The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  I am holding a baby. Her eyes look like mine. How the hell did this happen, I wonder. How did we finally have a girl after all these years? After all the bad things I’ve done, how did my life turn out to be this good?

  The second sailor stops and stares down at the eagle. Never mind that, the colonel says. It’s just a dead bird. It’s none of your business. Go talk to your friend. He threw the fight.

  In the hospital bed, Pop opens his eyes and he sees the woman. There have been dozens of women. Even a wife. But this is the one. The only one, really. She’s there leaning over him.

  In the lodge, the two sailors argue. You sold us out, the second sailor says. The first says, no, I’m going to share the winnings with you guys. I don’t have any of it yet. But I will. Joe, calm down. Joe, no.

  My daughter claps her hands the first time I walk to the mailbox and back without the crutches. You are one tough old bird, she says. Yes, I say. Yes I am. Guess what kind of tough old bird. I have its feather in my room. Have I ever shown you?

  The woman leaning over Pop is at once plain and beautiful. That paradox was the first thing that drew him to her. And then her frighteningly sharp mind kept him there. More than thirty years now. She is his best friend, was several times his lover, has always been his savior. But he’s been hers too, so that’s only fair. She looks so frightened. Why? Pop wonders, and then he knows. That makes him frightened too. And angry. He’s sixty-six. That’s not old enough for this, is it?

  The two sailors fight. The first catches the second with a punch to the jaw, but then the second shoves him back into the little room behind the jumble of sod and bone. He knocks him down, then slams his head back. He does it again.

  Pop is frightened and angry for only a moment. Then he sinks away, down into warm black cotton, and can only hear the woman’s sobs from far, far away. It’s okay, Lilishka, he tries to say. It’s okay.

  My little grandson and granddaughter run out and throw their arms around my legs, and I drop all the mail. So I look up at my daughter on the porch and ask her to go get her mother to help me. But she frowns and says, Dad, don’t you remember?

  I don’t. So she begins to tell me.

  XII

  Then Pop was slapping my face, hard, back and forth on both cheeks.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “That’s more than enough, goddamn it. Get up. Get your ass up right now, soldier.”

  He grabbed my collar and tried to pull me to my feet, but he wasn’t strong enough. So he let me drop back down. My head thumped on the plywood floor, and then he started slapping me again. The light hanging above us shone around his wild white hair like a halo.

  I almost slipped back into the visions, but Pop wouldn’t stop slapping me. Finally, I came up from limbo enough to grab his right wrist with my left hand. My right fist clenched.

  “Hit me again, old man,” I said, my words slurring. “Hit me again, and I’ll lay you out.”

  Pop sat down on the edge of the cot and ran his hand back through his hair. “All right,” he said. “I’d like to see that. You tried to slug me once before, and all I got was a cool breeze. I’m beginning to think you aren’t actually capable of hitting anyone who hasn’t been paid to take a dive.”

  I struggled up to my knees, tried to make it all the way to my feet, and fell back onto one of the stools. It tipped, but Pop reached out and grabbed my sleeve to keep me from going over.

  I didn’t say thanks. I was mad at him for smacking me around. My cheeks were burning.

  Pop let go of my sleeve and then shook his head as if trying to clear it.

  “That may have been the worst coffee I’ve ever had,” he said.

  My head was muzzy, and Pop was going in and out of focus. But I was in the hospital’s supply hut again. I was in the here and now. I looked around the room for the Cutthroat and didn’t see him anywhere.

  “He was gone when I came out of it,” Pop said, anticipating my question. “Then I heard you talking to people who obviously haven’t been born yet. So I decided that whatever you were experiencing, you’d better not experience any more of it. You’re too young for family responsibilities.”

  I began to feel less angry toward Pop as I looked at him and remembered what I’d just seen. His hand had been touching my forehead, and I had seen everything about him.

  Including his death.

  “Did you . . . hallucinate?” I asked.

