Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “We can retire if we want to,” Vix said. “Change our names and stop being Public Enemies. They can’t put us in jail. Can’t have a jail without sorrow and anger. Whole thing would fall down.”

  “They could kill us,” said Lorna, and snorted. “That sheriff.”

  There was a bullet hole in their back left tire, and they could hear it hissing out air. Headlights were approaching from all directions. They were the tent of the revival. They were miracle makers in the middle of a field. They were healer dealers, and they were tired.

  “Or we could kill him,” said Vix. “What’ve we got in the backseat, Lorn?”

  Vix’s eyes were on the rearview.

  “About a kilo of that straight shit from El Paso. I don’t know what was going on there last week, but everything they wanted to be healed of is bagged up. They wanted to forget it ever happened. I threw it in just in case. Thought we might mix it half and half with the sad from Juarez, sell it like that.”

  Vix pulled the car over, and Lorna looked at him.

  “Strong stuff,” he said. “Good to know. Open that sack.”

  Behind their car, Sheriff Hank Yarley crept around in a ditch, belly flat to the ground, rifle strapped to his back, bowie knife in his teeth. The headlights of the mob approached the two most wanted. He’d called out all the cops and righteous volunteers from the border, and they converged on Lorna and Vix, stars in their eyes, bounty in their hearts.

  Lorna’s long arms lifted the sack onto the roof of the car and she ducked, and that was when Yarley started shooting.

  The sack was intact for a moment and then it was perforated.

  White dust spun out into the night and into all the parked cars. Men and women were aiming rifles and pistols, aiming darts and clubs and arrows, aiming cameras and holding lanterns, and all of them inhaled.

  On his belly, Sheriff Hank Yarley took a deep and accidental breath, and what he breathed was pure, desperate love, cut with nothing. It was burning, scalding, lost and found. Once he took one breath, he had to take another and another, and in a moment, all the people in the mob were choking on it, upending on it, overdosing on it, because too much love was like too much anything.

  The seizure of love went through all of Texas, rattling the ground and making strangers fall hard into each other’s arms. This was love that took the South and drenched it, and up over the land, a storm of heat and heart took the dirt off the desert. People died of love, writhing on kitchen floors and kissing in traffic, and other people just caught a whiff of it and lived the rest of their lives looking for more. For ten years after, the people in Texas were different than they’d been. The borders opened wide and the river was full of folks from both sides being baptized with tongue. You know the story. You remember those years when everyone forgot who they’d been hating. You remember the drugstores full of nothing but lipsticks and soda pop. The world’s past that now, though. That time’s long over.

  People say that Lorna and Vix stood up from the scene of that last great crime, grimy and gleaming. People say that when they came out of that car, there were fifty bullet holes in the doors and windows, but that Lorna Grant and Vix Beller walked away unscathed. Maybe they went to the seashore. Maybe they went to South America. Maybe they’re dead now, or maybe they’re old folks healing people’s cats, dogs, and parakeets in some faraway city. Sheriff Yarley went on to start a charismatic church, exposed to the great light of some gods of El Paso, and full to the brim with strangers’ love. The others in his posse went wandering around America, preaching peace and pretty-pretty, carrying scraps of Lorna’s striped dress and Vix’s vest.

  In a glass case in Austin you can see the preserved remains of Lorna’s little finger, shot off by Sheriff Yarley when she put the desperate love up on the roof. It’s lit up under cover for tourists to see, but the rest of the two most wanted are long gone.

  Here in Texas, sorrow and fury are back in the bodies of men and women. Some nights, we hear our neighbors moaning and country music on the radio, and some nights we go out walking late, looking to be healed of every hurt, looking for a hand-painted sign that says, COME ON SINNER.

  Some nights, all we want is the neon promise of a motel, a hot bed, and some hands to hold us under the covers, and some nights, looking for that much, we keep driving and driving in the dark.

  About the Author

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the novel Queen of Kings and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Neil Gaiman, she is the co-editor of the New York Times-bestselling anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean, Glitter & Mayhem, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead. Magonia, a young adult novel, will be out from HarperCollins in 2015, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, will be released by Subterranean Press in August 2014. She grew up in rural Idaho on a sled-dog ranch, spent part of her twenties as a pirate negotiator and ship charterer in the maritime industry, and now lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile. You can find her on Twitter at @MARIADAHVANA. Or sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright © 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Art copyright © 2015 by Ashley Mackenzie

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  And if you’re a boy with a wide imagination who hikes the beach at Capitola for miles on winter days, hikes until the promontory marking home is a speck you can hide behind your outstretched hand, then you’ll continue hearing a voice in the green and white surf and in the hectoring cries of the gulls. You’ll hear it coming up behind you, miles behind, as you retrace your crumbling footsteps along the frost-packed sand, and you’ll hear it coming down from the eucalyptus as you tread the lane toward home, toward the Ol’ Barn Itself, where shaggy branches sway above the boulders and crushed shells in the ramshackle yards. It calls out Ho, Ballou when the wind is just right and the surf is distant and pounding on the beachhead—Ho, Ballou; Ho, Ballou—until the voice is lost in the wind whistling through the tie-down fence.

