The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Troy noted his companion’s ropy muscles and gracile hands and, with a friendliness borrowed from Leroy Holcomb, said, “You mean as a pro, don’t you?”

  Rivas shrugged and smiled. “Why not? My uncle, he played in the minors for five years, and I’m better than him.” He winked, full of young man’s bluster. Troy could tell he believed what he said.

  “I want to see you get there,” Troy responded with sincerity.

  That was five weeks before Rivas lost three vertebrae and too many internal organs in a nameless village in the Central Highlands. He had been the last one. First Siddens and Holcomb, then Artie Farina, Stewart Hutchison, Dennis Short, and Jimmy Wyckoff. Seven men dead from bullets, mortar rounds, and claymores that could have, should have killed Troy.

  Dirt on his pants. He could wash a million times, and never lose the traces of those men.

  Troy wound up, reading the batter’s desire for another sinker like the last one. Troy laid it in straight and fast. Strike three.

  “I want to see you get there.” When Troy had made that comment, it had been intended merely as polite encouragement, but it had since gone beyond that. Arturo was with him. He guided Troy’s arm through its moves, told him what the batters might be thinking, gave him speed when he ran around the bases. He was the one Angus was impressed with, the one the scout might reward with a contract.

  The tattoo itched. No, Troy thought. Not now. But his wishes were ignored. The mindset of a pitcher vanished. Arturo had phased out. He was Troy Chesley again – an indifferent athlete with no real knack for baseball.

  The new batter was waiting. Troy hesitated, drawing another of Angus’s infamous glares. No choice but to pitch and hope for the best. He flung the ball toward the plate.

  The gleam in the batter’s eye said it all even before he swung. The crack of wood against leather echoed from one side of the stadium to the other. The ball easily cleared the left field fence.

  The next few pitches were not much better. The batter let two go by wide and outside, then with a whack claimed a standing double. Luckily the player after that popped out to center field, sparing Troy any more humiliation.

  That ended the three-inning mini-game. Angus and his assistants reconfigured the players into a brand new Team A and Team B. Troy waited by the dugout for his assignment, but it didn’t come. As the other aspiring pros hit the turf or loosened their batting arms, Angus pulled Troy aside.

  The scout spat a brown river of tobacco juice onto the ground. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” he said gruffly. “You’ve got talent, Chesley, but no consistency. One moment you’re hot, the next you’re a meathead. Until you can keep yourself in the groove, you might as well forget about this camp. Put in some time on your own, get the kinks out, and maybe I’ll see you here next year.”

  Angus turned back to the diamond. His posture said that as far as he was concerned, Troy no longer existed.

  Troy slapped the dust from his mitt and trudged into the locker room. Next year? Next year would be no different. No matter how hard he tried to keep Arturo Rivas at the forefront, sooner or later he, Troy, would reemerge – he or one of the other six.

  He was living a total of eight lives. Out there on the diamond, he had been Arturo, as intended. This morning while shaving Artie Farina had surfaced, and he had whistled a tune learned during a boyhood in Brooklyn, 3,000 miles from where Troy Chesley had grown up. At least he thought it was Artie. Sometimes there was no way to really know. He simply was one guy or another, without any sort of command over the phenomenon, his only clue to the transition consisting of an itch or warmth or tingle in the area of his tattoo.

  He opened his locker, took out his kit bag, and began shoving items within, changing out of his togs as he went. No shower. He wanted out of this place. Already he knew what he would feel the next time Arturo emerged – the shame, the disappointment, the anger. The ambient stink of sweat and anti-fungal powder attacked Troy’s nostrils, making him crave clean air.

  “I’m sorry,” Troy whispered. “I tried.”

  How he had tried. This time with baseball, for Arturo. Last year in pre-med courses, aiming for the MD that Doug Siddens had wanted. In his biochemistry class he had sailed through the midterm, propelled by the mental faculties of a man determined to learn whatever was required to become a doctor. On the final, the unicorn remained as flat and dull as plain ink, and as mere Troy Chesley he scored a dismal thirty-two percent, killing his chance of a passing grade.

