Dangerous Women

by George R. R. Martin

  He was angry now, and that showed how close he was to breaking. She looked at the floor. Sarge was under the table. He lifted sad brown eyes to her. “And Sarge?” she asked quietly.

  He sighed. “Mom, he’s getting old. You should think about what is best for him.”

  That afternoon, she got out the step stool and changed the bulb in the porch light. She dragged the aluminum ladder out of the garage, set it up, pulled the hose out, climbed the damn thing, and hosed out the gutters along the front of the garage. She raked the wet leaves and debris into a pile on a tarp and then wrestled it over to the edge of her vegetable plot and dumped them. Compost. Easier than fighting with a leaf bin.

  She woke up at ten the next morning instead of six, aching all over, to an overcast day. Sarge’s whining woke her. He had to go. Getting out of bed was a cautious process. She put on her wrapper and leaned on the handrail going down the stairs. She let Sarge out into the foggy backyard, found the Advil, and pushed the button on the coffeemaker. “I’m going to do it until I can’t do it anymore,” she said savagely. “I’m not leaving my house.”

  The newspaper was on the front doormat. As she straightened up, she looked at her neighborhood and was jolted by the change. When she and Russ had moved in, it had been an upwardly mobile neighborhood where lawns stayed green and mowed all summer, houses were repainted with clockwork regularity, and flower beds were meticulously tended.

  Now her eyes snagged on a sagging gutter on the corner of the old McPherson house. And down the way, the weeping willow that had been Alice Carter’s pride had a broken branch that dangled down, covered in dead leaves. Her lawn was dead, too. And the paint was peeling on the sunny side of the house. When had it all become so run-down? Her breath came faster. This was not how she recalled her street. Was this what Alex was talking about? Had her forgetfulness become so encompassing? She clutched the newspaper to her breast and retreated into the house.

  Sarge was scratching at the back door. She opened it for the beagle and then stood staring out past her fence. The pickup truck was there again. Red and rusting, one tire flat, algae on the windows. The pieces of broken tree branch still littered the street, and the wind had heaped the fallen leaves against them. Slowly, her heart hammering, she lifted her eyes to the gnarled apple trees that had replaced her memory of broomstick saplings. “This cannot be,” she said to the dog.

  She lurched stiffly down the steps, Sarge trailing at her heels. She walked past her roses to the fence, peering through the tattered fog. Nothing changed. The more she studied her familiar neighborhood, the more foreign it became. Broken windows. Chimneys missing bricks, dead lawns, a collapsed carport. A rhythmic noise turned her head. The man came striding down the street, boots slapping through the wet leaves, the pink pack high on his shoulders. He carried the aluminum baseball bat across the front of his body, right hand gripping it, left hand cradling the barrel. Sarge growled low in his throat. Sarah couldn’t make a sound.

  He didn’t even glance at them. When he reached the truck, he set his feet, measured the distance, and then hit the driver’s-side window. The glass held. He hit it again, and then again, until it was a spiderwebbed, crinkling curtain of safety glass. Then he reversed the bat and rammed the glass out of his way. He reached in, unlocked the door, and jerked it open.

  “Where’s Linda? What did you do to her?”

  Surely it was someone else who shouted the brave words. The man froze in the act of rummaging inside the cab. He straightened and spun around, the bat ready. Sarah’s knees weakened and she grabbed the top rail of her fence to keep from sagging. The man who glared at her was in his late teens. The unlaced work boots looked too big for him, as did the bulky canvas jacket he wore. His hair was unkempt and his spotty beard an accident. He scanned the street in all directions. His eyes swept right past her and her growling dog without a pause as he looked for witnesses. She saw his chest rise and fall; his muscles were bunched in readiness.

  She stared at him, waiting for the confrontation. Should have grabbed the phone. Should have dialed 911 from inside the house. Stupid old woman. They’ll find me dead in the yard and never know what happened.

  But he didn’t advance. His shoulders slowly lowered. She remained standing where she was but he didn’t even look at her. Not worth his attention. He turned back to the cab of the truck and leaned in.

