He was shouting at them in his mind, however. What are you doing here? Getting some sort of vengeance? Do you think punishing me will bring your fathers back, you fools?
They pulled and pushed the chair into the van they had parked in front. The bishop’s van—Kippie wouldn’t have the use of that much longer. How much of the stolen grain was carried in here?”
“He’s going to roll around back here,” said Kippie.
“Tip him over,” said LaVon.
Carpenter felt the chair fly under him; by chance he landed in such a way that his left arm was not caught behind the chair. It would have broken then. As it was, the impact with the floor bent his arm forcibly against the strength of the spasmed muscles; he felt something tear, and his throat made a sound in spite of his effort to bear it silently.
“Did you hear that?” said Pope. “He’s got a voice.”
“Not for much longer,” said LaVon.
For the first time Carpenter realized that it wasn’t just pain that he had to fear. Now, only an hour after their fathers had been taken, long before time could cool their rage, these boys had murder in their hearts.
The road was smooth enough in town, but soon it became rough and painful. From that, Carpenter knew they were headed toward the fringe. He could feel the cold metal of the van’s corrugated floor against his face; the pain in his arm was settling down to a steady throb. Relax, quiet, calm, he told himself. How many times in your life have you wished to die? Death means nothing to you, fool—you decided that years ago—death is nothing but a release from this corpse. So what are you afraid of? Calm, quiet. His arms bent, his legs relaxed.
“He’s getting soft again,” reported Pope. From the front of the van, Kippie guffawed. “Little and squirmy. Mr. Bug. We always call you that, you hear me, Mr. Bug? There was always two of you. Mr. Machine and Mr. Bug. Mr. Machine was mean and tough and smart, but Mr. Bug was weak and squishy and gross, with wiggly legs. Made us want to puke, looking at Mr. Bug.”
I’ve been tormented by master torturers in my childhood, Pope Griffith. You are only a pathetic echo of their talent. Carpenter’s words were silent, until his hands found the keys. His left hand was almost too weak to use, after the fall, so he coded the words clumsily with his right hand alone. “If I disappear the day of your father’s arrest, Mr. Griffith, don’t you think they’ll guess who took me?”
“Keep his hands away from the keys!” shouted LaVon. “Don’t let him touch the computer.”
Almost immediately the van lurched and took a savage bounce as it left the roadway. Now it was clattering over rough, unfinished ground. Carpenter’s head banged against the metal floor, again and again. The pain of it made him go rigid; fortunately, spasms always carried his head upward to the right, so that his rigidity kept him from having his head beaten to unconsciousness.
Soon the bouncing stopped. The engine died. Carpenter could hear the wind whispering over the open desert land. They were beyond the fields and orchards, out past the grassland of the fringe. The van doors opened. LaVon and Kippie reached in and pulled him out, chair and all. They dragged the chair to the top of a wash. There was no water in it yet.
“Let’s just throw him down,” said Kippie. “Break his spastic little neck.” Carpenter had not guessed that anger could burn so hot in these languid, mocking boys.
But LaVon showed no fire. He was cold and smooth as snow. “I don’t want to kill him yet. I want to hear him talk first.”
Carpenter reached out to code an answer. LaVon slapped his hands away, gripped the computer, braced a foot on the wheelchair, and tore the computer off its mounting. He threw it across the arroyo; it smacked against the far side and tumbled down into the dry wash. Probably it wasn’t damaged, but it wasn’t the computer Carpenter was frightened for. Until now Carpenter had been able to cling to a hope that they just meant to frighten him. But it was unthinkable to treat precious electronic equipment that way, not if civilization still had any hold on LaVon.
“With your voice, Mr. Carpenter. Not the machine, your own voice.”
Not for you, Mr. Jensen. I don’t humiliate myself for you.
“Come on,” said Pope. “You know what we said. We just take him down into the wash and leave him there.”
“We’ll send him down the quick way,” said Kippie. He shoved at the wheelchair, teetering it toward the brink.
