by Nisi Shawl
“Come now.” Good Boy’s tone had turned suddenly cajoling. He stepped quickly toward her, almost running. “I am aware you got it. Hand it over. All gonna be well.”
“Hand what over?” Unnerved by his proximity, she put her hands in her pockets to prove that they were empty and felt something hard and slick.
Dr. Thompson’s water pistol. She pulled it out. “This?”
Ivorene’s teeth gleamed against her wide-stretched lips in a glad smile. “At last!” Good Boy received the gun reverently, cradling it in upturned palms as he examined it. The smile faded. “This a toy?”
“Good Boy, it’s all we have!”
He aimed it at her. “It loaded?” And shot her full in the face.
Kressi choked, coughed, swallowing salty water and wiping it from her eyes. She heard him laughing, heard him stop, heard the clatter of something hitting the yurt’s floor. Felt shaking arms wrap around her damp head and haul it closer, pressing it up against cloth-covered flesh. She fought free, but when she could see again there was something different—
“Mom?”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me outta my name like that! Just because I happen to be your—”
“Ivorene!” She nestled back into her mother’s arms once more. For however long she could.
“New areas of conscious awareness can be developed, beyond the current conscious comprehension of the self. With courage, fortitude, and perseverance the previously experienced boundaries can be crossed into new territories of subjective awareness and experience.”
Stars shone through the yurt’s many windows. Everything else was dark till Kressi held her lighter to the three candles in front of her. Three long flames leapt up, wavering golden fingers that quickly steadied and grew still. Two people sat at the table, two biocomputers containing at least that many control metaprograms. One of them happened to have given birth to the other.
Dr. Thompson, Captain Yancey, and a dozen others waited to watch the night’s proceedings through the live feed. A sheet from the printer contained a list of their questions.
Ivorene reached around the candles to grasp her daughter by her wrist. “Who do you think we should get for them to talk to?” she asked. Her palm slid against her daughter’s in an almost unconscious clasp.
You, Kressi wanted to say, but no, this was research. Talking to Ivorene wasn’t an option right now. Wasn’t always going to be one. Not with her mother. “You decide this time.”
Sensitive instruments recorded and broadcast Ivorene’s reply: “Good Boy.”
Kressi sat up in her chair, planted her feet more firmly on the floor, and released her mother’s hand.
“…the bodies of the network housing the minds, the ground on which they rest, the planet’s surface, impose definite limits. These limits are to be found experientially and experimentally, agreed upon by special minds, and communicated to the network. The results are called consensus science.”
(All quotes are from John C. Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments, second edition, 1974, Bantam Books, New York, NY.)
Little Horses
The white candle on top of her dresser had burned dirty that morning. When she stood up from her prayers she saw its glass sooting up black. Big Momma would say that meant danger of some kind. But what? To who? Not Carter. It was after Carter’s funeral Big Momma had made her promise to burn it.
Uneasily, Leora turned her gaze away from the boy beside her on the car’s back seat. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at him. And sometimes, for the same reasons, it hurt.
It was her job, though, keeping an eye on him. Leora did her duty. Especially today; might be he was who the candle had been warning her about. If Big Momma had a phone, she could have called her and found out.
If it was her own self in danger, that didn’t matter. Not that she’d commit the sin of suicide, but it wasn’t natural she should be living on after her child.
In case her suspicions were right, Leora had stayed close as she could by the door to the boy’s rooms when his teacher came that morning. She’d cut his sandwich in extra tiny pieces, even lifting the bread to check the chicken salad surreptitiously with her finger for bones. Left the lunch dishes for the maid to clear while she fussed at nothing in the basement, keeping an eye on him building his boat models till his mother came and insisted they go outside.
“Take the car,” she suggested, standing on the stairs in one of her floaty chiffon numbers, designed to hide her weight. Against Mr. McGinniss’s wishes, his wife had hired a new chauffeur. Now she needed to prove he wasn’t a waste of money.
