Six Bits

by Laurence Dahners

  BILLY BENOIT

  Billy Benoit had been transmuted.

  A change apparent at first glance to anyone who’d known him, even as casually as I had. Not transmuted as lead into gold, but more as brass into iron. Rusty, worn, beaten, or perhaps just hammered iron, but iron nonetheless. Hair still dark; handsome face still unwrinkled; frame still slender, yet muscular; but now age and experience hung about him like an aura.

  I had just entered Joel’s Hole as was my habit of a Friday night—after a week at the desk—to drink a few beers, to shoot the proverbial shit, and to hope that some woman would pick me up and take me home. Since I almost never had the courage to try to pick up a woman myself, I relied on an occasional desperate woman who might make the first move on me.

  Regularly, at some point during most evenings at Joel’s, I had a brief, backslapping, chest-puffing conversation with Billy. An exchange usually inspired by a desire to get closer to Billy’s companion. He would be there with a different woman almost every Friday, usually recently met, almost always the most attractive girl in the club.

  Billy and I would exchange a few meaningless pleasantries in the fashion of men, mostly braggadocios and insults. Eventually he would introduce me to his new lady and shortly after that I would move on. Later I would observe with envy as they became more and more entwined until eventually he maneuvered her out the door—low purpose in mind.

  But the night that I saw Billy had changed, I found him alone. His solitary status alone was exceptional, but, ignoring that, there was still a distinction. It was him, but it wasn’t the familiar him. Curious, I found myself settling onto the adjacent stool. Not to spend a few minutes on meaningless trivialities as had been our custom, but already cognizant somehow, that I would be there for hours.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  As he turned to face me, there was no surprise on his face. No question in his eyes that I would know something had changed in him. His stare was penetrating as he said, “You write, don’t you?”

  Neither Billy nor I had ever, to my recollection, spoken of our work, so the question surprised me. Mildly taken aback, I said, “Well I write some, more of a hobby. I’ve never had anything commercially published, but I must have converted at least one tree into rejection slips.”

  It was a poor joke, but one repeated often enough that my polished delivery usually brought at least a smirk.

  No smirks this time.

  Billy continued sizing me up for another few seconds and then said quietly, “I’ll tell you a story.”

  I’ve cursed myself several times since that night for not insisting on recording his tale. Of course, I didn’t think I’d hear much of a story. Other, closer, friends had told me yarns that they thought ought to be written; those stories had all been crap. So it wasn’t ‘til we were deep into his tale that I found myself expecting that, of course, I would try to write this story out.

  But, not wanting to interrupt Billy, I just let him ramble on. I figured that I’d just catch him later for any poorly recalled details.

  I haven’t seen Billy since.

  He began the story by reminding me that we’d met in our usual fashion the Friday before. He’d accompanied an exquisite blond woman named Kim. I’d stopped by to be introduced, to ogle Kim, and told them a few bad jokes. To my shame, I admit that all I actually remember of Kim was her cleavage. Despite her quirked smile of amusement over my attraction to it, that cleavage repeatedly drew my eyes—kind of like moths banging into a light.

  Billy related that after my departure he’d been surprised to find himself having an actual conversation with Kim. Certainly, he spoke to all the ladies he spent time with, but those were mere chats about meaningless trivialities. With Kim he found himself actually listening and arguing. Rather than merely trying to impress a girl with his conversational talent, he found himself wanting to know what she thought about the topics.

  She had an odd perspective on life, as if she were from a foreign country, though she had no accent. She questioned concepts that Billy accepted as matters of fact, especially things historical. As she would disagree with Billy’s prejudice on an issue, she would repeatedly point out that history is written by the winners. They spoke of literature, famous writers, and science fiction.

  At one point, Billy said, the topic ran aground upon Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee.” Billy’s contention had focused on his feeling that it would be great to go back in time where he, with his modern knowledge, could “kick ass and take names.”

