Black Milk

by Robert Reed

  “Oh he’s pretending to be ashamed,” said his mother. She put on an enormous smile. “Marshall waits for this like we all do. Don’t you, dear? Of course you do.”

  Her husband stood beside her, saying nothing.

  “Come here, birthday boy. Please?”

  We looked at Marshall’s eyes as they lifted, his mouth frowning even as he walked forward. The kitchen was crowded. People had to press against the walls and appliances to let him pass. I studied the neat horizontal lines in the corner. Marshall’s dad was making ready, finding the appropriate line with a pencil. Then he backed away and let Marshall turn and ease himself against the wall. “Your shoes. Remember?” his mom said. Marshall removed his shoes, his face placid and indifferent. His head tilted slightly to one side, and his dad straightened his head and then pressed the pencil flush to the top of his head. With confidence and a quick smile, he put a dash on the white wall.

  Marshall stepped away as soon as possible.

  His mom said, “There!” and approached. Her expression turned from a toothy smile to puzzlement, then to something darker. “What’s this?” she wondered. “What? I don’t believe this!”

  There were two lines on the wall. They were close but not quite the same, the new pencil mark maybe a quarter of an inch too low.

  She turned to her husband. “Let me try.” She made Marshall press back against the wall. “You have to keep the pencil level, dear.” Then she finished and found the new lines overlapping one another. Marshall was shorter than predicted, no doubt about it, and her response was to snort and ask, “How did this happen? Can someone tell me how?”

  No one made a sound.

  Then Marshall’s dad said, “At least I did it right,” and sighed, genuinely relieved.

  “But explain this!” She wheeled and looked at her son, her face close to angry. “What is it? Are you eating enough? Dear?” Then she seemed to hear herself, and she tried defusing the tension with a careless pretended smile. “Not that it’s absolutely important, of course. But I just wonder. Is everything fine?”

  Marshall watched her, saying nothing.

  “What’s wrong, dear?”

  He said, “Leave me alone,” with a quiet voice.

  “What? What was that?”

  He dipped his head and bit his lower lip so hard that I saw the clear pink imprints of his straight sharp teeth afterwards. He said, “Nothing.”

  She didn’t know what to say or think.

  “What we ought to do,” said her husband, “is try again come morning. That might do it.”

  No one spoke.

  “Your spine grows while you sleep,” he persisted. “It’s the lack of weight, right? Someone back me up on this. Am I right?”

  Marshall drummed on the wall with one fist, then the other, and he shook his head as if he was in mortal pain.

  “You sleep, you expand,” his dad declared. “We’ll wait for morning, dear. All right? Okay? We can do that.” He stared at his wife, desperate for some agreement; then he looked out at us, asking us, “Wouldn’t that be fair? What do you think? Yes?”

  Ten

  We built our treehouse high in the oak, Cody doing the bulk of the real work. She lifted and she pounded, and she had the better sense for where things belonged. Marshall would talk. One day he said, “Do you know why kids like trees and treehouses? It’s because of old monkey genes and ape genes and stuff. They tell us to climb and be safe above the ground.”

  “Is that true?” asked Beth.

  “Absolutely,” he declared. “The genes are expressed when we’re kids, and then they’re tucked away and forgotten.”

  We built our floor and the bones of our walls, then the roof, no maze below and no bridge even on our plans; and one sunny summer day we took a break to lie in the blazing sunlight, stretched out on the roof on colored beach towels. We were talking, drifting into a strangely honest conversation, telling each other how and why we had gotten to be like we were, gene-wise. I told about my folks wanting a healthy boy with a few synthetic genes, just a few, and Cody said, “They got a surprise, huh?” and laughed in a peaceful, understanding way. Marshall spoke in technical terms, outlining the effects and interactions of several dozen potent genes—a real stew of biochemical extras—and then no one spoke for a long while.

