by Anthology
Tell her, said the Angel. To stall for time, I knew, keep her occupied.
I was born funny, I said. I had both sexes.
"A hermaphrodite!" she exclaimed with real delight.
She loves freaks, the Angel said, but she didn't pay any attention.
There was an operation, but things went wrong. They kept trying to fix it as I got older but my body didn't have the right kind of chemistry or something. My parents were ashamed. I left after awhile.
"You poor thing," she said, not meaning anything like that. "You were just what darling, here, needed, weren't you? Just a little nothing, no demands, no desires. For anything." Her voice got all hard. "They could probably fix you up now, you know."
I don't want it. I left all that behind a long time ago, I don't need it.
"Just the sort of little pet that would be perfect for you," she said to the Angel. "Sorry I have to tear you away. But I can't get along without you now. Life is so boring. And empty. And--" She sounded puzzled. "And like there's nothing more to live for since you left me."
That's not me, said the Angel. That's you.
"No, it's a lot of you, too, and you know it. You know you're addictive to human beings, you knew that when you came here when they sent you here. Hey, you, pet, do you know what his crime was, why they sent him to this little backwater penal colony of a planet?"
Yeah, I know, I said. I really didn't, but I wasn't going to tell her that.
"What do you think about that, little pet neuter?" she said gleefully, hitting the accelerator pedal and speeding up. "What do you think of the crime of refusing to mate?"
The Angel made a sort of an out-loud groan and lunged at the steering wheel. The car swerved wildly and I fell backwards, the silvery stuff from the Angel going all over me. I tried to keep scooping it into my mouth the way I'd been doing, but it was flying all over the place now. I heard the crunch as the tires left the road and went onto the shoulder. Something struck the side of the car, probably the guard rail, and made it fishtail, throwing me down on the floor. Up front the woman was screaming and cursing and the Angel wasn't making a sound, but, in my head, I could hear him sort of keening. Whatever happened, this would be it. The Angel had told me all that time ago, after I'd taken him home, that they didn't last long after they got here, the exiles from his world and other worlds. Things tended to happen to them, even if they latched on to someone like me or the woman. They'd be in accidents or the people here would kill them. Like antibodies in a human body rejecting something or fighting a disease. At least I belonged here, but it looked like I was going to die in a car accident with the Angel and the woman both. I didn't care.
The car swerved back onto the highway for a few seconds and then pitched to the right again. Suddenly there was nothing under us and then we thumped down on something, not road but dirt or grass or something, bombing madly up and down. I pulled myself up on the back of the seat just in time to see the sign coming at us at an angle. The corner of it started to go through the windshield on the woman's side and then all I saw a long time was the biggest display of silver fireworks ever.
It was hard to be gentle with him. Every move hurt but I didn't want to leave him sitting in the car next to her, even if she was dead. Being in the back seat had kept most of the glass from flying into me but I was still shaking some out of my hair and the impact hadn't done much for my back.
I laid the Angel out on the lumpy grass a little ways from the car and looked around. We were maybe a hundred yards from the highway, near a road that ran parallel to it. It was dark but I could still read the sign that had come through the windshield and split the woman's head in half. It said, Construction Ahead, Reduce Speed. Far off on the other road, I could see a flashing yellow light and at first I was afraid it was the police or something but it stayed where it was and I realized that must be the construction.
"Friend," whispered the Angel, startling me. He'd never spoken aloud to me, not directly.
Don't talk, I said, bending over him, trying to figure out some way I could touch him, just for comfort. There wasn't anything else I could do now.
"I have to," he said, still whispering. "It's almost all gone. Did you get it?"
Mostly, I said. Not all.
"I meant for you to have it."
I know.
"I don't know that it will really do you any good." His breath kind of bubbled in his throat. I could see something wet and shiny on his mouth but it wasn't silver fireworks. "But it's yours. You can do as you like with it. Live on it the way I did. Get what you need when you need it. But you can live as a human, too. Eat. Work. However, whatever."
