How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  The help had been “planting” again. I kicked eight tin cans and a frayed length of wire out of the dirt past the avocados. We couldn’t keep such trash cleaned out of the garden. The help would put it right back. When we’d water or weed in the evenings, the help would pour water over their cans and sit and stare at them as if they expected something to happen. They just didn’t believe, yet, that you first had to grow food from plants and then put it in cans.

  Something was glittering in the little mango tree. I walked over to see what it was. The help had put pottery shards on all the branches. I wondered what kind of fruit they expected to grow from that, or whether this was part of some religious ritual with human trash.

  The help had dumped our gear on the raft and were chittering in the trees. The raft’s logs felt cool under my feet. Sam’s and the helps’ and my feet had worn the logs smooth, and we hardly ever got slivers anymore. The raft was longer than it was wide and held together with three-sided crosspieces driven through notches we’d cut top and bottom in the ends of each log. It was sturdy and not really tippy once you learned how to handle it. We set the two cans of liquid nitrogen toward the front of the raft for balance, since the back end was a little heavier, and packed everything else in our waterproof chest. I put my picture of Loryn in there.

  Sam untied the raft and jumped on. I poled us out on the bayou. Sam grabbed his pole, careful of his sore wrist, and we were off. The help followed in the trees. After two minutes we could not see the lights of the company town, could hear only the regular thumping of the generator, and that, too, faded quickly. Red moonlight skittered on the water. Otherwise, the bayou was dark. The leaves of all the trees around us started rustling — the gravitational wind was blowing off the land, cool on the back of my head, in my hair. The tide was starting out. Sam and I were alone, again, in the pântano — Portuguese for swamp; that’s all the Brazis had called it: swamp. So many Brazis had come up at first — before American Nicoji bought out Nicoji de Tocantins, the Brazilian corporation granted the original monopoly up here — that their names for places stuck. The maps in the company house showed tens of thousands of miles of pântano. It was so flat that even where we were, one hundred miles from the sea, when the moon pulled the tide in through the mass of vegetation, the water covered all the muddy land. We’d sleep on our raft tied to the top of a tree or in the trees themselves. The help would crowd with us on the platforms we made in the branches, not sleeping, since they slept in the day, but watching Sam and me while we slept.

  The trees started shaking and a roar swept over us: a ship had taken off. We watched it climb into the sky, red-orange glares under its wings. Two help fell from the trees into the water. One grabbed my pole, and Sam pulled the other onto the raft. We lifted them back up to the branches. I could see the help with the hurt hand still up there — he’d hung on. His white bandage flashed through the trees ahead of us till dawn began to light the bayou and the help crept into the shadows to sleep. They’d catch up with us. They knew the route. We had no open water to cross for two days, so they didn’t have to keep up. But when we came to open water, in the daylight, we’d have to bundle them up out of the light, put them on the raft with us, and pole them across to the next grove of trees.

  Late in the afternoon, it started to rain. The help had come down to sleep on the raft, but now they sat up and peeked out from under the sacks they held over their heads and stuck their tongues out to catch the cool rain. It rained harder and harder, so Sam and I decided to find shelter and wait it out.

  We poled our raft up against the roots of an old tree. The roots towered over our heads. We turned on our guns, listened to them hum for the three seconds it took them to warm up, then fired into the shadows under the roots. Nothing bellowed or splashed into the water, so we used the guns to burn through enough roots to let us pole the raft under the rest to the calm water against the trunk.

  It was dark under the roots. Before Sam could pull the lights out of the chest, the help swarmed into the roots to look around. The help with the hurt hand came back and tugged on my shorts. “Got nothing here, Jake,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “Fine,” I said. Sam and I shined the lights around anyway. Some guys told stories about waking a sleeping scam of lagarto when they went under roots like this. Sam and I’d never had anything like that happen. A few times we’d heard something around the tree swim away from us. That was all.

