Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

She looked tired. She always looks tired after a shift.

  “What are you doing?” she said, and looked over my shoulder at the handheld screen, and then at the topo map next to it. “Oh, Jesus, Mike. It’s on top of Peavine!”

  I could smell her shampoo. She always smells like shampoo after a shift. I didn’t want to think about what she smells like before she showers to come home.

  “He’s on top of Peavine,” I said. “Bobo’s on top of Peavine.”

  Mom shook her head. “Honey—no. You can’t go up there.”

  “Mom, he could be hurt! He could have a broken leg or something and not be able to move and just be lying there!” The signal hadn’t moved at all. If it had been lower down the mountain, I would have thought that maybe some family had taken Bobo in, but there still weren’t any houses that high. The top of Peavine was one of the few places the developers hadn’t got to yet.

  “Sweetheart,” Mom’s voice was very quiet. “Michael, turn around. Come on. Turn around and look at me.”

  I didn’t turn around. I stuffed a few more energy bars in my pack, and Mom put her hands on my shoulders and said, “Michael, he’s dead.”

  I still kept my back to her. “You don’t know that!”

  “He’s been gone for five days now, and the signal’s on top of Peavine. He has to be dead. A coyote got him and dragged him up there. He’s never gone that high by himself, has he?”

  She was right. In the year he’d had the transmitter, Bobo had never gone anywhere much, certainly not anywhere far. He’d liked exploring the neighbours’ yards, and the strips of wild land between the developments, where there were voles and mice. And coyotes.

  “So he decided to go exploring,” I said, and zipped my pack shut. “I have to go find out, anyway.”

  “Michael, there’s nothing to find out. He’s dead. You know that.”

  “I do not know that! I don’t know anything.” Except that David’s a piece of shit. I did turn around, then, because I wanted to see her face when I said, “He hasn’t been home since Monday, Mom, so how do I know what’s happened? I haven’t even seen him.”

  I guess I was up to fighting, after all. It was an awful thing to say, because it would only remind her of what we were all trying to forget, but I was still happy when she looked away from me, sharply, with a hiss of indrawn breath. She didn’t curse me out, though, even though I deserved it. She didn’t even leave the room. Instead she looked back at me, after a minute, and put her hands on my shoulders again. “You can’t go out there. Not in this weather. It wouldn’t even be safe to take the SUV, or I’d drive you—”

  “He could be lying hurt in the snow,” I said. “Or holed up somewhere, or—”

  “Michael, he’s dead.” I didn’t answer. Mom squeezed my shoulders and said gently, “And even if he were alive, you couldn’t reach him in time. Not all that way; not in this weather. Not even in the SUV.”

  “I just want to know,” I said. I looked right at her when I said it. I wasn’t saying it to be mean, this time. “I can’t stand not knowing.”

  “You do know,” she said. She sounded very sad. “You just won’t let yourself know that you know.”

  “OK,” I told her, my throat tight. “I can’t stand not seeing, then. Is that better?”

  She took her hands off my shoulders and sighed. “I’ll call Letty, but it’s not going to do any good. Is your brother home?”

  “No,” I said. David should have been home an hour before that. I wondered if he even knew that the satellites were back up.

  Mom frowned. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Do you think I care? Call the sheriff’s office, if you want to know where he is.”

  Mom gave me one of her patented warning looks. “Michael—”

  “He let Bobo out,” I said. “You know he did. He did it on purpose, just like all the other times. Do you think I care where the fuck he is?”

  “I’m going to go call Letty,” Mom said.

  David hated Bobo the minute we got him. He was my tenth birthday present from Mom and Dad. The four of us went to the pet store to pick him out, but when David saw the kittens, he just wrinkled his nose and backed up a few feet. David was always doing things like that, trying to be cool by pretending he couldn’t stand the rest of us.

  David and I used to be friends, when we were younger. We played catch and rode our bikes and dug around in the dirt pretending we were gold miners, and once David even pulled me out of the way of a rattlesnake, because I didn’t recognize the funny noise in the bushes and had gone to see what it was. I was six then, and David was ten. I’ll never forget how pale he was after he yanked me away from the rattling, how scared he looked when he yelled at me never, ever to do that again.