  “Sarge. Come, boy. Come.” She moved quietly away from the fence. The dog remained where he was, tail up, legs stiff, intent on the intruder in his street. The sun must have wandered behind a thicker bank of clouds. The day grayed and the fog thickened until she could scarcely see the fence. “Sarge!” she called more urgently. In response to the worry in her voice, his growl deepened.

  In the street, the thief stepped back from the truck, a canvas tool tote in his hands. He rummaged in it and a wrench fell. It rang metallic on the pavement and Sarge suddenly bayed. On his back, short, stiff hair stood up in a bristle. Out in the street, the man spun and stared directly at the dog. He knit his brows, leaning forward and peering. The fat beagle bayed again, and as the man lifted his bat, Sarge sprang forward, snarling.

  The fence didn’t stop him.

  Sarah stared as Sarge vanished into the rolling fog and then reappeared in the street outside her fence, baying. The man stooped, picked up a chunk of the rotten branch, and threw it at Sarge. She didn’t think it hit him, but the beagle yelped and dodged. “Leave my dog alone!” she shouted at him. “I’ve called the cops! They’re on the way!”

  He kept his eyes on the dog. Sarge bayed again, noisily proclaiming his territory. The thief snatched a wrench from the tool pouch and threw it. This time she heard a meaty thunk as it hit her dog, and Sarge’s yipping as he fled was that of an injured dog. “Sarge! Sarge, come back! You bastard! You bastard, leave my dog alone!” For the man was pursuing him, bat held ready.

  Sarah ran into the house, grabbed her phone, dialed it, and ran outside again. Ringing, ringing … “Sarge!” she shouted, fumbled the catch on the gate, and ran out into an empty street.

  Empty.

  No truck. No fallen branches or dead leaves. A mist under the greenbelt trees at the end of the street vanished as the sun broke through the overcast. She stood in a tidy urban neighborhood of mowed lawns and swept sidewalks. No shattered windshield, no shabby thief. Hastily, she pushed the “off” button on her phone. No beagle. “Sarge!” she called, her voice breaking on his name. But he was gone, just as gone as everything else she had glimpsed.

  The phone in her hand rang.

  Her voice shook as she assured 911 that everything was all right, that she had dropped the phone and accidentally pushed buttons as she picked it up. No, no one needed to come by, she was fine.

  She sat at her kitchen table, stared at the street, and cried for two hours. Cried for her mind that was slipping away, cried for Sarge being gone, cried for a life spinning out of her control. Cried for being alone in a foreign world. She took the assisted living brochures out of the recycling bin, read them, and wept over the Alzheimer’s wing with alarms on the doors. “Anything but this, God,” she begged Him, and then thought of the sleeping pills the doctor had offered when Russ had died. She’d never filled the prescription. She looked for it in her purse. It wasn’t there.

  She went upstairs and opened the drawer and looked in at the handgun. She remembered Russ showing her how the catch worked, and how she had loaded the magazine with ammunition. They’d gone plinking at tin cans in a gravel pit. Years ago. But the gun was still there, and when she worked the catch, the magazine dropped into her hand. There was an amber plastic box of ammunition next to it, surprisingly heavy. Fifty rounds. She looked at it and thought of Russ and how gone he was.

  Then she put it back, got her basket, and went to pick Maureen’s apples. She and Hugh weren’t home, probably up at the Seattle hospital. Sarah filled her basket with heavy apples and lugged it home, planning what she would make. Jars of applesauce, jars of apple rings spiced and
reddened with Red Hots candy. Empty jars waited, glass shoulder to shoulder, next to the enamel canner and the old pressure cooker. She stood in the kitchen, staring up at them and then at the apples on the counter. Put them in jars for whom? Who could trust anything she canned? She should drag them all down and donate them.

  She shut the cupboard. Done and over. Canning was as done and over as dancing or embroidery or sex. No use mooning over it.

  She washed and polished half a dozen apples, put them in a pretty basket with a late dahlia, and went to visit Richard. She left the basket at the desk with a thank-you note for the nurses and went in with the cup of coffee. She gave him sips of it and told him everything, about the fog and Linda disappearing and the man with her backpack. He watched her face and listened to the story she couldn’t tell anyone else. A shadow of life came back into his face as he offered a brother’s best advice. “Shoot the son of a bitch.” He shook his head, coughed, and added, “Poor old dog. But at least he probably went fast, eh? Better than a slow death.” He gestured around him with a bony, age-spotted hand. “Better than this, Sal. Better than this.”

