Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “Not yet.” One eye crimped against the smoke, he bent down and lifted the duffel. “Whatcha got in here, rocks?” He reached in a hand and pulled out a book. “Hah! The Web and the Rock!” He flipped open the cover. “Sorrel Park Public Library—no card…why were you so anxious to have me get out this?”

  She said desperately, “If the CPs had found it they could have pulled me in for theft.”

  “Good enough reason, I guess—but fifteen cents would have got you a card.”

  “And my name on somebody’s register.”

  He had pulled out an even heavier volume. “My God! Rorschach’s Test, Volume I, Basic Processes…but this must belong to—” he turned up the flyleaf, “—yeah.” He looked up and shook his head. “You never went to school.”

  “No.”

  “Jeez, I’d hate to have to test you.” She giggled. He asked with interest, “How’d you make out with it?”

  “Like Huck Finn’d say, it was interesting, but tough. I got through it.”

  “How’d you get hold of it?”

  “He was giving a lecture at the Y—you know, telling them what was being done for the kids? So I snuck it out of his briefcase when he was answering questions. But I haven’t touched his notes and markers. Was he mad?”

  “Mad!” He snorted. “But how could you get away with it? There was only grownups supposed to be there.”

  It was her turn to snort. “Listen, when I was six years old I used to carry bottles from Ma Slippec’s to Fitch’s in a doll carriage four-five times a day. Nobody ever asked me: whatcha got in there, little girl? Nobody ever asked me why I wasn’t in school, CPs, MPs, truant officers.”

  He said seriously, “I can understand that.”

  “I can’t. I know I’m bright—what else is different about me besides this?” She indicated her stringbean proportions.

  “You sure you’re bright, now?” He was grinning.

  “Why?”

  “Fitch gave you some money.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “How much?”

  “If you don’t know, it’s none of your business.”

  “I read him, so I know. Now you tell me how much.” She hadn’t taken time to examine the bill, and named the highest reasonable figure. “Five.”

  “No, ma’am. Twenty dollars.”

  “You’re nuts!”

  His single brow rose to an even more laughable shape. “Didn’t you even look at it?”

  Exasperated, she hooked a forefinger in her pocket, dug out the bill, and spread it carefully on a clean spot among the dirty dishes. It was a twenty. She looked at him suspiciously. “Did you have anything to do with this?”

  “I haven’t any reason to do anything of that kind, Shandy.”

  She had to take him at his word. “Wow, this is more than all the money I ever had added up together!”

  “Why’d he give it to you?”

  “What are you talking about?” She drew her dark brows together. “To help me out.”

  “Kind of sudden, giving you twenty right away just because you saw me”—his grin broadened—“holding up the lamppost.”

  Her heart beat faster. “So what?”

  “How’d I get to see you, when you’d been practically the invisible girl around here, these thirteen years?”

  She got the drift at last. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered.

  “How come your Ma Slippec got picked up by the CPs just two hours later?”

  The words rose to her lips: you want to smear everybody with the dirt you deal in. But she knew it wasn’t so. She glanced up and saw Jake picking his teeth and watching them impatiently. They were the only customers in the hiatus between supper and aftermovie, and he was anxious for them, having eaten, to Beat-It so he could duck out and hoist a couple from a jug of Ma Slippec’s corn. He was a dirty man, but not a bad one. Evil in a clean white shirt had just never occurred to her before. Not Fitch.

  “So why did he give you the twenty?”

  “For a Band-Aid on his conscience.”

  “Right.”

  She looked down and played with crumbs. Jason asked suddenly, “He ever dandle you on his knee, or anything like that?”

  “No…he did clip me on the ear once for busting one of his bottles, but I never held it against him.”

  “So he’s no loss.”

  He didn’t understand that. She had known Fitch for ten years. It was the loss of a ten-year belief that you knew someone very well. “But why would he do a thing like that?”

  He drew in deeply on his cigarette. “The government is thinking of opening up Sorrel Park.”

  She digested this for a moment, but was too tired to care what it might mean to her. “What will they do about the Dump?”

  “That’s what they haven’t figured out yet.”

  “I haven’t heard this around.”

  “Fitch did. I guess he’s got contacts.”

  I got spies, she had told Fitch. She guessed it had meant more than a kid’s game to him.

  “Anyway, he’s been running a blind pig eight or nine years, and it was okay as long as the Sore was closed up; nobody cared too much. People wanted the stuff, and fancy goods weren’t coming in. The police have gone easy on bootlegging and petty crime as long as it didn’t reflect on the rest of the state, or the country. People on the outside didn’t know about it. But once the Sore is open we gotta clean up. That’s why the CPs are busting up the stills.”

  “And Fitch?”

  “Like I say, he’s been running a blind pig. He knows he’ll have to give it up, but he doesn’t want to go to jail over it. He wants to be all ready for a nice fresh start. He figured he’d strike a good bargain with the CPs and the MPs: Ma Slippec to them, you to us. Buttering the bread on both sides.”