“We’ll take him down!” shouted Pope. “We aren’t going to kill him! You promised!”
“Lot of difference it makes,” said Kippie. “As soon as it rains in the mountains, this sucker’s gonna fill up with water and give him the swim of his life.”
“We don’t kill him,” insisted Pope.
“Come on,” said LaVon. “Let’s get him down into the wash.”
Carpenter concentrated on not going rigid as they wrestled the chair down the slope. The walls of the wash weren’t sheer, but they were steep enough that the climb down wasn’t easy. Carpenter tried to concentrate on mathematics problems so he wouldn’t panic and writhe for them again. Finally the chair came to rest at the bottom of the wash.
“You think you can come here and decide who’s good and who’s bad, right?” said LaVon. “You think you can sit on your little throne and decide whose father’s going to jail, is that it?”
Carpenter’s hands rested on the twisted mountings that used to hold his computer. He felt naked, defenseless without his stinging, frightening voice to whip them into line. LaVon was smart enough to take away his voice. LaVon knew what Carpenter could do with words.
“Everybody does it,” said Kippie. “You’re the only one who doesn’t black the harvest, and that’s only because you can’t.”
“It’s easy to be straight when you can’t get anything on the side, anyway,” said Pope.
Nothing’s easy, Mr. Griffeth. Not even virtue.
“My father’s a good man!” shouted Kippie. “He’s the bishop, for Christ’s sake! And you sent him to jail!”
“If he ain’t shot,” said Pope.
“They don’t shoot you for blacking anymore,” said LaVon. “That was in the old days.”
The old days. Only five years ago. But those were the old days for these children. Children are innocent in the eyes of God, Carpenter reminded himself. He tried to believe that these boys didn’t know what they were doing to him.
Kippie and Pope started up the side of the wash. “Come on,” said Pope. “Come on, LaVon.”
“Minute,” said LaVon. He leaned close to Carpenter and spoke softly, intensely, his breath hot and foul, his spittle like sparks from a cookfire on Carpenter’s face. “Just ask me,” he said. “Just open your mouth and beg me, little man, and I’ll carry you back up to the van. They’ll let you live if I tell them to, you know that.”
He knew it. But he also knew that LaVon would never tell them to spare his life.
“Beg me, Mr. Carpenter. Ask me please to let you live, and you’ll live. Look. I’ll even save your little talkbox for you.” He scooped up the computer from the sandy bottom and heaved it up out of the wash. It sailed over Kippie’s head just as he was emerging from the arroyo.
“What the hell was that, you trying to kill me?”
LaVon whispered again. “You know how many times you made me crawl? And now I gotta crawl forever, my father’s a jailbird thanks to you; I got little brothers and sisters—even if you hate me, what’ve you got against them, huh?”
A drop of rain struck Carpenter in the face. There were a few more drops.
“Feel that?” said LaVon. “The rain in the mountains makes this wash flood every time. You crawl for me, Carpenter, and I’ll take you up.”
Carpenter didn’t feel particularly brave as he kept his mouth shut and made no sound. If he actually believed LaVon might keep his promise, he would swallow his pride and beg. But LaVon was lying. He couldn’t afford to save Carpenter’s life now, even if he wanted to. It had gone too far, the consequences would be too great. Carpenter had to die, accidentally drowned, n
o witnesses, such a sad thing, such a great man, and no one the wiser about the three boys who carried him to his dying place.
If he begged and whined in his hound voice, his cat voice, his bestial monster voice, then LaVon would smirk at him in triumph and whisper, “Sucker.” Carpenter knew the boy too well. Tomorrow LaVon would have second thoughts, of course, but right now there’d be no softening. He only wanted his triumph to be complete, that’s why he held out a hope. He wanted to watch Carpenter twist like a worm and bay like a hound before he died. It was a victory, then, to keep silence. Let him remember me in his nightmares of guilt, let him remember I had courage enough not to whimper.
LaVon spat at him; the spittle struck him in the chest. “I can’t even get it in your ugly little worm face,” he said. Then he shoved the wheelchair and scrambled up the bank of the wash.
