The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Sure, come on,” one of the daughters said, “in here,” and took the child into a back room, not completely partitioned off from the crowded front room, but dark and uncrowded. Big shelves with mattresses and blankets lined the walls. “Crawl in!” said Chipmunk’s daughter, patting the child’s arm in the comforting way they had. The child climbed onto a shelf, under a blanket. She laid down her head. She thought, “I didn’t brush my teeth.”

  2

  She woke; she slept again. In Chipmunk’s sleeping room it was always stuffy, warm, and half dark, day and night. People came in and slept and got up and left, night and day. She dozed and slept, got down to drink from the bucket and dipper in the front room, and went back to sleep and doze.

  She was sitting up on the shelf, her feet dangling, not feeling bad anymore, but dreamy, weak. She felt in her jeans pocket. In the left front one was a pocket comb and a bubble gum wrapper, in the right front, two dollar bills and a quarter and a dime.

  Chipmunk and another woman—a very pretty, dark-eyed, plump one—came in. “So you woke up for your dance!” Chipmunk greeted her, laughing, and sat down by her with an arm around her.

  “Jay’s giving you a dance,” the dark woman said. “He’s going to make you all right. Let’s get you all ready!”

  There was a spring up under the rimrock, which flattened out into a pool with slimy, reedy shores. A flock of noisy children splashing in it ran off and left the child and the two women to bathe. The water was warm on the surface, cold down on the feet and legs. All naked, the two soft-voiced, laughing women, their round bellies and breasts, broad hips and buttocks gleaming warm in the late-afternoon light, sluiced the child down, washed and stroked her limbs and hands and hair, cleaned around the cheekbone and eyebrow of her right eye with infinite softness, admired her, sudsed her, rinsed her, splashed her out of the water, dried her off, dried each other off, got dressed, dressed her, braided her hair, braided each other’s hair, tied feathers on the braid-ends, admired her and each other again, and brought her back down into the little straggling town and to a kind of playing field or dirt parking lot in among the houses. There were no streets, just paths and dirt; no lawns and gardens, just sagebrush and dirt. Quite a few people were gathering or wandering around the open place, looking dressed up, wearing colorful shirts, bright dresses, strings of beads, earrings. “Hey there, Chipmunk, Whitefoot!” they greeted the women.

  A man in new jeans, with a bright blue velveteen vest over a clean, faded blue work shirt, came forward to meet them, very handsome, tense, and important. “All right, Gal!” he said in a harsh, loud voice, which startled among all these soft-speaking people. “We’re going to get that eye fixed right up tonight! You just sit down here and don’t worry about a thing.” He took her wrist, gently despite his bossy, brassy manner, and led her to a woven mat that lay on the dirt near the middle of the open place. There, feeling very foolish, she had to sit down, and was told to stay still. She soon got over feeling that everybody was looking at her, since nobody paid her more attention than a checking glance or, from Chipmunk or Whitefoot and their families, a reassuring wink. Every now and then, Jay rushed over to her and said something like, “Going to be as good as new!” and went off again to organize people, waving his long blue arms and shouting.

  Coming up the hill to the open place, a lean, loose, tawny figure—and the child started to jump up, remembered she was to sit still, and sat still, calling out softly, “Coyote! Coyote!”

  Coyote came lounging by. She grinned. She stood looking down at the child. “Don’t let that Bluejay fuck you up, Gal,” she said, and lounged on.

  The child’s gaze followed her, yearning.

