An Agent of Utopia

by Andy Duncan

  So. The Senator forced himself to smile, to hold his head high. He nodded, patted Miss Bunce’s shoulder (she seemed not to relish the contact), and walked toward the door. The crowd, still silent, parted for him. He smiled at those he knew. Few smiled back. As he moved through the crowd, a murmur of conversation arose. By the time he reached the exit, the normal hubbub had returned to the Bunce Inn, the Senator’s once-favorite tavern, where he had been recruited long ago to run for clerk on the Shire First ticket. He would never set foot in the place again. He stood on the threshold, listening to the noise behind, then cut it off by closing the door.

  The night air was hot and rank and stifling. Amid the waiting wagons and carriages and mules and two-wheeled pedal devices that the smart set rode nowadays, the Senator’s little troll-cart looked foolish in the lamplight. As did his two truant bodyguards, who were leaning against a sagging, creaking carriage, locked in a passionate embrace. The Senator decided he hadn’t seen that; he had seen enough today. He cleared his throat, and the trolls leaped apart with much coughing and harrumphing.

  “Home,” the Senator snapped. Eyeing the uneven pavement, he stepped with care to the cart, sat down in it, and waited. Nothing happened. The trolls just looked at one another, shifted from foot to foot. The Senator sighed and, against his better judgment, asked: “What is it?”

  The trolls exchanged another glance. Then the one on the right threw back his shoulders—a startling gesture, given the size of the shoulders involved—and said: “Gogluk quit.” He immediately turned to the other troll and said: “There, I said it.”

  “And you know that goes double for me,” said the other troll. “Let’s go, hon. Maybe some fine purebred halfling will take this old reprobate home.”

  Numb but for his dangling right hand, which felt as swollen as a pumpkin, the Senator watched the trolls walk away arm in arm. One told the other: “Spitting on people, yet! I thought I would just die.” As they strolled out of the lamplight, the Senator rubbed his face with his left hand, massaged his wrinkled brow. He had been taught in school, long ago, that the skulls of trolls ossified in childhood, making sophisticated language skills impossible. If it wasn’t true, it ought to be. There ought to be a law. He would write one as soon as he got home.

  But how was he to get home? He’d never make it on foot, and he certainly couldn’t creep back into the tavern to ask the egregious Bracegirdle for a ride. Besides, he couldn’t see to walk at the moment; his eyes were watering. He wiped them on his sleeve. It wasn’t that he would miss the trolls, certainly not, no more than he would miss, say, the andirons, were they to rise up, snarl insults, wound him to the heart, the wretches, and abandon him. One could always buy a new set. But at the thought of the andirons, the cozy hearth, the armchair, the Senator’s eyes brimmed anew. He was so tired, and so confused; he just wanted to go home. And his hand hurt. He kept his head down as he mopped his eyes, in case of passers-by. There were no passers-by. The streetlamp flared as a buzzing insect flew into it. He wished he had fired those worthless trolls. He certainly would, if he ever saw them again.

  “Ungratefulness,” the Senator said aloud, “is the curse of this age.” A mule whickered in reply.

  Across the street, in the black expanse of the Party Field, a lone mallorn-tree was silhouetted against the starlit sky. Enchanted elven dust had caused the mallorn and all the other trees planted after the War to grow full and tall in a single season, so that within the year the Shire was once again green and beautiful—or so went the fable, which the Senator’s party had eliminated from the schoolbooks years ago. The Senator blew his nose with vigor. The Shire needed nothing from elves.

  When the tavern door banged open, the Senator felt a surge of hope that died quickly as the hulking orc-shape shambled forth. The bastard creature had looked repellent enough inside; now, alone in the lamplit street, it was the stuff of a thousand halfling nightmares, its bristling shoulders as broad as hogsheads, its knuckles nearly scraping the cobbles, a single red eye guttering in the center of its face. No, wait. That was its cigar. The orc reared back on its absurd bowlegs and blew smoke rings at the streetlamp—rings worthy of any halfling, but what of it? Even a dog can be trained, after a fashion, to dance. The orc extended its horrid manlike hand and tapped ashes into the lamp. Then, arm still raised, it swiveled its great jowly head and looked directly at the Senator. Even a half-orc could see in the dark.

