Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 92

by Matthew Kressel

  “Get on back to your mule,” I said. “I think the sun has done touched you.”

  “—the one who could set his people free,” Ezekiel said, grabbing my shoulder and swinging me around. He stared into my face like a man looking for something he’s dropped and has got to find.

  “John!” the devil cried.

  We stood there in the sun, me and Ezekiel, and then something went out of his eyes, and he let go and walked back across the ditch and trudged after the mule without a word.

  I caught up to the Terraplane just in time for it to roll off again. I saw how it was, all right.

  A ways up the road, a couple of younguns was fishing off the right side of a plank bridge, and the devil announced he would stop to see had they caught anything, and if they had, to take it for his supper. He slid out of the Terraplane, with it still running, and the dogs fell out after him, a-hoping for a snack, I reckon. When the devil got hunkered down good over there with the younguns, facing the swift-running branch, I sidled up the driver’s side of the car, eased my guitar into the back seat, eased myself into the front seat, yanked the thing into gear and drove off. As I went past I saw three round O’s—a youngun and the devil and a youngun again.

  It was a pure pleasure to sit down, and the breeze coming through the windows felt good too. I commenced to get even more of a breeze going, on that long, straightaway road. I just could hear the devil holler back behind:

  “John! Get your handkerchief-headed, free-school Negro ass back here with my auto-MO-bile! Johhhhnnn!”

  “Here I come, old hoss,” I said, and I jerked the wheel and slewed that car around and barreled off back toward the bridge. The younguns and the dogs was ahead of the devil in figuring things out. The younguns scrambled up a tree as quick as squirrels, and the dogs went loping into a ditch, but the devil was all preoccupied, doing a salty jump and cussing me for a dadblasted blagstagging liver-lipped stormbuzzard, jigging around right there in the middle of the bridge, and he was still cussing when I drove full tilt onto that bridge and he did not cuss any less when he jumped clean out from under his hat and he may even have stepped it up some when he went over the side. I heard a ker-plunk like a big rock chunked into a pond just as I swerved to bust the hat with a front tire and then I was off the bridge and racing back the way we’d come, and that hat mashed in the road behind me like a possum.

  I knew something simply awful was going to happen, but man! I slapped the dashboard and kissed my hand and slicked it back across my hair and said aloud, “Lightly, slightly, and politely.” And I meant that thing. But my next move was to whip that razor out of my sock, flip it open and lay it on the seat beside me, just in case.

  I came up the road fast, and from way off I saw Ezekiel and the mule planted in the middle of his field like rocks. As they got bigger I saw both their heads had been turned my way the whole time, like they’d started looking before I even came over the hill. When I got level with them I stopped, engine running, and leaned on the horn until Ezekiel roused himself and walked over. The mule followed behind, like a yard dog, without being cussed or hauled or whipped. I must have been a sight. Ezekiel shook his head the whole way. “Oh, John,” he said. “Oh, my goodness. Oh, John.”

  “Jump in, brother,” I said. “Let Ole Massa plow this field his own damn self.”

  Ezekiel rubbed his hands along the chrome on the side of the car, swiping up and down and up and down. I was scared he’d burn himself. “Oh, John.” He kept shaking his head. “John tricks Ole Massa again. High John the Conqueror rides the Terraplane to glory.”

  “Quit that, now. You worry me.”

  “John, those songs you wrote been keeping us going down here. Did you know that?”

  “I ’preciate it.”

  “But lemme ask you, John. Lemme ask you something before you ride off. How come you wrote all those songs about hellhounds and the devil and such? How come you was so sure you’d be coming down here when you died?”

  I fidgeted and looked in the mirror at the road behind. “Man, I don’t know. Couldn’t imagine nothing else. Not for me, anyway.”

  Ezekiel laughed once, loud, boom, like a shotgun going off.

  “Don’t be doing that, man. I about jumped out of my britches. Come on and let’s go.”

