“No, sir,” he said, smiling bleakly at the tired old man, enunciating each word with terrible precision, not even, at the end, wanting to hurt the other man, but simply to make him understand. “I enjoyed it,” he said.
Snow Job
Introduction to Snow Job
Being a writer has its moments. Yeah, sure, there are days when you can’t help envying the placid denizens of a cube farm, days when you wake up with the flu and, lying in bed too weak to sit up, much less work, realize with horror that you no longer get sick pay. You’re in pain and you’re losing money! It goes beyond irony.
Other times, though, the universe decides to drop diamonds in your lap. You find yourself in a tux dancing ‘til dawn in the lobby of the Philadelphia Free Library. Swedish fans invite you to a party in the basement of the Ostgoth Nation in the University of Uppsala. You write a story without even noticing it.
Okay, this last is a little implausible. But it happened. With this story! I dropped by Gardner’s apartment one day, to see if he wanted to go out to lunch (this was in his old Quince Street digs, before he became editor of Asimov’s, back when he was poor as poor) and found him banging away on his old mechanical typewriter. “What’s new?” I asked him.
“Hang on a sec,” he muttered, “let me finish this page.” He hunched forward, concentrating, fingers a blur. Then he leaned back, ripped the page out of his machine, and said, “Congratulations, Michael! You and I have just finished a collaboration.”
I waited for the punchline. Because I knew I had done no such thing. Writing stories is like having children. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t forget about them afterwards.
Gardner tamped even the edges of a slim sheath of pages and handed me “Snow Job.” I began reading, and felt my eyes bug. He had taken the first chapter of a novel-gone-bust I’d begun a year before, removed the first and last pages, and inserted his own opening and ending. But here’s the astonishing part: He’d crafted from my chapter a totally new story that had almost nothing to do with what I had written. My story was about time-traveling con men. (That was why it had gone bust. I didn’t like con men. I’ve known too many.) His story was about . . . well, read it and see. It’s an elegant thing, far better than what I was trying to do solo, and if I hadn’t pointed out to you exactly where the seams are, you’d never have noticed them on your own.
This is a good example of what used to be one of the best-kept secrets in the business: That Gardner is a wonderful story-doctor. He can see the potential in a story whose author is ready to give up on it. He knows how to make it work.
Back in the misspent Philadelphia of my youth, I used to run everything I wrote past Gardner to get his take on it. It was my postgraduate education. In this, I was not alone. Sometimes Jack Dann would drive down from Binghamton, New York, to get Gardner’s advice, and we’d stay up until two and three in the morning, talking and drinking and writing. Those nights were a lot of fun. But Jack’s a fine and serious writer. He wouldn’t have been there if Gardner’s analysis of what he was doing hadn’t been worth its weight in pearls.
There was another time I remember, when I went to visit Gardner and found him radiant with joy. He’d just become the editor of Asimov’s. It was a great moment for him, and a great moment for science fiction. But I had mixed emotions. I was happy for my friend, of course. But also sadly aware that Gardner’s time was spoken for now. No longer could I run half-written novels and stories past him, looking for insight and the chance to astonish him just one more time. (“Oh, you did not!” he said when, in reply to him asking how “Ginungagap” was coming along, I told him I’d just written a scene in which a cat hijacks a spaceship. It’s the only time I’ve ever boggled him.) My postgrad studies were over. From that moment, I was on my own.
My loss is your gain. Gardner has a magazine’s worth of stories every month to ply his gentle skills on, and the field is the better for it. But take a glim at “Snow Job” and see exactly what’s been lost, exactly how much I’ve given up for you.
Don’t forget to say thank you.
You’re welcome.
Michael Swanwick
Snow Job
by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
Have you ever toured the Harding Dam in Boulder, Colorado? Have you ever caught that old Errol Flynn movie about the life of Lord Bolingbroke, the man who restored the Stuarts to the British throne and overran half of France but who “couldn’t conquer the Queen he didn’t dare to love,” a real classic, also starring Basil Rathbone and Olivia deHavilland? Have you?
Of course you haven’t—which shows what a difference a single line of coke can make.
If it weren’t for the coke, the blow-off wouldn’t have come hot, and things would have been very, very different.
