The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Ed Kelly, who sold the boards, smiled at them. “Come on, girls. Settle down. You’re gonna wet those cute pants.”

  “Don’t be fresh,” Martha said. “Six.” She handed over twelve dollars.

  Betty bought three boards and they went their separate ways. Betty’s eyesight was failing, so she insisted on sitting close to the front where she could peer up at the number board. But Martha’s eyes were fine—she could handle the twelve game panels on her six boards without trouble—and the people who sat in front were too eager for her. They made her mad when they shouted “Bingo!” so loud, as if someone was trying to cheat them. Her own spot was over against the windows on the side, with her back to one of the mock Greek pillars. When she got to her place a young man was already sitting there. Martha began to put down her purse and boards. She started to say, “Son, this is my spot—” but then the boy looked up at her.

  His tousled hair, in dazzling contrast to the narrow face beneath it, shone downy white. He had the darkest of brown eyes. His expression was one of dazed accusation, as if he had just awoken from being beaten senseless to find Martha gazing at him. His bruised eyes reminded her of David’s. She stood there, holding the straps of her purse, neither setting it down nor picking it up.

  Finally she managed to speak. “This is my spot,” she said. “Please go someplace else.”

  The boy sighed. Instead of getting up he pulled a card and a stylus from the gym bag beside him. It was a magic slate, a film of plastic laid over a black background. Martha’s children had played with such slates. On the slate, before he pulled up the plastic sheet to erase them, she read the words, CHARITY NEVER FAILETH. The boy cleared the old message and wrote, then held the slate up for Martha to see: FUCK OFF BITCH.

  Martha felt her heart skip a beat, then race. Were people watching? Just when she decided to call one of the men, the boy pulled up the plastic sheet and the neatly printed block letters vanished.

  He looked at her, then silently slid his slate and his single bingo board to the opposite side of the table. He walked around and sat, facing her, with his back to the front of the room and the bingo machine. He straightened his board in front of himself. Martha hesitated, then sat down. She spread out her boards, got the plastic box of chips and magnetic wand from her purse. She covered the free square of each panel with one of the metal-rimmed red chips. When she looked up again the boy was staring at her.

  Martha wondered if she had seen him in the neighborhood. He was probably one of those boys who could get your prescriptions filled cheap. The intensity of his stare made her nervous and for a moment she wished she’d sat someplace else. But she’d be damned if she’d let some punk push her around, let alone a mute, retarded one. If you did that then pretty soon you were at their mercy. She’d seen it happen.

  The boy sat back in the wooden folding chair, somehow managing to look innocent and alert at the same time. Martha had at first thought his hair was bleached, but now she decided it was naturally white. His face was cool as the moon on a hot night. Watching him, Martha felt her heart still sprinting, and she could not draw her breath. She did her best not to let on. It was like the beginning of one of her dizzy spells.

  Trying hard not to be aware of the boy, she looked around the hall. From the kitchen at the back came the smells of pizza and hot dogs. Men and women returned from the bar carrying beer in plastic cups and slices of pizza on paper plates with the grease already soaking through. The light was dying outside the rows of windows, and the gabble of voices competed with the whir of the ceiling fans.

  Martha could spot dozens of people she knew from the Paradise Beach condos, and those she did not know by name she recognized as regulars at the Colonel Marshall. They were of every color, Italians, Germans, Poles, Blacks, Cubans, Vietnamese, and Anglos, ex-New Yorkers and ex-Chicagoans and native Southerners, the physically fit and the terminally ill, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and even Hyman Spivek who preached a loudmouthed brand of Communism, men turned milk white by leukemia and women turned to brown leather by the sun, Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Seventh-Day Adventists, some with money to burn and others without two dimes to rub together, tolerable people like Betty, and fools like Sarah. Most were senior citizens managing to scrape along on pensions and savings, talking trash and hoping to win the $250 coverall so they could enjoy themselves a little more before the last trip to the hospital. As decent a crowd of people, Martha supposed, as you could scrape together in all the panhandle of Florida.

  All of which made the sudden appearance of this mute boy even more puzzling: he couldn’t be any more than fifteen and he acted more like he’d grown up on Mars than in America. He was a total stranger.

