Ruth picked up the mystery she had been reading but did not open it. She studied his image as if it might be a clue to something she had been trying to remember. Matt moaned and his fingers tightened around the cast that ran from his right hand to his elbow. She thought he must have started dreaming, because his face closed like a door. He rolled toward the eye and she could see the bruise on his cheek, blood-blue shading to brown.
“Someone is approaching,” said Ruth’s homebrain.
“The groceries?”
“The visitor is not on file.”
“Show me,” Ruth said.
The homebrain split Matt’s window and gave her a view of the front porch. A girl she had never seen before, holding two brown paper Shop ‘n’ Save sacks, pressed the doorbell with her elbow.
She was about thirteen and underfed, which meant she was probably a drood. She had long glitter hair and the peeling red skin of someone who did not pay enough attention to the UV forecasts. Her arms were decorated with blue stripes of warpaint. Or maybe they were tattoos. She was wearing sneakers, no socks, jeans, and a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus Hitler that said “For a nickel I will.”
“Hello?” said Ruth. “Do I know you?”
“Your stuff.” She shifted the sacks in her arms as if she were about to drop them.
“Where’s Jud? He usually delivers for me.”
“C’mon, lady! Not arguin’ with no fuckin’ door.” She kicked at it. “Hot as nukes out here.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“See these sacks? Costin’ you twenty-one fifty-three.”
“Please show me your ID.”
“Shit, lady.” She plunked the sacks down on the porch, brushed sweat from her face, pulled a card from her pocket and thrust it toward the eye in the door. The homebrain scanned and verified it. But it did not belong to her.
“That’s Jud’s card,” said Ruth.
“He busy, you know, so he must give it to me.” One of the sacks fell over. The girl nudged a box of dishwasher soap with her sneaker. “You want this or not?” She knelt, reached into the sack and tossed a bag of onion bagels, a bottle of liquid Pep, a frozen whitefish, two rolls of toilet paper, and a bunch of carrots into a pile on the middle of the porch.
“Stop that!” Ruth imagined the neighbors were watching her groceries being abused. “Wait there.”
The girl waggled a package of Daffy Toes at the eye. “Gimme cookie for my tip?”
Ruth hesitated before she pressed her thumb against the printreader built into the steel door. What was the point in having all these security systems if she was going to open up for strangers? This was exactly the way people like her got hurt. But it was Ruth’s order, and the girl looked too frail to be any trouble.
She smelled of incense. A suspicion of sweet ropy smoke clung to her clothes and hair. Ruth was tempted to ask what it was, but realized that she probably did not want to know. The latest in teen depravity, no doubt. The smell reminded her of when she was in college back in the sixties and she used to burn incense to cover the stink of pot. Skinny black cylinders of charcoal that smeared her fingers and smelled like a Christmas tree on fire. Ruth followed the girl into the kitchen, trying to remember the last time she had smoked pot.
The girl set the bags out on the counter and then sighed with pleasure. “Been wantin’ all day to get into some A/C.” She surveyed the kitchen as if she were hoping for an invitation to dinner. “Name’s Chaz.” She waited in vain for Ruth to introduce herself. “So, want me to unpack?”
“No.” Ruth took her wallet out of her purse.
“Lots of’em ask me to. They too old, or too lazy—hey, real costin’ wine.” She pulled a Medoc from the rack mounted under the china cabinet and ran her finger along the stubby shoulder. “In glass bottles. You rich or what?”
Ruth held out her cash card but Chaz ignored it.
“Bet you think I lie. You ‘fraid I come here to do your bones?” She hefted the bottle of Bordeaux by the neck, like a club.
Alarmed, Ruth clutched at her chest and squeezed the security pager that hung on a silver chain under her blouse. “Put that down.” The eye on the kitchen ceiling started broadcasting live to the private cops she subscribed to. Last time they had taken twenty minutes to come.
