by Robin Hobb
Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, hell, their places were just as bad, all landlords were assholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn’t give its own citizens a break on rent. If there’d been a lot of Skoags at the café that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot shit, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they’d come to Earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn’t care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the United States if they would give us blueprints of their ships. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried. He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn’t afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those damn Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they’ve ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he passed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my mom’s parties were like that.
I’d usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cushions and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I’d never heard before and would never hear again. That’s what Mom was really into, struggling musicians who were performing their own stuff in the little “play for tips” places. She’d latch on to some guy and keep him with her aid check. She’d watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafés and clubs. They’d come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I’d come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It’s funny. The men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my mom would always be saying the same thing. “Don’t give up. You’ve got a real talent. Someday you’ll make it, and you’ll look back at them and laugh. You’ve really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can hear it. You’re gonna be big one day.”
The funny part is, she was always right. Those guys would live with us for a few months or a year, and suddenly, out of the blue, their careers would take off. They’d be discovered, on a sidewalk or in a café, or picked up by a band on its way up. They’d leave my mom, and go on to better things. She never got bitter about it, though she liked to brag to other women about all the hot ones she’d known “back when they were nothing.” Like that was her calling in life, feeding guitar humpers until someone besides her could hear their songs. Like only she could keep the real music flowing. One night she brought home a disc and gave it to me. It was called Fire Eyes, and the guy on the front had dark hair and blue eyes, like me. “That’s your daddy, Billy Boy,” she told me. “Though he don’t know it. He took off before I knew you were coming, and he was on a national tour by the time you were born. Look at those pretty, pretty eyes. Same as you, kid. You should have heard him sing, Billy. I knew he had it, even then. Even then.” I think that was the first time I ever saw her sit down and cry. I’m still not sure if she was crying over my dad leaving us, or something else. She didn’t cry long, and she went to bed alone that night. But the next night she brought home a whole pack of musicians from some open mike. By next morning, she had a new musician in her bed.
Sometimes during a party, if Mom was really stoned, or safe-sexing someone in the bedroom, I’d get up in my pajamas and make for the food, stuffing down as much as I could and hiding a couple of rice cakes or a handful of crackers behind the sofa cushion. I knew the mice would nibble on it, but hell, they never took much, just lacing around the edges. I figured they didn’t do much better than I did anyway. If I was really lucky, there’d be some girls in the group, and they’d fuss over me, telling me how my big blue eyes were such a surprise with my dark hair, and giving me gum and Life Savers from their purses, or maybe quarters and pennies. Like people in sidewalk cafés feed sparrows. If my mom caught me, she’d get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn’t I want to make something of myself? Then she’d smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweet voice, “If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music class, too. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” As if I gave a shit. She was always bragging that I had my daddy’s voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.
Dumb. Like singing “Farmer in the Dell” with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my mom did. She’d never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she’d been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn’t real to them because she couldn’t make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time; the stereo was always playing when she didn’t have an in-house musician of her own. I’d be half asleep watching her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she’d just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.
I know the day my life changed. I was about three blocks from home, partway into the Skoag sector, listening to some Skoags on a street corner. Not listening, really, so much as watching them puff their greasy skins out until they looked like those stupid balloon animals Roxie the clown used to make for my Head Start class. Then when they were all puffed out, membrane ballooned over corally bone webs, they’d start making music, the skin going in and out just like speaker cones on really old speakers. They reminded me of frogs, because of how their throats puffed out to croak, and because of the wet green-yellow glints on their skins.
I kept a safe distance from them. Everyone did. From the Don’t Do Drugs sessions at school, I knew what the stuff on their skin could do to me. I’d seen Skoag gropies, wandering around bald-eyed, hands reaching to grope any passing Skoag, to get one more rush even if it deafened them. Skoag gropies were always getting killed, squashed by cars and trucks they could no longer hear, or dreaming themselves to death, forgetting to eat or drink, forgetting everything but groping a fingerful of Skoag slime. But there were no gropies around these Skoags, and because they all still had crests, I knew they were new to Earth. Skoags usually lost their crests pretty fast in our gravity. One of these Skoags had the tallest crest I’d ever seen, like a king’s crown, and purple like a deep old bruise.