  Her heartbeat seemed to be slowing. It was almost time to begin. Tony Schuster passed by them up the aisle, joking with the women on his way to the platform. He fired up the bingo machine: the board lit up, the numbered balls rattled into the transparent box and began to dance around like popcorn on the jet of air. “First game,” he announced through the P.A., “regular bingo on your cards, inside corners, outside corners, horizontal, vertical, diagonal rows. Ready for your first number?” The machine made a noise like a man with his larynx cut out taking a breath, and sucked up a ball. “1-18,” Schuster called.

  Martha covered the number on two of her boards. One of them was an inside corner. “G-52.” She had two of those, too, but they were on different panels from the first number. “G-47.” Nothing. “1-29.” Three covers. She looked up. Ed Kelly, now patrolling the aisles, was looking over the boy’s shoulder: on his top panel the boy had covered the four inside corners. He seemed oblivious. “Bingo!” Kelly called out, just as Schuster was about to announce the next number. The crowd groaned; Martha sighed.

  “I-18, 1-29, G-52, G-47,” Kelly read aloud.

  “We have a bingo,” Schuster called. The room was filled with the clicking of chips being wiped from several hundred boards, a field full of locusts singing. Martha ran her wand over her boards and pulled up her own chips while Kelly counted twenty dollars out to the silent boy. “Speak up next time, kid,” Kelly said good-naturedly.

  “He’s deaf and dumb,” Martha said.

  “Can’t be deaf, Martha—he’s got his back to the machine. Whyn’t you help him out?”

  Martha just stared at Kelly, and he went away. Schuster began the second game, a series beginning with a fifteen-dollar regular bingo and ending in an $80 coverall. Martha tried to ignore the boy and the injustice of his playing only one board yet winning. She managed to get four in the “O” column before someone across the room yelled “Bingo!” She sighed again. In the follow-up, the inner square, she had gotten nowhere when a black woman in the front bingoed. While the attendant called out the numbers for Schuster to check, Martha glanced over at the boy’s card. The inner square on one panel was completely covered.

  Martha thought about pointing it out to him, but held back. He turned his face up to her. He smiled. She ducked her head to look at her own boards.

  The kid was lucky but didn’t even know it. Luck was like that. Who could say how the numbers would come: Martha only knew that they did not come for her often enough to make up for her losses. Only the night before she had blown twenty dollars when the Red Sox lost the series to the Mets. She had never seen as clear a case of bad luck as had cost the Sox the series. Martha had been a Red Sox fan since she was a girl. She had met her husband Sam at Fenway Park on June 18, 1938, Sox over the Yankees 6-2.

  Sam was lucky about the Sox—he had won more than his share of bets on them over the years, which was no easy job—but not so lucky when the cancer ate him up at fifty-five. He had collected baseball cards. For fifteen years after his death Martha kept them, even though they didn’t mean anything to her. Sometimes she would take the cards out of their plastic envelopes and look at them, remember how Sam would worry over them and rearrange their vacations so they could go to swap meets where he might pick up a 1950 Vern Stephens or Wa
lt Dropo. He had cared for those cards more than for her. She would sigh in resignation. Staring at some corny action photo or head-and-shoulders shot of a bullet-headed ballplayer wearing an old-fashioned uniform, it would become all she could do to keep from crying. She would slide the card back into its envelope, stick the envelope in among the others, shove the collection back on its shelf in the closet. She would poke at her eyes with the wrist of her sweater and make a cup of coffee. It would almost be time for “The Young and the Restless.”

  Of their three kids, Robert, the eldest, was a CPA in Portland, and Gloria bought clothes for Macy’s in New York. Their youngest, David, her favorite, a beautiful boy—in some ways as beautiful a boy as this punk who insulted her in the Colonel Marshall—had died at the age of fifteen, in 1961. David had snuck off to Cape Cod one weekend with his friends. He did not have her permission, would never have gotten it if he had asked. Despite the fact that he had been a very good swimmer, he had drowned off the beach at Hyannis.