  People were sitting down now over on one side of the open place, making an uneven half circle that kept getting added to at the ends until there was nearly a circle of people sitting on the dirt around the child, ten or fifteen paces from her. All the people wore the kind of clothes the child was used to—jeans and jeans jackets, shirts, vests, cotton dresses—but they were all barefoot; and she thought they were more beautiful than the people she knew, each in a different way, as if each one had invented beauty. Yet some of them were also very strange: thin black shining people with whispery voices, a long-legged woman with eyes like jewels. The big man called Young Owl was there, sleepy-looking and dignified, like Judge McCown who owned a sixty-thousand acre ranch. And beside him was a woman the child thought might be his sister, for like him she had a hook nose and big, strong hands; but she was lean and dark, and there was a crazy look in her fierce eyes. Yellow eyes, but round, not long and slanted like Coyote’s. There was Coyote sitting yawning, scratching her armpit, bored. Now somebody was entering the circle: a man, wearing only a kind of kilt and a cloak painted or beaded with diamond shapes, dancing to the rhythm of the rattle he carried and shook with a buzzing fast beat. His limbs and body were thick yet supple, his movements smooth and pouring. The child kept her gaze on him as he danced past her, around her, past again. The rattle in his hand shook almost too fast to see; in the other hand was something thin and sharp. People were singing around the circle now, a few notes repeated in time to the rattle, soft and tuneless. It was exciting and boring, strange and familiar. The Rattler wove his dancing closer and closer to her, darting at her. The first time, she flinched away, frightened by the lunging movement and by his flat, cold face with narrow eyes, but after that she sat still, knowing her part. The dancing went on, the singing went on, till they carried her past boredom into a floating that could go on forever.

  Jay had come strutting into the circle and was standing beside her. He couldn’t sing, but he called out, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” in his big, harsh voice, and everybody answered from all round, and the echo came down from the rimrock on the second beat. Jay was holding up a stick with a ball on it in one hand, and something like a marble in the other. The stick was a pipe: he got smoke into his mouth from it and blew it in four directions and up and down and then over the marble, a puff each time. Then the rattle stopped suddenly, and everything was silent for several breaths. Jay squatted down and looked intently into the child’s face, his head cocked to one side. He reached forward, muttering something in time to the rattle and the singing that had started up again louder than before; he touched the child’s right eye in the black center of the pain. She flinched and endured. His touch was not gentle. She saw the marble, a dull yellow ball like beeswax, in his hand; then she shut her seeing eye and set her teeth.

  “There!” Jay shouted. “Open up. Come on! Let’s see!”

  Her jaw clenched like a vise, she opened both eyes. The lid of the right one stuck and dragged with such a searing white pain that she nearly threw up as she sat there in the middle of everybody watching.

  “Hey, can you see? How’s it work? It looks great!” Jay was shaking her arm, railing at her. “How’s it feel? Is it working?”

  What she saw was confused, hazy, yellowish. She began to discover, as everybody came crowding around peering at her—smiling, stroking and patting her arms and shoulders—that if she shut the hurting eye and looked with the other, everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep.

  There, right close, was Coyote’s long nose and narrow eyes and grin. “What is it, Jay?” she was asking, peering at the new eye. “One of mine you stole that time?”

  “It’s pine pitch,” Jay shouted furiously. “You think I’d use some stupid secondhand coyote eye? I’m a doctor!”

  “Ooooh, ooooh, a doctor,” Coyote said. “Boy, that is one ugly eye. Why didn’t you ask Rabbit for a rabbit dropping? That eye looks like shit.” She put her lean face yet closer, till the child thought she was going to kiss her; instead, the thin, firm tongue once more licked accurately across the pain, cooling, clearing. When the child opened both eyes again, the world looked pretty good.

  “It works fine,” she said.

  “Hey!” Jay yelled. “She says it works fine! It works fine; she sa
ys so! I told you! What’d I tell you?” He went off waving his arms and yelling. Coyote had disappeared. Everybody was wandering off.

  The child stood up, stiff from long sitting. It was nearly dark; only the long west held a great depth of pale radiance. Eastward, the plains ran down into night.

  Lights were on in some of the shanties. Off at the edge of town, somebody was playing a creaky fiddle, a lonesome chirping tune.

  A person came beside her and spoke quietly: “Where will you stay?”

  “I don’t know,” the child said. She was feeling extremely hungry. “Can I stay with Coyote?”

  “She isn’t home much,” the soft-voiced woman said. “You were staying with Chipmunk, weren’t you? Or there’s Rabbit, or Jackrabbit; they have families.…”

  “Do you have a family?” the girl asked, looking at the delicate, soft-eyed woman.

  “Two fawns,” the woman answered, smiling. “But I just came into town for the dance.”

  “I’d really like to stay with Coyote,” the child said after a pause, timid but obstinate.

