The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  And the Yankees, more Yankees than I’d seen in one place in my whole life—not just the bluecoats, but the other ones with their collars and ties all done up even in the summer. And the women—for the first time in my life, there were women everywhere who weren’t wearing black. The thought made me kind of grim, and I sat back down in my seat like Nathan.

  What I wanted most to see, more than anything else, was the railroad depot, the big, black-smoking locomotives. That was a secret dream of mine, that I might get to drive one of those engines when I grew up. Of course, I knew that not even a nigger could get a job like that, though they could work as firemen sometimes, or brakemen. But a Reb, as a train engineer—never.

  When we came up near to the depot, Mr. Jeff pulled up the mule and looked worried. There were squads of bluecoats all over the place, on horse and on foot. They were riot troops, with their steel helmets buckled on, and their faces looked hard. Mr. Jeff was trying to turn the wagon around, but the streets were too crowded. I stood up on the wagon seat to look, and I just caught a glimpse of the depot. There was a locomotive, lying on its side like a dead horse, and the rails all torn up around it. “Look!” I whispered to Nathan, all excited, because this was Raiders’ work; I was sure of it. I couldn’t wait to get down from the wagon and go get a closer look.

  But Mr. Jeff finally got the wagon turned around to take a different way to the market. That was when the trouble started. There was a squad of bluecoats lounging in the streets—not riot troops, but nigger soldiers wearing soft caps—and their sergeant, with his big gray side-whiskers, came up and took hold of the mule’s head. “They there, Reb! Where do you think you’re going?”

  The rest of them laughed and got slowly to their feet. I was scared, and I looked at Mr. Jeff to see what I was supposed to do, but he just sat there on the seat, staring forward, and though I could see a muscle twitch in his jaw, he never said a word as they started to surround the wagon.

  “Well, boys,” the sergeant said then, “hows about we just check out this here load for contraband, hey?”

  It was strange, hearing a nigger talk like a Yankee. Two of them climbed onto the back of the wagon and started sifting through the sacks of corn. They were tossing them this way and that, joking how they were going to find guns and ammunition hidden underneath. “How about we check inside some of these sacks?” one of them called out, and then the knives went to work, slitting the sacks, tossing out the corn.

  I was so mad and scared I wanted to cry and kill somebody at the same time. I glanced over at Mr. Jeff, sitting there all stiff, with his hands clenched so tight around the reins, the knuckles had gone white. Nathan, too, though he had that same look on his face that I’d seen a couple weeks before in the cotton field, and I knew what he must be thinking inside.

  They were throwing a lot of the corn out onto the street, and, seeing his crop getting ruined, Mr. Jeff finally turned around to the sergeant and said, “Look, now—”

  But it was like that’s what they’d been waiting for. The sergeant pulled out his revolver, grinning real nasty, and he stuck it under Mr. Jeffs chin. “What’s the matter? Afraid we’ll find your contraband? What is it—guns? Explosives? You going to blow up another train? I know how you Rebs operate. Where’d you bring this load in from, anyway, Texas?”

  Which proved he wasn’t after anything but to bait us, since anyone could see that mule couldn’t have made it across Tennessee, let alone to Texas, without falling dead in its traces. Mr. Jeff could see the same thing, and he clamped his mouth shut and didn’t say anything more while they finished slashing all his sacks. Then they stood around laughing some more to see us on our hands and knees picking up the corn from off the street. Mr. Jeffs face was all stiff, and I could tell it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to him, and I wondered how he’d stood it all for so many years.

  But they finally let us go, and we drove the rest of the way to the market, Nathan cursing infernally all the time that he was going to kill those Yankees, gut the blue-bellied swine, and like that. I didn’t have too much to say, I admit. I mean, it was one thing, them searching the wagon for contraband, what with the Raiders blowing up the train and all. But what they’d just done to us had been mainly meanness, and I had to suppose I hated them for that, because what had we done to them?

