The Best of Connie Willis (55 page)

It had gotten two nice shots of my forearm as I set it down on the kitchen counter of the Winnebago and some beautifully composed Still Lifes of Melmac with Spoons. Vehicles and people. The rest of the pictures were dead losses: my back, the open bathroom door, Jake’s back, and Mrs. Ambler’s public face.

Except the last one. She had been standing right in front of the eisenstadt, looking almost directly into the lens. “When I think of that
poor thing, all alone,” she had said, and by the time she turned around she had her public face back on, but for a minute there, looking at what she thought was a briefcase and remembering, there she was, the person I had tried all morning to get a picture of.

I took it into the living room and sat down and looked at it awhile.

“So you knew this Katherine Powell in Colorado,” Ramirez said, breaking in without preamble, and the highwire slid silently forward and began to print out the lifeline. “I always suspected you of having some deep dark secret in your past. Is she the reason you moved to Phoenix?”

I was watching the highwire advance the paper. Katherine Powell. 4628 Dutchman Drive, Apache Junction. Forty miles away.

“Holy Mother, you were really cradle-robbing. According to my calculations, she was seventeen when you lived there.”

Sixteen.

“Are you the owner of the dog?” the vet had asked her, his face slackening into pity when he saw how young she was.

“No,” she said. “I’m the one who hit him.”

“My God,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she said, and her face was wide open. “I just got my license.”

Ramirez said, “Aren’t you even going to tell me what she has to do with this Winnebago thing?”

“I moved down here to get away from the snow,” I said, and cut out without saying good-bye.

The lifeline was still rolling silently forward. Hacker at Hewlett-Packard. Fired in ninety-nine, probably during the unionization. Divorced. Two kids. She had moved to Arizona five years after I did. Management programmer for Toshiba. Arizona driver’s license.

I went back to the developer and looked at the picture of Mrs. Ambler. I had said dogs never came through. That wasn’t true. Taco wasn’t in the blurry Polaroids Mrs. Ambler had been so anxious to show me, in the stories she had been so anxious to tell. But she was in this
picture, reflected in the pain and love and loss on Mrs. Ambler’s face. I could see her plain as day, perched on the arm of the driver’s seat, barking impatiently when the light turned green.

I put a new cartridge in the eisenstadt and went out to see Katie.

I had to take Van Buren—it was almost four o’clock, and the rush hour would have started on the divideds—but the jackal was gone anyway. The Society is efficient. Like Hitler and his Nazis.

“How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked.

The question could have been based on the assumption that anyone who would fill his living room with photographs of dogs must have had one of his own, but it wasn’t. He had known about Aberfan, which meant he’d had access to my lifeline, which meant all kinds of things. My lifeline was privacy-coded, so I had to be notified before anybody could get access, except, it appeared, the Society.

A reporter I knew at the paper, Dolores Chiwere, had tried to do a story a while back claiming that the Society had an illegal link to the lifeline banks, but she hadn’t been able to come up with enough evidence to convince her editor. I wondered if this counted.

The lifeline would have told them about Aberfan but not about how he died. Killing a dog wasn’t a crime in those days, and I hadn’t pressed charges against Katie for reckless driving or even called the police.

“I think you should,” the vet’s assistant had said. “There are less than a hundred dogs left. People can’t just go around killing them.”

“My God, man, it was snowing and slick,” the vet had said angrily, “and she’s just a kid.”

“She’s old enough to have a license,” I said, looking at Katie. She was fumbling in her purse for her driver’s license. “She’s old enough to have been on the roads.”

Katie found her license and gave it to me. It was so new it was still shiny. Katherine Powell. She had turned sixteen two weeks ago.

“This won’t bring him back,” the vet had said, and taken the license out of my hand and given it back to her. “You go on home now.”

“I need her name for the records,” the vet’s assistant had said.

She had stepped forward. “Katie Powell,” she had said.

“We’ll do the paperwork later,” the vet had said firmly.

They never did do the paperwork, though. The next week the third wave hit, and I suppose there hadn’t seemed any point.