  Pop looked at his wristwatch and stood. “We both know those were more than hallucinations. And I believe you and I saw and heard the same things, up to the point where I snapped out of it. But now it’s eighteen thirty, and I have to piss like a thoroughbred. Then I have to go into Navytown and ask around for a certain commander. I understand he’s an admirer of mine. Are you all right to take yourself to your bunk, or to mess, or wherever you need to go?” I stood too, but I was feeling considerably wobblier than Pop looked.

  “Why aren’t you shook up?” I asked. “If you’d seen anything like what I saw, you’d be shook up.”

  Pop smiled that thin smile. “I’ve seen a lot of things, Private. And they’ve all shook me up, even when they didn’t involve Aleutian magic. But the key is to realize that it’s all like that. It’s all magic, it’s all insane. So you make sense of what little you can, and you rely on alcohol for the rest.” He gestured toward the door. “And now I really must be going.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you, Pop?” I asked. “I don’t like the thought of you dealing with those Navy goons all by yourself. And I don’t have to be at the colonel’s office until twenty-one hundred.”

  I really wanted to stick with him so I could keep my mind off that meeting. I still had no idea what I was going to say to the colonel. What could I tell him? That I’d had a vision of what he’d done? I doubted that would go over too well with him. Or with a court-martial, either.

  Pop shook his head. “No, Private, I don’t want you with me this time. Frankly, you don’t get along as well with those Navy people as I do. But while I’m gone, I would like you to do two things for me.”

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “Shoot.”

  Pop held up an index finger. “One. Do not go to the lieutenant colonel’s office at twenty-one hundred. I know he ordered you to be there. But again, ask yourself how well his orders have worked out for you so far. Stay in your barracks or hide somewhere. With luck, I’ll be back before twenty-one hundred anyway. And I’ll take care of all of this.”

  He stepped past me and headed for the door.

  “How, Pop?” I asked. “How are you going to do that? We don’t have proof of anything. All we have are hallucinations.”

  Pop paused at the door and looked back at me.

  “No offense, Private,” he said, “but that’s all you’ve got. I plan to return with considerably more.” He turned away and opened the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “You said you wanted me to do two things. What’s the second?”

  He held up two fingers and answered without looking back.

  “Don’t call me ‘Pop,’ ” he said. Then the door swung closed behind him. I stepped out just a moment later and found that a thick Aleutian fog had fallen. The wind, for a change, had died. I looked down past the third storage hut. But between the fog and the dim light, I only caught a glimpse of Pop’s thin, shadowy form before he disappeared.

  XIII

  My squad was back at our Quonset by the time I returned, and I went with them to mess. A couple of them tried to rib me by asking about what kind of soft duty I’d pulled that day, but I wouldn’t even look at them. Pretty soon they got the idea and left me alone.

  I made myself eat. I don’t remember what it was. Some kind of gray Adak food that matched the gray Adak fog outside. I didn’t want it. But I knew I had to put something in my stomach if I didn’t want to collapse. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the Spam sandwich more than twelve hours earlier. Besides, I wanted something to soak up whatever remained of the Cutthroat�
��s black sludge. Whatever it had been.

  The whole platoon had the evening off, which meant that my hut would be full of talking and card games. I didn’t want to have to put up with any of that, so I took off after chow and slogged northward up Main Street, toward the airfield, in the opposite direction from Navytown. Pop had made it clear that he didn’t want me around. So I didn’t want to be tempted to go look for him.

  I hadn’t even met him before that morning, but now he seemed like the only friend I had on the whole island. I had considered my old sergeant to be my friend, but he had died on Attu. The closest I had gotten to anyone since then had been to the poor Navy guy at the Fourth of July boxing match. But apparently that hadn’t been an honest relationship.

  Somehow, I wandered my way eastward to the rocky shore of Kuluk Bay. The iron-colored, choppy water stretched out beyond the fog, and a frigid wind blew in and numbed my face. There weren’t even any ships visible, since they were all anchored to the south in Sweeper Cove. So I had the feeling that I was alone at the edge of the world, and that all I had to do was step off into the cold dark water to be swallowed up, frozen and safe.