  Anyway, we got to the market, and Nathan and I helped Mr. Jeff unload the corn and sort out what the soldiers hadn’t ruined, and stack the damaged sacks back in the wagon so they could be sewn back up again. Then we were free to go while Mr. Jeff went to tend to his business. I really wanted to go back and see that train again, where they’d blown it off the tracks, and so I took off after Nathan down the street. I got to admit, I’d forgot all about my ma’s greenback folded into my overalls, and the needles I was supposed to buy for her. Just a block or so from the market, we ran into a couple more boys, who let us know what had been going on in town.

  I listened with my ears wide open while they told us all about the train being blown up, and how the Yankees had three men in jail for it, waiting to hang, and the riot—an insurrection, they called it—down at the courthouse yesterday when they’d announced the sentence. The Yankees were afraid that Raiders would be coming into town to try to break the three of them out, just what the rest of us hoped they would.

  Now, Nathan was just boiling over with hate for the Yankees after what they’d done to the corn sacks, thinking, now that it was all over, what he would’ve done if he only had his gun with him, or if he was a grown man, how he would’ve shown those Yankee bastards. I could tell he was ashamed of Mr. Jeff, though at the time, he’d just sat there quiet on the wagon seat like Mr. Jeff had done. Which was all anybody could have done, really.

  Then, before I knew it, Nathan and the rest of them were all loading up their pockets with rotten turnips and such from the market and heading on down the street. I followed, wondering whether or not this was such a good idea with the Yankees all hair-trigger edgy the way they were. The other boys led the way through the alleys to near the depot, with the soldiers all over the place, standing guard like they were expecting another attack. The boy in the lead hesitated, but Nathan stepped ahead of him and threw first. He caught one of the bluecoats in the back of the neck, under his helmet. Then the rest of us let off a barrage of rotten vegetables, and oh, the way that Yankee cussed! We were all grinning and slapping each other on the back, and I admit I felt better, getting some of my own back after what the bluecoats had done to us.

  I was ready to run, like the rest of them already had. But Nathan had got his blood up, and by bad luck there was a pile of loose cobblestones there in the alley. Before I could blink, he’d picked one of them up and let it fly. It hit the soldier on his steel helmet and dropped him to his knees. Then there was a commotion, with the other bluecoats giving the alarm. One of them fired, and I knew I’d had enough for sure. I grabbed onto Nathan’s coat to pull him away, but it was too late. A squad of riot troops came charging the alley.

  I turned tail to run, but not Nathan. He stood his ground and let fly with another stone, which hit the officer leading the squad. Then there was a roar of gunfire, just like thunder, and I saw Nathan fall, blood bursting out of him everywhere. For a second I couldn’t move, seeing him so still, his blood flowing into puddles in the dirt. Then I ran, blindly, because by then I couldn’t remember which way the market was, I was so scared.

  By the time I found my way back, the whole square was wrecked, wagons and stalls overturned, produce everywhere trodden underfoot. A whole troop of bluecoats had come through, smashed the place, and arrested everybody they could find, including Mr. Jeff. Folks who saw it told me the soldiers had to drag him away, they beat him so bad. They didn’t know if he was still alive. I couldn’t believe it—Mr. Jeff, resisting?

  All I could think of was I had to get back home, back to let the Rosses know what had happened. I’d have to walk, with the wagon wrecked and the mule nowhere in sight, but I kne
w how the road went, and I figured I could make it back before morning, even on foot. So I set out, down the road we’d come in on just that morning, never knowing what was going to happen. It seemed to me that it was wrong somehow that things should look just the same, that the sun was going to rise the next day just like it didn’t matter that Nathan was dead.

  I was about a mile or two out of town, when there was this clattery thunder of horses behind me on the road, and a troop of bluecoats came charging by. I just about froze, I was so scared, too scared to run, but they just kept right on going, and so I figured it wasn’t me they were after. And by the time I did realize where they were headed, it was too late, and I couldn’t have done anything, anyhow.

