Fictions

by Nancy Kress

“I got to go,” he said abruptly.

  “O.K.,” Tom said. “But it was nice talking to you. Come back if you feel like it.”

  Jorry started home without answering. Pa might be back from town, might be looking for him. It was bad to be in the house when Pa came in, but worse not to be.

  Moving slowly so his untied shoelaces wouldn’t tangle in the hay, the boy trudged through the green stalks, holding the plaster cast close to his body. He took a long oblique route that kept him downwind of the mice.

  But he went back, again and again, first hanging around the edges of the mowed stubble, observing as Tom worked and puttered and whistled off-key, then later moving in closer. Each time he came he brought something: a handful of chives from the plant that came up each year behind the barn, some wild strawberries from the hill by the creek, a sharpened pencil in case Tom lost his. Tom accepted these offerings gravely, putting the chives in his sandwich and the pencil in his shirt pocket, so Jorry felt it was all right for him to stay. He helped, too, whenever he could. He fed the mice, careful to measure each cupful with painstaking exactness, adding and removing single pellets until he was sure each cage received the same amount. After a while Jorry got used to Tom’s talking to him as if they were friends; sometimes he pretended to himself that they were. Jorry seldom said anything, but Tom talked all the time: talk poured out of him as relentlessly as sunshine, as unceasing as the crackle of the line. Jorry, unused to such talk, listened to all of it with cloistered intensity, his head bent forward, watching Tom through the sideways fall of his untrimmed bangs.

  “The thing is, Jorry, that electrostatic fields set up currents between different parts of your body. There you are, Jorry Whitfield, a real live wire.”

  “You, too,” Jorry said, astonishing himself. Tom leaped into the air, thrusting out his arms, legs, and tongue in a frenzied parody of every cartoon animal that ever stuck its finger in an electric socket on Saturday morning tv. The mice scuttled for cover.

  “So the question is—what do all these currents do, coursing through the body beautiful?”

  “What?” Jorry asked breathlessly.

  Tom shrugged and dropped to the ground. “Dunno. Nobody knows.”

  Jorry stared at him a fraction of a second before again ducking his head. His hair fell forward over his face.

  “We can guess, though. We can guess that it’s probably affecting the brain, because brain organelles are most sensitive to voltage differences. And the brain is where perception takes place, where you experience things, so perception’s a likely candidate for residual effects. You notice yourself seeing the grass blue, Jorry, or pink?”

  Jorry frowned. The grass looked the same as usual to him, a dusty green fading to brown under the hot sun.

  “Ah, well,” Tom said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Goodyear Rubber. Did you know that Goodyear—the first Goodyear, I can’t think of his name—that he discovered how to vulcanize rubber by accident, while he was cooking some sulphur gunk on the stove? Fact. You just never know what you’ll get with science. The whole thing might just as easily have exploded in his face. But it didn’t.”

  Jorry hadn’t known. Sometimes it seemed to him that he didn’t know anything, hadn’t ever thought about anything except how to stay out of people’s way, until the coming of the line, and Tom. Now at night he lay awake in bed, listening to the shutter that had been banging in the wind for over a year now, and thought about their talks. Each remembered word became a smooth stone to turn over and over, running his thumb over the texture and curves of the surface, squinting at the hidden lines. At such times he always had a picture of Tom standing gigantic against a clear empty sky. In his picture, Tom was still talking.

  There was a daily period, however, when they both sat silent and observed the mice for an uninterrupted hour, while Tom made notes in a large black folder. First he removed most of the shredded newspaper, and even the mice behind the wire Faraday cages could be seen clearly. As the weeks slipped by, it seemed to Jorry that the mice were increasingly jumpy and nervous, nipping at each other or fidgeting along the mesh, then dropping into periods of sudden sleep. He wondered what was going on in their brain organelles (he knew, now, what the words meant). Sometimes he touched his own head with one questing finger. It just felt like his head.

  The weather turned rainy, a warm, off-again on-again drizzle. Weeds grew lush and green in the vegetable garden, choking the feathery carrots and the string beans straggling up their sagging poles. Jorry tried to fix the bean poles, but the wood was old and rotten, and he couldn’t find the key to the storeroom where there may or may not have been fresh lumber. The uncut hay in the back field gave off the pungent smell of decay. As his father spent more and more time in town, Jorry slacked off on his chores, unable to find the needed supplies or equipment. He took care, however, to keep the few animals fed; when the chicken feed ran out, he gave the hens popcorn and Rice Krispies. They seemed to like it just as well.

