999 (32 page)

“Don’t bother anybody you might see here,” my uncle told me on that first day. “Just leave ‘em alone. They probably live here.”

And I have seen a very old man in the kitchen, always crying quietly over the sink and wearing one of those senior citizen jumpsuits that zip up from the ankle to the neck; I’ve just nodded to him and discreedy shuffled past across the dusty linoleum. What could we have to say to each other that the other wouldn’t already know? And a couple of times I’ve seen two kids out at the far end of the backyard. Let them play, I figure. My uncle is generally walking around in circles behind the garage trying to find his beer. There’s a patch of mirage out there—if you step into the weeds by the edge of the driveway, walking away from the house, you find with no shift at all that you’ve just stepped
onto
the driveway,
facing
the house.

“It’s been that way forever,” he told me one day when he was taking a break from it, sitting on the hood of his wrecked old truck. “But one night a few winters ago I stepped out there and
wasn’t
facing the house; and I was standing on one of your mom’s long-ago rosebushes. The flowers were open, like they thought it was day, and the leaves were warm. Time doesn’t pass, in mirages, everybody knows that—so I hopped right in the truck and bought two cases of Bud-weiser out of the cooler at Top Cat, and stashed ‘em there right by the rosebush. The next morning it was the two-for-one-step mirage again, but whenever it slacks off, I know where there’s a lot of cold beer.”

I nodded a number of times, and so did he, and it was right after this conversation with him that I started keeping all our old toys back there.

Yesterday my sister came rocking up the dirt driveway in a shiny green Edsel, and when she braked it in a cloud of dust and clanked the door open I could see that she’d been crying at some point on the drive up. It’s a long drive, and it takes a lot out of her.

My voice is gone because of the explosion having scorched my throat, so I stepped closer to her to be heard. “Come in the house and have … some water,” I rasped—awkwardly, because she’d doing all this for my sake. We don’t have any glasses, but she could drink it out of the faucet. “Or crackers,” I added.

“I can’t stand to see the inside of the house,” she said crossly. “We had good times in this house,
when we were all living
in it.” She squinted out past the dogwood tree at the infinity of brown hillocks that is the backyard. “Let’s talk out there.”

“You’re testy,” I noted as I followed her up the dirt driveway, past the house. She was wearing a blue sundress that clung to her sweaty back.

“Why do you suppose that is, Gunther?”

I glanced around quickly, but there wasn’t even a bird in the empty blue sky. “Doug,” I reminded her huskily, trying to project my frail voice. The name had been suggested by the phone call I’d got on the day before the explosion, and certainly Doug Olney himself would never hear about the deception, wherever he might be. “Always, you promised.”

We were walking out past the end of the driveway among the burr-weeds now, and I saw her shoulders shrug wearily. “Why do you suppose that is—Mr. Olney?” she called back to me.

I lengthened my stride to step up beside her. The soles of my feet must be tough, because the burrs never stick in my skin. “I bet it’s expensive to rent a classic Edsel,” I hazarded.

“Yes, it is.” Her voice was flat and harsh. “Especially in the summer, with all the Mexican weddings. It’s a ‘57, but it must have a new engine or something in it—I could hardly see the signs on the old Route 66 today. Just Foothill Boulevard all the way. I may not be able to come out here again, get through to you, not even your own
twin
, who
lived
here,
with
you! Not even in a car from those days. And Hakim needs me too.” She turned to face me and stamped her foot. “He could figure some way to get out of that airport if he really wanted to! And look at you! Damn it—Doug—how long do you think a comatose body can
live
, even in a hospital like Western Medical, with its soul off hiding
incognito
somewhere?”

“Well,
soul …”

“This is certainly unsanctified ground. Is it a crossroads? Have you got
rue
growing out here with the weeds?” She was crying again.
“Propane leak
. Why were you found out in the yard, out by the duck? You changed your mind, didn’t you? You were trying to walk away from it. Good! Keep
on
walking away from it; don’t stop here in the … in the terminal, the nowhere in-between. Walk right now to that silly old car back there, and let me drive you to Western Medical while I still can, while you can still make the trip. You can
wake up.”