  “O.K., that’s fine. Her house is over here.” Doe walked along beside the child to a ramshackle cabin on the high edge of town. No light shone from inside. A lot of junk was scattered around the front. There was no step up to the half-open door. Over a battered pine board, nailed up crooked, said: “Bide-A-Wee.”

  “Hey, Coyote? Visitors,” Doe said. Nothing happened.

  Doe pushed the door farther open and peered in. “She’s out hunting, I guess. I better be getting back to the fawns. You going to be O.K.? Anybody else here will give you something to eat—you know.… O.K.?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Thank you,” the child said.

  She watched Doe walk away through the clear twilight, a severely elegant walk, small steps, like a woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light.

  Inside Bide-A-Wee it was too dark to see anything, and so cluttered that she fell over something at every step. She could not figure out where or how to light a fire. There was something that felt like a bed, but when she lay down on it, it felt more like a dirty-clothes pile, and smelled like one. Things bit her legs, arms, neck, and back. She was terribly hungry. By smell, she found her way to what had to be a dead fish hanging from the ceiling in one corner. By feel, she broke off a greasy flake and tasted it. It was smoked, dried salmon. She ate one succulent piece after another until she was satisfied, and licked her fingers clean. Near the open door, starlight shone on water in a pot of some kind; the child smelled it cautiously, tasted it cautiously, and drank just enough to quench her thirst, for it tasted of mud and was warm and stale. Then she went back to the bed of dirty clothes and fleas, and lay down. She could have gone to Chipmunk’s house, or other friendly households; she thought of that as she lay forlorn in Coyote’s dirty bed. But she did not go. She slapped at fleas until she fell asleep.

  Along in the deep night, somebody said, “Move over, pup,” and was warm beside her.

  * * *

  Breakfast, eaten sitting in the sun in the doorway, was dried-salmon-powder mush. Coyote hunted, mornings and evenings, but what they ate was not fresh game but salmon, and dried stuff, and any berries in season. The child did not ask about this. It made sense to her. She was going to ask Coyote why she slept at night and waked in the day like humans, instead of the other way round like coyotes, but when she framed the question in her mind, she saw at once that night is when you sleep and day when you’re awake; that made sense, too. But one question she did ask, one hot day when they were lying around slapping fleas.

  “I don’t understand why you all look like people,” she said.

  “We are people.”

  “I mean, people like me, humans.”

  “Resemblance is in the eye,” Coyote said. “How is that lousy eye, by the way?”

  “It’s fine. But—like you wear clothes—and live in houses—with fires and stuff—”

  “That’s what you think.… If that loudmouth Jay hadn’t horned in, I could have done a really good job.”

  The child was quite used to Coyote’s disinclination to stick to any one subject, and to her boasting. Coyote was like a lot of kids she knew, in some respects. Not in others.

  “You mean what I’m seeing isn’t true? Isn’t real—like TV or something?”

  “No,” Coyote said. “Hey, that’s a tick on your collar.” She reached over, flicked the tick off, picked it up on one finger, bit it, and spat out the bits.

  “Yecch!” the child said. “So?”

  “So, to me, you’re basically grayish yellow and run on four legs. To that lot”—she waved disdainfully at the warren of little houses next down the hill—“you hop around twitching your nose all the time. To Hawk, you’re an egg, or maybe getting pinfeathers. See? It just depends on how you look at things. There are only two kinds of people.”

  “Humans and animals?”

  “No. The kind of people who say, ‘There are two kinds of people,’ and the kind of people who don’t.” Coyote cracked up, pounding her thighs and yelling with delight at her joke. The child didn’t get it, and waited.

  “O.K.,” Coyote said. “There’re the first people, and then the others. Those’re the two kinds.”

  “The first people are—?”

  “Us, the animals … and things. All the old ones. You know. And you pups, kids, fledglings. All first people.”

  “And the—others?”

  “Them,” Coyote said. “You know. The others. The new people. The ones who came.” Her fine, hard face had gone serious, rather formidable. She glanced directly, as she seldom did, at the child, a brief gold sharpness. “We are here,” she said. “We are always here. We are always here. Where we are is here. But it’s their country now. They’re running it.… Shit, even I did better!”

  The child pondered and offered a word she had used to hear a good deal: “They’re illegal immigrants.”

