Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “He misses his friends, and the school there, don’t you, Bally?” Mom looks back. “But he loves the beach. He can walk for miles.”

  “Beachcomber,” says Wilson, and you sit back further in the seat so he can’t find you with his eyes.

  You want to mention the islands but you don’t. You don’t want Wilson sticking around more than tonight, and if you mention the islands he might just decide to stay. Or he might roam up and down the coast following them, or trying to. After all, his house has wheels.

  Doodles is an old Sambo’s redone with a different paint job and no paintings of the little black boy in the jungle. Mom sometimes calls it Dumbo’s. The waitress is Clarissa, Mom’s only friend. “Is this who I think it is?” Clarissa says when you sit down.

  “Clarie, meet Wilson.”

  Clarissa wrinkles her nose like she smells Mom’s perfume. “I’ve heard some.” She smiles the smile of a waitress at all of you, but she and Mom share a glance.

  “I think I heard of you, too,” says Wilson.

  “Hi, B. How are you, kiddo? You want your bacon cheeseburger?”

  A bearded man at the counter catches your eye.

  “Bally?”

  “Sure,” you say, and look again.

  You excuse yourself and go to the bathroom, saying you have to wash your hands. On the way you try to look again, but the man at the counter turns away. At the sink you wash your hands and dry them three times to get the grit of sand from between your fingers then wash them again. When you fumble in your pocket you find one of your Centurions. You bring it out and set it on the edge of the sink, then crouch to see it straight-on. You shut one eye and move in closer, so that it becomes as big as Ragnar the Robot Slayer.

  “You don’t think he haunts the hallways,” Mom is saying softly, when she thinks you’re still in the bathroom.

  “Sixty-eight. Been quiet since then,” Wilson mutters before he sees you. Then his face lights up with a false smile. “What grade are you in, Ballou?”

  “He’s in fifth. Or he will be, when we enroll him.”

  As you sit down, they look at one another in a way you can’t figure out. “Were you shot?” you ask. “At Dem Bien Phu?”

  Wilson smiles and pets his cowboy hat, which sits like a straw cat on the table between the two of you. He sets down his fork on his empty plate and leans low over the tablecloth. “I went under, Ballou.”

  You look to Mom but she’s stirring her ice water with her straw.

  “What do you mean?”

  The moment stretches out, accompanied by the tinny muzak. Mom doesn’t need to look at Wilson to be looking at him.

  “Like Valhalla,” he says, straightening. “You know about Valhalla, Ballou?”

  You nod. “It’s in the clouds where Odin lives. And in the thirteenth eon Odin and Ragnarök had a big war and they built robots that got so powerful they escaped down to Earth. Odin made Ragnar the Robot Slayer and sent him down, only the Slayer has forgotten who he really is and thinks the Doctor’s the head of the evil army.” You set down your fork. You hadn’t meant to say so much.

  Wilson’s smile crinkles the corner of his eyes. “Hey, Lila, we got ourselves a road scholar here.”

  Mom pokes at her food, mouth down-turned.

  When Clarissa arrives with Wilson’s juicy steak and a bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup, he says, “Now I’m mighty fixed on devouring some animals.” He winks at her.

  “Some of those animals are my friends,” Clarissa mutters.

  Since he’s busy eating, Wilson doesn’t talk anymore and you turn to your burger. Mom brings up the subject of how Wilson paid for the mobile home and where he’d gotten it. You’re gulping down the burger, juicy and delicious with thick bacon that crackles against the roof of your mouth, all smoky and salty. “And where are you going tomorrow?” she asks.

  “Every day a different place.” He grins. “Maybe to the movies. What about it, Ballou? You want to go to the movies tomorrow?”

  But Mom says, “We have one theater, Wilson. They’re showing The Betsy. You want to see The Betsy with Mr. Laurence Olivier?” Her tone says he wouldn’t want to.

  “I was thinking of the drive-in along Pelican Bay. That still there?”

  Recalling a scrap of newspaper on the beach and the ad on the page, you jump in and say to Mom, “Yeah! They’re showing The Island of Dr. Moreau!” You begin to add that it stars Logan from Logan’s Run and the Admiral from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but Mom cuts you off.

  “Bally! You’re spewing ketchup!”