  The reduced chores gave him more time to hunt for things to take to Tom, necessary things, things that would earn him the right to visit the site under the line. He brought fresh eggs—Pa had stopped keeping egg tally—wild sumac for tea, blackberries, an Indian arrowhead, a four-leaf clover ironed between two sheets of waxed paper so it wouldn’t shrivel up. Tom made a face when he tasted the sumac tea, but he carefully put the four-leaf clover in his wallet, on top of his health insurance card.

  They observed the mice from under a leaky tarp rigged like a lean-to, and Tom shielded his notebook with an old plastic bag labeled “Marino’s work shirts.” Rain dripped off his beard into his coffee cup.

  “Ah, well, it’s still not as messy as reading chicken entrails,” Tom said as he wiped the rain off his thermos before pouring them more coffee. No one else had offered Jorry coffee. “Although sometimes Dame Science seems just as capricious as the rest of that Olympian crew about bestowing her mixed offerings and benedictions. Still, you have to be ready, in case she spreads her wings and gets generous.” Jorry looked bewildered and Tom laughed.

  “I mean that science gives both benefits, like tractors and medicine and this remarkable-unbreakable-new-improved-temperature-controlled thermos, and also problems, such as the power line. Starting off with a first step, you never really know what you’ll end up with. Surprise, folks! A cosmic poker game, new deals hourly, step right in and play!”

  “Like Charles Goodyear,” Jorry said. Tom stared at him, surprised, and Jorry added in a sudden rush, “I’m gonna be a scientist, too, when I grow up, and discover important things like rubber.” He reddened and ducked his head.

  “Where’d you learn Goodyear’s first name?” Tom asked. Jorry didn’t answer. One day when Pa had inexplicably ordered him to ride to town in the truck, and then just as inexplicably forgotten all about him when they got there, Jorry had slunk into the library and read what he could about the vulcanization of rubber, puzzling over the unfamiliar words until footsteps approached and he had fled before any librarian could demand payment in the form of his non-existent library card.

  Tom sipped his coffee. “I do hope you get to be a scientist, Jorry,” he said gently. “I really do. Tell me—you ever have a dog?”

  The boy shook his head and dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee.

  “Well, I did. A black Labrador retriever. Used to show her. I remember talking once to a farmer about a dog that had gone wild, up north this was, and was killing chickens. It might have been part coyote. Anyway, the farmer was determined to shoot it, and took to hanging around the farmhouse with his rifle all loaded; but the dog always slipped by him; time after time. It got to be an obsession with the guy. He took to neglecting his farm, ignoring his family. All sorts of financial and legal tangles developed, about mortgages and such, and then about bad checks and diseased stock—and the guy blamed it all on the dog killing those chickens. Just an excuse, of course—and a pretty shoddy one. Some men aren’t afraid of anything except th
eir mirrors.”

  He looked at Jorry with a sudden intensity, his eyes sharp and kind over the red plastic rim of the thermos cup, and Jorry wriggled his feet in embarrassment. Often he had the hazy impression that Tom was trying to tell him something, offer him something, in the same way he offered him the coffee. Why should a grown man be afraid of a mirror?

  Just now, however, Jorry had something that needed saying. Carefully he kept his eyes on the generous amount of artificial cream dissolving in swirls in his coffee.

  “Tom—there’s a meeting. Friday. Today. This afternoon.”

  “A meeting?”

  “Of people who live here.” Abruptly he looked up and offered the rest in a rush: “They’re all mad. Real mad, Tom. They’ve made up their minds to get this line tore down!”

  “And you thought I ought to know about it.” Tom’s brown eyes warmed with amused affection.

  “Yes!”

  “Well, Jorry, I’m not sure they’re not right. These figures we’ve been collecting. . .” He dumped out his rain-diluted coffee and poured himself some more from the thermos. “But we won’t really know anything until Monday, when the mice go into the lab for testing and mating and dissection.”

