Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  Somehow the music made it all real and I had to look into the wind to keep the water out of my eyes. Up ahead of us in Globe was a 15-vear-old kid listening to the same song, starting to get ready for his end-of-the-school-year dance. At that dance he was going to meet a girl named LeeAnn Patterson and fall in love with her. And he was never going to get over her.

  Never.

  Big Charlie eased the pickup off the road and found a place to cross the strip of melted glass. When the song finished, the radio erupted in a flare of trumpets. “This is Saturday, May the 27th, and this is Kay-Zowzowzow NEWS!” Big Charlie turned the volume down with an automatic flip of the wrist, but I didn’t care. The date was right, and I could have rattled off the headlines as well as the DJ could. Thornberg had made me do my homework.

  Khrushchev and Kennedy were headed for test-ban talks in Vienna. Freedom Riders were being jailed in Mississippi, and the Communists were stepping up their assault on Laos. Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem, and Alan Shepard was still being honored for his space flight of three weeks before.

  On the local scene, six teenagers were dead over in Stafford, part of the rising Memorial Day Death Toll. Rumors were going around about a strike against Kennicot Copper, whose strip mines employed about half of Globe’s work force.

  Eddie Sachs was going to be in the pole position when they ran the 500 on Tuesday. The Angels had taken the Tigers, and the Giants had edged the Cubs in 13.

  A decade of peace and quiet and short hair was winding down; a time when people knew their place and stayed in it. For ten years nobody had wanted anything but a new car and a bigger TV set. Now all that was about to change. In a little over a year the Cuban missile crisis would send thousands of people into their back yards to dig bomb shelters, and “advisors” would start pouring into Southeast Asia. In another year the president would be dead.

  All that I knew. What I didn’t know was why there was a huge melted scar across the desert.

  Suddenly the truck’s brakes squealed and I jerked back to attention. My eyes focused on the road ahead and saw a little boy straddling the white line, waving frantically.

  The truck slewed to the left and stopped dead. A girl of 12 or 13 stood up from a patch of mesquite and stared at us like she wanted to run away. She had a good six years on the boy, but when he ran back to her it seemed to calm her down.

  “Hey,” Big Charlie shouted, leaning out his window. “What do you kids think you’re doing?”

  The boy was tugging on the girl’s arm, saying, “It’s okay! They’re both okay, I’m sure, I’m really sure!”

  The boy pulled her gently toward the driver’s window of the truck. “Can you help us, mister?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s the big idea of standing out there in the middle of the road like that? You could have got killed.”

  The boy backed away and the girl stepped in.

  “We...we were running away from home.” She looked down at the boy as if she needed confirmation, and if I hadn’t known before that she was lying, I knew it then. “We...changed our minds. Can you take us back, mister? Just as far as town? Please?”

  Big Charlie thought it over for a minute and seemed to come up with the same answer as me. Whatever they’d done probably wasn’t that serious, and they were bound to be better off in town than hitchhiking in the middle of the desert.

  “In the back,” he said. “And watch what you’re doing!”

  They scrambled over the side of the pickup, their sneakers banging on the side walls. I turned to look at them as we pulled away and they were huddled by the tailgate, arms around each other, their eyes squeezed shut.

  I wondered what they were running from. They looked like they hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, and their clothes were torn and dirty. And what in God’s name had the boy meant when he said we were “okay?”

  Don’t worry about it, I told myself. Don’t get involved. You haven’t got time to get mixed up in somebody else’s problems. You’re not going to be here that long.

  We passed Glen’s Market at the foot of Skyline Drive, the one with the heavy wooden screen door that said “Rainbo is good bread” and the rich smells of doughnuts and bubble gum and citrus fruit.

  “Where do you want to get off?” Big Charlie asked me.