  The four-year difference didn’t matter back then, except that it meant David knew a lot more than I did. But once he got into high school, David didn’t want anything to do with any of us, especially his little brother. And all of a sudden, he didn’t seem so smart to me any more, even though he thought he was smarter than shit.

  I named my new kitten Bobcat, because he had that tawny coat and little tufts on his ears. His name got shortened to Bobo pretty quickly, though, and that’s what we always called him—everybody except David, who called him “Hairball”. By the time Dad died, Bobo was a really big cat: fifteen pounds, anyway, which was some comfort when David started “accidentally” letting Bobo out of the house. I figured he could hold his own against most other cats, maybe even against owls. I tried not to think about cars and coyotes, and people with guns.

  He started going over the fence right away, but he was good about coming home. He always showed up for meals, even if sometimes he brought along his own dessert: dead grasshoppers, and mice and voles, and once a baby bird. Dr Mills says that when cats bring you dead prey, it’s because they think you’re their kittens, and they’re trying to feed you.

  Bobo was a good cat, but David kept letting him out, no matter how much I yelled at him about it. Mom tried to ground David a couple of times, but it didn’t work. David just laughed. He kept letting Bobo out, and Bobo kept going over the fence. It took me four months of allowance, plus Christmas and birthday money, to save up enough for the transmitter chip and the handheld. David laughed about that, too.

  “He’s just a fucking cat, Mike. Jesus Christ, what are you spending all your money on that transmitter thing for?”

  “So I can find him if he gets lost,” I said, my stomach clenching. Even then, I could hardly stand to talk to David.

  “If he gets lost, so what? They have a million more cats at the pound.”

  And you’d let them all out if you could, wouldn’t you? “They don’t have a million who are mine,” I said, and Mom looked up from chopping onions in the kitchen. It was one of her days off.

  “David, leave him alone. You’re the one who should be paying for that transmitter, you know.” And they got into a huge fight, and David stomped out of the house and roared off in his rattletrap Jeep, and when all the dust had settled, Mom came and found me in my room. She sat down on the side of the bed and smoothed my hair back from my forehead, as if I was seven again instead of thirteen, and Bobo jumped down from where he’d been lying on my feet. He’d been licking the place where Dr Mills had put the transmitter chip in his shoulder. Dr Mills said that licking would help the wound heal, but that if Bobo started biting it, he’d have to wear one of those weird plastic collars that looks like a lamp shade. I hadn’t seen him biting it yet, but I was keeping an eye on him. When Mom sat on the bed, he resettled himself under my desk lamp, where the light from the bulb warmed the wood, and went back to licking.

  Bobo always liked warm places. Dr Mills says all cats do.

  Mom stroked my forehead, and watched Bobo for a little while, and then said, “Michael—sometimes you can know exactly where people are, and still not be able to protect them.” As if I didn’t know that. As if any of us had been able to protect Dad fro
m his own stupidity, even though the pit bosses knew exactly where he was every time he dealt a hand.

  I knew that Mom was thinking about Dad, but there was no point talking about it. Dad was gone, and Bobo was right in front of me. “I’d keep him inside if I could, Mom! If David—”

  “I know,” she said. “I know you would.” And then she gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and went downstairs again, and after a while, Hobo got off the desk and came back to lie on my feet. Watching him lick Ins shoulder, I wondered what it felt like to have a transmitter.

  I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t know.

  Letty is Mom’s best friend; they’ve known each other since second grade. Letty works for the BLM, and they have really good topo maps, so she could tell me exactly where Bobo was: just inside the mouth of an abandoned mine.

  “He could have crawled there to get out of the snow,” I said. The transmitter signal still hadn’t moved. Mom and Letty exchanged looks, and then Mom got up. “I’m going upstairs now,” she said. “You two talk.”

  “He could have,” I said.

  “Oh, Michael,” Mom said. She started to say something else, but then she stopped. “Talk to Letty,” she said, and turned and left the room.