“Don’t worry,” Chaz grinned. “I deliver plenty stuff before. In Portsmouth. Then we lose our house, got move to Durham. Nice town you got here.” She set the bottle back on the counter. “But you can’t hear nothin’ I say, right? You scared ‘cause kids hate you but I ain’t breaking your head, am I? Not today, anyway. Just wanna earn my fuckin’ nickel, lady.”
“I’m trying to pay you.” Ruth pushed the card at her.
She took it. “Place full of costin’ shit like this.” She shook her head in wonder at Ruth’s wealth. “You lucky, you know.” She rubbed the card against the port of Jud Gazzara’s Shop ‘n’ Save ID to deduct twenty-one dollars and fifty-three cents. “Yeah, this is great, compare to dorms. You ever see dorms inside?”
“No.”
“You oughta. Compare to dorms, this is heaven.” Chaz handed the card back. “No, better than heaven, ‘cause you can buy this, but you gotta die to get heaven. Gimme my cookie?” she said.
“Take it and leave.”
Chaz paused on the way out and peeked into the living room. “This walter what you do for fun, lady?” Matt was still asleep on the wall. “Jeez, you pigs good as dead already.”
“Would you please go?”
“Wake up, waiter!” She yelled at the screen. “Hustle or die!”
“Huh!” Matt jerked as if he had been shot. “What?” He curled into a ball, protecting his face with the cast.
“Give nasty, you get nasty.” Chaz winked at Ruth. “See you next week, lady.”
“Greta, is that you?”
Ruth could hear Matt calling to his dead wife as she shouldered the door shut. She braced her back against it until she felt the homebrain click the bolts into place.
“Greta?”
“It’s me,” she called. “Ruth.” She squeezed the security pager again to call the private cops off. At least she could avoid the charge for a house call. Her heart hammered against her chest.
“Ruth?”
She knew the girl was out there laughing at her. It made Ruth angry, the way these kids made a game of terrorizing people. “Turn your wall on, Matt.” It was not fair; she was no pig.
By the time Ruth got into the living room, Matt was sitting on the edge of his bed. He seemed dazed, as if he had woken up to find himself still in the nightmare.
“You asked me to check in on you,” she said. “Remember? Sorry if I disturbed you.” She decided not to tell him—or anyone—about Chaz. Nothing had happened, really. So the world was full of ignorant little bigots, so what? She could hardly report a case of rudeness to the Durham cops; they thought people like her complained too much as it was. “Did you have a nice nap?” Ruth was not admitting to anyone that she was afraid of trash like Chaz.
“I was having a dream about Greta,” said Matt. “She gave me a birthday cake on a train. We were going to some city, New York or Boston. Then she wanted to get off but I hadn’t finished the cake. It was big as a suitcase.”
Ruth had never understood why people wanted to tell her their dreams. Most of the ones she had heard were dumb. She could not help but be embarrassed when otherwise reasonable adults prattled on about their night-time lunacies. “How are you feeling?” She nestled into her favorite corner of the couch. “Do you need anything?”
“What was funny was that Greta wouldn’t help me.” He had not noticed how he was annoying her. “I mean, I told her to have some cake but she wouldn’t. She screamed at me to hurry up or I’d die. Then I woke up.”
What had Chaz called him? A walter. Ruth had never heard that one before. “Sorry,” she said, “I really didn’t mean to intrude. I should let you get back to sleep.”
“No, don’t go.” He slid his fee
t into the slippers next to the bed. “I’d like some company. I just lay down because there was nothing else to do.” He grunted as he stood, then glanced in the mirror and combed hair back over his bald spot with his fingers. “See, I’m up.”
He turned away and waved for her to follow. The eye tracked along the ceiling after him as he hobbled down the hall to his office, a dark shabby room decorated with books and diplomas. He lived in only three rooms: office, bedroom and kitchen. The rest of his house was closed down.
“I’m pretty useless these days.” He eased behind the antique steel desk he had brought home from his office when they closed the university. “No typing with this damn cast on. Not for six, maybe seven weeks.” He picked up a manuscript, read the title, dropped it back on a six inch stack next to the computer. “Nothing to do.”