I slowed down at the zoo entrance and looked up into the parking lot. The Amblers were doing a booming business. There were at least five cars and twice as many kids clustered around the Winnebago.

“Where the hell are you?” Ramirez said. “And where the hell are your pictures? I talked the
Republic
into a trade, but they insisted on scoop rights. I need your stills now!”

“I’ll send them in as soon as I get home,” I said. “I’m on a story.”

“The hell you are! You’re on your way out to see your old girlfriend. Well, not on the paper’s credits, you’re not.”

“Did you get the stuff on the Winnebago Indians?” I asked her.

“Yes. They were in Wisconsin, but they’re not anymore. In the mid-seventies there were sixteen hundred of them on the reservation and about forty-five hundred altogether, but by 1990, the number was down to five hundred, and now they don’t think there are any left, and nobody knows what happened to them.”

I’ll tell you what happened to them, I thought. Almost all of them were killed in the first wave, and people blamed the government and the Japanese and the ozone layer, and after the second wave hit, the Society passed all kinds of laws to protect the survivors, but it was too late, they were already below the minimum survival population limit, and then the third wave polished off the rest of them, and the last of the Winnebagos sat in a cage somewhere, and if I had been there I would probably have taken his picture.

“I called the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Ramirez said, “and they’re supposed to call me back, and you don’t give a damn about the Winnebagos. You just wanted to get me off the subject. What’s this story you’re on?”

I looked around the dashboard for an exclusion button.

“What the hell is going on, David? First you ditch two big stories, now you can’t even get your pictures in. Jesus, if something’s wrong, you can tell me. I want to help. It has something to do with Colorado, doesn’t it?”

I found the button and cut her off.

Van Buren got crowded as the afternoon rush spilled over off the divideds. Out past the curve, where Van Buren turns into Apache Boulevard, they were putting in new lanes. The cement forms were already up on the eastbound side, and they were building the wooden forms up in two of the six lanes on my side.

The Amblers must have just beaten the workmen, though at the rate the men were working right now, leaning on their shovels in the hot afternoon sun and smoking stew, it had probably taken them six weeks to do this stretch.

Mesa was still open multiway, but as soon as I was through downtown, the construction started again, and this stretch was nearly done—forms up on both sides and most of the cement poured.

The Amblers couldn’t have come in from Globe on this road. The lanes were barely wide enough for the Hitori, and the tanker lanes were gated. Superstition is full-divided, and the old highway down from Roosevelt is, too, which meant they hadn’t come in from Globe at all. I wondered how they had come in—probably in some tanker lane on a multiway.

“Oh, my, the things we’ve seen,” Mrs. Ambler had said. I wondered how much they’d been able to see skittering across the dark desert like a couple of kangaroo mice, trying to beat the cameras.

The road workers didn’t have the new exit signs up yet, and I missed the exit for Apache Junction and had to go halfway to Superior, trapped
in my narrow, cement-sided lane, till I hit a change-lanes and could get turned around.

Katie’s address was in Superstition Estates, a development pushed up as close to the base of Superstition Mountain as it could get. I thought about what I would say to Katie when I got there. I had said maybe ten sentences altogether to her, most of them shouted directions, in the two hours we had been together. In the jeep on the way to the vet’s I had talked to Aberfan, and after we got there, sitting in the waiting room, we hadn’t talked at all.

It occurred to me that I might not recognize her. I didn’t really remember what she looked like—only the sunburned nose and that terrible openness, and now, fifteen years later, it seemed unlikely that she would have either of them. The Arizona sun would have taken care of the first, and she had gotten married and divorced, been fired, had who knows what else happened to her in fifteen years to close her face. In which case, there had been no point in my driving all the way out here.

But Mrs. Ambler had had an almost impenetrable public face, and you could still catch her off guard. If you got her talking about the dogs. If she didn’t know she was being photographed.

