Carmine climbed out and came around the front of the van. “I had some business in town. She wanted me to look you up. See if you need more money and like that."
"As long as the checks from the estate keep coming, we're cool,” said Clyde. “How'd you find me?"
"I went over to your place. This woman told me you'd be here."
"Annalisa's nurse."
"Whatever.” Carmine examined the bottom of his shoe. “How's she making it ... Annalisa?"
"It's slow, but she'll be fine.” Clyde waved at the van. “This is new, huh?"
Carmine looked askance at the jack-o-lantern. “Milly's trying to encourage tourism. She's putting on a Halloween festival and all kinds of shit."
"You think that's wise? All you need is for a couple of tourists to get picked off by the lurruloo."
"They aren't a problem anymore."
"What do you mean?"
"They're not a problem. Milly handled it."
"What are you talking? She wiped them out?"
"That's not your business."
Despite having less than fond memories of the lurruloo, Clyde found the notion that they had been exterminated more than horrifying, but was unable to think of an alternative way by which Milly could have handled it.
"Jesus, it's fucking cold!” Carmine jammed his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet. “So what's life like in the republic?"
"Less benefits, little bit more freedom. It's a trade-off."
"Doesn't sound like so good a deal to me."
"That's your opinion, is it?"
Carmine gave a dry laugh. “I got to book. Any messages you want sent back?"
"How's Roberta and Mary Alonso?"
"They're in dyke heaven, I guess. They were married a few weeks back."
"No shit?"
"Milly made a law saying gay marriage is legal. Now she expects all the fruits to flock to Halloween.” Carmine spat off to the side. “Got to hand it to her. She knows how to get stuff done."
"She makes the trains run on time."
Puzzled by the reference, Carmine squinted at him, then walked around to the driver's side of the van.
"Did Helene Kmiec kill her husband?” Clyde asked.
"How the fuck should I know?” Carmine started the engine.
"I'm serious, man. It's bugging me. It's the only question I have about Halloween I don't know the answer to."
"That's the only one you got?” Carmine backed out of the parking space and yelled, “Man, did you even know where you were living?"
Clyde watched until the black speck of the van merged with the blackness of the street, wishing he'd asked after Joanie. He reached for a cigarette, the reflex of an old smoker, and said, “Fuck it.” He walked along the block to a newsstand that was opening up and bought a pack of Camel Wides. Out on the sidewalk, he lit one and exhaled a plume of smoke and frozen breath. Maybe Milly had blown up the entrance to the lurruloo's caves, sealing them in—maybe that was all she had done. What, he asked himself, would the penalty be for the genocide of a new intelligent species? Most likely nobody would give a damn, just like him. They had their own problems and couldn't be bothered. He thought about the 57th parallel and what might lie below it, and he thought about Annalisa's sharp tongue and wily good humor, subsumed beneath a haze of drugs. He thought about a local bar, once a funeral home, that now was painted white inside, every inch and object, with plants in the enormous urns and round marble tables, usually filled with seniors—it troubled him that she liked to drink there.
"Hey, buddy!” The newsstand owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and unruly wisps of gray hair lying across his mottled scalp like scraps of cloud over a wasteland—he beckoned to Clyde from the doorway and said, “You can smoke inside if you want.” When Clyde hesitated, he said, “You're going to freeze your ass. What're you doing out there?"
Clyde told him, and the old man said, “She's always late opening on Saturday. Come on in."
With Clyde at his heels, the owner walked stiff-legged back inside, took a seat on a stool behind the counter, picked up a lit stogie from an ashtray and puffed on it until the coal glowed redly.
"Screw those bastards in the legislature telling us we can't smoke in our own place,” said the owner. “Right?"
"Right."
There must have been a thousand magazines on the shelves: drab economic journals; bright pornos sealed in plastic; hockey, boxing, football, wrestling, MMA, the entire spectrum of violent sport; women's magazines with big, flashy graphics; People, Time, Rolling Stone; magazines for cat fanciers and antique collectors and pot smokers, for deer hunters and gun freaks and freaks of every persuasion; magazines about stamps and model trains, Japanese films and architecture, country cooking and travel in exotic lands; magazines in German, Italian, French. Clyde had patronized dozens of newsstands in his day, but never before had he been struck by the richness of such places, by the sheer profligacy of the written word.
"They tell you a man's home is his castle, but you know how that goes,” said the owner, winking broadly at Clyde. “The little woman takes control and pretty soon you can't sit in your favorite chair unless it's covered in a goddamn plastic sheet. But a man's place of business now, that's his kingdom. That's how come I named this place like I did."
"What's that?” Clyde asked.
The owner seemed offended that he didn't know. “Kingdom News. People come in sometimes thinking I'm a Christian store, and I tell ‘em to check out the name. Herschel Rothstein, Proprietor. I ain't no Christian. The point I'm making, shouldn't nobody tell a man he can't smoke in his damn kingdom."
