The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  Challenged, I actually looked at her for the first time. She moved loosely within her blouse, a plump woman with big brown freckles on her face and forearms. She crossed her arms in a way that caused her breasts to balloon upward, and laughed when I flushed in embarrassment.

  Her laughter struck me like the clapper of a great bell.

  “Becky!” I cried. “By the Seven, it’s you! I never expected—”

  “You never expected I’d grow so fat, eh?”

  “No, no!” I protested. “It’s not—”

  “You’re a fool, Will Taverner. But that’s not totally unbecoming in a man.” She drew me into the shadow of the stairway where there was privacy, and a small bench as well. We talked for a long time. And at the end of that conversation I thought she looked dissatisfied. Nor could I account for it until she reached between my legs to feel what was there. My cod, though, was a wiser man than I and stood up to greet her. “Well,” she said, “that’s a beginning. Cold dishes aren’t brought back to a boil in a minute.”

  She left me.

  ***

  You look unhappy. Becky’s your mam, isn’t she? Now that I come to think of it, there’s that glint in your eye and a hint at that same diabolos that hides at the edge of her mouth. Well she’s a widow now, which means she can do as she pleases. But I will horrify you with no more details of what we said.

  Where’s my pipe? What happened to that pouch of weed? Thank you. I’d be long asleep by now if not for its aid. This is the last trace of the margakasaya left in all the world. With me will die even the memory of it, for there are no elves abroad in the realms of men anymore. They have found parikasaya, “final extinction” you would say, or perhaps “the end of all.” Did you know that am’rta skandayaksa means “deathless elf-group?” There’s irony there, knew we only how to decipher it.

  Maybe I was wrong to kill the dragon.

  Maybe he was all that kept them from oblivion.

  When we had all shared Cakaravartin’s vision of Great Asura and of the giants at labor, their faces stolid and accepting of both their guilt and their punishment, and spoken with Boramohanagarahant, their king, it was almost dawn. Cakaravartin passed around the pipe one more time. “I see that you are determined to come with us,” he said to me, “and that is your decision to make. But first you should know the consequences.”

  Ratanavivicta’s mask tilted in a way that I would later learn indicated displeasure. But Cakaravartin drew in deeply and passed the pipe around again. I was trembling when it came to me. The mouthpiece was slick with elf-spit. I put it between my lips.

  I inhaled.

  At first I thought nothing had happened. The common room was exactly as before, the fire dying low in the hearth, the elfmaid slowly quartering out the air as ever she had done. Then I looked around me. The elves were gone. I was alone, save for one slim youth of about my own age, whom I did not recognize.

  That youth was you.

  Do I frighten you? I frighten myself far more, for I have reached that moment when I see all with doubled sight and apprehend with divided heart. Pray such possession never seizes you. This—now—is what I was shown all these many years ago, and this is the only chance I will ever have to voice my anger and regret to that younger self, who I know will not listen. How could he? A raggedy taverner’s boy with small prospects and a head stuffed full of half-shaped ambitions. What could I say to make him understand how much he is giving up?

  By rights you should have been my child. There’s the bitter nub of the thing, that Becky, who had all but pledged her heart to me, had her get by someone else. A good man, perhaps—they say half the Bridge turned out to launch his fire-boat when he was taken by the dropsy—but not me.

  I have lost more than years. I have lost the life I was meant to have, children on my knee and a goodwife growing old and fat with me as we sank into our dotage. Someone to carry my memory a few paces beyond the emptiness of the grave, and grandchildren to see sights I will not. These were my birthright, and I have them not. In his callowness and ignorance, my younger self has undone me.

  I can see him, even now, running madly after the elves, as he will in the shadowy hour before dawn. Heart pounding with fear that he will not catch up, lungs agonized with effort. Furious to be a hero, to see strange lands, to know the love of a lady of the am’rta skandayaksa. They are fickle and cruel, are the elves. Ratanavivicta snatched me from my life on a whim, as casually as she might pick up a bright pebble from the roadside. She cast me aside as easily as she would a gemstone of which she had wearied. There is no faith in her kind.

