Cottonwood (9 page)

“You could not pronounce my name,” he said at last.

“Then pick another one. Please. Anything. Please.”

Click. Click. She heard a soft scrape as he took his hand from the door, a single footstep toward her. “I am used to that one.”

“But—”

“It is only a joke if I allow it to be. I do not. I am Sanford.” The word came out harsh and alien through his mouth. It helped, a little.

“But what about your child?” She lowered her hand. The sun was directly in her eyes over the aqueduct wall, making them sting all over again. “Am I supposed to call him…Son?”

“I do.” He took another step toward her and looked at her papers, then at the case resting at her feet, and at the dark stain on her leg. “Why are you doing this?” he asked finally.

“As God is my witness,” Sarah said unhappily, “I do not know.”

He clicked again, then stepped back and pulled the door open. He held it for almost twenty seconds before she realized he was holding it for her.

None of her other clients had invited her in.

She went inside.

Small. That was her first thought. Eight feet by twenty, split into two rooms with a cardboard wall at the back. The front room was a cramped but uncluttered space dominated by a sawhorse/plyboard work table on which was piled a hodgepodge of electrical parts, including a working computer hooked to a car battery through some madly-coiling homemade device that had to be an adapter. The walls and even parts of the ceiling were covered in circuit boards, keyboards, bags of screws, bolts, washers and wires, all of it very neatly hung with cords carefully bound up where necessary. He’d written things beside some of them, not in English. He’d drawn schematics over magazine glossies and pinned them along the higher side of the separating wall; below, the little alien had pinned up some of his own drawings, mostly indecipherable, but certainly colorful. There was a cinderblock-and-board bookcase on the narrow wall to hold the heavier parts, like old televisions and computer casings, and on the lowest shelf, a few books and magazines, his water purifying jug, and a toolbox. Beyond a weathered stool at the work table and a ripped-up green vinyl chair, there was no other furniture, but the look of the place was softened by a stained and threadbare carpet rolled out over the floor. The carpet was hard to look at, a naked admission that this was indeed his house and all the better he could do for it. As she stood in this depressing, fascinating tableau, the cardboard door in the cardboard wall opened a crack, just a crack.

Sarah smiled weakly, but didn’t look directly at him. “Hey there, jellybean.”

The door opened a little more, then swept shut as the big one, Sanford, came in. He climbed onto the stool, not sitting as much as simply propping himself up, since even with part of the stool’s seat carved away, part of his weird, segmented body jutted stiffly out into space. It made her give the vinyl chair a curious glance, wondering how he fit in it if a stool presented such difficulties, but there were no obvious clues.

Sanford misinterpreted her curiosity. “Yes,” he said, picking up an r/c car and removing the body. “You may sit down.”

She did. Her feet promptly began to sting, then to throb, and then to scream. She picked up her papers and filled Sanford’s name in on a questionnaire, wishing she dared kick off her sensible shoes and rub at them. Looking at the worn cracks in the alien’s feet had a way of making that wish feel faintly obscene.

She asked her questions. He gave quiet, polite answers to every one of them and wasted no words. He gave no sign of offense at even the most personal of them, and called the little one out briefly so that she could confirm the registration number that had been etched into the side of his tiny head.
Property of IBI
, it began. The child’s eyes were huge and clear and curious as he watched her write. He had a habit of wringing his hands, clearly wanting to touch her, but at the first hesitant stretch of his tiny arm, Sanford quickly sent him back to the other room. Before the door closed, Sarah saw a sad little bed, just sheets on the floor in a heap, with the child’s tin cans to one side and dozens of magazine pages showing the alien ship stuck to the wall around it.

“Do you know how old he is?” she asked, staring sickly down at her papers.

“How long has this place been in operation?”

“A little over three years.”

He looked at her sharply, then down at the toy he was tinkering with. “Only three,” he said quietly. For a time, he was silent. At last, he simply went back to picking at wires, saying, “He is somewhat more than two years old, then.”

She wrote that down. “So…still his first molt?” she asked, reading the next line.

“His second.”