I smiled at her and shook my head. I know now that I was never scared of the boy in the dark ballroom. I was tense with fear of each fresh unknown dawn, which the boy had found a way to hide from, but which always did come to me mercilessly shining right through my closed eyelids. I opened my mouth to croak some reassurance to her, but she was looking past me with an empty expression.

“Jesus,” she said then, reverently, in a voice almost as hoarse as mine, “this is where that other picture was taken. The photo of the duck by the avocado tree. In the photo album, remember?” She pointed back toward the house. “There’s no tree here now, but the angle of the house, the windows—look, it’s the very same view, we just didn’t recognize it then because we remembered this house freshly painted, not all faded and peeled like it is now, and like it was in the picture, and because in the picture there was a big distracting avocado tree in the foreground!”

I stood beside her and squinted through watering eyes against the sun glare. She might have been right—if you imagined a tree to the right, with the poor duck leaning against the trunk, this view was at least very like the one in that old photo album.

“The person with the camera was standing right here,” she said softly.

Or
will be
standing, I thought.

“Could you drive me to Stater Brothers?” I said.

Several times I’ve gone out and looked since she drove away, and I’m still not sure she was right. The trouble is, I don’t remember the photograph all that clearly. It might have been this house. All I can do is wait.

I don’t imagine that I’ll be going to Stater Brothers again soon, if ever. The trip was upsetting, with so many curdles and fractures of mirage in the harsh daylight that you’d think San Bernardino was populated by nothing but walking skeletons and one-hoss shays. I did get an avocado, along with my crackers and processed cheese-food slices, and my sister left off a box of our dad’s old clothes because I’ve been wearing the scorched pants and shirt still, and she said it broke her heart to see me walking around all killed. I haven’t looked in the box, but it stands to reason that there’s one of those jumpsuits in it.

I know now that she’s going back, at last, to poor stalled Hakim at the airport in Roissy. I called her from the phone in the kitchen here.

“I’m on my way to the hospital,” I told her. “You can go back to France.”

“You’re—Gunth—I mean,
Doug
, where are you calling from?”

“I’m back in Santa Ana. I just want to change my clothes, try to comb my hair, before I get on a bus to the hospital.”

“Santa Ana? What’s the number there, I’ll call you right back.”

That panicked me. Helplessly I gave her the only phone number I could think of, my old Santa Ana number. “But I didn’t mean to take up any more of your time,” I babbled, “I just wanted to—”

“That’s our old number,” she said. “How can you be at our old number?”

“It—stayed with the house.” If I could still sweat, I’d have been sweating. “These people who live here now don’t mind me hanging around.” The lie was getting ahead of me. “They like me; they made me a sandwich.”

“I bet. Stay by the phone.”

She hung up, and I knew it was a race then to see which of us would be able to dial the old number most rapidly. She must have been hampered by a rotary-dial phone too, because I got ringing out of the earpiece; and after it had rung four times I concluded that the number must be back in service again, because I would have got the recording by then if it had not been. My lips were silently mouthing
Please, please
, and I was aching with anxious hope that whoever answered the line would agree to go along with what I’d tell them to say.

Then the phone at the other end was lifted, and the voice said, breathlessly, “Hello?”

Of course I recognized him, and the breath clogged in my numb throat.

“Hello?” came the voice again. “Am I talking to a short circuit?” Yes, I thought.

That oil tank in San Pedro hadn’t been in use for years, but it had once been equipped with an automatic-dial switch to call the company’s main office when its fuel was depleted; a stray power surge had apparently turned it on again, and the emergency number it called was by that time ours. Probably the oil tank hadn’t had any fuel in it at all anymore, and only occasionally noticed. Certainly there had been nothing we could do about it.

“Gunther!” It hurt my teeth to say the name. “Jesus, boy—this is—Doug Olney, from Neff High School! You remember me, don’t you?”

