The Very Best of F & SF v1 (42 page)

He followed them
back, counting as he went. In the general store one man lay with his arms
wrapped lovingly around the cracked candy jar he had dragged down with him.

He ended up
where he had started, in the middle of the deserted main street. He had shot
and killed thirty-nine men, fourteen women, and five children. He had shot and
killed everyone in Tull.

A sickish-sweet
odor came to him on the first of the dry, stirring wind. He followed it, then
looked up and nodded. The decaying body of Nort was spread-eagled atop the
plank roof of Sheb’s, crucified with wooden pegs. Mouth and eyes were open. A
large and purple cloven hoof had been pressed into the skin of his grimy
forehead.

He walked out of
town. His mule was standing in a clump of weed about forty yards out along the
remnant of the coach road. The gunslinger led it back to Kennerly’s stable.
Outside, the wind was playing a louder tune. He put the mule up and went back
to Sheb’s. He found a ladder in the back shed, went up to the roof, and cut
Nort down. The body was lighter than a bag of sticks. He tumbled it down to
join the common people. Then he went back inside, ate hamburgers and drank
three beers while the light failed and the sand began to fly. That night he
slept in the bed where he and Allie had lain. He had no dreams. The next
morning the wind was gone and the sun was its usual bright and forgetful self.
The bodies had gone south with the wind. At midmorning, after he had bound all
his cuts, he moved on as well.

XVIII

He thought Brown
had fallen asleep. The fire was down to a spark and the bird, Zoltan, had put
its head under its wing.

Just as he was
about to get up and spread a pallet in the corner, Brown said, “There. You’ve
told it. Do you feel better?”

The gunslinger
started. “Why would I feel bad?”

“You’re human,
you said. No demon. Or did you lie?”

“I didn’t lie.” He
felt the grudging admittance in him: he liked Brown. Honestly did. And he hadn’t
lied to the dweller in any way. “Who are you, Brown? Really, I mean.”

“Just me,” he
said, unperturbed. “Why do you have to think you’re such a mystery?”

The gunslinger
lit a smoke without replying.

“I think you’re
very close to your man in black,” Brown said. “Is he desperate?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you?”

“Not yet,” the
gunslinger said. He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance. “I do what I have
to do.”

“That’s good
then,” Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.

XIX

In the morning
Brown fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight he was an amazing figure
with his scrawny, burnt chest, pencil-like collarbones and ringleted shock of
red hair. The bird perched on his shoulder.

“The mule?” The
gunslinger asked.

“I’ll eat it,” Brown
said.

“Okay.”

Brown offered
his hand and the gunslinger shook it. The dweller nodded to the south. “Walk
easy.”

“You know it.”

They nodded at
each other and then the gunslinger walked away, his body festooned with guns and
water. He looked back once. Brown was rooting furiously at his little cornbed.
The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.

XX

The fire was
down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked restlessly. The
gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again. He dreamed a thirsty
dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. The thoughts
of guilt had faded. The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking
more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot, instead. Cort had known
black from white.

He stirred again
and awoke. He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape superimposed over the
other, more geometrical one. He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the
knowledge jealously.

That, of course,
made him think of Cort again. He didn’t know where Cort was. The world had
moved on.

The gunslinger
shouldered his tote sack and moved on with it.

(Thus ends what
is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands
at the root of Time. )

Return to Table of
Contents

Karen Joy Fowler’s novels include
Wit’s End, The Jane Austen Book Club
, and
Sarah
Canary.
Her short fiction tends to sneak up
on readers from unexpected directions, as you’ll soon see.

In
the summer
of 1954, Anna and Richard Becker
disappeared from Yosemite National Park along with Paul Becker, their
three-year-old son. Their campsite was intact; two paper plates with half-eaten
frankfurters remained on the picnic table, and a third frankfurter was in the
trash. The rangers took several black-and-white photographs of the meal, which,
when blown up to eight by ten, as part of the investigation, showed clearly the
words
love bites,
carved into the wooden picnic table many years ago. There appeared
to be some fresh scratches as well; the expert witness at the trial attributed
them, with no great assurance, to raccoon.

The Beckers’ car
was still backed into the campsite, a green De Soto with a spare key under the
right bumper and half a tank of gas. Inside the tent, two sleeping bags had
been zipped together marital style and laid on a large tarp. A smaller flannel
bag was spread over an inflated pool raft. Toiletries included three
toothbrushes; Ipana toothpaste, squeezed in the middle; Ivory soap; three
washcloths; and one towel. The newspapers discreetly made no mention of Anna’s
diaphragm, which remained powdered with talc, inside its pink shell, or of the
fact that Paul apparently still took a bottle to bed with him.

