by Gene Wolfe
“It says so.”
“It says the department store is selling percale sheets twenty percent under cost too.”
Richard put down his part of the paper and went to the bookcase.
After five minutes work with pencil and paper he said, “Bet?”
“What?”
“I’ve been making some calculations. According to the almanac—”
“That’s an old one. Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“It still ought to be pretty accurate, and it says there are—get this—two hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and thirty-six thousand harvested acres in the United States. Now there’s six hundred and forty acres in a square mile, so that means about four hundred and sixty-three thousand harvested square miles. Only the gross area of the United States is three million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty square miles.”
“So it isn’t ninety percent. You just proved it yourself.”
“I’m not arguing about the exact figure, but look at the size of the thing. Say that half as much is taken up for buildings and backyards as for all the farms. That still leaves over three million square miles unaccounted for. More than three quarters of the country.”
“Richard?”
“Yes?”
“Richard, do you really think that’s really there? That everybody wouldn’t go out and grab it?”
“The facts—”
“Dick, those are talking facts—they’re not real. It’s like what you were telling me when we bought the car, about the miles on the little thing—”
“Odometer.”
“You remember? You said they didn’t mean anything. It said thirteen thousand but you said it might be fifteen or twenty thousand really. Anything. Or like when they raised the city income tax. They said it was inflation, but if it was inflation everybody’s pay would go up too so the city’d get more—only they took another half percent anyway, remember? You could prove they didn’t need it, but it didn’t mean anything.”
“But it has to be somewhere.”
“You really think it’s out there? With deer on it, and bears? Dick, it’s silly.”
“Three million square miles.”
“When we drove to Baltimore last summer to see my mother, did you see any of it?”
Richard shook his head.
“When you flew to Cleveland for the company—”
“It was so foggy. Everything was socked in, and you couldn’t see anything but haze.”
“From factories! See?” Betty went back to her paper.
That night The Wizard of Oz was shown on television for the two hundredth time. Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow.”
Richard took to going on drives. He drove, sometimes for two or three or four hours, before coming home from work. He drove weekends, and once when Betty spent a weekend with her mother he drove from six A.M. Saturday until twelve P.M. Sunday and put sixteen hundred miles on the car. He knew all the best ways into and out of the city, and the best places for food and coffee. Once he was the first person to report an accident to the state highway patrol; once he helped college girls change a tire.
At a roadside zoo he made friends with three deer in a pen—a buck with fine antlers nuzzled his hand for popcorn, and Richard said softly, “I bet if they’d let you out you’d find some of them.” Later he asked the operator of the zoo if any animals ever escaped.
“Don’t worry about that.” (He was a desiccated man of fifty who wore checked sports shirts.) “We keep everything secure here. Look at it from my angle—those animals are valuable to me. You think I’d let them get out where they could hurt people?”
Richard said, “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just wondered if any of them ever got loose.”
“Not long as I’ve had the place, and I been here eight years.”
Later Richard asked the boy who pitched hay into the deer’s pen, and he said, “Last year. The little buck. I guess the big one was giving him a rough time, and he jumped the fence.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got out on the highway and got hit by a car.”
Richard began measuring the farm woodlots he passed, and the little acres of waste ground. He carried a hundred-foot tape in the car and picked up hitchhikers—mostly college boys with beaded headbands and fringed buckskin shirts—who would help him, holding one end of the tape while Richard trotted past five or six trees to put the other at the margin of a county road.
He stopped more and more often to examine the bodies of dead animals. Betty asked for a trial separation, and he agreed.
He bought four new tires and had his wheel bearings repacked.
At a roadhouse he paid a three-dollar cover and seventy-five cents for beer to watch a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a feather in her hair being undressed by a trained raccoon. The girl was called Princess Running Bare, and after Richard had given the waitress five dollars more she sat at his table and sipped coffee royal for half an hour. “All us Indians are alcoholics,” Princess Running Bare said, and she said she was half French Canadian and half Cree, and had been born in a Montreal slum. Richard tried to call Betty’s mother’s from a telephone booth next to the bar, but no one answered. He left the roadhouse and drove all night.