“Doug?” said the half-drunk, middle-aged man at the other end of the line, befuddledly wondering if I had throat cancer. “Olney? Sure I remember! Where are you? Are you in town—”

“No time to talk,” I said, trying not to choke. What if Doug Olney, the real one,
had
been in town, in Santa Ana? Would this unhappy loser have suggested that the two of them get together for lunch? “I don’t want to—” Stop you, I thought; save you, for damn sure. “—change any of your plans.” My eyes were watering, even in the dim kitchen. “Listen, a woman’s gonna call your number in a minute; she’s gonna ask for me. You don’t know her,” I assured him; I didn’t want him to be at all thinking he might. “Say I just left a minute ago, okay?”

“Who is she—”

I just hung up. You’ll find out, I thought.

My uncle’s beer appeared in the yard today, two cases of it, still cold from the cooler at Top Cat. The roses are still fresh, and I looked at the clip-cuts on some stems and tried to comprehend that my mother had cut the flowers only a few hours earlier, by the rosebush’s time; the smears in the white dust on the rose hips were probably from her fingers. Sitting in the dirt driveway in the noonday sun, my uncle and I got all weepy and sentimental, and drank can after can of the Bud-weiser in toasts to missing loved ones, though probably nobody was in the house, and the two children were by then long gone from the backyard.

I’ve planted the golf-ball-sized seeds from the avocado, right where the tree was in the picture—if it was in fact a picture of this house. Eventually it will be a tree, and maybe one day the duck will be there, leaning on the trunk, on his way back from Disneyland and Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the house where my sister and I are still seven years old. I plan to tag along, if he’ll have me.

Nancy A. Collins

CATFISH GAL BLUES

Nancy A. Collins made quite a name for herself with her Sonja Blue vampire hooks; she won a 1990 Bram Stoker Award (why don’t they call them Brammies instead of Stokers?) for
Sunglasses After Dark,
which was followed by
In the Blood
and
Paint It Black—
the three of them have been issued together as
The Sonja Blue Collection.

Which isn’t to say she’s restricted herself to vampires. She’s done comic book work (Swamp Thing), comic book novelizations (a novelization of the Fantastic Four), edited anthologies such as
Forbidden Acts
(with Edward E. Kramer and Martin H. Greenberg), and even penned westerns
(Walking Wolf. A Weird Western).

Here she gives us none of the above—but rather a folk tale, kind of a country legend that turns out for its protagonist to be … well, read on
.

F
lyjar is the kind of Southern town where time doesn’t mean much. Maybe that’s because there’s little in the way of change between the seasons—the difference between winter and summer a mere fifteen degrees on average. And when you’re as poor as most folks in Flyjar, there’s not a whole lot of difference between one decade and another—or century, for that matter.

The two constants in Flyjar are poverty and the river. The town clings to the Mississippi like a child to its mama’s skirt, and its fortunes—for good or ill—have been tied to the Big Muddy tighter than apron strings. At one time it had served as fueling stop for the river-boats that once traveled up and down the Father of All Waters. But those days were long gone, and all that remained of “the good old days” were some deteriorating wooden piers along the riverbanks.

Since most of the wharves extended several hundred feet into the river, there were plenty of crappies, channel cat and garfish free for the taking, provided you had the know-how and patience to catch them, as Sammy Herkimer, one of Flyjar’s better fishermen, was quick to tell anyone who’d listen.

There were several docks to choose from, but Sammy’s favorite was the one at Steamboat Bend. It was a mile or so from town and, because of that, was not in the best of shape. Since that meant keeping an eye on where you walked, not many of the locals used it, which suited Sammy just fine. Then one day, while he was sitting on the dock, sipping iced tea from a thermos, he was surprised to find himself joined by, of all people, Hop Armstrong.

Hop was the closest thing Flyjar had to a fancyman, since the good Lord had seen fit to bless him with good looks but had skimped in the ambition department. When it came to playing guitar and getting women to pay his way, Hop was second to none. But when it came to physical labor … well, that was another story.

“Lord A’mighty, Hop!” Sammy proclaimed, unable to hide his surprise. “What you doin’ here? Someone set fire to your house?”