  He shook his head again. “Maybe you knew you was needed down here, John. Maybe you knew we was singing, and telling stories, and waiting.” He stepped back into the dirt. “This is your ride, John. But I’ll make sure everybody knows what you done. I’ll tell ’em that things has changed in Beluthahatchie.”

  He looked off down the road. “You’d best get on. Shoot—maybe you can find some jook joint and have some fun afore he catches up to you.”

  “Maybe so, brother, maybe so.”

  I han’t gone two miles afore I got that bad old crawly feeling. I looked over to the passengers’ side of the car and saw it was all spattered with blood, the leather and the carpet and the chrome on the door, and both those mangy hound dogs was sprawled across the front seat wallowing in it, both licking my razor like it was something good, and that’s where the blood was coming from, welling up from the blade with each pass of their tongues. Time I caught sight of the dogs, they both lifted their heads and went to howling. It wan’t no howl like any dog should howl. It was more like a couple of panthers in the night.

  “Hush up, you dogs!” I yelled. “Hush up, I say!”

  One of the dogs kept on howling, but the other looked me in the eyes and gulped air, his jowls flapping, like he was fixing to bark, but instead of barking said:

  “Hush yourself, nigger.”

  When I looked back at the road, there wan’t no road, just a big thicket of bushes and trees a-coming at me. Then came a whole lot of screeching and scraping and banging, with me holding onto the wheel just to keep from flying out of the seat, and then the car went sideways and I heard an awful bang and a crack and then I didn’t know anything else. I just opened my eyes later, I don’t know how much later, and found me and my guitar lying on the shore of the Lake of the Dead.

  I had heard tell of that dreadful place, but I never had expected to see it for myself. Preacher Dodds whispered to us younguns once or twice about it, and said you have to work awful hard and be awful mean to get there, and once you get there, there ain’t no coming back. “Don’t seek it, my children, don’t seek it,” he’d say.

  As far as I could see, all along the edges of the water, was bones and carcasses and lumps that used to be animals—mules and horses and cows and coons and even little dried-up birds scattered like hickory chips, and some things lying away off that might have been animals and might not have been, oh Lord, I didn’t go to look. A couple of buzzards was strolling the edge of the water, not acting hungry nor vicious but just on a tour, I reckon. The sun was setting, but the water didn’t cast no shine at all. It had a dim and scummy look, so flat and still that you’d be tempted to try to walk across it, if any human could bear seeing what lay on the other side. “Don’t seek it, my children, don’t seek it.” I han’t sought it, but now the devil had sent me there, and all I knew to do was hold my guitar close to me and watch those buzzards a-picking and a-pecking and wait for it to get dark. And Lord, what would this place be like in the dark?

  But the guitar did feel good up against me thataway, like it had stored up all the songs I ever wrote or sung to comfort me in a hard time. I thought about those field hands a-pointing my way, and about Ezekiel sweating along behind his mule, and the way he grabbed aholt of my shoulder and swung me around. And I remembered the new song I had been fooling with all day in my head while I was following that li’l peckerwood in the Terraplane.

  “Well, boys,” I told the buzzards, “if the devil’s got some powers I reckon I got some, too. I didn’t expect to be playing no blues after I was dead. But I guess that’s all there is to play now. ’Sides, I’ve played worse places.”

  I started humming and strumming, and then just to warm up I played “Rambli
ng on My Mind” cause it was, and “Sweet Home Chicago” cause I figured I wouldn’t see that town no more, and “Terraplane Blues” on account of that damn car. Then I sang the song I had just made up that day.

  I’m down in Beluthahatchie, baby,

  Way out where the trains don’t run

  Yes, I’m down in Beluthahatchie, baby,

  Way out where the trains don’t run

  Who’s gonna take you strolling now

  Since your man he is dead and gone

  My body’s all laid out mama

  But my soul can’t get no rest

  My body’s all laid out mama

  But my soul can’t get no rest

  Cause you’ll be sportin with another man

  Lookin for some old Mr. Second Best

  Plain folks got to walk the line

  But the Devil he can up and ride

  Folks like us we walk the line

  But the Devil he can up and ride

  And I won’t never have blues enough

  Ooh, to keep that Devil satisfied.

