The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Thanks, then, I will.”

  When she leaves the building, Janet finds herself thinking of her mother, of her mother’s house up in Goldust, her nephew’s house, now. It was a wonderful place to be a child, that house, with the mountains hanging so close and the big trees all round. She remembers hunting for lizards in rock walls and rescuing birds from her mother’s cats, remembers thunderstorms bursting and booming over the high mountains as well as drowsy days of sun and the scent of pine. What if she had never left the mountains? What if she’d married Jimmy, the boy in high school who loved her, married him and settled down to get pregnant the way most girls did up in the mountains, or maybe taken a job in the drugstore till the babies came. She wouldn’t be an exile now, drifting down the streets of a city that will never be hers, no matter how much she loves it. She would have gone crazy, probably. She reminds herself sharply of that. She always knew that she would have to leave Goldust from the day she learned to read and found a wider world beyond the hills.

  But Mandi would have been happy in that house. She loved visiting her grandmother. Mandi might have been happy living in Goldust, too, safe and tucked away from the world.

  Driven by her memories, Janet finds herself drifting to the nearest card phone, built into a red plastic slab inside a red plastic kiosk, sheltered from the sound of traffic plunging past. While she fumbles through her wallet, out the door she sees long lawns behind wrought iron fences. It should be safe to call Richie, it really should. Why would the authorities bother her nephew, a rural teamster? But he might know where Mandi is, he really just might know.

  When Janet slides the card through the slot, she can feel her shoulders tense and hunch. With shaking fingers she punches in the code, hears other beeps, and then rings. The phone is ringing. By the most slender of all links she’s connected again, for this brief moment, to the Sierra, to Goldust, to what was once her mother’s house. She can picture the yellow telephone, sitting on Richie’s old-fashioned wood slab desk, right next to the pictures of his family in their red acrylic frames. Three rings, four—a click, and the room changes. She can think of it no other way, that the piece of space at the other end of the line has changed, grown larger, as if she could see the shabby wicker furniture, scattered with cats.

  “Hello.” The sound of Richie’s voice brings tears to her eyes. “You have reached 555–5252. Richie, Allie, and Robert aren’t home right now. Please leave us a message, and we’ll call you back.”

  Another click, a long tone. Janet hesitates, then hangs up fast. She cannot risk leaving a message, tangible evidence to some kangaroo court, perhaps, that Richie knows a traitor. As she takes her card out of the slot, the names she heard finally register. And Robert. Not just Richie’s name, not just his wife’s name, but Robert’s name as well.

  “He made it to the mountains. Oh thank god.”

  Janet reaches for her wallet to put the card away, but her fingers slip on the vinyl, and she nearly drops her purse. She glances round: two people have queued up to use the phone. Her paranoia stands at the head of the line. What are they really, this Pakistani woman in the pale grey suit, this Englishman in pinstripes? Agents, maybe? She pretends to drop her purse to gain a little time, squats, cooing unheard apologies, collects her things, shoves the card away along with the wallet and the handkerchief, her stylus and her notebook, her US passport that used to mean so much. With a gulp of breath she stands, settles the purse on her shoulder, and lays a hand on the door. The Englishman is looking at his watch. The Pakistani woman is studying a tiny address book.

  Janet gulps again, then swings the door wide and steps out. The Pakistani woman slips into the booth; the Englishman drifts closer to the door; neither so much as look her way as she strides off, heading blindly toward the gate into the park, searching for the safety of green and growing things. In the rising wind leafless trees rustle. Out on the ponds ducks glide. Janet smiles at them all like an idiot child. Robert is free, will most likely stay that way, because indeed, the junta have no reason to hunt him down, the apolitical artist, the popular teacher of the least political subject in the world.

  But no news of Mandi. She watches the ducks glide back and forth, the midges hovering at the water’s edge, while she tries to make up her mind once and for all. Will she dare call Richie again? It was stupid of her to endanger him at all, stupid and selfish. At least if the military police do try to trace that call, all they’ll get is the number of a public phone near Green Park. My daughter. I don’t dare call my daughter. She doesn’t want me to. She feels her joy at Robert’s safety crumple like a piece of paper in a fist. She sobs, staring at an alien lawn, at the roots of alien trees. Overhead white clouds pile and glide as the wind picks up strong.

