The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 29

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Bobby, Turk can legally defend himself.” God, if DeSpain didn’t have him by the balls, I didn’t know what was. I’d seen men who went to war or riot, then when war and riot ended, became demolition divers, drag racers, all to prove an image of masculinity women over twenty never were impressed with. I didn’t understand this emotionally, no more than men understood women’s haute couture combat dressing.

  I almost asked Bobby to sing one of the old high lonesome songs to me, but by thirty I’d gone beyond where nostalgia crosses into sentimentality.

  And I had to get sleep or I’d bitch out my aunt next stupid thing she remembered about the sixties. “Do as I say, Bobby.” The other side of this was animal business, a subalpha sucking up to the dog who beat him.

  He didn’t answer me, just gave me a look like what can a man expect from a pacifist liberal pinko woman? and went on his way.

  I began to wonder if I’d feel guilty over what seemed to be about to happen. No, I decided, testosterone rules.

  Behind the house, I heard the Cadillac start. “Marie?”

  Nobody but me was home. I went into my own bedroom and fell asleep against what I feared was going on. A pillow against my belly pushed my stitches back.

  Collected Artifacts

  “Marie, don’t follow him directly there,” Berenice told me. “Take 640 up to the parkway.”

  I said, “Have you noticed how redneck Lilly gets when she’s tired?”

  “She spent only seventeen years away, split into bits,” Berenice said. “And all the mountain shit—it’s like brain fungus. You think you’ve gotten completely modern when bam, you’re listening to a string band play a ballad that you’re about to reenact in real life. Is it that way for you and the blues culture sometimes?”

  “I fucking hate it.”

  “Yeah, and I bet you’ve got at least one lowdown dress. Turn here, go up on the parkway and sneak down.”

  “You don’t sound like a big-city radical woman now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bobby’s hopeless. What are you planning to do, Berenice?”

  “I want to see what happens.”

  I ran up 640 as fast as I could without rounding a curve at fifty-five and smashing some slow old boy. “I’m a chemical engineering student at Tech,” I said.

  “Meaning,” Berenice said, “that all this—and DeSpain, too—is hopelessly out of context?”

  I felt like three hundred years of rust was moving in on my stainlesssteel lab equipment. “I’ve got to remember why I hate Hugous and The Door 18.”

  “Don’t have to hate them.”

  “He’s buying liquor from this Turk.”

  Berenice shut up then. I wondered a second if I wasn’t on the wrong side, but drove on. Sometimes sides don’t matter as much as being loyal.

  No, Tech student, I told myself, that’s an attitude that’ll yank all your accomplishments right out from under you. “What’s important, Berenice, being right or being loyal?”

  “Sometimes you don’t have the least fucking idea,” she said. “I remember cops charging a late-night march on East 79th Street, seeing the fire-mouths, the ones who talked heavy trashing, lose it, seeing the Puerto Rican garage attendants grinning and waving. We cowered among Mercedes and Porsches while the garage guys closed the doors. Odd. We amused them, more than anything else, but those Puerto Ricans save our asses from a beating.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Panic is disgraceful. I remember thinking that I’d rather get clubbed than to panic.”

  God, she was losing it. I hoped she’d know what she was doing when we got to the Turk’s. Was I obeying her because she was a white woman, as dotty as she was? Had the bastards gotten that far into me?

  The Turk was waiting for us at the house. He’d folded Bobby over one arm and his pinstripe overalls were bloody.

  I stopped the car. Berenice said, “Reverse slowly.”

  I looked at her. Her face was immobile, her breathing shallow. Then I began backing. Something stalled the car out and the Turk came up and draped Bobby across the hood. “Good-bye,” he told us. Berenice didn’t look at him.

  I started the car again, fearing that I’d flooded it. I couldn’t look at Bobby laying across the hood, so I backed all the way out into Patrick County.

  When we reached hardtop, Berenice and I lifted Bobby’s body. It stretched. “He’s got no spine,” Berenice said. I pulled his shirt aside and saw the incision sewn back up. My heart lurched. At least the alien has to cut to get at them, I thought. We lugged Bobby’s taffy body into the trunk and drove to call the Franklin County sheriff.

