“There isn’t anybody else like me here,” she said as they sat by the pool in the morning sunlight.
“There isn’t anybody much like me anywhere,” said Horned Toad Child.
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.… There used to be people like you around, I guess.”
“What were they called?”
“Oh—people. Like everybody.…”
“But where do my people live? They have towns. I used to live in one. I don’t know where they are, is all. I ought to find out. I don’t know where my mother is now, but daddy’s in Canyonville. I was going there when.…”
“Ask Horse,” said Horned Toad Child sagaciously. He had moved away from the water, which he did not like and never drank, and was plaiting rushes.
“I don’t know Horse.”
“He hangs around the butte down there a lot of the time. He’s waiting till his uncle gets old and he can kick him out and be the big honcho. The old man and the women don’t want him around till then. Horses are weird. Anyway, he’s the one to ask. He gets around a lot. And his people came here with the new people; that’s what they say, anyhow.”
Illegal immigrants, the girl thought. She took Horned Toad’s advice, and one long day when Coyote was gone on one of her unannounced and unexplained trips, she took a pouchful of dried salmon and salmonberries and went off alone to the flat-topped butte miles away in the southwest.
There was a beautiful spring at the foot of the butte, and a trail to it with a lot of footprints on it. She waited there under willows by the clear pool, and after a while Horse came running, splendid, with copper-red skin and long, strong legs, deep chest, dark eyes, his black hair whipping his back as he ran. He stopped, not at all winded, and gave a snort as he looked at her. “Who are you?”
Nobody in town asked that—ever. She saw it was true; Horse had come here with her people, people who had to ask each other who they were.
“I live with Coyote,” she said cautiously.
“Oh sure, I heard about you,” Horse said. He knelt to drink from the pool. Long, deep drafts, his hands plunged in the cool water. When he had drunk, he wiped his mouth, sat back on his heels, and announced, “I’m going to be king.”
“King of the horses?”
“Right! Pretty soon now. I could lick the old man already, but I can wait. Let him have his day,” said Horse, vainglorious, magnanimous. The child gazed at him, in love already, forever.
“I can comb your hair, if you like,” she said.
“Great!” said Horse, and sat still while she stood behind him, tugging her pocket comb through his coarse, black, shining, yard-long hair. It took a long time to get it smooth. She tied it in a massive ponytail with willow bark when she was done. Horse bent over the pool to admire himself. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s really beautiful!”
“Do you ever go … where the other people are?” she asked in a low voice.
He did not reply for long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to; then he said, “You mean the metal places, the glass places? The holes? I go around them. There are all the walls now. There didn’t use to be so many. Grandmother said there didn’t use to be any walls. Do you know Grandmother?” he asked naively, looking at her with his great, dark eyes.
“Your grandmother?”
“Well, yes—Grandmother—you know. Who makes the web. Well, anyhow. I know there’s some of my people, horses, there. I’ve seen them across the walls. They act really crazy. You know, we brought the new people here. They couldn’t have got here without us: they have only two legs, and they have those metal shells. I can tell you that whole story. The king has to know the stories.”
“I like stories a lot.”
“It takes three nights to tell it. What do you want to know about them?”
“I was thinking that maybe I ought to go there. Where they are.”
“It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. You can’t go through—they’d catch you.”
“I’d just like to know the way.”
“I know the way,” Horse said, sounding for the first time entirely adult and reliable; she knew he did know the way. “It’s a long run for a colt.” He looked at her again. “I’ve got a cousin with different-color eyes,” he said, looking from her right to her left eye. “One brown and one blue. But she’s an Appaloosa.”
“Bluejay made the yellow one,” the child explained. “I lost my own one. In the … when.… You don’t think I could get to those places?”
“Why do you want to?”
“I sort of feel like I have to.”
Horse nodded. He got up. She stood still.
“I could take you, I guess,” he said.
“Would you? When?”
“Oh, now, I guess. Once I’m king I won’t be able to leave, you know. Have to protect the women. And I sure wouldn’t let my people get anywhere near those places!” A shudder ran right down his magnificent body, yet he said, with a toss of his head, “They couldn’t catch me, of course, but the others can’t run like I do.…”
“How long would it take us?”
Horse thought for a while. “Well, the nearest place like that is over the red rocks. If we left now, we’d be back here around tomorrow noon. It’s just a little hole.”
She did not know what he meant by “a hole,” but did not ask.
“You want to go?” Horse said, flipping back his ponytail.
“O.K.,” the girl said, feeling the ground go out from under her.
“Can you run?”
She shook her head. “I walked here, though.”
Horse laughed, a large, cheerful laugh. “Come on,” he said, and knelt and held his hands back-turned like stirrups for her to mount to his shoulders. “What do they call you?” he teased, rising easily, setting right off at a jog trot. “Gnat? Fly? Flea?”