  Then I glanced at my wristwatch, which my old man had given me as I’d left for basic. It was a lousy watch and lost almost fifteen minutes a day. Right now it said that it was 8:36, which meant that the actual time was about nine minutes before twenty-one hundred hours. Which was when the colonel had ordered me to be at his office. An order Pop had said I should disobey.

  I thought about it.

  Then I started back the way I had come, trudging through the muck as fast as I could. Maybe Pop was right, and I was an obstacle to the colonel’s promotion. Maybe he was going to blame me for the sailor’s death. Maybe he was going to have me court-martialed. Or maybe he was just trying to scare me into keeping my mouth shut no matter what anyone else might ask me.

  It didn’t matter. Whatever was going to happen to me now, I wasn’t going to count on Pop to get me out of it. I had seen that he was going to have his own problems soon enough.

  And I knew my life was going to be all right. I had seen that, too. I hadn’t seen every day or every detail. And I knew there would be some tough times, too. But overall, it was going to be better than what most people got. Better than I deserved.

  It was going to be better than what Pop had coming, anyway.

  When I reached the small frame building that housed the colonel’s office and living quarters, I had to stop and stare at it from across the road. The edge of the peaked roof was lined with ravens, stock-still except for a few ominous wing flaps. Normally, they would be swooping and squawking over my head. But now they were sitting on the colonel’s roof in silence. There must have been fifty of them.

  A few G.I.’s walking by looked up, and one of them made a comment about “those weird birds.” But otherwise, Main Street was almost empty. And that was weird, too.

  I crossed the slop, went up the wooden steps, and wiped my feet on the burlap mat at the top. The real time was almost exactly twenty-one hundred. I knocked on the door and waited for the colonel’s aide to let me in.

  Instead, as if from a great distance, I heard the colonel’s voice say, in a rough monotone, “Enter.”

  I opened the door and went in. The first small room was the colonel’s aide’s vestibule. The lamp on the desk was on, but the aide wasn’t there. Beyond the desk, the door to the colonel’s office was ajar. I crossed to it and hesitated.

  Beyond the door, the colonel spoke again. “I said enter.”

  I pushed the door open just far enough and stepped into the colonel’s office. The room was small and plain and lined with filing cabinets. The colonel’s desk was dead center, with the overhead light shining down onto a small stack of papers between the colonel’s hands. His garrison cap, its silver oak leaf shining, was flattened neatly beside the papers. The colonel’s face was mostly shadowed, with just the tip of his nose glowing in the light.

  I stepped smartly to within a foot of the desk, front and center, then saluted and stood at attention. It was the same thing I had done every time I had ever been summoned here.

  “Thank you for coming, Private,” the colonel said.

  I almost laughed. He had never thanked me for coming before. But now he had thanked me as if we were equals and I had done him a favor. He had thanked me as if I weren’t there because of a direct order that had been wrapped around a threat.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “My pleasure, sir.” I kept my eyes focused on an invisible point just over his head. But I could still see everything he did.

  The colonel touched the top of the small stack of papers with his fingertips and pushed the top sheet across the desk toward me.

  “I won’t waste your time or mine, soldier,” the colonel said. “This is a statement to the effect that this morning, 5 July 1944, you assisted your friend the corporal in a drunken escapade in which you killed an American bald eagle and then recklessly contributed to the accidental death of a Navy seaman. You are to sign at the bottom. I personally guarantee that you yourself will serve no more than one year in a stateside stockade, after which you’ll receive a dishonorable discharge.”

  He placed a fountain pen atop the piece of paper.

  I didn’t even try to think. I just stayed at attention with my arms stiff at my sides and my eyes staring at that invisible spot above his head.

  “Sir,” I heard myself saying. “I decline to sign that statement on the grounds that signing it may tend to incriminate me.”