Outside the car’s windows, Belle Isle’s spare spring beauty waltzed lazily around them as they followed the road’s curves. The man seemed to understand his business. Not real friendly, but then he wasn’t getting paid to talk to the nanny. The 1959 Cadillac was the McGinnisses’ third best car, last year’s model. He had it running smooth and fine; she could barely hear the engine.
He had known the best way to take to the park, too, staying on course as the street name changed from Lake Shore to Jefferson and passing up the thin charms of Waterworks Park without hesitating one second. And he had circled the stained white wedding cake of the Scott Fountain as many times as the boy asked him. Now he steered them past some people fishing, practicing for the Derby coming in June.
Without looking, Kevin’s hand sought and found Leora’s. He was all of six years old. Six-and-a-half, he would have said. His fingers stretched to curl over the edge of her pinkish palm, the tips extending between her knuckles. Not such a high contrast in color as it could have been. His daddy was what they called “Black Irish,” which was only about his hair being dark and curly and his eyes brown and his skin liable to take a tan easier than some white folks.
A gentle turn, and the road ran between the waters of Lake Tacoma and the Detroit River. Kevin’s hand nestled deeper into her own. She let her eyes sweep slowly away from the window, over the car’s plush interior and the back of the driver’s head, the pierced-glass barrier dividing him from the rear seat, to the boy’s snub-nosed profile. A pause; then she slid her glance past him through the far window to the Canadian shore. So much the same. But different. A different country. Slaves had escaped to Ontario a hundred years ago. Some of them settled there and never came back.
The driver spoke unexpectedly. “Here’s the boat museum site coming up, Mester McGinniss.” A pile of bricks, low and flat, ugly even in the late afternoon sun, occupied the road’s left side. Holes gaped for windows. The driver honked his horn at a man sitting hunched over on a sawhorse with his back to them and turned sharply onto Picnic Way, stopping right on the road. Two red trucks and a beat-up black-and-purple sedan squatted on the muddy lot around the half-finished museum. “You want to get out, Mester McGinniss, take a look around?” What was there to look at they couldn’t see from where they were sitting? With Kevin’s clean loafers in mind, Leora told the driver to keep driving. Time enough for them to visit when it was open; Kevin wasn’t like most boys his age, excited by earthmovers and heavy machinery.
They headed for the island’s center. The Peace Carillon loomed up, narrow and white like that black-burning candle. Usually Belle Isle’s spacious vistas calmed Leora’s spirit, but not today.
At Central they turned east again, toward the island’s wilder end. “Will we see any deer?” Kevin asked.
“No tellin,” Leora answered.
“I think we should get out when we get to the woods. They’re never going to walk up close to a car.” He took his hand back to hold himself up off the seat cushions with two stiff arms, a sure sign of determination. “We could hide ourselves behind some trees.”
Leora was about to tell him about the one time she’d seen them there, a whole herd, eight or ten wild deer, crossing Oakway bold as you please. But the driver interrupted her thoughts. “A fine idea, Mester McGinniss,” he said, as if he was the one to de
cide those sorts of things. “We’ll do just that.”
No one else on the road before them or behind them, and the driver took advantage of that to step on the gas again. What was the man’s name? Farmer, she recalled, and was ready to speak up sharp to him, white or not, when he slowed down. Way down.
He grinned back over his shoulder at the boy, a nervous grin not coming anywhere near his pale eyes. “Like that?” he asked. Kevin nodded, grave as his uncle the judge. “You ever try driving?” Leora clamped her lips firmly shut to make sure she didn’t call the man a fool to his face.
“Maybe when we get safe into the woods I’ll take you up on my lap, let you to steer a bit afore we ambush them deer, Mester McGinniss.” Farmer turned to the front. “If your mammy won’t mind.”
“I ain’t his mammy.”
“Beg pardon, but I thought that’s what—”
“Mammies is Southern. I’m Kevin’s nanny.”