Their nearest
neighbor had seen nothing. He had been in his hammock, he said, listening to
the game. Of course, the reception in Yosemite was lousy. At home he had a
shortwave set; he said he had once pulled in Dover, clear as a bell. “You had
to really concentrate to hear the game,” he told the rangers. “You could’ve
dropped the bomb. I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Anna Becker’s
mother, Edna, received a postcard postmarked a day earlier. “Seen the firefall,”
it said simply. “Home Wednesday. Love.” Edna identified the bottle. “Oh yes,
that’s Paul’s bokkie,” she told the police. She dissolved into tears. “He never
goes anywhere without it,” she said.

In the spring of
1960, Mark Cooper and Manuel Rodriguez went on a fishing expedition in
Yosemite. They set up a base camp in Tuolumne Meadows and went off to pursue
steelhead. They were gone from camp approximately six hours, leaving their food
and a six-pack of beer zipped inside their backpacks zipped inside their tent.
When they returned, both beer and food were gone. Canine footprints circled the
tent, but a small and mysterious handprint remained on the tent flap. “Raccoon,”
said the rangers who hadn’t seen it. The tent and packs were undamaged.
Whatever had taken the food had worked the zippers. “Has to be raccoon.”

The last time
Manuel had gone backpacking, he’d suspended his pack from a tree to protect it.
A deer had stopped to investigate, and when Manuel shouted to warn it off the
deer hooked the pack over its antlers in a panic, tearing the pack loose from
the branch and carrying it away. Pack and antlers were so entangled, Manuel
imagined the deer must have worn his provisions and clean shirts until
antler-shedding season. He reported that incident to the rangers, too, but what
could anyone do? He was reminded of it, guiltily, every time he read
Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose
to his four-year-old son.

Manuel and Mark
arrived home three days early. Manuel’s wife said she’d been expecting him.

She emptied his
pack. “Where’s the can opener?” she asked.

“It’s there
somewhere,” said Manuel.

“It’s not,” she
said.

“Check the shirt
pocket.”

“It’s not here.”
Manuel’s wife held the pack upside down and shook it. Dead leaves fell out. “How
were you going to drink the beer?” she asked.

In August of
1962, Caroline Crosby, a teenager from Palo Alto, accompanied her family on a
forced march from Tuolumne Meadows to Vogelsang. She carried fourteen pounds in
a pack with an aluminum frame—and her father said it was the lightest pack on
the market, and she should be able to carry one-third her weight, so fourteen
pounds was nothing, but her pack stabbed her continuously in one coin-sized
spot just below her right shoulder, and it still hurt the next morning. Her
boots left a blister on her right heel, and her pack straps had rubbed. Her
father had bought her a mummy bag with no zipper so as to minimize its weight;
it was stiflingly hot, and she sweated all night. She missed an overnight at
Ann Watson’s house, where Ann showed them her sister’s Mark Eden bust
developer, and her sister retaliated by freezing all their bras behind the
twin-pops. She missed
The Beverly
Hillbillies.

Caroline’s
father had quit smoking just for the duration of the trip, so as to spare
himself the weight of cigarettes, and made continual comments about Nature,
which were laudatory in content and increasingly abusive in tone. Caroline’s
mother kept telling her to smile.

In the morning
her father mixed half a cup of stream water into a packet of powdered eggs and
cooked them over a Coleman stove. “Damn fine breakfast,” he told Caroline intimidatingly
as she stared in horror at her plate. “Out here in God’s own country. What else
could you ask for?” He turned to Caroline’s mother, who was still trying to get
a pot of water to come to a boil. “Where’s the goddamn coffee?” he asked. He
went to the stream to brush his teeth with a toothbrush he had sawed the handle
from in order to save the weight. Her mother told her to please make a little
effort to be cheerful and not spoil the trip for everyone.

One week later
she was in Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. The diagnosis was septicemic
plague.

Which is finally
where I come into the story. My name is Keith Harmon,B.A. in history with a
special emphasis on epidemics. I probably know as much as anyone about the
plague of Athens. Typhus. Tarantism. Tsutsugamushi fever. It’s an odder
historical specialty than it ought to be. More battles have been decided by
disease than by generals—and if you don’t believe me, take a closer look at the
Crusades or the fall of the Roman Empire or Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

My M.A. is in
public administration. Vietnam veteran, too, but in 1962 I worked for the state
of California as part of the plague-monitoring team. When Letterman’s reported
a plague victim, Sacramento sent me down to talk to her.

Caroline had
been moved to a private room. “You’re going to be fine,” I told her. Of course,
she was. We still lose people to the pneumonic plague, but the slower form is
easily cured. The only tricky part is making the diagnosis.

“I don’t feel
well. I don’t like the food,” she said. She pointed out Letterman’s Tuesday
menu. “Hawaiian Delight. You know what that is? Green Jell-O with a canned
pineapple ring on top. What’s delightful about that?” She was feverish and
lethargic. Her hair lay limply about her head, and she kept tangling it in her
fingers as she talked. “I’m missing a lot of school.” Impossible to tell if
this last was a complaint or a boast. She raised her bed to a sitting position
and spent most of the rest of the interview looking out the window, making it
clear that a view of the Letterman parking lot was more arresting than a
conversation with an old man like me. She seemed younger than fifteen. Of
course, everyone in a hospital bed feels young. Helpless. “Will you ask them to
let me wash and set my hair?”

