Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (63 page)

Jamie goggled at all this, wondering if it could possibly be real or if it was one of the “effects”—hallucinations, as even he understood—that he sometimes got during particularly bad “spells.” After a moment or two—during which the wagon didn’t shimmer or fade around the edges at all—he widened his attention enough to notice the signs: big hand-painted signs hung on either side of a kind of sandwich-board framework that was braced upright in the wagon bed. At the top each sign read MOHAWK CONFEDERACY in bright red paint, and then, underneath that, came a long list of words, each word painted in a different color:

HAND-LOADED AMMUNITION

PAINT

FALSE TEETH

EYEGLASSES—GROUND TO PRESCRIPTION

LAMP OIL

PAINLESS DENTISTRY

UNTAINTED SEED FOR WHEAT, CORN, MELONS

FLAX CLOTH

WINDOW GLASS

MEDICINES & LINIMENT

CONDOMS

IRON FARM TOOLS

UNTAINTED LIVESTOCK

NAILS

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

MARIJUANA

WHISKY

SOAP

PRINTING DONE

ALL MADE IN MOHAWK!

Jamie was puzzling out some of the harder words when the door to the Outriders’ station opened and Mr. Stover came hurriedly down the stairs. “What’re you doing here, Jamie?” he asked. “What’re you hanging around here for?”

Jamie gaped at him, trying to find the words to describe the wonderful new wagon, and how strange it made him feel, but the effort was too great, and the words slipped away. “Going to Mr. Hardy’s store,” he said at last. “Just going to sweep up at Mr. Hardy’s store.”

Mr. Stover glanced nervously back up at the door of the Outriders’ station, fingered his chin for a moment while he made up his mind, and then said, “Never mind that today, Jamie. Never mind about the store today. You just go on back home now.”

“But—” Jamie said, bewildered. “But—I sweep up every day!”

“Not today,” Mr. Stover said sharply. “You go on home, you hear me? Go on, git!”

“Mrs. Hamlin’s going to be awful mad,” Jamie said sadly, resignedly.

“You tell Edna I said for you to go home. And you stay inside, too, Jamie. You stay out of sight, hear? We’ve got an important visitor here in Northview today, and it’d never do to have him run into you.”

Jamie nodded his head in acceptance of this. He wasn’t so dumb that he didn’t know what the unvoiced part of the sentence was: run into you, the half-wit, the crazy person, the nut. He’d heard it often enough. He knew he was crazy. He knew that he was an embarrassment. He knew that he had to stay inside, away from visitors, lest he embarrass Mrs. Hamlin and all his friends.

Crazy Jamie.

Slowly he turned and shuffled away, back the way he had come.

The sun beat down on the back of his head now, and sweat gathered in the wrinkled hollows beneath his eyes.

Crazy Jamie.

At the corner, bathed in the shadow cast by the big oak at the edge of the schoolyard, he turned and looked back.

A group of men had come out of the Outriders’ station and were now walking slowly in the direction of Mr. Hardy’s store, talking as they went. There was Mr. Jameson, Mr. Galli, Mr. Stover, Mr. Ashley, and, in the middle of them, talking animatedly and waving his arms, the visitor, the stranger—a big, florid-faced man with a shock of unruly blond hair that shone like beaten gold in the sunlight.

Watching him, the visitor—now clapping a hand on Mr. Galli’s shoulder, Mr. Galli shrinking away—Jamie felt a chill, that unreasoning and unreasoned fear of strangers, of everything from outside Northview’s narrow boundaries that had affected him ever since he could remember, and suddenly his delight in the wonderful wagon was tarnished, diminished, because he realized that it, too, must come from outside.

He headed for home, walking a little faster now, as if chivied along by some old cold wind that didn’t quite reach the sunlit world.

That night was the Fourthday feast—“Independence Day,” some of the old folks still called it—and for Jamie, who was helping in the kitchen as usual, the early part of the evening was a blur of work as they sweated to prepare the meal: roast turkey, ham, wild pigeon, trout, baked raccoon, sweet potatoes, corn, pearl onions, berry soup, homemade bread, blackberries, plums, and a dozen other things.

That was all as usual; he expected and accepted that. What was not usual—and what he did not expect—was that he would not be allowed to eat with the rest when the feast was served. Instead, Tessie set a plate out for him in the kitchen, saying, not unkindly, “Now, Jamie, mind you stay here. They’ve got a guest out there this year, that loud-mouthed Mr. Brodey, and Mrs. Hamlin, she says you got to eat in the kitchen and keep out of sight. Now don’t you mind, honey. I’ll fix you up a plate real nice, just the same stuff you’d get out there.”