  After that her life started to go to pieces. Sam and she had moved to Florida in 1970, and a year later he was dead, too. His pension had seemed to shrink as time went by. Last year she had sold the baseball cards to raise some cash.

  “B-9.” She placed her chips, glanced up from her board and saw the boy covering the number on his own, completing the outer square, covering the complete panel as well. He made no attempt to draw the attention of one of the men. Schuster called three more numbers. The kid had all of those numbers too, on the lower panel of his board. With the fourth number came simultaneous shouts of “Bingo!” from three spots around the hall. The crowd groaned. The boy just sat there. He didn’t yell, he didn’t sigh, he didn’t even seem to realize that he had won, did not seem even to hear the babble of disappointed voices filling the room.

  Martha felt herself getting mad. They ought not to allow such a fool into the place. She supposed she could call out for him, but that would only tie her to him, and he had insulted her. If he won, she couldn’t. The men finished checking the winners’ boards and divided up the money.

  “Now, for the $80 coverall,” Schuster announced. “I-22.” Martha was so distracted staring at the boy’s board, completely covered with red chips, that she forgot to check her own boards. “O-74.”

  “Bingo!” a man shouted.

  The boy tilted his board and all the chips slid off onto the table.

  The kid was trying to get to her. He had to have been cheating. That was why he had not called out—he knew that when the attendant came to check his board, they would find that he had not really won. She decided to keep an eye on him through the next game.

  Schuster called five numbers. The boy had four of them, a clear winning diagonal that shot across the board like an arrow into Martha’s heart. He remained mute as a snake, and somebody else won two numbers later. He had both of those numbers, too.

  She sat there and, with an anxiety that grew like a tumor, watched him win the next five games in a row, none of which he called out. The room faded into the background until all there was was the boy’s bingo board. Schuster would call a number, and it was as if he were reading them off the kid’s battered pasteboard. Still the boy said nothing. He let other people take $150 that could have been his.

  Martha had trouble breathing. She needed some air. But more than air, more than life itself, she needed that board.

  * * *

  By the time of the break after the tenth game, Martha’s anxiety had been transformed from anger to fear. The boy had won every game and called out none. There was no way one card could win game after game unless the numbers on it changed from moment to moment, but as close as she watched Martha could not see them change. At the end of the last coverall, when two women, one of them Betty Alcyk, shouted bingo simultaneously, the boy looked up at Martha. Placidly, he pointed to the cards in front of her. She had not covered half of her own numbers. The boy wrote on his slate: DON’T YOU WANT TO WIN?

  “Shut up!” she said, loud enough so that the people at the next table looked over at them.

  He ripped off the old words and printed something new. He held up the slate and the bingo board simultaneously, scattering colored chips across the table. One of them rolled off into her lap. YOU WANT IT?

  Martha bit her lip. She feared a trick. She nodded furtively.

  He wrote: COME OUTSIDE.

  The boy got up quickly and went out the double doors at the side of the auditorium without looking back at her. After a minute Martha followed. She tried to look as if she was simply going outside for a breath of air, and in truth the weight of the evening and her losses seemed to have lodged in her chest like a stone.

  Outside, in the parking lot, a few men and women were talking and smoking. Paula Lorenzetti waved to her as she came out, but Martha acted as if she did not see her. She spotted the boy standing by the street under one of the lights. At first that reassured her, but then she realized it was only because he needed the light to use his slate.

  When she got to him he held the bingo board out toward her. She took it, examined it. It seemed perfectly normal. A Capitol: dog-eared pasteboard, two game grids printed green and black on white, a little picture of the dome of the Congress in each of the free squares. In the corner someone had written, in childish handwriting, “Passions Rule!”

  “How much?” she asked.

  He wrote on the slate: YOUR VOICE.

  “What?”

  YOU WILL GIVE UP YOUR VOICE.

  Martha felt flushed. She could see everything so clearly it almost hurt. Her senses seemed as sharp as if she were twenty again; her eyes picked out every hair on the boy’s arm, she smelled the aroma of food from the hall and garbage from the alley. Across the city somewhere a truck was climbing up the gears away from a stoplight.