  You wipe your mouth and try to appear sedate, brimming with table manners. “I wanted to see it in Austin last year but we moved away.”

  Clarissa drops the check onto the table. “Anything else, you two?” She looks Wilson up and down.

  “Thank you, Clarissa, it sure was delicious.” Mom tries to pick up the slip but Wilson gets it.

  He winks over his fork. “Hey, Scout, you want some chocolate ice cream? Three ice creams, what about, Lil’?”

  Mom rubs between her eyes. “You going to make Clarissa rewrite this bill?”

  “Chocolate with chocolate syrup drizzled on top, okay? Double dose for the kid.”

  “None for me. Wilson, when did you get so well-to-do?”

  Clarissa smiles and strolls to the counter.

  “Here and there and everywhere. And tomorrow, we’ll drive up to Pelican Bay.”

  “And Dr. Moreau. Right, Mom?”

  She sighs. “If you’re polite to everyone and do your chores without complaining. Then it’s Dr. Moreau, Bally. If Wilson can get us there. Bally?”

  You sit back, assured that the bearded man at the counter isn’t the Doctor.

  * * *

  On the way home Mom asks Wilson to stop at Beach Market for cigarettes and a bottle of Empirin. He offers to go in and declines her five dollar bill. “Want to come with me, champ?”

  You do.

  You feel older, somehow, walking into the buzzing bright store with Wilson towering beside you. You point out where the aspirin is, and the cigarettes, but Wilson says he wants to shop on his own and leaves you at the comic book rack, where you look for any Archies or Star Treks, then at the last minute you spy the new Ragnar the Robot Slayer. You snatch it up. The cover shows Ragnar in a rowboat fighting giant blood-red robots. The Doctor’s island looms in the background, smoke rising against a setting sun.

  Wilson chuckles. He juggles the six-pack of Coors and the box of True 100s into the crook of his elbow and takes it up. “You know what this is, Ballou?” He grins, and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes have never been deeper. “It’s junk for the mind.”

  “Can I get it, Uncle Wilson?” You feel for a moment that you’ve sold something to him you can never get back, simply by calling him Uncle.

  “Buy it later,” he says, and replaces it in the rack. You nod, disappointed, and walk to the checkout feeling the sting. Maybe Wilson senses this and that’s why he says, “Here.” He plucks up a stick of Bubs Daddy apple gum from the jar on the checkout counter and drops it down with the beer and cigarettes. It’ll do, you guess, and at the same time you’re wondering if he’ll really take you and Mom to see the movie the next day.

  “Your mom say anything about me, Ballou? Other than I died in ‘Nam?”

  You shake your head.

  Just as you’re approaching the Dodge Dart from behind he pulls the Ragnar the Robot Slayer from under his jacket and shoves it into your hands.

  “Hey, tough!” The pleasure of that cover, the promise of what waits inside, is enough to drive away any shame.

  “Tuck it in your coat,” he says, removing the bottle of Empirin from his coat pocket and tossing it into the bag. “Don’t say anything to your ma.”

  * * *

  “When one has an adversary,” the Doctor told you on your third visit to his laboratory high above the sea, “one rarely gets the adversary that one deserves, or desires.” He stands against cloudy jars lined up on
the counter. His white coat, crisp as though cut and assembled with paper and scissors, is no paler than his face and hands. “My robot minions are mindless. They roam the sea around my island with orders to destroy any intruders. For them the act is as simple, and as empty, as flipping a light switch.” Here he pauses to do just that, the lamplight revealing further jars in which float the shadows of shearwaters and birds ever smaller and darker.

  You wear your C-3PO pajamas with booties, still warm from the blankets.

  “With Ragnar I am almost deliriously well-matched. I loathe him, I admire him, I pity him, I will destroy him.” Here, a wistful sigh, as he uncaps one of the jars. An instant later the tang of chemicals tickles your nostrils. “Yet when I’m away from this laboratory and my island, when I’ve left my single-minded pursuits behind here, I always find myself asking, are there not others I hold in lesser esteem? Others I would wish my adversaries instead?” He crouches, so that his black beard with its fine strands contrasts vividly against the deathly white of his skin. “Tell me, Ballou. Your nosebleeds. Have they’ve stopped, now that the ghost is gone?”

