The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  So I just sat on my bed and stared out the window at the snow, trying not to think. My window faces east, away from Peavine, toward downtown. I couldn’t see the lights from the casinos because of the snow, but I knew they were there. After a while it stopped snowing, and a few stars came out between the clouds, and so did the neon: the blue and white stripes of the Peppermill, which stands apart from everything else, south of downtown, and the bright white of the Hilton a bit north of that—“the Mother ship,” Mom always calls it—and then, clustered downtown, the red of Circus Circus and the green of Harrah’s, which Mom calls Oz City, and the flashing purple of the Silverado, where Dad used to work.

  Dad loved this view; he was so proud that we could look down on the city. He couldn’t stop crowing about it to all his friends. I remember when he brought George Flanking and Howard Schuster, Leon and Johnny’s dads, into my room so they could look out my window, too. So they could see “the panorama.” That was what Dad called it. We’d never been able to see anything from our old windows, except more trailers across the way. “I’m going to get us out of this box,” Dad said when we lived there. “We’re going to live in a real house, I swear we are.” And then we moved here, to a real house, and pretty soon that wasn’t big enough for him, either.

  I shut my blinds and flopped down on my bed. Someplace a dog had started to bark, and then another joined in, and another and another, until the whole damn neighborhood was going nuts. And then I heard what must have set them off: the yipping howl of a coyote, trotting between houses looking for prey.

  When we bought our house five years ago, the street ended a block from here, and that was where the mountain started. Winter mornings, sometimes, we’d see coyotes in our driveway. Now the developers have built another hundred houses up the street, with more subdivisions going up all the time: fancy houses, big, the kind we could never afford, the kind that made Dad’s eyes narrow, that made him spend hours hunched over his desk. The kind he talked about when he went out drinking with George and Howard, I guess. I don’t know who’s buying those big houses; casino and warehouse workers can’t afford places like that. Mom could, maybe, if she weren’t saving for nursing school. The only people I can think of who might live there are the ones who work for the development companies.

  So we don’t get coyotes in our driveway anymore, but they’re still around. They travel in back of the houses, next to the six-foot fences people put around their yards. There’s still sagebrush between the subdivisions, and rabbits, and you can still follow those little strips of wildness to the really wild places, up on the mountain.

  Coyotes are unbelievably smart, and they’ll eat anything if they have to, and it doesn’t bother them when people cut the land into pieces. They like it, because the boundaries between city and wilderness are where rodents live, and rodents are about coyotes’ favorite food, aside from cats. So when we cut things up for them, there are more edges where they can hunt. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve killed most of the wolves, who eat coyotes when they can, or that coyotes look so much like dogs. They can sneak in just about anyplace. Dr. Mills says there are coyotes living in New York City now, in Central Park. There are millions of them, all over the country.

  Ranchers and farmers hate them because they’re so hard to kill, and because even if you kill them, there are always more. But I can’t hate them, not even for eating cats. They’re smart and they’re beautiful, and they’re just trying to get by, and as far as I can tell, they’re doing a better job of it than we are. They know how to work the system. That’s what Dad thought he was doing, but he wasn’t smart enough.

  I lay there, listening to that coyote and to all the dogs, still trying not to think, but thinking anyway: about what a weird town this is, where you get casinos and coyotes both, where the developers are covering everything with new subdivisions, but there’s still a mountain where you can die. After a while it got quiet again, and I peeked out the window and saw more snow. A while after that I heard the bells jangling downstairs, and heard Mom’s feet hitting her bedroom floor and thudding down the stairs. When she and David started yelling at each other, I pulled my pillow over my head and finally managed to go to sleep.

  It wasn’t snowing when I woke up on Saturday, but it looked like it might start again any minute. The transmitter signal still hadn’t moved, and when I thought about Bobo out there in the cold, I felt my own heart freezing in my chest. I heard voices from downstairs, and smelled coffee and bacon. Mom and David were both home, then. I threw on clothing and grabbed the handheld and ran down to the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” Mom said, and handed me a plate of bacon and eggs. She was wearing sweats and looked pretty relaxed. David was wearing his bathrobe and scowling, but David always scowls. I wondered what he was doing up so early. “Any change on the screen, Mike?”

