The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  They’ll be unarmed, they will not hurt anyone, and they’ll have nothing on them. All will be processed for deportation. Joe has been a Border Patrol Agent for two years and has witnessed the same sorry scene at least twice a month.

  The Tubac checkpoint is a temporary one, with its portable lights and generators resting on the shoulder of I-19, alongside its incendiary local politics. The suburbanites don’t want a fixed checkpoint because checkpoint towns become a de facto second border, fearing smugglers and immigrants and other dangerous (non-white) criminals would use their sleepy little towns as way stations, drug factories, and shoot ’em ups. The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector comprises almost the entire Arizona-Mexico border and is the only sector without at least one fixed checkpoint.

  Agents separate the fifty men into groups of ten. The men are a task to be divvied up. They are sweaty, exhausted, and frightened, but everyone makes it out of the trailer alive and conscious. Joe’s ten stand in a line and with their hands held out and open although he did not tell them to do so. Joe pats them down. The third in line has something in the front left pocket of his jeans. Joe says, “¿Cuál es su nombre?” being rigidly formal in the request, an attempt to give a measure of respect and dignity, but he knows it could very well be interpreted as one of la migra flaunting his position.

  The man says, “Guillermo.” He’s tall and skinny, a piece of string hanging from the leg of his cut-off jean shorts. Guillermo has thick beard stubble overwriting a map of acne scars and he is likely a full decade older than Joe is, but there’s no way to tell. He doesn’t have a passport.

  Joe says, “Guillermo, dame lo que tienes un tu bolsillo. Por favor.”

  “No es nada. No son drogas.” It is nothing. It is not drugs. His speech pattern is as formal as Joe’s. The two men are actors afraid of forgetting their lines. He reaches into his pocket and gives Joe what he wants. It’s a folded rectangle of tinfoil.

  “Entonces, ¿qué es?”

  “Es de m’hijo.”

  Joe unwraps the tinfoil slowly. It sits open on his palm, a metal flower with petals dancing in the warm breeze. In the middle, there’s a small, clear plastic baggie, and inside the baggie is a white rock. Joe takes it out and realizes it is a tooth, a baby tooth, small as a pebble, so inconsequential and fragile that it might blow away in the scalding desert winds, or simply disintegrate.

  The lights are dim. Local country songs alternate with Johnny Cash standards on the jukebox, one that still plays scratchy 45 records. Joe is purposefully early, sitting at their usual booth for two at Zula’s, a restaurant in the small and impoverished border town of Nogales, their hometown. He stirs his second screwdriver with a red swizzle stick, counterclockwise, as if he can turn back the clock. The tinfoil, folded up with its secret tooth inside, is on the chipped wooden table-top. Es de m’hijo. It’s from my son. Joe kept it by mistake. Before he could give the tooth back to Guillermo, he was called away to help with the smuggler’s arrest and processing, and then Joe forgot he’d pocketed the tooth. The other agents deported Guillermo and the rest of the immigrants before Joe could return the harmless keepsake. There’s no way he can get the tooth back to Guillermo. He can’t even create a fantasy scenario where he meets the ragged man unexpectedly to return the memento, the little white tooth. The scenario that’s easy to conjure is Guillermo’s return home as a failure being unbearably brief and then him attempting an even more dangerous and desperate route to the U.S., hiking through the desert around Nogales, where the past two years have seen an over twenty percent increase in immigrant fatalities. Security improvements are forcing more immigrants to attempt border crossings in further remote areas, forcing them to take their chances in the desert. Joe imagines Guillermo struggling through the barren, unforgiving landscape, then falling, twisting an ankle, getting lost, dying of heat exposure, or as has been increasingly the case, he sees Guillermo falling prey to bandits, armed Mexican nationals, or a double-crossing smuggler he paid as a guide, his body never to be found. Last winter, bandits shot a group of immigrants in an area just west of Nogales, inside the expansive and desolate Tohono-O’odham Reservation. Joe helped carry one of the rescued survivors to an ambulance, an older Nicaraguan woman who had her left ear blown off. After receiving baseline medical care she was sent back to Nicaragua.