For a moment the chair hung in the balance; then it tipped over. This time Carpenter relaxed during the fall and rolled out of the chair without further injury. His back was to the side of the wash they had climbed; he couldn’t see if they were watching him or not. So he held still, except for a slight twitching of his hurt left arm. After a while the van drove away.
Only then did he begin to reach out his arms and paw at the sand of the arroyo bottom. His legs were completely useless, dragging behind him. But he was not totally helpless without his chair. He could control his arms, and by reaching them out and then pulling his body onto his elbows, he could make good progress across the sand. How did they think he got from his wheelchair to bed, or to the toilet? Hadn’t they seen him use his hands and arms? Of course they had, but they assumed that because his arms were weak, they were useless.
Then he got to the arroyo wall and realized that they were useless. As soon as there was any slope to climb, his left arm began to hurt badly. And the bank was steep. Without being able to use his fingers to clutch at one of the sagebrushes or tree starts, there was no hope he could climb out.
The lightning was flashing in the distance, and he could hear the thunder. The rain here was a steady plick plick plick on the sand, a tiny slapping sound on the few leaves. It would already be raining heavily in the mountains. Soon the water would be here.
He dragged himself another meter up the slope despite the pain. The sand scraped his elbows as he dug with them to pull himself along. The rain fell steadily now, many large drops, but still not a downpour. It was little comfort to Carpenter. Water was beginning to dribble down the sides of the wash and form puddles in the streambed.
With bitter humor he imagined himself telling Dean Wintz, “On second thought, I don’t want to go out and teach sixth grade. I’ll just go right on teaching them here, when they come off the farm. Just the few who want to learn something beyond sixth grade, who want a university education. The ones who love books and numbers and languages, the ones who understand civilization and want to keep it alive. Give me the children who want to learn, instead of these poor sandscrapers who go to school only because the law commands that six years out of their first fifteen years have to be spent as captives in the prison of learning.”
Why do the fire-eaters go out searching for the old missile sites and risk their lives disarming them? To preserve civilization. Why do the freedom riders leave their safe homes and go out to bring the frightened, lonely refugees in to the safety of the mountains? To preserve civilization.
And why had Timothy Carpenter informed the marshals about the black marketeering he had discovered in Reefrock Farms? Was it, truly, to preserve civilization?
Yes, he insisted to himself.
The water was flowing now along the bottom of the wash. His feet were near the flow. He painfully pulled himself up another meter. He had to keep his body pointed straight toward the side of the wash, or he would not be able to stop himself from rolling to one side or the other. He found that by kicking his legs in his spastic, uncontrolled fashion, he could root the toes of his shoes into the sand just enough that he could take some pressure off his arms, just for a moment.
No, he told himself. It was not just to preserve civilization. It was because of the swaggering way their children walked, in their stolen clothes, with their full bellies and healthy skin and hair, cocky as only security can make a child feel. Enough and to spare, that’s what they had, while the poor suckers around them worried whether there’d be food enough for winter, and if their mother as getting enough so the nursing baby wouldn’t lack, and whether their shoes could last another summer. The thieves could take a wagon up the long road to Price or even to Zarahemla, the shining city on the Mormon Sea, while the children of honest men never saw anything but the dust and sand and ruddy mountains of the fringe.
Carpenter hated them for that, for all the differences in the world, for the children who had legs and walked nowhere that mattered, for the children who had voices and used them to speak stupidity, who had deft and clever fingers and used them to frighten and compel the weak. For all the inequalities in the world, he hated them and wanted them to pay for it. They couldn’t go to jail for having obedient arms and legs and tongues, but they could damn well go for stealing the hard-earned harvest of trusting men and women. Whatever his own motives might be, that was reason enough to call it justice.
