Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” She shrugged. “I guess I do, in spite of myself.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. I’ve held on this long, but I don’t have much time left. Maybe an hour or two.”

  “And then?”

  “It’s like inertia. If you don’t change anything, it’s not too hard to stay here. But the more improbable your being here becomes, the more likely you’ll just—snap back.”

  “And when people find out what you really are—or even suspect—that makes it worse, right? Like the skywriting yesterday. It snapped some of your people right out of their cars.”

  Louis nodded. “I saw it in the paper this morning.”

  “And the weather. Is that your fault too?”

  “Yes. It’s kind of ironic. The disturbance we made coming back here loused up your own climate. You know, people used to blame the migrating birds for bringing cold weather with them when they flew south. What was it you called us? Snowbirds?”

  He stood up. “I’m going now. I can’t fight it off much longer. I don’t want to be here when it happens.”

  “Louis...” She reached for him, stopped with her hand on his sleeve.

  “You’re not even going to remember me, you know. It may take you a day or two to forget, but you will. People who don’t really know me, they’ll forget right away.”

  She felt bitter, used, betrayed. “Go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  The door closed quietly and she heard his car pull out of the driveway.

  “I won’t forget,” she said.

  He eased into the street, sharp points of pain dancing up and down his ribs. Goddammit! he thought. Goddammit to hell!

  The road in front of him flickered, and the houses to either side strobed in and out. It was like watching a film that wasn’t framed in the projector. The car ran smoothly enough but his stomach felt like he was on a Tilt-A-Whirl.

  He saw a set of abandoned metal furniture on the lawn ahead of him, left out through the long winter and the endless freezing spring. Lawn furniture, he thought. Sweet Jesus!

  He didn’t want to go back. Damn that man and his skywriting, damn Marge and her nosiness, damn them all to a cold and airless hell. He wrenched the wheel and the car shot over the curb, skidding on the patches of snow and the damp yellow grass. He crashed through the metal table and chairs. Something tore loose under the car as he jammed the accelerator down. He swerved into a mailbox and clipped a white picket fence, then wrestled the car back onto the street, his anger spent.

  By the time the car coasted to a stop at the end of the street, the driver’s seat was empty.

  Wanting lights and crowds and loud colors, Marge drove through the snow to Northpark. She window-shopped for a while, then stopped to rest at the fountain outside Neiman’s, watching three grade-school kids slide down the tile sculpture.

  “Hey,” she said. “Come here a minute.” They stopped and stared at her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I just want to show you something.”

  One of them, a little older looking than the others, sauntered over.

  “You want to see something neat?” she said. “See that man over there?” She pointed to a middle-aged man who reminded her of Louis (Louis who? What was his last name?), well-dressed, bundled in an overcoat and scarf. “Go up to him and ask him something for me.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “Ask him, ‘Are you from the future?’ Then see what happens.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Think so? Try it and see.”

  The boy laughed and ran away. She watched him tell his friends what she’d said. They argued back and forth, then the smallest of them went up to the man in the overcoat.

  Marge found herself holding her breath.

  The boy tugged at the man’s trouser leg. He had to bend over to listen. The boy pointed to Marge and asked him something, and for a moment the man’s eyes seemed to glow with a fierce hostility.

  Marge blinked.

  Hadn’t that little boy just been talking to an older man?

  She shook her head. I’ve been working too hard, she thought. I need to forget all this nonsense I’ve been worrying about (what nonsense?) and get some rest.

  As she got up, three little boys, laughing wildly, ran past her, asking a question of everyone they saw.

  Marge pushed open the heavy glass door of the mall and stepped out into a warm April mist.

  Match

  It was a good summer for tennis, hot and clear. I was newly divorced and working at home and had my mornings free. My partner was a radiologist from St. David’s on the second shift. We played two sets a day, three if we could take the heat.

  Afternoons I cranked up the headphones and sat down at the drawing table. I had discovered heavy metal. The louder the better—it kept my mind on my work instead of my marriage. This week work was one of those new fruit-juice-and-fizzy-water drinks called Tropical Blizzards. I started sketching a layout with a sweating tennis player. Right arm straight overhead, wrist cocked, body lunging forward. Face knotted in concentration. I worked on the face until I could see the heat in it. Brutal heat, murderous heat.

  Suddenly it was my father’s face.

  I saw him clutch his chest and go down. My hand started to shake and the pencil lead snapped off.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. In the morning I called my parents in Houston and my father answered.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Me who?”

  “It’s the goddamn Easter bunny, who do you think it is?”

  “My only begotten son. Big deal.” From his tone of voice I was supposed to figure he was kidding.

  “I’m driving up for a meeting on Saturday. Thought I’d stay through the weekend if that’s okay.”

  “I don’t care. Talk to your mother.” The phone clunked on the table. Distantly I heard him say, “It’s your son.”

  “Hi darling,” my mother said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Just thought I’d come up for the weekend.”

  “Of course. Your room’s made up and ready.”

  I was thirty-six. I hadn’t lived with my parents in nineteen years. “I’ll be in Friday afternoon. I don’t know what time, so don’t panic if I’m not there for dinner, okay?”

