Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  It didn’t. Sam got up again, kicked dirt over the damp patch, and walked off. “She’s my caseworker too,” he called. “I’ll do what I damn well please.”

  “Father?”

  “Come inside now.” Sanford waited, watching until Sam was tucked up in his own house, before backing indoors and shutting the light away. Push her down and get inside that. He felt like spitting.

  But the ship in his son’s hands caught his eye. How she’d sat, telling stories and laughing as though she sat with friends. She talked of being a girl…he’d never thought of humans as ever being children, although of course he’d seen pictures, he knew they didn’t drop down whole from the sky. She talked of her father, her family. And when T’aki was gone, then out came her plans, her little courage, her guileless trust in him.

  ‘She’s dangerous,’ he thought suddenly. ‘She’s dangerous because you don’t see her as human. She could use that against you.’

  But she wouldn’t.

  ‘You can’t afford to believe that.’

  She was honest.

  ‘She’s one of the IBI.’

  But she was trying to help.

  He listened, but not even the black voice of caution could argue that.

  “Father?”

  T’aki had climbed up on the chair, on just the arm, as though Sarah were sitting in it even now. Sanford picked him up and held him, him and his ship both, and looked out the window at the empty road.

  “Does our ship look like this?” T’aki asked.

  “No, of course not. You’ve seen pictures of the ship.” He glanced at the toy. “Perhaps a little.”

  “Can I call it anything I want?”

  “It belongs to you now.”

  The boy thought, his little fingers stroking over the plastic wings. “The Fortesque Freeship is a good name.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Sanford, unsurprised.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sarah swiped her card at the gate and walked in, wishing she’d brought the van. It was stupid to drive the garbage-choked causeway of Section Seventeen just for a few minutes of air-conditioning in-between clients, but ugh, the heat was just an animal today. Her native co-workers assured her that it would start cooling off in September, but then it would also start to rain every day, and in addition to the new and improved smell that would create, she’d also be walking this road ankle-deep in trash-water. After that, it would be October and icing over. Then November, when the mercury might start dipping into single digits and possibly stay that way until late February. Then it would be storm season, and after the usual batch of tornados, it would be May and back in the nineties. All of which certainly seemed to prove Kate’s theory that they only put the aliens here because it was the worst place they had available to put them.

  Now it was Friday—a breezeless, cloudless, joyless Friday—and at just after nine o’clock in the morning, it was already ninety-three degrees and rising. They told her she’d get used to it, but there was no getting used to this kind of heat. Not the heat and not the muggy blanket of damp that kept the heat pressed up heavily against a body, along with all the hot, wet smells of the world, which, in Cottonwood, were Lovecraftian. She dreaded leaving the house, but honestly, she looked forward to the last railroad car on the first corner of the causeway where she had been made welcome all week long.

  And every day, after she’d done her walking and knocked on her doors and been shoved off porches and spat on and all the rest of what made up her working day, she gratefully intruded. Sometimes, she sat with T’aki on the green chair and chatted, or read magazines with him, or listened solemnly to his increasingly epic stories of the Fortesque Freeship and its eternal struggle with the evil tin cans of Earth. Sometimes she went with them to the Heaps, and although she wasn’t very useful yet at dump-diving, she tried to pull her weight. Sanford did take them to the ‘movies’ once afterwards, which was another run-down slum building, this one with a television set inside, and an alien who charged only two chits apiece to sit on the floor and watch whatever old tapes or DVDs he was able to salvage out of the Heaps. But it really didn’t matter what they did; she was just as happy to sit in the dirt playing with T’aki as she was watching Indiana Jones in a dark pavilion with fifty alien strangers, she’d just be happier to be doing it all in decent Northwest weather.

  Rounding the curve onto the causeway, Sarah heard the shrill call going out. She looked through the shacks and glimpsed movement, alien bodies darting through the alleys, ducking down here and there to watch her. It didn’t seem to be as many as there used to be when she first started. They were getting used to her, maybe. She hoped so.