  * * *

  When you get home Wilson strides to the Winnebago and unhooks the garden hose from the side.

  While he coils it, you crouch, pretending that you see something on the gravel, but you’re really looking at the underside. Whatever dropped down isn’t there. You look around the porch and the rock garden.

  Mom wearily ruffles your hair. “Why don’t you go play upstairs?”

  “You got some good stuff to read, I bet.” Wilson winks.

  You feel the comic book under your coat, against your stomach. You hold it tighter with your pocketed hands. But you’re remembering the thing dropping to the ground. “Can I stay outside?”

  “It’s late for that, Bally.”

  “Just in the yard.”

  “It’s cold.”

  You zip the Windbreaker up to your chin. It makes her smile, and you’re happy to see her look so beautiful.

  “Okay. In by nine.”

  You avoid looking at Wilson and retreat to the yard; they shut the door behind them. As you take out the comic book you feel the breeze on your face and hands. Re-zipping the coat, you wonder if it was wise to stay out here rather than go to your room.

  You gaze up at the house, which looks like a painting in the fog. With the comic book under your arm, you take out the long stick of Bubs Daddy, nudge the gum through the end, and bite off a good mouthful of the sweet-and-sour apple gum with its powdery dusting. The combination of sweetness and sourness makes your mouth water, and you’re chewing enthusiastically and swallowing. You bend the rest of the stick in half and shove it back in your pocket. The fog carries the salty tang of the sea, and just about is the sea, on nights like this, rolling like a tide up the cliffs and through the ramshackle yards.

  Ho, Ballou, says the surf. Ho, Ballou.

  You walk around the mobile home, pausing to look under, peering out at the yard. WIN EBAGO says the grille, and you feel that great rush of movement as it chased up the drive. Now it seems as solid as the house, and as permanent.

  At the back a ladder goes to the roof. You can’t help but think of the Doctor’s tower and the ladder that Ragnar had once climbed. Up top you’d find the flat wide surface under moonlight with the sea all around.

  It’s his home, you think, staring up. And it’ll roll off and away. You remember Mom and Wilson looking at one another and their look leaving you out. Crouching slowly, you look once more at shadows which are solid and unmoving.

  Whatever it was, the thing dropped down and left for the grounds or the house.

  You crinkle your nose at the scent of plasticky, stagnant water from the water tank. Straightening, you resume looking, listening.

  Ho, Ballou. Ho, Ballou.

  The side door to the garage is partway open. You walk toward it, certain it had been closed that afternoon. Sand dollars and seashells glued to the frame seem to float, faintly glowing in fog. When you pull the door open all the way, it creaks like something out of a Halloween sound effects LP.

  Inside, the darkness is clotted and fuzzy, becoming varied tones of deep gray the longer you stare. Everything hesitating, as if you’ve walked in just after the sawhorses and stacks of wood and boxes were dancing like in a Disney film, and now they’ve stopped. For a moment, you cease chewing your gum. The cord for the bare light bulb is farther in, to the left. You take another step. Near your foot is a battered bucket full of sand dollars and mussel shells you brought back from the beach and haven’t cleaned up. Beyond the bucket is the big brass pot taller than you that Mom calls a samovar. Next to that are rattan chairs where mice had made a home the previous summer, until Mom and Clarissa set traps.

  Everything stands still. And not at all like they were dancing, you decide. Rather that they’re all hunched up, like the tomcat that hissed at you when you ventured into the neighbor’s distant yard.

  Then you hear a brittle scuffle, ahead of you, left to right against the wall.

  As your chest goes cold you remember the shape somewhat like a spider’s, somewhat like a crab’s.

  But this is something larger than either, brushing against the brick, accompanied by the slither of heavy chain on the concrete.

  The hairs stand up on your arms

  The previous summer, in the similar darkness of the crawl space, you had heard the same sound, and now here’s the snuffling that went with it, alive, behind the disused planking.

  While searching for whatever had dropped from the Winnebago, you’ve found instead the old ghost, the one that was driven off. Wilson, by his arrival, somehow broke the barrier that kept it out.

  You’re rooted to the spot, frozen in place, heart pounding against your jaw. And the ghost is moving now like it’s decided you’ve left, brushing against planks which slowly teeter as it trudges along the wall, and into the open.