  Joe checks his watch. She’s late. He turns the swizzle stick again. Today was another worst day in a litany of worst days; still his job has an inexplicable hold on him, a job that says more about him than he cares to hear. He orders a third screwdriver, which means he likely won’t be driving back to his Tucson apartment tonight.

  Jody Fernandez finally arrives, forty minutes late, limping to their booth. “Sorry, Joe. I had a hard time escaping from my parents’ house.” Her voice is rough but dampened, a crinkling paper bag as it’s shaped into a ball. She wears a black long-sleeved T-shirt to cover her skinny arms and jeans that are supposed to be tight, but hang off her gaunt frame like elephant skin. Her black hair is tied up in a ponytail and her skin is pale. She’s in her late twenties like Joe but looks like she could be his older sister, or an aunt. Still, she’s in better shape than she was a few short months ago, before the rehab stint.

  Joe gets the sense that she’s not telling him the truth, but he’s okay with it. Despite everything and the relapse warning signs he’s supposed to watch for, they’re close enough that the little lies don’t equate to betrayal. Not yet, anyway. He says, “De nada. I’ve had a long day and I’m just sitting here. Unwinding.”

  Jody smiles, but won’t show her teeth, which were ravaged by the year-plus of meth addiction. Meth is acidic, dries up the protective saliva, and while in the throes of the drug, the heavy users grind and clench their teeth to dust. She explained it to him once, saying meth mouth was like a neglected and abused engine being empty of oil but still redlining and chewing up its own gears. She says, “I see that. I guess you’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight, then?”

  As children, they were neighbors and best friends. Their mothers taught biology and chemistry at the regional high school and their fathers commuted to Tucson together. Joe and Jody, their names and lives almost the same until college, where both went to the University of Arizona. Jody married a physics Ph.D. student and upon graduation got a job teaching special-ed for elementary-aged children. Two years ago, after visiting her mother in Nogales, she and her husband were hit by a pest exterminator who fell asleep at the wheel and drifted over the center lines. Her husband died. Jody’s right leg shattered in three places and her skull fractured, requiring a plate. She suffered from debilitating headaches for months and wasn’t able to work, living but not living on disability insurance, so, like many of the hopeless locals of Nogales, she turned to meth.

  Joe says, “Yeah, I think I might need to crash on your couch. Will that be okay?”

  “Of course, but no puking allowed. I just cleaned the goddamn bathroom.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  A waiter appears with a beer that she must’ve ordered before she sat down. She takes a sip big enough for the both of them, then says, “Shitty, like I was last week. But I can deal with it.”

  Joe fights a growing impatience. Her lateness, her short answers that aren’t really answers; he knows he can’t rush her back. He wants the Jody he knew before the addiction, before the accident. He might never get her back, and that’s something he needs to deal with, not her.

  They both order light meals, garden salads and appetizer-sized quesadillas. Joe orders another screwdriver. He says, “How’s your mother?”

  “Fine. Same old stuff. Bugging me to move back home until I get back on my feet. God, I hate that fucking phrase. Like me being able to simply walk around on my broken leg has anything to do with improving my shitty days.”

  Joe says, “I hate it when people say cut a check.” As soon as he says it, he thinks the quip ill-timed and a terrible, miserable mistake. But she laughs, and he’s flooded with relief, then shame becau
se he shouldn’t be so nervous around her.

  Jody stops laughing, then leans forward, her head in the spotlight of the black pewter pot light fixture that hangs above their table like a bat. Her deep, brown eyes grow too big for her face. “All right, Joe, I wasn’t at my mom’s house. I’m late because I found an old note from Steve, today.” She smirks; a child caught doing something wrong, but not caring at all. But that’s not right. She’s no child and hasn’t been one for a lifetime.

  Joe says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not sure if I am. It was folded inside an old textbook, Educational Philosophy. My therapist keeps saying work is still a year or two away, but I’ve been looking through my old notes and textbooks, reading until the headaches take over.”

  Joe nods. He knows that’s enough.

  “I opened up to the chapter on cognitive disorders, and there it was, one of his wiseass notes. De-motivational aphorisms, he called them.” She smiles but covers her mouth with a hand. The hand tremors and it’s not enough to cover everything. “He slipped them into my notebooks and textbooks; the gloomy physics geek that he was, thinking his clever was so cute.”