  “You’re kidding.”

  NO.

  “How will you take my voice?”

  I DON’T TAKE—YOU GIVE.

  “How can I give you my voice?”

  SAY YES.

  What did she have to lose? There was no way he could steal a person’s voice. Besides, you had to take a chance in your life. “All right,” she said.

  The boy nodded. “Good-bye,” he said: softly, almost a whisper.

  He lifted his chin and turned. Something in the way he did this so reminded her of the insolence with which David had defied her more than once, that she felt it like a blow—it was David, or some ghost come to torment her with his silence and insult—and she almost cried out for him to wait, to please, please speak to her. She hesitated, and in a moment he was down an alley and around the corner. She held the board in her damp hand. She moved, sweating, back toward the hall. She felt light, as if at any moment her step might push her away from the earth and she would float into the night.

  She remembered making the long drive with Sam down to the hospital, fighting the traffic on the Sagamore Bridge. Sam had urged her not to go; it was no thing for a woman to have to do, but she had insisted in a voice that even Sam could hear that she was going. The emergency room was hot and smelled of Lysol. The staff had wheeled David from a bay in emergency to a side corridor, left him on the gurney against the wall with a sheet over him like a used tray from room service. For the first time in her life she had the feeling that the world was unreal, that her body was not her: she was merely living in it, peering out through the eyes, running her arms and legs like a man running a backhoe. There was David, pale, calm. His hair, long on the sides and in back so he could comb it into the silly D.A. that they had fought over, was still damp but not wet, beginning to stand away from his head. She touched his face and it was cool as a satin sofa pillow. Sam had had to pull her away, trying to talk to her. It was a day before she spoke to him and then it was only to tell him to be quiet.

  “Martha!”

  It was Paula, come across the lot to speak to her. “What are you doing? Who was that boy?” She looked at the card in Martha’s hand, looked away.

  It took a mom
ent for Martha to come back to reality. This would be the test. “Some punk kid,” she said. “Hot night.”

  “It’s that ozone layer. Messing up the air.”

  “It’s always hot in October.” Her voice flowed as easily as water.

  “Not like this,” said Paula.

  “I like your blouse.”

  “This? It’s cheap. If you don’t like the pattern, all you got to do is wash it.”

  Martha laughed. They went back into the hall. Most of the people were already seated. Martha hurried to her place. She put her other boards aside and set the new one directly in front of her. Magenta chips for the center squares. Mel Shiffman, balding, athletic, wearing his teasing grin, took over the platform to announce the rest of the games.

  “Settle down, settle down,” he said, like a homeroom teacher coming into class just after the bell. “Eleventh game, on your reg’lar boards, straight bingo. First number: Under the O, 65.”

  The room was dead silent. Martha had that number, on the lower playing card—bottom right corner.

  “B-14.” Upper left corner.

  “N-33.” Middle top.

  “N-42.” No cover. Martha began to worry.

  “O-72.” Upper right. One more for the outer corners: B-1. B-1, she thought.

  “B-1.”

  It was a flood of light, a joy that filled her, as if the number machine, the voice of Mel Shiffman, the world itself were under her control. “Bingo!” she shouted. The buzz of the people roared in her ears. Ed Kelly came by and checked off her numbers. “We have a bingo,” Mel announced.

  Kelly paid out twenty dollars to her. The bills were crisp and dry as dead leaves. “Inner or outer square,” Shiffman called. The people settled down. “Next number: 1-25.” Both panels on Martha’s board had that number. Shiffman called three more. Each number found its counterpart on her board. All her senses were heightened: the board before her, the grain of the wooden table it rested on, stood out with the three dimensionality of a child’s Viewmaster picture; their colors were distinct and pure. In the air she could pick out the mingled smells of pizza and cigarette smoke and a wisp of bus exhaust that trailed through the window. She heard the gasps and mutterings of the restless crowd, could almost identify the individual voices of her friends as they hovered above their bingo boards, wishing, hoping, to win. Except Martha knew that they wouldn’t: she would. As if ordered by God, the numbers fell to her, one by one, and the inner square was covered. “Bingo!” she shouted again.