The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  “Lilly, you afraid of the alien?” she asked me, sitting in the tub covered with bubbles. I turned on the sprayer and began rinsing her hair.

  “I was startled.”

  “Do you hate being startled at your age? I hate limping.”

  “Well, if you’d let me help you with the bath yesterday, you…” Nope, I needed to help her in and out of the tub all the time.

  Berenice bent forward and pulled the drain lever down. “The alien wants to see you. He called here.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s on that bulletin board everyone uses for selling liquor.”

  “Everyone doesn’t use it for selling liquor.”

  “DeSpain’s on it. Bobby’s on it.” She leaned on me as she stood up, all baggy skin over what seemed to have been fairly decent muscles. I rinsed her free of soap and wrapped a towel around her. “I said I was your aunt and that I’d like to talk to him even if you couldn’t come. I faxed him my Freedom of Information file.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “He’s calling himself Turk. Can we go over this afternoon? He said it would be acceptable. You don’t have any appointments.”

  I shrugged and walked her into her bedroom. She sat down on the bed to dry off while I got together her panties, bra, slacks, socks, and top. L.L. Bean shipped just this week the thirtieth or so pair of a shoe she’d been wearing for over five decades. She watched me pull the paper out of the toes. “I don’t wear them out often these days,” she said as she wiggled into the slacks and top. I put the socks on her feet, smoothing them, then slipped the shoes on, tying the knots tightly so the laces wouldn’t come undone and trip her. “So I’ve lived to see an alien in Franklin County.”

  And Berenice was going to make the most of it even if he wasn’t the sort of client I wanted. I held her elbow as we walked to the car.

  “Why did you fax him your Freedom of Information file?” I asked while the car ran diagnostics on the pollution control devices.

  “Well, I thought an alien who came to Franklin County might be weird.” She didn’t want to see him unless he found the file unobjectionable.

  I don’t tell people about my past, but Berenice lets anyone she meets know what a bit part player she was in the events of ’68. And I’m being cynical because bit player is all I’ve been, too. But Berenice refuses to admit that anyone has more than a bit part. I said, “I hope Turk was impressed.”

  The car diagnostics showed that the catalytic converter would need to be replaced soon. Thanks to the reprogramming I’d done to prolong the active-with-warning phase, that probably meant the converter was gone completely by now, as I’d been getting a REPLACE SOON reading for about four months now.

  “There is a reason to keep the car burning clean.”

  “I guess, Berenice,” I said as I pulled out of our driveway, “but I’ve got to replace the air conditioner at the office first.”

  “Your lungs aren’t as fragile as mine.”

  “Don’t play Earth Firster with me this afternoon, okay.”

  “No, that’s not appropriate, considering who we’re going to see.”

  I asked, “And where does this Turk live?”

  “Shooting Creek section. Patrick and Franklin. On the line. He’s renting from Delacourt heirs.”

  I could visualize the place, three miles of mud roads, oil pan gashing rocks, then the house, some three-story family place slowly twisting to the ground, riddled with powderpost beetles. The grandchildren would own and neglect it and rent it to summer people. Or aliens, why not? Maybe the Turk liked leaking roofs?

  We drove down to Ferrum and took the road toward Shooting Creek. The road was exactly as I’d imagined it, but the house looked like several military freight helicopters had to have dropped it in last week. It was a replica of a ranch house. No, just because an alien lived there didn’t mean it wasn’t actually a ranch house.

  Berenice looked a long while, then said, “I wonder if he got the design from TV real estate channels.”

  The alien came up to us, his machine laughing for him. “Ladies, lawyer, radical social worker. Berenice’s file fascinates.”

  “Where did you get the house?” I asked.

  Turk said, “Restored it.”

  Berenice looked slightly disappointed. I tried to remember what I could about the Delacourt family, but they were as mixed a bunch as anyone in the area, from jewel thieves to corporate executives.

  We followed Turk around to the kitchen entrance. The backyard looked freshly bulldozed, raw soil faintly hazed with grass seedlings. I heard an exhaust fan running and couldn’t make out where the sound was, exactly. Exhaust fans in strange places trigger my sniffing reflex—but no mash odor here, or alcohol smell either.