  “Downtown, anywhere.” The highway had curved past Globe’s three motels and now the grade school was coming up on the right. The Toastmaster Café, and its big Wurlitzer jukebox with the colored tube of bubbles around the side, was just across the street. Overhead was the concrete walkway used to get from one to the other. It seemed a lot closer to the ground than it used to, even though I’d tried to prepare myself for things being smaller than I remembered.

  Number 207 on the Toastmaster’s Wurlitzer was “True Love Ways” by Buddy Holly. I could almost hear those thick, syrupy violins and the hollow moan of King Curtis’ saxophone as we turned the corner and pulled up in front of Upton’s.

  “This okay?” Big Charlie asked.

  “Fine.” I was thinking about the smell of pencil shavings and the one piece of gum that was always stuck. in the drain of the water fountain at the high school across the street. I got out of the truck. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Not to worry,” Big Charlie said, and the pickup rattled away down Main.

  The counter inside Upton’s swung out in a wide U, dotted with red plastic-covered stools. The chrome and the white linoleum made it look more like an operating room than a place to eat, but it passed for atmosphere at the time.

  “Help you?” said the kid behind the counter.

  His name was Curtis and he lived up the street from my parents’ house. He was a lot younger than I remembered him and he could have done with a shampoo. It was all I could do not to call him by name and order a Suicide. The Suicide was Curtis’ own invention, and he made it by playing the chrome spigots behind the counter like they were piano keys.

  “Just coffee,” I said.

  Five of the tables along the south wall were occupied, two of them by clean, cut families at dinner. Dinner tonight was a hamburger or the 89 cent Daily Special: fried chicken, three vegetables, tea or coffee. The women’s dresses hung to mid-calf and most of the male children had flat-top haircuts that showed a strip of close-shaven skull in the middle. Everybody seemed to be smoking. A woman around the corner from me had bought the Jackie Kennedy look all the way, down to the red pill, box hat and the upswept hair. Two seats away from her a kid in a T-shirt and a leather jacket was flipping noisily through the metal-edged pages in the jukebox console.

  When I looked up, the two kids from the highway were sitting next to me. The girl was getting some stares. Her face was streaked with dirt and her shirt was thin enough to make it obvious that she should have been wearing a training bra under it.

  “My name’s Carolyn,” she said. “This is Jeremy.”

  She put her arm around the boy, who smiled and picked at his fingernails.

  “I’m Travis. Is he your brother?”

  “Yes,” the girl said, at the same time that the boy said, “No.”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  “What do you want to know for, anyway?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t really care. You’re following me, remember?”

  Curtis was standing by the brand-new Seeburg box in the corner. He must have gotten tired of waiting for the kid in the motorcycle jacket to make up his mind. He pushed some buttons, a record dropped, and the room filled with violins. The bass thumped, a stick touched a cymbal, and Ray Charles started singing “Georgia.”

  “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Rubbing your hair that way. Like it feels funny. “

  I jerked my hands away from my ragged prison hair, cut. Ray was singing about his dreams. “The road,” he sang, “leads back to you...”

  I knew that he was talking to me. My road had brought me back here, to see Curtis
standing in front of the jukebox, to the music hanging changeless in the air, to LeeAnn. Even if Brother Ray and Hoagy Carmichael had never imagined a road made of Thornberg’s anti-particles.

  “Stop that,” the girl said, and for a second I thought she was talking to me. Then I saw that Jeremy was staring down at the countertop, chewing on the ridge of flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Blood started to trickle out of the front of his mouth. The sight of it put the music out of my head and left me scared and confused.

  I hadn’t looked at him closely before, but now that I did I saw scabs all over his arms and spots of dried, chocolate’ colored blood on his T-shirt. His eyes were rolling back in his head and he looked like he was going to go backwards off the stool.

  Carolyn slapped him across the mouth, knocking his hand away. He started to moan, louder than the jukebox, loud enough to turn heads across the room.

  “I have to get him out of here,” the girl said, pulling him to his feet.

  “He needs a doctor,” I said. “Let me...”