  She’d disagreed. She felt that even “simple” technology required significant “pre-existing art” and necessitated a certain knowledge and technology base. The combination of skills required by the “Yankee” just didn’t exist in a single, unaided human. She said, “Even if you knew that gunpowder needed saltpeter, you probably wouldn’t know what saltpeter actually was, where it could be found, or how it could be purified”.

  Billy allowed that the “Yankee” had accomplished more than most people could, but still felt that he, Billy Benoit, “would be king of the mountain in no time,” especially if he was to go back even further in time. Far enough back that he could invent the bow and arrow or domesticate the horse.

  To Billy’s surprise Kim turned out to be a willing bed partner that night and even more to his amazement they returned to argue the “Yankee” concept after sex, but before sleep. During their contention her eyes flashed with merriment and he had the constant feeling she was laughing at him, rather than with him.

  Billy woke the next morning with a throbbing pain in his jaw. It was cold. He was gnawingly hungry and sore all over. His tongue probed and found swollen, inflamed gums about a molar that was partly gone. His breasts were sore.

  Breasts!

  To his horror, he realized that during the night he’d become a woman!

  A woman who called herself Teba. Billy and Teba were cohabiting “her” body. He found with some astonishment that he was not surprised to be sharing this woman’s body. He “knew” with a certain conviction that Kim had sent him back in time by placing him in Teba’s mind and realized simultaneously and with complete confidence that Kim had been visiting us from our own future.

  Teba didn’t find it unusual to have a throbbing tooth in her jaw. It had been throbbing for weeks now. Teba wasn’t surprised to be hungry either. There had been nothing but a few roots to eat yesterday and the tribe had only had a rabbit to share the day before. The general soreness of her body went practically unnoticed by Teba. It came from sleeping on a thin layer of rotting leaves over a surface of cold hard dirt. She was in a cave of sorts, lying in a mass of tangled limbs with the other fourteen members of her tribe. They were huddled together for warmth. The “cave” was in reality just a place with a rock overhang big enough to provide some shelter. Its mouth was too large to really close out the weather.

  Teba began extricating herself from the surrounding bodies with an urge to empty her bladder. Billy, though he sensed that he was ultimately in control, felt so stunned by his new circumstances that he was perfectly willing to let Teba move about her usual morning functions without his interference. Teba moved with great care lest she disturb the others, especially the five men, whom, Billy recognized with surprise, she uniformly dreaded and feared.

  Once up, she went out into the cold to perch on the end of a nearby log which overhung a foul smelling mess of human offal. A glance told Billy that it would smell much worse when things warmed up. Although the morning bordered on frosty, Teba felt pleased that it seemed a little warmer than mornings had been. She looked forward to the near future with eager anticipation of a full belly.

  Billy recognized, after pondering Teba’s memories, that spring must be coming soon and that winter had always meant a scarcity of game with long stretches of hunger. Billy’s mind began to look forward to the changes he was going to make—a little modern day knowledge was going to go much farther in caveman times than it had in the old England of the Conn
ecticut Yankee!

  When Teba returned to the cave others had begun stirring. Her stomach turned. Bant was awake and staring at her! Muscular, squat, easily-angered, brutal Bant. To her relief he quickly shuffled out of the cave toward the “log.” Teba ruffled her son Gano’s hair and hugged him briefly, wishing she had something to feed him.

  Billy felt Teba’s fear and knew that it had to do with Bant’s constant desire for sex. Billy discerned his own queasy revulsion over the possibility of being on the receiving end of the sex act and yet felt a tingling curiosity about what it would be like as a woman.

  Suddenly a lancing pain came from Teba’s scalp. She was forced to her knees by a powerful grip on her hair. Billy felt her dropping quickly, utterly resigned to the inevitability of the act. She bent forward. Shocked initially at the brutality of it, Billy suddenly raged at the thought that this was being done to him. He hadn’t given his consent!

  Rape was something Billy had given little thought to as a man. Now, in Teba’s mind he learned that it was the only form of sex she’d ever known. In fact she thought of rape as an inevitable fact of a woman’s existence.