  Turk moved a few magazines—one in some alien script that could have been just another Earth language—and we sat down.

  “Do you want to meet people or do you prefer to be left alone?” I asked.

  His ear facets glinted as he shifted his head. “Some people,” he answered. His tongue flicked out, bristled at the tip. Like a lory, I thought, a nectar-feeding parrot. He asked, “Would you like a drink?” That was the most complete sentence I’d heard him speak.

  “Yes,” Berenice said quickly.

  The alien made the kitchen look bizarre. His hands made the brushed nickel sink fixtures look like spacecraft gizmos that would regulate fuel mixes or the temperature of water, just as he was doing here, filling a glass teakettle that looked like laboratory equipment. The light mix—I thought—he’s got weird-spectrum tubes in the fixtures. Then my mind redid some parameters and the kitchen looked like a kitchen with an alien in it, setting a glass teakettle on a burner. Berenice tightened the muscles around her mouth. She didn’t consider tea a drink.

  “Why did you come to Franklin County?” I asked.

  “I heard about Franklin County from time-aged analogues,” Turk said as he reached up in his cupboard for glasses and a teacup. Berenice watched the teacup as though hoping it wasn’t for her. “But isn’t here Franklin County?” He stuck his hand back into the cupboard and came back with a bottled and bonded vodka. Berenice smiled, but sat down when her legs began to quiver.

  The Turk poured vodka, then tonic into two glasses for us, then put some dried green leaves in a strainer, balanced the strainer over his own cup, and filled it from the teakettle. He narrowed his eyes, but his face seemed bizarre even with that expression. I realized he’d made it with eyelids alone, without shifting a face muscle. His face skin was too rigid for muscle gestures to penetrate.

  I moved to take the drink the Turk offered me and realized I was stiff. He came closer to Berenice with hers, recognizing her feebleness, perhaps.

  It was alcohol but not vodka. Berenice said, “I understand you’re on Loose Trade.”

  An iridescent flush washed over the Turk’s face. He lifted his strainer and put it in the sink. The herb he’d used in his brew wasn’t tea, but wasn’t anything I knew to be illegal. He added white grains, about a quarter cup, of what was either sugar or salt. A sugar or a salt, I reminded myself, or protein crystals, not necessarily dextrose or sodium chloride.

  I smelled my drink again and caught an echo of that herb smell as though he’d put a sprig of the herb in the liquor bottle.

  Berenice said, “Can you drink alcohol yourself?”

  “No.” The alien put his tongue down close to his tea and rolled it into a tube. He dangled the fringed end in the tea for a few seconds before drawing the tea up. His eyes widened as if the tea startled him. Definitely a drug, I thought.

  Berenice sipped her drink, but she kept her face carefully in neutral. She said, “You know this isn’t vodka?”

  “Yes,” the alien said. “I would like to put Lilly on retainer.” He spoke as though he’d memorized the phrase.

  “I’m not a bootlegger lawyer,” I said.

  “Don’t be so stuffy,” Berenice said. “They’re social outlaws.”

  “The
y all become mill owners in the end.”

  The alien said, “I will never become a mill owner in the end.”

  I stopped mentally cursing all the liquor makers and investors and looked more closely at the alien. “What is your civic standing here?”

  “Resident alien,” he said. “I am legally human.”

  “What kind of retainer?” I said, thinking about replacing the old air conditioner with one more compatible with the ozone layer.

  “Ten thousand for the year. I can pay you now.” He went to one of the cabinets and began laying hands on it, then pushing it. The door opened as if it were quite dense. Turk pulled out a contract and then counted out ten stacks of bills, Crestar bank wrappers still on them.

  I asked, “Do you expect to get busted?”

  He looked at me, flushed rainbow again, then said, “I plan to have fun.”

  I hated him for a second. “It’s not a game for the people around here. People get killed.”

  “Killed is an option. Bored, not.”

  “Glad you feel that way. You’re risking it.” I looked over his contract. I’d have to defend him in any criminal or civil suit during the year of retainer for my usual fee less twenty-five percent. I sighed and signed it, then said, “You really need a checking account.”