Clyde wondered if the owner and his newsstand might not have been summoned from the Uncreate, perhaps by the same entity that had visited him after his ordeal in the Tubes, so as to pose an object lesson. He had been considering kingdoms in grandiose terms, a place requiring a castle, at least a symbolic one, and great holdings; yet now he recognized that a kingdom could be a small, rich thing, an enterprise of substance somewhere below the 57th parallel. A newsstand, a bar, a fishing camp—someplace quiet and pristine where Annalisa would heal and thrive.
A young woman dressed in cold weather yuppie gear came in to buy a paper and wrinkled her nose at the smell of the old man's cigar. He flirted outrageously with her and sent her away smiling, and they sat there, the owner on his stool, Clyde on a stack of Times-Leaders, laughing and smoking and talking about the bastards in the state legislature and the bigger bastards down in Washington, recalling days of grace and purity that never were, forgetting the wide world that lay beyond the door, happily cursing the twenty-first century and the republic in its decline, secure for the moment in the heart of their kingdom.
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Short Story: MERMAID by Robert Reed
There was a time when I felt cursed by a demanding and very accurate memory. But I've recovered nicely from that affliction, and now the past is a gray realm full of gaping holes and possibilities. I think that my first copy of F&S , bought on a newsstand, published a story by Gregory Benford, and this would have been the end of high school or early college, and I have a rather clear and very pleasant memory of reading Benford's Jupiter adventure while camping in the bluffs above the Missouri River. Funny, but Jupiter seems more real to me now than that boy sitting in the wilderness woods.—Robert Reed
I was netting the dead out of my swimming pool. Last night's storm had swept every bug and lost leaf into the chlorinated water. But at least our air turned cool and dry. That's why most every window in the house was open. That's why I heard the doorbell ringing while I was outdoors. Right away, I dropped the net and started inside, almost but not quite running. I was passing the bedroom when the bell rang a second time, and a third time right after that. Somebody was impatient, which made me impatient, and that's why I didn't look through the peephole before opening up.
I wished I had. I didn't know the man from a can of paint, yet with a glance, I could tell he was a
meth addict. The gaunt features, the tooth-impoverished grin. Who knew when he had slept last? Or eaten? Or enjoyed a normal, coherent thought? But he could still smile, and my front door was open, nothing between us but perishable manners. “My car broke down,” he began. Which explained the red wreck parked in the vicinity of my front curb, and that's all I noticed for the time being. I looked back at him, and he shook his head hard enough to make the long, greasy black hair jump. “Can I use your phone, call for help?"
I waited a few moments, pretending to think it through. Then with a firm voice, I told him, “No."
He pretended not to hear me. “Dad will help,” he promised. Maybe he was talking to me, maybe himself.
From what I understand, meth makes a soul feel supercharged, but the body takes a wicked beating. The stranger was ten or fifteen years younger than me, which put him in his theoretical prime, but he was stringy and spent like you rarely saw outside of hospitals. Somehow I couldn't imagine this little twig pulling a gun or knife on me. He was pathetically, profoundly helpless. If he had ever owned any weapon, it was pawned for cash. Or stolen. Or lost. That was the kind of ragged, exhausted poverty that was standing on my front porch.
"Your phone?” he asked again.
"No way,” I snapped.
My rebuff took both of us by surprise. Slowly, as my criminal lack of charity became evident, the young fellow transformed himself into an appalled and righteously defiant creature.
"Why not?” he asked.
"Because you're scary,” I said.
His astonishment was total. Was he scary? Really? Lifting his empty hands, he gawked at the bony relics, wiggling fingers while taking his own measure. Then he dropped them, or rather, he let the hands fall, his fatigue that deep, that taxing. Even his voice sounded beaten when he asked, “Even if you hand me your phone? I don't need to bother you."
"Go away,” I told him, starting to close the door.
He was lost, unable to piece together any response. But as the big oak door shut in his face, he decided this was wrong—an injustice of the worst magnitude—and his reaction was to step toward me too late, the door latched and then locked before he could throw any of his feeble weight against it.
Looking through the little peephole, I wondered how long I should wait before calling 911.
The druggie on my porch muttered a few curses.
"Go away,” I called out. But trying not to shout. Trying to keep the house both safe and quiet.
For another moment, the young man was trapped. Pride and anger kept him standing his ground while that soggy head tried to find a new direction for his miserable life.
I grimaced, holding my breath.
Then a new voice entered the contest. Muted by the door and by distance, I heard a young woman calling out, “What's happening? Won't he help us?"
In the peephole, a second shape was moving. I went to the kitchen window and looked at the derelict car again, and that's when I finally noticed the girl. She was walking across my yard. It took me a breath or two to realize that she belonged to both the vehicle and the half-dead druggie. She was that different, that unexpected. I saw long red hair and assumed that the attached face would be prematurely old and wrinkled. But it wasn't. She wasn't. I'm not claiming that she would have stood her own among the finalists of a major beauty pageant, but then again, she might have. Her youth was obvious. Her beauty snuck up on me. Even after a long stare through the kitchen curtains—long enough for her to come most of the way across my grass—I was only beginning to appreciate the tiny nose and blue eyes and that innocent, lovely mouth, each feature combining into something just a little short of gorgeous.
