by Matt Ruff
“We’d like to know what you can tell us about this.” Detective Noble placed a copy of The Interplanetary Adventures of Orithyia Blue on the table. “You recognize it?”
Horace picked up the book. It was issue #11: the Christmas special. It was wrinkled and torn and the ink on the front cover had smeared. The back cover was soiled with a muddy tire track.
“It was found at the scene of an accident,” Detective Noble said.
“Accident! Is my mom OK?”
“Your mom?” said Detective Burke. “She’s fine, as far as we know.”
“What makes you ask about her?” said Detective Noble.
“Nothing,” said Horace. He lowered his eyes and pretended to be interested in the tire track.
Detective Noble jabbed two fingers under Horace’s chin and tilted his head up. “Horace, listen to me,” he said. “You don’t want to lie to us.”
“You really don’t,” Detective Burke agreed. “There’s no future in it.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” said Detective Noble. “Cops—smart cops—a lot of times when we ask a question, we already know the answer. But we ask anyway, because we like to know whether the person we’re talking to is cooperating—”
“—or trying to fuck us,” Detective Burke said.
“You’re not trying to fuck us, are you, Horace?” Detective Noble said.
“No!” Horace said. “But I don’t . . . I don’t know what this is about.”
“You don’t need to know what it’s about,” Detective Burke said. “You just need to answer our questions.”
“But,” added Detective Noble, in a gentler voice, “we could probably tell you a little, just to get things off on the right foot.” He looked at his partner. “We can tell him a little, can’t we?”
Detective Burke shrugged. “Maybe a little.”
“Sure.” Detective Noble turned back to Horace. “It’s about connections,” he said. “The past few months, Detective Burke and I have been running a surveillance detail. You know what that is?”
“You’re watching somebody?”
“That’s right. A man named Caleb Braithwhite. You familiar with that name, Horace?”
Horace shook his head, conscious of the two detectives studying him very intently now.
“Well,” Detective Noble said, “we’ve been keeping an eye on Mr. Braithwhite and on people he associates with. People like your cousin Atticus, and your uncle Montrose, and your dad.”
“My dad? What—”
“And because we like to be thorough,” the detective continued, “we’ve also been looking at people who might be associated with Mr. Braithwhite, even if we’ve never actually seen them together. Your mom, she’d be in that category. So that’s the first thing.”
“The second thing,” said Detective Burke, “is this accident . . .”
“A shooting accident,” Detective Noble said. “But with complications.”
“Yeah, weird ones,” said Detective Burke. “Three men dead, two more missing, and signs of at least one other person who fled the scene. And this”—tapping a finger on the comic book—“was on the ground near the victims.”
“Now this happened in Wisconsin, outside our jurisdiction,” Detective Noble explained. “But the authorities who are looking into it are friends of our boss, and they like to trade favors and share information, so they ended up showing him this comic book, which they couldn’t make heads or tails of.”
“Ordinarily it wouldn’t have meant anything to us, either,” Detective Burke said. “But this is where the part about the connections comes in . . .”
“Orithyia Blue, that’s an unusual name,” said Detective Noble. “Orithyia was a queen of the Amazons. Not a very famous one, though. These days, the only Amazon most people have heard of is Wonder Woman. And if they know an Amazon queen, it’s probably Wonder Woman’s mom. What was she called again?”
“Hippolyte,” Detective Burke said.
“That’s right, Hippolyte, with an ‘e’ on the end. But you can also spell it with an ‘a.’”
“Orithyia Blue,” Detective Burke said. “Hippolyta Berry. Interesting coincidence.”
“And it gets more interesting,” Detective Noble said, “if you know, like we do, that your mother used to be Hippolyta Green.”
“Blue and Green.” Detective Burke grinned. “Both colored women.”
“We also know your mother goes on a lot of road trips,” Detective Noble said, “and we know she was out of town on the night of December twenty-first, which is when this thing in Wisconsin happened. We wouldn’t have figured her for a comics fan, but then your teacher Mrs. Freeman told us—”
“You talked to Mrs. Freeman?”
