Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  There was only one ‘she’ he could possibly mean and it made the mystery no clearer. Sanford looked at the paper again, thinking of the human, the caseworker, beginning to feel a faint sense of guarded optimism. If he actually had a propane oven, or even just a propane torch—!

  And then Sam told him.

  “She was out there all day,” he finished, laughing again, so hard that his words were scarcely intelligible. “You should have seen her. God, the stink! Made my eyes burn. Crawling out there in the piss, running water out of her head and picking up papers! I thought I was going to go blind laughing!”

  “Zhu’kwe,” Sanford said, and turned around.

  “That’s what she said. More or less. Hey, come on in a second.”

  Palps snapping, Sanford followed Sam into the trailer. Open beer cans were everywhere—on the floor, on the counters, in piles knee-deep—every one half-filled with rancid beer. The stink was almost a physical thing, as intended. Humans went where they wanted; the only defense was to encourage them not to want to go where they should not be. Also, the beer drew clouds of flies, which Sanford did not consider a benefit, but he could see a net hanging on the wall next to a box of baggies to indicate Sam did. He could taste chaw in his throat, but he did not spit. Protein was protein and chits were chits, and if Sam found people hungry enough to buy his horrible trade, who was Sanford to condemn him?

  Sam popped the false panel to the rear room and the scent of chemicals overblew that of old beer. He’d been brewing, making drugs for the humans most likely, but this was not what he wanted Sanford to see.

  There was a yang’ti incinerator on the wall.

  “Doesn’t work,” said Sam, watching Sanford heft it down. “Can you fix it?”

  “Perhaps. Where did you get it?”

  “Under the floor at Jefferson’s. They took him away last week. He had it hidden pretty good too. And he had this.”

  Sanford’s glance showed him part of an ancillary output cable in Sam’s hand. Only part, but it was the part with the connector-plate.

  “Can you fix it?” Sam asked, tapping the gun. He bounced the cable in his hand, as he’d dangled meat over T’aki.

  Could he fix it? Should he? Ko’vi the Creator might Himself shudder to think of Sam armed with such a devastating weapon. Sam had been familiar to him even before all…this…which meant he was not a civilian. Not that familiar, so he probably wasn’t a soldier, but he might still know the operating codes for the incinerator, and if so, Sanford would be responsible for whatever damage it went on to do in Sam’s hands. And that was assuming Sam wanted to use it and not sell it. If a functional incinerator fell into human hands…but the cable had a way of drawing his eye.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Sam tossed him the cable. He caught it with the hand not holding the gun. It felt heavy. Not salvaged as badly as it appeared, perhaps. He could feel his antennae wanting to quiver.

  “Want a beer?” Sam asked. “Or something stronger? I got some good ferment in the back.”

  “Not now.”

  “Something to eat? I can get this shit cleaned up in a minute. Stay awhile.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Fuck you then, I’ll go out.” His eye fell on the paper now tucked in the waist of Sanford’s breeches. He chuckled. “Think she’ll be back again?”

  “If she does come back,” Sanford said without planning to, “leave her alone.”

  Sam paused and drew back, his head cocked and eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “What do you think will happen when you succeed in frightening her?”

  Sam blew air through his palps derisively. “She’s not going to do anything, she’s an egg.”

  “She doesn’t have to do anything,” Sanford said, “except come back in a white van with more humans who won’t be impressed by your games.”

  Sam held his arms out stiffly from his sides and trembled them. “This is me, shaking with fear,” he said solemnly. “Oh fine, I’ll ease off. But you should have seen her crawling around with her ass in the air.” Sam laughed again, but his eyes grew distracted. He was quiet for a moment and then he shook it off and gestured at the door, muttering, “Get the fuck out of here, I need to go.”

  Sanford left Sam heading north over the rows and returned to his own house, where T’aki sat in the back room, playing. He looked at the cable first, then broke down the incinerator and had a look inside.

  “What’s jellybean?” T’aki asked, rolling an empty can back and forth between his hands.