  Ah, it is a dreadful night! The winds prowl the rooftops like cats, bringing in the winter. There’ll be frost by morning, and no mistake.

  Is the story over, you ask? Have you not been listening? There is no story. Or else it all—your life and mine and Krodasparasa’s alike—is one story and that story always ending and never coming to a conclusion. But my telling ends now, with my younger self starting from his dream of age and defeat and finding himself abandoned, the sole mortal awake on all the Bridge, with the last of the elf horde gone into the sleeping streets of the city beyond the Dragon Gate.

  He will leap to his feet and snatch up his father’s sword from its place over the hearth—there, where my spear hangs now. He will grab a blanket for a cloak and a handful of jerked meat to eat along the road, and nothing more, so great will be his dread of being left behind.

  I would not stop him if I could. Run, lad, run! What do you care what becomes of me? Twenty years of glory lie at your feet. The dream is already fading from your head.

  You feel the breeze from the river as you burst out the door.

  Your heart sings.

  The moment is past. I have been left behind.

  Only now can I admit this. Through all this telling, I have been haunted by a ghost and the name of that ghost was Hope. So long as I had not passed beyond that ancient vision, there was yet the chance that I was not my older self at all, but he who was destined to shake off his doubts and leap out that door. In the innermost reaches of my head, I was still young. The dragon was not slain, the road untraveled, the elves alive, the adventures ahead, the magic not yet passed out of the world.

  And now, well. I’m home.

  North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy

  The train to Hell don’t stop in New Jersey. It pulls out of Grand Central Station at midnight, moving slow at first but steadily picking up speed as it passes under the Bay, and by the time we hit the refineries, it’s cannonballing. We don’t stop for nothing. We don’t stop for nobody. And if you step in our way expecting Old Goatfoot to apply the brakes, well, pardon me for saying it, but you’re going to get exactly what’s coming to you.

  We don’t stop and we don’t slow down once that gleaming black-and-silver locomotive leaves the station. Not ’til we get to where we’re going. Once we’re rolling, there’s no second chances. And no exceptions neither.

  So that night the train did stop, I knew straight off that we were in for some serious trouble.

  We were barreling through the Pine Barrens, shedding smoke and sulfur and sparks, when I heard the air brakes squeal. The train commenced to losing velocity. I was just about to open the snack bar, but right off I heard that sound, I flipped around the CLOSED sign, grabbed my cap, and skittered off to see what the matter was.

  The damned were slumped in their seats. Some of them stared straight ahead of themselves at nothing in particular. Others peered listlessly out the windows or else at their own grey reflections in the glass. Our passengers are always a little subdued in the early stages of the trip.

  “Oh, porter!” one of the damned called to me. She was a skinnylittle white woman with a worried-looking kind of pinched-in face. “Would it be all right of me to open the window just a crack, so I could get some air?”

  I smiled gently into those big pleading eyes of hers and said, “Why, bless you, honey, you can do whatever you want. What difference could it possibly make n
ow?”

  She flinched back like I’d hit her.

  But I reached over and took the window clips and slid it down two inches. “Don’t go no further, I’m afraid. Some of the lost souls might take it into their heads to try and…you know?” I lowered my voice in a confidential manner.

  Timidly, she nodded.

  I got a pillow out of the overhead and fluffed it up for her. “Now you just let me slide this behind your head. There! Isn’t that better? You relax now, and in a couple minutes the kitchen will be open. When I come back, I’ll give you a menu. Got a nice selection of sandwiches and beverages. You rest up and have a comfy ride.”

  All the while I was talking, I was just about dying inside of curiosity. Through the window behind the old lady I could see that we’d stopped in a small clearing in the pines. We were miles from the nearest town. The only light here was what came from the moon and the greenish spill from the windows of the train itself. There were maybe half a dozen dim figures out there. I could see them hoist up a long crate of some kind. Somebody—and who else could it be but Billy Bones?—leaned out from the caboose with a lantern and waved them forward.

  The damned stared out the windows with disinterest. Most likely they thought we were picking up more passengers. Only the crew knew different.

