The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I heard the Bronco roar a moment later but I did not look up until the truck was gone, driving over the fallen trees as it turned and accelerating through Ward and back down the canyon.

  It took a trip back to Boulder—an early-eighties version this time but still as empty—to find bandages and antibiotic for the slash on my ribs and inner arm. It is beginning to scar over now, but it still hurts when I walk or breathe deeply.

  I carry the Remington everywhere now.

  * * *

  Even after I had been teaching drunk for two years, the central administration did not have the balls to fire me. Our master agreement specified that because I was tenured, malfeasance and gross incompetence had to be documented by one or more administrators, I had to be given at least three chances to redeem myself, and I was to enjoy due process every step of the way. As it turned out, the high-school principal and the director of secondary education were too chickenshit to confront me with any documentation sessions, I didn’t want to redeem myself, and everyone was too busy trying to figure out a way to hide me from sight or get rid of me outside of channels to worry about due process. In the end, the superintendent ordered the director of elementary instruction—a gray carbuncle of a woman named Dr. Maxine Millard—to observe me the required number of times, to give me my warnings and chances to rehabilitate myself, and then to do the necessary paperwork to get rid of me.

  I knew the days that Dr. Max was going to be there so I could have called in sick or at least not shown up drunk or hungover, but I figured—Fuck it, let them do their worst. They did. My tenure was revoked and I was dismissed from the district three years and two days before I could have put in for early retirement.

  I don’t miss the job. I miss the kids, even the slumpy, acned, socially inept high-school kids. Oddly, I remember the little kids from my earlier years in elementary even more clearly. And miss them more.

  A sage without a stage is no sage, drunk or sober.

  * * *

  This morning I followed Kelly Dahl’s tire tracks down Flagstaff Mountain on a narrow gravel road, came out where Chautauqua Park should be to find Boulder gone and the Inland Sea back again. Only this time, far out on the mud flats, reachable by a long causeway raised just feet above the quicksand beds, was a great island of stone with a walled city rising from its rocks, a great cathedral rising from the stone city, and Michael the Archangel standing on the summit of the tallest tower, his sword raised, his foot firmly planted on a writhing devil, a cock signifying eternal vigilance perched on his mailed foot.

  “Christ, Kelly,” I said to the tire tracks as I followed them across the causeway, “this is getting a little elaborate.”

  It was Mont-Saint-Michel, of course, complete down to its last stained-glass window and wrought-iron balustrade. I only vaguely remembered showing my sixth-grade class the slides of it. The twelfth-century structure had caught my fancy the summer before when I took my family there. Maria had not been impressed, but ten-year-old Allan had flipped over it. He and I bought every book on the subject that we could and seriously discussed building a model of the fortress-cathedral out of balsa wood.

  Kelly Dahl’s old Bronco was parked outside the gate. I took the Remington, actioned a round into the breech, and went through the gate and up the cobblestone walkway in search of her. My footfalls echoed. Occasionally I paused, looked back over the ramparts at the Flatirons gleaming in the Colorado sunshine, and listened for her footsteps above the lap of lazy waves. There were noises higher up.

  The cathedral was empty, but a thin book made of heavy parchment bound in leather had been set on the central altar. I picked up the vellum and read:

  Co sent sent Rollanz que la mort le trespent

  Devers la teste sur le quer li descent

  Desuz un pin i est alez curanz

  Sur l’ erbe verte si est culchiez adenz

  Desuz lui met s’ espree e l’ olifant

  Turnat sa teste vers la paiene gent.

  This was eleventh-century French verse. I knew it from my last year of college. This was the kind of thing I had devoted my life to translating in those final months before being drafted and sent around the world to kill small Asian people.

  Then Roland feels that death is taking him;

  Down from the head upon the heart it falls.

  Beneath a pine he hastens running;

  On the green grass he throws himself down;

  Beneath him puts his sword and oliphant,

  Turns his face toward the pagan army.

