by R. Lee Smith
She nodded.
“They were sure pissed when he had him. They came by a few days after the kid was licensed and tried to take him away. Said the conditions were unsafe.”
His eyes in the rearview mirror invited comment. Sarah said nothing.
“Sanford can be pretty bad-ass when he wants to be, don’t let that cool exterior fool you. And by the way, what do you think of the conditions here, caseworker?”
“Of course they’re unsafe,” she said. “They’re unsafe for anyone. That’s why we have to fix the conditions, not take away people’s children.”
“You sound like one of those humans on TV with all their chatter about the best way to manage us. And yet we’re still so dangerous. Even the cute ones.” Samaritan leaned in a little closer and drummed his palps lightly against the back of her now-bared neck. He laughed again when she shuddered, but backed away. “Tell me the truth, are you just using the kid to get a little closer to his dad? Is that it, caseworker? You curious about the chitin?”
“Would you please get out of my car?”
“It’s nice in here. But it’s funny that you only have the two seats up front and the long bench in back…with all this space in the middle…and a blanket.” He picked up one corner of Fagin’s traveling quilt and put it down again. He looked at her. “Why don’t you come in back with me?”
“Get out of my car!”
“It’ll be a little cramped, but we can make it work.”
“I know you’re not serious, now get out!”
His eyes blinked once, cat-like. “What makes you think I’m not serious?”
‘Because you’re an unisexual drone!’ she wanted to shout, but something in his smug, knowing stare stopped her.
“You are so much fun,” he said, and opened up the side door. He got out, straightened with a brisk shake, and slammed it, waggling his fingers at her through the window.
“Asshole,” she muttered, and pulled her hair loose again with hands that only shook a little. T’aki was still waiting, and now the door behind him was also open, an invitation to the slightly cooler interior of Sanford’s home. She left Samaritan behind her on the causeway and drove the last hundred meters or so to her ultimate destination. This time, she locked the doors.
“Blue van!” T’aki cheered as she got out, and came running over to climb onto the van’s hood and slap his palms over its ticking engine. “Is that the good kind?”
“I like it.” She picked him off the hot hood and set him on the ground again. “Don’t run off anywhere, jellybean. I found something of yours.”
He stopped bouncing and cocked his head at her. “Of mine? Where?”
“Out here somewhere,” she said, going around to the back. She heard the scrape of Sanford’s stool and saw him come to the door.
T’aki turned around and wrung his hands a little as he looked back and forth from each one of his tin cans to the half a milk jug in their center. “I didn’t lose anything,” he said. And when he saw the box come out of the van, his tiny face became quite solemn. “That isn’t mine. It belongs to someone else.”
“Honey…” Sarah hipchecked the van doors shut and came to set the box down on the hood. She hunkered down to get more or less on the boy’s level, and smiled for him. “I have a lot of rules that I have to follow if I want to work here, you know that, right? Like, I have to come only during certain hours, and I’m not allowed to talk about certain things, and mostly, I’m not allowed to bring stuff in or take stuff out unless I have specific permission to do so, even if I really want to.”
“Yes?”
“So I can’t give you things,” she said slowly, meaningfully. “But if I find things inside Cottonwood, it’s okay for me to return them to you.”
T’aki’s eyes slowly narrowed as he leaned forward, the very picture of intense concentration. “Is it…a lie?”
Sarah sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Yes, honey. It is a lie.”
He looked up at the box and wrung his hands again. “Where did you really find it?”
“In my house. Please open it.”
“Inside,” said Sanford, clicking hard as he looked down the empty causeway. He took the box, held the door for the two of them (still staring outside), then shut them all away in privacy. Only then did he look at it, moving his fingers slightly to inspect the mailing address and the faint blue lettering stamped beneath it. “You should not have done this,” he said, setting it down at last before his hopping, excited son.