  Still, I take pride in my work. I fussed over that little lady and by the time I left her she was actually smiling. It was only a tense little smile, but it was a smile still.

  People can fool themselves into believing anything.

  ***

  Soon as I got myself clear, I made straight for the baggage car. I had got me a real bad feeling about what was going on, and I intended to pry a few answers out of Billy Bones. But I didn’t get beyond the door. When I tried to slide it back, it wouldn’t budge. I seized it with both hands and applied some muscle. Nothing.

  It was locked from inside.

  I banged on the door. “Mister Bones!”

  A silence, and then the peephole slide moved aside. A cadaverous slice of Billy Bones’s face appeared. Flesh so tight it didn’t hide the skull. Eyes as bright and glittery as a rat’s. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you give me that what-is-it bullshit—why did we stop?” The pines made a dark, jagged line against the sky. I could smell them. If I wanted, I could step down off the train and walk into them. “Just what kind of unholy cargo have you taken on?”

  Billy Bones looked me straight in the eye. “We ain’t taken on no cargo.”

  “Now don’t get me started,” I said. “You open up and—”

  He slammed that little slide-door right in my face.

  I blinked. “Well!” I said. “You may think you’ve had the last word, Mister Billy Bones, but you have not, I assure you that!”

  But I didn’t feel nowhere near so brash as I made out. Billy Bones was a natural-born hustler down to his fingertips, the kind of man that could break you a quarter and short-change you a dollar in the process. Ain’t nobody never outbluffed him. Ain’t nobody never got nothing out of him that he didn’t want to give. In my experience, what he didn’t wish to say, I wasn’t about to hear.

  So back I strode, up the train, looking for Sugar. My old stomach ulcer was starting to act up.

  ***

  “Diddy-Wah-DIDDY!” Sugar bawled. He strolled briskly through the car, clacking his ticket punch. “Diddy-Wah-Diddy, Ginny Gall, WEST Hell, Hell, and BeluthaHATCHie! Have your tickets ready.”

  I gave him the high sign. But a portly gent in a pinstripe suit laid hold of his sleeve and launched into a long complaint about his ticket, so I had to hold back and wait. Sugar listened patiently to the man for a time, then leaned over him like a purple storm cloud. The man cringed away. He’s big, is Sugar, and every ounce of him is pure intimidation.

  “I tell you what, sir,” he said in a low and menacing way. “Why don’t you take a spoon and jab it in your eye? Stir it around good. See how clean you can scrape out the socket.” He punched the ticket. “I guarantee you that a week from now you gone look back upon the experience with nostalgia.”

  The man turned grey and for an instant I thought he was going to rise up out of his seat. But Sugar smiled in a way that bulged up every muscle in his face and neck and the man subsided. Sugar stuck the ticket stub in the seat clip. Then, shaking his head, he came and joined me between cars.

  His bulk filled what space there was pretty good. “Make it brief, Malcolm. I got things to do.”

  “You know anything ’bout why we stopped?” Those dim people were trudging away into the pines. None of them looked back, not even once. They just dissolved into the shadows. “I saw Billy Bones take on a crate and when I asked him about it, he clammed right up.”

  Sugar stared at me with those boogieman eyes of his. In all the three-four years he’d been on the train, I don’t recall ever seeing him blink. “You ain’t seen nothing,” he said.

  I put my hands on my hips. “Now, don’t you start in on me! I was a porter on this train back when your mama was sucking tittie.”

  Sugar seemed to swell up then, a great black mountain with twopinpricks of hellfire dancing in his eyes. “You watch what you say about my mother.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. But I didn’t back down. “Just what you intending to do?” I shook my finger in his face. “You know the regs. If you so much as touch me, you’re off the train. And they don’t let you out in Manhattan, neither!”

  “Can’t say I much care.” He put those enormous hands on my shoulders. His voice was small and dreamy. “After this run, I don’t much care whether I keep this job or not.”

  All the while he spoke, those hands kept kneading my shoulders. He laid one huge thumb alongside my face and shoved my head to the side. I didn’t much doubt he could crush my bones and snap my spine, if he wanted to. He was that strong. And I could see that he’d enjoy it.

