Beggars and Choosers (11 page)

Mr. Keller told me the cafe kitchen was fixed. I walked Annie and
Lizzie
,
sweet-clean as berries in the dew, to get our breakfast. But the cafe
was full, it, not just with Livers eating but of donkeys making a holo
of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.

It was her, all right. No tape. She stood in front of the foodbelt,
which offered the usual soysynth eggs, bacon, cereals, and breads, plus
some fresh genemod strawberries. I don’t like genemod strawberries, me.
They might keep for weeks, but they never taste like them little wild
sweet berries that grow on the hillsides in June.

“… serving her people with the best she has, no matter the need, no
matter the hour, no matter the emergency,” said a handsome donkey into
a camera ‘bot. “Janet Carol Land, on the spot to serve East Oleanta—on
the spot to serve
you
. A politician who deserves those
memorable words from the Bible: ’Well done, good and faithful
servant‘!” some days—and then raw stuff from the kitchen. Potatoes and
x apples and stuff.“

“Annie pressed her lips together. She ain’t a morning person, her.
But it felt so good to be waking up at Annie’s place that I forgot
that, me. She said, ”The food would rot in just two-three days. I don’t
want, me, to have a lot of half-rotten stuff around here. It ain’t
clean.“

“Then we’ll throw it out, us, and get some more.” I spoke gentle.
Annie don’t like things to be different than they’ve always been.

Lizzie said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

I said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. Let’s go look, us. Better get
dressed.”

Annie said, “She got to go, her, to the baths first. She stinks. Me,
too. You walk us, Billy?”

“Sure.” What good did she think an old wreck like me’d be against
rabid coons? But I’d of walked Annie past them demons she believes in.

Lizzie
said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed
yet?”

There wasn’t no raccoons near the baths. The men’s bath was empty
except for Mr. Keller, who’s so old I don’t think even he remembers if
he’s got a first name, and two little boys who shouldn’t of been there
alone, them. But they were having themselves a wonderful splashing
time. I liked watching them, me. They cheered up the morning.

Mr. Keller told me the cafe kitchen was fixed. I walked Annie and
Lizzie
,
sweet-clean as berries in the dew, to get our breakfast. But the cafe
was full, it, not just with Livers eating but of donkeys making a holo
of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.

It was her, all right. No tape. She stood in front of the foodbelt,
which offered the usual soysynth eggs, bacon, cereals, and breads, plus
some fresh genemod strawberries. I don’t like genemod strawberries, me.
They might keep for weeks, but they never taste like them little wild
sweet berries that grow on the hillsides in June.

“. - . serving her people with the best she has, no matter the need,
no matter the hour, no matter the emergency,” said a handsome donkey
into a camera ‘bot. “Janet Carol Land, on the spot to serve East
Oleanta—on the spot to serve
you
. A politician who deserves
those memorable words from the Bible: ’Well done, good and faithful
servant‘!”

Land railed. She was a looker, her, the way donkey women are when
they’re not young: fine soft skin and pink lips and hair in pretty
silver waves. Too skinny, though. Not like Annie. Who pressed her
dark-berry lips together like she was going to squeeze cider with them.

Land said to the handsome man, “Thank you, Royce. As you know, the
cafe is the heart of any aristo town. That’s why when a cafe
malfunctions, I move heaven and earth to get it operable again. As
these good citizens of East Oleanta can attest.”

“Let’s talk to some of them,” Royce said, showing all his teeth. He
and Land walked to a table where Jack Sawicki sat, him, looking‘
cornered. “Mayor Sawicki, what do you think of the service
Congresswoman Land provided your town today?”

Paulie Cenverno looked up, him, from where he ate at the next table.
With him was Celie Kane. Annie’s lower lip trembled itself into a
half-grin, half-wince.

Jack said miserably, “We’re awful happy, us, that the foodbelt’s
fixed, and we—”

“When you fuckers gonna get them rabid raccoons killed?” Celie
demanded.

Royce’s face froze, it. “I don’t think—”

“You better think, you, and think hard about them coons, or you and
the Congresswoman gonna be thinking about new jobs!”

“Cut,” Royce said. “Don’t worry, Janet, we’ll edit it.” His smile
looked like it was foamed onto his face, but I saw his eyes, me, and I
looked away. My fighting days are over, unless I have to fight for
Annie or Lizzie.

