a car battery?” Scooter asked incredulously.

  Marti laughed. “Scooter, people like you are the reason people like me own the world. At least this part of it.” She pointed again at the object attached. “That’s an alternator. Got it from an auto-parts store. It was originally meant to go on a truck engine. I use it to charge batteries off the generator. It’s a sideline business I run myself: sell batteries, then charge to juice ’em up again when they run low.” She indicated a dozen car batteries, tagged with the names of their owners, against the far wall. “What kinda amp you got?” she asked.

  “Fender.”

  She pursed her lips, thinking, then went to a trunk against the wall beside the batteries. She produced a key from her ring and unlocked the trunk, opened it, and removed a small box from inside. She shut the trunk and locked it again.

  “Motor-scooter battery,” she told Scooter, returning to him and placing it in his hand. It was heavy for its size. “Used to power one of those Honda Elites. Perfect for you—a Scooter battery, huh?” She laughed. “Anyway, it’s all charged up and ready to use. Just bring it back when you’re done with it, okay? Don’t lose it, don’t sell it, and don’t keep it too long.”