“Really?” She brought out her paz and punched up IBI’s anatomy guide (Know Your Bug!). “He’s awfully small, isn’t he? Like…by half.”

Line Ten:
Assess living situation for child. Note all unsafe conditions
. Was Son malnourished? Or just short? What was her responsibility here?

“Our young molt once in the egg,” said Sanford without looking at her. “You humans choose not to acknowledge that. You would consider him to be in his first-molt stage still.” He soldered something. “But he isn’t.”

She put her papers down. “How can I help you?” she asked.

He clicked, changing out a corroded wire with a pick and his own long, inhuman finger.

“I’m here to help you,” she told him. “I want to help you.”

He snapped the car’s body back on, put it on its wheels, and picked up the controller. It came on at his command, turned right, turned left, rolled forward and back. He switched it off, removed its batteries, set it and the controller beside it in a weathered box under the table. He opened up a black plastic garbage bag, pulled out a keyboard with a cracked shell and several missing keys, and got up to lift down a second mangled keyboard from the wall.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

“I will not tell you what to do.”

“But I work for you. I’m your caseworker.”

He glanced at her, put both keyboards down, and turned around on the stool to face her. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking a census so we can update our records and I’m introducing myself to all my clients.”

“These papers…IBI will use them to take my son?”

Sarah flinched.
Note all unsafe conditions
. “No,” she said firmly. “That’s not why I’m here. Mr. Sanford, I—”

“Sanford only.”

She paused, started over. “Sanford, I don’t think they’re planning anything. You were supposed to have caseworkers three years ago, it was part of the h—of the civil rights lobbying. This isn’t something new, it’s something old that’s only just now getting done.”

“And what will it accomplish?”

Honesty and exhaustion took the tact from her mouth. “It’ll shut the lobbyists up. Beyond that, I just don’t know, but I do want to help you and I will if I can.”

His palps moved, softly grinding against each other. He stood up and opened the door.

That was her cue, and a better one than she’d had all day. She walked quietly out under his thorny arm and faced him again on the stoop.

“Will you sign the census, please?”

He made his mark. She checked it against the first one, when he was just Fred Sanford and not Fred Sanford and Son.

Sanford and Son. What kind of person would think that was funny?

“I’m sorry,” she heard herself say. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

“I know,” he said.

He gave her the clipboard and she shut it away in her case. Movement stirred near the ground, the little one peeking out at her from behind his father’s leg. Sarah tried to smile at him.

“Take care of your dad, jellybean,” she said.

He wrung his hands, waved one, jumped back inside and hid. Sanford shut the door. He didn’t say goodbye, but then, why would he?

Sarah limped back to the Checkpoint gate. She did not sing.

* * *

That first week passed like some hellish alien version of the Groundhog Day movie: getting up each morning in an empty house that didn’t feel hers, passing a few minutes of cold dread in the office to put off going to her real workplace, and then walking through the gate into Cottonwood, knocking on doors and trying to track down at least some of her clients. The ones who were gone were gone again the next day; Fletcher was still drunk and reeling around his house; Levin still came barreling out with his nail-studded club to shout at her when she walked by; Baccus still refused to open the door (although he did ultimately answer questions through it, and sign the page she pushed through the broken, blacked-out window); and Samaritan, waiting outside every day, always had some new piece of nastiness to try out on her.

He seemed to love to make her stammer, make her blush, make her drop her eyes. He loved to hear her say she didn’t know, couldn’t help, wasn’t useful. And when he tired of attacking her as a member of IBI, he attacked her as Sarah Fowler. Personal insults, physical threats, the occasional dumping of her papers or slapping at her hands, peppered with those disturbingly direct sexual remarks which he couldn’t possibly understand.

Through it all, she looked forward to the last house on the road, but the child (she couldn’t call him Son, not even to herself) was never outside when she finished her other rounds, and the door was never open. She could sometimes see Sanford on the other side of his cracked glass window, and once she thought he looked at her too, but she had no reason to go knock on his door and so she trudged away from it and on to the next house.