  “No,” she said. “Stay out of it.”

  I flinched and she ran for the door, tugging Jeremy after her. They were halfway across the floor when the door swung open.

  A man in loose slacks and a sport shirt stood in the doorway, staring at them. The little boy looked like he’d just seen the giant wasp in The Monster from Green Hell. His jaw dropped open and he started to shake. I could see the scream building from all the way across the room.

  Before he could cut loose with it, Carolyn dragged him past the man and out into the street. The man stood there for a second with a puzzled half-smile on his face, then shrugged and looked around for a seat.

  When my stomach started jumping I thought at first that I was just reacting to all the confusion. Then I remembered what Thornberg had said about phase shifting, and I knew I only had about a minute before the charge that had sent me back wore off.

  I left a quarter on the counter and went to the men’s room in back. The smell of the deodorant cake in the urinal almost made me sick as I leaned against the wall. I felt drunk and dizzy and there seemed to be two of everything. Then the floor went out from under me and I was falling again.

  I sailed back up toward the future like a fish on the end of a line.

  I spent two days in debriefing. Thornberg got to ask the questions, but there was always a proctor or two around, videotaping everything.

  From Thornberg’s end everything had looked fine. One second I’d been there, the next I’d just winked out. I was gone a little over an hour, then I popped back in, dizzy but conscious, and all my vital signs had been good.

  Thornberg’s excitement showed me for the first time how personally he was involved. He seemed frankly envious, and I suddenly realized that he didn’t just want the experiment to work, he wanted to be able to go back himself.

  I was too caught up in my own questions to worry very long about Thornberg. My common sense told me everything that had happened to me had been real, but my rational mind was still having trouble. Who were those two kids, and what were they running from? What could have torn up the highway that way?

  The proctors liked it a lot less than I did. “We’ve been through the government files,” one of them said on the second day. “No experiments on the San Carlos Reservation. Nothing even in development that could have caused it.”

  “So how do you explain it?” Thornberg asked.

  “Hallucination,” the proctor said. “The whole experience was completely subjective and internal.”

  “No,” Thornberg said. “Out of the question. We saw his body disappear.”

  The proctor stood up. “I think we’d better suspend this whole thing until this is cleared up.”

  “No!” Thornberg got between the proctor and the door. “We’ve got to have more data. We have to send him back again.”

  The proctor shook his head. The gesture didn’t put the slightest wrinkle in his maroon double knit uniform.

  “You can’t stop me, you know,” Thornberg said. “You’ll have to get an executive order.”

  “I’ll get it,” the proctor said, and stepped around him.

  When the door was closed Thornberg turned to me. “Then we send you back first. Now.”

  I landed back where I’d come from, leaning against the dingy walls of the rest room for support. My head cleared, and the last two days could have been no more than a fever dream caused by bad coffee on an empty stomach.

  I started back into the restaurant. The jukebox was playing “Sink the Bismarck” by Johnny Horton. Horton was a big local favorite and he’d died just a few months before, in a car crash in Texas.

  The man in the sport shirt, the one that had scared Jeremy so badly, was sitting in a booth with a cheeseburger. I stood for a second in the shadows of the hall, way and watched him. He looked ordinary to me—short, curly hair, no sideburns, no facial hair. His shirt was one of those short-sleeved African prints in muted oranges and blues that wanted to be loud but couldn’t quite bring it off. Sunglasses peeked out of the shirt pocket.

  He looked like a tourist. But why would there be any tourists in Globe, Arizona, in 1961?

  And then I saw his fingers.

  His right hand was tucked under his left elbow and the fingers were moving in short, precise gestures against his side. I’d seen hands move like that before, keying data into a computer by touch.

  Cut it out, I told myself. So the guy’s got a nervous habit. It’s none of your business.

  I picked up my copy of the newspaper from the counter and tore off the masthead, including the date. If the proctors wanted some proof, I’d try to oblige. I folded the strip of newsprint and put it in my back pocket, dropping the rest of the paper in the trash.

