The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I didn’t say she was making liquor now,” Berenice said. She looked down at her hands, then rubbed a large brown patch between her index finger knuckle and her thumb. “First sign I had I was getting old were wrinkles going up and down my fingers on the palm side. Nobody ever warned me about them. I like Marie, but the youth doesn’t rub off, does it?”

  “Berenice, there’s an alien in Franklin County.”

  “So the government put it here. We never have any real say, do we? Alien? No different than a foreigner in most folks’ minds.” Foreigner means from outside our home county. The Welsh brought the concept with them, which is only fitting, as welsh means foreigner in Anglo-Saxon. Berenice continued, “You think Marie’s sad, don’t you? Like self-cultural genocide? Maybe she’d be happier if she were more like Terrella?”

  “Cultural genocide is a stupid term. It trivializes things like really murdered people.”

  “Well, then I’ll just say she’s awful divided against herself then.”

  “Are we supposed to judge blacks?”

  “It’s racist not to,” Berenice said, and I realized she’d been teasing me. Berenice could be such a yo-yo, but she’d ceased to take herself seriously without giving up what had been good about her ideals. Taking her in, I had to watch her mind wobble, but right now Berenice seemed fine, not bitterly ironic, not lapsing into the past because the present jammed in short-term memory, three-minute chunks throwing each past three minutes into oblivion. “Lilly, you’re sure you’re going to have to have surgery?” She asked sharply as though needing surgery were my fault.

  If I did have cancer, Berenice would be extremely pissed. She’d have to go to a nursing home. The jittery insistance I tolerated for the delight she was on good days would get drugged out of her. I nodded, then said yes because she wasn’t looking at me directly.

  Berenice poured herself another whiskey, drained it, and said, “I’ve lived fully, interestingly. I’d rather lose my present than my past. At least senility won’t suck that away. Did I tell you about the time I hitchhiked down to Big Sur and met Henry Miller?”

  Not that she hadn’t had senile moments already, I thought in pity. Then I realized I had not heard about Henry Miller and said, “Tell me.”

  DeSpain in Tailwater

  DeSpain cast out with his Orvis rod, the Hardy Princess reel waiting for a big brown trout to inhale his Martin’s Crook rigged behind the gold-plated spinner. He was missing Marie, wanted her back and wanted to kill her, but he’d do a sixteen-inch-plus trout instead.

  Or break the law and kill a little one. But DeSpain had principles. He broke the law only for serious money. One of his nephews who’d gone to Johns Hopkins said that DeSpain was trying to work sympathetic magic with the law.

  The Smith River fell with the sun as the Danville and Martinsville offices and factories turned out their lights. All but poachers out of the water in half an hour. DeSpain remembered what the guide told him about tying on a stonefly nymph, but he hated strike indicators and fishing something he couldn’t see upstream.

  Intending this to be the last cast of the day, DeSpain pulled up the sink tip and cast the big wet fly and the spinner across the river, shooting out line, then reeling it in. Then he saw the alien standing in bare legs in the cold Smith River, casting with the guide, coming along the opposite bank. DeSpain realized that the alien was two feet longer in the legs than the guide, who was up to his hips in the river, closer to the bank than the alien.

  DeSpain yelled, “I knew the Smith was famous nationally, but this is ridiculous.”

  The alien said, “DeSpain. Liquor distributor. Still maker.”

  The Smith wasn’t chilly enough to suit DeSpain right then, and his waders were much too warm. He’d heard the alien was rude. Correct—rude or very alien. DeSpain remembered gossip about the alien and said, “Turkemaw, Svarti resident extraterrestrial, mate went back home after two weeks here.” He felt better.

  “Dennis, you fishing a stonefly nymph?” the guide asked.

  DeSpain pretended not to hear and left his line in the water, no orange foam strike indicator on the leader, obviously either real cocky about his skill with upwater nymphs or not fishing one.

  The alien pushed a button on a small box hanging like a locket around his neck. The box laughed.

  DeSpain remembered hearing last week from one of his drivers that the alien had bought stainless-steel welding rods and that its farm had corn acreage. Everyone wondered if so conspicuous a creature was going to be so very more flagrantly making liquor. Or maybe the creature was making spaceships in its basement? “Be careful,” he said to both of them. After they waded on, DeSpain caught the spinner and fly in his hand, then switched to the stonefly nymph.