  “What about you, Beth?” said Cody. There wasn’t much to tell, Beth claimed. Her folks, her dear sweet folks, had had simpler kinds of tailoring done. The clinic doctors had mapped and sorted their own genes, picking and choosing for fruitful combinations; and no, she wasn’t blessed with synthetics or famous people’s genes, or anything like that. She was the best her folks had to offer. That’s what she told us. “I’m the best they could give me,” and she smiled and hugged herself, saying nothing more.

  Then it was Cody’s turn to tell.

  She held a hammer in one hand, and every so often she tossed it up against the cobalt blue sky. It would roll and rise, roll and fall, and she caught it every time by its massive metal head. She never slipped. She didn’t seem to think about her motions, and her words ran along at a steady pace.

  “My mothers,” she said, “were pissed when they were young. You know what I mean? Tina’s folks hated her because she lived with a woman, and May’s folks pretended they were just roommates. Only they knew better. And my mothers were part of some radical groups that were big back then. The old lesbian groups. They were charter members.”

  “They’ve told you this?” asked Beth, doubtful.

  “They’ve told me everything, sure.” I watched the hammer against the sky, then there was just sky. “Anyway,” said Cody, “they decided to have a kid. A girl. It would have been hypocritical to have a boy, what with the lesbians talking about societies free of men. All men. That’s why my moms went into debt and did a lot a crazy tailoring. They were getting ready. They were pissed at the world and wanted a daughter who could do anything a boy could manage. And more.”

  No one spoke.

  “That was long ago,” Cody told us. “Those lesbians got crazier and crazier, talking about going to war against men. Shit like that. So my moms dropped out and May had me, and May’s folks didn’t have any other grandkids to spoil. So things got good with them. In a gradual way.” She paused, then she said, “I don’t know. Things have always felt pretty ordinary to me. Life, I mean, I don’t feel all that strange.”

  “Are they sorry?” asked Beth. “For doing so much with you?”

  “Sometimes. Sort of.” She shrugged and threw her hammer, then she said, “I’m not.” She snatched the hammer and rose. “I get a real charge out of doing stuff. You know? Stuff no one else can do.” She stood on the edge of the roof, walking toe-to-heel with her arms outstretched and the hammer balanced on top of her head. “We’ve got a great relationship, my moms and me. They talk to me and I talk to them.” She went up on one leg, saying, “Every kid thinks his or her folks are the best, I guess. But I know mine are.” She started to laugh, and the hammer slipped and hit the roof with a thud. “Oops,” said Cody. “Oops.”

  We finished the walls to the big room, and Cody told us, “It’s not enough. I know where we can get super-loops and solar panels…but we’ve got to have cash. Some green. We can’t do it for free.”

  Everyone glanced at Marshall, waiting.

  “I’m not giving. Not more than my share,” he said, licking his lips. “I don’t want to. I shouldn’t have to. And forget it.”

  “Not even if we name the treehouse after you?” asked Cody. “Not even if we put up a big sign with your name?”

  Marshall licked his lips again, considering the offer.

  But Cody said, “No, wait! I’ve got a better idea!”

  “What is it?” asked Marshall. He broke into a frown.

  “A contest,” she told us. “We’ll hold a big contest and get the little kids to pay to enter. The winner gets the money, of course. And I’ll be the big winner. Me.”

  “You?” said Marshall.

 
“What kind of contest?” said Beth.

  “Snake hunting.” Cody smiled, her square teeth showing. “What do you think? We’ll judge the snakes on length, and weight too. Every kid pays a dollar to enter, and I’ll just catch more than anyone else. Okay?”

  She was a good hunter, all right. She knew the rich spots and she was quick enough to snatch them without fuss. Fuss was what took time with the little kids. We hadn’t hunted snakes much that year, true—the treehouse filled our time—but I could imagine her plan working. Absolutely.

  We held the contest on a Saturday morning.

  We had posted signs on trees and streetlamps. Forty-two kids came from the neighborhood, and most of them were small kids. The ones as old as Cody, or older, could be beaten. She felt sure. She had a huge cloth sack, ready for anything. Beth was in charge of money. I was going to help Marshall patrol the parkland, making certain nobody even tried to cheat.