Farmer muttered something, his voice low, lost under the quiet engine’s. She should have kept her own counsel. She should have, but there was only so much a body could take, and after nearly thirty years of passing up on pound cake and plucking her eyebrows and creaming her hardworking hands and pressing her hair and dyeing and altering her employers’ worn out gowns so you wouldn’t hardly recognize them, Leora was not about to sit silent while some ignorant peckerwood called her after a fat, ragheaded old Aunt Jemima. And her so light-skinned. Even at forty-two, she was better looking than that. Not long ago, she had been beautiful.
Mr. McGinniss had called her irresistible.
Shadows covered the car hood, the road ahead, the view out of either window. Thin shadows, thickening as she noticed them, leafless branches crowding together to warm their sap in the spring sun. They were in the woods, and suddenly that ignorant driver had swung onto an unpaved side road. The car slowed to a crawl, ruts and puddles rocking it along. Farmer stopped, for no reason Leora could see. “Is this where we hide to look for the deer? And I can learn to drive?” the boy asked.
“Yessir, Mester McGinniss. This here’s the place. Just let me take you on my lap.” The driver got out and went around the back to Kevin’s side. As Farmer opened the door, the fear smell came off him in great stinking waves like a waterfall. Leora reached for Kevin. She got him by his waist and held him as Farmer grabbed his arm, lifting him half off the car seat.
The boy screamed. They were pulling him apart, hurting him. Leora loosened her grip, but only a moment. Then she had him again, by his wool-clad thighs this time and they were both out on the ground, Farmer yelling and yanking Kevin’s arm, jerking him around so she rolled in the mud. Sharp pains, blows to her sides that made her sick. Someone was kicking her and she screamed too, held on tighter as if the boy could keep away the pain.
“Stop.” It was a man’s voice, sounding quiet above all the noise, like smoke above a flame. Leora held Kevin solidly in her arms, sat up on the muddy ground, and looked.
There were three of them. The driver Farmer, or whatever his real name was, and two more. The others wore masks, but she recognized one by his sweater, a thick, grey cardigan bunched up over his broad hips. He had sat on the sawhorse at the construction site. He had a gun. It was aimed at her. And beside him stood a thin man in a long coat with his hands in the pockets.
“What do you want?” Leora asked.
The thin man snorted. “Shut up, mammy.” Farmer rolled his shoulder, wincing like she’d hurt him. Good.
“Bring the car closer,” the thin man said. The driver went off out of sight down the dirt road, past the Caddy. That left two. Could she run away and lose them in the woods?
“Stay down,” said the thin man. “And no more noise out of either of you.” The one with the gun lifted it, like it was something she might have missed.
She didn’t ask again what they wanted. They were kidnappers, had to be: the danger that dirty burning signified. That’s what these men were up to, like in the papers; why else would they be doing this?
Kevin started crying and shivering, and she turned her attention back to him. “Shush now,” she told him. “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you, baby. They just gonna ask your daddy to give them some money is all.” She hummed the lullaby Big Momma taught her, soft, no words, so only he would hear, and stroked his hair back from his face. No words. She had never been able to bring herself to sing them.
It worked well enough; his sobbing wound itself down to where she could listen in on their captors.
“—shoulda waited to give the signal on a day she wasn’t riding along.”
“Farmer said he’d be able to separate them. Said he’d have no problems.” A short pause. “Find a way to tie and gag her, too. Give me the gun. Somebody could come along any minute.” Smart, that one in the long coat. In fact, she heard an engine now, getting louder, nearer. The police? They had a station on the island’s other side.
“On your feet, mammy.” She looked up from Kevin’s dark-lashed eyes. The sweatered man held out one hand to help her up; a dingy-looking red bandana drooped from the other. She got her legs under her and stood up on her own, the boy a soft weight in her arms. She could see through the leafless trees now, and it was only the black-and-purple sedan from the construction site coming towards them. The man took her by the elbow. The sedan stopped, and he started to steer her to its back door.
“No.” She planted her feet as firm as she could. Prepared to fight. The thin man had said it himself; stay here and someone would come along eventually. No telling where they’d take her once they got her in the car. Not anyplace she’d want to go.
