One morning we were lying in late, being easy together, when the dogs set up a baying, as they sometimes would, only this was louder and more prolonged than usual. Annie sat up in bed, the sheet falling away from her breasts, and listened. I made a grab for her, but she pushed my hand away and said, “Quiet!” Within a matter of seconds, the barking diminished, but didn’t stop altogether. Soon I heard solitary barks closer at hand, and then the clitter of paws as dogs went running past our room.
“They’re here,” Annie said in a dead voice.
“What?” I sat up beside her and looked at her despairing face.
She didn’t answer, and I said, “You mean the fritters?”
She nodded.
I jumped up from the bed. “Let’s go! Let’s get outa here!”
“Don’t do no good,” she said, hanging her head.
“The hell you mean?”
“It don’t do no good,” she said sternly, almost angrily. “Ain’t nowhere to go. Safest place we can be is right here.”
A dog, a black Lab mix like Stupid, only bigger, poked his head in through the curtained doorway, woofed, and then retreated.
“The dogs can protect us here,” Annie said. “There’s not a damn thing else we can do ’cept set right where we are.”
“That’s crazy! We can fight ’em.”
“You can’t fight ’em. Try and hit ’em with a stick, a machete, they just slip away. It’s like they know it’s comin’. And if they touch you, you’re a goner.”
I couldn’t accept this. “There’s gotta be somethin’ we can do!”
“Come back to bed, Billy,” she said, giving me a steady look. “If there was anything to do, don’tcha think I’d be doin’ it?”
I ducked back under the covers and we lay there most of the day, listening to dogs snarling and barking, to distant screams, and to some less distant that caused me to squeeze Annie so hard I was worried afterward that I had hurt her. We comforted each other, said things were going to work out all right, but I could tell Annie didn’t buy it, so I couldn’t believe it myself. Being afraid is an awful thing, but being helpless and afraid is like being buried alive. I felt I was suffocating, every second stretching out and wrapping me in a freezing fist, with my heart sounding huge and thudding in my ears. Even after darkness fell and Annie told me that the fritters weren’t aggressive at night, I couldn’t completely escape that feeling. I had to do something, and when Annie fell asleep I sneaked out of the room and went to see what was up. Dogs were roaming throughout the tree, their eyes glowing yellow in the dimness, and other people were having a look-see, holding up lanterns, speaking in soft bewildered voices. I ran into Pie. The lines in his homely face appeared to have sunk deeper, and he had nothing good to tell me.
“Nearly thirty’s dead,” he said. “Josiah Tobin and Bo Myers. Nancy Savarese. They ain’t never come at us this bad. Must be thousands of ’em this year.”
“You saw ’em?” I asked.
“Naw, not all of ’em.” He rubbed his chin. “I seen ’em coming for Yonder once couple years after I crossed. I don’t need to see it again.”
But I needed to see it. I followed the weave of limbs up high in the tree until I was forced to climb, not walk, and found a spot where I could sit astraddle of one of the branches close to the edge of the canopy, and there I waited until first light. Then I eased forward so I could see out between the leaves. They did resemble fritters. Pale brown and round and lumpy, sort of like misshapen dinner plates, thick through the middle of the body, with thin rippling edges. All floating above the river between the walls of vegetation. Pie had been right in his estimate. There must have been thousands of them. Singly, they didn’t seem much of a threat, but glimpsed altogether, drifting aimlessly, many in sharp silhouette against the gray sky—they had the look of an impossible armada, an invasion of pale brown jellyfish, utterly evil and strange. I say they were drifting aimlessly, but as I watched they began a general movement toward the tree as if borne on the breeze; yet there was no breeze I could feel, and I realized they were launching a leisurely attack, gradually closing the distance between themselves and the edge of the canopy. I scrambled back along the branch and began my descent, hurrying along, less fearing a misstep than seeing a wave of fritters pushing their way through the leaves. On reaching the lower branches, I began to run, becoming lost at one point and having to retrace my steps. I was cotton-mouthed, and my pulse raced. I imagined myself surrounded by stinging, burning, flimsy scraps of death. At length I came to a populated level, saw curtains hanging over doors, and believed I was safe. I stood a moment to calm my heart. Dogs were barking down below, but I heard nothing near to hand. I set out again, passing along a stretch of limb that was tightly enclosed by walls of leaves so thick, no light could penetrate. As I came to a bend, a dog snarled up ahead of me, a violent engine of a sound that made my breath catch.