  “Yes, dear,” my mother said.

  Dinner at my parents’ house was five PM sharp, in time for the evening news. I walked in as my mother set the TV tray in front of my father. Leftover pot roast, potatoes and gravy, canned green beans boiled for hours with hunks of bacon fat. I had a gray canvas bag in my left hand, with the handle of my racket sticking out.

  My mother hugged me and said, “So, you’re just going to let your hair grow now, is that it?” She was short, with a small pot belly and short hair dyed an odd sandy color. I got my gray hair from her. I already had more of it than my father did at sixty-eight.

  “Nice to see you too, Mom.”

  My father squinted at me from his recliner. He wore a napkin tucked in over his shirt when he ate. He would have been six foot one, half an inch taller than me, if he ever stood up straight. He seemed to be devolving into some prototypical Texan ancestor, with long sideburns and hair combed straight back off his forehead. It made his nose seem to reach out toward his chin.

  “Can you believe this crap? Thirty-two stations and not a goddamn thing worth watching.”

  “Great to see you too,” I said.

  “There’s the same shitty stations you get without cable. Then there’s three stations of niggers shouting at each other. Two stations of messkins. Two movie channels showing the same three movies over and over again. Rock and roll and country western on the rest. If it wasn’t for sports I don’t know why anybody would bother.”

  “Try some crack,” I said. “That’s how the rest of us manage.”

  He looked at the bag. My left hand clenched reflexively. “What’s that? You’re not trying to play tennis again, a
re you?”

  “I’ve got a client here who plays.”

  “I wouldn’t think it was good business to look like a jerk in front of somebody wants to give you money.”

  “Maybe I’ve been practicing.”

  “There’s not enough practice in the world.” He took a dainty bit of meat, then held the remote control out at arm’s length. He switched through the channels, giving them no more than a couple of seconds each. His entire attention was on the screen.

  “Is that all you brought?” my mother said, finally noticing the bag.

  “I’m just staying the weekend.”

  “Could you two keep it down to a dull roar?” my father said. “I’m trying to watch a program here.”

  I may not have given much of a presentation the next morning, but I was hell on the tennis court. My client took me out to River Oaks and I slaughtered him 6-1, 6-0. As a career move, it was not exactly brilliant. I didn’t care. I kept hearing my father say there wasn’t enough practice in the world.

  I came back to my parents’ house drenched in sweat and flushed from the sun. “How’d it go?” my mother asked, meaning the presentation, of course.

  I pretended to misunderstand. “Okay. My serve’s a little off and I can’t seem to get enough power out of my backhand.”

  “You’re probably not swinging through,” my father said, not looking up from the TV. “You always did chop your backhand.”

  My father had his first heart attack the summer after my junior year in high school. He was playing tennis with one of his students in 100-degree heat. My father won the first and third sets, and then he lit up a Roi-Tan cigarillo and sucked in a big lungful of smoke. He said he felt something then, like a hunger pain, so he went home and had a banana and a glass of milk. Finally he went to bed and my mother called the doctor. I remember him lying there, white and shaking. Scared, I guess. Another half hour, the doctor said, and he would have died. I used to think about that a lot.

  I looked at my father and said, “Maybe I need a lesson.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  My mother said to him, “You can’t go on a tennis court. It would kill you.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Dr. Clarendon.”

  “It’s not going to kill me to go out and look at his backhand.”

  My mother turned to me. The look said don’t let him do this. If you let him do this I’ll never forgive you.

  I thought about the time I ran away from home. It was the year after his heart attack. My mother promised we’d get counseling, talked me into coming back. The counselor turned out to be Dr. Clarendon. Mom took my father’s side, and lied to protect him. Funny how things like that can still jerk your emotions around, even after twenty years.

  I looked at my father. “Great,” I said. “We’ll go out tomorrow morning.”

  I lay awake past midnight in the tiny twin bed. Finally I told myself I wouldn’t go through with it. I’d let the old man coach me a little and we’d come home. It bought me a few hours’ sleep.

  My father looked ten years younger Sunday morning. He wore his plain white tennis shorts and T-shirt to the breakfast table. Only queers, of course, wore all those bright colored outfits. He leaned forward and slurped loudly at his Shredded Wheat. “You’re not dressed yet,” he said.

  “My stuff is in the wash.” I’d brought blue shorts and a red T-shirt, just to stimulate his blood pressure.

  “I thought we were playing this morning.” My father had been compulsively early all his life. If I said nine o’clock, he was impatient and angry by eight-thirty.

  “Let your breakfast settle,” I said. I couldn’t eat. I choked down some orange juice and felt it eat through my stomach lining.

  I kept him waiting until ten. The temperature was already in the 80s and the air was like wet cotton. I drove us out to the courts we’d used when I was at Rice. They had fabric nets and a good composite surface, green inside the baselines and brick red outside. Pine trees grew right up to the fence and dropped their needles on the backcourt. I could smell pine sap baking in the heat.