And then, after a few moments of somewhat embarrassed bustling, she was gone.

Jamie sat alone in the empty kitchen.

His plate was filled to overflowing with food, and he’d even been given a glass of dandelion wine, a rare treat, but somehow he wasn’t hungry anymore.

He sat listening to the wind tug at the old house, creaking the rafters, making the wood groan. When the wind died, he could hear them talking out there in the big dining room, the voices just too faint for him to make out the words.

An unfamiliar anger began to rise in him. “Crazy Jamie,” he said aloud, his voice sounding flat and dull to his own ears. It wasn’t fair. He glanced out the window, to where the sun had almost set in a welter of sullen purple clouds. Suddenly he slashed out at the glass of wine, sending it spinning to the floor. It wasn’t fair! He was an adult, wasn’t he? Why did he have to sit back here by himself like a naughty child? Even if—In spite of—He was—

Somehow he found himself on his feet. He
deserved
to eat with the others, didn’t he? He was as good as anybody else, wasn’t he? In fact—In fact—

The corridor. He seemed to float along it in spite of his stumbling, hesitant feet. The voices got louder, and just at the point where they resolved into words, he stopped, standing unnoticed in the shadows behind the dining room archway, hanging onto the doorjamb, torn between rage and fear and a curious, empty yearning.

“Sooner or later you’ll find that you have to incorporate with the Confederacy,” Mr. Brodey, the stranger, was saying. The other faces around the big dining room table were cool and reserved. “The kind of inter-village barter economy you’ve got up here just can’t hold up forever, you know, even though it’s really a kind of communal socialism—”

“Are you sayin’ we’re
communists
up heah?” Mr. Samuels said, outraged, but before Brodey could reply (if he intended to), Jamie strode to the table, pulled out an empty chair—his own habitual seat—and sat down. All faces turned to him, startled, and conversation stopped.

Jamie stared back at them. To walk to the table had taken the last of his will; things were closing down on him again, his vision was swimming, and he began to lose touch with his body, as if his mind were floating slowly up and away from it, like a balloon held by the thinnest sort of tether. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he opened his mouth, panting like a dog. Through a sliding, shifting confusion, he heard Mrs. Hamlin start to say, “Jamie! I thought I told you—” at the same time that Mr. Ashley was saying to Mr. Brodey, “Don’t let him bother you none. He’s just the local half-wit. We’ll send him back to the kitchen,” and Brodey was smiling in tolerant, condescending amusement, and something about Brodey’s thin, contemptuous smile, something about the circle of staring faces,
something
wrenched words up out of Jamie, sending them suddenly flying out of his mouth. He hurled the familiar words out at the pale staring faces as he had so many times before, rattling their teeth with them, shaking them to their bones. He didn’t know what the words meant anymore, but they were the old strong words, the right words, and he heard his voice fill with iron as he spoke them. He spoke the words until there were no more words to speak, and then he stopped.

A deathly hush had fallen over the room. Mr. Brodey was staring at him, and Jamie saw his face run through a quick gamut of expressions: from irritation to startled speculation to dawning astonishment. Brodey’s jaw went slack, and he gasped—a little startled grunt, as if he had been punched in the stomach—and the color went swiftly out of his face. “My God!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

For Jamie, it was as if the world were draining away again, everything pulling back until he could just barely touch reality with his fingertips, and the room shimmered and buzzed as he struggled to hold on to even that much control. All the faces had gone blank, wiped clean of individuality, and he could no longer tell which of the featureless pink ovoids was the sweating, earnest, astounded face of Mr. Brodey. He got clumsily to his feet, driving his leaden body by an act of conscious will, as though it were some ill-made clockwork golem. He flailed his arms for balance, knocked his chair over with a clatter, and stood swaying before them, smelling the sour reek of his own sweat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hamlin. I didn’t
mean
to—”

The silence went on a moment longer, and then, above the mounting waves of buzzing nausea and unreality, he heard Mrs. Hamlin say, “That’s all right, child. We know you didn’t mean any harm. Go on upstairs now, Jamie. Go on.” Her voice sounded dry and flat and tired.

Blindly, Jamie spun and stumbled for the stairs, all the inchoate demons of memory snapping at his heels like years.