  * * *

  Rain falls in curtains, twisting across the Thames. In yellow slickers men bend and haul, throw and pile sandbags in a levee six bags across and as high as they can make it. The thin yellow line, Janet thinks to herself. In a slicker of her own she stands on the RiverBus dock and watches a red lorry, heaped with sandbags, drive down the grey street toward the workers. Struggling with a bent umbrella Vi scurries to join her. Drops gleam in her pale blonde hair.

  “Dr Richards tells me you got your red card.”

  “Yesterday morning, yeah. There apparently wasn’t any problem. Just the usual bureaucracy stuff. The guy who needed to sign the red card was on vacation. That’s all.”

  “That’s super.”

  “Well, yeah. I’m glad, of course.” Janet turns away to watch the men unloading the lorry. “I wasn’t looking forward to being deported and thrown in prison.”

  “We wouldn’t a let that happen. Me and the girls, we’d a thought of something. Hidden you out, y’know? here and there. There’s a lot of us, y’know, all over this bleeding island. Girls like me and Rach and Mary and the lot. We think you’re super, y’know, we really do, and we’re networked.”

  “Do you?” For a moment Janet cannot speak. She recovers herself with a long swallow. “Thanks. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to take you up on that.”

  “’Course not. It wouldn’t a been any fun.” Vi grins, a twisted little smile. “But you’ve got the asylum, so it doesn’t matter, right?”

  “Right. But tell everyone I really appreciate it.”

  “I will, don’t worry. Look.” Vi pauses for a glance round. “We’ve got the feed working. Is there anything you want us to search for?”

  I could ask them to get Mandi’s number. I bet they could. Piece of cake, breaking into a military phone book. Yet she cannot ask, her mouth seems paralysed. What if they find the number, what if she calls only to have Mandi cut her off, what if Mandi makes it clear, undeniably once and for finally all that she never ever wants her mother to call again? Vi is waiting, smiling a little. Janet could ask her. They’d find the number, she and Harry.

  “Well, actually,” Janet says. “What I really need is my notes and stuff, all my research banks. But the military confiscated my computer, I’m sure of that. If it’s not even plugged in, you won’t be able to reach it.”

  “Oh, I dunno. What if they downloaded everything to some central bank, like? I’ll bet they’re like the Inquisition was, filing everything away, keeping all the heresies nice and tidy.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “But now, that’ll take us a while to figure out. I know, you start writing down everything you can remember, file names, codes, anything at all. That’ll give us something to match, like, if we find their central banks.” Vi grins again. “And that’s what we’ll want, anyway, their central banks.”

  “Yeah, I just bet it is.”

  “And if you think of anything else, you just tell me, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “I will, Vi. Thanks. Thanks a whole lot.”

  But she knows now that she’ll never ask for Mandi’s number, knows that having it would be too great a temptation to call, to late one night break down and punch code only to hear her daug
hter hang up the handset as fast as she can.

  “Bleeding cold out here,” Vi says. “Coming inside?”

  “In a minute.”

  She hears the umbrella rustle, hears Vi walk a few steps off. The girl will wait, she supposes, until she decides to go in. Yellow slickers flapping, the workmen turn and swing, heaving the sandbags onto the levee. The Thames slides by, brown under a grey sky.

  “Riverrun,” Janet says. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

  She turns and follows Vi inside.

  RED ELVIS

  Walter Jon Williams

  As the twig is bent, the adage assures us, so the tree inclines. And, as the ingenious story that follows makes quite clear, some of the directions in which the tree can bend are very surprising indeed …

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Annual Collections. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, and the critically acclaimed Aristoi. His short fiction has been gathered in the collection Facets. A new novel, Metropolitian, has just been published.