Katie’s house was an old-style passive solar, with flat black panels on the roof. It looked presentable, but not compulsively neat. There wasn’t any grass—tankers won’t waste their credits coming this far out, and Apache Junction isn’t big enough to match the bribes and incentives of Phoenix or Tempe—but the front yard was laid out with alternating patches of black lava chips and prickly pear. The side yard had a parched-looking palo verde tree, and there was a cat tied to it. A little girl was playing under it with toy cars.

I took the eisenstadt out of the back and went up to the front door and rang the bell. At the last moment, when it was too late to change my mind, walk away, because she was already opening the screen door, it occurred to me that she might not recognize me, that I might have to tell her who I was.

Her nose wasn’t sunburned, and she had put on the weight a
sixteen-year-old puts on to get to be thirty, but otherwise she looked the same as she had that day in front of my house. And her face hadn’t completely closed. I could tell, looking at her, that she recognized me and that she had known I was coming. She must have put a notify on her lifeline to have them warn her if I asked her whereabouts. I thought about what that meant.

She opened the screen door a little, the way I had to the Humane Society. “What do you want?” she said.

I had never seen her angry, not even when I turned on her at the vet’s. “I wanted to see you,” I said.

I had thought I might tell her I had run across her name while I was working on a story and wondered if it was the same person or that I was doing a piece on the last of the passive solars. “I saw a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said.

“And you thought I killed it?” she said. She tried to shut the screen door.

I put out my hand without thinking, to stop her. “No,” I said.

I took my hand off the door. “No, of course I don’t think that. Can I come in? I just want to talk to you.”

The little girl had come over, clutching her toy cars to her pink T-shirt, and was standing off to the side, watching curiously.

“Come on inside, Jana,” Katie said, and opened the screen door a fraction wider. The little girl scooted through. “Go on in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll fix you some Kool-Aid.” She looked up at me. “I used to have nightmares about your coming. I’d dream that I’d go to the door and there you’d be.”

“It’s really hot out here,” I said and knew I sounded like Hunter. “Can I come in?”

She opened the screen door all the way. “I’ve got to make my daughter something to drink,” she said, and led the way into the kitchen, the little girl dancing in front of her.

“What kind of Kool-Aid do you want?” Katie asked her, and she shouted, “Red!”

The kitchen counter faced the stove, refrigerator, and water cooler across a narrow aisle that opened out into an alcove with a table and chairs. I put the eisenstadt down on the table and then sat down myself so she wouldn’t suggest moving into another room.

Katie reached a plastic pitcher down from one of the shelves and stuck it under the water tank to fill it. Jana dumped her cars on the counter, clambered up beside them, and began opening the cupboard doors.

“How old’s your little girl?” I asked.

Katie got a wooden spoon out of the drawer next to the stove and brought it and the pitcher over to the table. “She’s four,” she said. “Did you find the Kool-Aid?” she asked the little girl.

“Yes,” the little girl said, but it wasn’t Kool-Aid. It was a pinkish cube she peeled a plastic wrapping off of. It fizzed and turned a thinnish red when she dropped it in the pitcher. Kool-Aid must have become extinct, too, along with Winnebagos and passive solar. Or else changed beyond recognition. Like the Humane Society.

Katie poured the red stuff into a glass with a cartoon whale on it.

“Is she your only one?” I asked.

“No, I have a little boy,” she said, but warily, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell me, even though if I’d requested the lifeline I already had access to all this information. Jana asked if she could have a cookie and then took it and her Kool-Aid back down the hall and outside. I could hear the screen door slam.

Katie put the pitcher in the refrigerator and leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded across her chest. “What do you want?”

She was just out of range of the eisenstadt, her face in the shadow of the narrow aisle.

“There was a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said. I kept my voice low so she would lean forward into the light to try and hear me. “It’d been hit by a car, and it was lying funny, at an angle. It looked like a dog. I wanted to talk to somebody who remembered Aberfan, somebody who knew him.”

“I didn’t know him,” she said. “I only killed him, remember? That’s why you did this, isn’t it, because I killed Aberfan?”

She didn’t look at the eisenstadt, hadn’t even glanced at it when I set it on the table, but I wondered suddenly if she knew what I was up to. She was still carefully out of range.