  “Are pennies okay?” asked Beth. “Cody?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s that little Wells kid,” she explained. “He’s got pockets full of pennies—”

  “If there’s a hundred, sure.”

  “Okay.”

  We started the hunt in the pasture, close to the oak, and maybe half the kids didn’t last an hour. They got bored or they saw other kids doing better and became discouraged. It took patience to walk and listen for the right sounds. A very good hunter could smell a garter snake—a faint sour odor that became strong when it was in your hand, flipping and shitting its musk gland dry—and the very best hunter, like Cody, could even hear a tiny snake slipping through the grass and brush, even on a windy day. The contest was to last until noon, no later, and by eleven the parkland was nearly empty of kids. Cody had ten or twelve competitors. I caught two of them pooling their snakes into one bag, and I told them even those weren’t enough to win and they were disqualified. By noon there were eight kids according to my count, plus Cody, and I walked back to the oak and found Cody sitting in the shade, smiling. Her big sack was heavy with all kinds of snakes, and she whistled and said, “Would you look?” It was obvious who had won. The other kids dumped out their sacks and left without trying to compare. Cody nodded and looked into the oak, saying, “It’s over. It’s done.”

  But it was a minute short of noon.

  Marshall came from the opposite direction, one kid on his trail. I saw Jack Wells struggling with his sacks. His old clothes were torn and his freckled face was streaked with new dirt and fresh thorn cuts, and the two sacks in his hands were at least equal to Cody’s one. Cody saw him too. She rose and blinked, saying, “Okay,” and she turned to Marshall when he arrived. “Did he cheat?” she asked. “How’d he get so many?”

  “I don’t know how.” Marshall shrugged his narrow shoulders, then he told us, “You should have seen him. Plucking them out of everywhere, the little welfare shit—”

  “Hey,” said Cody.

  “What?”

  Jack Wells had heard Marshall talking. The hard adult eyes showed a slow anger, staring at Marshall, and he put down both sacks and said, “Now what?” He didn’t talk like a little kid. He acted ready to kick shit where he found it. “What do I do now? Huh?”

  We weighed the sacks, and Jack’s two weighed a bit more than Cody’s.

  “So I win?” asked Jack. “Is that it?”

  “Weight and length,” reminded Marshall. “Just wait.”

  The feud had started. I can point to the precise moment. Marshall spoke to Jack with a certain voice, and Jack stared at him. Something inside Jack wouldn’t bend an inch or forget a single ugly word. And then Marshall made it worse by refusing to explain how he was judging the snakes. “You couldn’t understand it. It’s a big formula, kid.”

  So many inches equalled so many ounces.

  Marshall invented the system as he went along. I helped Beth put the squirming snakes against the tape measure, and Marshall kept track of everything on a big sheet of liquid crystal paper. He would say, “Cody’s ahead.” Then he would say, “It’s Jack Wells. For now.”

  Cody herself said, “Play fair, okay?”

  “Who said I wasn’t? You think I’m cheating?”

  Cody couldn’t tell what he was doing. And besides, she wanted the money for us. So she didn’t look at the numbers too hard.

  Finally Marshall straightened, smiled and said, “It’s done. Cody won.”

  Jack Wells said, “What? How come?”

  “Look for yourself,” Marshall told him. “See here? See? You know how to add, don’t you?”

  Jack said, “Asshole.”

  Cody stepped between them. For the first time.

  “It’s as simple as simple can be,” Marshall explained. “Cody won by three inches. So many inches equals an ounce, see? And you’ve got more weight, but Cody’s got more inches. Enough more that it’s not even close. Can you see?”

  “Three inches?” said Jack. “You asshole!”

  “It’s the rules,” Marshall told him. “We’ve got to obey the rules.”

  Jack glared at Marshall.

  Cody pressed her tongue against a cheek, her eyes narrowed. She was watching Jack Wells.

  Jack opened one of his sacks. After a minute, he said, “Wait. Wait! I had another one.”

  “Another what?” asked Marshall.

  “A little garter snake. In this sack, right here.”

  “Maybe it got away.”

  “No way, asshole!”