“You could say that.” Hop grunted. “My woman said I had to bring home supper.”

“That a fact?” Sammy said, raising an eyebrow.

Hop’s most recent sugar mama was Lucinda Solomon, the proprietress of the local beauty parlor. Lucinda was good-looking and well-to-do, at least by Flyjar’s standards. She was also notoriously strong-willed, and rumor had it that in living off Lucinda, Hop had finally met up with something approximating hard work.

Sammy glanced at the younger man’s gear, noting with some amusement that while Hop had remembered to bring along his guitar, he hadn’t bothered to pack a net. He returned his gaze to the river, shaking his head. After a long stretch of silence between the two, the older man spoke up abruptly.

“You know why they call this stretch of the river Steamboat Bend, Hop?”

“I figgered on account of it bein’ a bend in the river and there was steamboats that used to come down it,” he replied with a shrug.

“That’s part of it, but it ain’t the whole reason. A long time ago there was this big ole paddleboat that used to cruise up and down the river called
Delta Blossom
. She was a real fancy pleasure boat, with marble mantelpieces and crystal chandeliers and gold door handles. When folks heard
Delta Blossom
was coming, they ran from the houses and fields to watch her pass. Anyways, one day, without any warning,
Delta Blossom
went down with all hands right about there,” Sammy said, gesturing towards the middle of the river.

“Why did she sink?” Hop asked, a tinge of interest seeping into his voice.

“No one’s rightly sure. Some said the boilers blew out th’ side of the boat. Some said there was a fire belowdecks. Maybe it got its hull punched open by a submerged tree. Who can really know, after all this time? But my old granny used to swear up and down that
Delta Blossom
was scuttled by catfish gals.”

Hop scowled at the older man. “You funnin’ with me, ain’t you, Sammy.”

“No, sir, I ain’t!” he said solemnly, shaking his head for emphasis. “Before there was any white or black folk, or even Indians living in these parts, there was catfish gals here. They live in the river, down where it’s muddy and deep. They got the upper parts of women and from the waist down are big ole channel cats. They keep their distance from humans and, for the most part, are peaceful enough. Some folks said the catfish gals sank the
Delta Blossom
on account of one of them gettin’ caught in the paddlewheel and crushed.”

Hop turned to fix the older man with a curious stare. “You ever
seen
one of them catfish gals, Sammy?”

“No, I ain’t. But I ain’t gone lookin’ for them, neither. But my granny said they was why no one hardly ever finds folks who are fool enough to go swimmin’ in the river. They take the drowned bodies and stick ‘em deep in the mud, until they get all blote up. That way their flesh is easier to eat …”

Hop grimaced. “Hush up about that! It’s bad enough my woman’s got me out here without you goin’ on about catfish eatin’ daid folks!”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize you was sensitive on the subject.” After another stretch of silence, Sammy nodded towards the guitar. “So—if you’re here to fish, why the git-box?”

“Man can do more than one thing at a time, can’t he?”

“I reckon so—but I don’t recommend it. You’ll scare off the fish.”

“Mebbe I’ll just charm me a catfish gal instead.” Hop grinned.

“If anyone could, I reckon it’d be you.” Sammy sighed as he reeled in his line. “Well, I caught me enough for one day. I better get on home so’s I can clean this mess of crappies in time for supper. Good luck on charming them catfish gals, Hop. Y’all take care.

“Y’all too, Sammy,” Hop replied absently, his gaze fixed on the river.

*  *  *

Hop had to admit that being out in the sunshine on a day like today wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t too hot and there was a nice breeze coming off the water … plus, there was the added advantage of being out of his woman’s line of sight.

Lucinda was far from an easy woman to please, and an even harder one to live with when riled. And she was most always riled. Hop knew the signs well enough by now to realize that his days of leisure at the feisty Miz Solomon’s expense were drawing to their close, but he didn’t like to jump ship unless he had a new girlfriend lined up. Unfortunately, for a man of his tastes and inclinations, Flyjar didn’t have much in the way of available lady folk for him to choose from—so it looked like he was going to have to make do with Lucinda for a while longer. At least Steamboat Bend was remote enough that the chances of Luanda’s actually finding how hard he was—or wasn’t—working at making sure there would be supper on the table come sundown were in his favor.