  “What’d the note say?”

  “I’ll tell you if you show me what you’re hiding?”

  “What? I’m not hiding anything?”

  “You had something out on the table and you stuffed it into your pocket when I walked over. I want to see it.”

  He says, “Okay. Deal. But you tell me first.” Joe doesn’t look forward to explaining why he has the tinfoil and what it means, but he’ll play along. It’s good to see her willing to play games with him, even if the game pieces aren’t exactly silly.

  “It said, ‘Evil is a consequence of good. Cheers! Steve.’ ”

  “That’s nice. Should be a Hallmark card.”

  “I know. This was the only note I confronted him about. Was he implying that a gig serving special needs students was somehow a bad thing in his warped little world? He could be snotty about his field of study putting him in the supreme strata of society.” Jody is talking fast, manic with her words. “If he was honest with me, if he didn’t back down, he would’ve said something like my helping the helpless only delayed and prolonged their suffering and the suffering of their loved ones, making it all worse in the long run. He used to say shit like that at parties just to get a rise out of people. But he didn’t say any of that, didn’t let me put those words in his mouth. I played at being super pissed and he backed off real quick, apologizing up and down. It was the last of those notes he left in my books. Him backing down, that was my small victory, our relationship was always a competition, but now I wish he’d given me more of his pithy lovenotes of doom. Isn’t that sad? I spent the afternoon and early evening staring at it and thinking it was all quite sad.”

  “It is sad. But I’m glad you can talk about it.”

  “Stop it. You sound like my fucking therapist when you say shit like that.”

  “Does she say ‘cut a check’ too?”

  “No, but I’ll insist she do so from now on. Now pay up, Marquez. What are you hiding from me?”

  “Oh oh. Using the last name, she means business.”

  “All business all the time.”

  “Okay, let’s take a look.” Joe takes out the tinfoil and lays it on the table. Jody furrows her brow and cocks her head to the side, and Joe panics, almost spilling his drink as he pleads with opens his hands over the tinfoil, a bumbling magician with nothing up his sleeves. He says, “Now, hold on a second. It’s not what you think it is.” He won’t say drugs. He quickly launches into the story of Guillermo, fumbles through their roadside conversation, how this belonged to his son, and then how everything got so crazy that he forgot to give it back. The story already sounds rehearsed. Joe talks while slowly unwrapping the package, careful not to make any new folds or marks in the tinfoil, preservation somehow being of the upmost importance.

  Jody leans over the table. “Well, what is it?”

  He lifts the plastic bag, dangles it from his finger, and holds it across the table. “It’s a tooth. His son’s baby tooth. See? I feel bad, it’s probably the first tooth he . . . ”

  Jody stands up, jumps out of her seat, and her head crashes into the pewter pot light fixture, sending its weak light arcing elsewhere into the restaurant.

  “Whoa. You okay?”

  She turns away from the flickering light and from him, and says, “I need to go to the bathroom.” The light shines directly in his eyes, then away, then back, and Joe is unable to watch her progress through the restaurant and bar.

  The waiter appears with their food, and steadies the swaying light fixture. The quesadillas are smoking and hissing on the pan. Joe wraps the little tooth back into the foil. Jody didn’t just go to the bathroom; she fled from the table. He’s not sure what he did, but clearly it was wrong, and he’s not sure if Jody is coming back. He waits, elbows on the table, hands making a steeple, and now she has been gone long enough that he considers going to the bathroom or the parking lot to find her.

  She does come back, walking as fast as her limp allows, and she sits down abruptly, the final word to some inner conversation. She stabs her fork around the salad, into the cherry tomatoes, and doesn’t place her napkin on her lap.

  Joe says, “Hey, everything okay? I’m sorry if . . . ”

  “Jim Dandy,” she says, but doesn’t look at him.

  Everything has become so difficult between them. He knows he’s not being fair, but these bi-weekly dinners are becoming as tedious and futile as his job. He isn’t helping anyone, isn’t improving lives, if anything he’s making everything worse; he is that note from Steve. He orders another screwdriver.

  For now, Joe won’t ask Jody what’s wrong because he’s afraid of making it worse, and he’s also being selfish. He drank too much to drive home and he needs her couch tonight, not further complications.