  Tapping at the trigger-lock, Sanford clicked a distracted, “I don’t know.” After several minutes’ work, it occurred to him to ask why.

  “I think they jump.”

  “Perhaps.”

  T’aki came out to climb on the table and watch him. It made him uncomfortable, his son and the weapon, but there was no room to perform this examination below and not enough lighting.

  “How many suns does our world have?” the boy asked finally.

  “Just one.”

  “Is it hot?”

  “All suns are hot.”

  T’aki blew air through his palps and looked away, at Earth’s sun.

  “Don’t do that. You’ll burn your eyes,” Sanford said. He thought the problem might be in the channeler, and if so, the gun was dead. The only way to get another channeler was off another incinerator. That was the problem with too many of these things. None of them were built to last twenty years.

  That stirred up thoughts of the ship, unpleasant thoughts like strips of funeral wind blowing through his heart. Twenty years was not so unreasonable a time to expect the ship to remain functional…but he doubted it had another twenty years in it. Surely not when it had been left to hover above Earth’s ocean, abandoned and left to deteriorate, save by the humans who might still be prying it apart.

  He could not afford to nurture these thoughts. Sanford blocked them stolidly from his mind and focused again on the gun.

  “When are we leaving?” T’aki asked, coming to the table’s edge to watch him. “Is it soon?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused, reached out and rubbed the boy’s head. “Do you want to go outside and play?”

  “No. Father…what’s roach?”

  Sanford patted him, then sighed and put down his tools. He picked up his young son and pulled him onto his lap. “It is a word humans use to mean yang’ti.”

  “Like bug?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a bad word?”

  Sanford hesitated. “It is a lazy word.”

  “Do we have bad words to mean humans?”

  “Some.”

  “What are they?”

  “I do not teach my son lazy words.” And suddenly, he thought of the caseworker and how she’d stood in the sun, covering her eyes and silent because she would not speak his name, the unknown joke he had been given. He looked down at T’aki. “Who called you a roach?” he asked.

  T’aki was evasive. “I heard it on the Heaps.”

  “And who called you—” His mouth could not make the word as easily as his son. “—the other word?”

  “The case woman.”

  Sanford thought. “Then it is probably not a bad word,” he said slowly, unsure why he believed it. “You can ask her. She may come tomorrow.”

  “Will I have to go in back?” T’aki asked cautiously.

  “Not if you behave.” Sanford gave his son another pat, then set him down and picked up the gun again. “Go out and play, if you like. Stay close.”

  This time, T’aki scooped up his toys and ran outside.

  Sanford removed the channeler’s casing and had a look at it through his magnifier-frame. He thought of the woman. Hours in the piss-mires, picking up papers in a land already thick in cast-off paper…

  And then he put her from his mind and got to work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She went back. Of course she went back. One paycheck half-spent did not give her the courage to test IBI’s
enforcement of that breach of contract clause. She asked for and received (with a heavy sigh and a lot of eye-rolling) new forms and questionnaires, and she rode the tracks, and she walked in through the Checkpoint gate with her head held high past the same jerk guard who’d seen her leave yesterday.

  “Still no car?” he asked, smirking at her. “Some people never learn.”

  “President Dufries says we all have to do our part to conserve energy,” she replied piously. She refused to use a bodyguard to do her job. She was helping people, damn it.

  “Suit yourself, doll. But do yourself a favor and dial 99 the next time someone looks like they’re going to work you over,” he said as she swiped her card. “You get killed in there and it reflects real bad on me.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  The gate shut behind her. The howl of alien alarm went up. Sarah heaved a breath and started trudging down her causeway. It seemed to her that the cries howling out of the alleys were different today, just a little bit broken, like whoever was doing it was laughing at the same time. Maybe he’d seen her leave too.

  Hobart was sitting in the shade next to his house. He stood up when she came near and walked out to meet her. “You lost my census report,” he said.