  A trout took it. As he played it, then reeled it in, it came jaws out of the water, eyeballs rolled to see the hook in its mouth. He netted it, then measured it: fifteen inches three-quarters. We can fix that, DeSpain thought as he broke the fish’s spine and stretched. Bingo, sixteen and one-tenth. The hell I work sympathetic magic with the law.

  Satisfied with the dead trout, DeSpain left the river, his eidetic memory reviewing his investments, both legal and illegal. I have to be so mean with the illegal ones. Fourteen trucks out with piggyback stills, $200,000 in a Uzbek metallurgical firm, $50,000 in Central Asian cotton mills, and maybe $500,000 in various inventories, legal and illegal.

  His brain began to run more detail, like a self-programming and over-eager computer. No spreadsheets, he thought as he began to wonder again if he’d bought into the global equivalent of just another Franklin County. He had first wondered if the Armenians were cheating him, but then he considered he was damn apt at bullying other men into working for him. Let other people run their butts off when the law came to blow a still.

  The true reality of the world wasn’t Tokyo’s glitter, DeSpain had long since decided after one trip to Tokyo, but the harsh little deals driven in places like Rocky Mount and Uralsk. Tokyo and New York could evaporate and the small traders would still be off making deals, machine oil under their nails, doing the world’s real business.

  But that nigger bitch got away from him like no man had ever been able to. Goddamn great body and smart, too. He had a lust like a pain for women like her and his wife, Orris. Yeah, Orris, she wanted him to have only simple women on the side.

  He pulled the rod apart and wound down the line to keep the two sections together and the fly hook in the keeper. The trunk security chimed as he opened it. He pushed the code buttons and put the rod and vest in it before he stripped off his waders and boots and put them in a bag, then laid the trout carefully on ice, making sure it stayed stretched out.

  Remembering that he paid $400 to get a ten percent casting improvement over the cheaper generic rod, DeSpain thought, Wouldn’t do that in business, but …

  “If you just want to kill trout, may I suggest a spinning rod,” the clerk had said in tones that condemned meat fishing and people too cheap or insensitive to the nuances of a $400 rod.

  Liquor. A man needs the illegal to bankroll him for the legal. “It’s not romantic with me,” he said out loud, thinking about the folklorist who’d come from Ferrum to tape his father about his grandfather’s suicide after the feds broke his ring in the thirties.

  DeSpain felt a touch of guilt that he was sending bootleg money out of the country, but no more than when he yanked an extra fraction of an inch out of a Smith River brown so that it would go over sixteen inches. He turned the key in the Volvo’s ignition and drove home.

  His wife came out when she heard the garage door open. When she wore her red silk dress like she was, she expected to go out to eat. Her hair was blowing, but instead of reaching to smooth it, she folded her arms across her breasts. DeSpain pulled on into the garage and turned off the electric eye. “Orris,” DeSpain said in the garage, “what did you fix for dinner?”

  “Steven’s at Mother’s. You owe me, Dennis. The bitch is a college student. You’ve even t
aken her out for breakfast.”

  “Why does that make it different? She’s just another one of my dancing girlfriends. I’m tired.”

  “I can drive myself to Roanoke if you’re that tired. I know what it means when a man wants to talk to a woman in the morning. And you were telling her about still workings. At breakfast.”

  DeSpain knew if he stayed home Orris would harangue his ass off about that bitch Marie. When a particular black woman was seducing him out of moonshine technology and college tuition, then he should have known Orris would see the woman as a real rival. “Okay, let’s go. You don’t have to drive.” He wouldn’t tell her that Marie had left him.

  “To the Japanese place.”

  The Japanese place made Dennis nervous. Orris had picked up more about Japan than he had. “I need to log some items on the bulletin board.” He watched Orris carefully for a loosening of those arms before he went inside. He got his Toshiba out of the safe, unfolded it, and plugged in the phone line. His bat file brought up all his bulletin boards: Posse Commitatus, the Junk Market, Technology Today, and Loose Trade. He pushed for the Loose Trade bulletin board and scanned through the messages. All his messages were coded:

  TO RICHARD CROOK: BOONE MILLS LOST HUBCAP, FOUND, NO PROBLEM. GOT GAS AT THE USUAL. SPINNER.