Next he would get melancholy, if she let him. “So dictate.”
“I’m too old to think anymore without my fingers on a keyboard and a screen to remind me what I just wrote.” He snorted in disgust. “But you didn’t call to hear me complain. You’ve been so good, Ruth. To pay so much attention and everything. I don’t know why you do it.”
“Must be your sunny personality, Matt.” Ruth hated the way he had been acting since they released him from the hospital. So predictable. So sad. “I’m cooking my mom’s famous gefilte fish. Maybe I’ll bring some over later? And a bottle of wine?”
“That’s sweet, but no. No, you know how upset you get when you go out.” He grinned. “You just stay safe where you are.”
“This is my town, too. And yours. I’ve lived here thirty-two years. I’m not about to let them take it away from me now.”
“We lost it long ago, Ruth. Maybe it’s time we acknowledged that.”
“Really? Can I stop paying property taxes?”
“You know, I understand the way they feel.” He tapped the keyboard at random with his good hand. “The world’s a mess; it’s not their fault that they’re homeless. They watch the walls in the dorms and they see all the problems and they need someone to blame. So they call us pigs and we call them droods. Much simpler that way.”
“So what are you going to do? Send them a thank you note for crippling you? Breaking your arm? Wake up and listen to yourself, Matt. You shouldn’t have to hide in your house like a criminal. You didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. I didn’t do anything. Maybe it’s time.”
“Damn it, don’t start that again! You’re a teacher, you worked hard.” Ruth grabbed a pillow she had embroidered. She wanted to hurl it right through the wall and knock some sense into the foolish old man. “God, I don’t know why I bother.” Instead she hugged it to her chest. “Sometimes you make me mad, Matt. I mean really angry.”
“I’m sorry, Ruth. I’m just in one of my moods. Maybe I should call you back when I’m better company?”
“All right,” she said without enthusiasm. “I’ll talk to you later then.”
“Don’t give up on me, Ruth.”
She wiped him off the wall. He was replaced by Silver Cascade Brook up in Crawford Notch. She had reprocessed the loop from video she had shot years ago, before she had had to stop traveling. Water burbled, leaves rustled, birds sang. “Chirp, chirp,” she said sourly and zapped it. Afloat on the Oeschinensee in the Alps. Zap. Coral gardens off the Caribbean coast of St. Lucia. Zap. Exotic birds of the Everglades. Zap. She flipped restlessly through her favorite vacations; nothing pleased her. Finally she settled on a vista of Mill Pond across the street. The town swans cut slow V’s across the placid surface. In the old days, when she used to sit on the porch, she could hear frogs in the summertime. She was tempted to drag her rocker out there right now. Then she would call Matt, just to show him it could still be done.
Instead she went into the kitchen to unpack the groceries. She put the dishwasher soap under the sink and the cookies in the bread drawer. Mart was a crotchety old man, ridden with guilt, but he and she were just about the last ones left. She picked up the whitefish, opened the freezer, then changed her mind. When was the last time she had seen Margie or Stanley What’s-His-Name, who lived just two doors down? Ruth closed the door again, stripped the shrinkwrap from the fish and popped it into the microwave to defrost. If she were afraid to show him, Matt would end up like all the others. He would stop calling or move or die and then Ruth would be a stranger in her own home town. When the whitefish thawed she whacked off the head, skinned and boned it. She put the head, skin, and bones in a pot, covered them with water, cut in some carrots and onion and set it on the stove to boil. She was not going to let anyone make her a prisoner in her own kitchen. She ground the cleaned fish and some onions together, then beat in matzo meal, water, and a cup of ovobinder. Her mom’s recipe called for eggs but uncontaminated eggs were hard to find. She formed the fish mixture into balls and bravely dropped them into the boiling stock. Ruth was going visiting, and no one was going to stop her.