  Berenice said, “Or DeSpain’s broker.”

  Turk said, “I had most invested in a money market.”

  I wondered how long the aliens had been dealing with the government, and what these aliens were to a ACLU part-time radical lawyer like me. “Why me?”

  The alien studied me three seconds, then said, “You’re odd.”

  “I don’t know why I’m agreeing to this.”

  Berenice said, “Because you get bored in Rocky Mount, too.”

  Turk blinked slowly at me, then nodded as if translating blinks to nods with his cross-species semiotic dictionary. I blinked at him and he triggered his laugh machine. I thought I’d gotten too old for illegal thrills, but then Berenice proved that was impossible for those of my lineage.

  Bobby Wasn’t Working

  MR. B. CORN WON’T DO IT, DeSpain read on the computer screen. Damn Bobby, I’m going to get the boys to beat him.

  He went in to the bathroom and saw Orris washing her feet, rubbing them under the running tap in the tub. It reminded him of broke mountain people living in waterless shacks, hauling jugs of water up from neighbors. Her mother had grown up like that, washing bony dirty feet with water from milk cartons, in a thirty-dollar-a-month house wired for enough electricity to take care of the stove and the rented TV. Seeing Orris washing her feet made DeSpain’s stomach lurch. “You need a bath, Orris, take a whole one.”

  “I just got my feet dirty when I was working in the garden.” She looked up at him with her pale eyes. He suspected she washed her feet this way to tell him that he was only a bit further from the shacks than she.

  “Bobby won’t work for me.”

  “You do what you need to,” Orris said. She got out of the way of the toilet so he could piss, which he always needed to do when he got angry. Her dress rode up her thighs as she toweled her feet dry.

  “I’m glad you understand that.”

  “Why does washing my feet bother you so?”

  “It reminds me of welfare bitches too broke to have tubs.”

  “I was doing it in one of our three tubs. You do what you need to do, Dennis, and I trust the tubs won’t evaporate.”

  DeSpain thought, don’t keep leaving Steve with your mother to let him pick up hick ways, too, but said, “I really won’t trust the money until I’ve got a good income coming from something safe.”

  “Safe? Then maybe I do need to keep in practice for water conservation if you think we might end up back having to haul it from a well.” Orris smiled and went out of the bathroom in her bare feet, heels chapped as though shoes were new to her.

  DeSpain had kin, distant kin, living on roads so rough Social Service made visits in four-wheel-drive vehicles. “Safe. Like a marina on the lake. The Russian stuff isn’t safe enough.”

  Orris, from her bedroom, said, “You’d be bored shitless smiling at rich foreigners and gassing their idiot two-bedroom yachts in a lake too small for an overnight cruise.”

  “You want one of those yachts.”

  “Not here. Maybe in Russia, on the Black Sea.” He could tell from her voice that she was smiling.

  “I guess I should call the nephews and cousins.”

  “Is he making liquor behind your back, Dennis?”

  “He won’t make it. I thought it would be great for the lake people—good liquor, fine made, aged. Run them some bull about our Scottish heritage and Bobby’s old family equipment passed on for twelve generations. Look, I already do the same thing as gassing tourists’ boats.”

  “If he quit … I don’t know, Dennis. I know you can’t afford to get soft-headed.”

  “You want to go with the boys and lay in a few licks, too?”

  “Might take you up on that, Dennis.”

  The notion of Orris in jeans and a pillowcase hood beating a man appalled Dennis. She was strong enough, he knew. He said, “Let us men take care of it.”

  “Okay, Dennis, but I’ll go if you need me. Maybe if I beat up his wife…”

  “Well, I appreciate that, Orris.” Dennis went back in his room, turned off the computer, and put the 9-millimeter Beretta Orris gave him for Christmas in his briefcase. Pausing in front of the dresser, he stared at his collection of car keys and decided to take the pickup he’d gotten at the government auction. Let them take it and resell it again. He wondered if they could seize the Volvo, just because it might have come from liquor money. He pulled off his white shirt and pulled on a Japanese T-shirt he’d picked up in the Urals. Then dark glasses with the enhancer circuit in case he got caught by the dark. He grimaced at himself and added a Ford Motor Company baseball cap. Maybe some chewing tobacco? he wondered.