  Once on the street I saw men all around me in short-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck. Long, rectangular cars covered with chrome and sharp angles cruised the streets like patient sharks. TV sets blinked at me from the window of the furniture store, their screens cramped and nearly circular. I stopped and watched a toothpaste ad with an invisible shield in it and remembered the craze for secret ingredients.

  That 15-year-old kid across town had a theory about secret ingredients. He believed they were codes, and that aliens from space were using them to take over the Earth. GL70: Town Secure. AT-7: Send More Saucers. He dreamed at night about great domed ships gliding over the desert.

  I thought about the scar in the highway and the man in the restaurant and got another chill. This one turned my whole body cold.

  My feet carried me down the street and stopped in front of the National News Stand. The door was locked, but through the window I could see the line of comics: Sea Devils and Showcase and Rip Hunter, Time Master. My father made me stop buying Rip Hunter because it was ruining my sense of reality; every time Rip and his crew went back in time they found aliens there, tampering with human history.

  Aliens.

  A spin rack by the door was full of science-fiction paperbacks. The short fat Ace Doubles were crammed in next to the taller Ballantines with the weird, abstract covers. Right at the top, in a pocket all to itself, was Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

  Flying saucers.

  Further back, where I could barely see it in the dimness of the store, was the rack of men’s magazines. When the old man with the cigar that ran the place wasn’t paying attention I used to go back and thumb through them, but I never found quite what I was looking for.

  The store was like an unassembled Revell model kit of my childhood. All the pieces were there, the superheroes and the aliens and the unobtainable women, and if I could just fit them together the right way I might be able to make sense of it. In a lifetime I might have done it, but I only had another hour.

  I felt too much like an aging delinquent in the T-shirt I was wearing, so I bought a fresh shirt at the dimestore across the street and changed in their rest room. I thought for a second about time paradoxes as I threw the old one away,
then decided to hell with it.

  The dime store clock said seven-thirty and the dance should have started at seven. Enough of a crowd should have accumulated for me to become another faceless parent in the background. I started uphill toward the high school and was sweating by the time I got there. But that was okay. You could still sweat in 1961, and your clothes could still wrinkle.

  All the doors to the gym were open and Japanese lanterns hung inside the doors. From across the asphalt playground I could hear the heavy, thumping bass of “Little Darlin’” by the Diamonds.

  I went inside. A banner across the far end of the gym read “Look for a Star” in crude, glittering letters. Across thirty years I remembered the sappy lyrics to the song that had been forced on us as our theme. Four-pointed stars, sprayed with gold paint, dangled from the girders, and the lanterns over the punch bowls had Saturn rings stapled to them.

  Most of the teachers stood in a clump. I recognized Mrs. Smith’s hooked nose and long jaw; she’d cried when she found the drawing of her as a witch. Mr. Miller, next to her, was still wearing the goatee that he would be forced to shave off the next fall because it made him look “like a beatnik.”

  About half the kids in my class were already there.

  Bobby Arias, class president, and Myron Cessarini, track star and sex symbol, were quietly breaking hearts at their own end of the gym. Over by the opposite wall was Marsha Something-or-other, the one that threw up all over the floor in sixth grade, with the wings on her glasses and waxen skin.

  But no sign of LeeAnn or the 15-year-old Travis. I went outside to get away from the heat and the close, sweat-sock smell of the place. Coals of cigarettes glowed where a few of the adults were taking advantage of the growing darkness. I sniffed the clean air and tried to think of reasons why I didn’t want to stay right where I was for the rest of my life.

  Lots of reasons. Racism. Sexism. People throwing trash on highways and dumping sewage in the creeks and not even knowing it was wrong. No sex. Not on TV, not in the movies, especially not in real life. Nice girls didn’t. Curfews. Dress codes. Gas-guzzling cars.