With a cautious step, I rounded the bend. I should, I suppose, have backed away, but things would doubtless have gone the same had I done so. Stupid was standing between me and two fritters floating head-high in the passage, trembling as if responding to some impalpable current. I spoke his name. His tail wagged, but his ears were laid flat, and before I could speak again, he leaped twisting in the air and snagged one of the fritters by its edge, dragged it down and began worrying it, holding it between his paws and tearing. The thing emitted a faint squeal, like air leaking from a balloon, and as Stupid continued to kill it, the second fritter slid downward, edge first, like a falling Frisbee, and plastered itself to the side of his head. Stupid yelped, rolled onto his side, trying to pry the thing loose, and succeeded in dislodging it; but it settled on him once again, on his flank. He struggled to his feet, snapping at it, his body bent almost double. Annie had told me that dogs were less sensitive to the fritters than people—they could withstand quite a bit of poison, whereas a touch would kill a man. But apparently Stupid had absorbed close to his limit. When the fritter lifted from him, he staggered to the side, his lips drawn up in a silent snarl, wobbled, then toppled off the limb and down through the leaves without a sound. I had no time to grieve, for I found myself confronting the fritter that had killed him. It was not, as I’d thought, a uniform color, but mottled with whitish patches, and it had the aspect not of an entire creature, but instead seemed a piece of one, a slimy organ that might have been removed from the body of some diseased monstrosity. Its edges rippled, the way the edges of a crepe will ripple from the heat of the griddle beneath, and I took the trembling it displayed for agitation. Full of dread, I eased a pace backward, and then, recognizing I was done for any way it shook out, not wanting it to touch me, I jumped through the leafy wall on my left and fell.
If I had jumped to my right, the direction in which Stupid had vanished, I would have fallen to my death. But instinct or luck directed me the opposite way, and I fell only about ten feet, crashing through the leafy ceiling of the room belonging to an elderly hobo with hair and beard gone almost totally white, whom I knew as SLC, which stood for Salt Lake City, his home—I hadn’t spoken to him since my arrival and had not bothered to learn his real name. I landed half on his mattress, my head bonking on the floor, but though I took a pretty good whack, I didn’t lose consciousness. SLC was sitting on some pillows in the corner of the room, calm as you please, eating a bowl of soup. When I managed to shake off the dizziness and sat up, he said, “Thanks for dropping in,” and chuckled.
I noticed he was wearing a threadbare gray suit, a dingy white shirt, and a wide silk foulard tie of a style that I’d only seen in old black-and-white movies. He saw me registering this, apparently, because he said, “Thought I’d put on my buryin’ suit…just in case. Them fritters gonna get me, I’ll be prepared.” He peered at me and blinked rapidly. “Reckon they almost got you. Was there a bunch of ’em?”
“Just one.” My head started throbbing. I thought about Stupid and all the bad good times we’d shared, and felt sadness wadding up in my chest. I glanced at
the hole I’d put in SLC’s ceiling, expecting to see the fritter that had killed Stupid and maybe some of his pals. Nothing but leaves and shadow.
“Might as well get comfortable,” SLC said. “Gonna be a long day.” In his shabby finery, with stiffened hanks of white hair hanging to his shoulders, his food-stained beard, and his bony wrists and ankles, he looked like an elf gone to seed.
“I ain’t stayin’ here,” I told him, and made to stand; but the effort got me dizzy again.
“Wouldn’t be surprised you had yourself a concussion,” SLC said. He slurped up another spoonful of soup. “I took a knock on the head once left me confused for a week.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute,” I said.
I had a look around SLC’s room. Taped to one wall, almost entirely covering it, were dozens of dog-eared and faded Polaroids, most photographs of natural scenery. Probably places he’d traveled. There were a few books and magazines scattered on the floor beside his mattress. Some clothes neatly piled. Two old pipe tobacco tins that likely contained sewing materials and such. Tins of Sterno and a stack of canned tomato soup. The whole place smelled like ripe hobo.
Taking stock of SLC’s meager possessions steadied me, and I gave standing another try, but I was still too dizzy. I was scared and pissed off—I wanted to get back to Annie—and I said, “I don’t know why the fuck you just sittin’ round waitin’ to die, man.”
“That’s all I’d be doin’ things was normal,” said SLC. “Sit or stand, don’t make much difference.”
“What I can’t figure is, how come people don’t move outa the way of these things.”
“Where you suggest we move to? Ain’t nothin’ out there ’cept more jungle, and you can’t live on the plain ’cause the beardsleys is all over.”
“Have you looked?” I asked. “You hunted around for a better place?”
“Much as I’m goin’ to look.” SLC set down his soup, sucked on his teeth. “You wanta look, you go on ahead.”
“Maybe I will.” I heaved myself up and this time I managed to make it to my feet.
“Well, that’s fine. But I recommend you stay where you are for now. Goin’ out in the passageways is a damn sight more dangerous.”
The room did a half spin, and I leaned against the wall.
“Got yourself a concussion…oh yeah!” SLC said brightly. “Best thing for you is to sit on back down. I’ll heat you some soup.”
In my dazed condition, the prospect of sitting down for a bowl of hot soup was appealing for the moment, but the next minute, the thought of slurping tomato soup while thousands of poisonous pancakes fluttered about killing dogs and people seemed like the peak of insanity. Still unsteady, I started for the door.
“Hang on, boy!” SLC set his bowl on the floor and stood—it took him a couple of tries before he made it upright. “If you ain’t got sense enough to stay put, I best go with you. Way you’re staggerin’, you ain’t gon’ get very far by yourself.”