I'm not human, I said. I'm not any more human than you, even if I do belong here.
"Yes, you are, little friend. I haven't made you any less human," he said, and coughed some. "I'm not sorry I wouldn't mate. I couldn't mate with my own. It was too ... I don't know, too little of me, too much of them, something. I couldn't bond, it would have been nothing but emptiness. The Great Sin, to be unable to give, because the universe knows only less or more and I insisted that it would be good or bad. So they sent me here. But in the end, you know, they got their way, little friend." I felt his hand on me for a moment before it fell away. "I did it after all. Even if it wasn't with my own."
The bubbling in his throat stopped. I sat next to him for a while in the dark. Finally I felt it, the Angel stuff: It was kind of fluttery-churny, like too much coffee on an empty stomach. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass, shivering. Maybe some of it was shock but I don't think so. The silver fireworks started, in my head this time, and with them came a lot of pictures I couldn't understand. Stuff about the Angel and where he'd come from and the way they mated. It was a lot like how we'd been together, the Angel and me. They looked a lot like us but there were a lot of differences, too, things I couldn't make out. I couldn't make out how they'd sent him here, either--by light, in, like, little bundles or something. It didn't make any sense to me, but I guessed an Angel could be light. Silver fireworks.
I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, it felt like I'd been lying there a long time. It was still dark, though. I sat up and reached for the Angel, thinking I ought to hide his body.
He was gone. There was just a sort of wet sandy stuff where he'd been.
I looked at the car and her. All that was still there. Somebody was going to see it soon. I didn't want to be around for that.
Everything still hurt but I managed to get to the other road and start walking back toward the city. It was like I could feel it now, the way the Angel must have, as though it were vibrating like a drum or ringing like a bell with all kinds of stuff, people laughing and crying and loving and hating and being afraid and everything else that happens to people. The stuff that the Angel took in, energy, that I could take in now if I wanted.
And I knew that taking it in that way, it would be bigger than anything all those people had, bigger than anything I could have had if things hadn't gone wrong with me all those years ago.
I wasn't so sure I wanted it. Like the Angel, refusing to mate back where he'd come from. He wouldn't, there, and I couldn't, here. Except now I could do something else.
I wasn't so sure I wanted it. But I didn't think I'd be able to stop it, either, any more than I could stop my heart from beating. Maybe it wasn't really such a good thing or a right thing. But it was like the Angel said: the universe doesn't know good or bad, only less or more.
Yeah. I heard that.
I thought about the waitress with no face. I could find them all now, all the ones from the other places, other worlds that sent them away for some kind of alien crimes nobody would have understood. I could find them all. They threw away their outcasts, I'd tell them, but here, we kept ours. And here's how. Here's how you live in a universe that only knows less or more.
I kept walking toward the city.
THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY
Karen Fowler
His fi
rst reaction is that I just can't deal with the larger theoretical issues. He's got this new insight he wants to call the Displacement Theory and I can't grasp it. Your basic, quiet, practical minority sidekick. The limited edition. Kato. Spock. Me. But this is not true.
I still remember the two general theories we were taught on the reservation which purported to explain the movement of history. The first we named the Great Man Theory. Its thesis was that the critical decisions in human development were made by individuals, special people gifted in personality and circumstance. The second we named the Wave Theory. It argued that only the masses could effectively determine the course of history. Those very visible individuals who appeared as leaders of the great movements were, in fact, only those who happened to articulate the direction which had already been chosen. They were as much the victims of the process as any other single individual. Flotsam. Running Dog and I used to be able to debate this issue for hours.
It is true that this particular question has ceased to interest me much. But a correlative question has come to interest me more. I spent most of my fortieth birthday sitting by myself, listening to Pachelbel's Canon, over and over, and I'm asking myself: Are some people special? Are some people more special than others? Have I spent my whole life backing the wrong horse?