  As he peeled away his shirt, the tattoo was framed in the small mirror he had mounted on the inside of his locker door. He touched it, as ever feeling as though, no matter how much it was under his skin, it wasn’t truly part of him.

  A good luck charm? Oh, he’d survived all right. Through the war without a scratch. He had all the life and youth he could ever have imagined. Seven extra doses. But as usual, the rearing shape gave him no clue what he was supposed to do with so much abundance.

  1975

  Troy’s dented Pontiac Bonneville carried him out of New Orleans, across the Pontchartrain Causeway, through the counties of St Tammany and Washington, and over the boundary into southern Mississippi. As he drove along country roads beside trees draped with Spanish moss and parasitic masses of kudzu, the sense of familiarity grew ever more intense, though he had never been to this part of the South.

  He unerringly selected the correct turns, having no need to consult his map. His destination appeared through the windshield. Hardly a town at all, it was one of those impoverished, former whistlestop communities destined to vanish into the woods as more and more of its young men and women migrated to the cities with each generation. By all rights he should never have recalled the place name; it had been mentioned in his presence no more than twice, all those years ago.

  There were two cemeteries, the first dotted with old family mausoleums and elaborate tombstones – a forest of marble. He went straight to the second, a modest but carefully maintained site overlooking a river. The caretaker stared at him as if he had never seen a white man on the grounds before, but he was polite as he directed Troy to the graves belonging to the Holcomb family.

  Leroy’s resting place was easy to find. Eight years of weather had not been enough to mute the engraving of the granite marker. A few wilted flowers lay in the cup. He lifted them to his nose, catching vestiges of aroma. Not yet a week old. After eight years, someone still remembered this particular dead man. That brought a tightness to his throat.

  He had a fresh bouquet with him, but he placed it at the head of a nearby grave marked Lionel Holcomb, 1919–1962.

  “Rest in peace, Daddy,” he whispered.

  A woodpecker hammered in the oak tree on the river side of the graveyard. The air thrummed with an invisible chorus of insects that could never survive in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Troy had been raised. Seldom had he felt anything so real as the smell of the grass at his feet or the humidity sucking at his pores.

  He turned and walked determinedly back to his car and drove into town. A block past the Baptist church, he pulled up at a house. The clapboard was peeling, but the lawn was mowed and the roof had been recently patched, showing that while no rich folk lived here, the occupants cared about the property.

  Troy stepped up onto the porch. The urge to rush inside was next to overwhelming, but he stifled it. The body he inhabited was the wrong colour, the wrong size. No matter what, part of him was always Troy Chesley, even when he didn’t want it to be so. He knocked politely.

  A stout black woman in a flower-print dress opened the inner door and stared at him through the screen mesh, her eyes widening at his stranger’s face.

  Mama! I love you, Mama! Troy forced down the words in his mind and uttered the pale substitutions circumstances allowed. “Mrs Holcomb?”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  I missed you, Mama. “My name is Troy Chesley. I served with your son Leroy in the war.”

  The woman lifted her bifocals out
of the way and wiped her eyes. “Leroy,” she said huskily. “He was my first-born, you know. Hard on an old widow to lose a son like that. What can I do for you, child?”

  “I have a few questions, Ma’am. I was wondering . . . what kind of plans Leroy had? What he wanted to do with his life? What do you think he’d be doing right now, if he’d come back from over there?”

  She shook her greying head firmly. “Now what you want to go asking me those kinds of things for? All that will just remind me he ain’t here. The war is over, Mr Chesley. Go on about your business and don’t bother me no mo’.” She shut the door.

  “But – ” Troy raised his hand to protest, but blank wood confronted him. You don’t understand, Mama. Troy’s got all my chances.

  “I’ve got everybody’s chances,” he murmured as he turned, shoulders drooping, and stumbled back to his Pontiac.