  So we sat there in the dark, shining our lights, making the help screech when we’d shine the lights in their eyes. The forest canopy above us and the roots let very little rain drip down. It thundered, and the sound of it boomed out across the pântano.

  I started thinking about Alberto Goldstein, the Brazi Jew who got under a tree like this once and found a perfect Star of David growing in the bark. He took it for a sign that he was going home. He told us he didn’t plan to stay in Brazil — he’d go to Israel, and after that, if he could manage it, to one of the Israeli stations in the asteroids. Nice as all of us goyim were, he said, he’d spend the next Passover with his people in Jerusalem.

  He disappeared one month after that. He was working with two other Brazis. Cliff Morgan and Doug Jones found the Brazis’ raft tied to the side of a tree below a platform they’d built. Up on the platform was all the Brazis’ gear, packed in tidy piles, their guns laid out in the sun to recharge. No sign of the Brazis. No sign of a struggle. Cliff and Doug looked for them for two days and finally gave up, took their gear back to the company town, and gave it to the Brazis’ friends.

  I shined my light up the tree trunk. No Stars of David grew there. Just muddy, black bark. Sam took a nap, but I kept shining my light around, looking. Soon the rain lifted, and we floated the raft back out on the bayou. The help climbed up to the forest canopy and followed us along there, it was that dark under the rain clouds.

  When the sun started down and the water began to rise, we were in the right place. We laid our poles across the raft and let the raft rise up among the empty boles of a great grove of mature trees. Only young trees had branches below the night waterline. Sam and I had a platform in an old tree thick with branches growing straight out across the water. Some teams got used to traveling at night, but Sam and I stuck to the day so we could see. We weren’t sure enough of the things that hunted in the dark.

  I tied our raft to the tree, and Sam and I climbed up to the platform, twenty feet above the water. Somebody had slept there since we’d last used it. They’d left the platform covered with leaves. The leaves had rotted in the rain, and ants were thick in the rot. I stepped out on the platform, but Sam pulled me back. “Booby-trapped,” he said. He pointed to a branch on the outer edge of the platform. It was cut partway through.

  “Who’d do this?” Sam asked.

  I hung on to a branch and stomped on the log. It snapped and dropped into the water. Sam and I stomped on each log, and half of them broke in two.

  “I didn’t like this place anyway,” I said.

  “Who wants to sleep with ants?” Sam asked.

  We dumped the rest of the logs in the water to get rid of the ants and built a new platform on the other side of the tree. Sam climbed after the wide leaves we slept on. I let down our fish trap and pulled up one nicoji and a long slimy thing with eight stubby legs that flapped around in the trap till I threw it out. The nicoji surprised me, but only one came up so I decided no big colonies had moved in nearby. The third time I dropped the trap I brought up six sadfish. Sam and I laughed at their melancholy faces and ate them. By the time we finished washing our dishes and tying everything down on our raft, it had been dark for an hour.

  Our help came chittering up through the trees. They leaned down from the branches to smell us, then scampered around the platform and the raft. I opened the waterproof chest, pulled out the bottle of gagga raisins, and gave some to the help. They loved the raisins.

  Sam took out his glasses and flashlight and read a few pages from his one book, Pilgrim’s Progress. He�
�d read that book five or six times — twice to me out loud. The wife of our first company inspector had given it to him. It had bored her. When we settled down to sleep — a flashlight in one hand to scare off the littler things that might crawl up after us, our guns strapped to our sides for the rest — the help settled down around us to watch.

  In the night, something bellowed, far-off, a hollow sound like a foghorn’s, deep and huge. The help patted our faces to make sure we were awake, listening. They were terrified, but they made no sound. We heard nothing else unusual for half an hour, and I was drifting off to sleep when it bellowed again, closer. Sam and I sat up. The help climbed quickly and silently into the branches. I occasionally saw pairs of their round eyes looking down at us. The help with the hurt hand inched down the tree to the water and rubbed mud and slime over his white bandage, to hide it. I thought we ought to take it off if he was going to do that, but he climbed up the other side of the tree and disappeared. We heard nothing else. Sam and I finally lay back down. I kept thinking of all the things we’d seen that the scientists had never seen, and of all the things we’d heard but never seen.