  She stayed an extra hour with him that day. Then she rode the bus home and went directly to bed. When she woke up at 2 a.m., she swept the floor and cleaned the bathroom and baked herself a lonely apple in the oven. The cinnamon-apple-brown-sugar smell made her weep. She ate it with tears on her cheeks.

  That was the day she became completely unhooked from time. Without Sarge asking her to get up at six and feed him, what did it matter what time she got up, or when she cooked or ate or raked leaves? The newspaper would always wait for her, Safeway never closed, and she never knew which days would show her a pleasant fall afternoon in a quiet neighborhood and which ones would reveal a foggy world of derelict houses and rusting cars. Why not shop for groceries at one in the morning, or read the day’s news at eight o’clock at night while eating a microwaved dinner? Time didn’t matter anymore.

  That, she decided, was the secret of it. She wondered if it happened to all old people, once they realized that time no longer applied to them. She began to deliberately go out into the yard on the foggy days to stare by choice into that dismal other world. Three days after Sarge had vanished, she saw a ragged little girl shaking the lower branches of an overgrown apple tree, hoping that the last wormy apples would fall for her. Nothing fell, but she kept trying. Sarah went back into the house and brought out the basket of apples from Maureen’s tree. She stood in her backyard and pitched them over the fence, one at a time. She threw them underhand, just as she had used to pitch softballs for her children. The first three simply vanished in the fog. Then, as the mist thickened, one thunked to the weedy brown lawn by the child. The girl jumped on the apple, believing she had shaken it down herself. Sarah lobbed half a dozen more fat red apples, sprayed and watered and ripe. With each succeeding apple, the child’s delight grew. She sat down under the tree, hunched her legs to her chest for warmth, and hungrily ate apple after apple. Sarah bit into an apple herself and ate it while she watched. When she was finished, it became a game for Sarah, to stand ready to lob an apple when the child shook the tree. When the girl couldn’t eat any more, she stuffed them into her ragged backpack. When all the apples had been thrown, Sarah went back into the house, made herself tea, and thought about it until the mist burned away and she saw the first apples she had tossed lying in the street. She laughed, brushed her hair, put on her shoes, and went shopping.

  For three days the mist came, but no child appeared. Sarah wasn’t discouraged. The next time the mist swept through, she was ready. She had bagged the pink socks in plastic, taped securely shut. No telling how long they would lie there before the child came back. There were two sweatshirts, pink with sequins, and warm woolly tights and a sturdy blue backpack full of granola bars. One after another, she flung them over the fence and into the mist. She heard them land even though she couldn’t see them. When the mist cleared and only one pair of socks remained in the street, she rejoiced. She hoped she would see the little girl come back and find her gifts. She didn’t, but the next time the mist swirled, she could clearly see that the treasures were gone. “She found them,” she congratulated herself, and planned more surprises.

  Simple things. A bag of dried apricots. Oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips in a sturdy plastic tub. Over the fence and into the mist. Those she saw the girl find, and the look on her face as she opened the box was priceless. The nights got colder and snow threatened. Was it as cold in that other world? Where did the child sleep? Did she den in some bushes or lair in one of the abandoned houses? Sarah found her knitting needles and ferreted out a stash of yarn. She had forgotten these colors, heather purple and acorn-cap brown and moss green. They wrapped her needles and slid through her stiff fingers with the memories of days when she could hike the autumn hillsides. She took her knitting with her in a bag when she visited Richard, and even if he didn’t know her, he remembered how their mother would never watch television without her knitting. They laughed at that, and cried a bit, too. His cough was worse. She gave him sips of coffee to clear his throat, and when he asked, in a boy’s voice, if he could keep the green wool hat, she left it with him.

  Sarah packaged together heathery woolen mittens, a matching hat, and a pair of pink rubber boots. On impulse, she added a picture dictionary. She put the things in ziplock bags and when the mist swirled in the winter winds, she grinned as she Frisbeed them over the fence and into the fog. Early in November, she threw a sack of orange and black Halloween crème candies, pumpkins and cats and ears of corn left over after a very disappointing turnout of trick-or-treaters at her door.