Royce took the Congresswoman’s elbow, him, and steered her toward
the door. Celie shrilled, “I mean it, me! It’s been days now and you
guys done shit! ”Public servants!“ You ain’t nothing but—”

“
Celie
,” Jack and Paulie both said.

Land broke free of Royce. She turned back, her, to Celie. “Your
concern for your town’s safety is natural, ma’am. The warden ‘bot and
any sick wildlife are not in my jurisdiction—they fall to District
Supervisor Samuelson—but when I return to Albany I’ll do everything in
my power to see that the problem is solved.” She looked straight into
Celie’s eyes, real steady, and it was Celie who looked away first, her.

Celie didn’t say nothing. Land smiled, her, and turned to her crew,
think we’re done here, Royce. I’ll meet you outside.“ She walked to the
door, back straight, head high. And the only reason I ever saw anything
different was because of where I stood, me, sideways to the door,
between Annie and any trouble. Congress-woman Land reached the door and
she was a smiling pretty cocksure politician, her. Then she went
through the door and she was a woman with tired, tired eyes.

I glanced at Annie to see if she saw. But she was clucking at Celie
Kane. Annie might of grinned, her, at Celie’s balls, but deep down
inside Annie don’t approve of sassing public servants.
They can’t
help being donkeys
. I could almost hear her say it, me. /

Lizzie said in her clear young voice, “That Congresswoman can’t
really help get the warden ‘bot fixed in Albany, can she? She was just
pretending, her.”

“Oh hush,” Annie said. “You never will learn, you, when to keep your
mouth quiet and when not.”

==========

Two days later, two days of everybody staying inside, us, and no
warden ‘bot tech from Albany, we made a hunting party. It took hours of
talk that went around and around in dizzies, but we made it. Livers
ain’t supposed to have no guns, us. No warehouses stock a District
Supervisor Tara Eleanor Schmidt .22 rifle. No political campaigns give
away a Senator Jason Howard Adams shotgun or a County Legislature Terry
William Monaghan pistol. But we got them, us.

Paulie Cenverno dug up his granddaddy’s shotgun, him, from a
plastisynth box behind the school. Plastisynth keeps out damn near
everything: dirt, damp, rust, bugs. Eddie Rollins and Jim Swikehardt
and old Doug Kane had their daddies’ rifles, them. Sue Rollins and her
sister, Krystal Mandor, said they’d share a family Matlin; I didn’t
see, me, how that could work. Two men I didn’t know had shotguns. Al
Rauber had a pistol. Two of the teenage stomps showed up, grinning, not
armed. Just what we needed, us. Altogether, we were twenty.

“Let’s split, us, into pairs, and set out in ten straight lines from
the cafe,” Jack Sawicki said.

“You sound like a goddamn donkey,” Eddie Rollins said in disgust.
The stomps grinned.

“You got a better idea, you?” Jack said. He held his rifle real
tight over his bulging green jacks.

“We’re Livers,” Krystal Mandor said, “let us go where we want, us.”

Jack said, “And what if somebody gets shot, them? You want the
police franchise down on us?”

Eddie said, “I want to hunt raccoons, me, like an aristo. Don’t give
me no orders, Jack.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “Go ahead, you. I’m not saying another goddamn
word.”

After ten minutes of arguing we set off in pairs, us, in ten
straight lines.

I walked with Doug Kane, Celie’s father. Two old men, us, slow and
limping. But Doug still knew, him, how to walk quiet in the woods. Off
to my right I heard somebody whooping and laughing. One of the stomps.
After a while, the sound died away.

The woods were cool and sweet-smelling, so thick overhead that the
floor wasn’t much overgrown. We stepped, us, on pine needles that sent
up their clean smell. White birches, slim as Lizzie, rustled. Under the
trees moss grew dark green, and in the sunny patches there was daisies
and buttercups and black-eyed Susans. A mourning dove called, the
calmest sound in the whole world.

“Pretty,” Doug said, so quiet that a rabbit upwind didn’t even
twitch its long ears.

Toward noon, the trees got skimpier and the underbrush thicker. I
smelled blackberries somewheres, which made me think of Annie. I
figured, me, that we come at least six hard miles from East Oleanta.
All we seen was rabbits, a doe, and a mess of harmless snakes. No
coons. And any rabid coons out this far, killing them wouldn’t do the
town no good anyway. It was time to turn back.