  We got up in the dark when the wind started and the tide turned. The water hissed away through the trees. We were quiet then — night things were still out — and we had to be careful not to let our raft get tangled in branches below the nighttime waterline. Our raft had got caught, once, thirty feet above the mud, in a snag of dead and dying branches that hadn’t yet fallen off the trunk of a young tree just starting to grow above the waterline. We foolishly tried to shove the raft free with our poles — and let the water drop farther and farther away below us till we could see mud. We couldn’t cut the raft free, then. We were afraid the fall would break it apart. So we tied the raft to the tree trunk to keep it from floating away when the tide came back or from falling to the mud if the dead branches it was caught in broke away, grabbed our stuff, and spent the day in the part of the tree above the waterline. In the evening, when the water came up under the raft, we cut it free, floated it up on the tide, then over to a mature tree that wouldn’t still have branches below the nighttime waterline.

  But we didn’t get caught this time. By dawn we’d almost dropped down, and in the light we felt safer. We set our guns in the light to recharge.

  My hand with the locator felt stiff and sore. Sam kept rubbing his. I wondered what would happen after we’d gone as far south as we dared go with the locators on and we cut them out. I wondered how long it would take to get to the new company town. “Women, Sam,” I said.

  He smiled. “More than one, I hope,” he said.

  I laughed and remembered the “shore leave” the company’d sent us on when we were out one year. They’d flown us up to their station and given us a tiny room together. The fridge was stocked with fruit from home — apples, oranges, even a peach. We sat on the beds to eat the fruit, and someone knocked on the door. I opened it. A pretty girl stood there in a tatty white dress with a red sash around her middle, barefoot. “Oh, there are two of you,” she said, and her face went red. The company was so cheap it had sent one girl for the two of us. We had her come in. She ate an apple, and we laughed for a while. “Well,” she said when our conversation lagged. She smoothed out her dress and looked at us. I couldn’t do anything. The girl was willing to take on both Sam and me — it was her job — but I was just a year away from Loryn, and Loryn had promised to be true to me, and I’d promised to be true to her. I’d even carried Loryn’s picture up with me in my pocket. So I left the girl with Sam and went to the observation deck to watch clouds blow over the seas below us and to look at my picture of Loryn. “Yeah, women,” I said to Sam.

  I wondered what Loryn was doing now, and whether she was thinking of me.

  We traveled south for a week to the nicoji colony Sam and I’d discovered on our last trip — the best we’d ever found. It was on a huge hummock rising seventeen feet out of the pântano — a mile square, Sam and I figured — and when the tide was out hundreds of thousands of tiny, black holes covered the mud below the trees, holes that marked where the nicoji burrowed down for the day. When the tide came in and covered most of the hummock, the nicoji swarmed out. Since only Sam and I knew about the colony, it hadn’t been overharvested, and in three nights we’d catch more nicoji than our raft could carry south to the new company town, a decent catch that would pay our way.

  We got to the hummock about midday, so Sam and I tied up the raft and lay down on our stomachs to sleep since we’d have to work hard all night. The help scampered out from under the sacks we’d covered them with and clambered up the trees to the shadows. On their way, some poked their hands down nicoji holes and tried to pull up a nicoji. The first few caught one or two — muddy and gasping in the air and light — and carried them up the trees to suck them clean, spit out the mud, and eat them. The rest had a harder time. The nicoji sensed the vibrations of the help walking on the mud and burrowed deeper and at angles from their original tunnels. The last help off the raft didn’t catch any nicoji.