“Tick, because I stick!” the child cried, gripping the willow bark tie of the black mane, laughing with delight at being suddenly eight feet tall and traveling across the desert without even trying, like the tumbleweed, as fast as the wind.
* * *
Moon, a night past full, rose to light the plains for them. Horse jogged easily on and on. Somewhere deep in the night, they stopped at a Pygmy Owl camp, ate a little, and rested. Most of the owls were out hunting, but an old lady entertained them at her campfire, telling them tales about the ghost of a cricket, about the great invisible people, tales that the child heard interwoven with her own dreams as she dozed and half woke and dozed again. Then Horse put her up on his shoulders, and on they went at a tireless, slow lope. Moon went down behind them, and before them the sky paled into rose and gold. The soft night wind was gone; the air was sharp, cold, still. On it, in it, there was a faint, sour smell of burning. The child felt Horse’s gait change, grow tighter, uneasy.
“Hey, Prince!”
A small, slightly scolding voice: the child knew it, and placed it as soon as she saw the person sitting by a juniper tree, neatly dressed, wearing an old black cap.
“Hey, Chickadee!” Horse said, coming round and stopping. The child had observed, back in Coyote’s town, that everybody treated Chickadee with respect. She didn’t see why. Chickadee seemed an ordinary person, busy and talkative like most of the small birds, nothing so endearing as Quail or so impressive as Hawk or Great Owl.
“You’re going on that way?” Chickadee asked Horse.
“The little one wants to see if her people are living there,” Horse said, surprising the child. Was that what she wanted?
Chickadee looked disapproving, as she often did. She whistled a few notes thoughtfully, another of her habits, and then got up. “I’ll come along.”
“That’s great,” Horse said thankfully.
“I’ll scout,” Chickadee said, and off she went, surprisingly fast, ahead of them, while Horse took up his steady, long lope.
The sour smell was stronger in the air.
Chickadee halted, way ahead of them on a slight
rise, and stood still. Horse dropped to a walk, and then stopped. “There,” she said in a low voice.
The child stared. In the strange light and slight mist before sunrise, she could not see clearly, and when she strained and peered, she felt as if her left eye were not seeing at all. “What is it?” she whispered.
“One of the holes. Across the wall—see?”
It did seem there was a line, a straight, jerky line drawn across the sagebrush plain, and on the far side of it—nothing? Was it mist? Something moved there—
“It’s cattle!” she said.
Horse stood silent, uneasy. Chickadee was coming back toward them.
“It’s a ranch,” the child said. “That’s a fence. There’re a lot of Herefords.” The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth. The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing—a hole in the world, a burned place like a cigarette burn. “Go closer!” she urged Horse. “I want to see.”
And as if he owed her obedience, he went forward, tense but unquestioning.
Chickadee came up to them. “Nobody around,” she said in her small, dry voice, “but there’s one of those fast turtle things coming.”
Horse nodded but kept going forward.
Gripping his broad shoulders, the child stared into the blank, and as if Chickadee’s words had focused her eyes, she saw again: the scattered whitefaces, a few of them looking up with bluish, rolling eyes—the fences—over the rise a chimneyed house roof and a high barn—and then in the distance, something moving fast, too fast, burning across the ground straight at them at terrible speed. “Run!” she yelled to Horse. “Run away! Run!” As if released from bonds, he wheeled and ran, flat out, in great reaching strides, away from sunrise, the fiery burning chariot, the smell of acid, iron, death. And Chickadee flew before them like a cinder on the air of dawn.
4
“Horse?” Coyote said. “That prick? Cat food!”
Coyote had been there when the child got home to Bide-A-Wee, but she clearly hadn’t been worrying about where Gal was, and maybe hadn’t even noticed she was gone. She was in a vile mood, and took it all wrong when the child tried to tell her about where she had been.
“If you’re going to do damn fool things, next time do ’em with me; at least I’m an expert,” she said, morose, and slouched out the door. The child saw her squatting down, poking an old white turd with a stick, trying to get it to answer some question she kept asking it. The turd lay obstinately silent. Later in the day the child saw two coyote men, a young one and a mangy-looking older one, loitering around near the spring, looking over at Bide-A-Wee. She decided it would be a good night to spend somewhere else.
The thought of the crowded rooms of Chipmunk’s house was not attractive. It was going to be a warm night again tonight, and moonlit. Maybe she would sleep outside. If she could feel sure some people wouldn’t come around, like the Rattler.… She was standing indecisively halfway through town when a dry voice said, “Hey, Gal.”
“Hey, Chickadee.”
The trim, black-capped woman was standing on her doorstep shaking out a rug. She kept her house neat, trim like herself. Having come back across the desert with her, the child now knew, though she still could not have said, why Chickadee was a respected person.