  They walk the two blocks to Jody’s one-bedroom apartment. It’s late, a weeknight, and no one else is out, the streets as desolate and windswept as the desert. They don’t talk. She doesn’t ask Joe why he still has that tooth, why hasn’t he just pitched it and moved on. Joe assumes she’s just accepted it, like he has.

  Her apartment is maniacally clean, antiseptic, and it smells of cleanser and airfreshener. The hardwood floor in the living room gives way to yellowed and curling linoleum tile in the kitchen. Joe falls onto the couch in front of the TV and turns it on. Jody says that she has a headache, and disappears into her bedroom, closing and locking the door.

  Joe kills the lights and tries watching a baseball game between two teams he doesn’t like, then shuts off the TV and reclines, sinking into the couch, and stares at the stucco ceiling. The buzz of alcohol fills the sensory void, droning in his ears and jostling his equilibrium. He closes his eyes, the room spins, he sinks deeper into the couch, and he can’t sleep. He’s always had trouble sleeping. As a kid, he’d lie awake for hours and obsess over his nightmares. Then he learned to trick himself to sleep. He created and choreographed his own waking-dream, some simple innocuous scene on which to focus and loop in his head until it relaxed him enough and he fell sleep.

  Tonight, in Joe’s crafted dream, he gets off the couch and walks into the kitchen, first pausing above the room’s borderline, where the hardwood meets the cracked linoleum. He fills a glass with tap water and drinks half, dumps the rest in the sink, then walks back to the couch, lies down, then starts it all up again, past the borderline and back to the kitchen again for his same glass of water. On one of his return trips to the sink, Joe stops filling his glass. To his right and next to Jody’s bedroom is the study, and its door is open. There’s no light, everything is dark, but inside the study is somehow darker than the rest of the apartment. A child, a little boy, stands in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, hangdog in his posture. It’s too dark to see any facial features, but he knows this boy. Then Joe is standing in the doorway although he doesn’t want t
o be there, just wants to be back at the sink, filling his glass of water and make it half-empty. The boy is still in the doorway too, and he wraps his arms around Joe’s legs. The embrace is brief and weak, a butterfly wing hug, and then the boy puts his hand inside Joe’s and it feels like a small, cool stone. The boy leads Joe back to the couch. There’s more light here, stray neon and streetlight amber filter through the windows. The boy has thick, black hair and eyes like Jody’s but not Jody’s. Joe lies on the couch. He doesn’t want to lie on the couch. He’s tired of doing so many things that he doesn’t want to do, that he can’t do. The boy smiles like Jody too, hiding his mouth behind quivering lips. It’s not a smile, it’s something else, recognition maybe, or acceptance, whatever it is, it’s filled with more despair than the tears to come. Then the boy does part his lips, those rusted hinges, and opens his mouth, and the teeth, an angler fish at the bottom of the deep, black ocean, his teeth, the stalactites and stalagmites of nightmare, angry shards of glass with thick tips curved in awkward and dangerous directions, teeth just spilling out of the boy’s mouth. He climbs on top of Joe, sits on his lap, and tears the size of gumdrops fall from the boy’s eyes as if he doesn’t know he’s a monster, and it’s not fair because he’s not supposed to be the monster, does not deserve to be the monster. But the teeth, the teeth.

  Two weeks pass like most time does, without any acknowledgement. It’s the night before Joe is to return to active duty. He is again at their booth at Zula’s. He sits, a tumbleweed without a breeze, and he stares at his empty screwdriver and empty cup of coffee.

  After he fled her apartment for his car and I-19, Joe was stopped at the Tubac checkpoint, his non-permanent checkpoint. The agents shined flashlights in his face. He knew they initially only saw a Mexican behind the wheel, and Joe knew he looked just like the men in that decaying trailer, dark skin, squinting and hands held empty and up. The agents were going to pat him down and take the tinfoil away, but the flashlights turned off as they did recognize their coworker. Yeah, they knew him, and they knew he was drunk. They didn’t arrest him, but they didn’t allow him to drive home and there was an incident report filed with the Tucson office. His immediate two-week suspension was the result.