  “But I’m not valuable,” said Shandy. “Not from his point of view. I have no psi.”

  “He said you were different,” Jason said. “He didn’t know why, but that it might be worth our while to find out.”

  Shandy picked up the bill and folded it into a wad.

  “So you see that money’s kind of dirty.”

  “I never did anything dirty to get it.” She shoved the bill down where she hoped to have a cleavage one day, but it only crackled down her washboard chest and lodged in a fold of her jersey.

  He had recoiled a little, but he only said quietly, “I wasn’t trying to take it away from you…what I want to know, Shandy, is—if you’re so bright, why didn’t you figure Fitch?”

  She thought, why is he willing to sit here and talk like this, when it’s getting so late? He wouldn’t have understood the answer she had for his question: Fitch had been an unemotionally accepted and unquestioned part of her life for ten years. Aside from Ma Slippec she had no-one else, and without him there would be a hiatus in her spirit. “I can’t read minds, Jason.”

  His eyes clouded. “Well, maybe I’ll tell you something now. I can’t read yours.”

  She sat very still. “Not at all?”

  “No. You’re an Impervious.”

  “Is that—is that what’s different about me?” It explained a lot. She felt a wild excitement rising in her.

  “Oh, I think Fitch’s story was probably hogwash. But this is one genuine thing. If there’s anything else,” he added cheerfully, “we’ll find it out.”

  Oh, no you won’t, Jason Hemmer! My plans have changed!

  He picked up the check without looking at it, and dug in his picket. “You know, you don’t realize how hard it is for me to talk to a person I can’t read. It’s a nice change, though. Talk about change,”—he poked around in his palmful of coins—“I hope we don’t have to use that money of yours.”

  “You can wash dishes!”

  He laughed. “Yo
u think they really get washed here? Listen,”—he turned serious—“maybe you know now why you managed to stay inconspicuous.”

  “Fitch greased a few palms, saving me up for now?”

  “Ah, now you’re getting nasty-minded, and I liked you better the other way. Save the crack! No—Fitch isn’t that complicated. Most normal people have latent or vestigal psi. It’s a lot stronger in babies and little kids, but it’s a kind of clumsy and inarticulate thing and it withers away when better methods of communication develop. But adults can still feel the presence of people they can’t see, most of the time unconsciously, or nobody could ever hide. With you it’s different. Anybody who notices you has to practically tread on your toes first. I even have to concentrate hard before I can see you in anybody else’s mind. You’re the first complete Imper I’ve ever come across. That’s why I whistled.”

  “Is that right!”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” He had that cockeyed grin, now, that she had expected, looking over the parapet. “Grow up a little, Shandy. Maybe I’ll whistle again.”

  “Don’t wait for me!” she snapped. As he stood up, still smiling, she said, “I want to go”—she jerked her head—“back there.”

  He sat down again. “I’ll wait for that.”

  So wait, amuse yourself, read about Rorschach’s test. She did not turn her head on the way to the Ladies, although she had no intention of seeing or being seen by Jason Hemmer again. With twenty in her pocket she could afford to leave behind the duffel with her ragged possessions. When she was inside with the door closed she transferred the money back to her jeans and reached up on tiptoe to unlatch the tiny frosted window. Nobody but herself could ever have expected to get out by it, and even she had her doubts. The last joker who had painted here, God knew when, had cheerfully slopped the guck over latch and hinges; she had to kneel in the filthy sink and wrench with all her strength to get the thing open. The waft of fresh night air that came in was something the like of which the place had never known.

  With one foot on the sink rim and hands supported on the upraised window, now never to be closed in a thousand years, she hooked a leg over the sill. She worked like a contortionist to get the other one over, and inched out writhing on her hard hips. She had to turn her head to get it through, and nearly lost an ear on the sill.

  Grimacing with pain, she was about to let go, when she found out why Jason had been so willing to let her sit and talk. It was too late.

  Two hard hands clamped on her ankles; a voice in the dark said, “It’s okay, Buck; I got her.” And she came down into the upreached arms of two tall grinning MPs in tans and armbands (not flowered).

  Sunburst: 2

  My name is Sandra Ruth Johnson. I was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011. Both my parents were born here; their families had settled in thirty or forty years before. My father’s name was Lars Johnson, and it was his grandfather, Olaf Jensen, who came here from Denmark and changed his name to make it sound more American, though the family still kept giving their kids first names like Nels and Kristin.

  My father was a kind of ratty, vital little man with freckles and white eyelashes. He was a steam fitter at the power plant, and he had arthritis badly in his hands. The fingers were hard and callused and permanently curled from handling pipes and wrenches. I think he took drugs for it, but even so he never could lay his hand out flat on a table.

  My mother was the big soft type of woman that always seems to marry a little scrawny energetic man. Her name was Katherine O’Brian, and her parents were born in Ireland. She had very black hair and blue eyes. She cleaned offices at the plant while they were running the thermonuclear pile, and after the Blowup, when the old coal plant was put to use again, she went over there until I was born, like most of the other workers who survived, and my father kept on wrenching pipes.