“I’m aware of that, but in the great scheme of things, it didn’t seem like a lot of risk. I didn’t smuggle in uranium or anything.” She dropped into Sanford’s green vinyl chair and watched T’aki clamber head-first through the cardboard flaps, crumpled newspaper flying as he unwrapped the first item.
His kicking feet stilled. A low, groaning sort of rattling breath came out of the box. Sarah checked with Sanford to see if it was a good sound, and therefore missed the moment that T’aki dropped back onto the floor, holding her giant rubber iguana in both hands over his head like the Holy Grail. He made it squeak. The eyes bugged. Sanford’s head cocked, his antennae spiking upwards. T’aki squealed and dove back into the box.
A sparkly frisbee, a couple glittery rubber balls that lit up on the good bounces, her remote-controlled tarantula (“That may not have any batteries,” she said. “I have spares,” Sanford replied, still watching his son), a squirt gun in the shape of an elephant, her Spiderman webslingers, a whole row of Easter chicks that peeped if you held them in your hand, a huge can of Legos, three of the six officially licensed PlantGirlz 12” action figures, her dolphin lava lamp, and—
“Oh my gosh!” Sarah laughed, delighted. “The Fortesque Freeship! I forgot I even had that!”
T’aki, by this time standing chest-deep in wadded newspapers inside the otherwise empty box, looked at her and then at the clunky plastic ship in his hands. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a toy spaceship. Actually, I think it’s the ship from Scylla Six, but it always reminded me a little of the one Fortesque used in Invasion of the Asteroid Men, so when I saw it at the thrift store, I basically promised my mom my life’s blood if she’d buy it for me.”
“Spaceship,” T’aki echoed softly, his eyes huge. He touched the tiny plastic window. “It flies.”
“Only in pretend. I used to have a little Creature from the Black Lagoon inside it for a pilot, but one time Kate got really cheesed at me for something and popped the head off, so I threw it out.” She watched him make a practice swoop and laughed quietly to herself. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that a headless monster in a spaceship was right up Fortesque’s alley.”
“Can I keep this one?” T’aki asked, bouncing in the box with the ship clutched to his chest. “Please! Please please please please!”
“Honey, you can keep them all.”
Sanford looked at her.
“I guess anything you don’t particularly want, you can give to someone else. Or, you know, whatever.” She picked up Iggy and squeaked him, smiling. She tried not to wonder how many cans of rotten roadkill he was worth.
“What is Fortesque?” T’aki asked, struggling his way out of the box in a drift of newspaper and still trying to keep his ship in the air, flying.
“Fortesque was Charles M. Fortesque. He was an Englishman who came to America back in the seventies to learn how to make serious movies, and then went to Italy and made a lot of science-fiction ones instead.” She paused. “Movies are—”
“I know. Picture-stories for pretend.” Swish-swish went the ship, and then T’aki looked at her brightly. “Sometimes Father takes me to see movies after the Heaps.”
“My Dad used to take me to movies too. And Fortesque’s were the best. They were just awful.” And she laughed. “I loved them.”
Father and son glanced at each other.
“Yeah, I know that needs some explaining. Fortesque made movies with a little money, a lot of creative freedom, and this
glorious excess of enthusiasm that made the most ridiculous things fun to watch, regardless of how bad you knew the movie really was. I know, I know. I have to give you an example.” She thought about it, and laughed. “Okay, first Fortesque I ever saw was Killer Sludge from Dimension X. I don’t expect you to know this, but even the title is terrible and hilarious. Okay, so the sludge is actually a thin layer of latex spread out over an ottoman with some air bladders built in and a lot of dish soap to make it shiny, so even at the very start, it is about the least menacing thing you can possibly imagine. It spends about ninety minutes creeping around, blowing bubbles and apparently killing people off-screen, although I was never able to figure out how. I don’t know, maybe it had a gun.