“Like I said, we’re thorough. Mrs. Freeman told us you’re quite the little artist. So you see where this takes us,” Detective Noble concluded. “And now that we’ve shared all this with you, Horace, it’s time for you to start sharing back. This is your work, right?”
No point in denying it. “Yes, sir.”
“You gave this to your mother before she left on her trip?”
Horace nodded.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Minneapolis.”
“So she would have driven through Wisconsin.”
“I guess.”
“And what happened?”
“I don’t know.” As Detective Burke suddenly leaned into him: “I don’t!”
“You know something,” Detective Burke said.
“She said . . . she said she lost it!”
“When?”
“When she got back,” Horace said. “At Christmas. She asked me if I took the book out of the car, and I said I didn’t, and she said she must have lost it. She was worried.” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. “But she wouldn’t . . .”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Wouldn’t do anything bad!”
“Maybe not on her own,” Detective Noble said. “But if Mr. Braithwhite asked her to do something for him—”
“I don’t know any Mr. Braithwhite! I—”
“Calm down, Horace, we believe you. But see, now we’ve got this problem. Detective Burke and I need answers. We could just go ask your mother directly, but if she is working for Mr. Braithwhite, she might not want to talk to us—”
“And that could get ugly,” Detective Burke said. “Fast.”
“We’ll do what we have to do,” Detective Noble said. “But what I’m thinking, maybe you could talk to your mother for us. Be subtle about it: Ask her if she ever found that missing comic book, and then see if you can get her to tell you about her Minneapolis trip.”
“And when you’ve gotten what you can about that,” Detective Burke added, “try mentioning Mr. Braithwhite’s name. Maybe say you overheard your dad talking about him. See how she reacts.”
“And then come back to us,” Detective Noble said. “And tell us all about it. What do you say, Horace? You think you could do that?”
He wanted badly to say no. Beyond not wishing to betray his mother’s confidence, Horace sensed that this was all a play-act, and that the detectives had already decided what they were going to do. If their plans included hurting Horace’s mom, nothing he did or didn’t agree to would change that. In which case he should refuse them and suffer the consequences with his dignity intact. But he wasn’t nearly brave enough to do that, and just the thought of saying no triggered another warning spasm in his lungs.
“I can try,” he said, the words coming out wheezy. “I can try talking to her.”
Detective Noble looked sad. “Oh, Horace,” he said. “You disappoint me.”
“We warned you not to lie, Horace,” Detective Burke said.
“I’m not lying!” Horace said. “I’ll talk to my mom. I’ll—” But then he broke off, coughing. The customer with the cigar had gotten up from the counter and was approaching the booth, preceded by a heavy reek of smoke.
&nbs
p; “So?” the cigar man said.
“Sorry, Captain Lancaster,” Detective Noble told him. “I don’t think Horace is going to play ball with us.”
“He thinks he can pretend to go along,” said Detective Burke. “Trick us into letting him go, then run home to warn Mommy and Daddy.”
“All right, then,” Captain Lancaster said. “We’ll do it the other way.” He drew on the cigar, and as the tip flared, Horace felt a twitch start in his left eye. “Stand him up,” the captain said.
The detectives grabbed Horace’s arms, lifting him out of his seat and over the top of the table. Horace kicked and tried to scream, but his lungs wouldn’t give him the air, and then as he was set down on the floor outside the booth he saw it didn’t matter anyway: The waitress and the diner’s other customers had all disappeared. He was alone with the detectives, the captain, and the burning cigar tip.
Horace whipped his head around until he was dizzy, determined to present a moving target, but Lancaster’s intent wasn’t to blind him. Instead he held the cigar in his right hand and spat thickly into his left. He jammed the cigar back between his teeth, then clapped his hands and began rubbing them together briskly. Horace stopped moving as he saw what looked like steam jetting from between the captain’s palms.