“I’ll shoot you,” the thin man said. He stepped nearer and the gun’s muzzle dug into her neck. She couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold or both. “I will. Give me half a chance,” he said, and she decided she’d better believe him. Maybe he wouldn’t; maybe a gun would make too much noise. She wasn’t going to find out.
Leora laid Kevin down on the car seat the way she would for a nap. He looked up at her accusingly, as if the kidnapping was her fault, and opened his mouth to say something, but she shook her head and put her finger to her lips. She tried to get in next to him, but the gun pressed harder. “Hold up,” the thin man told her. She stood as still as she could.
The driver got out with a short piece of clothesline hanging from his arm and went into the back on the other side. “Farmer, my father’s going to be very angry at you.” Kevin’s voice sounded firm and fragile at the same time, like pie crust. “You’d better bring us home right away.”
“All in good time, Mester McGinniss. Give me your hands here and put em together at the wrists. Don’t make us have to shoot nobody, now—yes—that’s the way. I’ll have that gag now.” The sweatered man moved to the other door. They stuck the dirty red bandana over the boy’s mouth.
When they were done with Kevin, it was her turn. The thin man stepped back but kept the gun aimed at her face. “Take your jacket off. Now put it on again, backwards. Leave your arms out.” He had Farmer jerk it down level with her elbows and tie the sleeves behind her. He searched the pockets, confiscating her keys, wadding up her gloves and handkerchief and throwing them in the dirt. Then he picked them up again and crammed the gloves in her mouth with her handkerchief on top, smashing her lips flat when he tied it in back. Farmer put her silk neck scarf over her eyes, knotted it too tight, and that was the last she saw for a while.
They shoved her in next to the boy, laying his head in her lap, she was pretty sure. That was what it felt like. The thin man crowded in beside her; she knew it was him by the gun muzzle he dug in her neck. He pulled her towards himself and pushed her face against his coat’s shoulder. He smelled like Old Spice and dry-cleaning fluid.
Somebody started the car and backed it up the dirt road to where the pavement began again. They turned left and kept driving.
She could feel when they came from under the trees. The sun was so low it struck through the sedan’s windows, warming the back of her head. Almos
t ready to set.
“They’ll be taking off soon.” That was the sweatered man talking.
“All right, we’ll circle around the island a few times.” The thin man. They didn’t use each others’ names. As they talked more she figured out the discussion was about the boat museum’s construction crew going home for the weekend. Farmer said something about ransom money. She had been right. Such a comfort.
Kevin began crying again. With his gag in she felt more than heard him: hot tears soaking her skirt, shoulders trembling. She tried humming the lullabye, but this time her voice wouldn’t cooperate. It cracked, wanted to rise up and up, roll out of her loud and high. The gunmetal pressing into her neck muscles put an end to that before it got properly started.
Where were they going? She lost track of the turns: angles, curves, left, right, hummocks and dips that might lead anywhere. Nowhere. The boy’s weeping went on and on. She did her best to shut it from her mind and think how to escape.
The scarf was too tight. Her coat was untied and off; the wind blowing from the river cut through the thin material of her uniform. Her shoes, heavy with mud, slipped on the unseen ladder’s rungs and she held herself on as best she could, arms half-numb from being pinned to her sides. Then she reached the floor. The wind died, and the smell of earth and concrete rose around her.
A shove on her shoulder sent Leora sprawling to the side, but she stayed upright. What was happening? She had to know. She tore at the scarf, her short, blunt fingernails useless. Muffled sobs and shrieks came closer and closer, lower and lower, accompanied by the scrape of leather on wooden rungs.
“Dump him in the corner over there.” That was the thin man, the one who had forced her down the ladder by telling her he had a gun aimed at her head. He gave all the orders. He was the one she had to convince.
She needed to get calm, get ahold of herself. She had a plan. It had come to her in the car. She willed her hands away from the knotted silk blinding her weeping eyes. Worked instead on the gag, wet with her own drool. Quickly, while they were too busy with Kevin to notice. The handkerchief was cheap, a gift from Big Momma, flimsy cotton. It tore easily and hung in damp shreds around her neck.
