LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  I insisted that Ted swim with me out to the raft.

  He didn’t want to, having more sense than I did, even then. I was two years older and, as I recall, I shamed him into the attempt—not from any need of company but from the silent pulsing of rivalry that spreads its dark under so many family relationships.

  Limping across the beach, we plunged into water the color and temperature of iced coffee. The raft was distant, black, and ominously tilted. Ted thrashed furiously toward it, arms pounding up spray, his head rigidly lifted, like the head of a scouting turtle.

  After a bitter struggle, he flailed to the raft. His fingers locked hard on the slippery timbers and there he huddled, shaking, white-faced, gulping air. He had fought his way out by sheer will. Even to me, it was apparent he could not fight his way back.

  Eventually he tried.

  The years overlay this incident with a spurious inevitability, as if events could have happened only this way. But, like so much else, events seem inevitable only when you stare straight at what happened, ignoring the motives behind.

  Ted tried for shore. Halfway there, his splashing stopped. Very quietly, he submerged.

  From the raft, I saw the pale glimmer of his body dwindle through the clear black water. Guilt shocked me. I had wanted him to fail, I suppose, without ever considering the consequences of failure.

  No one else noticed that he had gone down. I hurled off the raft and swam furiously to where he had vanished. Not a bubble marked the spot. I surface-dived, eyes open, swimming steeply away from the light. The water seemed to open all around me, black and deep and hollow, as if I swam downward through the ceiling of a liquid room, immensely empty. I descended through layers of increasing cold. Pressure closed around me. Light left the water and I could see nothing.

  Then, entirely without warning, my hands plunged into a chilled silk of mud.

  I jerked away in horror. As I did so, my left hand lightly grazed cold skin. I clutched and missed. I spread my arms and found nothing and groped at random through that lightless place tasting of stirred mud.

  I was confused and needed air. I lashed about, scared and disoriented within that darkness.

  And blundered full against his small, cold figure, sitting upright, arms locked about his knees.

  I clutched him with both hands, squeezing unmercifully, and drove both feet against the mud. My legs sank in to the knees. In a frenzy, I kicked loose. The mud taste thickened in the water. Mindless, angry, horrified, I kicked frantically. Slowly we wallowed upward. Anguish gripped my chest. Beneath, the mud waited for our return.

  It was black, then not so black. I was mad for air. The water grayed, then transformed itself to opaque white, softly warm, and we burst into the light.

  Afterward, we sprawled loose-limbed on the beach stones. I felt the violence in my heart, and, at the edge of my sight, in all that sun, dark mist wavered.

  But no one had noticed. Past us stormed a pack of kids, howling after a yellow ball. Not one of them knew. It had all happened right beside them, sixteen feet away—the blind search above the mud, the despairing struggle upward. As close to those kids as the skins on their bodies. But not one of them knew.

  Finally, I asked him, “How come you just sat there?”

  “Was watching them.”

  “Watching who?”

  “People.”

  “People” was a favored word. He used it with casual ambiguity to mean swimmers or weeds or fish or fleets of boats. The imprecision bothered neither of us.

  He added in his thin voice, “They watched but they wouldn’t come.”

  I said, “Nobody saw us. You shut up.”

  He rolled over to stare at me with uncomprehending eyes. “You hit the People. They went away.”

  Then he slammed me hard on one shoulder and scrambled up and tottered off toward the car.

  ###

  Eventually, Ted learned to swim—although in an indoor swimming pool. He had developed a distaste for the water of lakes and streams. He prowled warily at the banks of these, studying their currents with calculating eyes.

  “Swimming doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asked, many vacations later.

  We lounged in a boat that slowly drifted across the weed beds of Indian Lake. Ahead of our prow, swarms of brightly patched red and yellow turtles scattered wildly.

  I said, “In lakes and stuff? No. Should it?”

  “Look at all that down there.” He motioned toward the green-brown banks of weeds that rose like cliffs in the transparent water. “Weeds, turtles, all that stuff.”