I pulled a chair
over to the bed. “I need to know if you’ve been anywhere unusual recently. We
know about Yosemite. Anywhere else. Hiking out around the airport, for instance.”
The plague is endemic in the San Bruno Mountains by the San Francisco Airport.
That particular species of flea doesn’t bite humans, though. Or so we’d always
thought. “It’s kind of a romantic spot for some teenagers, isn’t it?”

I’ve seen some
withering adolescent stares in my time, but this one was practiced. I still
remember it. I may be sick, it said, but at least I’m not an idiot. “Out by the
airport?” she said. “Oh, right. Real romantic. The radio playing and those 727s
overhead. Give me a break.”

“Let’s talk
about Yosemite, then.”

She softened a
little. “In Palo Alto we go to the water temple,” she informed me. “And, no, I
haven’t been there, either. My parents
made
me go to Yosemite. And now I’ve got bubonic plague.” Her tone was
one of satisfaction. “I think it was the powdered eggs. They
made
me eat them. I’ve been
sick ever since.”

“Did you see any
unusual wildlife there? Did you play with any squirrels?”

“Oh, right,” she
said. “I always play with squirrels. Birds sit on my fingers.” She resumed the
stare. “My parents didn’t tell you what I saw?”

“No,” I said.

“Figures.” Caroline
combed her fingers through her hair. “If I had a brush, I could at least rat
it. Will you ask the doctors to bring me a brush?”

“What did you
see, Caroline?”

“Nothing.
According to my parents. No big deal.” She looked out at the parking lot. “I
saw a boy.”

She wouldn’t
look at me, but she finished her story. I heard about the mummy bag and the
overnight party she missed. I heard about the eggs. Apparently, the altercation
over breakfast had escalated, culminating in Caroline’s refusal to accompany her
parents on a brisk hike to Ireland Lake. She stayed behind, lying on top of her
sleeping bag and reading the part of
Green
Mansions
where Abel eats a fine meal of anteater
flesh. “After the breakfast I had, my mouth was watering,” she told me.
Something made her look up suddenly from her book. She said it wasn’t a sound.
She said it was a silence.

A naked boy
dipped his hands into the stream and licked the water from his fingers. His
fingernails curled toward his palms like claws. “Hey,” Caroline told me she
told him. She could see his penis and everything. The boy gave her a quick look
and then backed away into the trees. She went back to her book.

She described
him to her family when they returned. “Real dirty,” she said. “Real hairy.”

“You have a very
superior attitude,” her mother noted. “It’s going to get you in trouble someday.”

“Fine,” said
Caroline, feeling superior. “Don’t believe me.” She made a vow never to tell
her parents anything again. “And I never will,” she told me. “Not if l have to
eat powdered eggs until I die.”

At
this time there started a plague. It appeared not in one part of the world
only, not in one race of men only, and not in any particular season; but it
spread over the entire earth, and afflicted all without mercy of both sexes and
of every age. It began in Egypt, at Pelusium; thence it spread to Alexandria
and to the rest of Egypt; then went to Palestine, and from there over the whole
world...

In the
second year, in the spring, it reached Byzantium and began in the following manner:
To many there appeared phantoms in human form. Those who were so encountered,
were struck by a blow from the phantom, and so contracted the disease. Others
locked themselves into their houses. But then the phantoms appeared to them in
dreams, or they heard voices that told them that they had been selected for
death.

This comes from
Procopius’s account of the first pandemic, A.D. 541,
De Bello Persico,
chapter
XXII. It’s the only explanation I can give you for why Caroline’s
story
made me so uneasy, why I chose not to mention it to anyone. I thought she’d had
a fever dream, but thinking this didn’t settle me any. I talked to her parents
briefly and then went back to Sacramento to write my report.

We have no way
of calculating the deaths in the first pandemic. Gibbon says that during three
months, five to ten thousand people died daily in Constantinople, and many
Eastern cities were completely abandoned.

The second
pandemic began in 1346. It was the darkest time the planet has known. A third
of the world died. The Jews were blamed, and, throughout Europe, pogroms
occurred wherever sufficient health remained for the activity. When murdering
Jews provided no alleviation, a committee of doctors at the University of Paris
concluded the plague was the result of an unfortunate conjunction of Saturn,
Jupiter, and Mars.

The third
pandemic occurred in Europe during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The
fourth began in China in 1855. It reached Hong Kong in 1894, where Alexandre
Yersin of the Institut Pasteur at last identified the responsible bacilli. By
1898 the disease had killed six million people in India. Dr. Paul-Louis Simond,
also working for the Institut Pasteur, but stationed in Bombay, finally
identified fleas as the primary carriers. “On June 2, 1898, I was overwhelmed,”
he wrote. “I had just unveiled a secret which had tormented man for so long.”