  Tom frowned. “The thing is, the behavior changes in the mice are negative, all right—jumpiness, decreased sexual interest, interrupted sleep patterns: all indicate stress. But they’re not dramatic changes, not something that makes you sit up and take notice. Not, anyway, if you’re on the State Power Commission. Without something more theatrical to offer, any appeal on this line will just get lost in the lobbying. The bureaucratic tendency to not shut the lion’s cage till the beastie’s loose. Now if the mice had done something really stagy, like grow three-inch fangs or invent espionage warfare . . . well. But I think all our hard work here may end up just another overlooked scientific study, a dull and ineffective witness for the prosecution. And thanks, Jorry, for the information about the meeting, but I already knew about it. Oh, I’m up on all the local gossip. I board at the Sandersons’, you know.”

  Jorry didn’t know. He hadn’t ever thought about Tom boarding somewhere, eating breakfast, brushing his teeth. Every day Tom just appeared, like a part of the huge black towers and crackling hum of the line itself. Jorry tried to picture him watching TV with Jeanine Sanderson, who had been in his class at school last year, and a queasy feeling twisted in his stomach. Once he had overheard Mrs. Sanderson tell Jeanine that she “shouldn’t play with that Whitfield boy, because with a pa like that, you never knew.” The feeling twisted harder. Jorry stood up.

  “I got to go.”

  “You sure . . . it’s not your usual time yet. Here—wipe off your cast with the towel. There’s coffee on it.”

  “No!”

  “Hey, Jorry—what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! I got to go.”

  “But—”

  “I got to go!”

  Tom watched him intently. Around the boy’s eyes were the beginnings of moist trails streaking the dirt on his thin face.

  “Jorry,” he said quietly, “Jorry—how did you break your arm?”

  The tear trails paled, and the boy made an aborted halfgesture in the direction of throwing up his arm. Then he blinked dully and mumbled, “I fell out of the hay loft.”

  Tom put an arm around Jorry’s shoulders, speaking in a low serious voice so unlike his usual self that Jorry was startled into listening. “Jorry, you know this is the last day for this project. After I pick up the mice on Monday I won’t be back. I don’t believe you fell out of the hay loft—no, wait, don’t squirm away, listen to me—you’re a bright kid, and a damn nice one, and if you stay here. . . Jorry, there are arrangements, laws, for making sure that nothing like that happens to kids. You can leave here, stay with some nice foster family; and I could even visit you on weekends. We could go to a ball game, mess around in my lab. All you have to do is let me take you to Social Services, and then you’ll have to be willing to tell them—Jorry wait, listen to me—wait!”

  “You’re crazy!” Jorry shouted, already backing away. Crazy, crazy, crazy! Tom didn’t even need Jorry’s information about the meeting—he already had it, already had everything. Let Tom take him away? When Jorry could give Tom nothing but sumac tea he didn’t even like, could be worth nothing to Tom, to anyone except Clayte Whitfield, doing farm chores, and even there mostly a useless nuisance—“goddamn nuisance!” his father roared. To be always in the way, always in need, always someone other people’s children shouldn’t play with? To be always with nothing to trade for the impatient charity of strangers who traded taking care of you for money from the Welfare—to live like that? Crazy!

  “Go take Jeanine Sanderson to a ball game!” he shouted.

  “Hey, Jorry—”

  “Just leave me alone!” And then he was running, clutching his cast awkwardly against his stomach, running with a lopsided lope over the ridge, through the rain.

  By the time Jorry reached home, still running, his elbow ached from bouncing against the inside of the cast. Water streamed into it from his shoulders and hair; with each heaving breath he smelled soaked plaster mingled with damp earth and the wind-borne smell of wet cows. Leaning against the house, Jorry tried to catch his breath, to stop the silent sobs that shook his whole body, before he pushed open the screen door and went inside.

  “Where you been, boy?”

  Jorry snapped his head upward. Pa, who should have been in town, should have been still at that meeting, was never in the house at this time anyway—Pa was sitting behind the kitchen table, a glass in his big hand. Over the rain smells came that other smell. A pool of it had spilled on the table and one amber drop slid lazily over the edge, hung suspended for a long second, then plopped softly to the floor. Funny about that plop, Jorry thought crazily—you should hardly be able to hear it over the rain, but it filled the room like thunder.

  Slowly he reached behind him for the latch to the screen door.