  Here it is, the white house south of the city on US 51. The Memphis Palace of Labor. The district is called Whitehaven and is tony, but the Palace itself sits on the highway opposite some ugly strip malls, a John Deere dealer, and a burger joint.

  It’s a big house made of Tennessee fieldstone, with a portico and a green lawn and some little mean shacks out back for the servants. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect at all, not for the person who lived there. It’s the sort of house a boss would live in.

  There’s a long, long line of mourners out front, stretching from the front door across the drive and for half a mile down Highway 51. The harmonies of a black gospel choir sound faintly from the interior.

  Join the long, slow line of mourners who file past the coffin. Hear the music that rings somehow inside you.

  Remember who the dead man was, and why you’re here.

  * * *

  The boy knows that he had a brother who is just like him, except that he is an angel. They were twins—identical twins, because there was the same webbing between two of their toes—and the eldest lived and the youngest was born dead. And the boy’s Mamma tells him that this fact makes him special, that even before he was born, he made his brother an angel.

  But that doesn’t mean that the boy can’t talk to his brother when he wants to. His Mamma takes him to the cemetery often, and the two of them sit by the brother’s grave and pray to him and sing songs and tell him everything that happened since they last visited.

  The boy likes the cemetery. It’s so much more pleasant than the family’s little two-room shanty in East Tupelo, where the wind cries like a wailing haunt through the gray clapboard walls and the furniture needs mending and the slop bucket under the sink always smells poorly.

  In the cemetery, the boy can always talk to his brother and tell him everything. In the cemetery, someone is always bringing flowers.

  * * *

  Something bad has happened and the boy has lost his Daddy. Men with badges came and took him away. He hears new words—there is “forgery” and “arrest,” along with a word whose very utterance is an occasion for terror—“Parchman.” Parchman is where Daddy is going, and a man named Orville Bean is sending him there. Orville Bean is Daddy’s boss.

  The boy screams and weeps and clings to his Mamma’s leg. The men with badges told Mamma that the family has to leave the house. The boy always thought the house belonged to Mamma, but now it belongs to Orville Bean. Suddenly the gray two-room shack is the most precious thing the boy has ever known.

  Mamma pets him and calls him by his special name, but the boy won’t be stilled. Grandpa and Grandma, who have come to help Mamma move the furniture, watch the boy’s agony with a certain surprise.

  “That Mr. Bean sure is cruel,” Grandpa says. “Boss don’t have no mercy on a working man.”

  That night the boy prays to his brother to rescue Daddy, to fly him out of Parchman on angels’ wings, but his brother doesn’t answer.

  * * *

  Mamma’s real name is Satnin, though everyone else calls her Gladys. She and the boy are never apart. She won’t let the boy do anything that might hurt him, like swim or dive, or play with other children outside of Mamma’s sight. He sleeps with Satnin every night so that nothing can harm him.

  Satnin teaches him things to keep him safe. He learns to touch iron after he sees a black cat, and that if you have a spell cast on you, you can take the spell off with a Jack, which is a red cloth filled with coal dust and dirt and a silver dime. The boy learns that most dreams aren’t true but that some are, and that Satnin’s dreams are almost always true. When she dreams about something bad that’s going to happen, she’ll do something to prevent it, like make a cake, with special ingredients, that she’ll feed to a dog to carry the bad luck away.

  After Daddy comes back from Parchman, he gets a job in a war plant in Memphis, so he’s home only on weekends. The boy spends all his time with his mother.

  When the boy grows old enough for school, his Mamma walks with him to school every morning, then home in the afternoon. They still visit the cemetery regularly so that the boy can talk to his brother, who is an angel.

  Sometimes the boy thinks he can hear his brother’s voice. “I will always be with you,” his brother says. “I am in Heaven and you are special and I will watch out for you always.”

  * * *

  The boy is a Christian, which is good because when he dies, he will go to Heaven and see his brother. The boy and Satnin and Daddy go to the Assembly of God Church in East Tupelo, and they sing along with Daddy’s cousin Sayles, who is in the choir. The Reverend Smith is a nice, quiet man who teaches the boy a few chords on the guitar.