  The Senator gasped. He was old and alone, no bodyguards. Now the orc was walking toward him! The Senator looked for help, found none. Had the wizard’s visit been an omen? Had the confusticated old charm-tosser left a curse behind with his sharp-toothed staff? As the Senator cowered, heard the inexorable click of the orc’s claws on the stones, his scream died in his throat—not because of any damned and bebothered wizard’s trickery, but because of fear, plain and simple fear. He somehow always had known the orcs would get him in the end. He gasped, shrank back. The orc loomed over him, its pointed head blocking the lamplight. The orc laid one awful hand, oh so gently, on the Senator’s right shoulder, the only points of contact the fingertips—rounded, mannish, hellish fingertips. The Senator shuddered as if the orc’s arm were a lightning rod. The Senator spasmed and stared and fancied the orc hand and his own injured halfling hand were flickering blue in tandem, like the ends of a wizard’s staff. The great mouth cracked the orc’s leathered face, blue-lit from below, and a voice rumbled forth like a subterranean river: “Senator? Is that you? Are you all right?”

  Sprawled there in the cart, pinned by the creature’s gentle hand as by a spear, the Senator began to cry, in great sucking sobs of rage and pain and humiliation, as he realized this damned orc was not going to splinter his limbs and crush his skull and slurp his brains. How far have I fallen, the Senator thought. This morning the four corners of the Shire were my own ten toes, to wiggle as I pleased. Tonight I’m pitied by an orc.

  The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  A railroad bull was in charge, of course, cane-tapping around the planks till he tripped the trap, feeling two-handed up the post to find the rope-notch, hissing to himself like a slow leak.

  Under the planks, six coppers were planted in a circle like fenceposts. One had a bumble drilling into his shin, kicking the sawdust out behind, and another sprouted dandelions from his knobby knees. Everything grows in the Rock Candy country, even a copper’s dried-out joints. I once had a toothpick bloom halfway to my mouth, and that is true, as true as the average.

  Penned inside the cop-ring, a little leather-faced woman in too-big overalls and a too-small porkpie hat sat in the grass, sharp chin on her knees and skinny arms wrapped around. She cussed a blue streak in a tired, raspy boy-voice, like she had wearied of it. “You withered-up hollowed-out skanktified old shits, old sons.”

  Me, I’d been down to the lake for a bowl of stew and was feeling belly-warm and prideful. Some miracles get stale with use and others go bad quicker than a Baptist flounder, but friends, a bowl of Big Rock stew—whether scooped from a lake or poured from a falls or welling up out of a crack in the rocks—will stay a miracle till the world looks level. So I was full of stew and full of myself when I stumbled upon the scaffold in the making. I sat beneath a cigarette tree and picked a good one and fired it up by looking at it, and puffing I called from the side of my mouth: “What’s happening here, Muckle?”

  The bull quit sniffing along the fat rope long enough to yell, “What’s it look like?”—not that he knew himself, all the railroad police being blind since birth, if birth they could claim. They were all just alike, but only one came around at any given time, and he always answered to Muckle, so whether Muckle was the full-time name of an individual or a sort of a migrating title like a Cherokee talking stick I’d given up wondering long before.

  The setting sun flashed off Muckle’s dark glasses as he sniffed his way to just the right spot. “Ahhh,” he said, gnawed the rope to mark the place, and started threadi
ng it through the notch.

  “What has the lady done?” I asked.

  “It ain’t what Dula’s done, Railroad Pete,” Muckle replied. “It’s what Dula wants to do.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Dula wants to.” He shuddered. “Dula’s trying to.” He spat. “Dula’s hankering to, angling to, ootching and boosting to . . . work.”

  “Work!” snorted the prisoner.

  “Work!” groaned the coppers.

  “Work!” rumbled the far-off Big Rock Candy, its glittery crystal slopes to the north for a change. The ground shimmied. The air cooled. Mr. Muckle’s dickey flew up out of his Sunday vest with a ping. A dark black cloud ate the sun and rained down on us a flock of roasted ducks, burnt on one side and raw on the other.