  “The alien said it was self-defense,” the sheriff said. “He has tapes to prove it, he says.”

  Faked? An alien who could stall your car out, we’d never know, I thought. We waited by the store for the ambulance.

  “Berenice, we should have stopped him.”

  She shook her head, but I couldn’t figure precisely what she meant.

  When we got back to Lilly’s house, the high wailing time had come. Bobby’s wife, Sylvia, had her nails raking her face, screams coming out against Lilly and DeSpain. Her children in the car bawled to see their momma so upset, out of control.

  She came at me with “his nigger bitch lover.”

  Berenice took her hands before she got me. I said, “I didn’t put DeSpain up to anything.”

  “You cunt and a half.” She might have been outraged, but not enough to be fighting an old woman. Berenice kept holding Sylvia’s hands.

  Dennis drove up then with Orris in a new car, a Saab. We nodded to each other and she smiled slightly, like is he worth it to fight over? Sylvia turned away from Berenice and screamed at Dennis, “You killed him, you coward bastard.”

  “I didn’t tell him to attack the Turk,” Dennis said. “Still, I’ll take care of you.”

  Orris looked at Sylvia, then back at me, then straight ahead over the Saab’s sloping hood. She reached over and cut the lights off while Dennis kept talking, “Bobby was a good man. He wanted to defend us against the alien.”

  “You bastard, you and your overeducated hillbilly wife and your nigger bitch and you killed him.”

  “Sylvia, I didn’t want it to happen this way.”

  I looked back at Orris. She mouthed something at me. I jerked my head what and she said, “You’ll find out.”

  Dennis stopped trying to soothe Sylvia and looked at Orris, who shrugged. She said, “Sylvia, we will take care of you. Why don’t you call your minister and go home? Your children are scared to see you like this.”

  Sylvia looked at her children, who shrank back as if she were a stranger. “Oh, babies, I’m sorry your momma was so nasty-mouthed, but these people killed your daddy.”

  Berenice said, “I’m so sorry, Sylvia.” She hugged Sylvia once, then stepped back. Lilly stared at DeSpain.

  “Dennis,” I said, “you ought go.” And flinched to hear myself drop the infinitive marker to in front of Miss Orris.

  “He going,” Orris said. I didn’t know if she was mocking me or dropping from stress into her own first tongue. We looked at each other again. I felt like we women had made a conspiracy against Dennis, but for doing what I wasn’t sure.

  Lilly said, “Sylvia, I can’t drive yet, but I can ride with you to the emergency room. If you don’t mind, Marie will take your car and the children back home.”

  Dennis started his car and was out of there. Sylvia said, “Can she sit with them until I get home?” She hadn’t asked me, but I nodded. She looked exhausted now, face soppy with tears, wrinkles etching in heavier, a mill woman married to another mill hand. Half the income now, she’d drop down into welfare unless Dennis did take care of her. Racism was Sylvia’s secret defense against knowing where in the social heap she was. I could play maid one night.

  “Thanks, Marie,” Lilly said, meaning more than Sylvia could understand.

  The kids cried on the way home.
I bathed them and rocked them. The sickly baby sucked on my arm as if he thought his mother had died and I could be recruited for the role if he tried hard enough.

  Lilly and Sylvia pulled up after I got them to sleep. Sylvia looked drugged. Lilly said, “We’ve arranged for a forensic autopsy anyway. And we’ve been talking to the funeral home and her minister.”

  You’re the Turk’s lawyer, I thought.

  Sylvia said, “Are my babies okay?”

  “They’re asleep,” I said. “Please don’t wake them.”

  “I want to see them.”

  She went in and put her hand on the boy’s chest to see if he still breathed. We led her off to her own bed when she stumbled. “He’s been sick,” she said as Lilly and I undressed her.

  “Do you want either of us to stay?” Lilly asked.

  “I’m fine,” Sylvia said. “My sister will be over in the morning. She’s on third shift.”