  I listened to Mom’s footsteps going upstairs, and after a minute Letty said, “Mike, it’s not safe to go out there now. You know that, right? It wouldn’t be safe even in a truck. Not in this weather. And in the snow, you can know exactly where something is and still not be able to get at it.”

  “I know,” I said. “Like that hiker last year. The one whose body they didn’t find until spring.” Except that the hiker hadn’t had a transmitter, so they hadn’t known where he was. It didn’t matter. For ten days after he went missing, the cops and the BLM had search teams and helicopters all over the mountain, and never mind the weather.

  “Yes,” Letty said very quietly. “Exactly.” She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. “That guy was dying, you know. He was in a lot of pain all the time. His wife said later she thought maybe that was why he went out in a storm like that, while he could still go out at all.”

  Letty stopped and waited again, and I kept my head down. “He went out in bad weather,” she said finally, “near dark. It’s snowing now, and you were getting ready to hike up the mountain when your mom got home at seven-thirty. Michael?”

  “Bobo could still be alive,” I said fiercely. “It’s not like anybody else cares. It’s not like the state’s going to spend thousands of dollars on a search-and-rescue!”

  “So you were thinking—what?” Letty said. “That you’d go up there and get everybody hysterical, and get a search going, and while they were at it, they’d bring Bobo back? Was that the plan?”

  “No,” I said. I felt a little sick. I hadn’t thought about any of that. I hadn’t even thought about how I was going to get Bobo back down the mountain once I found him. “I just—I just wanted to get Bobo, that’s all. I thought I could go up there and it would be OK. I’ve hiked in snow before.”

  “At night?” Letty asked. Then she sighed. “Mike, you know, a lot of people care about Bobo. Your mom cares, and I care, and Rich Mills cares. He was a sweet cat, and we know you love him. But we care about you, too.”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. I wasn’t sitting in the mouth of a mine during a snowstorm. I wasn’t registered with the sheriff’s office.

  “You wouldn’t be fine if you went up on Peavine tonight,” Letty said. “That’s the point. And even if Bobo’s still alive—and I don’t think he can be, Michael—you can’t help him if you’re frozen to death in a gully somewhere. OK?”

  I stared at the handheld, at the stationary signal. I thought about Bobo huddled in the mouth of the mine, getting colder and colder. He hated being cold. “Is it true that when you freeze to death,” I said, “you feel warm at the end?”

  “That’s what I hear,” Letty said. “I don’t plan to test it.”

  “I don’t either. That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Good. Don’t do anything stupid, Mike. Search-and-rescue might not be able to get you out of it.”

  I felt like I was suffocating. “I was putting food in my pack. An entire box of energy bars. Ask Mom.”

  Letty shrugged. “Energy bars won’t keep you from freezing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. And one more thing: don’t you pay any mind to those Schuster and Flanking kids. They’re slime.”

  I jerked my head up. How did she know about that? She raised an eyebrow when she saw my face, and said, “People talk. Folks at my office have kids in your school. Those bullies are slime, Michael, and everybody knows it. Don’t let them give you grief. Your mother’s a good person.”

  “I know she is.” I wanted to ask Letty if she’d told Mom about Johnny and Leon, wanted to beg her not to tell Mom, but the way adults did things, that probably meant that telling Mom would be the first thing she’d do.

  Letty nodded. “Good. Just ignore them, then.”

  It was easy for her to say. She didn’t have to listen to them all the time. “That wasn’t why I was going out,” I told her. “I was going after Bobo.”

  “I know you were,” Letty said. “I also know nothing’s simple.” She folded her topo map and stood up and said, “I’d better be getting on home, before the weather gets any worse. Tell your mom I’ll talk to her tomorrow. And try to have a good weekend.” She ruffled my hair before she went, the way Mom had when Bobo got the chip. Letty hadn’t done that since I was little. I didn’t move. I just sat there, looking at the blip on the handheld.