There was a mixed crowd around the Skoags. Inlander tourists who’d never seen a Skoag before, taking videos, making tapes. Locals panhandling the tourists, sometimes pretending they were passing the hat for the Skoags. Older boys and a few girls, just hanging out, calling the Skoags dirty names to shock the tourists, making out with a lot of tongue. And a few kids like me, skipping school because the sun was shining and it wasn’t too windy and we didn’t feel li
ke doing the weekly pee-in-the-bottle thing. The Skoags played for us all.
They’d been playing all morning, the usual Skoag set. They did “Happy Trails to You,” and “Horiko Cries,” and “When You Were Mine,” and then “America the Beautiful.” That was the weirdest thing about Skoags, how they’d pick up any music they fancied, and then play it back in any order. They’d started “Moon over Bourbon Street” when I saw my mom coming.
She and Teddy had gone to pick up her aid check that morning. But Teddy wasn’t with her, and I knew from her face that another musician had moved out. I was glad in a selfish way, because for the next few days there’d be regular meals on the table, and more food, because the check would only be feeding us two, and Mom would talk to me twice as much as usual. Of course, she’d make sure I actually got up and went to school, too, but that wasn’t much price to pay. And it wouldn’t last long before she’d hold another party and reel in a new musician.
So I was determined to enjoy it while it lasted. So I ran up to her, saying, “Wow, Mom, you should hear this purple-crested one play, he’s really something.” I said that for about four reasons. First, so she wouldn’t have the chance to ask me why I wasn’t in school, and, second, to show that I wasn’t going to notice that jerk Teddy was gone because he wasn’t worth her time. Third, it cheered her up when I acted like I was interested in music. I think she always hoped I really would be like my father, would grow up to be a singer and redeem her, or justify her life or something. And fourth, because the purple-crested one really was something, though I couldn’t have said why.
“You playing tourist, Billy Boy?” my mom asked me in her teasing way that she used when it was only she and I together again. And I laughed, because it was dumb the way the tourists from inland came down to our part of Seattle to spy on the Skoags and listen to them jam. Anybody who’d lived here ignored them the way you ignored supermarket music or a TV in a store window. All you ever heard from a Skoag was the same thing you’d heard a hundred times before anyway. So what I said was sort of a joke, too, to make her laugh and take the flatness out of her eyes.
But Teddy must have been better than I’d known, because her smile faded, and she didn’t scold me or anything. She just stooped down and hugged me like I was all she had in the world. And then she said, very gently, as if I were the adult and she were the little kid explaining something bad she’d done, “I gave him our check, Billy Boy. See, Teddy has a chance to go to Portland and audition for Sound & Fury Records. It’s a new label, and if things go like I know they will, he’ll be into the big money in no time. And he’ll send for us. We’ll have a real house, Billy, all to ourselves, or maybe we’ll get a motor home and travel across the country with him on tour, see the whole United States.”
She said more stuff but I didn’t listen. I knew what it meant, because once one of her guys had stolen both checks, her Career Mother Wage and my Child Nutrition Supplement. What it meant was bad times. It meant a month of food-bank food, runny peanut butter on dry bread, dry milk made up with more water than you were supposed to use, generic cereal that turned into sog in the milk, and macaroni. Lots and lots of microwaved macaroni, to the point where I used to swallow it whole because I couldn’t stand the squidgy feeling of chewing it anymore. I was already hungry from being out in the wind all morning, and just thinking about it made me hungrier. There wasn’t much food at home; there never was right before the aid check was due.
I just went on holding on to Mom, hating Teddy, but not much, because if it hadn’t been Teddy, it would have been someone else. I wanted to ask, “What about me? What about us? Aren’t we just as important as Teddy?” But I didn’t. Because it wouldn’t bring the money back, so there was no sense in making her cry. The other reason was, about three weeks before, Janice from upstairs had sat at our kitchen table and cried to Mom because she’d just given her little girls away. Because she couldn’t take care of them or feed them. Janice had kept saying that at least they’d get decent meals and warm clothes now. I didn’t want Mom to think that I wanted food and clothes more than I wanted to stay with her.
So I wiped my face on her shirt without seeming to and pulled back to look at her. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “We’ll get by. Let’s go home and figure things out.”
But she wasn’t even listening to me. She was focused on the Skoags, actually on the one with the big crest, listening to “Moon over Bourbon Street” like she’d never heard it before. It sounded the same as always to me, and I tugged at her hand. But it was just like I wasn’t there, like she had gone off somewhere. So I just stood there and waited.