  TO MR. MAX: COLLEAGUES REALLY APPRECIATED THE LOBSTER. WOULD LIKE TO ORDER DOZEN MORE CHICKEN-SIZED.

  TO RICHARD CROOK: HOPE CAN BUY ANOTHER FIVE LAMB’S FLEECES, WASHABLE TANNED.

  TO BUD G. R. HARESEAR: NEED SOME SENSE OF PROGRESS REPORT.

  One of his trucks had almost been busted at the Cave Spring I-81 exit Exxon station. Three of his suppliers needed deliveries. DeSpain made code notes and purged the messages. Then he noticed that the alien was asking in plain text if anyone wanted to sell it an old tractor. Why is he on this bulletin board? DeSpain swore he’d bring in the feds if the alien was going to be able to distill openly when people had to be discreet about it. Fool, the feds brought the alien here to begin with.

  After DeSpain exited Loose Trade, he took his accounting disks out of his safe. He needed to ship out twenty-seven gallons to the small bars and then collect on some of the larger accounts. Follett’s salary came due again. DeSpain paid his men full rate when they were in jail and half rate when they were on probation and not working a full schedule, but Follett would be off probation next week. Damn Follett, DeSpain thought, he just sits there when he’s raided. Most of his still men had never been busted. He wrote a check on his hardware store account.

  An image of the researcher listening to his grandmother came to mind, all romantic-ass about the business, and believing the guff that no one ever died at a still raid, that both sides of the game had an understanding. Yeah, and the mountain counties averaged a murder a week in the twenties and thirties.

  His grandfather wouldn’t have hanged himself over a game.

  Orris came in and said, as though she hadn’t been bitching at him minutes earlier, “I hope your foreign investments do well.”

  DeSpain rubbed his eyes and said, “I’ve got to go back over there in September.”

  “I’d like to go with you this time.”

  “Babe, it’s just like Detroit over there. Really.”

  “If you went to Detroit for a month, I’d want to come along.”

  He wasn’t sure if she were implying anything further, so he decided to just stomp change the subject. “You think I should wear a suit?” Wrong, that sounded hick asking his more sophisticated wife what to wear in the larger sense. DeSpain learned how to dress at Emory & Henry before they threw him out for getting arrested.

  She said, “It’s not Sunday.”

  “Man who looks like he was just in the river they know is rich enough not to care what a waiter thinks. Mud equals real estate.”

  Orris said, “Not on a nigger or a neck, mud doesn’t.”

  DeSpain wondered if she thought her red dress would look like polyester if he didn’t dress to match. He said, “I’ll change,” and she stepped her skinny body out on her high heels without indicating whether she was pleased or not. Orris, an iris root. DeSpain had looked it up once and wondered who in her family knew such an arcane thing.

  He folded his computer and put all his records and it back in the safe, then found a blue suit to wear with a string tie. String ties made Orris nervous.

  On the drive to Roanoke, she said, “Don’t do that to me again.”

  “What, with a college student?” Dennis realized she knew the affair was over, but did she know the how and why?

  “Right, Dennis.”

  “And if I did it with some poor-ass good old girl, I’d probably be fucking your family.”

  “So crude, but then what was I to expect, marrying a bootlegger.”

  “Not that I’m not employing half your cousins. The bitch left me, if that’s any damn consolation.”

  She laughed, then said, “One of my friends said at least recently you’d been more considerate.”

  Stomp change again. “Did I tell you I saw the alien when I was fishing?”

  “Dennis, you are so obvious when you don’t want to talk about something. I heard he was rich.”

  “I suppose. He had a guide with him.”

  “And I’ve heard he’s rude. Is he?”

  “He told me to my face I was a still maker and a liquor investor.”

  “Maybe he’s just alien, doesn’t know not to think out loud. At least he didn’t tell you about what he knew about Marie.”

  “Gee, Orris, you can find the good side of anyone, can’t you?”

  “Not everyone,” Orris said. They pulled up to the restaurant and walked in. “I need sashimi tonight,” she said as if eating raw fish took guts.