Hop pulled a forked stick from his tackle box and wedged it between the loose planks of the dock. After baiting the hook, he cast the line into the murky waters and propped the reel against the stick. Keeping one eye on the bobber, Hop leaned against the nearby wooden pylon and picked up his guitar.

There was not a time in his memory when music didn’t come easy to him. Ever since he was knee-high, he’d been able to make a guitar do whatever it was he wanted of it. It was pretty much the same with women, too. Playing guitar came as natural to him as breathing and eating—and felt a lot more pleasant than chopping cotton or driving a tractor.

Hop scanned the deceptively calm surface of the river. It was so wide the current’s strength was difficult to gauge with the naked eye. The only way to figure out just how powerful the river truly was was by the size of the driftwood and the speed at which it went past. There were days when full-grown oak trees raced one another to the Gulf of Mexico. Today was relatively placid, with only a few deadfalls the size of railroad ties headed downriver.

Hop found his mind turning once again to the story Sammy had told him. Not about the catfish gals—that was pure hokum if ever he heard it. What piqued his imagination was the
Delta Blossom
. Hop wondered what it must have been like back in those days, when the steamboats cruised the river, bringing glamour and wealth to pissant little towns like Flyjar.

To think that one of the grandest of the old paddlewheelers had come to its end a stone’s throw from where he was sitting, taking all its splendor to the Mississippi’s silty floor. All Hop had ever seen gracing the river were flat-bottomed barges and the occasional freighter or small leisure craft. These were hardly the kinds of boats that sparked the imagination and quickened the heart. Folks didn’t flock to the levees just to watch a barge pass by.

Hop wondered if there was still anything left of the old
Delta Blossom
at the bottom of Steamboat Bend. There was no way to know. What secrets the river held it did not give up readily. Still, it didn’t keep him from idly hoping to spot the sunken pleasure ship’s outline.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the long-lost floating pleasure palace, white as new cotton with towering double smokestack puffing away like a rich man’s cigars as she made her way along the Mississippi. He could picture the Southern belles in hoop skirts lining the ship’s second-story promenade, silk fans fluttering like caged birds, while riverboat gamblers in pristine linen suits and wide-brimmed hats tossed silver dollars and gold pieces onto the felt of the gaming tables. Hop saw himself dressed like Clark Gable in
Gone With the Wind
, tipping his hat to the young ladies of fashion gathered in the
Delta Blossom’s
grand salon for the evening’s entertainment. What a swath he could have cut back then!

As his well-dressed phantom-self began to dance underneath the swaying crystal chandeliers with a young woman who looked a great deal like Vivien Leigh, Hop’s nimble fingers were quick to provide the music. Granted, “Goodnight Irene” wasn’t around at the time, but it was his daydream, after all, wasn’t it?

As he played, a sudden movement in the middle of the river caught Hop’s eye. From where he was sitting, it looked as if a swimmer had surfaced in the middle of the bend, near where Sammy said the
Delta Blossom
had gone down, then just as quickly submerged. But that was impossible.

Swimming in the Mississippi was only slightly less hazardous to your health than brushing your teeth with lit dynamite. Every so often some fool would get drunk enough to try to swim the river—and disappear without a trace ten feet from shore. If the family was lucky, the body would turn up a few days later, fifty miles downstream, snagged in the branches of a tree on the floodplain, looking more like a drowned pig than a human being. But what Hop saw hadn’t looked anything like a floater popping to the surface. For one thing, it stayed in one place and didn’t follow the current. Hop shaded his eyes against the sun, trying to get a better look, but there was nothing there. His attention was brought back closer to shore as the bobber on his line registered a strike. Hop dropped his guitar and snatched up the fishing rod, reeling in a ten-pound catfish.