  She blinked at him, feeling her cheeks crawl with embarrassed heat even though she knew she hadn’t lost a damned thing. “I—I’m sorry, there was a—”

  “Hurry up,” he said. “I have things to do.”

  Startled, she fished out a new form while he stood there, annoyed and impatient, but perfectly polite. She asked the questions and he answered them, leaving out all the nasty remarks and swearing he’d sprinkled yesterday’s census with, trimming it all down to “Yes,” “No,” and, “Is that it?” Then he walked with her three houses down and banged on Jules Verne’s door with his fist.

  Someone inside spat out a wordless snake-like rattle.

  “Get your husk out here, you piss-drinking pain in the ass!” Hobart snapped, and dented in the side of the trailer with a hard kick.

  Verne opened the door and glared at them.

  “God, guide my hands before I wrap them around your useless neck,” Hobart said, and pointed one long black finger directly into the other alien’s face. “Be nice. You know nice? Nice is what I am when I don’t kick your chitin open. Behave your fucking self.” He turned around and looked at Sarah. “We’re done, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stalked off, muttering, and left the two of them alone.

  “Get on with it, meat-sack,” said Verne.

  She fumbled out a second questionnaire, and twenty minutes later, she was tucking it back in her case and walking away, a little shell-shocked but pleased. Encouraged. Happy, even. She caught herself humming twice, stifled it, then went ahead and let it happen. Things were looking up. Maybe the bad days were over.

  And there was Samaritan, sitting on his car with a pop bottle dangling between his knees, staring at her.

  Her stomach tightened up as she neared him. She tried not to look at him, but her skin crawled, expecting at any moment his sarcastic greeting, the first insult, the first touch of his hand.

  Nothing. He ignored her.

  She didn’t breathe easy until she was not only past his house, but the two empty lots beyond it. Then she had to look back, just like Orpheus in the mouth of Hades, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up behind her.

  He was watching. He waved, sending a mocking buzz at her, and took a long drink from his bottle.

  Oh wow, it really was going to be a good day. She headed for Che Baccus’s house (it bothered her that he wouldn’t come out. If she could just see for herself that he wasn’t sick or injured…) and stopped when she saw Sanford’s door swing open.

  It stayed open. Empty, but open.

  An invitation?

  Sarah started over, uncertainly at first, then quicker, lighter, when he didn’t shut himself away again. She reached the house, hesitated, and knocked on the wall. “Sanford? It’s Sarah.”

  Nothing from the big one, but the child popped through the door at once. “I can behave,” he announced, wringing his hands.

  “Well, you’re one up on me at that age,” Sarah answered, taken aback. She smiled. “Is your father in?”

  The child pointed. Sarah peeked in and there he was, his back to her, working. “May I come in?” she asked.

  Silence, but for the tinker and tap of his work.

  It didn’t feel right to barge in, even with the door open. Sarah loitered, losing some of that buoyant feeling, and finally stepped aside, moved some hubcaps, and sat down in the dirt. She thought his head turned towards her, just slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

  The child disappeared and then came scuttling out with his tin cans and milk jug. He gave her a can and sprawled in front of her, carving a quick road in the loose layer of rusty soil for his trucks to ride on.

  “How you holding on, jellybean?” she asked. “You and your dad doing all right?”

  “Yes. What’s jellybean?”

  “Oh. Well, it’s a kind of candy, I guess. It’s just what my dad used to call us kids when we jumped around a lot. Jumping jellybeans.” She scraped some dirt into a mountain and marked it with some burnt pieces of plastic. It had been a long time since she’d played Trucks. She wasn’t sure she was doing it right. “Does it bother you?”

  “I jump a lot.”

  “Better than I ever did.”

  “That’s because your legs are on backwards.”

  Sanford clicked loudly inside. The boy looked back and his antennae lowered.

  “They still go all the way to the ground, just like yours.” She reached down to scratch at some sand on her ankle, and the boy stopped making truck noises to watch. “I guess as long as they still do that, I can’t complain.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Um?” She looked at her tin can and then at him. “Driving?”