My mom listened until they were done. The big purple-crested Skoag watched her listen to them. His big flat eye spots were pointed toward her all the time, calm and dead and unfocused like all Skoag eyes are. He was looking over the heads of the tourists and hecklers, straight at her.
When the song was finished, they didn’t go right into another song like usual. Purple stood there, watching my mother and letting the air leak out of his puffers. The other Skoags looked at him, and they seemed puzzled, shifting around, and one made a flat squawk. But then they let their air out, too, and pretty soon they were all empty and bony, their puffer things tight against their bodies again. My mom kept staring at the Skoag, like she was still hearing music, until I shook her arm.
“I’m coming,” she said, but she didn’t. She didn’t even move, until I shook her arm again and said, “I’m hungry.”
Then she jerked and looked down at me finally. “Oh, my poor little kid,” she said. She really meant it. That bothered me. I thought about it while we walked home. I wasn’t any more selfish than any kid is, and kids have a right to be selfish sometimes. So I walked along, thinking that she really did know how awful this month was going to be and how much I hated squidgy macaroni, and she probably even knew that the sole was coming off my sneaker. But she’d still given the check to Teddy. And that was a hard thing for a kid to understand.
So we went home. Mom switched on the stereo and went right to work. She was real methodical and practical when there wasn’t a musician to distract her. She sorted out what groceries we had and organized them in the cupboard.
Then she went through all the pockets of her clothes and dug inside the chair and got together all the money we had. It was ten seventy-eight. Then she sat me at the table with her, like I was one of her musicians, and told me how she was going to get us through the month. She explained that if I went to school every day, I’d get the free morning milk and vita-roll, and free hot lunch on my aid ticket. So I’d be mostly okay, even if there wasn’t much for dinner. We’d get through just fine. After all, we were pretty tough, weren’t we? And couldn’t the two of us beat anything if we just stuck together? And were we going to let a month of crummy groceries knock down tough guys like us? All that stuff. But suddenly, in the middle of the pep talk, she got up and knelt by her stereo. She twiddled the knobs, frowning. “Signal’s drifting, or something. Damn, that’s all I need. For this to drop dead on me now.” She tried about three different stations, then snapped it off. “Lousy speakers,” she complained to me. “Everything sounds tinny.”
It had sounded okay to me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat still and watched her take out a pot and run water and take things from the cupboards for dinner.
We had oatmeal for dinner, and toast with peanut butter melting on it. Mom gave me the last of the brown sugar for my oatmeal. “Good grains and protein in this meal,” she said wisely, as if she had planned it rather than scraped together what we had left. I nodded and ate it. It wasn’t so bad. At least it wasn’t macaroni.
That evening Mom sat at the table, reading a paperback that Teddy had left and wearing his old sweatshirt. I guess she felt pretty bad. Every so often, she’d turn on the stereo and fool with it for a while, then shake her head and snap it off. She’d read a little longer, and then she’d get up and turn the stereo on again, searching through the stations, but ne
ver finding what she wanted. In between, I was listening to the building sounds, spooky at night. The water heater in the utility room was growing and gurgling through the wall. I was coloring a Don’t Do Drugs handout from school, wishing they’d given me more than three crayons. I wanted to color the spoon and syringe silver. Yellow just wasn’t the same.
Mom had just snapped the radio off for about the twelfth time. In the quiet I heard a sound like someone dragging a bag of potatoes down our steps. Mom and I looked at each other. She lifted her finger to her lips and said, “Shush!” So I sat perfectly still, waiting. There came a slapping sound against the door, and whatever was slapping pushed against it too. The door thudded against the catch.
My mom’s dark eyes went huge, scaring me more than the noises outside the door. She went to the kitchen and got our biggest knife. “Go to my room, Billy Boy,” she whispered. But I was too scared to move. Like a monster movie, when the music screams and you know they’re going to show you something awful, but you can’t look away. I had to know what was outside. And Mom was too scared to make me obey. Instead she crept a little closer to the door, holding the knife tight. “Who’s out there?” she yelled, but her voice cracked.
The pressure on the door stopped, and for a moment all was silent. Then there was a sound, sort of like a harmonica wedged in a trumpet, and someone blowing through it anyway. It was a silly cartoon sound, Doofus Duck smacked with a rubber mallet, and my mom looked so startled that I burst out laughing. It was a dorko noise. Nothing scary could make a sound like that. Then a voice spoke, a low, low voice, like cello strings being rubbed slowly.