  The street seemed empty as she walked, with everyone inside and out of the sun. They said the aliens weren’t bothered by extreme temperatures, but she wasn’t so sure. She made her rounds resolutely, passing the relatively cooler hours until high noon knocking on doors and smiling at the people who told her to fuck off. She took a few more reports—she’d once entertained the fantasy of being the first caseworker in her group to complete a census detail, but as it stood, she was fifty names short of done and half the people in her office had already finished theirs—and chatted with whoever would tolerate it, but she didn’t get much done and she knew it.

  She spent her lunch hour in the sweltering shack of a client, helping him move his depressing furniture around so that they could lay down the planks he’d purchased at the Heaps and make a ‘real’ floor. His evident pride as he measured, cut and placed each new board should have been heart-warming, but the heat killed any pleasure there might have been for her. As much as she tried to share his triumph in the finished project, all she could see was an ugly stretch of recycled lumber and a lot of heavy junk she was going to have to move on top of it. She felt ashamed and hypocritical, sure, but she also felt hot and sick and impatient and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about that.

  It was no better once that was finally done. The sun beat down on her unprotected head like a skillet and what little breeze blew at all was coming in directly over the Heaps; she found herself thinking, quite clearly and without much emotion, that Hell itself could not be worse than Cottonwood. Thank God she could go home or at least go back to the office to do pretend-work in an air-conditioned cubicle. The rest of her day seemed to stretch out for miles, wavering in the heat…but at the end of it was Sanford’s house.

  But why wait? She needed the emotional smoothie of a cute little kid playing Trucks before she got back to the spitting and shoving. She headed back toward the causeway, her briefcase dangling from her sweaty hand, seeing nothing but the trash-strewn road in front of her, thinking of nothing but Sanford’s open door and T’aki bouncing his hellos when he saw her, humming endless love-is’s in smiling, toneless distraction.

  “Hello, caseworker.”

  Samaritan seemed to come from nowhere, unfolding himself from the shade of a burned-out trailer to a sudden and menacing height, damned near at arm’s reach of her. Sarah leapt back, her heart suddenly and senselessly pounding, and lost her grip on her briefcase. It hit the ground and thumped over on its face. Samaritan’s dusty foot covered it in the next instant, before she could even think of bending down to grab it back.

  “You—” scared me, was how that wanted to end, but that would be a bad idea, wouldn’t it? And he was a client, no matter what else he was. He was her client. “Do you want something, Mr. Samaritan?” she asked, determined to stay calm, professional.

  “I’m sure starting to.” He took a swig of beer/bug food slurry and tossed the can he’d been carrying it in away into the ditch. “What’s that I smell?”

  “Please move your foot.”

  “I smell sweat.” He leaned in close, inhaling slow. His palps spread; his breath blew back at her, rancid, sickening. The feathery black wand-like things tucked in at his abdomen shot out unexpectedly, tickling at her chest and thighs as she jumped back. He buzzed loudly, rocking his head back and forth, but just as swiftl
y left off his miming when she tried to go around him. His arm snapped around her waist; he pulled her hard against him, spooning up against her back, enjoying her startled struggles.

  “I smell your neck sweat,” he said, palps fumbling at her throat from behind. “I smell your arm sweat.” He bent to suck a breath, ignoring her squirms as he nuzzled at her pits. Suddenly, his claspers bent out around her waist, nudging with shocking intimacy at her groin. Samaritan’s palps vibrated against her neck in a low purr. “I smell your thigh sweat.”

  “Let me know when you get to my foot sweat so I can go,” Sarah snapped. She sounded only angry. Good. Her heart was pounding, though, pounding right on her ribs. “Mr. Samaritan, give me my briefcase. This isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not joking.” He ducked down to rub his palps over her again, actually shoving them under the neck of her shirt to slide along her collarbones, tickling lightly between her breasts. He couldn’t possibly know how wrong that was, could he? Could he? “God, you smell good. Well, not good,” he amended thoughtfully, leaning back a little but still not letting go of her. “It’s like…It’s like eating chicken eggs. You know it’s wrong, but you get a taste for it.” The feathery brush-tips of his claspers tickled under her skirt. “It’s been years and you’d think I’d have forgotten, or at least changed my mind about how to remember it, but you—” He pulled her, struggling, even closer. “—smell so damn good.”