  I know that some of the people involved were able to have children soon afterwards, but though my parents had had the injections against r-sickness they hadn’t had any kids before, and then they were sterile for about seventeen years, and I guess never expected to have any. And my father had been hit in the back by a piece of hot material, and the wound never quite healed. I imagine my arrival was kind of a surprise. My father was forty-seven when I was born, and my mother forty-two. I think. I was three and a half when they died, and since I can’t remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can’t have really known them for more than two years, so maybe I haven’t got everything down correctly.

  I couldn’t tell you whether they were any different from other people, or any better. I only know that I loved them. My father used to dance me around the room, singing, “Shandy, Shandy, sugar and candy!” and we played all those games that most very little kids play with their fathers. My mother used to wallop me once in a while, but I never considered this particularly unfair; she wore clean cotton housedresses so full of starch they crackled. Not like Ma Slippec—though there was some kind of queer suffocated goodness in her too.

  I remember very clearly the day my father went into the hospital for the last time. I was nearly three and a half by then. After my mother had packed a few things for him she took the dressing off his back and went into the bathroom to make a fresh one so he could start off clean. I had had a popsicle and came in because my hands were sticky. I was supposed to stay out of the way but they were upset and didn’t hear me. My father was sitting on the bed with nothing on but his briefs; his back was towards me…

  * * * *

  She lifted her head and looked out the window, sucking the top of the pen; a small puff of summer cumulus moved blindly across the field of a vision haunted by memory:

  A sunburst with twisting rays of exploded scar, and between the rays thick brown keloids; a humped center of ruined flesh, cracked and oozing, ebbing out beyond the cancerous moles into coin-size blue-black naevi, paling and decreasing till they washed into freckles on white skin.

  She jerked her mind away, past the man at the desk and the other one watching immobile in the corner, down to the scribbled pages.

  * * * *

  …heard a noise and turned. His mouth opened wide; he was about to yell at me and then he stopped. He looked terribly shocked for a moment; I don’t know what he saw in my face—I’m not quite certain of what I was thinking, but I do know what I saw. He took a good deep breath and said in a much more gentle voice than he had been going to use before, “Run out and play, kid.” I went back out and played and after a few minutes he came down with his suitcase and kissed me goodbye. I never saw him again.

  We lived over the grocery next door to the Slippecs, and my mother left me with them when she went to the funeral. I didn’t do any crying, and I heard Ma Slippec say to Karel, “That kid gives me the shivers.”

  When my mother came back from the funeral in her black dress with her eyes swollen, she hugged me and cried again and said, “You just don’t know what it’s all about, do you, sweetie?” But adults don’t realize how sensitive even not very bright children are to these things. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the children of the oldest Slippec boy and girl, and as far as I can tell they’re about dull normal.

  My mother had stopped work when she had me, but when my father died she had to go back to her old job and she had the Slippecs take care of me. They were a rowdy lot, always having the kind of fights that blow over like summer thunderstorms—but they weren’t mean. My mother didn’t care much for them, especially because the old man was in jail again as usual, but she figured if Ma Slippec could keep her own six kids alive and healthy she could do the same for me.

  But then my mother started coming home more tired and sick every day. First she couldn’t get my supper, and after a while she could hardly get me to bed. I began to be afraid. My father had gone away so casually…

  One day she couldn’t go to work, and she stayed in bed for a few days—she was terribly pale, and
her skin was hot. Ma Slippec called the ambulance for her, finally, and packed her some clothes in the same suitcase my father took. She smiled at me from the stretcher, and said she’d be back soon—but she’d become thin…her hair was so black, and her skin so white against it…

  * * * *

  Shandy put the pen aside and lined up the sheets, and folded them across, down over her closed childhood. She got up, handed them to the man at the desk, and went over to the window.

  Outside she could see a courtyard, surrounded by a brick wall with iron gates. There were three jeeps parked in the court. She had been brought here by one of them the night before. Beyond that there was an asphalt pavement; an electrified fence, sentry-guarded, enclosed all of this and also a huge acreage empty of everything but grasses, wild flowers, and the Dump.

  A great circle bounded by a wall of heavy fieldstone covered with concrete, topped by barbed wire, and implanted with several dozens of huge antennas emitting the buzzing scrambler circuit known as the Marczinek Field. It was impossible to see what was inside the Dump, and she did not want to. Sometimes the dull wash of a savage roar of sound beat against the windowpanes. Other times there was only the buzz of the Field.

  Beyond the Dump, the vast meadow, and the fence, there was a deep culvert, last ditch against the road threading the world outside.

  Urquhart cleared his throat rather peremptorily and she came back to the little table and sat down. He was a youngish balding man with horn-rimmed glasses; his elbow was resting firmly on Rorschach’s Test: he was its owner. He pulled a thread from a frayed cuff and folded his pink rawboned hands. He had made little red-ink notes on the margins of her ms., which she imagined as: Use of “ratty” in conj. w. father—signif? and Sight of scar—poss. trauma?