  Furious, Billy decided that it was time to start teaching these “cavemen” that the general order of things had just changed. He’d had a little self-defense course once and surely knew more about fighting than this brute behind him! Teba’s mind registered consternation as Billy took over, rolling her to her side, then onto her back. He lashed out with her right foot. It smashed into Bant’s crotch with a satisfying crunch.

  Bant’s eyes flashed wide in anger, but then he dropped to his own knees as pain radiated in waves from his groin and took his breath away. Teba scrambled to her feet, desperately wanting to apologize. Billy stopped her before her first word came out, puzzled in some sense to realize that these people had a language, but not surprised that he understood their language through Teba. Billy felt aware of the gibbering terror pouring through Teba, but didn’t worry himself.

  Further, he recognized the astonished wrath on the face of Bant as the man began to rise to his feet.

  “There’s more where that came from, Bant,” Billy had Teba say.

  Teba was absolutely panicked by the words that had just crossed her lips.

  Bant looked startled. Then he simply stepped across the intervening two paces and drove his fist into Teba’s abdomen with astonishing force. Teba/Billy dropped to the ground as if his/her strings had been cut. Billy couldn’t believe the power of the blow Bant had just delivered.

  Unable to breath or really even to move, Teba reflexively covered her head with her arms against the rain of kicks and blows she knew would, and did, come. As Teba/Billy lay in agony under the seemingly endless battering, desperate to get his/her breath, Teba was astounded at “their” temerity in resisting Bant.

  To Teba’s horror, Gano darted forward to attack Bant in an effort to stop the man’s assault on Gano‘s mother. Bant knocked the boy aside with a blow that seemed like an afterthought, but left Gano curled miserably on his side.

  Billy, for his part, felt bewildered by the pitiful ease with which Bant’s single crushing blow had defeated them. There had been no dancing about, no feints, no trial punches, and no time for Billy to finesse victory with some exciting martial arts move.

  A martial arts move which he began to realize he might have seen on TV, but didn’t really know how to execute. He’d heard someone say once that real fights ended in just one or two blows.

  Now he understood why.

  One blow from Bant and he’d found himself lying puddled on the ground, gasping to breathe. When the blows stopped, Bant wrapped his hand in Teba’s hair. The man dragged Teba/Billy to her/his knees and then Billy found out first hand exactly what being raped felt like. When he’d finished, Bant followed up with another brief beating, then left Teba/Billy sobbing on the floor of the cave.

  Teba crawled over to her son and huddled around him, trying to comfort the boy.

  Bant and the other men collected their gear and left on a hunt.

  As soon as the men were gone, Selah, the tribe’s mother figure, came over and lifted Teba’s head into her lap. Billy expected her to apologize for not trying to intervene. Instead, stroking Teba’s head gently she asked, “Teba, what came over you?! Have you been possessed by a demon spirit?”

  Teba’s mind, still gibbering, indeed thought of herself as possessed by a demon, but Billy forcefully suppressed her attempt at communication on that issue. Instead he focused bitterly on his anticipation of their revenge on Bant.

  As the pain began to ease, Billy set himself to ransacking Teba’s memory for information on the tribe’s level of technology. She knew little of their hunting or weapons. They used spears tipped with whatever sharp objects were to hand; including bone fragments, broken stones and simple fire hardening of the wooden points. Teba had witnessed only one hunt. In that one, the hunters had surrounded a sickly animal and stabbed it to death. She had no recollection of spear throwing, nor knowledge of other hunting techniques. Teba had seen the men breaking stones to try to obtain points. Billy realized with chagrin that he had no idea what flint looked like and so, though he had Teba’s memories of the stone that the men had broken, he didn’t know whether it was flint, nor how he would teach them to find flint if it wasn’t.

  The tribe used fire, but apparently couldn’t start a fire if it burned out. It would appear from Teba’s memories that they hadn’t had a fire for the entire past winter because it had burned out shortly after the weather got cold. Aha, Billy thought to himself, I can build a fire!