  The thorns along his side seemed to be digging at her back in pulses, as if he were rubbing himself sideways on her. Not scary on its own, but weird enough to fake it in a big way. Sarah succumbed to a quick spate of panic, just a few seconds’ worth, which Samaritan leaned back to watch. The causeway was empty, but the alleys weren’t. She kicked and twisted and gasped out short, shrill whimpers, and people were back there watching, just watching!

  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” Samaritan remarked. “What exactly is it that you think I’ll do to you?”

  She stared at him, pulled as far away as she could get (which wasn’t far), shivering in the heat.

  “You’re no different from the rest of them,” he told her. “You think you are, but you’re not. You’re my caseworker, right? You work for me, isn’t that what you always say? You call me Mister and you say sir, but under all that, you’re just another meat-sack afraid of the big, bad bugs.”

  “I am nuh-not!” She squirmed futilely in his effortless grip and snapped, “And that’s not fair! You’re trying to scare me!”

  “It’s not fair?” He rolled his eyes, scuttling out another low laugh. “It’s not fair,” he told the sky. “Look around you, caseworker. Fair doesn’t come here very fucking often. And I don’t have to try very hard,” he added. “See, I don’t have a cute little kid, so this is what I have to do to get your attention.”

  She stopped struggling and stood frowning in his uncomfortable clutch. “That’s not true.”

  “Yeah? How many times have you ever knocked on my door, caseworker?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it without speaking.

  Samaritan held up one hand and extended his longest finger. “Once,” he said solemnly. “One time. Not even one whole hour. And how many days have you walked right past me since then? How many times have you even said hello?”

  Damn him, she was blushing. “Well, you’re—”

  “I’m what?” he interrupted, and suddenly flared his mandibles, clicking in exaggerated bug-speak inches from her face. “I’m mean to you? You only work for the nice ones?”

  She had no answer.

  “I used to be nice.” He drew back. His claspers twitched and came out to tickle at her thighs again. His gaze unfocused. “I used to be a lot of things. You smell good.”

  “Th-Thank you.” That probably wasn’t the right answer, but she honestly didn’t know what else to say. “Please let go of me.”

  “You are so polite,” he said in a slow, wondering way. The feathery tips of his claspers slipped up under her skirt. He was fast. Before she could flinch or even suck in a breath to yelp, he’d brushed them all the way up her thighs to her panties and tucked them up again. “And so fucking sweet.”

  “That was very inappropriate!” she said. Tried to say. Squeaked. “Let go of me right now! I have got to get back to work!”

  “I am your work.” Samaritan put his other arm around her, took her wrist, and released her waist. She leapt back at once and he let her, but kept his grip, keeping her firmly tethered to him no matter how she struggled. “You don’t have to like it, but I am your fucking work just as much as fucking Sanford and his cute little kid.”

  “Fine,” she managed, prying futilely at his fingers. They were as good as steel, absolutely immoveable. “If there’s suh-something you want, I have s-some forms.”

  “You have some forms.” He eyed the briefcase he was still stepping on. Then he shrugged, or at least, came as close to a shrug as one of his kind could, and picked it up. “Come on, let’s have a look at your forms.”

  Every shred of common sense she had was screaming at her that this was not a good idea, but Samaritan let go of her and strolled away, still carrying her briefcase. He reached the causeway, turned toward his house and paused to look back at her.

  She didn’t move.

  ‘It’s my job,’ she thought bleakly. When that failed to budge her, she thought, sternly now, ‘What are you going to do, go back and ask for another stupid briefcase?’ and that did the trick. Her feet started moving and before she knew it, she was squeezing past him and his groping claspers into the dark oven of his house. She told herself it was just another juvenile game and tried not to see the way he scanned the empty causeway before shutting the door again. Shutting it, and tying it closed. He drew the curtains on his dingy windows, dropped the briefcase on a sagging sofa, and came toward her.