Downstairs, Mr. Brodey was still saying, “Oh, my God!” He hardly noticed that the dinner party was being dissolved around him or that Mrs. Hamlin was hustling him out onto the porch “for a word in private.” When she finally had him alone out there, the cool evening breeze slapping at his face through the wire mesh of the enclosed porch, he shook himself out of his daze and turned slowly to face her where she stood hunched and patient in the dappled shadows. “It’s
him,”
he said, still more awe than accusation in his voice. “Son of a
bitch.
It really is him, isn’t it?”

“Who, Mr. Brodey?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Brodey said harshly. “I’ve seen the old pictures. The half-wit, he really was—”

“Is.”

“—the President of the United States.” Brodey stared at her. “He may be crazy, but not because he thinks he’s the President—he is the President. James W. McNaughton. He is McNaughton, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“My God! Think of it. The very last President.”

“The
incumbent
President,” Mrs. Hamlin said softly.

They stared at each other through the soft evening shadows.

“And it’s not a surprise to you, either, is it?” Anger was beginning to replace disbelief in Brodey’s voice. “You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? All of you have known. You all knew from the start that he was President McNaughton?”

“Yes.”

“My God!” Brodey said, giving an entirely new reading to the phrase, disgust and edgy anger instead of awe. He opened his mouth, closed it, and began turning red.

“He came here almost twenty years ago, Mr. Brodey,” Mrs. Hamlin said, speaking calmly, reminiscently. “Perhaps two months after the War. The Outriders found him collapsed in a field out by the edge of town. He was nearly dead. Don’t ask me how he got there. Maybe there was some sort of hidden bunker way back up there in the hills, maybe his plane crashed nearby, maybe he walked all the way up here from what’s left of Washington—I don’t know. Jamie himself doesn’t know. His memory was almost gone; shock, I guess, and exposure. All he remembered, basically, was that he was the President, and even that was dim and misty, like something you might remember out of a bad dream, the kind that fades away and comes back sometimes, late at night. And life’s been like a half-dream for him ever since, poor soul. He never did get quite right in the head again.”

“And you gave him shelter?” Brodey said, his voice becoming shrill with indignation. “You took him in? That butcher?”

“Watch your mouth, son. You’re speaking about the President.”

“Goddamn it, woman. Don’t you know—he
caused the War?”

After a smothering moment of silence, Mrs. Hamlin said mildly, “That’s your opinion, Mr. Brodey, not mine.”

“How can you deny it? The ‘One Life’ Ultimatum? The ‘preventative strikes’ on Mexico and Panama? It was within hours of the raid on Monterrey that the bombs started falling.”

“He didn’t have any other
choice!
The Indonesians had pushed him—”

“That’s crap, and you know it!” Brodey was shouting now. “They taught us all about it down in Mohawk; they made
damn
sure we knew the name of the man who destroyed the world, you can bet on that! Christ, everybody knew
then
that he was unfit for office, just a bombastic backwoods senator on a hate crusade, a cracker-barrel warmonger. Everybody said that he’d cause the War if he got into the White House—and he did! By God, he did! That pathetic half-wit in there.
He
did it!”

Mrs. Hamlin sighed and folded her arms across her middle, hugging herself as if in pain. She seemed to grow smaller and older, more withered and gnarled. “I don’t know, son,” she said wearily, after a heavy pause. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe
he
was wrong. I don’t know. All that seemed so important then. Now I can hardly remember what the issues were, what it was all
about.
It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, somehow.”

“How can you say that?” Brodey wiped at his face—he was sweating profusely and looking very earnest now, bewilderment leaching away some of the anger. “How can you let that . . . that man . . . him—how can you let
him
live here, under your roof? How can you stand to let him live at all, let alone cook for him, do his washing. My God!”

“His memory was gone, Mr. Brodey. His
mind
was gone. Can you understand that? Old Doc Norton, rest his soul, spent months just trying to get Jamie to the point where he could walk around by himself without anybody to watch him too close. He had to be taught how to feed himself, how to dress himself, how to go to the bathroom—like a child. At first there was some even right here in Northview that felt the way you do, Mr. Brodey, and there’s still some as can’t be comfortable around Jamie, but one by one they came to understand, and they made their peace with him. Whatever he was or wasn’t, he’s just like a little child now—a sick, old, frightened child who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him, most of the time. Mr. Brodey, you can’t hate a little child for something he can’t even remember he’s done.”