  When I was done it was black dark and the crickets was zinging and everything was changed.

  “You can sure get around this country,” I said, “Just a-sitting on your ass.”

  I was in a cane-back chair on the porch of a little wooden house, with bugs smacking into an oil lamp over my head. Just an old cropper place, sitting in the middle of a cotton field, but it had been spruced up some. Somebody had swept the yard clean, from what I could see of it, and on a post above the dipper was a couple of yellow flowers in a nailed-up Chase & Sanborn can.

  When I looked back down at the yard, though, it wan’t clean anymore. There was words written in the dirt, big and scrawly like from someone dragging his foot.

  DON’T GET A BIG HEAD JOHN

  I’LL BE BACK

  Sitting on my name was those two fat old hound dogs. “Get on with your damn stinking talking serves,” I yelled, and I shied a rock at them. It didn’t go near as far as I expected, just sorta plopped down into the dirt, but the hounds yawned and got up, snuffling each other, and waddled off into the dark.

  I stood up and stretched and mumbled. But something was still shifting in the yard, just past where the light was. Didn’t sound like no dogs, though.

  “Who that? Who that who got business with a wore out dead man?”

  Then they come up toward the porch a little closer where I could see. It was a whole mess of colored folks, men in overalls and women in aprons, granny women in bonnets pecking the ground with walking sticks, younguns with their bellies pookin out and no pants on, an old man with Coke-bottle glasses and his eyes swimming in your face nearly, and every last one of them grinning like they was touched. Why, Preacher Dodds woulda passed the plate and called it a revival. They massed up against the edge of the porch, crowding closer in and bumping up against each other, and reaching their arms out and taking hold of me, my lapels, my shoulders, my hands, my guitar, my face, the little ones aholt of my pants legs—not hauling on me or messing with me, just touching me feather light here and there like Meemaw used to touch her favorite quilt after she’d already folded it to put away. They was talking, too, mumbling and whispering and saying, “Here he is. We heard he was coming and here he is. God bless you friend, God bless you brother, God bless you son.” Some of the womenfolks was crying, and there was Ezekiel, blowing his nose on a rag.

  “Y’all got the wrong man,” I said, directly, but they was already heading back across the yard, which was all churned up now, no words to read and no pattern neither. They was looking back at me and smiling and touching, holding hands and leaning into each other, till they was all gone and it was just me and the crickets and the cotton.

  Wan’t nowhere else to go, so I opened the screen door and went on in the house. There was a bed all turned down with a feather pillow, and in the middle of the checkered oilcloth on the table was a crock of molasses, a jar of buttermilk, and a plate covered with a rag. The buttermilk was cool like it had been chilling in the well, with water beaded up on the sides of the jar. Under the rag was three hoecakes and a slab of bacon.

  When I was done with my supper, I latched the front door, lay down on the bed and was just about dead to the world when I heard something else out in the yard—swish, swish, swish. Out the window I saw, in the edge of the porch light, one old granny woman with a shuck broom, smoothing out the yard where the folks had been. She was sweeping it as clean as for company on a Sunday. She looked up from under her bonnet and showed me what teeth she had and waved from the wrist like a youngun, and then she backed on out of the light, swish swish swish, rubbing out her tracks as she went.

  First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1997.

  About the Author

  Andy Duncan made his first sale in 1997. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the Final Nebula Ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and in 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. He also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2002 for his novella “The Chief Designer.” His other books include an anthology co-edited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and a non-fiction guidebook, Alabama Curiosities. His most recent books include a chapbook novella, The Night Cache, and a new collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, now lives in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife Sydney, and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Frostburo State University.

  From Wooden Legs to Carbon Fiber Hands:

  How Technology Improves Prosthetic Limbs

  Ed Grabianowski

  Humans are incredibly adaptable. A person can lose a hand or a leg and learn how to do most of the same things they could do before, from mundane daily tasks to impressive athletic feats. No one would argue that life is easier when you’ve lost a limb though, which is why we’ve been making, using, and improving prosthetic limbs for thousands of years.