* * *
After she called the minibus, she packed the cooled gefilte fish into one Tupperware, poured the lukewarm sauce into another and tucked them both into her tote bag beside the Medoc. Then she reached to the cabinet above the refrigerator, took down her blowcuffs and velcroed one to each wrist. In the bedroom she opened the top drawer of her dresser and rooted through the underwear until she found two flat clips of riot gas, two inches by three. The slogan on the side read: “With Knockdown, they go down and stay down.” The clips hissed as she fitted them into the cuffs. Outside, a minibus pulled into the parking lot of the Church Hill Apartments and honked.
“Damn!” There must have been one in the neighborhood; service was never this prompt. She pulled on a baggy long-sleeved shirtwaist to hide the cuffs and grabbed her tote.
As soon as Ruth opened the front door, she realized she had forgotten to put sunblock on. Too late now. The light needled her unprotected skin as she hurried down the walk. There was one other rider on the mini, a leathery man in a stiff brown suit. He perched at the edge of his seat with an aluminum briefcase between his legs. The man glanced at her and then went back to studying the gum spots on the floor. The carbrain asked where she was going.
“14 Hampshire Road.” Ruth brushed her cash card across its port.
“The fare is $1.35 including the senior citizen discount,” said the carbrain. “Please take your seat.”
She picked a spot on the bench across from the door. The air blowing out of the vents was hot, which was why all the windows were open. She brushed the hair out of her eyes as the mini rumbled around Mill Pond and onto Oyster River Road.
The mini was strewn with debris; wrappers, squashed beer boxes, dirty receipts. Someone had left a paper bag on the bench next to her. Just more garbage, she thought—until it jumped. It was a muddy Shop ‘n’ Save sack with the top crumpled down to form a seal. As she watched, it moved again.
She knew better than to talk to people on the minibus, but Ruth could not help herself. “Is this yours?”
The man’s expression hardened to cement. He shook his head and then touched the eye clipped to the neckband of his shirt and started recording her.
“Sorry.” She scooted down the bench and opened the bag. A bullfrog the size of her fist rose up on its hind legs, scrabbled weakly toward her and then sank back. At first she thought it was a toy with a run down battery. Then she realized that some brain-dead kid had probably caught it down at the pond and then left it behind. Although she had not seen a frog up close in years, she thought this one looked wrong somehow. Dried out. They breathed through their skins, didn’t they? She considered getting off the mini and taking it back to the water herself. But then she would be on foot in the open, an easy target. Ruth felt sorry for the poor thing, yes, but she was not risking her life for a frog. She closed the bag so she would not have to watch it suffer.
The mini stopped at an apartment on Mill Road and honked. When no one came out, it continued toward the center of town, passed another minibus going in the o
pposite direction, and then pulled into the crumbling lot in front of the Shop ‘n’ Save plaza. There were about a dozen bicycles in the racks next to the store, and four electric cars parked out front, their skinny fiberglass bodies blanching in the afternoon sun. A delivery man was unloading beer boxes from a truck onto a dolly. The mini pulled up behind the truck and shut itself off. The door opened and the clock above it started a countdown: 10:00 … 09:59 … 09:58. The man with the aluminum suitcase got off, strode down the plaza and knocked at the door of what had once been the hardware store. He watched Ruth watching him until the door opened and he went in.
The empty lot shimmered like a blacktopped desert and the heat of the day closed around her. To escape it, she tried filling the space with ghost cars: Fords and Chryslers and Toyotas. She imagined there was no place to park, just like when they still pumped gas, before they closed the university. 06:22 … 06:21 … 06:20. But the sun was stronger than her memory. It was the sun, the goddamned sun, that was driving the world crazy. She could even hear it: the mini’s metal roof clicked in its harsh light like a bomb. Who could think in heat like this?
The bag twitched again and Ruth realized she could get water from the store and pour it over the frog. She glanced at the clock. 02:13 … 02:12 … Too late now.
The carbrain honked and started the engine when the clock reached 00:30. Three kids trudged out of the store. Two were lugging sacks filled with groceries; the third was Chaz, who was empty-handed. Ruth shifted her tote bag onto her lap, got a firm grip on the handle and tried to make herself as small as possible.
“Destination, please?” said the carbrain.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 68