  “No,” I said. I knew she didn’t think there ever would be, and I wondered why she’d asked. David’s face had gone from scowling to murderous, but that was all right, because I planned to be out the door as soon as possible.

  “Okay,” Mom said. “We’re all going up there after breakfast.”

  “We are?” I said.

  “Your brother’s coming whether he wants to or not, and I asked Letty to come too. Rich Mills has to work this morning. Unless you’d rather not have all those people, honey.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. So that’s what David was doing up. Mom was making him come as punishment, so he could see what he’d done, and Letty was coming because she had the maps, and maybe to help Mom keep me and David apart if we tried to kill each other. And Mom wouldn’t think it was important to have Dr. Mills there, because she didn’t think Bobo was still alive. I put down my plate and gulped down some coffee and said, “I’m going to go put the carrying case in the SUV.”

  “You’re going to eat first,” Mom said. “Sit down.”

  I sat. Driving up Peavine in the snow wasn’t exactly Mom’s idea of a day off; the least I could do was not give her any lip. David bit into his toast and said around a mouthful of bread, “I’m not going.”

  That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to say so in front of Mom. It was their fight. “You’re coming,” she told him. “And if Bobo’s still alive you’re paying the vet bills, and if he’s not, you’re buying your brother another cat. And if we get another cat you’ll damn well help us keep it in the house, or I’ll call the sheriffs office myself and tell them to take you off probation and put you in jail, David, I swear to God I will!”

  She would, too. Even David knew that much. He scowled up at her and said, “The cat didn’t want to stay in the house.”

  “That’s not the issue,” Mom said, and I stuffed my face full of eggs to keep from screaming at David that he’d hated Bobo, that he’d wanted Bobo to die, and that I hoped he’d die, too: alone, in the cold.

  I remembered one of the first times David had let Bobo out. Bobo didn’t have the transmitter yet, and I was in the backyard calling his name. Suddenly I saw something race over the fence and he ran up to me, mewing and mewing, his tail all puffy. I picked him up and carried him inside and he stayed on my lap, with his face stuck into my armpit like he was hiding, for half an hour, until finally he calmed down and stopped shaking and jumped down to get some food. I’d hoped that whatever had spooked him so badly would keep him from wanting to go out again, even if David opened all the doors and windows, but I guess he forgot how scared he’d been. “He didn’t want to freeze to death, either,” I said.

  David pushed his chair back from the table and said, “Look, whatever happened to your fucking cat, it’s not my fault, and I’m not wasting my day off going up there.” He looked at Mom and said, “Do whatever you want: it doesn’t matter. I might as well be in prison already.”

  “Bullshit,” Mom said. “If you go to prison, you’ll lose a lot more than a Saturday. Do you have any idea how lucky you are not to be there already? Especially after the stunts you’ve been pulling this week?” Nev
ada’s a zero-tolerance drug state, even for minors, so when David got caught driving stoned last year, with most of a lid of pot in the glove compartment of his Jeep, Mom had to use every connection she had to get him probation instead of jail. It would have been a “juvenile facility,” since David was still a few weeks short of eighteen, but Mom says that her connections said that wouldn’t make much difference. Juvenile facilities are worse, if anything.

  Mom didn’t say who her connections are, and I don’t want to know. Whoever they are, I figure they didn’t help David entirely out of the goodness of their hearts. I figure they were scared of what Mom could tell people about them, even if what she does is legal.

  “I told you,” David said, “I’ve just been hanging out with some guys from work. You know: eating dinner, playing pool? I was in town.”

  “Right,” Mom said. “And there’s no way anybody could check that with the satellites down, is there? That’s what you were counting on.”