Then the captain said, “Hold his head still,” and Horace started struggling again. But Detective Burke dug his fingers into the back of Horace’s skull, and the captain reached out with his hot, spit-slicked hands and massaged Horace’s scalp as though determined to rub away every last ounce of luck he possessed.
That night he had the dream about the heads.
It was an old dream. Back when Horace was seven, he’d taken a ride with his uncle to a warehouse in Gary, Indiana. The place was a giant junk shop that specialized in secondhand industrial equipment, and Montrose’s bosses had sent him to look at a used printing press.
While Uncle Montrose conducted his business, Horace explored the warehouse’s collection of spare machine parts. Larger items sat out openly on shelves, or on the floor, while smaller objects were gathered in wooden crates. The crates were themselves secondhand, and some still bore the labels for the produce they had originally contained. As he wandered, Horace began making up a story about a grocery store for robots, a “metalgrocer” that sold lettuces made of fan blades and stone fruits that were vacuum tubes.
In the shadows at the back of a low shelf he spied a crate labeled GEORGIA NIGGER HEADS; the words were accompanied by a cartoon of a freckled and bucktoothed Negro boy. In what might have been someone’s idea of a joke, the portion of the label showing the boy’s body had been torn away, leaving only the grinning head and the wide-brimmed straw hat.
A white man hunting for something along the same row of shelves saw Horace staring at the crate. “They’re watermelons,” the man told him. “Little watermelons, about the size of your noggin. With dark rinds, and woolly bits around the stems. So that’s what they call them, nigger heads. You can eat the seeds.”
Riding home that day, Horace fell asleep in the car and dreamed that he was in the produce section of a big supermarket, facing a display stand on which colored boys’ heads were stacked in a tidy pyramid.
The heads themselves were not that scary. They weren’t severed heads, just heads that lacked bodies. They were alive and didn’t appear to be suffering; most of them looked bored, or were asleep. The unnerving thing was that none of the customers in the store seemed to find them at all remarkable. They pushed their carts past the display without a glance, or if they did look, they regarded the heads with indifference, as if they really were nothing more than a bunch of watermelons. Horace kept wanting to speak up, to point out that no, in fact, these were boys’ heads. But at the same time he was afraid to draw attention to himself, certain that something awful would happen if he did.
The dream had recurred many times since then, usually when he was anxious about something. In more recent versions, his own head was often part of the display.
This time Horace’s head remained on his shoulders, but the faces of Neville, Curtis, and the Reverend Oxbow’s son Reggie all looked out from the pile.
It was after hours. The supermarket’s lights were turned down low and there were no customers, which Horace couldn’t recall ever having been the case before. Nervously he looked towards the rear of the store. There was something moving around back there, making furtive noises in the shadows. Whatever it was, Horace knew instinctively that he didn’t want to meet it face to face. He needed to get out of here.
But when he looked to the front of the store, there was no exit door, just a line of opaque, milky-white windows. Lights shining from outside cast the silhouettes of two men against the glass. The detectives, Burke and Noble, waiting in the parking lot: If he broke a window to escape, they’d grab him.
Just get a good running start, Horace told himself. Bust right on through and keep going; they won’t expect that. He took his mark and was about to go when something made him glance at the heads again. Neville and Curtis and Reggie were all looking at him imploringly. Don’t leave us, their faces said. Don’t leave us behind.
The thing from the back of the store was coming closer now, scuttling up an aisle towards the produce section. Horace searched frantically for something to carry the heads in. On a low shelf underneath a counter heaped with peaches he saw a wicker basket. But when Horace tried to grab it, it slid back out of his grasp. He crouched and leaned forward, cheek pressed against the front of the counter, arms reaching blindly into the shelf.
The lights went out. Something shifted above him and a peach tumbled down and burst, rotten and slimy, on his shoulder. Horace gave a cry of disgust and scrambled backwards to escape the avalanche of peaches that followed. He raised his arms defensively, expecting something to come flying at him out of the darkness. Then he realized there was a weight on his shoulder that was more than just the remnant of the burst peach—a weight on both his shoulders. Strong hands reached up from behind and clapped over his ears, gripping tight. Twisting. Horace screamed himself awake then, but not before feeling his head turned completely around and yanked from the top of his spine, as neatly as a ripe piece of fruit being harvested from the vine.