  I set down the book and shouted into the gloom of the cathedral. “Is this a threat, kid?” Only echoes answered.

  The next page I recognized as Thibaut, thirteenth century:

  Nus hom ne puet ami reconforter

  Se cele non ou it a son cuer mis.

  Pour ce m’ estuet sovent plaindre et plourer

  Que nus confors ne me vient, ce m’ est vis,

  De la ou j’ ai tote ma remembrance.

  Pour biens amer ai sovent esmaiance A dire voir.

  Dame, merci! donez moi esperance De joie avoir.

  This took me a moment. Finally I thought I had it.

  There is no comfort to be found in pain

  Save only where the heart has made its home.

  Therefore I can but murmur and complain

  Because no comfort to my pain has come

  From where I garnered all my happiness.

  From true love have I only earned distress The truth to say.

  Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess A hope, one day.

  “Kelly!” I shouted into the cathedral shadows. “I don’t need this shit!” When there was no answer, I raised the Remington and fired a single slug into the huge stained-glass window of the Virgin opposite the altar. The echo of the shot and of falling glass was still sounding as I left.

  I dropped the handmade book into the quicksand as I drove back across the causeway.

  * * *

  When I returned home from the hospital after the accident that killed Allan, I found that Maria had emptied our eleven-year-old son’s room of all his possessions, our house of all images and records of him. His clothes were gone. The posters and photographs and desk clutter and old Star Trek models hanging from black thread in his room—all gone. The rocking-horse quilt she had made for him the month before he was born was gone from his bed. The bed was stripped as clean as the walls and closet, as if his room and bed were in a dormitory or barracks, waiting sterilely for the next recruits to arrive.

  There were no next recruits.

  Maria had purged the photo albums of any image of Allan. It was as if his eleven years simply had not been. The family photo we had kept on our bedroom dresser was gone, as were the snapshots that had been held to the refrigerator door by magnets. His fifth-grade school portrait was no longer in the drawer in the study, and all of the baby pictures were gone from the shoe box. I never found out if she had given the clothes and toys and sports equipment to the Salvation Army, or burned the photographs, or buried them. She would not speak of it. She would not speak of Allan. When I forced the subject, Maria’s eyes took on a stubborn, distant look. I soon learned not to force the subject.

  This was the summer after I taught my last sixth-grade class. Allan would have been a year younger than Kelly Dahl, twenty-two now, out of college, finding his way in the world. It is very difficult to imagine.

  * * *

  I tracked her to Trail Ridge Road but left the Jeep behind at the beginning of the tundra. There was no Trail Ridge Road—no sign of human existence—only the tundra extending up beyond the tree line. It was very cold out of the shelter of the trees. When I’d awakened at my high camp that morning, it had felt like late autumn. The skies were leaden, there were clouds in the valleys below, hiding the lateral moraines, wisps of cloud edge curling up against the mountainsides like tentacles of fog. The air was freezing. I cursed myself for not bringing gloves and balled my hands in the pockets of my jacket, the Remington col
d and heavy against my forearms.

  Passing the last of the stunted trees, I tried to remember the name for these ancient dwarfs at the tree line.

  Krummholz, came Kelly Dahl’s voice almost in my ear. It means “elfin timber” or “crooked wood.”

  I dropped to one knee on the frozen moss, the rifle coming up. There was no one within one hundred meters of open tundra. I scoped the tree line, the boulders large enough to hide a human figure. Nothing moved.

  I love all the tundra terms you taught us, continued Kelly’s voice in my mind. She had done this only a few times before. Fell-field, meadow vole, boreal chorus frog, snowball saxifrage, solifluction terraces, avens and sedges, yellow-bellied marmots, permafrost, nivation depressions, saffron ragworts, green-leaf chiming bells, man-hater sedge …

  I looked up and out across the windswept tundra. Nothing moved. But I had been wrong about there being no sign of human existence: a well-worn trail ran across the permafrost field toward the summit of the pass. I began following it. “I thought you hated all the technical terms,” I said aloud, the rifle ready in the crook of my arm. My ribs and the inside of my left arm ached from where her arrow had cut deep.