  His father’s hand caught him at the shoulder and spun him across the kitchen and into the table. The glass shattered on the floor.

  “I asked you where you been!”

  “Ou-out, Pa!”

  Fighting for balance, Jorry twisted his head and gazed at his father in terror. But Whitfield was nodding, a drunken heavy nod that made his head bounce like a dropped sack of grain.

  “Out. You been out, and I know where—you think I don’t know where, I know where. I been out, too—out with those namby-pamby bastards who don’t give a damn if their farms go to hell on account of some fat-assed power company, ’thout doing a damn thing about it but givin’ the farms away!” He nodded over and over, repeating the phrase: “Givin’ away. Just givin’ away.

  “And you know what they’re gonna do—what got decided at their big angry meeting—they’re gonna send a delegation up to the Congressman . . . up to the Congressman, tiptoein’ all polite up to the Capitol, where nobody gives a damn anyway—but not me, boy! Not me! I know the only way to set the bastards to rights!” He shoved his face close to Jorry’s and hissed again, “Not me!” Rheumy yellowish liquid oozed from the corners of his eyes. “What do you say to that, boy?”

  “N-no, Pa.”

  Whitfield laughed loudly, straightened up, and groped behind him for the missing glass. Jorry edged around the table, numbly eyeing his father’s face, until his foot struck something hard. Glancing down, he saw the box from the Country Agricultural Agency, open now, spilling out the cylinders that could blast out a stubborn stump no tractor could dislodge, could send it spraying wood chips ten feet into the air. One stick of the dynamite lay half-puddled in amber whiskey. A stump, or a rock—or a truck. ‘You been out and I know where.’

  “Hey!” Whitfield yelled, and snatched at air. Jorry had barreled across the kitchen and through the door, his cast striking the screen with such force that bits of plaster flaked into the dirty mesh. He stumbled as the rain hit him in a solid sheet, but picked himself up and ran, zig-zagging acr
oss the barnyard and around the edge of the barn. Behind him he heard the door bang again and then his father’s hoarse yell, the words blown away by wind and rain. Jorry leaned against the barn, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before peering around the corner.

  His father was lurching across the barnyard.

  A sudden, unexpected flash of thunder lit up the sky and to Jorry his father suddenly looked huge, a giant swelling blackly to fill up the world and no place to hide and

  —the buckle coming down and the smell of whiskey and his own voice screaming just before the—

  Giants!

  He ran the length of the barn and headed out toward the hay field, bent low, huddled over the cast. Cutting diagonally through the rotting hay, running until his lungs ached, stopping only to wipe the streaming water from his eyes before running again, until he collapsed, heaving and panting, in the one place his father had never yet come. Sanctuary.

  But for how long?

  Jorry wrapped his good hand around the bottom girder and convulsively flexed and unflexed his fingers over the wet metal. Gradually his breathing slowed and he no longer had to snatch at draughts of wet air. Above him the line crackled and snapped, glowing through the rain with a fuzzy, reddish-blue corona. The line swayed gently, like the smooth surf line of some radioactive sea, but the boy hardly noticed. When he could stand, he began to trudge along the right-of-way, shedding stray bits of hay as he went, and his eyes moved only to jump to the next colossus in the long row of looming black giants safe-guarding his trail.

  The truck was gone, and Tom with it.

  Only the cages of mice remained. Water slid down the glass sides in smooth, silent trails. The rain had let up, but the sky was darkening, and occasionally thunder drowned out the ceaseless crackle overhead. Jorry stared blankly at the spot where the tarp lean-to had been, and his face twisted sideways.

  Gone. Home for the day, home to the Sandersons’, home and dry and in no danger at all. Playing checkers with Jeanine and drinking hot coffee and not needing to be warned, not needing anything, because dynamite fuses don’t light in the rain and even Pa would remember that. Everyone remembered that, except Jorry. And on Monday Tom would pick up the mice and be gone for good, gone beyond the reaches of Jorry’s stupid rescues or bitter tea or anything else he might scrounge up. He wouldn’t see Tom again, couldn’t see him, because things didn’t work like that. You didn’t get things for free, and suddenly he didn’t care if Pa blew up every tower on the whole line, one by one, and Jorry himself along with them. He just didn’t care.