“Anyway, there’s a scene where the hero and the heroine are in their living room talking about how to destroy it, and while they’re talking, the sludge suddenly creeps in from the kitchen and comes towards them. In any other movie,” said Sarah into T’aki’s wide-eyed and fascinated face, “this would be an intensely dramatic moment. The kids are completely wrapped up in each other, the sludge is ominous and out-of-focus, just coming and coming…and coming…” She waited. “And coming…”
T’aki giggled.
“I timed it once. The scene takes five minutes and fifteen seconds before the sludge finally rears up behind the couch and the kids see it. And the living room is not that big, so yeah, it takes five minutes and fifteen seconds to creep along at most twenty-five feet. Let me break that down for you, jellybean. Your dad’s work table is about five feet long. I’m going to set my timer—” She fished out her paz and flipped the stopwatch app on. “—for one minute and three seconds, and you try to walk from one side to the other and not get there before it beeps.”
T’aki took her paz without relinquishing the ship. Head down, eyes fixed on the screen, he started walking.
Sanford was still watching her.
“Slow it down, jellybean,” she advised, grinning.
“I can’t!” And laughed himself. “This is slow!”
“It really is. By my calculations, when the sludge finally does rear up to blow bubbles at them, the kids should have had time to get up, walk around the couch to the kitchen table, sit down, and finish their conversation. Instead, they run screaming out of the house, get in the car, drive ninety miles an hour across two towns to the observatory, run up to the magnescope, and there’s the sludge, and all I could think was, ‘What, did he catch a cab?’ That’s Charles M. Fortesque. I loved those movies!”
“Tell me another one!” T’aki said, leaping up onto the arm of the chair beside her.
“Well…” Sarah looked at his father, dimly aware that not everyone in the world was entertained by having some zealot recount old movie-plots, but he merely turned around and went quietly back to work on whatever he was fixing today. That left her with T’aki, bouncing in place and staring at her with his pleading, pale eyes and his brand-new spaceship. “Okay,” she said. “One more. My favorite Fortesque of all time: Aliens From Outer Space.”
T’aki chirped loudly and drew up his legs, all attention.
“Okay, so one fine evening, a spaceship comes to Earth and starts sucking people up in beams of light. Where the aliens come from is never explained. Why they are abducting people is never explained. What happens to all the people they have abducted, with the exception of our plucky heroine—”
“Is never explained,” T’aki said.
“You’re starting to get the hang of a Fortesque flick. So okay, our heroine is a simply amazing young actress who plays a physicist who is abducted out of her laboratory and wakes to find herself aboard the alien craft in a wooden cage. Now,” began Sarah, warming to the tale. “Far be it for me to wonder why a civilization advanced enough to master interstellar flight can’t build a decent holding cell, but in addition to having a wooden cage, the bars are clearly wide enough for our heroine to climb out through. I mean, clearly.”
“Does she?”
“Clearly not,” murmured Sanford.
“No, she doesn’t. She decides she’s trapped and spends several minutes looking very distressed while pulling on bars that are actually further apart than her shoulders. And then the door opens and in comes our first alien, who is in fact a giant starfish with an eye in his stomach. Our heroine takes two seconds to ponder this—one, two—and goes strutting over to seduce the starfish—er…” she amended, suddenly remembering she was talking to a three year-old. “To make him think she’s his friend so he’ll let her out of the cage.”
“That isn’t very nice,” said T’aki solemnly.
“No, but neither is abducting people off their planet, so I guess it evens out. The thing that always got me, however, is the speed with which she came up with this plan. I’m sorry, but if you can come to terms with the idea of seducing a giant starfish in just two seconds, this has to be a notion you’ve pondered long before you ever met one.”
Sanford made a noise, a kind of rattling cough. She paused expectantly, but he kept his back to her and his hands at work.
“Did she get out?” T’aki asked.
“Yes, she did, thanks to the starfish and the extremely liberal Italian censorship restrictions on film. Then off she runs in her underwear through a ship that looked, when it was on Earth, about the size of a schooner, but which is big enough on the inside not only to support an entire civilization of different aliens, but to have its own climate. She actually comes to one room that has a jungle in it. My dad and I once had a ripping good discussion trying to figure out the jungle,” Sarah recalled, smiling. “I argued that it was useful for producing oxygen.”