  I like poetry. Her voice was in my mind, not my ear. The only real sound was the wind. But her voice was real enough.

  Mr. Jakes, do you remember that Robert Frost thing you read us about poetry?

  I was two hundred meters out from the last line of krummholz now. There were some house-size boulders about three hundred meters above and to my left. She might be hiding there. I sensed that she was close.

  “Which poem?” I said. If I could keep her talking, thinking, she might not notice my approach.

  Not poem, the Frost introduction to one of his books. It was about the figure a poem makes.

  “I don’t remember,” I said. I did. I had shared that with the high-school juniors only weeks before Kelly Dahl had quit school and run away.

  Frost said that it should be the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. He said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. He said the figure is the same for love.

  “Mmm,” I said, moving quickly across the permafrost field now, my breath fogging the air as I panted. The rifle was gripped in both hands, the cold forgotten. “Tell me more.”

  Stop a minute. Kelly Dahl’s voice was flat in my mind.

  I paused, panting. The boulders were less than fifty meters from me. The trail I had been following cut across the grassy area once used by the Ute and Pawnee women, old people, and youngsters to cross the Divide. This path looked newly used, as if the Utes had just disappeared over the rock saddle ahead of me.

  I don’t think the Indians left trails, came Kelly Dahl’s soft voice in my mind. Look down.

  Still trying to catch my breath, dizzy with the altitude and adrenaline, I looked down. A plant was growing on the cushioned terrace between two low rocks there. The wind was whipping snow past me; the temperature must have been in the twenties, if not lower.

  Look more closely.

  Still gasping for air, I went to one knee on the fell-field. When Kelly Dahl’s voice began again, I took the opportunity to action a round into the Remington’s chamber.

  See those little trenches in the soil, Mr. Jakes? They look like smooth runways, little toboggan runs through the tundra. Do you remember teaching us about them?

  I shook my head, all the time watching for movement out of the corner of my eye. I truly did not remember. My passion for alpine ecology had burned away with all of my other passions. Not even an ember of interest remained. “Tell me,” I said aloud, as if hearing the echo of her mental voice would reveal her position to me.

  They were originally burrows dug out by pocket gophers, came her soft voice, sounding mildly amused. The soil’s so tough and rocky up here, that not even earthworms tunnel, but the pocket gopher digs these shallow burrows. When the gopher goes away, the smaller meadow voles claim them. See where their feet have made the earth smooth? Look closer, Mr. Jakes.

  I lay on the soft moss, laying my rifle ahead of me casually, as if just setting it out of the way. The barrel was aimed toward the boulders above. If something moved, I could be sighted in on it within two seconds. I glanced down at the collapsed gopher burrow. It did look like a dirt-smoothed toboggan run, one of hundreds that crisscrossed this section of tundra like an exposed labyrinth, like some indecipherable script left by aliens.

  The vole keeps using these little highways in the winter, said Kelly Dahl. Under the snow. Up here we would see giant drifts and an empty, sterile world. But under the snow, the vole is shuttling around, carrying out her business, collecting the grasses she harvested and stored in the autumn, chewing out the centers of cushion plants, munching on taproots. And somewhere nearby, the pocket gopher is digging away.

  Something gray did move near the boulders. I leaned closer to the collapsed vole run, closer to the rifle. The snow was suddenly thicker, whipping down the permafrost field like a curtain of gauze that now lifted, now lowered.

  In the spring, continued Kelly Dahl’s soft voice in my head, the tops of all these pocket gopher tunnels appear from beneath the melting snowbanks. The ridges are called eskers and look like brown snakes looping around everywhere. You taught us that a pocket gopher up here could dig a tunnel more than one hundred feet long in a single night and move up to eight tons of topsoil per acre in a year.