  The earliest prosthetics were rudimentary limbs made of bundled fibers, wood, or metal. The Roman General Marcus Sergius was said to have worn an iron hand circa 200 BC. These limbs were attached with straps and harnesses, and didn’t offer much functionality—a wooden leg might offer balance and slow walking with a cane, but an iron hand or prosthetic arm was mostly just cosmetic.

  Prosthetic limb technology advanced slowly, but the development of better attachment systems, lighter materials, and more effective control mechanisms improved life for those who had lost limbs or were born without them. Major advancements were often driven by sudden influxes of wounded soldiers who lost limbs in the world’s most cataclysmic wars. For instance, the number of amputees coming home from Civil War battlefields drove researchers to create several new types of artificial limbs, including the Hanger Limb and William Selpho’s prosthetic arm.

  Selpho’s design is particularly significant because it included one of the early control mechanisms, offering something beyond a simple static hook. A strap running to the opposite shoulder could be pulled taught by shrugging or otherwise moving the shoulder, activating a mechanism in the prosthetic hand that caused the fingers to close and open. While prosthetic technology seemed to creep forward for the last few hundred years, it’s clear that important work was being done, and the advances helped improve lives.

  Advances in the last decade, however, have moved with astonishing speed. New materials like titanium and carbon fiber make today’s prosthetics lighter, which brings a host of add-on benefits like greater freedom of movement, reduced user fatigue, and a wider variety of attachment options. Cutting edge control mechanisms are far beyond anything Selpho could have imagined, incorporating m
uscle impulses or even brain-computer interfaces.

  One of the exciting things about prosthetic development is that it incorporates so many scientific disciplines. Medical science works with the prosthetic wearer’s physiology and the underlying tissues of a residual limb. Materials science and engineering play a major role in development. Practical nuts and bolts mechanical know-how is important too. Computer science has taken on a vital role with the development of more advanced control systems. While this may have once created barriers to smooth, efficient development, researchers and people involved with open source prosthetic projects can take advantage of the Internet to share information and build off of each other’s work.

  Materials

  Advanced plastics have improved the cosmetic appearance of prostheses for those who desire a natural appearance. Shells and covers can be carefully matched to the wearer’s skin tone, and expert painting can capture the look of real skin.

  The biggest breakthrough in prosthetic materials has been carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is significantly stronger than steel while weighing much less. It’s made of fine carbon filaments, which are woven into larger fibers, made into fabric and laminated with epoxy resin into rigid shapes. Its properties allow it to be constructed into shapes that bend and rebound, acting like springs. The best-known example is the Flex-Foot Cheetah, a carbon fiber prosthetic leg that looks like a curved “blade.” Many para-athletes use these legs, which allow them to run with a natural gait at high speeds.

  The lightness of carbon fiber allows prosthetic limbs to be attached with suction or with ratcheting devices that are much more comfortable and easy to use than earlier strap systems. A split-toe carbon fiber foot flexes naturally, increasing the wearer’s agility and the naturalness of his or her gait.

  Control Methods

  No aspect of prosthetic science has developed as much, or become as complex, as control methods. Lower limb prosthetics are somewhat simpler because the wearer can control it without any kind of command-response mechanism. A good example of this is the Rheo Knee. A human knee is not a simple hinge that flops along as you swing your legs. Through complex muscular controls you may not be aware exist, the stiffness and angle of your knee varies depending on your walking speed, the surface you’re traversing, and even where you are in your stride. The Rheo Knee uses microcomputers to measure the load and angle experienced by the knee. It then adjusts the stiffness of the joint by altering the viscosity of a magnetic fluid. Another common prosthetic, the C-Leg, also provides computer controlled dynamic stiffness adjustments. The result is not only a more natural gait, but the wearer has an easier time walking because the leg properly transfers momentum during the various phases of a stride.