There were other children, as it turned out, but they were all older than Son, or at least, they were all bigger—second- and third-molts…or third- and fourth-molts, as Sanford would say, and he’d ought to know. Those children did not play with tin cans and pin their artwork up on their parent’s wall. Like smaller versions of the adults, they watched Sarah talk with hard eyes and scraping palps, hating her with cold, grown-up hate. She tried to pretend she didn’t see it, tried to smile at them and mean it, but by the end of that first week, not only could she not imagine how it could get worse, she realized she no longer expected it to get better.

Over the weekend, her first paycheck arrived. She opened an account—not at IBI’s cute little community bank, that was too Company Store for her taste, but thirty miles away in the nearest town of Wheaton—and sent half of it back to Kate, then splurged dangerously on a thrift-store sofa and a dining set, some sheets and towels, more Chinese food, and dog biscuits. She threw Fagin’s ball for hours at a stretch, which he seemed to feel was only his due, and called Kate twice, both times trying to describe the awful slum quality of Cottonwood, and both times somehow lost control of the conversation as Kate got her to enthuse about her new house, the yard, and what fun events were coming to the community center.

“Well, so how are things there?” she’d asked Sunday night, beginning to feel a little bereft as Kate yet again interrupted a description of the reservoirs to talk about how great it must be to have a free community pool right down the street on a hot day like this.

“What, in Brookings? Nothing changes here. Roof still leaks. Floor still sags. Cops still come howling through three times a night.” Kate laughed a little, sadly. “My radio’s gone.”

“Heh. I never realized how much I did that. No one wants to sit with me on the monorail.”

“How do the roaches like it?”

“Kate!”

“I’m sorry. How do the bugs like it?”

And what could she say about that? There wasn’t anything else to call them. Like Mr. van Meyer said, after twenty years, ‘Visitors’ got old.

“I hear them buzzing back at me once in a while.” Samaritan, in particular, would follow her all up and down the road, buzzing loudly long after she’d fallen silent, droning in her ear like a giant cicada until she wanted to scream at him to shut up, just shut up, except that would undoubtedly make him happier. “I don’t feel much like singing in there.”

“It can’t be all bad.”

‘Well of course you’d say that, you won’t listen to me tell you how bad it is,’ Sarah thought peevishly. “I guess it isn’t. The residents are a little…slow to thaw, but they’re not like people say they are. They’re not scary. And there is the cutest kid in there.”

“How do you have a
cute
giant bug?” Kate laughed.

She could feel herself starting to get angry, genuinely angry. The first words that wanted out of her were not defensive ones or even explanations, but a perfectly nasty, ‘When did you turn into such a
bigot
, Kate?’ only, where do you go from there? They’d done five years of cold hostility and hurt feelings, and they were supposed to have put it behind them. They were family now, they were closer than they’d ever been…only where was all this bug-talk coming from? Sarah couldn’t remember ever hearing Kate talk so casually about roach-this and bug-that, and it really bothered her to hear it now, especially when she was working for those people and supposed to be on their side.

“He’s cute,” she insisted now. “He’s little and green and just so jumpy, he’s like—”

“A grasshopper,” Kate interrupted.

“Is that it?” Sarah snapped. “Are you done now? Why don’t you tell a few more bug-jokes and get it all out of your system? Oh, here’s one: Why did the bugs come to Earth? Because someone left the light on, har de-freaking-har har. How do you keep bugs out of your back yard? Move the trash cans to the front. What’s the difference between a bug and a bucket of shit? The bucket.”

“Oh, come on,” said Kate, plainly uncomfortable. “It was just a joke.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was a cheap dig and I’m sick of hearing them. These are my clients. I’m not going to help you make fun of them!”

“Sarah…” Kate began, but then just sighed. Her image skewed away as she dropped her paz into her lap.

Sarah picked at the sofa arm, silent, and watched Kate’s ceiling pixelate until her sister picked it back up and aimed it properly.

“Okay, well…it’s great to hear from you, kiddo. I’m glad to hear you’re doing so well and having so much fun down there. Maybe I’ll come out someday and visit. It sounds fabulous. Got to go now.”