  In the Church, the boy receives his baptism of the spirit and gives away everything he owns to other children. His comic books and his bike and all his money. His Daddy keeps bringing the bike back, but the boy only gives it away again. Finally his Daddy gives up and lets the boy give the bike away for good.

  “You are a good boy to give everything away,” his brother whispers. “We will live together in Heaven and be happy forever.”

  * * *

  The family moves to Memphis so that Daddy can find work. The boy is sad about leaving his brother behind in the cemetery, but his brother tells him that he is really in Heaven, not the cemetery, and the boy can still talk to him anytime he likes.

  The family lives in the Lauderdale Courts, part of the projects run by the Housing Authority. Everyone in the projects works except for Satnin, who spends all her time with her boy. Daddy has a job at United Paint, but he can’t earn too much or the Housing Authority will make the family move.

  “They never let a workingman get ahead,” he says.

  The boy goes to Humes High School, where he’s in the ninth grade. Mamma still walks him to and from school every day, but the boy has his own bed now, and he sleeps alone. He has nightmares almost every night and doesn’t know why.

  Sometimes he takes his guitar outside to the steps of the Lauderdale Courts and sings. People from the projects always stop what they’re doing and form a half circle around him and listen. It’s as if they’re bewitched. Their staring makes the boy so self-conscious that he sings only after dark, so that he doesn’t have to see the way they look at him.

  He looks in the mirror and sees this little cracker kid in overalls, nothing he wants to be. He tries to make what he sees better. One time he has Satnin give his fine, blond hair a permanent. Another time he cuts his hair off except for a Mohawk strip down the middle.

  One day, during summer vacation, the boy goes to the picture show and sees The City Across the River, with a new actor named Tony Curtis. He watches entranced at the story of the poor working kids who belong to a gang called th
e “Amboy Dukes,” and who wear flashy clothes and have their hair different from anyone the boy has ever seen. Tony Curtis’s hair is perfect, long and shiny, winged on the sides, with a curl in the front and upturned in back. He talks in a funny jivey way, singsong, almost like he has his own language. It’s like the language the boy’s brother speaks in dreams.

  The boy watches the movie three times.

  Next day he goes to a hairdresser. He knows he’ll never get the haircut he wants in a barbershop. “Give me that Tony Curtis cut,” he says to the astonished beautician. The boy describes what he wants and the beautician tells him the cut is called a D.A. The beautician cuts his hair, but she warns him that his blond hair is too fine to stay in the shape he wants it, and sells him a tin of Royal Crown Pomade. The pomade darkens his hair by several shades but keeps it in place and makes it gleam.

  The only place the boy can think to find the right clothes is on Beale Street. It’s in the colored part of town where people are killed every week, then carried away so their bodies will be found somewhere else. The boy is a little nervous going there alone, but it’s daylight and it looks safe enough, and as he walks down the street, he can see colored men dressed just as he wants to be, in raw-silk jackets dyed lime green or baby blue, with Billy Eckstine collars worn turned up.

  The boy finds what he wants in Lansky Brothers’ store. Pleated, shiny-black pants worn high on the floating ribs, with red or yellow seams. Double-breasted jackets in glowing colors, with huge vents and sparkles in them, big enough to move around in.

  He spends all his money at Lansky Brothers.

  Next time he looks in the mirror, he likes what he sees.

  Maybe everyone in Heaven looks like this.

  * * *

  In his nightmares, the boy is surrounded by enemies, all of them jeering and laughing at him. He fights them, lashing out with his fists, and often wakes with smarting knuckles from having jumped out of bed and punched the wall.

  When the nightmares come true, he doesn’t fight. He can’t—there are too many of them, the biggest, toughest kids in school, surrounding him and calling him names. They say he dresses like a nigra pimp. They call him a sissy, a queer. He doesn’t quite know what a queer is, but he knows it’s bad. They threaten to cut his hair off. They knock him around every day, a jeering circle of crackers in overalls with muscles bulging out of their plaid shirts—they’re everything the boy wants to get away from, everything he doesn’t want to be.