The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “This man kept adventure alive, when, everyplace else, it’s dying. There was nothing ever smug or safe about this man. If he had fears, he laughed. This man never hit a woman or crossed a friend. He did tie the can on Betty Lou one night, but can’t be blamed. It was really The Dog who did that one. Jesse never had a problem until he climbed into that Studebaker.”

  So Mike had known all along. At least Mike knew something.

  “I could always run even with Jesse,” Mike said, “but I never could beat The Dog. The Dog could clear any track. And in a damn Studebaker.”

  “But a very swift Studebaker,” Matt muttered, like a Holy Roller answering the preacher.

  “Bored and stroked and rowdy,” Mike said, “and you can say the same for Jesse. Let that be the final word. Amen.”

  IV

  A little spark of flame dwelt at the stack of the dozer, and distant mountains lay white-capped and prophesied winter. Mike filled the graves quick. Matt got rakes and a shovel. I helped him mound the graves with only moonlight to go on, while Mike went to the trailer. He made coffee.

  “Drink up and git,” Mike told us when he poured the coffee. “Jesse’s got some friends who need to visit, and it will be morning pretty quick.”

  “Let them,” Matt said. “We’re no hindrance.”

  “You’re a smart man,” Mike told Matt, “but your smartness makes you dumb. You started to hinder the night you stopped driving beyond your headlights.” Mike didn’t know how to say it kind, so he said it rough. His red mustache and bald head made him look like a pirate in a picture.

  “You’re saying that I’m getting old.” Matt has known Mike long enough not to take offense.

  “Me, too,” Mike said, “but not that old. When you get old, you stop seeing them. Then you want to stop seeing them. You get afraid for your hide.”

  “You stop imagining?”

  “Shitfire,” Mike said, “You stop seeing. Imagination is something you use when you don’t have eyes.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and was chewing it before he ever got it lit. “Ghosts have lost it all. Maybe they’re the ones the Lord didn’t love well enough. If you see them, but ain’t one, maybe you’re important.”

  Matt mulled that, and so did I. We’ve both wailed a lot of road for some sort of reason.

  “They’re kind of rough,” Matt said about ghosts. “They hitch rides, but don’t want ’em. I’ve stopped for them and got laughed at. They fool themselves, or maybe they don’t.”

  “It’s a young man’s game,” Matt said.

  “It’s a game guys got to play. Jesse played the whole deck. He was who he was, whenever he was it. That’s the key. That’s the reason you slug cops when you gotta. It looks like Jesse died old, but he lived young longer than most. That’s the real mystery. How does a fella keep going?”

  “Before we leave,” I said, “how long did you know that Jesse was The Dog?”

  “Maybe a year and a half. About the time he started running crazy.”

  “And never said a word?”

  Mike looked at me like something you’d wipe off your boot. “Learn to ride your own fence,” he told me. “It was Jesse’s business.” Then he felt sorry for being rough. “Besides,” he said, “we were having fun. I expect that’s all over now.”

  Matt followed me to the Chrysler. We left the cemetery, feeling tired and mournful. I shoved the car onto Highway 2, heading toward Matt’s place.

  “Wring it out once for old times?”

  “Putter along,” Matt said. “I just entered the putter stage of life, and may as well practice doing it.”

  In my mirrors a stream of headlights showed, then vanished one by one as cars turned into the graveyard. The moon had left the sky. Over toward South Dakota was a suggestion of first faint morning light. Mounded graves lay at my elbow, and so did Canada. On my left the road south ran fine and fast as a man can go. Mist rose from the roadside ditches, and maybe there was movement in the mist, maybe not.

  * * *

  There’s little more to tell. Through fall and winter and spring and summer, I drove to Sheridan. The Mormon turned out to be a pretty good man, for a Mormon. I kept at it, and drove through another autumn and another winter. Linda got convinced. We got married in the spring, and I expected trouble. Married people are supposed to fight, but nothing like that ever happened. We just worked hard, got our own place in a few years, and Linda birthed two girls. That disappointed the Mormon, but was a relief to me.

  And in those seasons of driving, when the roads were good for twenty miles an hour in the snow, or eighty under sun, the road stood empty except for a couple times. Miss Molly showed up once early on to say a bridge was out. She might have showed up another time. Squinchy little taillights winked one night when it was late and I was highballing. Some guy jackknifed a Freightliner, and his trailer lay across the road.

  But I saw no other ghosts. I’d like to say that I saw the twins, John and Jesse, standing by the road, giving the high sign or dancing, but it never happened.

  I did think of Jesse, though, and thought of one more thing. If Matt was right, then I saw how Jesse had to die before I got home. He had to, because I believed in Road Dog. My belief would have been just enough to bring John forward, and that would have been fatal, too. If either one of them became too strong, they both of them lost. So Jesse had to do it.