  Home has a formal name, painted on the black iron post beside the drive, stamped in the many books left by a previous owner—The House of 31 Sparrow Lane—but with you and Mom it is always the Ol’ Barn Itself. Every time she drives you home from Beach Market, with you jostling with the jostling grocery bags in the back, she announces over her shoulder, “Back to the Ol’ Barn Itself, Ballou.” The name is your own invention, uttered when you first set eyes on the house.

  Its style is eccentric, like many of the properties in your small beach town. The real estate lady had called it Georgian, but additions were made in varying styles, and the uneven profile of the house marks an owner’s changing whims, the best of which is your bedroom under the roof. It has a peaked ceiling and old dark wood like something from a Spanish galleon, and you reach it by climbing a brass spiral staircase from off the kitchen, a dizzying climb up and up with the smell of pine and the wood painted blue overhead, like a summer sky.

  You’re ten years and two days old, tired from your walk, chill from the breeze that presages night. You’re hungry, but not hungry enough to bother Mom. You kneel in the crabgrass beside the porch, Windbreaker zipped to your chin, hunching over your motley armies of Centurions, Saracens, Knights, and plastic army soldiers, along with a few die-cast tanks and a red tyrannosaurus. Under your hectoring eye the thirty-some odd pieces become three thousand, and the yard the
size of the coast. Sand flies buzz the battlefield. Under your hand a Saracen’s jutting black beard pronounces doom upon the Enemy, led by a Centurion with his bright red plume. You shift them, watching the epic cycle of clamor and bloodletting, green plastic soldiers falling under the sword, Saracens toppling in a spray of machine-gun fire. Your white knuckles dig trenches in the sand. Then the surf rises to a roar, wild in the eucalyptus, and a shadow swarms toward you with a great crunch and rattle.

  You stand up, heart beating in your throat.

  A towering truck glares up the drive, dragging a deep rumble beneath. It spreads its shadow over the gravel and the eucalyptus, and over you. The engine growls, drawing frazzled breaths through the grille, then cuts out.

  Visitors are rare. For days on end it’s only the mailman with his bag over his shoulder and his ponytail. Sometimes it’s only the far neighbor’s tomcat, brown and white with a clipped ear where a gull got it. Sometimes it’s only birds. Sparrow Ln. reads the sign at the end of the road, though you’ve never seen a sparrow, only shearwaters and gulls. And once, a pelican had dropped startled out of low fog onto the crabgrass, flapping its wings and clacking open its pot-bellied beak. It had lingered, dazed a bit by the yard, giving you time to run into the kitchen for the Wonder Bread then advance in slow sliding steps toward it whispering, Hey there, hey, and toss wads of bread into its open gullet before it clapped shut and the pelican rustled its wings and sailed up and away.

  Sometimes it’s only the ghosts of birds, rising out of the salty night air.

  You advance cautiously.

  WIN EBAGO proclaims the rusted letters on the truck’s grille. You wonder if someone really won it, and what type of vehicle an Ebago is, then let yourself recognize the name. You feel the heat from the grille and study the battered Oregon license plate. The windshield betrays nothing beyond its glare, nor does any further sound come from it, other than a tic-tic from the engine. You retreat to your armies near the porch, watching the door in the side of the vehicle, waiting.

  Words were once painted there, you realize. YOU 10, it tells you, in faded blue.

  “Bally?” Mom says through the open window above you, and you can picture her stretching on the couch. “What’ve you got your hands on?”

  * * *

  When you first saw the island outside of a comic book it was faint with fog that dampened the air and made the hard, glassy waves look like horses charging toward shore. In comic books the island is always jagged, and the Doctor’s laboratory rises from its center like a lighthouse made of steel. But this island is pale like the fog and the laboratory thin as glass. In the fog it comes and goes. From inside—the inside you first reached from the cubbyhole off your bedroom—the laboratory is white and full of tall windows. “Time is tide,” the Doctor told you, that first time, steepling his deathly white fingers beneath his beard. “Time is tide and the beating of a heart, Ballou. And if you were to wade into that tide and swim away, swim in any direction—since any direction would be away from my laboratory, and my island—then you’d be moving into your past, into your days before, when you were at other schools, when you had other playmates, and when you and your mother were happier.” You stood at the window, looking first at him then out across the shimmering water to the shore, hoping to catch sight of home. “And a tide pool … Well, Bally, time in a tide pool is time stopped.”

  Saying this he reached into the mouth of the glass jar, lifting out a damp red bloom.

  * * *

  You 10. The words on the side of the mobile home, in faded blue.

  You stand with your arms out, your Swabbies stiff at the bell-bottoms from salty spray, damp at the knees from kneeling in the crabgrass. You feel as you do when standing in the surf and it retreats back to sea, the land threatening to go with it.

  Faint, through the window behind you: “Ballou?”