  I had heard words similar to those just a few hours before. But they wouldn’t be spoken for a few years yet.

  The colonel gave a growl. He picked up the pen, pushed across the next piece of paper, and put the pen down on top of it.

  “Very well,” he said. “This next statement is to the effect that you weren’t intoxicated at all, but had an altercation with the sailor and committed manslaughter. And the corporal witnessed it.”

  “Sir,” I heard myself saying again. “I decline to sign on the grounds that signing may tend to incriminate me.”

  The colonel stood, put his hands on the desk, and leaned forward into the light like a Nebraska judge. Now my eyes were focused on the top of his head. He had the same greasy, wormlike hair as the man at the high, long podium in my vision.

  “Son, you’d best listen up and listen good,” the colonel snarled. He pushed the remaining three pages onto the first two. “I have five confessions here, each with a slightly different version of what you and the corporal have done. You can sign any one of them. The consequences vary depending upon which one you choose. But if you don’t choose one, then I’ll choose one for you. And you won’t like that. Nor will you like the way things go for you when both my aide and I swear that we witnessed the aftermath of your crimes as well as your signature.”

  I heard every word he said, and I knew what each one meant.

  But what I said in reply was, “Sir, I decline to sign on the grounds—”

  Then I heard the telltale sound of a hammer clicking back, and my eyes broke focus from the top of the colonel’s head. I looked down and saw his .45 service automatic in his hand. It was pointing at my gut.

  “Let me put this another way, Private,” he said. His Texas accent slid into a self-satisfied drawl. “You can sign one of these pieces of paper, or I can tell the judge advocate that you went berserk when I confronted you with the evidence. I can tell him that you attacked a much superior officer, namely myself, and that the officer was therefore compelled to defend himself.”

  I stared at the muzzle of the .45 for what seemed like a long, long moment. Then I snapped my eyes back up to a point above and behind the colonel’s head.

  Maybe I hadn’t seen the future after all. Maybe this was the future, right here. And maybe that was fair.

  Maybe this would make me even again.

  “Sir,” I said. “I decline to sign. You already know why.”

  The colonel gave a disgusted groan.
“That’s a damn poor choice, son. But if that’s the way you want it . . . ”

  Another hammer clicked.

  This one was behind me. It was followed by a thick, hacking, tubercular cough. But that only lasted a second.

  Then I heard that smooth, sophisticated voice.

  “Speaking of damn poor choices,” Pop said.

  I looked down at the colonel again. His eyes were wide, and his face was twitching with mingled fury and fear.

  But the fear won. He put his left thumb in front of the .45’s hammer, let it down slowly, and then set the pistol on the stack of confessions.

  “Lovely,” Pop said, coming up on my right. He held up a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red with his free hand. God knows where he’d gotten it. “Now, let’s have a drink.”

  XIV

  Pop didn’t even glance at me. He kept his eyes on the colonel, giving him the same thin smile I had been seeing all day. He had a .38 revolver in his right hand and the fifth of Johnnie Walker in his left.

  “You can sit back down,” he told the colonel. “But we’ll stand.”

  The colonel sat down. He looked up at Pop with a mockery of Pop’s thin smile. It was a repellent sneer.

  “A Communist corporal holding a pistol on a lieutenant colonel,” he said. “This is not going to end well for you.”

  Pop set the bottle of whiskey beside the stack of confessions. “Nothing ends well for anyone,” he said. He picked up the .45 and dropped it into a small metal wastebasket on the floor beside the desk. “Do you have any glasses? I’d rather not pass the bottle.”

  The colonel nodded past my shoulder. “In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet beside the door. But don’t touch my brandy.”

  Pop’s eyes didn’t move from him. “Private, would you mind?”

  I took a few steps backward, bumped into the filing cabinet, and squatted down to open the drawer. There were two short glasses and a cut-glass bottle of liquor. I took out the glasses, closed the drawer, and brought the glasses to the desk.