  Even before I came around the turn in the road to the Ross place, the flames were shooting up so high it looked like hellfire against the night sky. By the time I got there, the bluecoats had gone, and Miss Rachel was standing out in the yard with the little girls and old Mrs. Ross, Nathan’s grandma. They were all of them crying, and Miss Rachel’s dress was torn.

  “Where’s the captain?” I asked, gasping because I’d run most of the way since I first saw the glow of the flames.

  Miss Rachel didn’t say anything, but she just looked hard at where the porch had been. Later she told the story to my ma, how all those years that Captain Ross had sat out on that porch, he’d kept a pistol strapped under his coat, the same sidearm he’d carried through the War, and he’d sworn that if any bluecoat Yankee ever came up that road onto his land, he’d shoot the bastard dead. And so he had, the last deed of his life.

  When I told Miss Rachel what had happened in Covington, she didn’t seem much surprised, like it was bound to have happened sooner or later.

  I took them all home to my ma—it was the only thing I could think of to do, no matter that we didn’t really have the room to put them up. I had to move my bed out onto the porch. When my ma asked Miss Rachel whether she’d be keeping the land and working it, she said she didn’t hardly see how she could, on her own, with no man on the place and the taxes still owing.

  Without thinking, I burst out, “No! You can’t do that! Mr. Jeff will be back; he didn’t do anything!”

  They just looked at me, and I remembered the dead Yankee officer at the Rosses’ place. It would be Jefferson Ross who’d pay for that, since the captain was beyond their reach. “But what about Jeb and Bobby?” I asked—Nathan’s brothers. “It’s their land, too!”

  My ma shook her head. “Jeb and Bobby are outlaws, Jamie. They can’t come back to work the land, not with that bounty on them.”

  “I’ll do it, then. I’ll come help till Mr. Jeff gets back. You know I’m almost twelve years old!”

  But Miss Rachel just gave me a kind of sad smile and said how she appreciated my offer and she’d think about it, and didn’t my ma need me here at home? I couldn’t help thinking, the next few days when everything was upside down with the funerals and all, that my ma likely could manage fairly well without me around, that I’d probably been more of a care and a trouble to her most of my life. It was the same way everywhere, what with the men all dead or in prison or away with the Raiders, bounties on their heads. It was the only thing the Yankees had left us. Now Nathan gone, and Captain Ross, and Mr. Jeff, too—not dead, but in prison for riot and insurrection and conspiracy. All he ever meant to do was stay home and tend his family’s land, but they got him, too, in the end. Only the women left, all in black.

  And me. So one day I faced it like I always knew I’d have to—I went down in the woods by the creek, down to the limestone shelf that was off the Ross property, and I lifted up the stone where Nathan had showed me, that one time. There it was, wrapped up the way he left it.

  To this day, I’ve never known whether I could call it my own choice or something else. After a while, it didn’t seem like it made much of a difference. I reached into the hiding place and lifted out the gun, and the weight of it was heavier than any burden I’d ever known.

  NOTE:

  This excerpt from my grandfather’s journal was sent me by my sister Ellen, who has been editing his papers. It was included in a letter he had written to his wife while he was waiting to be executed for sedition during the last European War. Thirty years ago, almost to the day. I suppose, considering my current situation, that the selection is particularly appropriate.

  The future of the South was never bleaker than when my grandfather was a young man, before the European conflicts gave us new hope. And yet they never considered abandoning the Cause. The tide is turning now, with our allies behind us, but it could never have come to pass without the courage and determination of those generations. When my own turn comes, I will be proud to be in their company.

  I hope someday my own sons and daughters will be able to read this and understand. When it is your time, if our Cause demands that you bear your part of the burden, you may hesitate, but I have confidence that in the end you will know what you have to do.

  Oberführer James Ross Dunbar II

  58th SS Grenadier Division “Robert E. Lee”

  (U.S. Military Prison at Lexington, Ky.,

  July 18, 1952)

  SKINNER’S ROOM

  William Gibson

  The homeless are a problem that is likely to be with us well into the twenty-first century, alas. There seem to be no easy solutions, but here William Gibson suggests, if not a solution, exactly, then at least an ingenious and creative way that society may try to cope with the crisis in the future … and in the process gives us a fascinating slice-of-life glimpse of a strange new way of living.