  I wished we’d get out of here—the poverty made me feel guilty for being a college student, for having a school teacher mother. We went back to the living room with the framed photos of kin, weddings, and babies. Sylvia put her hands to her face and twitched her head. Lilly and I left.

  “I guess she’ll be all right,” I said. “Dennis can’t afford not to take care of her.”

  Lilly said, “Dennis will for a while. When people forget, he’ll quit.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m going to sleep for the next twenty-four hours.”

  “You shouldn’t let people bother you while you’re like this.”

  “I told them to wait, didn’t I?”

  We drove home. Lilly winced as she got out of the car, bracing her hands against the doorframe. She reached for her surgical scar, but pulled her hands away as if remembering she couldn’t touch it. I helped her with her shower to make sure she didn’t fall, then gave her a pain pill and a sleeping pill. “Enough. You’ve got to get better first.”

  She pushed a pillow against her belly and said, “Should I let them all kill each other?”

  “None of those trash are worth getting sick over. Go to sleep.” I pulled the sheet over her.

  As Lilly turned to her side and adjusted the pillow against her incision, I looked out her back bedroom window and stopped myself from exclaiming out loud, Oh, shit. The old compact Cadillac was gone. You can’t deal with this, Lilly, I thought as I looked back at her in bed, eyes blinking in the dark, not quite asleep.

  I went downstairs to call the sheriff, thinking about Bobby’s body folded over his arm. No spine. I wondered if the Turk collected spines as trophies. Well, I thought, maybe Berenice was old enough to die. Old radical like her, she’d probably get a kick out of it and die biting and head-butting, too.

  I said to the dispatcher, “Berenice Nelson, Lilly Nelson’s aunt, is out driving in a 1986 compact Cadillac. She’s too old to be doing this.”

  “Does she have a valid driver’s license?”

  “Yes, she has her license but—”

  “Has she been declared incompetent?”

  “No. How long does she have to be missing before you do anything?”

  “Twenty-four hours, unless her mental state was clouded or confused the last time you saw her.”

  “Well, actually, she threatened to deal with the alien, so doesn’t that qualify as confused?”

  Don’t Take the Spine, That’s Alien

  DeSpain knew that he had to avenge Bobby’s death if he was going to get his black accounts back. He put on the bulletproof vest with the false muscle lines, found the infrared goggles, then called his cousins. His cousins said they were busy, so he drove the truck into Rocky Mount and picked up a couple of guys at Jeb’s Old War Parlor. “It’ll be a good fight,” DeSpain said. “I’ll pay you five hundred each.”

  One man smiled and asked, “Where are your cousins?” But the others weren’t listening. Three of them, two logging crew workers with less than twenty fingers between them, and a loudmouth fool DeSpain planned to put on point, nodded. They followed DeSpain out and climbed in back of the truck. “Any of you have a bike?” he asked them. Get them in first, he thought, then come in behind and shoot the fucker.

  The mouthy one did, a huge overdone Harley. DeSpain said, “That’s all right. I’ve got something lighter back at the house.” They detoured back to pick up the moped the law made Dennis use after his liquor-running bust.

  That would do. If the motor shorted out, DeSpain could pedal it. He gunned the truck to keep the guys in back from laughing and headed through the night toward the Turk’s.

  The guys in back yelled at each other and into the wind. DeSpain didn’t care what they said. He was rather glad now that he wasn’t using cousins. His left foot tapped against the bottom strip around the doorframe, then went to the clutch for the turn off 40. He’d thought about going around on the mountainside, but no, pass the sheep farm, then turn, turn again.

  DeSpain stopped the truck. “Here, you take it down to the house,” he told the fat mouthy one. “I’ll follow right behind you. Road’s rough. If the truck stalls out, then we’ll have to walk in.”

  “We’re going after the alien,” one of the other men said softly.

  “Damn straight,” DeSpain said. “He killed Bobby Vipperman. Yanked out his spine.”

  “Bobby was no fighter,” the fat mouthy man said.

  Just like you, DeSpain thought, but he said, “Bobby was a bit soft or he’d”—no, can’t say or he’d have got himself out of the mill because that’s probably where kin of theirs worked—“have taken the Turk out.”

