The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She gets out of the car. She’s wearing a silk blouse, a set of June Cleaver double-strand pearls and matching earrings, and a pair of those shorts that make the wearer look like they have a refrigerator stuffed down the back of them.

  “Are you handicapped?” I ask.

  She looks right through me. She’s taking a yellow Attempt to Deliver slip out of her sharkskin purse. She has on shades.

  “I said, are you handicapped? I don’t see a sticker on your car.”

  “What business is it of yours?” she asks. “Besides, I’m only going to be in there a minute.”

  That’s what you think. She goes inside. I shrug at the one-armed guy. With some people it was their own fault they went to Korea or Viet Nam and got their legs and stuff blown off, with others it wasn’t.

  He drives off down the packed lot. He probably won’t find a space for a block.

  I take my bike tools out of my pocket. I go to the Volvo. In deference to Bob, I undo the valve cores on the left front and right rear tires.

  Then I get on my bike and ride down to the pay phone at the bakery three blocks away, call the non-emergency police number, and tell them there’s a lady without a handicap sticker blocking the reserved spot at the post office substation.

  After mailing the rods and using the quarter for the phone, I have eighty-two cents left—just enough for coffee at the bakery. It’s a chi-chi place I usually never go to, but I haven’t had any coffee this morning and I know they make a cup of Brazilian stuff that would bring Dwight D. Eisenhower back to life.

  I go in. They’ve got one of those European doorchimes that sets poor people’s nerves on edge and lets those with a heavy wallet know they’re in a place where they can really drop a chunk of money.

  The clerk is Indian or Paki; he’s on the phone talking to someone. I start tapping my change on the counter looking around. Maybe ten people in the place. He hangs up and starts toward me.

  “Large cuppa—” I start to say.

  The chime jingles and the smell hits me at the same time as their voices; a mixture of Jovan Musk for Men and Sassoon styling mousse.

  “—game.” says a voice. “How many croissants you still got?” says the voice over my shoulder to the clerk.

  The counterman has one hand on the coffee spigot and a sixteen ounce styrofoam cup in the other.

  “Oh, very many, I think,” he says to the voice behind me.

  “Give us about—oh, what, John?—say, twenty-five assorted fruit-filled, no lemon, okay?”

  The clerk starts to put down the styrofoam cup. In ambiguous situations, people always move toward the voice that sounds most like money.

  “My coffee?” I say.

  The clerk looks back and forth like he’s just been dropped on the planet.

  “Could you sort of hurry?” says the voice behind me. “We’re double-parked.”

  I turn around then. There are three of them in warmup outfits—gold and green, blue and orange, blue and silver. They look maybe twenty-five. Sure enough, there’s a blue Renault blocking three cars parked at the laundromat next door. The handles of squash racquets stick up out of the blue and orange, blue and silver, gold and green duffles in the back seat.

  “No lemon,” says the blond-haired guy on the left. “Make sure there’s no lemon, huh?”

  “You gonna fill our order?” asks the first guy, who looks like he was raised in a meatloaf mold.

  “No,” I say. “First he’s going to get my coffee, then he’ll get your order.”

  They notice me for the first time then, suspicion dawning on them this wasn’t covered in their Executive Assertiveness Training program.

  The clerk is turning his head back and forth like a radar antenna.

  “I thought they gave free coffee at the Salvation Army,” says the blond guy, looking me up and down.

  “Tres, tres amusant.” I said.

  “Are you going to fill our $35 order, or are you going to give him his big fifty cent cup of coffee?” asked the first guy.

  The ten other people in the place were all frozen in whatever attitude they had been in when all this started. One woman actually had a donut halfway to her mouth and was watching, her eyes growing wider.

  “My big seventy-five cent order,” I said, letting the change clink on the glass countertop. “Any time you come in any place,” I went on, “you should look around the room and you should ask yourself, who’s the only, only possible one here who could have taken Taiwanese mercenaries into Laos in 1968? And you should act accordingly.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the middle one, who hadn’t spoken before and looked like he’d taken tai-kwon-do since he was four.