  She backed up, but there just wasn’t anywhere to go. The area in which they stood, his kitchen/living/dining room wasn’t much bigger than her bathroom. If she retreated much further, where would she be but in his bedroom? So she stopped.

  He didn’t.

  “Okay, I’m here. What is it that you want?” she demanded, tried to demand. Her voice cracked.

  Samaritan leaned in close again, palps shoving at her cheek. “I want to fuck,” he clicked. “Let’s requisition that, shall we?”

  She got back fast, banging her hip on the table in her speed to put it between them. He straightened up and watched her, squeezing snickers out through his snapping palps. It was a cute laugh on T’aki. It was hair-raising on Samaritan.

  “Relax,” he said, and suddenly jumped completely over the table and behind her, catching at her arm almost before she could grasp that he was really there. “Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. Human females like me, and do you know why?” He slipped his free hand around her waist, rubbing little circles over her stomach. “Because I’m never done until they are. Guaranteed.”

  “Let go,” she said. And yanked at his steely grip. Then pushed at him. And finally let out a shout and really fought, bouncing slaps and kicks harmlessly off his chitin.

  He let her, laughing, for a few seconds, then swung her around and shoved her flat on the table. Bang, and she was down, her cheek pressed painfully against the splintery wood, her chest crushed flat and breathless. He held her easily, with one hand. “Calm down,” he said.

  “Let go of me!”

  “I’ll let go when you calm down.” He reached past her to the refrigerator for a fresh beer. She heard the crack-hiss as he opened it. She heard the wet grunts as he drank. “I can wait.”

  She wanted to tell him to get off of her. She wanted to sound hot and strong and maybe even a little bored, as if this were tiresome but not terrifying. She wanted to tell him…but could think of nothing. She had no breath. She had no words. She couldn’t understand what was happening. The more she tried, the more the room just seemed to bleed out. What could he possibly do to her anyway? He was unisexual (having one gender, the ghost of
orientation muttered, the male gender), he shouldn’t even know what sex was.

  “I kind of like fucking humans, to tell the truth,” Samaritan remarked. “They’re warm. You may have noticed we don’t care a lot about the weather, but we do feel it, and to feel that hot body on the inside…” He exhaled in a low skree and rubbed his palps on her neck. “Very nice.”

  “Let m-me up r-right now. I’m c-calm.”

  “No. You know what I think is funny? I said I wanted to fuck, a perfectly harmless observation, and you just assumed I meant with you. That’s funny to me. That makes me think maybe you’d like a little chitin in you.” He bent over her, squeezing her between his rigid chest, the wooden table. “Is that it, caseworker? Are you curious? It’s okay to be curious.”

  “D-Don’t—”

  “Relax, I keep saying. I won’t hurt you.” He stroked a few strands of hair back from her face. “I have never hurt a human woman yet. Not the way you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not afraid of you!”

  “Yes, you are,” he replied evenly. “But you shouldn’t be. We’re just talking, you and I. Anything we do later, well, that’s later…and I promise you’ll have a good time. I know exactly what to do and I’m good at it. Hang on.” He lifted himself up just enough to untuck his claspers and wrap them around her waist. He settled again, the hard angles of his hips wedged between her buttocks and the feathery tips of his claspers tapping and rubbing under her skirt. “That’s better.”

  “Please get off me!”

  “That’s right, please and thank you.” He drank. She could feel his hand splayed open between her shoulderblades, relaxed, comfortable. “So polite. Like that first girl on the boat and I’m not sure she really counts. I don’t think she spoke much English.”

  “What g-girl? W-What boat?”

  She felt him still and then he uttered a short, humorless laugh and pushed his can of beer to the far end of the table. “I’m getting drunk,” he explained. “Maybe you should do some of the talking for a while.”