  David rolled his eyes. “What time did the damn GPS go back up last night? Six-thirty or something? We were still eating then. We were at that pizza place in the mall. Call the sheriffs office and ask them, if you don’t believe me.” He jerked a thumb at my handheld and said, “How stupid do you think I am? I knew it could come back online any second. What, I’m going to take off for Mexico or something?”

  Mom didn’t bother to answer. She and I were the smart ones in the family: David took after Dad. Anybody stupid enough to get caught with that much pot was stupid enough to do just about anything else, as far as I could tell, but the only time I’d even started to say anything like that, right after his arrest, David had just glared at me and said, “Yeah, well, if you’d had to look at what I had to look at, you’d smoke dope too, baby brother.”

  As if I hadn’t wanted to look. As if I hadn’t kept trying to go outside. As if even now I didn’t keep imagining what it had looked like, a million different ways, enough to keep me awake, sometimes.

  But even then, I knew that David had only said it to make me feel guilty. He knew just how to get at everybody. Now he gestured at the handheld again and said bitterly, “I can’t wipe my ass without those people knowing about it.”

  He was needling Mom, because that’s what Dad had always said about dealing blackjack at the Silverado. The dealers were under surveillance all the time: from pit bosses, from hidden cameras. “You can’t get away from it,” Dad said. “It’s like working in a goddamn box, with the walls closing in on you.” But Dad chose his box, and so did David.

  “That’s not the issue,” Mom told David again. “It’s more than staying in county limits, David. You’re supposed to come home straight after work. You know that.”

  “So you’re my jailer now? Just like the casino was Dad’s and the Lyon County cops are—”

  “Stop it,” Mom said, her voice icy. “I’m not your jailer. I’m the one who kept you out of jail. You agreed to the terms of the probation!”

  “Like you agreed to all those terms when you decided to go down to Carson and play nurse?”

  Mom was out of her chair then, and David was out of his, and they stood nose to nose, glaring at each other, and I knew that there was no way we were all going up on Peavine today, because they wouldn’t be able to sit in the same car even if David had wanted to go, even if I’d wanted him there. Nothing David says to Mom ever makes any real sense, but he knows exactly how to get to her. Sometimes he has to keep at it for a while, but Mom always snaps eventually, even if the same thing has happened a million times before. Just like Bobo being scared by something outside, and still going out again when David gave him the chance. David knows exactly how to get people to hurt themselves.

  They were still eye-to-eye, like cats circling each other before a fight, when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I said. Maybe it was Letty, and I could warn her about what was happening before she came inside.

  It was a cop. “Good morning, son,” he said. “I’m looking for David. That your brother?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but my legs felt like wood, and I didn’t seem to be able to get out of the way.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just a routine drug test.”

  That was supposed to happen on Fridays. So David had skipped his drug test, too. My stomach shriveled some more. “Will he have to go to jail?” I said. The house would be a lot quieter if David was in jail, but school would be worse. If David went to jail, he’d probably be in the same place as George Flanking and Howard Schuster, and I didn’t want to think too much about that.

  The cop’s face softened. “No. Not if he’s clean. He’ll get a warning, that’s all.” And then Mom, behind me, said, “Michael, let him in,” and my legs came alive and I got out of the doorway, fast, and the cop came in, tipping his hat to Mom.

  “Morning, ma’am.” I wondered if Mom was remembering the last time the cops were at our house. I wondered if this cop was one of her connections. I wonder that about all kinds of people: my teachers and all the cops and storekeepers and Dr. Mills, even. I hate wondering it, but that’s another thing I can’t talk to Mom about. It would just hurt her. It would just make me like David, or like Aunt Tina, who hasn’t even talked to us since Mom started working down in Carson.

  The fight Aunt Tina picked with Mom was as bad as any of David’s: worse, maybe, because she doesn’t even live with us. She wasn’t even here when Dad died. It was none of her business. “Oh, Sherry! How can you do that, of all things? With your boys the ages they are, after what their father did? How will they be able to hold their heads up, knowing—”

  “Knowing that their mother’s keeping a roof over their heads? My secretarial job doesn’t pay enough, Tina, not by itself—and if you know what else I can do to earn a hundred thousand a year, go right ahead and tell me!”