  The graveyard sank beneath the weather. Mike tended it for a while, but lost interest. Weather swept the mounds flat. Weed-covered markers tumbled to decay and dust, so that only one marble headstone stands solid beside Highway 2. The marker doesn’t bend before the winter winds, nor does the little stone that me and Mike and Matt put there. It lays flat against the ground. You have to know where to look:

  Road Dog

  1931–1965

  2 million miles, more or less

  Run and run as fast as we can

  We never can catch the Gingerbread Man

  And now, even the great good cars are dead, or most of them. What with gas prices and wars and rumors of wars, the cars these days are all suspensions. They’ll corner like a cat, but don’t have the scratch of a cat; and maybe that’s a good thing. The state posts fewer crosses.

  Still, there are some howlers left out there, and some guys are still howling. I lie in bed of nights and listen to the scorch of engines along Highway 2. I hear them claw the darkness, stretching lonesome at the sky, scatting across the eternal land; younger guys running as young guys must; chasing each other, or chasing the land of dreams, or chasing into ghostland while hoping it ain’t true—guys running into darkness chasing each other, or chasing something—chasing road.

  FEEDBACK

  Joe Haldeman

  “I may not know art,” the old cliché tells us, “but I know what I like!” Just what someone likes, though, can vary radically from one person to another—sometimes, as the high-tech shocker that follows will demonstrate, with strange and unforeseeable results.…

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembe
red, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II) Worlds, Worlds Apart, Buying Time, and The Hemingway Hoax, the “techno-thriller” Tool of the Trade, the collections Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent books are the SF novel Worlds Enough and Time and a new collection, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. Upcoming is a major new mainstream novel, 1969. He has had stories in our First, Third, Eighth, and Tenth Annual Collections. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  * * *

  This game was easier before I was famous, or infamous, and before the damned process was so efficient. When I could still pretend it was my own art, or at least about my art. Nowadays, once you’re doped up and squeezed into the skinsuit, it’s hard to tell whose eye is measuring the model. Whose hand is holding the brush.

  I’ll work in any painting or drawing medium the customer wants, within reason. Through most of my career people naturally chose my own specialty, transparent watercolor, but since I became famous with the Manhattan Monster thing, a lot of them want me to trowel on thick acrylics in primary colors. Boring. But they take the painting home and hang it up and ask their friends, Isn’t that just as scary as shit? That’s the stylistic association with the Monster, usually, not the subject matter. Most people’s nightmares stay safely hidden when they pick up a brush. Good thing, too. If the customer is a nut case, the collaboration can be truly disturbing—and perhaps revealing. A lot of us find employment in mental institutions. Some of us find residence in them. Occupational hazard.

  At least I make enough per assignment now, thanks to the notoriety of the Monster case, so that I can take off half the year to travel and paint for myself. This year, I was leaving the first of February to start off the vacation sailing in the Caribbean. With one week to go, I could already feel the sun, taste the rum. I’d sublet the apartment and studio and already had all my clothes and gear packed into two small bags. Watercolors don’t take up much space, and you don’t need a lot of clothes where I was headed.

  I was even tempted to forsake my schedule and go to the islands early. It would have cost extra and confused my friends, who know me to be methodical and punctual. But I should have done it. God, I should have done it.

  * * *

  We had one of those fast, hard snows that make Manhattan beautiful for a while. I walked to and from lunch the long way, through Central Park, willing to trade the slight extra danger for the beauty. Besides, my walking stick supposedly holds an electric charge strong enough to stun a horse.

  The man waiting for me in the lobby didn’t look like trouble, though you never know. Short, balding, old-fashioned John Lennon-style spectacles.

  He introduced himself while I fumbled with overcoat and boots. Juan Carlos Segura, investment counselor.

  “Have you ever painted before?” I asked him. “Drawn or sculpted or anything?” Some of the most interesting work I produce in collaboration comes from the inexperienced, their unfamiliarity with the tools and techniques resulting in happy accidents, spontaneity.

  “No. My talents lie elsewhere.” I think I was supposed to be able to tell how wealthy he was by upper-class lodge signals—the cut of his conservative blue pinstripe, the gold mechanical watch—but my talents lie elsewhere. So I asked him directly, “You understand how expensive my services are?”

  “Exactly. One hundred thousand dollars a day.”

  “And you know you must accept the work as produced? No money-back guarantee.”

  “I understand.”

  “We’re in business, then.” I buzzed my assistant, Allison, to start tea while we waited for the ancient elevator.

  People who aren’t impressed by my studio, with its original Picasso, Monet, Dali and Turner, are often fascinated by Allison. She is beautiful but very large, 6′3″ but perfectly proportioned, as if some magic device had enlarged her by 20 percent. Segura didn’t notice the paintings on the walls and didn’t blink at her, either. Maybe that should have told me something. He accepted his tea and thanked her politely.

  I blew on my tea and studied him over the cup. He looked serious, studious, calm. So had the Manhattan Monster.

  “There’s half a page of facilitators in the phone book,” I said. “Every single one of them charges less than I do.” I believe in the direct approach. It sometimes costs me a commission.