  “I ain’t neither,” Dula said.

  “You see?” Muckle screeched. “You see what the world is coming to? Not a one of them ducks edible!” He shoved his dickey back down and straightened his celluloid collar. The bulls always dressed as if for a railroad owner’s ball—I suppose to show up the rest of us stiffs. “Shrimp bushes blooming with razors, chocolate streams hardening up, ice cream turning sour before it’s even out of the cow—and it’s all the fault of this one, a-using around here, a-using around there, all over Hell’s Half Acre, trying to talk perfectly good people into what? Into hitching the Eastbound!”

  At that my cigarette lost its taste, and I put it out with a look. Heard screaming in the distance late at night, the Eastbound left your bones rattling like rails; even hearing its name at sunset was enough to give a grown man the greeny ganders. The old-timers said we’d all ridden the Eastbound to get here, and were blessed to have forgotten the details. I looked at Dula again, the set of her jaw. There was something in her face I couldn’t name, something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  Muckle tied the noose, his face paying no attention to his hands. They were like two crabs fighting. “There ain’t no way to ride no Eastbound no how,” Muckle went on, addressing the topmost cigarette on the tree, “if you don’t scheme and run and sweat and jump and climb and hide and fight and kill and that’s work and to hell with it.”

  “Hell,” groaned the coppers.

  “Hell,” moaned the Big Rock Candy, and blew a little airish fart. A pelter of peanuts came down, skittered off Muckle’s hat brim.

  “Pah! Poodle dogs,” Dula muttered. “Keep on yapping, you pissant poodle dogs.”

  Muckle laughed like a cat getting cut the long way. No one had been hanged in the Big Rock country since the days of the one-page almanac, and he seemed to be having a high time reintroducing the custom. I’d heard many a tramp say, “Hang me if I ever work again,” but I never took it, you know, for law.

  I had decided to roll my own, so I snatched a paper from a passing breeze, pinched some loose tobacco off the ground, and set to work. I needed to watch that no more than Muckle needed to look at his rope-ties, so I regarded the prisoner with the edge of my eye. I had identified that long-gone thing in her face. It was need. Everything a human could want lying around for the taking in the Big Rock country, and there was a face full of need. Seeing it was like climbing into a boxcar halfway between Goddamn and Nowhere and being greeted in the cattle-smelling dark by a long-gone friend, or enemy.

  “Got it figured full and complete, do you, Muckle?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “Working is a capital offense, is it?”

  “That it is, Railroad Pete.”

  “Trying to work, even?”

  “So it is said. So it must be.”

  “Well, then, Muckle,” I said, watching the little fenced-in woman watching me, “who’ll be doing the honors next?”

  Muckle’s hands stopped, but his head swiveled on its wattled neck and trained those eyeless panes at me. I fancied I saw my cigarette reflected in those black squares, but maybe that flame wasn’t on my side of the glass at all. “Whazzat?” Muckle snapped. “Honors? What honors?”

  “Well, if you yourself hang this gal, then one of the coppers has to hang you next. Because all this time I’ve been sitting here in the shade taking my ease and smoking freeweed, you’ve been out there working your ass off and fixing to work even harder, hauling an easily five-stone gal, if she’s a day, completely off the ground and holding her there till she’s strangled dead. I call that work, and I say more stew for me.”

  Muckle’s jaw worked away, but no sound came out. The coppers gaped, frozen in place like a prairie-dog town. I do not believe the wood in a copper stops at the hips. The Big Rock Candy heaved again, and we all got a nice dusting of powdered sugar. I knocked it off with my hat.

  “But what truly gets up between my back teeth,” I went on, “is this. However much work it takes you, Muckle, to hang this woman, why, it’s going to take two or three times that much to hang you. So whichever copper does that job will just have to take his turn in the noose, and the copper after that, and the copper after that, and before you know it, Muckle, we’ll be completely out of coppers in these parts, save one. So I’ll have to do the honors on him, and then I’ll have to find a passerby to do me, and so on and so forth, and directly, why, this whole country will be put plumb out of business. No, Muckle, I’ve studied it and studied it, and I frankly see no way out, once you’ve set that hellish, inexorable vortex in motion.”