  I got a bucket of tennis balls out of the trunk. “Haven’t you got anything but those goddamn green balls?” My father was headed for the far court, working his arm in a circle. He had an ancient Jack Kramer wood racket, still in the press.

  I carried the bucket to the other baseline. “They don’t make white balls anymore. They haven’t for ten years. You might as well forget about it.”

  “TV made them do that. You can’t see a green ball as well as a white one.” He threw the racket press aside, slashed the air with the racket. “You’ve got no depth perception on it. All it does is show up better on a TV screen.”

  “The players like them better. The human eye sees green better than any other color. Scientific fact.”

  “Bullshit. Don’t tell me about science. What do you know about science?”

  My father was a structural engineer. He worked on survey teams all through high school in the 30s. He laid the course for I-35 all the way from Dilley, where his mother grew up, to the Mexican border. He joined the corps to get free tuition at A&M’s engineering school, and when the beatings and hazing got too bad he convinced a maiden aunt to send him to UCLA. He was a self-made man, the son of dirt-poor Texas farmers, and he’d fought his way up to a tenured professorship at Rice University. He tended to not let anyone forget it.

  I rubbed sunscreen on my arms and legs, then put sweatbands on my head and wrists. My father wolf-whistled. “Hey, bathing beauty. Any time you want to play some tennis.”

  I took two balls out of the bucket. I shoved one in my left pocket and squinted across the court. I was so pissed off I could feel it like something sharp stuck in my throat. I served at my father as hard as I could.

  He stepped out of the way and said, “You still serve like a girl. Get that toss higher.”

  I remembered playing canasta with my father as a child, his smearing the cards together on the table because I was beating him, the cards bending and tearing, me starting to cry in helpless rage.

  I tried to serve like a precision robot, hating myself because I didn’t just walk away. My father crouched inside his baseline, leaning theatrically from side to side, swatting my serves long or into the net, not trying for the ones that were out of reach. After every serve he would point out what I did wrong, over and over, in a bored voice.

  The bucket was empty. I started to gather up the balls. My father could have helped, but instead he watched, smiling sarcastically. I was painfully aware of my ass sticking out as I bent over. We traded sides and I picked up the rest of the balls. I stood on the baseline with the bucket next to my feet.

  We’d played doubles with his students here, every playable Sunday, no matter how tired or hung over I was. I’d learned to pray for rain. My father had recovered from the heart attack and promised my mother he wouldn’t overdo. I remembered the way he gloated over every point we won, and rode home in brooding silence if we lost.

  “Waiting for something?” my father asked.

  I bounced the ball with my left hand. It was the same motion as the toss, except the opposite direction. The idea was to focus on it. I couldn’t focus. All I could hear was my heart, beating like crazy. I want it, I thought. I want it now.

  “How about a game?” I said.

  “Don’t make me laugh. I can still kick your ass, on or off the court.”

  Twenty years ago, just out of the hospital, he’d said the same thing. He hadn’t even made it into the house yet. He stood wobbling in the driveway, weak, gray-skinned, barely able to walk, threatening to kick my ass. Just the memory of it made my breath come fast.

  “Prove it, old man.”

  I’d never said anything like it before, not to anybody. I felt the racket shiver in my hand.

  “Serve ‘em up,” my father said. The look in his eyes was final. I’d done something that couldn’t be undone. I felt like I was on a deserted stretch of interstate with
the pedal all the way to the floor.

  I picked out three balls and carried the bucket to the side of the court. I rolled one ball back to the chain link fence, put one in my left hand pocket. I leaned forward, bouncing the third in front of me.

  I tossed the ball for the serve. My hand shook and the ball curved back over my head. I swung at it anyway and hit it into the net.

  My father took one step closer.

  I tried to get my breathing to even out. I couldn’t get my breath at all. I took the second ball out of my pocket and bounced it, thinking, relax, relax. I pressed the ball into the racket head as I started my backswing. It felt all wrong. The toss was too low and I hit into the net again.

  Double fault. My father straightened up and walked over to the ad court. I went to the net and picked the balls up, slapping the second with the racket so I could snag it out of the air. It got away from me. I chased after it, feeling my father’s eyes on me the whole time.

  “Love fifteen,” I said. I pictured the serve in my mind and took a practice swing. I tossed the ball and hit it long.

  “Back,” my father said.

  I was a little kid again, ugly, clumsy, with patches on my jeans and silver caps on my front teeth. I hated that little kid with everything I had. I got out the second ball and made a perfect, unselfconscious swing. The ball hit inside the line on my father’s backhand. He jumped at it, took a stiff swing, and knocked it into the fence behind me.

  I collected the balls and moved to the deuce court. “Fifteen all,” I said. The first serve went in and my father hit it sharply down the backhand line. I got to and hit it crosscourt, thinking, run, you bastard, run. He stretched to make it, his shoes squealing as he turned. The ball floated back to me like a wounded bird. I hit it deep to his forehand. He chased it and didn’t get there in time.

  The knot in my guts loosened and the piney air tasted sweet and cool. I aced the next point and on the next my father hit into the net. It was my game. We changed sides and I put the balls on my father’s outstretched racket.