  1978

  The bathroom mirror showed Troy a twenty-one-year-old self. No traces of the beer belly or the receding hairline his younger brother was developing. No need for the corrective lenses his sister had required when she reached twenty-five. His greet-the-day erection stood stiff as a recruit being screamed at by a drill sergeant: A kid’s boner, there even when all he wanted to do was take a piss.

  He was aging eight times slower than normal. He was thirty now, a point when other two-tour vets often looked forty-five. At least he was aging. That proved he wasn’t literally immortal. Just as he wasn’t totally invulnerable, or the razor wouldn’t have nicked him the day before. He didn’t think he could bear it if the tattoo didn’t have some limits.

  He showered, dried, and drifted into the living room/kitchenette wearing only a pair of briefs – the summer sun was already high, and the apartment had no air-conditioning. Slicing an apple and eating it a sliver at a time filled the next three minutes. The clock above the stove ticked: the heartbeat of the room.

  So many years to live.

  Troy pulled open the file cabinet in the corner of the room that served as his home office and ran his fingers across a series of manila folders marked with names. He pulled out one at random.

  It turned out to be that of Warren Nance, the RTO whose life he had saved with the emergency tracheotomy. That is to say, the one Doug Siddens had saved using Troy’s hands. Clippings dropped out onto the floor, covering the threadbare spots his landlord described as “a little wear and tear”. He sat down cross-legged and glanced at them as he put them back in the folder.

  Warren was a realtor these days. The first clipping was a Yellow Pages ad for his business, describing it as the largest in the Texas Panhandle. A pamphlet of houses for sale listed Warren’s name as agent more than two dozen times. The third item, a newspaper clipping, praised him for a large donation to help people with speech impediments.

  A dozen files in Troy’s cabinet told similar tales. Sgt Morris was now an assistant county superintendent of schools. Crazy Vic Naughton, now clean-cut and much heftier than he had been in Vietnam, was a sports commentator for a television station.

  The one thing the files did not contain was direct correspondence, save for a Christmas card or two. Troy had seldom attempted to contact old buddies; he had abandoned the effort altogether after the incident with Leroy Holcomb’s mother. As happened throughout the veteran community, the connections he had established in Vietnam disintegrated within the milieu of the World, no matter how intense those ties had been in the jungle.

  It worked both ways. Troy had received scores of letters during late 1969 and early 1970. All from guys still In Country. He barely heard from those men once they arrived stateside. As the saying in ’Nam went: “There it is.” And there it was. Soldiers sitting in the elephant grass watching the gunships rumble by overhead needed to hold in their hands replies from someone who made it back, just to have written proof that it was possible to make it back. Once they came home themselves, they didn’t want to be reminded of the war. Now, with North Vietnam the victor, the silence was even more entrenched. Troy saw no reason to disrupt the quiet, and many reasons not to.

  But still he kept the files. The other drawer contained only seven, but they were inches thick, filled with all the information he could collect on Leroy, on Doug, on Arturo and the others who had died beside him. This morning that drawer remained locked. He was thinking about the men who had lived. The other survivors.

  They were making something of themselves.

  Here he sat. He didn’t even have a savings account. He was employed as a short order cook at Denny’s, a job he had had for two months and one he would probably quit before another two months had gone by. Where his buddies had found focus, he had found dissipation, his efforts spread too thin in too many directions.

  Too many chances. Those other men knew the Grim Reaper would catch them sooner rather than later, so they got down to business before their youth and energy raced away. Troy was missing that urgency.

  On the other side of the wall he heard the reverberation of feet landing on the floor beside the bed and padding into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. The shower nozzle spat fitfully into life, and a soprano voice rose in song above the din of the spray and the groan of the plumbing: “Carry on my Wayward Son” by Kansas.

  A hint of a smile played at the edges of Troy’s lips. Troy let the folder in his hands close. He cleared the floor, stowed the materials in the file cabinet, and locked the drawer. Before sitting back down, he lowered his briefs and tossed them on the couch.

  Maybe he could make some sort of progress after all.