  “Practically nobody,” I said. “But if any of you say one more word before I get my coffee, I’m going out to the saddlebag on my bike, and I’m going to take out a product backed by 132 years of Connecticut Yankee know-how and fine American craftsmanship and I’m coming back in here and showing you exactly how the rat chews the cheese.”

  Then I gave them the Thousand Yard Stare, focusing on something about a half mile past the left shoulder of the guy in the middle.

  They backed up, jangling the doorbell, out onto the sidewalk, bumping into a lady coming out with a load of wash.

  “Crazy fuck,” I heard one of them say as he climbed into the car. The tai-kwon-do guy kept looking at me as the driver cranked the car up. He said something to him, jumped around the car and started kicking the shit out of the back tire of the twelve-speed white Concord leaning against the telephone pole out front.

  I heard people sucking in their breaths in the bakery.

  The guy kicked the bike three times, watching me, breaking out the spokes in a half moon, laughing.

  “My bike!” yelled a woman on one of the stools. “That’s my bike! You assholes! Get their license number!” She ran outside.

  I turned to the clerk, who had my cup of coffee ready. I plunked down eighty cents in nickels, dimes and pennies, and put two cents in the TIPS cup. Then I put saccharine and cream in the coffee.

  Out on the sidewalk, the woman was screaming at the tai-kwon-do-looking guy, and she was crying. His two friends were talking to him in low voices and reaching for their billfolds. He looked like a little kid who’d broken a window in a sandlot ball game. People had come out of the grocery store across the street and were watching.

  I got on my bike and rode to the corner unnoticed.

  A cop car, lights flashing but with the siren off, turned toward the bakery as I turned out onto the street.

  It was only 9:15 A.M. It was looking to be a nice day.

  * * *

  I got two-and-three-fourths stars in the 1977 Career Woman’s Guide to Austin Men. Here’s the entry: Working-class bozo, well-read. Great for a rainy Tuesday night when your regular feller is out of town. PS: You’ll have to pick up all the tabs.

  * * *

  I’m still friends with about two-thirds of the women I’ve ever gone with, which I’m as proud of as anything else in my life, I guess. I care a lot, I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat personality.

  * * *

  At one time, in those days before herpes and AIDS, when everybody was trying to figure out just who and what they were, I was sort of a Last Station of the Way for women who, in Bob’s words, “were trying to decide whether to go nelly or not.” They usually did anyway, more often than not with another old girlfriend of mine.

  (It all started when I was dating the ex-wife of the guy who was then living with my ex-girlfriend. The lady who was then the ex-wife now lives with a nice lady who used to be married to another friend of mine. They each have tattoos on their left shoulders. One of them has a portrait of Karl Marx and under it the words Hot to Trotsky.

  The other has the Harley-Davidson symbol but instead of the usual legend it says Born to Read Hegel.)

  No one set out an agenda or anything for me to be their Last Guy on Earth. It jus
t happened, and expanded outward like ripples in a pond.

  * * *

  About two months ago at a party some young kid was listening to a bunch of us old farts talk, and he asked me, “If the Sixties were so great, and the Eighties suck so bad, then what happened in the Seventies?”

  “Well,” I said. “Richard Nixon resigned, and then, and then … gee, I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Another woman I dated for a while had only one goal in life: to plant the red flag on the rubble of several prominent landmarks between Virginia and Maryland.

  We used to be coming home from the dollar midnight flicks on campus (Our Daily Bread, Sweet Movie, China Is Near) and we would pass this neat old four-story hundred-year-old house, and every time, she would look up at it and say “That’s where I’m going to live after the Revolution.”

  I’m talking 1976 here, folks.

  We’d gone out together five or six times, and we went back to her place and were going to bed together for the first time. We were necking, and she got up to go to the bathroom. “Get undressed,” she said.