I mean, it was my birthday and not one damn person called.
Finally, about four o'clock in the afternoon, I gave up and I called him. "Eh, Poncho," I say. "What's happening?"
"Eh, Cisco," he answers. "Happy birthday."
"Thanks," I tell him. I can't decide whether I am more pissed to know he remembered but didn't call than I was when I thought he forgot.
"The big four-o," he says. "Wait a second, buddy. Let me go turn the music down." He's got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. He's always got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. I'm not saying the man has a problem, but the last time we were in Safeway together he claimed to see a woman being kidnapped by a silver baron over in frozen foods. He pulled the flip top off a Tab and lobbed the can into the ice cream. "Cover me," he shouts, and runs an end pattern with the cart through the soups. I had to tell everyone he was having a Vietnam flashback.
And the mask. There are times and seasons when a mask is useful; I'm the first to admit that. It's Thanksgiving, say, and you're an Indian so it's never been one of your favorite holidays, and you've got no family because you spent your youth playing the supporting role to some macho creep who couldn't commit, so here you are, standing in line to see Rocky IV, and someone you know walks by. I mean, I've been there. But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There's an element of exhibitionism in it. A large element. If you ask me.
So now he's back on the phone. He sighs. "God," he says. "I miss those thrilling days of yesteryear."
See? We haven't talked twenty seconds and already the subject is his problems. His ennui. His angst. "I'm having an affair," I tell him. Two years ago I wouldn't have said it. Two years ago he'd just completed his est training and he would have told me to take responsibility for it. Now he's into biofeedback and astrology. Now we're not responsible for anything.
"Yeah?" he says. He thinks for a minute. "You're not married," he points out.
I can't see that this is relevant. "She is," I tell him.
"Yeah?" he says again, only this "yeah" has a nasty quality to it; this "yeah" tells me someone is hoping for sensationalistic details. This is not the "yeah" of a concerned friend. Still, I can't help playing to it. For years I've been holding this man's horse while he leaps onto its back from the roof. For years I've been providing cover from behind a rock while he breaks for the back door. I'm forty now. It's time to get something back from him. So I hint at the use of controlled substances. We're talking peyote and cocaine. I mention pornography. Illegally imported. From Denmark. Of course, it's not really my affair. Can you picture me? My affair is quiet and ardent. I borrowed this affair from another friend. It shows you the lengths I have to go to before anyone will listen to me.
I may finally have gone too far. He's really at a loss now. "Women," he says finally. "You can't live with them and you can't live without them." Which is a joke, coming from him. He had that single-man-raising-his-orphaned-nephew-all-alone schtick working so smoothly the women were passing each other on the way in and out the door. Or maybe it was the mask and the leather. What do women want? Who has a clue?
"Is that it?" I ask him. "The sum total of your advice? She won't leave her husband. Man, my heart is broken."
"Oh," he says. There's a long pause. "Don't let it show," he suggests. Then he sighs. Again. "I miss that old white horse," he tells me. And you know what I do? I hang up on him. And you know what he doesn't do? He doesn't call me back.
It really hurts me.
So his second reaction, now that I don't want to listen to him explaining his new theories to me, is to say that I seem to be sulking about something, he can't imagine what. And this is harder to deny.
The day after my birthday I went for a drive in my car, a little white Saab with personalized license plates. KEMO, they say. Maybe the phone is ringing, maybe it's not. I feel better when I don't know. So, he misses his horse. Hey, I've never been the same since that little pinto of mine joined the Big Roundup, but I try not to burden my friends with this. I try not to burden my friends with anything. I just nurse them back to health when the Cavendish gang leaves them for dead. I just come in the middle of the night with the medicine man when little Britt has a fever and it's not responding to Tylenol. I just organize the surprise party when a friend turns forty.
You want to bet even Attila the Hun had a party on his fortieth? You want to bet he was one hard man to surprise? And who blew up the balloons and had everyone hiding under the rugs and in with the goats? This name is lost forever.