  After a while, I went up to my room. David hadn’t come back yet, not that I cared, and Mom’s door was closed. I knew she was sleeping off the shift. I also knew she’d be out of bed and downstairs in two seconds if she heard David coming in or me going out. She’d hung the front and back doors with bells, brass things from Nepal or some place she’d got at Pier One. You couldn’t go out or come in without making a racket, and you couldn’t take the bells off the door without making one, either. “You learn to sleep lightly when you have babies,” Mom told me once, as if either me or David had been babies for years. And our windows were old, and pretty noisy in their own right. And it was snowing harder.

  So I just sat on my bed and stared out the window at the snow, trying not to think. My window faces east, away from Peavine, towards downtown. I couldn’t see the lights from the casinos because of the snow, but I knew they were there. After a while it stopped snowing, and a few stars came out between the clouds, and so did the neon: the blue and white stripes of the Peppermill, which stands apart from everything else, south of downtown, and the bright white of the Hilton a bit north of that—”the Mother ship”, Mom always calls it—and then, clustered downtown, the red of Circus Circus and the green of Harrah’s, which Mom calls Oz City, and the flashing purple of the Silverado, where Dad used to work.

  Dad loved this view; he was so proud that we could look down on the city, he couldn’t stop crowing about it to all his friends. I remember when he brought George Flanking and Howard Schuster, Leon and Johnny’s dads, into my room so they could look out my window, too. So they could see “the panorama”. That was what Dad called it. We’d never been able to see anything from our old windows, except more trailers across the way. “I’m going to get us out of this box,” Dad said when we lived there. “We’re going to live in a real house, I swear we are.” And then we moved here, to a real house, and pretty soon that wasn’t big enough for him, either.

  I shut my blinds and flopped down on my bed. Some place a dog had started to bark, and then another joined in, and another and another, until the whole damn neighbourhood was going nuts. And then I heard what must have set them off: the yipping howl of a coyote, trotting between houses looking for prey.

  When we bought our house five years ago, the street ended a block from here, and that was where the mountain started. Winter mornings, sometimes, we’d see coyotes in our dr
iveway. Now the developers have built another hundred houses up the street, with more subdivisions going up all the time: fancy houses, big, the kind we could never afford, the kind that made Dad’s eyes narrow, that made him spend hours hunched over his desk. The kind he talked about when he went out drinking with George and Howard, I guess. I don’t know who’s buying those big houses; casino and warehouse workers can’t afford places like that. Mom could, maybe, if she weren’t saving for nursing school. The only people I can think of who might live there are the ones who work for the development companies.

  So we don’t get coyotes in our driveway any more, but they’re still around.

  They travel in back of the houses, next to the six-foot fences people put around their yards. There’s still sagebrush between the subdivisions, and rabbits, and you can still follow those little strips of wildness to the really wild places, up on the mountain.

  Coyotes are unbelievably smart, and they’ll eat anything if they have to, and it doesn’t bother them when people cut the land into pieces. They like it, because the boundaries between city and wilderness are where rodents live, and rodents are about coyotes’ favourite food, aside from cats. So when we cut things up for them, there are more edges where they can hunt. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve killed most of the wolves, who eat coyotes when they can, or that coyotes look so much like dogs. They can sneak in just about any place. Dr Mills says there are coyotes living in New York City now, in Central Park. There are millions of them, all over the country.

  Ranchers and farmers hate them because they’re so hard to kill, and because even if you kill them, there are always more. But I can’t hate them, not even for eating cats. They’re smart and they’re beautiful, and they’re just trying to get by, and as far as I can tell, they’re doing a better job of it than we are. They know how to work the system. That’s what Dad thought he was doing, but he wasn’t smart enough.

  I lay there, listening to that coyote and to all the dogs, still trying not to think, but thinking anyway: about what a weird town this is, where you get casinos and coyotes both, where the developers are covering everything with new subdivisions, but there’s still a mountain where you can die. After a while it got quiet again, and I peeked out of the window and saw more snow. A while after that I heard the bells jangling downstairs, and heard Mom’s feet hitting her bedroom floor and thudding down the stairs. When she and David started yelling at each other, I pulled my pillow over my head and finally managed to go to sleep.