  “I ain’t said nothing!” I was terrified. “I ain’t said nothing about your mama.”

  Sugar considered this for a long time, that sleepy little smile floating on his face. At last he said, “See that you don’t.”

  And he turned away.

  I exhaled. I can’t say I knew Sugar at all well. He was a recent addi-tion to the crew; the conductor before him took to visiting the juke joints and gambling dens of Ginny Gall during stopovers and lost his precariously-held spiritual balance. But if ever anyone was meant to bea badman, it was Sugar. He was born just naturally brimming-over with anger. They say when the midwife slapped his bottom, the rage in his voice and the look on his face were so awful that straightaway she threw him down on the floor. He was born with a strangler’s hands and a murderer’s eyes. The rest of him, the size and bulk of him, just grew, so’s to have a package big enough and mean enough to contain all the temper there inside.

  And they also say that when the midwife lifted up her foot to crush Sugar to death, his mama rose up off of the bed and thrashed her within an inch of her life. She was one of those tiny little women too, but her love for her baby was that strong. She threw that midwife right out of the room and down the stairs, broken bones and all. Then she picked up Sugar and put him to her breast and cooed at him and sang to him until he fell asleep. That’s the kind of blood flowed in Sugar’s veins, the kind of stuff he was made from.

  There was a sudden lurch and the train started to move again. Whatever was going down, it was too late to stop it now.

  ***

  With Billy Bones and Sugar refusing to talk to me, there wasn’t any chance none of the girls would either. They were all three union, and Billy was their shop steward. Me, I was union too, but in a different shop.

  The only remaining possible source of information was Old Goatfoot. I headed back for the concession stand to fetch a bottle of rye. I had it in a paper bag under one arm and was passing through the sleeper cars when a door slid open and a long slim hand crooked a red-nailed finger.

  I stepped into the compartment. A ginger-colored woman close
d the door and slid between me and it. For an instant we just stood there looking at each other. At last she said, “Porter.”

  “Yes’m?”

  She smiled in a sly kind of way. “I want to show you something.” She unbuttoned her blouse, thrusting her chest forward. She was wearing one of those black lacy kinds of bras that squeeze the breasts together and up. It was something to behold.

  “If you’ll excuse me, ma’am,” I said uncomfortably. “I have to get back to work.”

  “I got work for you right here,” she said, grabbing at me. I reached for the doorknob, but she was tugging at my jacket, trying to get it open. I grabbed her by the wrists, afraid of losing a button.

  “Please, ma’am.” I was just about dying of embarrassment.

  “Don’t you please ma’am me, boy! You know I got what you want and we both know I ain’t got long to use it.” She was rubbing herself against me and at the same time trying to shove my head down into her bosom. Somehow her brassiere had come undone and her breasts were slapping me in the face. It was awful. I was thrashing around, struggling to get free, and she was all over me.

  Then I managed to slip out of her grip and straight-arm her so that she fell on her back onto the bunk. For a second she lay there looking rumpled and expectant.

  I used that second to open the door and step out into the hall. Keeping a wary eye on the woman, I began to tug my uniform back into place.

  When she realized I wasn’t going to stay, her face twisted, and she spat out a nasty word.

  “Cocksucker!”

  It hurt. I’m not saying it didn’t. But she was under a lot of pressure, and it wouldn’t have been professional for me to let my feelings show.So I simply said, “Yes’m. That’s so. But I’m sure there are plenty of menon board this train who would be extremely interested in what you got to offer. The dining room opens soon. You might take a stroll up that way and see what sort of gents are available.”

  I slipped away.

  Back when I died, men like me called ourselves “queers.” That’s how long ago it was. And back then, if you were queer and had the misfortune to die, you were automatically damned. It was a mortal sin just being one of us, never mind that you didn’t have any say in the matter. The Stonewall Riots changed all that. After them, if you’d lived a good life you qualified for the other place. There’s still a lot of bitterness in certain circles of Hell over this, but what are you going to do? The Man in charge don’t take complaints.