  It was perfectly legal, and it would let Mom earn enough money to go to nursing school at UNR and get a job none of us would have to be embarrassed about. That’s what she kept telling us. A year, she’d said, or two at the most. But it had already been two years, and she hadn’t saved enough to quit yet, because the hundred thousand didn’t include food or clothing or insurance, or all the tests Mom has to have to make sure she’s still healthy. She has drug tests, too. She gets more tests than David does, even though she’s not a criminal and never did anything wrong, and she has to pay for all of hers. And when she’s in Carson, she can’t go into a casino or a bar by herself, and she can’t be seen in a restaurant with a man, and she has to be registered with the Lyon County Sheriffs Office—because technically, she’s not in Carson at all. Her job’s not legal in big towns: not in Reno, not in Vegas, not even in lousy little Carson City, the most pathetic excuse for a state capital you ever saw. Mom has to work right outside Carson, in Lyon County, which is still plenty close enough to be convenient for her connections.

  It used to be that the women in Mom’s job couldn’t even leave the buildings where they worked without somebody going with them, but now they have transmitters, instead. And it used to be that they had to work every day for three weeks, living at the job, and then get one week off, but some of them got together and lobbied to change that, because so many of them were single mothers, and they wanted to be able to go home to their kids at night. But they still can’t live in the same county where they work, which is why Mom has to commute between Reno and Carson. Highway 395’s the only way to get down there, and those thirty-five miles can get really bad in the winter. That’s why Mom had to buy the SUV. The SUV wasn’t included in the hundred thousand, either.

  Mom doesn’t know that I know a lot of this. I’ve heard her and Letty talking about it, especially about all the tests. Letty’s afraid Mom’s going to get something horrible and die, but Mom keeps pooh-poohing her. “For heaven’s sake, Letty; it’s not like they don’t have to wear condoms!”

  I got out of the cop’s way and tried not to think about him wearing a condom. It’s hard not to get really mad at Dad whenever I think thi
ngs like that. It’s hard not to get even madder at David. He has it easier than Mom does, and it’s not fair. She’s not the criminal.

  I followed the cop into the kitchen. Mom was chit-chatting about the weather and pouring him a cup of coffee; David was disappearing down the hall to the bathroom, carrying a little plastic cup. I looked at the drug kit, sitting on the table next to our half-eaten breakfasts. “Only takes two minutes,” the cop told me, “and then I’ll be out of here and leave you folks to your weekend. Ma’am, you mind if I take my jacket off?”

  “Of course not,” she said, and he did, and when I saw the gun in its holster I took a step back, even though of course the cop would be wearing a gun, all cops wear guns. Nearly everybody around here owns guns anyway, except us. And Mom bit her lip and the cop stepped back too, away from me, raising his hands. He looked sad.

  “Hey, hey, son, it’s all right. I’ll put the jacket back on.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said, my face burning. “I’m going up to my room, anyway.” I wanted to get out of there before David came back out of the bathroom with his precious bodily fluids. I didn’t want to stand around and find out what the drug tests said. So I went upstairs, wondering if there was anybody in the entire fucking town who didn’t know everything about anything that had ever happened to us.

  I flopped down on my bed again, waiting for the jangle of bells that would mean the cop had left. It came pretty quickly, and then there was another right after it, and I didn’t hear any yelling, so I figured everything was okay. The phone had rung, somewhere in there. One of David’s loser friends, maybe. Maybe he’d gone out. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with him today. I wanted to be out on the mountain, climbing up to Bobo, but I knew the SUV would get there more quickly than I could, even with the delay.

  But when I went back downstairs, David was in the living room watching TV, and Mom and Letty were sitting at the kitchen table, looking worried. I looked at Mom and she said, “Relax. Your brother’s clean.”