Startled is an inadequate word for my emotions just then.
Tenderly, she asked her companion, “What's wrong, darling?"
Adrenaline and embarrassment gave the fellow new strength. “The idiot won't help us,” he complained with an injured tone. “He told me—can you believe this—that I was scary?"
The girl seemed as injured as he was. Her pretty face dipped, and she chewed on her bottom lip before asking, “Should I speak to him?"
"No!” he snapped.
"Then we should leave,” she said, her tone nothing but reasonable.
By then she was standing at the bottom of the porch steps—a small-framed woman wearing an oversized shirt, her breasts big enough to be noticed and the wide hips covered with jeans sawed off down by the ankles. Simple flipflops rode on her colorless feet. Somebody had punched a hole through the old belt that held up her jeans, long enough that its pointed end reached all the way around to the small of her back.
She looked seventeen. Or maybe that was my brain playing games with me. Nobody goes to prison for a seventeen-year-old. But fifteen isn't a safe age, and that was my better guess. Fifteen years of life rode on those elegant, still-growing bones, and I was a beast for what I was thinking, watching her little white hands reach up to her companion, halfway catching him as he stumbled down the first step—catching him with the deftness born out of practice and the instincts of a natural nurse.
He said a few words; I couldn't make them out.
"That's all right,” she told him. If she was five feet tall, it was because of her sandals. Tucked beneath one scarecrow arm, she said, “We'll find help somewhere. Come on now, come with me."
Her boyfriend was nearly a foot taller, and I doubt that he weighed 130. Wrapped together, they crossed the grass, and after another quick conversation beside the car, they turned right, working their way up the street. But most of my neighbors were old people scared sick by the local news channels, and the odds of any of them opening their homes to that character were minimal at best.
I nearly followed them. Or I like to think that I wanted to help. But then the girl vanished, and with that, my frail charity was lost.
When I finally stepped outside, the mysterious couple had vanished around the corner, presumably ringing doorbells along Baker Boulevard. The left-behind car was a red Ford Focus—from the first year or two of the model's history, which made it unreliable at its inception. A lot of miles and hard abuse had been endured over the last decade-plus, including a mashed-in rear bumper. I looked through a grimy window. Not one door was locked. Keys were dangling in the ignition. Except for the traffic out on Baker, nobody was in sight. So I opened the passenger door and then the glove compartment, finding nothing but the original owner's manual still in its plastic sleeve, unread. Then I shut the door and walked around back, studying the license plate. If somebody happened past, I'd explain that I was concerned for the fate of an underaged girl. An older, drug-infected adult male was putting her in peril; any good citizen could agree with that assessment. And if the couple returned suddenly, I would play that good-citizen role, openly asking who she was and which adult should I call first.
And that's when long red hair reappeared at the corner.
Kneeling down, I hid behind the car. An SUV was coming up Baker, its engine solid and steady. Waving her arms, the girl got the driver to stop, and she looked inside, speaking to a passenger before pointing at someone that I couldn't see anymore. Her nodding told the rest. She climbed into the back seat and the car rolled forward and stopped again. It took another minute to load up the addict. Then the Good Samaritans hit the gas, carrying them wherever they needed to be.
Trying to be quick as well as efficient, I studied the derelict. I wrote the license number and VIN on my left palm. Then with the keys, I opened the trunk. But it was as empty as possible, the spare and jack both lost, or maybe sold for a dollar or two. Finally I took an inventory of the various half-eaten meals deposited on the back seat. What clues did the trash offer? Nothing that I could see for myself. But as I sat in the front seat, smelling old food and the louder odor of unwashed flesh, I tried to find a prosaic explanation for why that young girl hadn't carried a purse with her. And why she was wearing the oversized clothes. And what array of unlikely factors would bring together two such dissimilar souls.
None of this was my business.
A reasonable voice kept telling me that I should do nothing, that I should forget this right now.
But I couldn't.
I stepped back inside. The bedroom door was still closed, and I stood in the hallway for several minutes, touching the knob but otherwise doing nothing. I was listening, waiting. Usually this kind of silence was good news. Usually. Then I went back outside to finish cleaning the pool, and when that chore was done, I walked out on the dock. No other body of water in the county was as big as this lake—a dark round reservoir that was deeper than the casual eye would guess. Living on the shoreline added eighty thousand to the value of my house. One of these days, I'd run out of money and have to sell this place. That's what I was thinking about, and then twenty other topics came to mind. Then I slipped through the back door and found the bedroom door opened a little ways. Which was a signal. I pushed it open far enough to look inside, and from the darkness, she said, “Just a little longer."
"I'm out here,” I said.
She told me, “I know."
I went around the house, quietly cleaning up every little mess. Then it was evening and nothing had changed in the house, and I thought to look out the kitchen window again.
The broken car was gone.
I stepped outside and studied the oil stain on the pavement, and I went back in, and while making dinner for two, I called an old friend, asking for a very large favor.
FSF, October-November 2009 Page 23