“Gotta… sit down, me,” Doug said.

I looked at him, me, and my skin turned cold. He was pale as the
birch bark, his eyelids fluttering like two hummingbirds. He dropped
the rifle, him, and it went off—old fool had the safety off. The bullet
buried itself in a tree trunk. Doug clutched his chest and fell over.
I’d been so busy, me, enjoying air and flowers and I ain’t even seen he
was having a heart attack.

“Sit down! Sit down!” I eased him onto a patch of some kind of
ground cover, all shiny green leaves. Doug lay on his side, him,
breathing hard:
whoooo, whoooo
. His right hand batted the air
but I knew, me, that his eyes didn’t see nothing. They were wild.

“Lay quiet, Doug. Don’t move, you! I’ll go get help, me, I’ll make
them bring the medunit…”

Whoooo, whoooo, whoooo .
. . then the breathing noises
stopped.

I thought:
He’s gone
. But his bony old chest still rose
and fell, just shallow and quiet now. His eyes glazed.

“I’ll bring the medunit!” I said again, turned, and nearly fell
myself, me. Staring at me from not ten feet away was a rabid coon.

Once you seen a animal gone rabid, you don’t never forget it. I
could see, me, the separate specks of foam around the coon’s mouth.
Sunlight from between the trees sparkled on the specks like they was
glass. The coon bared its teeth, it, and hissed at me, a sound like I
never heard no coon make. Its hindquarters shook. It was near the end.

I raised Doug’s rifle, me, knowing that if it come for me there was
no way I was going to be fast enough.

The coon twitched and lunged. I jerked up the rifle, me, but I never
even got it to shoulder height. A beam of light shot out from some
place behind me, only it wasn’t light but something else like light.
And the coon flipped over backwards, it, in mid-lunge and crashed to
the ground dead.

I turned around, me, very slow. And if I seen one of Annie’s angels,
I couldn’t of been more surprised.

A girl stood there, her, a short girl with a big head and dark hair
tied back with a red ribbon. She wore stupid clothes for the woods:
white shorts, thin white shirt, open sandals, just like we didn’t have
no deer ticks or blackflies or snakes. The girl looked at me somber.
After a minute she said, “Are you all right?”

“Y-yes, ma’am. But Doug Kane there—I think his heart…”

She walked over to Doug, her, knelt, and felt his pulse. She looked
up at me. “I want you to do something, please. Drop this on the dead
raccoon, right on top of the body.” She handed me a smooth gray disk
the size of a coin. I remember coins, me.

She kept on looking at me, not even blinking, and so I did it. I
just turned my back, me, on her and Doug both, and did it. Why? Annie
asked me later, and I didn’t have no answer. Maybe it was the girl’s
eyes. Donkey, and not. No Janet Carol Land facing no camera with
well
done good and faithful servant
.

The gray disk hit the coon’s damp fur and stuck. It shimmered, it,
and in a second that coon was cased in a clear shell that went right
down to the ground and, it turned out, sliced through an inch
underground. Maybe Y-energy, maybe not. A leaf blew against the shell
and slid right off. I touched the shell. I don’t know, me, where I got
the nerve. The shell was hard as foamcast.

Made out of nothing.

When I turned back the girl was putting something, her, in her
shorts pocket, and Doug’s eyes were coming clear. He gasped, him.

“Don’t move him yet,” the girl said, still not smiling. She didn’t
look like she smiled much. “Go get help. He’ll be safe until you get
back.”

“Who are you, ma’am?” It came out squeaky. “What did you do to him,
you?”

“I gave him some medicine. The same injection the medunit would have
given him. But he needs a stretcher to be carried back to your town. Go
get help, Mr. Washington.”

I took a step, me, right toward her. She stood up. She didn’t seem
afraid, her—just went on looking at me with those eyes with no smile.
After seeing the coon, it came to me that she had a shell, too. Not
hard like the coon’s, and maybe not away from her body neither. Maybe
close on it like a clear glove. But that was why she was out in the
woods in shorts and flimsy sandals, and why she wasn’t bit up, her, by
no blackflies, and why she wasn’t afraid of me.

I said, “You… you’re from Eden, ain’t you? It’s really here
someplace, in these woods, it’s really here…”

She got a funny expression on her face. I didn’t know, me, what it
meant, and it came to me that I could better guess what a rabid coon
was thinking than what this girl was.