  Toward evening, I woke up and then woke Sam. The water was rising and the wind was blowing. We floated up with the tide and poled our raft toward the center of the hummock to a place the water didn’t cover — a dry place twenty feet square — and tied our raft to a tree on the shore. We’d dug three pits there that filled with water, where we kept our nicoji alive in burlap sacks till we were ready to go.

  Sam and I stripped down to our shorts and started stringing out our nets. The help came up through the trees, slowly, climbed down and chittered around behind us on the grass. It was work time now, and that never made them happy.

  “Fix net? Sam and Jake fix net?”

  It was the help with the hurt hand. He was picking up sections of the net and inspecting it.

  “Yes, we fix,” I said, and then I laughed. I was talking like the help.

  “You got hole here.”

  He held out a section of the net to me and, sure enough, he’d found a hole. I got our hemp from the raft and mended the tear.

  When the sun was nearly down, the water around us started to boil: the nicoji were swarming to the surface after bugs that sailed on the surface tension. The nicoji never jumped out. They just stirred the water and sucked the bugs under. We watched the water carefully, and the help were watching it, trying to see if anything had swum in around the island hunting for something more substantial to eat than nicoji. The water looked fine. Sam and I took opposite ends of the net, our twelve help picked up the middle, and we waded into the water, mud squishing up through our toes.

  The nicoji hardly swam away from us. Sam and I waded up to our chests in the water and the help swam bravely, holding their sections of net in their teeth and keeping it from getting tangled. When we started back for shore, dragging in the net, it got so heavy Sam and I couldn’t pull it and we had to let some of the nicoji go. After we got the net on shore, the nicoji swarmed out and tried to crawl to the water, their tails arched high over their backs. Sam and I scrambled after them, filled two burlap sacks, and dropped the sacks in the pits. We broke the necks of all the nicoji sharks we saw to cut down on the competition. The help sat and shoved whole handfuls of nicoji in their mouths, gorging themselves contentedly.

  The water looked fine. We watched the help, and they seemed willing to go again, so we went, this time on the other side of the island. By the time we’d dragged that net to the beach, dumped the nicoji in sacks, carried the sacks to the pits, and straightened out our nets, it had been dark for half an hour. Sam and I shone our lights across the water. The water bubbled away with the nicoji but nothing more, nothing bigger. We’d usually drag in two or three nets, then pole out the raft, watching and taking turns using a smaller net to catch nicoji. Wading through water in the dark was too dangerous. “Time for the raft,” I said.

  “But look at the nicoji,” Sam said.

  There were so many nicoji so easily taken.

  “Let’s get one more net,” he said.
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  I nodded. If something came after us, it usually got tangled in the net while we climbed on the raft, or on shore, or up a tree. So we went. But this time we only waded out till the water came up to our bellies. The help swam past Sam. Sam and I started pulling in the net.

  And the water stopped boiling. All the noise in the treetops quit, suddenly, as if the silence had been commanded.

  Sam and I kept hold of the net — letting the nicoji swim out underneath and above it but keeping the net between us and whatever had come hunting — and started walking backward toward shore, slowly, disturbing the water as little as possible. I looked back but could see nothing on the shore or in the water behind us.

  The help suddenly dropped the net, swam to me, and bunched up around my legs. They’d never done that before. We’d always held the net together till every one of us got on the raft or on shore. It was something new, then, out there.

  “Sam —” I said.

  Something dark rose out of the water in front of him. “Run!” Sam turned to run but the thing lashed out at him, and he screamed and fell in the water.

  I stumbled to the raft for my gun and waded out after Sam. Sam was floundering in the water. I splashed up to him, and he hung on around my waist. “Its tongue’s around my leg!” he yelled. I held my gun ready to shoot whatever had his leg, but I couldn’t see anything. It was under the water. I started dragging Sam to shore, and it rose up, dark and huge. Lagarto. It was a lagarto with its hallucinatory poison on the needles in its tongue. It had been waiting for the poison to work before pulling Sam to its mouth and teeth. It roared and lunged for Sam’s foot.