Outside a steel-making town he took the wrong lane of a three-pronged freeway fork and found himself rushing, with a hundred other cars, in a direction in which he had no wish to go. He pulled off at a service park and asked the attendant.
“Lots of them does that,” the attendant said, pulling at the bill of his green cap. “You want to go—” and he waved in the direction from which Richard had come.
“Yes,” Richard said. He named the Interstate he wished to use, which was not the one he was on. “Southeast.” For some reason he added, “I want to go home.” It was about nine o’clock.
“Yeah,” the attendant said. He looked around conspiratorially. “Tell you what. Out that way ‘bout three-quarters of a mile is the eastbound lanes.” He waved an arm toward the back of the service park, where uneven, down-sloping ground was thick with dead grass. “Know what I mean? See, this here is four lanes goin’ west and over there is where they come back. Now if you keep going the way you are it’s seventeen miles until you can get off and cross over. But sometimes people just jump their tires over that little curb at the back of the station and drive across.”
“I see,” Richard said.
“Only when you come in you come into the fast lane, naturally. Course it’s against the law.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“And if I was you I’d walk out a little way first to make sure it isn’t too swampy. Usually dry enough, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck.”
It felt soft under his feet, but not dangerously so. The eastbound lanes, presumably a thousand yards or so ahead, were not visible, and as he walked the gentle slope buried the westbound lanes behind him, and at last even the red roof of the service park. The distant noises of traffic mingled with the sound of the wind. “Here,” he said to himself. “Here.”
His shoes crushed the soft tunnels of moles. He looked up and saw a bird that might have been a hawk circling. An old, rusted hubcap lying on its face held a cup of water, and mosquito larvae, and he thought of it springing from the wheel of its car and rolling, rolling all this distance across the empty ground. It seemed a long way.
At the top of the next rise he could see the eastbound lanes, and that the rest of the ground was dry enough to drive over. He turned and went back, but found he had somehow lost his way, and that he was a quarter mile at least from the service park where he had left his car. He began walking back to it along the shoulder of the Interstate, but the traffic passing only a few feet to his right at ninety miles an hour frightened him. He moved away from it, and the ground became really swampy, the mud sticking to his shoes and insects buzzing up with each step he took; so that he went back to the shoulder of the highway, still afraid.
<
br /> CHRISTMAS EVE
The War Beneath the Tree
“It’s Christmas Eve, Commander Robin,” the Spaceman said. “You’d better go to bed, or Santa won’t come.”
Robin’s mother said, “That’s right, Robin. Time to say good night.”
The little boy in blue pajamas nodded, but made no move to rise.
“Kiss me,” said Bear. Bear walked his funny, waddly walk around the tree and threw his arms about Robin. “We have to go to bed. I’ll come too.” It was what he said every night.
Robin’s mother shook her head in amused despair. “Listen to them,” she said. “Look at him, Bertha. He’s like a little prince surrounded by his court. How is he going to feel when he’s grown and can’t have transistorized sycophants to spoil him all the time?”
Bertha the robot maid nodded her own almost human head as she put the poker back in its stand. “That’s right, Ms. Jackson. That’s right for sure.”
The Dancing Doll took Robin by the hand, making an arabesque penché of it. Now Robin rose. His guardsmen formed up and presented arms.
“On the other hand,” Robin’s mother said, “they’re children only such a short time.”
Bertha nodded again. “They’re only young once, Ms. Jackson. That’s for sure. All right if I tell these little cute toys to help me straighten up after he’s asleep?”
The Captain of the Guardsmen saluted with his silver saber, the Largest Guardsman beat the tattoo on his drum, and the rest of the guardsmen formed a double file.
“He sleeps with Bear,” Robin’s mother said.
“I can spare Bear. There’s plenty of others.”