  You picture Mom on the couch, a towel across her forehead, listening to The 20,000 Dollar Pyramid or Name That Tune. Since losing her job two weeks ago, she’s always listened to TV rather than watched it, with the image all snowy and sometimes rolling up like an eye into its head.

  In front of you, the side door of the Winnebago pops open. Cowboy boots are the first thing you notice, then gangly denim trousers and a rumpled white shirt. The intruder hooks his thumbs onto his belt. His face is like the Marlboro Man’s, and his squint is somewhat like McCloud’s, though he’s younger and has a mangy beard. His shirt is red plaid, like one of the tablecloths at Doodles on the freeway, with buttons like the inside of an abalone shell. His gold belt buckle says W.

  “Well, hey there. You might just be a kid named Ballou.”

  You nod, uncertain.

  “Don’t suppose you remember me.” He extends his hand. A large gold ring sits on the thumb.

  You step back, once, twice.

  “Lila in there?” He’s looking up at the house as he says this, then out at the eucalyptus and the garage and back, devouring the place. He reaches out with his other hand and, like a magician, conjures a cowboy hat. He sweeps it down toward your head but you sprint through the gravel, scattering the soldiers.

  “Hey, Lila! He’s an itchy kid!”

  You race up the porch stairs, into the hall, ready to slam shut the door. “Mom!”

  In the living room, she’s throwing back the purple quilt, sitting up, raising her too-pale face to the shuddering light. “What are you doin’, Bally?” After rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she looks pretty once more.

  “Lila?”

  You turn. He’s crossing the porch, hat in one hand, the other hooked on his belt. His boots resound like drums.

  Mom blinks and mouths something that might be the answer to the question on the TV. Then: “Wilson, that you?”

  Wilson. The name echoes strangely.

  He’s in the doorway. “You get my letter, Lila?” When she says nothing he adds, “Was in your neck of the woods, thought I’d stop by, say hi.”

  “Stop by in what?”

  “A mobile palace, a bit beat-up.”

  “You swindle somebody, Wilson? Or somebody swindle you?”

  But he’s looking at you. “You heard of me, kid? Uncle Wilson?”

  Uneasy, you shake your head. You see something, a shadow, like a huge spider, or a crab, scuttling across the gravel behind him.

  “Bally? You okay?”

  You know immediately, even without having seen it. Something had been hanging onto the bottom of the Winnebago and had dropped down.

  “Bally, are you okay? Answer me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You startled him. All that noise.”

  Wilson sets his hat on the little table beside the door. “My apologies. It’s nice to see you, Lil’.”

  “It’s just I’m not feeling too well today,” Mom says listlessly. “Wilson, you should’ve called.”

  “Last time I saw you, you weren’t feeling well.”

  “Wilson.”

  “Swallowed something.”

  “Come in, if you’re coming in.”

  You want to shout, No! and hurtle yourself at the door. But you’re torn with looking out at the empty gravel as he swings it shut behind him.

  * * *

  You can’t remember Uncle Wilson because Uncle Wilson is dead. Or anyway, that’s what Mom said more than once. He was killed in Dem Bien Phu in ‘72 by Charlie, and there’s a singsong pleasure in the name of that faraway battlefield, one that you often re-enact with armies in the front yard. Dem Bien Phu is a palace with great huge walls in a jungle, and archers shooting through narrow slits in the stone, hailing death upon the green American army soldiers. Charlie, though, will always be Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator for you.

  Mom doesn’t hug Wilson, and doesn’t offer him a drink, though more than once he pats a silver flask in his pocket. By this time of night, even when she had a job and wouldn’t return home ‘til six, she’d be listening to The Joker’s Wild and you’d fix ravioli and continue with your ho
meschool, and you’d sit with her until nine, when you were allowed to go to your bedroom in the attic. (You may retire to your chamber, Master Ballou, she’d say, and gently kiss your forehead.) There you’d watch Adam-12 on the little black-and-white television, or crawl into your fort under the eaves and read your books, Henry Treece and Eleanor Cameron, lately.

  “Ballou, we got to take your ma out to eat. Where’s the best place to eat in this town?”

  You would’ve said Herfys but you see the opportunity to get a real meal, maybe steak and eggs. “Faradays on Main Street.”

  “Yeah? You mean that blue and white fancy palace? What about it, Lila? Faradays,” he says, and laughs.

  She wipes the fog from her eyes, but it just comes back again. “Let’s go to Doodles by the exit. I don’t want to rip a hole in your wallet.”

  You know she really wants to go to Doodles because Clarissa works there, and she wants Clarissa to see him.

  * * *

  Wilson drives Mom’s rusty green Dodge Dart.

  She changed into her flowery blouse as well as a pink scarf. She smells of perfume, which only makes you realize how long it’s been since she smelled of perfume. Wilson tries to place his arm around her, simply by turning to talk to you in the back seat. She moves over, leans her head against the window.

  You wanted to ride in the Winnebago, feel the thrum of it, see it nosing into Doodles’ small parking lot, until you remember the thing that had dropped down from under.

  “Hey, Ballou.” His eyes find you in the rearview. “You miss Austin?”