  “You can stay out of the weeds.”

  “I was just thinking,” he said. “Suppose there’s something in there looking at you. Watching. Lying back where they can see and you can’t, all quiet. Not curious, not mad, just watching you and the way you move and waiting till you go someplace else. Just patient and quiet and part of the water, sort of.”

  “What? Fish?”

  “No, not that.”

  I sensed that he had told me something of importance and I had not understood. In some annoyance, I snapped, “What you talking about, watching?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It was just a sort of feeling I had. A kind of idea. I don’t like swimming much.”

  ###

  We grew up and grew apart. Twenty-five years of education and military service separated us. The parents died and Ted married. So did I, although that was a mistake. We settled into the flow of time, I in Texas with NASA, Ted in Pennsylvania as an associate college professor.

  We did not write much. We were separated by more than geography. The Ted and Ray Madison who were joined, as children, by blood ties and silent competition, were separated, as adults, by the same factors. We indulged our separation carefully, as if aware of what closer relations might incubate.

  In early June, I took off a week to visit him. I had been at NASA headquarters in Washington, as a mainly silent handler of viewgraphs and printed handouts showing wonderfully high shuttle launch rates, supported by personnel who never got tired, never encountered technical problems, and needed no spare parts. This was in 1985, before the ethereal palace of mission planning splintered against reality.

  Ted and his wife Barbara owned a small farmhouse just outside of Peter’s Ford. This is one of those tiny Pennsylvania towns with narrow streets and worn red or white brick buildings crowding against the sidewalk, their windows masked by interior curtains. They resemble rows of faces with their eyes shut.

  You crept through town at thirty miles an hour (radar enforced) until, with no warning, the town fell away. You came at once among fields rolling leisurely across shallow hills.

  This was worn country, old country, rubbed by time, concealing a million years’ worth of death beneath its gentle fields. Behind fat clusters of willows along Happyjack Creek showed lines of blue mountains, as lovely and ominous as an end game in chess.

  I followed a gravel road between fields of young corn. Far overhead, a hawk watched from its spiral against a hot blue sky. The road rose around a knoll and circled a small brown and white house, full of windows. Bulky trees shielded it from the fields.

  I stopped the car and stepped out. The shaded air smelted sweetly coot. I could hear nothing. No wind, no birds, no creak of limb or flutter of leaf. My footsteps grated loudly as I walked to the house and rapped on the screen.

  “Hey, Ted.”

  No one answered.

  Far overhead, limbs and leaves interlocked in ascending layers through which blazed bright bits of sky. I stood at the bottom of a clear, dim well of light as transparent as water, listening to the silence.

  The screen door banged when I entered the house. The kitchen smelled of onions and wax, and on the walls gleamed copper food molds. I called again and got no answer and moved, watchful and soft-footed into the next room.

  This was a brown and gold living room, full of light. It was as neatly ordered as a small girl dressed for Sunday school. Well-used furniture crowded
against stuffed bookcases. On the pale walls matted watercolors glowed soft rose, blue, pale green. Their mood was calm. The technique was pure Barbara: she favored partially drawn outlines touched by color. It was delicate work that looked like the tag end of a dream.

  I stood listening intently, although there was nothing to listen to. “This place,” I said loudly, “is like the Marie Celeste.” And moved to the baby grand piano by a double window. A transcription of Handel’s Water Music stood open on a rack above the keyboard.

  When I touched the keys, the piano emitted an unexpected bellow of sound. I jumped, scowled, looked at the music.

  Handel instantly defeated me. Closing the Water Music, I rooted through a stack of 1930s sheet music, searching for simplicity.

  At the bottom of the pile, under a copy of “Muddy River Moan,” I found a folded watercolor. It was a study of light and shadow along a stream. From the water stared a transparent man, evidently stretched among white stones. It was hard to tell. His body melted into shadow. Except for the figure, which was irritatingly indistinct, it was a nice piece of work. Barbara’s name was scribbled in the lower right-hand corner.