The Spaceman touched the buckle of his antigravity belt and soared to a height of four feet like a graceful, broad-shoulded balloon. With the Dancing Doll on his left and Bear on his right, Robin toddled off behind the guardsmen. Robin’s mother ground out her last cigarette of the evening, winked at Bertha, and said, “I suppose I’d better turn in too. You needn’t help me undress, just pick up my things in the morning.”
“Yes’um. Too bad Mr. Jackson ain’t here, it bein’ Christmas Eve and you expectin’ an’ all.”
“He’ll be back from Brazil in a week—I’ve told you already. And Bertha, your speech habits are getting worse and worse. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be a French maid for a while?”
“Maize none, Ms. Jackson. I have too much trouble talkin’ to the men that comes to the door when I’m French.”
“When Mr. Jackson gets his next promotion, we’re going to have a chauffeur,” Robin’s mother said. “He’s going to be Italian, and he’s going to stay Italian.”
Bertha watched her waddle out of the room. “All right, you lazy toys! You empty them ashtrays into the fire an’ get everythin’ put away. I’m goin’ to turn myself off, but the next time I come on, this room better be straight or there’s goin’ to be some broken toys around here.”
She watched long enough to see the Gingham Dog dump the largest ashtray on the crackling logs, the Spaceman float up to straighten the magazines on the coffee table, and the Dancing Doll begin to sweep the hearth. “Put yourselfs in your box,” she told the guardsmen, and turned off.
In the smallest bedroom, Bear lay in Robin’s arm. “Be quiet,” said Robin.
“I am quiet,” said Bear.
“Every time I am almost gone to sleep, you squiggle.”
“I don’t,” said Bear.
“You do.”
“Sometimes you have trouble going to sleep too, Robin,” said Bear.
“I’m having trouble tonight,” Robin countered meaningfully.
Bear slipped from under his arm. “I want to see if it’s snowing again.” He climbed from the bed to an open drawer, and from the open drawer to the top of the dresser. It was snowing.
Robin said, “Bear, you have a circuit loose.” It was what his mother sometimes said to Bertha.
Bear did not reply.
“Oh, Bear,” Robin said sleepily, a moment later. “I know why you’re antsy. It’s your birthday tomorrow, and you think I didn’t get you anything.”
“Did you?” Bear asked.
“I will,” Robin said. “Mother will take me to the store.” In half a minute his breathing became the regular, heavy sighing of a sleeping child.
Bear sat on the edge of the dresser and looked at him. Then he said under his breath, “I can sing Christmas carols.” It had been the first thing he had ever said to Robin, one year ago. He spread his arms. All is calm. All is bright. It made him think of the lights on the tree and the bright fire in the living room. The Spaceman was there, but because he was the only toy who could fly, none of the others liked the Spaceman much. The Dancing Doll was there too. The Dancing Doll was clever, but, well … He could not think of the word.
He jumped down into the drawer on top of a pile of Robin’s undershirts, then out of the drawer, softly to the dark, carpeted floor.
“Limited,” he said to himself. “The Dancing Doll is limited.” He thought again of the fire, then of the old toys, the Blocks Robin had had before he and the Dancing Doll and the rest had come—the Wooden Man who rode a yellow bicycle, the Singing Top.
In the living room, the Dancing Doll was positioning the guardsmen, while the Spaceman stood on the mantel and supervised. “We can get three or four behind the bookcase,” he called.
“Where they won’t be able to see a thing,” Bear growled.
The Dancing Doll pirouetted and dropped a sparkling curtsy. “We were afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said.
“Put one behind each leg of the coffee table,” Bear told her. “I had to wait until he was asleep. Now listen to me, all of you. When I call, ‘Charge!’ we must all run at them together. That’s very important. If we can, we’ll have a practice beforehand.”
The Largest Guardsman said, “I’ll beat my drum.”
“You’ll beat the enemy, or you’ll go into the fire with the rest of us,” Bear said.