“I thought maybe I’d sleep out tonight,” the child said, tentative.
“Unhealthy,” said Chickadee. “What are nests for?”
“Mom’s kind of busy,” the child said.
“Tsk!” went Chickadee, and snapped the rug with disapproving vigor. “What about her little friend? At least they’re decent people.”
“Horny-toad? His parents are so shy.…”
“Well. Come in and have something to eat, anyhow,” said Chickadee.
The child helped her cook dinner. She knew now why there were rocks in the mush pot.
“Chickadee,” she said, “I still don’t understand; can I ask you? Mom said it depends who’s seeing it, but still; I mean, if I see you wearing clothes and everything like humans, then how come you cook this way, in baskets, you know, and there aren’t any—any of the things like they have—there where we were with Horse this morning?”
“I don’t know,” Chickadee said. Her voice indoors was quite soft and pleasant. “I guess we do things the way they always were done, when your people and my people lived together, you know. And together with everything else here. The rocks, you know. The plants and everything.” She looked at the basket of willow bark, fern root, and pitch, at the blackened rocks that were heating in the fire. “You see how it all goes together.…”
“But you have fire—That’s different—”
“Ah!” said Chickadee, impatient, “you people! Do you think you invented the sun?”
She took up the wooden tongs, plopped the heated rocks into the water-filled basket with a terrific hiss and steam and loud bubblings. The child sprinkled in the pounded seeds and stirred.
Chickadee brought out a basket of fine blackberries. They sat on the newly shaken-out rug and ate. The child’s two-finger scoop technique with mush was now highly refined.
“Maybe I didn’t cause the world,” Chickadee said, “but I’m a better cook than Coyote.”
The child nodded, stuffing.
“I don’t know why I made Horse go there,” she said after she had stuffed. “I got just as scared as he did when I saw it. But now I feel again like I have to go back there. But I want to stay here. With my friends, with Coyote. I don’t understand.”
“When we lived together, it was all one place,” Chickadee said in her slow, soft home-voice. “But now the others, the new people, they live apart. And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out.… Maybe after a while longer, there’ll be only one place again, their place. And none of us here. I knew Bison, out over the mountains. I knew Antelope right here. I knew Grizzly and Graywolf, up west there. Gone. All gone. And the salmon you eat at Coyote’s house, those are the dream salmon, those are the true food; but in the rivers, how many salmon now? The rivers that were red with them in spring? Who dances, now, when the First Salmon offers himself? Who dances by the river? Oh, you should ask Coyote about all this. She knows more than I do! But she forgets.… She’s hopeless, worse than Raven; she has to piss on every post; she’s a terrible housekeeper.…” Chickadee’s voice had sharpened. She whistled a note or two, and said no more.
After a while the child asked very softly, “Who is Grandmother?”
“Grandmother,” Chickadee said. She looked at the child and ate several blackberries thoughtfully. She stroked the rug they sat on.
“If I built the fire on the rug, it would burn a hole in it,” she said. “Right? So we build the fire on sand, on dirt.… Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother.” She whistled four notes, looking up the smoke hole. “After all,” she added, “maybe all this place—the other places, too—maybe they’re all only one side of the weaving. I don’t know. I can look with one eye at a time; how can I tell how deep it goes?”
Lying that night rolled up in a blanket in Chickadee’s backyard, the child heard the wind soughing and storming in the cottonwoods down in the draw, and then slept deeply, weary from the long night before. Just at sunrise she woke. The eastern mountains were a cloudy dark red as if the level light shone through them as through a hand held before the fire. In the tobacco patch—the only farming anybody in this town did was to raise a little wild tobacco—Lizard and Beetle were singing some kind of growing song or blessing song, soft and desultory, huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh, and as she lay warm-curled on the ground, the song made her feel rooted in the ground, cradled on it and in it, so where her fingers ended and the dirt began, she did not know, as if she were dead—but she was wholly alive; she was the earth’s life. She got up dancing, left the blanket folded neatly on Chickadee’s nest and already empty bed, and danced up the hill to Bide-A-Wee. At the
half-open door, she sang:
Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking
And her knees kept a knocking and her toes kept a rocking,
Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking,
Danced by the light of the moon!
Coyote emerged, tousled and lurching, and eyed her narrowly. “Sheeeoot,” she said. She sucked her teeth and then went to splash water all over her head from the gourd by the door. She shook her head, and the water drops flew. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I have had it. I don’t know what got into me. If I’m pregnant again, at my age, oh shit. Let’s get out of town. I need a change of air.”
In the fuggy dark of the house, the child could see at least two coyote men sprawled snoring away on the bed and floor.
Coyote walked over to the old white turd and kicked it. “Why didn’t you stop me?” she shouted.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 30