  After tucking the watercolor back under the music, I sat and listened. Caught myself listening. Stood up violently and padded through the hush of the back door.

  Outside, the sense of being watched was powerful, the quiet intolerable. High overhead, layered leaves quivered, liquid and unstable as flowing water. Some sort of small gray animal slowly crept along a high branch, like the silent sliding of a gray fingertip. I could not see it clearly. It flowed out of sight and I had the curious feeling that it stopped behind the leaves to look down at me.

  From the road rang a clear feminine voice: “Hey, Ray. Here I am.”

  I jumped less than a foot and stepped down to greet Barbara.

  She was a tall girl, lean and square-faced, with a lot of flying brown hair. She wore jeans and a color-smudged old shirt with the tail out, and carried a wooden painter’s box. “I was down at the creek,” she said, kissing me. “You’re early. Lordy, isn’t it hot? When’d you get in?”

  “Just a while ago. Thought you were all lost in the woods.”

  “How do you like the place? Isn’t it lovely?”

  A bird shrilled. Overhead a limb jerked as a squirrel scuttled along it and a twig clicked against the top of my car. In the distance, I heard the lament of cattle.

  “Listen to that bird,” I said.

  “Place is full of birds. Wait till you hear them in the morning. Let’s get a drink. Where’s your bag?”

  Inside, in the living room, I settled into a gold chair and watched her snap open the wooden box and rustle out her sketches. “Ted hates me going down to the creek to paint. But it’s so pretty.”

  “What’s the matter with the creek? Quicksand?”

  “No. It’s shallow. Stony. Look here.”

  She showed me her sketches—white stones and sun on a shallow skin of water. No transparent figures.

  “Very nice,” I said, listening to the birds outside the window.

  “Ted don’t like the creek. He’s got this thing.” Her long fingers made a complicated movement in the air. “I try not to worry him. But it’s so silly. He almost drowned once, didn’t he?”

  “Once.” I told her about my heroic rescue, leaving out the sibling rivalry and my panic under the dark water. “I suppose he’s got a right to be funny about water.”

  “He swims okay,” she said. “He just worries . . .”Again the curious finger gestures suggesting complexity. “Anyhow, it’s a real pest. Here I am, right in the middle of a drawing cycle. You know—daybreak to dusk on the creek.” Her voice sounded diminished. “I guess he’s afraid I might fall in.”

  “He’s got funny in his old age,” I said.

  “It isn’t very funny,” she said, and the talk shifted to other things.

  ###

  At four o’clock, the screen door slammed and Ted burst into the living room, his long face beaming. “Well, I’ll be doggonned, you did come, didn’t you.”

  He had become a tall lean man with a wide mouth. Gray scattered the edges of his hair. He was long-bodied, long-armed and, unlike his brother, had not thickened around the waist.

  He beat joyously on my shoulder with a hand. “I was going to be early, but the computer flopped. The computer always flops. Damn fool thing. A computer’s a box full of half-right information that it feeds you in one-minute bursts, surrounded by hours of downtime.”

  “Just like ours,” I said, looking at him.

  “Ahhhhhh, you dern scientist.”

  Behind the graying hair, the faintly worn face, the strange long body, I saw the familiar brother of yesterday, still eager, still protecting his vulnerability with chatter, expressing himself in broad, clumsy gestures. I wondered if I seemed as strange to him as he did to me.

  He dropped his briefcase, kissed Barbara, beamed at me.

  “When’d you get in? Did Barb show you around? I got to work a couple of hours tomorrow, then I’m off all weekend. How do you like this place?”

  “Nice and quiet,” I said. “I was admiring Barbara’s watercolors.”

  “I have some new ones,” she said, not quite defiantly. She thrust them out.

  Animation went out of his face. “The creek, huh? It’s pretty.” Ghosts of past disagreements edged his voice.

  She smiled up at him, innocent as a cat. “The light was just right.”

  “That’s nice,” he said.