  When she came back in, taking her sweater off over her head, I was naked in the bed with the sheets pulled up to my neck. I was wearing a Mao Tse Tung mask.

  It was wonderful.

  * * *

  Friday. Reunion Eve.

  It was one of those days when everything is wrong. All the work I started I messed up in some particularly stupid way. I started everything over twice. I gave up at three P.M.

  Things didn’t get any better. I tried TV. A blur of talking heads. Nothing interested me for more than thirty seconds.

  Outside the sun was setting past Mt. Bonnell and Lake Austin. Over on Cat Mountain the red winks of the lights on the TV towers came on. A Continental 737 went over, heading towards California’s golden climes.

  I put on a music tape I’d made and tried to read a book. I got up and turned the noise off. It was too Sixties. I’d hear enough of that tomorrow night. No use setting myself up for a wallow in the good times and peaking too early. I drank a beer that tasted like kerosene. It was going to be a cool clear October night. I closed the windows and watched the moon come up over Manor, Texas.

  The book was Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. I tried to read it some more and it began to go yammer yammer yibble yibble Twain, yammer yibble Hemingway. Enough.

  I turned the music back on, put on the headphones and lay down on the only rug in the house, looking up at the cracks in the plaster and listening to the Moody Blues. What a loss of a day, but I was tired anyway. I went to bed at nine P.M.

  It was one of those nights when every change in the wind brings an erection, when every time you close your eyes you see penises and vulvas, a lot of them ones you haven’t seen before. After staring up at the ceiling for an hour, I got up, got another beer, went into the living room and sat naked in the dark.

  I had one of those feelings like I hadn’t had in years. The kind your aunt told you she’d had the day your grandfather died, before anybody knew it yet. She told you at the funeral that three days before she’d felt wrong and irritable all day and didn’t know why, until the phone rang with the news. The kind of feeling Phil Collins gets on “In the Air Tonight,” a mood that builds and builds with no discernible cause.

  It was a feeling like in a Raymond Chandler novel, the kind he blames on the Santa Ana winds, when all the dogs bark, when people get pissed off for no reason, when yelling at someone you love is easier than going on silently with the mood you have inside.

  Only there were no howling dogs, no sound of fights from next door. Maybe it was just me. Maybe this reunion thing was getting to me more than I wanted it to.

  Maybe it was just horniness. I went to the VCR, an old Beta II, second one they ever made, no scan, no timer, all metal, weighs 150 pounds, bought at Big State Pawn for fifty bucks, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I put in Cum Shot Revue #1 and settled back in my favorite easy chair.

  The TV going kskkssssssssss woke me up at 4:32 A.M. I turned everything off. So this is what me and my whole generation come down to, people sleeping naked in front of their TVs with empty beer cans in their laps. It was too depressing to think about.

  I made my way to bed, lay down, and had dreams. I don’t remember anything about them, except that I didn’t like them.

  * * *

  I’ve known three women the latter part of the twentieth century has driven slapdab crazy.

  For one, it was through no fault of her own. Certain chemicals were missing in her body. She broke up with me quietly after six months and checked herself into the MHMR. That was the last time I saw her.

  She evidently came back through town about three years ago, after she quit taking her lithium. I got strange phone calls from old friends who had seen her. Her vision, and that of the one we call reality, no longer intersected. Having destroyed her present, she had begun to work on the past and the future also.

  Last I heard she had run off with a cook she met at a Halfway House; they were rumored to be working Exxon barges together on the Mississippi River.

  * * *

  The second, after affairs with five real jerks in a row in six months, began to lose weight. She’d only been 111 pounds to begin with. People whispered about leukemia, cancer, some wasting disease. Of course it wasn’t—in the rest of the world, dying by not getting enough to eat is a right, in America, it’s a privilege. She began to look like sticks held together with a pair of kid’s blue-jeans and a shirt, with only two brightly-glowing eyes watching you from the head to show she was still alive. She was fainting a lot by then.