The water was rising many centimeters every minute. The current was tugging at his feet now. He released his elbows to reach them up for another, higher purchase on the bank, but no sooner had he reached out his arms than he slid downward and the current pulled harder at him. It took great effort just to return to where he started, and his left arm was on fire with the tearing muscles. Still, it was life, wasn’t it? His left elbow rooted him in place while he reached with his right arm and climbed higher still, and again higher. He even tried to use his fingers to cling to the soil, to a branch, to a rock, but his fists stayed closed and hammered uselessly against the ground.
Am I vengeful, bitter, spiteful? Maybe I am. But whatever my motive was, they were thieves, and had no business remaining among the people they had betrayed. It was hard on the children, of course, cruelly hard on them, to have their fathers stripped away from them by the authorities. But how much worse would it be for the fathers to stay, and the children to learn that trust was for the stupid and honor for the weak? what kind of people would we be then, if the children could do their numbers and letters but couldn’t hold someone else’s plate and leave the food on it untouched?
The water was up to his waist. The current was rocking him slightly, pulling him downstream. His legs were floating behind him now, and water was trickling down the bank, making the earth looser under his elbows. So the children wanted him dead now, in their fury. He would die in a good cause, wouldn’t he?
With the water rising faster, the current swifter, he decided that martyrdom was not all it was cracked up to be. Nor was life, when he came right down to it, something to be given up lightly because of a few inconveniences. He managed to squirm up a few more centimeters, but now a shelf of earth blocked him. Someone with hands could have reached over it easily and grabbed hold of the sagebrush just above it.
He clenched his mouth tight and lifted his arm up onto the shelf of dirt. He tried to scrape some purchase for his forearm, but the soil was slick. When he tried to place some weight on the arm, he slid down again.
This was it, this was his death, he could feel it; and in the sudden rush of fear, his body went rigid. Almost at once his feet caught on the rocky bed of the river and stopped him from sliding farther. Spastic, his legs were of some use to him. He swung his right arm up, scraped his fist on the sagebrush stem, trying to pry his clenched fingers open.
And, with agonizing effort, he did it. All but the smallest finger opened enough to hook the stem. Now the clenching was some help to him. He used his left arm mercilessly, ignoring the pain, to pull him up a little farther, onto the shelf; his feet were still in the water, but his waist wasn’t, and the current wasn’t strong against him now.
It was a victory, but not
much of one. The water wasn’t even a meter deep yet, and the current wasn’t yet strong enough to carry away his wheelchair. But it was enough to kill him, if he hadn’t come this far. Still, what was he really accomplishing? In storms like this, the water came up near the top; he’d have been dead for an hour before the water began to come down again.
He could hear, in the distance, a vehicle approaching on the road. Had they come back to watch him die? They couldn’t be that stupid. How far was this wash from the highway? Not far—they hadn’t driven that long on the rough ground to get here. But it meant nothing. No one would see him, or even the computer that lay among the tumbleweeds and sagebrush at the arroyo’s edge.
They might hear him. It was possible. If their window was open—in a rainstorm? If their engine was quiet—but loud enough that he could hear them? Impossible, impossible. And it might be the boys again, come to hear him scream and whine for life; I’m not going to cry out now, after so many years of silence—
But the will to live, he discovered, was stronger than shame; his voice came unbidden to his throat. His lips and tongue and teeth that in childhood had so painstakingly practiced words that only his family could ever understand now formed a word again: “Help!” It was a difficult word; it almost closed his mouth, it made him too quiet to hear. So at last he simply howled, saying nothing except the terrible sound of his voice.
The brakes squealed, long and loud, and the vehicle rattled to a stop. The engine died. Carpenter howled again. Car doors slammed. “I tell you it’s just a dog somewhere, somebody’s old dog—”
Carpenter howled again.
“Dog or not, it’s alive, isn’t it?”
They ran along the edge of the arroyo, and someone saw him.
“A little kid!”
“What’s he doing down there!”
“Come on kid, you can climb up from there!”
I nearly killed myself climbing this far, you fool, if I could climb, don’t you think I would have? Help me! He cried out again.
“It’s not a little boy. He’s got a beard—”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 20