I drove out into the country, where every cactus holds its memory for me, where every outcropping of rock once hid an outlaw. Ten years ago the terrain was still so rough I would have had to take the International Scout. Now it's a paved highway straight to the hanging tree. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, turned off the motor, and just sat there. I was remembering the time Ms. Peggy Cooper stumbled into the Wilcox bank robbery looking for her little girl who'd gone with friends to the swimming hole and hadn't bothered to tell her mania. We were on our way to see Colonel Davis at Fort Comanche about some cattle rustling. We hadn't heard about the bank robbery. Which is why we were taken completely by surprise.
My pony and I were eating the masked man's dust, as usual, when something hit me from behind. Arnold Wilcox, a heavy-set man who sported a five o'clock shadow by eight in the morning, jumped me from the big rock overlooking the Butter-field trail, and I went down like a sack of potatoes. I heard horses converging on us from the left and the right and that hypertrophic white stallion of his took off like a big bird. I laid one on Arnold's stubbly jaw, but he cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol and I couldn't tell you what happened next.
I don't come to until it's after dark and I'm trussed up like a turkey. Ms. Cooper is next to me, and her hands are tied behind her back with a red bandanna and there's a rope around her feet. She looks disheveled but pretty; her eyes are wide and I can tell she's not too pleased to be lying here next to an Indian. Her dress is buttoned up to the chin so I'm thinking, At least, thank God, they've respected her. It's cold, even as close together as we are. The Wilcoxes are all huddled around the fire, counting money, and the smoke is a straight white line in the sky you could see for miles. So this is more good news, and I'm thinking the Wilcoxes were always a bunch of dumb-ass honkies when it came to your basic woodlore. I'm wondering how they got it together to pull off a bank job, when I hear a horse's hooves and my question is answered. Pierre Cardeaux, Canadian French, hops off the horse's back and goes straight to the fire and stamps it out.
"Imbeciles!" he tells them, only he's got this heavy accent so it comes out "Eembeece
els."
Which insults the Wilcoxes a little. "Hold on there, hombre," Andrew Wilcox says. "Jes' because we followed your plan into the bank and your trail for the getaway doesn't make you the boss here." Pierre pays him about as much notice as you do an ant your horse is about to step on. He comes over to us and puts his hand under Ms. Cooper's chin, sort of thoughtfully. She spits at him and he laughs.
"Spunk," he says. "I like that." I mean, I suppose that's what he says, because that's what they always say, but the truth is, with his accent, I don't understand a word.
Andrew Wilcox isn't finished yet. He's got this big chicken leg he's eating and it's dribbling onto his chin, so he wipes his arm over his face. Which just spreads the grease around more, really, and anyway, he's got this hunk of chicken stuck between his front teeth, so Pierre can hardly keep a straight face when he talks to him. "I understand why we're keeping the woman," Andrew says. "Cause she has—uses. But the Injun there. He's just going to be baggage. I want to waste him."
"Mon ami," says Pierre. "Even pour vous, thees stupiditee lives me spitchless." He's kissing his fingers to illustrate the point as if he were really French and not just Canadian French and has probably never drunk really good wine in his life. I'm lying in the dust, and whatever they've bound my wrists with is cutting off the circulation so my hands feel like someone is jabbing them with porcupine needles. Even now, I can remember smelling the smoke which wasn't there anymore and the Wilcoxes who were and the lavender eau de toilette that Ms. Cooper used. And horses and dust and sweat. These were the glory days, but whose glory? you may well ask, and even if I answered, what difference would it make?
Ms. Cooper gets a good whiff of Andrew Wilcox, and it makes her cough.
"He's right, little brother," says Russell Wilcox, the runt of the litter at three-hundred-odd pounds and a little quicker on the uptake than the rest of the family. "You ever beared tell of a man who rides a white horse, wears a black mask, and shoots a very pricey kind of bullet? This here Injun is his compadre."