I’m not sure what was on SLC’s mind. He might have been so senile, he’d forgotten the reason he had for keeping to his room. Or maybe he was so old, he figured he wasn’t risking all that much. He latched onto my elbow and we started off. We passed a couple of bodies, their faces branded with empurpled blazes where they had been touched by fritters, but luck was with us and we didn’t meet up with any ourselves. Once I thought I saw some floating off from us a ways on a branch two levels down, but I was seeing lots of floating things and I couldn’t be sure if any of them were real. As for SLC, he hobbled along, muttering to himself, acting no different than he usually did, except every so often he would glance up at me and flash a snaggletoothed grin.
When we pushed through the curtained door into Annie’s room, I thought she was going to throw us back out. She yelled at me, said how she thought I was dead, and what was I…Crazy? Didn’t I know any better than to go sniffing around after something that would kill me? She cried, she yelled some more, called me names. Finally I put my arm around her, agreed with everything she said for about ten or fifteen minutes, and she calmed down enough to sit with me on the mattress.
“I thought you was dead,” she said. “You didn’t come back, and I just knew they’d got you.”
“I shouldn’t have gone,” I told her. “It was dumb.”
“It was way more’n dumb! It was…” She couldn’t find the words and so I chimed in, saying, “It was irresponsible.”
“You make it sound like you was late for work or somethin’. You coulda been killed.” She looked gloomily down at my hand, which was resting on the blanket next to hers, as if she saw in it a bad sign she’d not noticed before. “I thought you’d changed.”
“Hey!” said SLC. He had settled in the corner and was sitting with his knees drawn up, looking worried. “Ain’t y’all got anything to eat in here?”
In the morning the fritters were gone. They took sixty-three souls with them, about a quarter of Yonder’s population. We burned the bodies on the stones where usually the laundry was stretched to dry, and scattered the ashes in the river. I went to Josiah Tobin’s wake, which consisted of eight old hobos sitting in his room, chewing jungleberries, and reminiscing about Josiah, telling lies about what a great rider he was and how he’d foxed the bulls in Yakima that one time, and didn’t he fry up the best hobo hash you’d ever tried? I felt like a young heathen among them. I wanted to say that stories about how Josiah had pissed his life away didn’t tell nothing of the man, and that to my mind he was the smartest son of a bitch I’d ever met on the rails, and the thing we should study on was not the mess he’d made of himself, but what he could have been if he’d given life more than half-a-try. But when it came my turn to speak, I told a story about drinking out in a desert squat east of Phoenix with him and Ragbone Sally. I guess I figured saying what I had thought wouldn’t mean much to anyone except Josiah.
Once the funerals were done, life over Yonder went back to normal. It was like nothing had happened. I tried to resist the impulse to embrace the sense of relief that caused us to want to put the attack behind us, but I didn’t try hard enough—a few days later I started going fishing with Euliss Brooks again, and me and Annie got back on track, and the tree where we all lived regained its customary lethargic atmosphere. My jungleberry consumption increased for a while, and Bobby Forstadt was, for about the same length of time, a bit more strident about his computer game theory, saying that the recurring menace of the fritters fit right in, and what we should be doing was attempting to influence the game. That was a fair sample of our reaction to sixty-three deaths. It wasn’t natural, but I suppose I’d become a full-on citizen of Yonder, and the unnatural responses of my fellows no longer struck me as being out of line. But I wasn’t happy. Annie and I were growing closer, but there was nowhere to go with it. If we had been back in the world, maybe we would have gotten off the rails and found regular work and built some sort of a life together; but what could you build living in a tree like kids on a backyard camp-out. We talked about catching out without any goal other than the filling up of time. We talked about returning to the world and giving it a go, but our talk was energyless and never got too serious.
Some people in Yonder kept calendars, recorded the passage of days, but I didn’t catch the habit—the days generally were so much alike, they seemed one long day striped with nights, and I saw no point in marking them. Thus I’m forced to estimate that it was about three weeks after the fritter attack when things turned for me. I was out fishing with Euliss, and at midmorning we decided that since we hadn’t had much success sitting together in the middle of the stone ledge, we’d try our luck at opposite ends of the ledge. It had rained overnight, and the sun was out, putting dazzles on the eddies, and the fishing should have been good, but neither one of us had gotten a nibble. The only odd thing I noticed was that the elders had reeled in their tentacles. When I mentioned this to Euliss, asked if he’d ever seen anything like it, he said maybe there was a day when it had happened before, bu
t he wasn’t sure. Then he advised me to concentrate on my fishing and pushed the brim of his baseball cap down over his eyes, signaling that he wasn’t interested in talking. We were sitting about thirty feet apart, and I was watching the flow of the green water about my line when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a rippling out at the center of the gorge. I was about to call it to Euliss’s attention, but he beat me to the punch and shouted, “Got me somepin’!”
I clambered to my feet, dusted the seat of my trousers. “Is it a big ’un?” I asked, thinking I’d walk over and see what he’d hooked.
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