  Orris’s reflection appeared in the dresser mirror. “Wear that cap in Uralsk where nobody knows what it means,” she said, “not here.”

  “We both hoed up our roots, haven’t we?”

  “It’s tacky, considering what you’re going out to do. Or are you stalling?”

  He threw the cap on the bed and left, feeling pretty obvious in the truck that had been auctioned after seizures four times now.

  His nephews and cousins were at one of their houses with a pool, barbecuing a split pig over half an oil drum full of charcoal, drinking beer and swimming naked while their women sat around in bathing suits looking embarrassed. “Ken,” DeSpain said to the cousin whose house it was, “I need a little help with Bobby.” Ken had built forty houses on the lake, run drugs, and retired at thirty-four after investing in detox centers. De-Spain’s broker said detox centers could lose you money if the Feds stopped the Medicaid subsidy.

  Ken pulled himself out of the pool and said, “Is he undercutting you?”

  “No, he just not working. Your brothers want to help me?”

  “Gee, Dennis, we’ve got this pig on.” Ken padded over to the oil drum and brushed on a mix of vinegar and red pepper, then turned the crank of the spit. He’d geared the crank so one man could roll a whole pig. “You want us to deal with it without you. Say while you’re off on a lunch boat cruising the lake?”

  “I’m going, too. Be nice.”

  “Thanks, Dennis, but I don’t think so. You ought to get out of that stupid-ass liquor business anyhow.”

  “Feds don’t bother a man these days.”

  “Feds don’t bother much since when their budgets got cut. You just do what they’re not specializing in busting.”

  DeSpain felt like he’d gobbled down half a pound of hot pork already. “We don’t have to go tonight, but I don’t like someone sneaking out on me.”

  “You plan to beat on him, too?” Ken used a long fork to twist off some barbecue. He held the fork out to DeSpain, who pinched the meat away and tasted it. “Done?” Ken asked.
<
br />   “Done,” DeSpain said.

  “You know, we put my daughter in that Montessori school, but I made Helen go out and work to pay for it.”

  “Maybe I should put Steve in it, too.”

  “Don’t know. Helen plans to have Ann go to law school, medical school, something a woman can make money on around here. Stevie, I don’t know if he needs more than public school.”

  “Stevie will get all he needs,” DeSpain said.

  Ken said, “We starting to sound like women in the mommy wars. Get naked. Swim.”

  “I’m ready to talk to Bobby tonight.” DeSpain noticed two teenaged nephews pulled up to the poolside, arms folded across the rim. “You boys want to go?”

  “Beat someone up?” The one who spoke looked at the other.

  DeSpain couldn’t even remember their names. The family was drifting apart. But maybe tonight that was just as well. “Can we use one of the other cars?”

  Ken said, “Nope. We can’t afford to lose any of them.”

  The boys toweled off and pulled on jeans and cutoff T-shirts. DeSpain grimaced. Six-packs in hand, they climbed up into the truck bed.

  As DeSpain drove the truck toward Bobby’s, he looked up at the rearview mirror and saw the bigger nephew poke the littler one in the ribs below the shirt. They both laughed and the little one threw up a leg as the truck turned.

  Nobody’s a professional anymore, DeSpain thought. He thought about taking them back to Ken’s, but kept going and pulled up to Bobby’s house.

  Bobby came up to the door with a shotgun in his hand. “Leave me alone, DeSpain.”

  “Bobby, all I want is to protect you, find you good sales.” DeSpain stayed in the cab of the truck.

  “I won’t make liquor for you.”

  The two nephews in the back of the truck stood up. The bigger one smiled. DeSpain looked back at them, then at Bobby and said, “I didn’t come here to beat on you. But I do have a market for what you’re making and can help you out with any cash-flow problems.”

  The bigger nephew said, “We didn’t bring guns this time.”

  “Damn and a half,” the little one said, “why didn’t I bring my old AK-47? We’ll have to remember that next time.”