  Marie

  Sometimes I play black and tough, but not at Tech. It’d be too easy to slide from a Dennis DeSpain to a drunk rich frat boy who knows his daddy’s lawyer will get him off if he leaves a woman to strangle in ropes, or to a cracker trucker with a knife.

  I hate my colorful ancestors, the liquor queens, the Jesus priestesses. Times were I suspected they just renamed a Dahomey god Jesus so they could keep on writhing to him.

  But here I was, home for the weekend in a brick house in a compound that reminded me unpleasantly of anthropology class, the whole lineage spread kraal-style from broke-down trailers to $100,000 brick ranch houses with $20,000 in landscaping.

  We were at least in one of the nice houses; Momma was waiting for me. “You broke with DeSpain like I told you. I’m satisfied.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I saw what you were taking at Tech when your grades came. We’re not paying for you to learn bootlegging.”

  “Chemical engineering, Mamma.”

  She sat down on the piano bench and closed her eyes. I sat down on one of the red velvet armchairs and leaned my head back against the antimacassar. “I know they can use you at DuPont or in a dye house. Find a place that will pay you to take a master’s in business. Daddy’s been knowing a white boy all his life that’s now doing that.”

  I wondered if we’d moved away from the trailer kin what my life would have been like. I could have grown up in Charlotte, North Carolina—black, white, and mulatto all doing airy things like architecture and graphics design. Momma saw the look on my face and said, “Do you think you collected all the white blood in the family?”

  “No, Mamma.”

  “You white granddaddies better than that DeSpain.”

  Lapsing out of proper English again, Mamma? I rolled my eyes at her and said, “I need be studying.” Yeah, yeah, I know Black English grammar has its own formal structure and I was hashing it.

  “You need the computer?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come home for the weekend. It’s so depressing around here.”

  “You are an example to your kin.”

  I thought about Grannie crocheting billions of antimacassars like giant mutant snowflakes, rabidly industrious while her sisters slid by on
their asses. “Do you think they really appreciate it?”

  Momma asked, half interested and half to abruptly change the subject, “Is there really an alien down near Endicott?”

  “He was walking around Rocky Mount, trying to pass for a good old boy. Yeah, let me get on the computer.” Momma grew up associating computers with school as they didn’t have node numbers and nets and gossip by the megabyte when she was coming along. I could access all sorts of trash while she thought I was studying.

  Orris had left me a message on Loose Trade: DENNIS’S DANCING GIRLFRIEND: SORRY, BETTER LUCK/CHOICE NEXT TIME. I felt my tongue begin to throb; I’d pushed against my teeth so hard.

  But before I sniped back at her, I noticed messages about the alien: ALIEN IS A BASTARD. HEARD WHEN PEOPLE CLAIM THEY WERE KIDNAPPED BY HIM, HE SAYS HE DOESN’T REMEMBER THEM IN A WAY THAT MAKES EVEN CRAZY PEOPLE FEEL REAL TRIVIAL.

  I wondered if he had really kidnapped people, if his people had.

  Another message about the alien: HE’S OFF BACK ABOUT A MILE AND A HALF FROM THE HARDTOP. WON’T LET THE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT SELL HIM THE SURFACE TREATMENT EITHER.

  I left a message to Dennis: MRS. DESPAIN CALLED. TERRELLA IF YOU WANT TO THINK OF ME THAT WAY. I knew he wanted me to be more like her than I could ever wish to be.

  Then the alien came on the board in real time: PLEASE, I HOPE TO DO BUSINESS HERE. MY WIFE LEFT ME. I WISH ONLY TO LIVE QUIETLY. YOUR RESIDENT ALIEN.

  Someone quickly typed back: ARE YOU FOR REAL?

  I DON’T REMEMBER KIDNAPPING ANYONE FROM THIS COUNTY.

  I wondered why an alien would be doing business on a semi-honest bulletin board and remembered Lilly saw him buying welding equipment. I typed, THIS BULLETIN BOARD ISN’T AS SECURE AS THE SYSTEMS OPERATOR MAY HAVE TOLD YOU WHEN YOU SIGNED ON.

  The alien replied: IF I NEEDED SECURITY, I WOULDN’T BE ON THIS PLANET.

  2

  Lilly: As Alien as It Gets

  The next Saturday, as I helped Berenice with her bath, I told her how startled I’d been when the alien told me my name and occupation.