  He laid the watercolors carefully on the table and did not look at them again. We talked of other things—of birds and orbital flight, term papers and county history. Through it all you could feel the presence of the watercolors, a point of vague unease, like a tiny cut in the skin. A very tiny cut. But enough to make them carefully cheerful with each other and overenthusiastic with me.

  After dark, Ted and I ambled down the road to admire Jupiter and Venus in the same sector of sky. Above us, leaves hissed with wind, as if water rushed at us across sand.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we’re sorta far out here. I’d like to be over on the other side of town. But it seems our inescapable destiny to have this house and live in this house and love this house and never ever escape from this house. About six generations of Barb’s family owned this area. She grew up here and we bought it from her parents. They still farm it. It’s okay. I’m just not too crazy about it.”

  “Too close to the creek?”

  His head moved sharply, his expression masked by shadow. “Barb said something, huh?”

  “No. You were never too crazy about water.”

  “I guess not,” he said slowly, thinking about it. “Especially deep water. Not that the creek is all that deep. Isn’t Happyjack Creek a great name? It’s only about six inches, usually.”

  “You can drown in an inch when your luck’s out.”

  “I expect I’m nuts,” he said. “Barb thinks I’m nuts. About the creek.”

  I hardly knew what to say to this stranger-brother. He stood in the darkness, head tipped back, listening to the hissing of the wind. The house lights quivered behind the tossing leaves and between that distant yellow light and our eyes hung shapeless masses of blackness, alive with movement, shadows slipping within shadows.

  I saw that he was looking out toward Jupiter. He said, “I come out here a lot at night. It’s quite likely extremely self-indulgent, morally. Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living on the outside of reality? Walking around preoccupied with ourselves. And just a hand away, the real world goes on. We’re of no importance to the real world. We’re just an unimportant transient. The living part of reality is someplace else.”

  “Sure,” I said, “I feel that way every time I go to Washington.”

  He broke into a sharp laugh. “You violate my sense of melodramatic doom.”

  We walked slowly back to the house, our feet crunching the gravel. Nothing lay behind the shadows. We stepped through them quite easily and c
ame under the trees. But when I looked back, the place where we had talked was dense with darkness.

  ###

  I went to sleep in a strange bedroom and just as always woke immediately. The pillow felt too flat and the bed too high and the mattress pressed at unfamiliar points, comfortable but not my own. I adjusted myself and heard their voices through the near wall.

  It was not possible to understand much. His voice, then hers, a soft blur of sound, rising to a few clear words, then fading to a rhythmic blur, so that you caught the cadence of speech without the sense of it, the sound the fish hear as the fishermen talk while baiting their hooks.

  “. . . must not,” his voice said. And again, “. . . dangerous. I asked you not . . .” And once, “Don’t look for them.”

  Her voice answering, softer yet clearer, holding anger and pity, “. . . all my life . . . There’s nothing. I know you’re worried. Ask Ray. Thought too long about. Nothing. Nothing . . .”

  It was shameful to listen but I listened, prying at their privacy, feeling as if the act of listening exposed me to the silent derision of those intelligences watching from a concealed place.

  Their voices stopped. I covered myself. Wind among the leaves like water flowing among white rocks. I slept without dreams.

  By the time I pried myself out of bed the next morning, Ted had left for work. As I entered the kitchen, sweet with the odor of hot ham and biscuits, Barbara was snapping up her painting box.

  “Can you make out all alone here for a couple of hours?” she asked. “I got maybe an hour’s light left. Ted’s gone.”

  “Let me make a sandwich and I’ll walk down with you. I want to see the Forbidden Creek.”

  “Ha!” she said. “It doesn’t make me nervous. I’ve looked at that creek all my life . . . ”

  I had found a foam cup in the cupboard and was pouring it full of coffee. “. . . and never saw the People,” I said.

  The painting box banged loudly as she dropped it on the table. I saw the darkness under her eyes from not enough sleep, the gossamer lines of strain at the corners of eyes and lips. She looked wary and alert.

  She asked, “When did he tell you?”