  “Did I teach that?” I said. The gray shape in the snow separated itself from the gray boulders. I quit breathing and set my finger on the trigger guard.

  It’s fascinating, isn’t it, Mr. Jakes? That there’s one visible winter world up here on the tundra—cold, inhospitable, intolerable—but the most defenseless animals here just create another world right under the surface where they can continue to survive. They’re even necessary to the ecology, bringing subsoil up and burying plants that will decompose quicker underground. Everything fits.

  I leaned forward as if to set my face to the plant, lifted the rifle in a single motion, centered the moving gray form in the crosshairs, and fired. The gray figure fell.

  “Kelly?” I said as I ran panting up the tundra, moving from solifluction terrace to solifluction terrace.

  There was no answer.

  I expected nothing to be there when I arrived at the boulders, but she had fallen exactly where I had last seen the movement. The arterial blood was bright, excruciatingly bright, the single bold color almost shocking on the dim and dun tundra. The bullet had taken her behind the right eye, which was still open and questioning. I guessed that the cow elk was an adult but not quite fully grown. Snowflakes settled on its gray, hairy side, still melted on the pink of its extruded tongue.

  Gasping for breath, I stood straight and spun around, surveying the rocks, the tundra, the lowering sky, the clouds rising like wraiths from the cold valleys below. “Kelly?”

  Only the wind responded.

  I looked down. The elk’s luminous but fading black eye seemed to be conveying a message.

  Things can die here.

  * * *

  The last time I saw Kelly Dahl in the real world, the other world, had been at a late-season basketball game. I hated basketball—I hated all of the school’s inane and insanely cheered sports—but it was part of my job as low-man-on-the-totem-pole English teacher to do something at the damn events, so I was ticket taker. At least that way I could leave twenty minutes or so into the game when they closed the doors.

  I remember coming out of the gym into the freezing darkness—it was officially spring but Colorado rarely recognizes the end of winter until late May, if then—and seeing a familiar figure heading down Arapaho going the opposite direction. Kelly Dahl had not been in class for several days that week, and rumor was that she had moved. I jogged across the street, avoiding patches of black ice, and caught up to her under a streetlight a block east of the school.

  She turned as if unsurprised to see me, almost as if she had been waiting for me to follow
her. “Hey, Mr. Jakes. What’s happening?” Her eyes were redder than usual, her face pinched and white. The other instructors were sure that she was using drugs and I had finally, reluctantly, come to the same conclusion. There was little trace of the eleven-year-old girl in the gaunt woman’s face I stared into that night.

  “You been sick, Kelly?”

  She returned my stare. “No, I just haven’t been going to school.”

  “You know Van Der Mere will call in your mother.”

  Kelly Dahl shrugged. Her jacket was far too thin for such a cold night. When we spoke, our breath hung between us like a veil. “She’s gone,” said Kelly.

  “Gone where?” I asked, knowing it was none of my business but feeling the concern for this child rise in me like faint nausea.

  Again the shrug.

  “You coming back to school on Monday?” I asked.

  Kelly Dahl did not blink. “I’m not coming back.”

  I remember wishing at the time that I had not given up smoking the year before. It would have been good at that moment to light a cigarette and take a drag before speaking. Instead, I said, “Well, shit, Kelly.”

  The pale face nodded.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere and talk about it, kiddo.”

  She shook her head. A car roared past and slid into the school parking lot, latecomers shouting. Neither of us turned to look.

  “Why don’t we…,” I began.

  “No,” said Kelly Dahl. “You and I had our chance, Mr. Jakes.”

  I frowned at her in the cold light from the streetlamp. “What do you mean?”

  For a long moment I was sure she would say nothing else, that she was on the verge of turning away and disappearing into the dark. Instead, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You remember the year … the seven months … I was in your sixth-grade class, Mr. Jakes?”

  “Of course.”