“There are far more efficient ways,” Sanford remarked.
“Which is what my dad said, but if they used machines, where would they get the wood to build their cages? See, the fun of watching Fortesque’s movies isn’t finding the holes, it’s patching them. Or at least admiring them. It takes real talent to be that bad.”
T’aki laughed, drumming his feet on the arm of the chair. “Bad is good.”
“Sometimes. But back to our heroine, who, after seventy minutes of various shenanigans, has made it to the command deck, where she finds that all the controls for operating the entire ship are neatly contained not just in one place, but in one device. And it’s a bathtub.”
“A bathtub?”
“A bathtub. Oh, it’s a nice bathtub,” she admitted, smiling dreamily into space. “And Fortesque went to great lengths to disguise the shower head with lights and the spigot with futurific plastic panels, but it is blatantly a bathtub. And while our heroine is trying to figure out whether the ship’s engines run on hot or cold running water, in from the shadows comes the king of the aliens. Remember the scene with the kids on the couch and the killer sludge?”
T’aki nodded, giggling.
“Same scene. The king comes gliding forward in a single sustained shot for four and a half minutes, which is plenty of time for you, the viewer, to be bored out of your skull, and also to see that the king is—” Sarah hesitated, looking around the room. She pointed. “See that magazine, honey? Can you hand it to me?”
Before T’aki could hop down, Sanford stretched across to the indicated shelf and passed her the mangled Cosmopolitan. He didn’t look to see what she did with it, but just went back to work.
Some of the pages were ripped out, presumably for Sanford to use as writing material, but it wasn’t long before Sarah found what she wanted. “There’s the alien king,” she said, pointing. “Otherwise known as a common household floor lamp.”
T’aki stared at it, clicking and purring, delighted.
“They painted up the glass globe to look like a giant eyeball, and wrapped the rod with pipe cleaners or something to make it look fuzzy, but yeah, it was a still very obviously a lamp, and there were three different shots where you could see the cord trailing behind the little dolly or whatever they had it standing on so they could roll it evilly around. First time I saw it, I actually
fell off the couch laughing.”
She passed the magazine back to Sanford. He took it without comment, glanced once at the photograph, and continued to work.
“Now after four and a half minutes of failing to operate a faucet, our heroine looks up and sees the king. She takes two seconds to ponder this—”
“One, two,” chanted T’aki.
“—and struts over to seduce the king, and this is the sheer brilliance of Fortesque’s movies, because while the ideas are bad and the writing is bad and the effects are bad, the casting is phenomenally good. Our heroine is able not only to hipshot her way over to a household appliance while staring smolderingly into its eye, she puts her hand up on this glass globe, which as I’ve said has been burning with at least a hundred-watt bulb in a continuous shot for four and a half minutes, and never loses an ounce of her panther-like heat and intensity, in spite of the fact that her hand audibly sizzles on contact. That is an amazing actress, and that is one of only two things I can ever think while watching that scene.”
“What’s the other think?” T’aki asked.
“To wonder why the king’s first words are, ‘So, you think to throw yourself upon my mercy,’ and not, ‘Ouch, bitch, my eye!’“
Sanford erupted in laughter. Both hands slammed down on the table; he rocked back, spraying the strange mix of rattles and broken whoops straight up at the ceiling. Sarah and T’aki both jumped, but he recovered first, joining his father in peals of giggles while she just sat and blushed.
“Bitch is actually a vulgar word,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to myself.”
Sanford flapped a hand at her, still laughing. He picked up his tools, wound himself down to chuckles, and got back to work.
“Fortesque’s movies were the best, but they were twenty years old by the time I even discovered them so they’re hard to find. They don’t even play them on TV anymore. I had a bunch on tape and they released a few on DVD, but the bottom dropped out of the sci-fi movie market when your ship showed up.”