When he came out to breakfast, his parents were arguing. Horace’s mom had made last-minute plans to drive to New York to see her mother over the weekend. But Horace’s dad had been counting on her to fill in for Victor Franklin at the Grand Boulevard travel office while Victor was in Philadelphia at his sister’s wedding.
Ordinarily Horace would have stayed out of it. But if Mom was going out of town alone—which it sounded like she was determined to do—he needed to warn her about the police being after her.
He’d tried to tell her yesterday. After the detectives had let him go, he’d run straight home. His scalp had been on fire, as if the captain’s spittle were laced with battery acid, and as soon as he got in the apartment he’d stuck his head under a cold faucet. The burning subsided, but there was a residual itch that no amount of soap and water could get rid of.
The itch in his scalp was mirrored by an itch in his throat and lungs. As he discovered over the course of the evening, any attempt to tell his mother or his father about his encounter with the police caused the itch to flare up. He’d get a few words out at most and then start coughing. The more he tried to talk, the harder he coughed, until he was hacking like a hairball-sick cat.
He’d hoped a night’s sleep might cure him. Instead, the itch seemed to have progressed to a more advanced stage, where even thinking about talking was enough to set it off.
“I don’t see why it has to be me,” his mother was saying. “Can’t you get Atticus to do it?”
“Atticus won’t be back from Michigan until tomorrow morning,” his father said, “and I imagine he’s going to want to sleep when he gets in.”
Cough.
“What about Quincy, then?”
“I need Quincy at the Douglas office. Why can�
�t you just wait for Victor to get back on Tuesday and go see your mother then?”
“Because the weather’s supposed to turn next week and if there’s a blizzard I can’t go anywhere.”
Cough, cough. Horace reached for his drinking glass.
“George,” his mother said, “I just need to be on the road awhile. You know how I get. I’ve been feeling cooped up lately.”
“You’ve definitely been feeling something, and not just lately,” his father said. “Is there something you haven’t—”
Horace coughed explosively, spraying milk all over his scrambled eggs and a good portion of the table besides.
“Good Lord,” his mother said.
“Horace,” said his father. “You all right?”
No, he wasn’t. But it was beginning to sink in that he wasn’t allowed to say so.
Horace was one of a rotating crew of boys who ran deliveries after school for Rollo Danvers’s corner grocery. He worked three or sometimes four days a week, earning a flat nickel for each delivery run plus whatever he got in tips. Usually he tried to get in quick and snag the first run of the afternoon, but today Horace let the other boys go ahead of him, so he could have some time to finish up a project he’d started in class.
His parents had reached a compromise: His mother was minding the Grand Boulevard office today and tomorrow and would leave for New York tomorrow night, while his father got someone else to fill in on Monday. Meanwhile Horace, seeking to pass a warning to his mom without speaking it aloud, had decided to encode his message in a comic. A straightforward note might have seemed more sensible, but Horace was used to communicating this way.
He didn’t have time to do a complete book, so he’d concentrated his effort on a single page-sized illustration. Orithyia Blue was front and center, cruising through open space, distracted by the contents of the as-yet-unfilled thought balloon beside her head. Following close behind her, plain to see if only she’d look in the rearview, were a pair of vicious bounty hunters. Horace had spent a lot of time on the bounty hunters’ faces.
The artwork was done. What he still had to figure out was what the two bounty hunters were saying—and what Orithyia was thinking. He sat in the little back room of the grocery, sketchbook on his knees, trying to come up with the right words, always the hardest part for him. His scalp continued to itch, which made it difficult to concentrate. He scratched his head furiously to buy himself a few seconds’ relief and lowered the tip of his pencil to Bounty Hunter Noble’s dialogue balloon.