  The glow of embers are the ghost pig’s eyes, and the scent of burning flesh its aura.

  A moment too late, you feel the warm blood coursing down your left nostril. You lift your hand to your nose and tip back your head. As you stagger the blood spreads across the webbing of your first finger and thumb. You taste copper in the back of your throat. You shove your way through the open door, unable to look down to see if something’s climbing your jeans. You swallow and feel the blood drying on your hand and upper lip.

  Outside, you assure yourself nothing followed you and close the door, then retreat to the gravel. You crouch down, fingers pressed against your nose. You tell yourself to calm down, just like the counselor in Austin taught you. You press hard, fingers trembling, eyes fixed on the garage door, and wait until you’re sure the pressure has stopped the blood, and even then you wait a bit longer, letting up slightly with your tired hand and waiting for the blood to reappear as it so often did.

  But apart from the coppery taste that infuses the gum in your mouth, the bleeding has stopped.

  The door is still shut. You wait, and listen, and begin doubting what you saw. Or trying to.

  You don’t want Mom or Wilson seeing you bloodied, so you find the spigot for the hose. You spit out the gum, turn the water on just barely, then lift the end from where Wilson coiled it, wait for the water to gurgle out and run it over your hand and rub your hand across the dried blood on your nose. Just as quietly, you return the hose and shut off the spigot.

  You retrieve the comic book from where you dropped it.

  Above, at the window, fingernails tap the glass. Not like they’re trying to summon you, more like they didn’t mean to. It’s Mom’s hand. Through the window and the box fan’s grille, you see her hand, then Wilson’s shaggy head. You boost yourself up on the foundation block, carefully, and peer in. Mom is on the couch, her head on the pillow, her arm crooked, and Wilson—Wilson kneels down on the carpet beside the couch, his back to you. You go cold, all the way down to your toes. He’s like a prince slipping a ring on the princess’s finger. You move a litt
le to the right and see Mom’s eyes squeezed shut. Then Wilson moves away. He rises up tall as the Doctor or taller, and Mom brings her arm closer to her side.

  Her fingers clench.

  * * *

  You force yourself to walk around the mobile home three times.

  You think about the Robot Slayer and Dem Bien Phu then Wilson saying I went under.

  You check the garage door once more. It’s still shut. Not that that ever stopped the ghost from moving from the crawl space to the kitchen to the backyard; the backyard most of all, where you’d glimpse it on a moonlit night turning over and over in the crabgrass.

  When finally you step into the house—into blazing heat and a pall of cigarette smoke—Mom is nowhere to be seen. Wilson crouches next to the TV fiddling with the antenna, and Alice is yelling at Mel with the snow getting so bad you can barely see them. A green mug sits on the coffee table beside his flask. The mug says Stepping Out.

  “Your mom’s asleep. Don’t wake her.” He jiggles the antenna. Finally he lurches up and goes to the kitchen while you survey the couch and drop the creased comic book onto the cushion. He returns with tinfoil. For the next five minutes, while you think about Mom and her clenching hand, and the ghost pig that had once been a living pig chained up in the backyard, Wilson applies tin foil experimentally around the antenna’s base and up the left antenna. The picture comes and goes, until finally Alice is back, and you can see Flo sneering at Mel and she says, “Kiss my grits.”

  Wilson steps away, arms held out like he’s done a miracle. He looks at you but you say nothing.

  “You tell Lila I did that,” he says quietly, ruffling your hair as he steps past. “Okay?” He fetches a beer from the fridge then sinks down onto the sofa, getting the blue-and-red macramé all messed up.

  “It’s better now, isn’t it?” He cracks open the beer and tosses the pull tab toward the dusty mop bucket.

  “Yeah.”

  “You like living here, Ballou?”

  You say nothing, hoping that everything can be caught up in the TV’s small, clear image. Wilson burps under his breath. With his free hand he reaches for something on the other side of his chair. He comes up lugging one of your and your mom’s favorite books, Mysteries of the Pacific Coast. When you had first found it in the cubbyhole off the kitchen, you’d both spent days paging through it after dinner, the book on her lap and you snug against her shoulder, peering at weird pen-and-ink drawings of the early coast, of the first dwellings in Capitola.