  “I see the Turk in town,” the third man said softly. “He knows important people. State Department man was with him.”

  “The State Department told me the Turk’s fair game now.” The men DeSpain had hired squeezed in the cab together. The older logger drove. DeSpain started the moped, swearing praise for lithium batteries. If I can’t get this alien, he might as well take me, DeSpain thought. He touched his 9-millimeter Beretta in his shoulder holster and the knife against his back. His spine, too sympathetic with Bobby Vipperman’s spine, seemed to twist under the knife.

  The truck stalled. The fat man got out and, screaming, ran back through the dark. The radio suddenly cut on, induced into playing by the strong electric currents. Turk talked alien at them through the radio, obvious, terrible threats.

  The two men still in the truck watched as DeSpain’s moped stalled out. “Guess we get seven hundred fifty each,” the younger logger said, scratching his nose with the stub of his index finger.

  “Seems like it,” DeSpain said. “You want more beer before we go in?”

  “Not hardly,” the man said, looking at the other man, who could have been his older brother. “You got two more pair of those night goggles? Are we beating or shooting?

  “Defend yourselves however.”

  “Maybe we should talk a thousand,” the older man said. “Seems like it’s a bit more dangerous than poaching black walnut logs.”

  “Here,” DeSpain said, fishing for his wallet, “I’ll give you both three hundred each before, seven hundred after.”

  “Write us a note on it,” the younger man said.

  “The Turk knows we’re here. We better get moving,” DeSpain said.

  “He’ll wonder why we’re sitting out here,” the older man said, “and maybe come out of the house. Write us the note.”

  DeSpain wrote them a promise for seven hundred each after they talked to the Turk. Away from the house, that was where they ought to confront the alien. He thought, next time, man or woman, alien or human, gets in my face, I’m going to kill ’em first offense.

  The two loggers let DeSpain pass them. He pedaled the moped up as far as he could go without actually seeing the house, then stopped and pulled down the night goggles. A ghost of infrared behind the trees. Too hot to get a good reading through these cheap goggles. He yelled, hoping those stereo speaker ears were keen enough to hear him, “Turk, we’ve got
to talk.”

  “My lawyer’s aunt warned me you were coming.”

  Shit on the old bat. “Don’t believe what she told you. She’s crazy.”

  “You and she are not in collaboration.” The alien said it like he was reading voice stresses. DeSpain figured maybe stress analyzers came with the ears.

  The two loggers stopped. “Come up to the house alone,” the Turk called.

  DeSpain whispered, “You won’t get paid.”

  The older man said, “We’ve got enough.”

  “He’ll kill you anyway,” DeSpain said. “He can identify you through your voices.”

  “Don’t believe Mr. DeSpain,” the alien said.

  “Hell, I’m one of you. He’s alien. He’s selling drugs. I just sell liquor.”

  “Dennis, this alien stops the truck, he tore out Bobby Vipperman’s spine, he’s buddies with Hugous at The Door 18, and you want all two of us to march on him?” The men stared at the gun in Dennis’s hand.

  He looked at it himself, then said, “Do what you want to. You’ll have run off and left me.”

  They did. He thought about shooting them, but went on toward the Turk. Maybe we should work together, he thought, but I don’t understand the motivations. Why here? Why liquor? Why with the blacks first? He said, “I’m not coming in your house where you can drug me.”

  “Fine. We’ll come out with lights, action, cameras. I’ll even have a human witness.”

  Berenice, Marie’s friend, bitches both. DeSpain sweated under his bulletproof vest. The damn thing seemed glued to him by now, heavier than before, loaded with quarts of sweat. He put the Beretta in his front waistband, pointed to the left. Neither his spine nor his legs wanted him to walk forward, but he could force his body forward by thinking about how everyone would pick him apart if he couldn’t deal with this alien. He wondered if news that an alien pushed him off his home territory would get back to Uralsk. The Armenians were being difficult enough as was. Forward, get a look at the guy through the goggles if he’s hotter than 75 degrees at the surface.