  “Quit saying that,” Marshall protested. Then he laughed and shook his head, pleased with his cleverness.

  Jack got on his knees and picked out a big king snake, speckled and pretty, and he wrapped it around his hand and tossed it into the air. Then he chased it through the long grass. I watched him catch it with a graceful stab of the hand, and he shook it and then stroked its belly and spun it in a wide circle, making us dizzy. Then he said, “Okay. Watch.”

  The snake vomited its morning meal. We saw the fresh bright carcass of a tiny garter snake, and Jack said, “More than three inches. Look!”

  “You can’t!” cried Marshall.

  Cody told Marshall to quit it. “It’s done.”

  “This is stupid,” he insisted. “This is so stupid!”

  “You’re stupid,” said Jack.

  “Welfare shit!” said Marshall. “Cheap ugly welfare genes—!”

  Jack launched himself at Marshall, and they fought their first fight on the grass. It lasted five seconds, nobody was bloodied, and then Cody was between them and shoving them to the ground. She told Jack, “You win. The money’s yours, okay?” Then she looked at Beth, saying, “Can you count it out now? Please?”

  Beth was beside Marshall. “Are you all right?” she wondered.

  “I’m just fine,” he blubbered. His face was red, his anger slow to leave. “Just go. I don’t need a goddamn nurse,” and he fled her grasp. He started walking home, and Beth was crestfallen. They had been the best of friends, never fighting. Now Beth sat in the grass, her face pushed shut and both hands wringing the fat green stalks.

  Jack counted his own money, then he dumped the sacks and watched the rushing snakes spreading across the pasture. I emptied Cody’s sack for her, and when I turned I saw her talking to Jack. I thought she was trying to calm him down. I went to Beth and sat. She looked lonely. I didn’t know her well enough to know what to say, but I sat because that seemed the right thing to do. When I looked again, Jack was handing his money to Cody. Minus the pennies. Then he turned and started walking toward our oak, walking straight through the grass.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”

  Cody picked up her empty sack. I could smell its snakes on my hands, the musk and shit. “Oh,” she said, “we made a deal.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think he’s all that lousy. I really don’t.”

  I waited.

  Cody told me, “He’s just a kid, I mean. And tailored. And his big brothers would rather piss on him t
han give him the time of day.”

  “Why’d he give up the money?”

  “He wanted to,” she said. “He’s joined us. The money’s so we can finish the treehouse.”

  I saw Jack Wells climbing the oak’s trunk, his arms reaching and his feet on the lowest step. “Marshall’s going to be mad,” I said.

  “He can’t always win,” she told me.

  Jack couldn’t reach the next step, and while I watched he slipped and fell with a hard thud and a cloud of dust. Then I blinked and he was up again, climbing again, sore and hurting; but he didn’t quit until he was sitting in the big room itself.

  Summer came, school closed; the spark-hounds stayed in the sky.

  There was still homework during the hot months, assignments fed into the home personals, but there was plenty of time to wander and talk and do nothing at all. The U.N. was getting closer to the great assault, and the TV was full of the news. But the strangeness of it all was turning ordinary. Sometimes it felt as if the war’s finish would be nothing. An anticlimax. When it came—“Soon,” said the generals, “soon!”—the spark-hounds would be pulverized with every terrible weapon—beams of neutrons and X-ray lasers coupled with freshly minted hydrogen bombs. And the very worst result for people would be a dusting of fallout on the moon’s surface. Surely nothing more, we were told. Because every factor was being weighed, and every dark possibility was being considered.

  Come summer, with no warning, Jack moved out of his house and into the oak.

  His folks and brothers didn’t care, and Cody said it would be a good thing to have a guard in the treehouse. There were still plenty of kids hunting for the snow dragon, or just walking the trails late at night. Maybe some of them would try something. “If they do,” said Cody, “pop them. Okay? If the snowballs don’t stop them, I’ve got slingshots and marbles in that cabinet. Way in the back.”

  Jack said, “Great,” and nodded. He pretended to throw a snowball out the window. “I’ll cream them.”