  “Illegal!” Coyote said, mocking, sneering. “Illegal is a sick bird. What the fuck’s illegal mean? You want a code of justice from a coyote? Grow up kid!”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to grow up?”

  “I’ll be the other kind if I do.”

  “Yeah. So,” Coyote said, and shrugged. “That’s life.” She got up and went around the house, and the child heard her pissing in the backyard.

  A lot of things were hard to take about Coyote as a mother. When her boyfriends came to visit, the child learned to go stay with Chipmunk or the Rabbits for the night, because Coyote and her friend wouldn’t even wait to get on the bed, but would start doing that right on the floor or even out in the yard. A couple of times, Coyote came back late from hunting with a friend, and the child had to lie up against the wall in the same bed and hear and feel them doing that right next to her. It was something like fighting and something like dancing, with a beat to it, and she didn’t mind too much except that it made it hard to stay asleep. Once she woke up and one of Coyote’s friends was stroking her stomach in a creepy way. She didn’t know what to do, but Coyote woke up and realized what he was doing, bit him hard, and kicked him out of bed. He spent the night on the floor, and apologized next morning—“Aw, hell, Ki, I forgot the kid was there; I thought it was you—”

  Coyote, unappeased, yelled, “You think I don’t got any standards? You think I’d let some coyote rape a kid in my bed?” She kicked him out of the house, and grumbled about him all day. But a while later he spent the night again, and he and Coyote did that three or four times.

  Another thing that was embarrassing was the way Coyote peed anywhere, taking her pants down in public. But most people here didn’t seem to care. The thing that worried the child most, maybe, was when Coyote did number two anywhere and then turned around and talked to it. That seemed so awful. As if Coyote were—the way she often seemed, but really wasn’t—crazy.

  The child gathered up all the old dry turds from around the house one day while Coyote was having a nap, and buri
ed them in a sandy place near where she and Bobcat and some of the other people generally went and did and buried their number twos.

  Coyote woke up, came lounging out of Bide-A-Wee, rubbing her hands through her thick, fair, grayish hair and yawning, looked all round once with those narrow eyes, and said, “Hey! Where are they?” Then she shouted, “Where are you? Where are you?”

  And a faint chorus came from over in the draw: “Mommy! We’re here!”

  Coyote trotted over, squatted down, raked out every turd, and talked with them for a long time. When she came back, she said nothing, but the child, red-faced and heart pounding, said, “I’m sorry I did that.”

  “It’s just easier when they’re all around close by,” Coyote said, washing her hands (despite the filth of her house, she kept herself quite clean, in her own fashion).

  “I kept stepping on them,” the child said, trying to justify her deed.

  “Poor little shits,” said Coyote, practicing dance steps.

  “Coyote,” the child said timidly. “Did you ever have any children? I mean real pups?”

  “Did I? Did I have children? Litters! That one that tried feeling you up, you know? That was my son. Pick of the litter.… Listen, Gal. Have daughters. When you have anything, have daughters. At least they clear out.”

  3

  The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra. So far as she knew, she was the only person in town who had two names. She had to think about that, and about what Coyote had said about the two kinds of people; she had to think about where she belonged. Some persons in town made it clear that as far as they were concerned, she didn’t and never would belong there. Hawk’s furious stare burned through her; the Skunk children made audible remarks about what she smelled like. And though Whitefoot and Chipmunk and their families were kind, it was the generosity of big families, where one more or less simply doesn’t count. If one of them, or Cottontail, or Jackrabbit, had come upon her in the desert lying lost and half blind, would they have stayed with her, like Coyote? That was Coyote’s craziness, what they called her craziness. She wasn’t afraid. She went between the two kinds of people; she crossed over. Buck and Doe and their beautiful children were really afraid, because they lived so constantly in danger. The Rattler wasn’t afraid, because he was so dangerous. And yet maybe he was afraid of her, for he never spoke, and never came close to her. None of them treated her the way Coyote did. Even among the children, her only constant playmate was one younger than herself, a preposterous and fearless little boy called Horned Toad Child. They dug and built together, out among the sagebrush, and played at hunting and gathering and keeping house and holding dances, all the great games. A pale, squatty child with fringed eyebrows, he was a self-contained but loyal friend; and he knew a good deal for his age.