  He nodded, studying me back.

  “Some people want me just because I am the most expensive. A few want me because they know my work, my own work, and it’s very good. Most want a painting by the man who released the Monster from Claude Avery.”

  “Is it important for you to know why I chose you?”

  “The more I know about you, the better picture you’ll get.”

  He nodded and paused. “Then accept this. Maybe fifty percent of my motivation is because you are the most costly. That is sometimes an index of value. Of your artistic abilities, or anybody else’s, I am totally ignorant.”

  “So fifty percent is the Monster?”

  “Not exactly. In the first place, I don’t care to pay that much for something that so many other people have. And I don’t like the style. Two of my acquaintances own paintings they did with you in that disturbing mode. But, looking at their paintings, it occurred to me that something more subtle was possible. You. Your anger at being used in this way.”

  “I have expressed that in my own paintings.”

  “I am sure that you have. What I want, I suppose, is to express my own anger. At my customers.”

  That was a new wrinkle. “You’re angry at your customers?”

  “Not all of them. Most. People give me large amounts of money to invest for them. Once each quarter, I extract a percentage of the profit.” He set down the cup and put his hands on his knees. “But most of them want some input. It is their money, after all.”

  “And you would prefer to follow a single strategy,” I said, “to use all their money the same way. The more capital you have behind your investment pattern, the less actual risk—since I assume that you don’t have to pay back a percentage—if an investment fails.”

  “For an artist, you know a lot about money.”

  I smiled. “I’m a rich artist.”

  “People are emotionally connected to their money, and they want to do things with it, other than make more money. They want to change the world.”

  “Interesting. I see the connection with my work. My clients.”

  “I saw it when I read the profile in Forbes a couple years ago.”

  “And you waited for my price to come down?”

  “Your price actually has come down nine percent, because of inflation, since the article. You’ll be raising it soon.”

  “Good timing. I like round numbers, so I’m going up to one-twenty when I return from vacation in August.” I picked up a stylus and touchpad and began drawing close parallel lines. It helps me think. “The connection, the analogy, is good. I know that many of my clients must be dissatisfied with abstract smearings that cost them six figures. But they get exactly what they pay for. I explain it to them beforehand, and if they choose not to hear me, that’s their problem.”

  “You said as much in the article. But I don’t want abstract smearings. I want your customary medium, when you are working seriously. The old-fashioned hyperrealism.”

  “Do you want a Boston School watercolor?”

  “Exactly. I know the subject, the setting_____”

  “That’s three weeks’ work, minimum. More than two million dollars.”

  “I can afford it.”

  “Can you afford to leave your own work for three weeks?” I was drawing lines very fast. This would really screw up my vacation schedule. But it would be half a year’s income in three weeks.

  “I
’m not only going to leave for three weeks, I’m going exactly where you are. The Cayman Islands. George Town.”

  I just looked at him.

  “They say the beach is wonderful.”

  I never asked him how he’d found out about my vacation plans. Through my credit-card company, I supposed. That he would take the trouble before our initial interview was revealing. He was a man who left nothing to chance.

  * * *

  He wanted a photo-realist painting of a nude woman sitting in a conference room, alone, studying papers. Horn-rimmed glasses. The conference room elegant.

  The room would be no problem, given money, since George Town has as many banks and insurance buildings as bikinis. The model was another matter. Most of the models in George Town would be black, which would complicate the text of the painting, or would be gorgeous beach bums with tan lines and silicone breasts. I told him that I thought we wanted an ordinary woman, trim but severe-looking, someone whose posture would radiate dignity without clothing. (I showed him Olympia and Maja Desnuda and some Delacroix, and a few of Wyeth’s Helgas that had that quality.) She also would have to be a damned good model to do three weeks of sittings in the same position. I suggested we hire someone in New York and fly her down with us. He agreed.

  Allison had been watching through the ceiling bug, part of her job. She came in when he left and poured herself a cup of tea. “Nut case,” she said.

  “Interesting nut case, though. Rich.”

  “If you ever took on a charity nut case, I wasn’t watching.” She stirred a spoonful of marmalade into her tea. Russian style. She does that only to watch me cringe. “So I should get tickets to the Caymans for me and M&M?”

  “Yeah, Friday.”

  “First class?”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “I don’t know. You want a cup of tea in your lap?”

  “First class.”

  * * *

  Finding the right model was difficult. I knew two or three women who would fill the bill in terms of physical appearance and sitting ability, but they were friends. That would interfere with the client’s wishes, since he obviously wanted a cold, clinical approach. Allison and I spent an afternoon going through agency files, and another afternoon interviewing people, until we found the right one. Rhonda Speck, 30, slender enough to show ribs. I disliked her on sight, and liked her even less when she took off her clothes, for the way she looked at me—her expression a prim gash of disapproval. Even if I were heterosexual, I wouldn’t be ogling her unprofessionally. That edge of resentment might help the painting, I thought. I didn’t know the half of it.