  Almost unknown only a few years ago, William Gibson won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1985 for his remarkable first novel, Neuromancer—a rise to prominence as fiery and meteoric as any in SF history. By the late eighties, the appearance of Neuromancer and its sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, had made him the most talked-about and controversial new SF writer of the decade—one might almost say “writer,” leaving out the “SF” part, for Gibson’s reputation spread far outside the usual boundaries of the genre, with wildly enthusiastic notices about him and interviews with him appearing in places like Rolling Stone, Spin, and The Village Voice, and with pop-culture figures like Timothy Leary (not someone ordinarily much given to close observation of the SF world) embracing him with open arms. By the beginning of the nineties, even most of his harshest critics had been forced to admit—sometimes grudgingly—that a major new talent had entered the field, the kind of major talent that comes along maybe once or twice in a literary generation. Gibson’s short fiction has been collected in Burning Chrome. His most recent book is a novel written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and he also has a new solo novel coming up. His story “The Winter Market” appeared in our Fourth Annual Collection; his “Dogfight,” written in collaboration with Michael Swanwick, appeared in our Third Annual; and his “New Rose Hotel” was in our Second Annual Collection. Born in South Carolina, he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and family.

  Halloween, she finds her way up into some old hotel above Geary: Tenderloin’s cannibal fringe down one side, the gray shells of big stores off the other. Pressing her cheek to cold glass to spy the bridge’s nearest tower—Skinner’s room is there—all lit tonight with torches and carnival bulbs.

  Too far away but still it reassures her, in here with these foreigners who’ve done too much of something and one of them’s making noises in the bathroom—when someone touches her, cold finger on bare skin above the waistband of her jeans, sliding it in under her sweater and the hem of Skinner’s jacket: not the touch that makes her jump so much as the abrupt awareness of how hot she is, a greenhouse sweat, zipped up behind the unbreathing horsehide of the ancient jacket, its seams and elbows sueded pale with wear, a jingle of hardware as she swings around—D-rings, zip-pulls, five-pointed stars—her thumb tip against the hole in the knife’s blade, opening it, locked, ready. The b
lade’s no longer than her little finger, shaped something like the head of a bird, its eye the hole that gives the thumb purchase. Blade and handle are brushed stainless, like the heavy clip, with its three precise machine screws, that secures it firmly to boottop, belt, or wristband. Edge of serrated razor.

  The man—boy, really—blinks at her. He hasn’t seen the blade but he’s felt its meaning, her deep body-verb, and his hand withdraws. He steps back unsteadily, grinning wetly and dunking the sodden end of a small cigar in a stemmed glass of some pharmaceutically clear liquid. “I am celebrating,” he says, and draws on the cigar.

  “Halloween?”

  Not a noun he remembers at the moment. He just looks at her like she isn’t there, then blows a blue stream of smoke up at the suite’s high ceiling. Lowers the cigar. Licks his lips.

  “I am living now,” he says, “in this hotel, one hundred fifty days.” His jacket is leather, too, but not like Skinner’s. Some thin-skinned animal whose hide drapes like heavy silk, the color of tobacco. She remembers the smell of the yellow-spined magazines in Skinner’s room, some so old the pictures are only shades of gray, the way the city looks sometimes from the bridge. Could she find that animal, there?

  “This is a fine hotel.” He dips the wet green end of the cigar into the glass again.

  She thumbs the blade release and closes the knife against her thigh. He blinks at the click. He’s having trouble focusing. “One hundred. Fifty days.”

  Behind him, she sees that the others have tumbled together on the huge bed. Leather, lace, white skin, bright henna. Sounds from the bathroom are getting worse but nobody seems to hear. In the jungle heat of Skinner’s jacket she slips the knife back up, under her belt. She’s come up here for whatever she can find, really, but what she’s found is a hard desperation, a lameness of spirit, that twists her up inside, so maybe that’s why she’s sweating so, steaming …