  Hardly had the thought coalesced in his mind than his chest began to itch. He scratched reflexively, fingernails tracing the outline of the unicorn. No. He would not let anyone surface. This was his moment. With a firm act of will, he drew his hand away, brought his attention back to the sound of faucets being shut off in the bathroom. The doorway to the bedroom seemed to grow larger and larger until his girl friend emerged wrapping a towel around her glossy brunette mane, her bare skin rosy from the effect of the hot water.

  Scanning his naked body with an appreciative eye, she migrated forward with the boldness that had originally lured him into their relationship. He clasped her wrists, easing her down beside him and patiently thwarting her attempts to fondle him.

  “Lydia, do you love me?”

  She tilted her head, humming. “I will if you let go of my hands.”

  “I’m serious.”

  She blanched as the gravity of his tone sank in. “I . . . oh . . .” She hiccupped.

  “I take it that’s a yes?” he said as he released her wrists.

  Head turning aside, arms hugging herself, and cheeks ablaze with uncharacteristic shyness, she nodded. “You weren’t supposed to know, you fucker.” He realized the drops on her face were not drips from her wet hair. “Not until you said it first.”

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  Her nose crinkled, as if she were going to laugh or sneeze. She lay back on the ratty carpet and spread her legs. “You sure I can’t distract you enough to make you forget you said that?”

  “Not a chance,” he said firmly. “Does that mean you’re turning me down?”

  “I’m . . . stalling.” Her features hardened. “I don’t want you to say one thing today, and another tomorrow, Troy. If you mean to follow through, then of course I’ll marry you.”

  The puff of his pent-up breath almost made the walls shake. Shifting forward, he accepted her body’s invitation.

  1983

  “You can’t be doing this,” Lydia said, yanking at the tag on his garment bag.

  “Don’t. You’ll rip it.” As he snapped his briefcase closed, she let go of the tag, spun, and marched to the window of their apartment. The Minneapolis/St Paul skyline stretched flat beyond her – the nearest mountain a billion miles over the horizon. They had moved here when she landed the hospital job, but after almost two years he still couldn’t get used to the landscape. He wanted geographical features that could daunt the wind, and
most especially slow the approach of the summer thunderstorms whose booms reminded him too much of artillery.

  “Darling, we discussed this,” he said. “I’ll be back by suppertime tomorrow. It’s a little late to change plans.”

  “You didn’t even ask what I thought of the idea. You didn’t even think about the budget when you bought the plane ticket.” Lydia tugged the curtain to the side and frowned. “The taxi’s here.” She turned back, meeting him eye to eye, freezing him in place instead of tendering silent permission to pick up his luggage. “What is so important that you have to spend money we don’t have?”

  “We have the money.”

  “Barely. There are other things we could have done with that cash.”

  He sighed and, denying her spell, carried his things to the front door. “This is something I need to do. You act like I’m way out of line.”

  “You’re going all this way for a guy you knew for a few months? Doesn’t that strike you as little obsessive?” She patted her abdomen, highlighting the prominent evidence of pregnancy. “Don’t you think you have bigger priorities at home right now? Christ, Troy, I feel like I’m living with a stranger sometimes. I don’t know you right now. You’re someone else.”

  Troy turned away before she could see his reaction. Her glare drilled a hole through the back of his head as he walked out the doorway, and the wound remained open throughout the ride to the airport, the liftoff, and the climb to cruising altitude. How he wanted to tell her: about the unicorn, about the seven lives he lived besides his own. Everything.

  Even Stu wanted to tell her. That’s who had emerged earlier in the week. Stewart Hutchison, his squad leader after Sgt Morris had rotated to the safety of rear echelon duty. Stu understood Troy’s needs the way Troy understood his.

  He lowered the lunch tray and tried to write his explanation out in a note. He began by admitting that he had lied: This trip was not for a funeral. But when it came to speaking of all he had been holding in throughout their relationship, he kept crossing out the sentences, finally giving up when he noticed the woman seated next to him glancing at the paper.