  “What is this?’ He made clumsy scratching motions over his leg.

  “Oh. It’s nothing. I’m not used to the weather down here. My skin is dry.”

  He stared at her. “Isn’t it supposed to be?”

  “Well, yeah, but if it gets too dry, it itches.”

  “What’s itches?”

  The question took her completely by surprise. She stared at the boy in his unfeeling chitin shell, and finally stammered, “It’s…It’s kind of a more serious tickle.”

  “What’s tickle?”

  Sarah laughed a little. “Kind of a frivolous itch. I don’t know how to answer, honey. It’s just the way skin feels.”

  He studied her, all of her, wringing his hands together. “It looks soft.”

  “It is, relatively. Want to touch?”

  Another loud click, hard enough to hurt her eardrums. The boy turned around and said, “She said I could!” in a protesting wail.

  “It’s okay. You won’t hurt me.”

  “Where?” the boy asked, his eyes moving hungrily up and down.

  “Anywhere.”

  “But where anywhere?”

  “Anywhere.” She laughed again. “Skin can feel everything.”

  He stared, pale eyes widening. “All over?”

  “Yep.”

  And now narrowed, suspicious. “Close your eyes.”

  She did, smiling, and felt his tiny brittle hand poke her thigh. She touched the same place herself and said, “Here.” Her arm. “There.” One tiny finger on her cheek. She copied. “Right there.” And then a fourth touch, and she opened her eyes, blushing, to put an end to the game. “Yeah, I felt that, but for future reference, that’s not a polite place to touch.”

  “Oh.” He eyed her chest curiously, then popped off the ground like, well, a jellybean. “I know why!”

  Away he ran, and swiftly returned with a folded page from a magazine to thrust under her nose.

  And suddenly, she was looking at Miss February from an esteemed gentleman’s periodical called Cyber Sluts. And
Miss Feb was an adventurous little lady with a lot of power tools. “Oh wow,” she said, startled.

  “You’re a woman,” the child said proudly. “Like her.”

  “Well, yes, generally speaking, like her.”

  The boy took his picture back and sat down slowly, smoothing the page out over the dirt and staring at it. He made a constant, low, staccato purring sound as he gazed at it, but that stopped when he looked up at her again. “Do you do that?” he asked.

  “I can honestly say I never have, no,” Sarah admitted, eyeing the model and her visual aids. “Although I suppose there’s really nothing stopping me apart from a shop-vac and some self-respect.” Gently, she took the page from him and folded it again. She looked at the open doorway behind her; it remained empty and quiet. She supposed the least-offensive thing to do would be just to let it go, but that would mean leaving pornography in the hands of a minor. What was the responsible thing to do here? Tentatively, she said, “Honey…do you know what vulgar means?”

  The boy’s excited posture became subdued, uncertain. He glanced into the house too, where his father sat out of sight, perhaps listening. “Is it…like a bad word?”

  “Close. Bad words are bad because they’re vulgar, they’re lazy and mean-spirited, which is why we shouldn’t use them. But words aren’t the only things that can be vulgar.”

  He looked at the paper in her hands. “Pictures too?”

  “Some of them. And I know you have to have a lot of vulgar things around you sometimes. We can’t really control what gets said next to us, or put next to us…but we can control what we take home with us.”

  He gave her an intense and puzzled look. “You sound like Father,” he said.

  That was a relief. “I think that’s a good person to sound like, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes. I have to pee.” Off he ran to the culvert, leaving Sarah holding Miss February.

  A plated hand came through the door to take it. She heard it unfolded and then silence. “I did not know he had this,” he said at last.

  “It’s kind of everywhere, I’m sure. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, I just—”

  “He needs to hear such things from more than me.” Wood creaked. He came to the doorway, crumpling the page absently in one hand. He tossed it out into the street and it drifted away on the breeze until it fell into the ditch and soaked up with black. Sanford watched it sink, then looked at her. He clicked, glanced away a few times, but kept coming back to her. At last, he said, “Will you come inside?”