  Coppers never talk much, but after a long quiet time one of them rasped: “You could hang yourself, Muckle, after you do the gal, and break the cycle.”

  “Shut up!” Muckle said.

  “We’d have to work to bury him,” another copper said.

  “Shut up!”

  “Not if the cyclone got him,” the first copper said. “The cyclone comes through here every day about five.”

  “We’d have to throw him in it, though, and we might miss.”

  “I’ll do some throwing, if you don’t shut up!”

  “Maybe the gal would hang her own self.”

  “Hey, gal,” the first copper called out. “You ain’t feeling a mite sad, by any chance?”

  Dula looked at me, and I looked back at her. “No, sir,” she said, “feeling right as rain,” and a little grape spo-de-o-dee spattered down from the sky. Some say the weather is the only thing you can do something about in the Big Rock country, just by thinking.

  Well, the day got on, as days will, and those coppers jawed and hashed and gnawed the problem so long they took root where they were standing, and Dula just crawled out of the little thicket they had made. Bluebirds landed on their heads and sang a tune. Muckle had a hissy fit, threw down his rope, and stomped down the scaffold stairs, shaking his cane and cussing us both to a fare-thee-well.

  “Well, ma’am,” I told her. “I’m afraid it’s the jailhouse for both of us.”

  We had a nice get-acquainted visit, she and I, as we led Muckle to the jailhouse, him being blind and all. We got the history out of the way early, since we couldn’t remember peaturkey about our lives before we landed in the Big Rock country, and of course by definition nothing had happened since—just eating and sleeping and screwing around, and what is that to talk about? So we helped Muckle over the alky streams and the chocolate rocks and yessired him when he told us we should meditate on our sins, but we otherwise just goofed around. We laughed and laughed when we flushed a little covey of quail with bacon and fennel and buttermilk mashed potatoes, and later I blew her a smoke ring that turned into a spinning pineapple slice. She caught it on her index finger, and when she bit, the juice went everywhere.

  It was a nice tin jailhouse, shining in the sun. Muckle shoved us in and slammed the door and felt around for the latch and locked it and threw away the key, which I caught and handed back to him as we came out the other door. “Much obliged,” he muttered. “And you can just hush that laughing, Railroad Pete!” he called after us, as we strolled off nudging hips and elbows and
meditating on sins yet to come. “Think you’re so damn smart. Well, this troublemaker here is your lookout now!” Like I didn’t know that already.

  Sex in the Big Rock country, like all the other good things in life, is just plumb great, and we’ll leave it at that. And when it’s done and you roll over, right there at your elbow is a frosty mug of beer or a Cuban cigar or a straight-from-the-oven doughnut with the hot glaze sliding down. The system ain’t noways Christian, but it’s pretty damn workable all the same, and for a few weeks there Dula and I worked it for all it was worth.

  But Dula wouldn’t stop talking about the Eastbound and how to catch it, and about that fabulous land we couldn’t even remember, but where—if you believed the tales—everything worth having had to be earned, was so hard to get, in fact, that no two people had everything the same.

  “But Dula, if that’s how those poor suckers have it, why, we’re living the life they dream of, right here.”

  “How do you know what they dream of? Do you remember what you dreamed of, when you were there? I don’t know about you, Pete, but I damn sure wasn’t dreaming about a talking mountain that strolls around firing off cherry jawbreakers.”

  “Woof!” huffed the Big Rock Candy.

  When I woke up at night, Dula might be sitting beside me, framed by stars, stroking my face, or she might be halfway up a licorice tree, hoping to glimpse the Eastbound as it screamed by in the distance.

  We fought some.

  One night I woke up and sat up at the same time, all a-sweat and chilled. I’d had my first nightmare, maybe the first nightmare ever in the Big Rock country. I turned to tell Dula about it, but she was gone, and so was the memory of the dream. Only it wasn’t a dream, I knew; it was my past. It was me.

  “Who am I?” I said aloud.

  “Who!” said the Big Rock Candy. “Whooo! Whoooooooooo!”