  When she visited Richard, he was wearing his green hat in bed. She told him about the little girl, about the apples and the mittens. He laughed his old laugh, then coughed himself red in the face. The nurse came, and when she eyed his coffee suspiciously, Sarah smiled and drank the rest of it. “You’re a nice lady,” Richard told her as she was leaving. “You remind me of my sister.”

  Several nights later, in the middle of the night, a storm woke her and she came down the stairs to the kitchen. Outside, the wind blew past her chimney and brushed the tree branches against the roof. It would bring the last of the leaves down; she’d have to rake tomorrow. Through the wind, she heard a child’s voice, perhaps the girl’s. She opened her back door and stepped onto her porch. Overhead, the branches of the beech swayed and leaves rained, but in the street, a thick bank of mist rolled slowly past. She crossed her lawn and groped for the top of her fence. She strained her eyes and ears, trying to penetrate the fog and the darkness.

  She almost stayed too long. The fence faded from her grip. She stepped back as it melted into fog. The porch light seemed distant. Mist roiled between her and her steps. Behind her, she heard heavier footfalls in the street. Men, not a child. She moved through the fog as if she were breasting deep water. Her breath was sobbing in and out of her as she stumbled up the steps. The men’s footfalls rang clear behind her. Reaching around the door, into her house, she snapped off the porch light and stood frozen on the steps, peering through mist and dark.

  They had the girl. One held her firmly by the wrist. She pointed and spoke to them. She touched her hat and spoke again. The man gripping her wrist shook his head. The girl pointed again, insistently, at the apple tree across the street. The man advanced on it. Sarah watched them as they methodically searched the tree, the area under the tree, and then the planting strip and the yard across the street. One of them dragged open the sagging door and vanished into the house. He emerged a short time later shaking his head. When they looked in her direction, she wondered what they saw. What was her house in their world and time? A deserted place with broken windows like the house across the street? A burned-out hulk like the Masons’ home halfway down the block?

  What would happen if the fog engulfed her house?

  The man with Linda’s backpack and the baseball bat stared intently at her porch. A swirl of mist followed
her as she retreated into her kitchen, not daring to shut her door lest it make a noise. Noise, she knew, could reach from her world to theirs. She pushed a chair out of the way, hating how it scraped on the floor, and hunched low to peer out over the windowsill. She reached for the light switch and snapped the lights off. There. She could see more clearly.

  Backpack Man was staring at her window as he crossed the street, lightly slapping the bat against his palm as he came. The mist had coalesced in her yard. She saw him come into her yard, unhampered by an iron fence that didn’t exist in his world. He stood in her roses just below her kitchen window and stared up at her, his pale eyes focused past her. He studied her window, then threw back his head and shouted, “Sarah!” The word reached her, faint but clear. He stepped back, searching her window for her. She remained frozen. He can’t see me. I’m not in his world. Even if he knows my name, he can’t see me. He looked at the upper windows of her house and shook his head in frustration. “Sarah!” he shouted again. “You are there. You hear me! Come out!” Behind him, his cohorts took it up. “Sarah!” they chorused to the night. “Come out, Sarah!” The others drifted closer to flank Backpack Man.

  They knew her name. Before they killed Linda, they had learned her name. And what else? The little girl took up the cry, her voice a thin echo. She stood close by the man who held her hand. Not his captive. Her protector.

  Sarah slipped from her chair, folding down on the floor, her heart racing so she could scarcely breathe. Tears came and she huddled under her table, shaking, terrified that at any moment the window would shatter to his bat or he would step in through the open doorway. What a fool she was! Of course the child was part of their group. They would have a foraging territory, just like any group of primates. The gifts she had thrown intending only kindness to a hungry child had lured them here. The man out there wasn’t a fool. He’d seen Sarge come out of nowhere, the dog he had probably hunted down for meat. He’d know there was something mysterious about her house. Had Linda told him something before they killed her and took her things? How much had she told? Had she been pursued by them, had she led them here when she tried to cross back to this world?