  One day Bob, who had been her lover six years before, went over to her house. (By then she was forgetting to do things like close and lock the doors, or turn on the lights at night.)

  Bob picked her up by her shirt collar (it was easy, she only weighed eighty-three pounds by then) and slapped her, like in the movies, five times as hard as he could.

  It was only on the fifth slap that her eyes came to life and filled with fear.

  “Stop it, Gabriella,” said Bob. “You’re killing yourself.” Then he kissed her on her bloody, swelling lips, set her down blinking, and walked out her door and her life, and hasn’t seen her since.

  He saved her. She met another nice woman at the eating disorder clinic. They now live in Westlake Hills, raising the other woman’s two boys by her first marriage.

  * * *

  The third one’s cat ran away one morning. She went back upstairs, wrote a long apologetic note to her mother, dialed 911 and told them where she was, hung up and drank most of an eleven-ounce can of Crystal Drano.

  She lived on for six days in the hospital in a coma with no insides and a raging 107° fever.

  Her friends kept checking, but the cat never came back.

  * * *

  “Yo!” said Olin Sweetwater. He and two or three others were standing outside the community college on the cool Saturday morning. He had on a sweatshirt, done up in the old school colors, that said Bull Goose Tour Guide. We shook hands (thumbs locked, sawing our arms back and forth). He was balding; what hair he had left had a white plume across the left side.

  The two women, Angela Pardo and Rita Jones when I’d known them, were nervous. Olin handed us sweatshirts that said Tour Guide. We thanked him.

  I looked at the brick facade. The school had been an ugly dump in 1969; it was still a dump, but with a charm all its own.

  (One of the reasons Olin asked me to help with the tour is that I’d lived with a lady artist for a year who had worked part-time as a clerk in the admissions office of the community college. I guess he thought that qualified me as an Expert.)

  The tours were supposed to start at ten A.M. Sleepy college students who had Saturday labs were wandering in and out of the two-and-a-half story building or some of the other outbuildings the college leased. Olin had pulled lots of strings to let us guide people without any interference, or so he kept t
elling us.

  Around 9:45 people started wandering up, trailing kids, shy husbands, wives, lovers. God, I thought recognizing a few here and there. We’re so fucking normal looking. We look like our mothers and fathers did in 1969.

  (Remember in 1973 when you saw American Graffiti for the first time and everybody laughed at the short haircuts and long skirts, then when you went back to see it in 1981 those parts didn’t seem so strange anymore?)

  I was talking to one of the few women who’d been nice to me in high school, a quiet girl named Sharon, whose front teeth then had reminded me, sweetly and not at all unpleasantly, of Rocket J. Squirrel’s. She was now, I learned, on her second divorce. She introduced me to her kids—Seth and Jason—who looked like they’d rather be on Mars than here.

  Sharon stopped talking and stared behind me. I saw other people turning and followed their gaze toward the street. “Jesus,” I said. A pink flowered VW Beetle pulled up to the curb as a student drove away. Out of it came something from Mr. Natural—the guy had hair down to his butthole (a wig, it turned out), headband, walnut shell beads, elephant bell pants with neon green flash panels, a khaki shirt and wool vest, Ben Franklin specs tinted Vick’s Salve blue. There was a B-52 peace symbol button big as a dinner plate on his left abdomen, and the vest had a leather stash pocket at the bottom snaps.

  Something in the way he moves …

  Seth and Jason were pointing and laughing, other people were looking embarrassed.

  “Peace, Love, and Brotherhood,” he said, flashing us the peace sign.

  The voice. I knew it after twenty years. Hoyt Lawton.

  Hoyt Lawton had been president of the fucking Key Club in 1969! He’d worn three-piece suits to school even on the days when he didn’t have to go eat with the Rotarians! His hair was never more than three-eighths of an inch off his skull—we said he never got it cut, it just never grew. He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about. Hoyt Lawton, what an asshole!