Robin was sliding on the ice. His feet went out from under him and right up into the air so he fell down with a tremendous BUMP that shook him all over. He lifted his head, and he was not on the frozen pond in the park at all. He was in his own bed, with the moon shining in at the window, and it was Christmas Eve … no, Christmas Night now … and Santa was coming, maybe had already come. Robin listened for reindeer on the roof and did not hear reindeer steps. Then he listened for Santa eating the cookies his mother had left on the stone shelf by the fireplace. There was no munching or crunching. Then he threw back the covers and slipped down over the edge of his bed until his feet touched the floor. The good smells of tree and fire had come into his room. He followed them out of it ever so quietly, into the hall.
Santa was in the living room, bent over beside the tree! Robin’s eyes opened until they were as big and as round as his pajama buttons. Then Santa straightened up, and he was not Santa at all, but Robin’s mother in a new red bathrobe. Robin’s mother was nearly as fat as Santa, and Robin had to put his fingers in his mouth to keep from laughing at the way she puffed, and pushed at her knees with her hands until she stood straight.
But Santa had come! There were toys—new toys!—everywhere under the tree.
Robin’s mother went to the cookies on the stone shelf and ate half of one. Then she drank half the glass of milk. Then she turned to go back into her bedroom, and Robin retreated into the darkness of his own room until she was past. When he peeked cautiously around the door frame again, the toys—the new toys—were beginning to move.
They shifted and shook themselves and looked about. Perhaps it was because it was Christmas Eve. Perhaps it was only because the light of the fire had activated their circuits. But a Clown brushed himself off and stretched, and a Raggedy Girl smoothed her raggedy apron (with the heart embroidered on it), and a Monkey gave a big jump and chinned himself on the next-to-lowest limb of the Christmas tree. Robin saw them. And Bear, behind the hassock of Robin’s father’s chair, saw them too. Cowboys
and Native Americans were lifting the lid of a box, and a Knight opened a cardboard door (made to look like wood) in the side of another box (made to look like stone), letting a Dragon peer over his shoulder.
“Charge!” Bear called. “Charge!” He came around the side of the hassock on all fours like a real bear, running stiffly but very fast, and he hit the Clown at his wide waistline and knocked him down, then picked him up and threw him halfway to the fire.
The Spaceman had swooped down on the Monkey; they wrestled, teetering, on top of a polystyrene tricycle.
The Dancing Doll had charged fastest of all, faster even than Bear himself, in a breathtaking series of jetés, but the Raggedy Girl had lifted her feet from the floor, and now she was running with her toward the fire. As Bear struck the Clown a second time, he saw two Native Americans carrying a guardsman—the Captain of the Guardsmen—toward the fire too. The Captain’s saber had gone through one of the Native Americans and it must have disabled some circuit because the Native American walked badly; but in a moment more the Captain was burning, his red uniform burning, his hands thrown up like flames themselves, his black eyes glazing and cracking, bright metal running from him like sweat to harden among the ashes under the logs.
The Clown tried to wrestle with Bear, but Bear threw him down. The Dragon’s teeth were sunk in Bear’s left heel, but he kicked himself free. The Calico Cat was burning, burning. The Gingham Dog tried to pull her out, but the Monkey pushed him in. For a moment, Bear thought of the cellar stairs and the deep, dark cellar, where there were boxes and bundles and a hundred forgotten corners. If he ran and hid, the new toys might never find him, might never even try to find him. Years from now Robin would discover him, covered with dust.
The Dancing Doll’s scream was high and sweet, and Bear turned to face the Knight’s upraised sword.
When Robin’s mother got up on Christmas Morning, Robin was awake already, sitting under the tree with the Cowboys, watching the Native Americans do their rain dance. The Monkey was perched on his shoulder, the Raggedy Girl (programmed, the store had assured Robin’s mother, to begin Robin’s sex education) in his lap, and the Knight and the Dragon were at his feet. “Do you like the toys Santa brought you, Robin?” Robin’s mother asked.