  But, first I need a weapon to dispatch Bant.

  As Billy began picturing Bant with a spear or knife in his side, to his surprise Teba became terribly distraught. It became apparent that if Billy/Teba seriously injured Bant she thought it would be a horrible blow to the tribe as a whole. Without Bant, Teba didn’t think there would be enough food to eat. Despite her fear of Bant and her primeval dislike for the man, she had an instinctive conviction that the tribe needed all its hunters if they were to have sufficient meat to keep the tribe alive. From Teba’s thoughts, Billy learned that Bant was well recognized to be one of the tribe’s better hunters. An injury to Bant could actually threaten the lives of everyone in the tribe.

  Billy felt certain that his modern knowledge would make Billy/Teba a much better hunter than Bant had ever been. Bant would soon be superfluous. Billy made an effort to project this conviction to Teba.

  She remained absolutely unconvinced.

  After pondering a moment, Billy decided to look for materials to “invent” a weapon. Whether such a weapon was used to injure Bant or instead used to teach the tribe a better way of hunting mattered little at this point.

  First he went over to the area of the cave where the tribe’s hunters made their weapons. There were quite a few spears lying about in various stages of creation or disrepair. Billy also found a good deal of fragmented stone and rock of various types lying around. As Billy/Teba found out by stepping on them, some of the fragments were quite sharp. However, Teba's feet were callused enough that sharp points which would have lacerated Billy's feet only felt uncomfortable to her. Billy wondered if any of the rock fragments were flint. He stirred through some of the small sharp flakes of stone, then picked up two of the larger ones and struck them together. A small amount of rock dust appeared at the impact site, but neither rock broke. Billy struck them together harder. This time one broke into multiple small fragments. Many of those small fragments had sharp edges on them somewhere, but none of them looked particularly useful to Billy.

  Teba was horrified that he/she was even touching the men's equipment. When Billy looked up he saw the rest of the women staring aghast as well.

  Billy banged the rocks together again. He tried striking them together at an angle. Most times he only created rock dust at the impact points; a few times he knocked off some larger pieces. None of the pieces seemed to have useful shapes. Billy shook his head, deciding that w
orking rock or flint might take a lot more practice than he had expected. As he contemplated the mess he had made, he considered a vague memory that working flint had been a skill bordering on an art.

  If that were true, then this did not appear to be where he was going to make a major change in the life of the cave.

  Billy/Teba stood and turned to go back the other way. With some surprise he realized that everyone in the cave still couldn’t believe what he’d been doing. Teba's son Gano looked terribly dismayed. Although Billy himself didn’t really care what Gano thought, he found Teba's emotions of embarrassment and dismay washing over him in uncomfortable waves. Without thinking he found himself practically rushing out of the men's area of the cave. Teba sheepishly wanted to explain what Billy/Teba had been doing there. However she didn’t really understand what the rock banging had been all about herself.

  Billy, on the other hand, didn’t feel that he needed or even wanted to explain himself to a bunch of ignorant cave people.

  Billy thought for a moment, then decided to begin looking for supplies to build a fire. Billy considered what he knew about fire making. He knew that for one of the best known methods you took a straight stick and spun it between your palms, heating the tip by friction against a softer piece of wood. You could also use a bow, but that would require string and a piece of springy wood. He looked about the cave for a short straight stick which might be suitable. None were readily evident. He thought you needed a flat piece with a notch or pit in it for the straight stick to be drilled into. He didn’t see any pieces of wood in the cave that appeared suitable. For a minute Billy was confused, thinking that the tribe must keep firewood somewhere. After a moment's delving into Teba’s memory, he realized that since they hadn’t had a fire for a long time they had little reason to stock firewood. The firewood they’d stocked had been used up for this or that project in the months since the fire had burned out. Following her thoughts, he went over to the wall where they’d kept wood in the past, but only found some scattered pieces, some of it full of dry rot.