Just how different, you don’t realize. You can’t realize, in fact.
But take my word for it, baby—I can.
One little mistake . . .
I was running, faster than I had ever run in my life, and as I ran those words kept ringing through my head, louder than the pounding of my heart or the breath rasping in my throat: one little mistake . . . that was what the losers always said; the gonifs stupid enough to get caught, that was what they’d whine as the handcuffs closed over their wrists and the Boys in Blue dragged them away . . . its not fair, just one little mistake . . . its not fair . . . But I wasn’t a loser, I was tough and smart, I wasn’t like them . . .
One little mistake . . .
I was running through the warehouse district and the cops were right behind me, and not all that far behind me either, in hot pursuit as they say on TV, following the trail of blood I was laying down drop by drop. I could hear the footsteps clattering in staccato nonrhythm back there, harbingers of more hot pursuit to come. And they were going to catch me this time. This time they were going to get me—the certainty of that sat in a cold lump in my stomach, and made my legs feel cold and slow, so slow. I’d made my one little mistake, and now I was going to pay for it; boy, was I going to pay, my whole life was going down the toilet and it wasn’t fair . . .
I choked back a laugh that sounded more like a sob.
Behind me, the footsteps were abruptly halved. Tiny hairs crackled on the nape of my neck. I knew without looking that one of the cops was falling into the regulation crouch while his buddy ran far and to the side. Now he would be holding his gun two-handed and leveling it at me. I tried to zigzag, do some broken-field running, but let’s face it, fear drives you forward, not to the side. Maybe my path wobbled a bit; you couldn’t really call it evasive action.
I felt the bullet sizzle by, inches from my head, an instantaneous fraction of a second before I heard it. The time lag would have been subliminal to anyone who wasn’t hyper on adrenaline and fear. There was a ping as the bullet ricocheted off a brick wall far down the street, and I went into panic mode, pure scrambling terror. Otherwise I’d have known better than to duck into a side alley without checking for exits first.
It was a cul-de-sac.
Belgian block paving stone, a few ripe heaps of garbage, a rusted automobile muffler or three. And dead ahead, the blank back wall of a warehouse. No doors, no windows, no exits.
I skidded to a stop, and gaped idiotically.
What now, wiseass?
The cops rounded the corner behind me.
Galvanized, like a corpse jolted into motion by electrodes, I started running again, blindly, straight at the wall.
There was no place to go . . .
An hour before, I had been trying to sell four kilos of lactose for a hundred thousand dollars. Listen—I had a hell of a nut. My overhead included rent and furnishings for the Big Store (actually the second floor of an old warehouse converted into a loft apartment), a thousand each for the shills, ten percent of the take for the manager, and thirty-five percent for the roper. These things add up.
Stringy—the mark—was a joy to burn, though. He was a pimp and I never have liked those suckers. Cheap and laz
y grifters, the batch of them.
“It’s been stepped on once,” I said. “Very lightly. And that’s only because I prefer it that way. Know what I mean?”
Stringy nodded sagely. The roper, James Whittcombe Harris—better known in some circles as Jimmy the Wit—grinned a trifle too eagerly. In the background half a dozen post-hippie types wandered about, putting Grateful Dead albums on the sound system, rolling joints, discussing the Cosmic All, and doing all those beautiful things that made the sixties die so hard. “I know what you mean, Brother Man,” Stringy said meaningfully. Jimmy the Wit snickered in anticipation.
“Jerry’s got the best stuff on the Coast,” Jimmy the Wit said. “He smuggles it in himself “
“That so?”
I smiled modestly. “I had help. But I’ll admit to being pleased with this particular scam. We set up a front office—religious wholesalers—with calling cards, stationery, the whole riff. And we brought the load in inside of a batch of wooden madonnas. You should have seen the things! The absolute, and I mean ne plus ultra worst examples of native folk art these tired old eyes have ever seen. The cheeks were painted orange.” I shuddered theatrically.
“When we uncrated the things—man, you should’ve been there. We took a hatchet and split them up the crotch, and all this wonderful white powder tumbled out of the stomachs.”
We shared appreciative laughter. Somewhere in the background, a shill put on the Sergeant Pepper album. Somebody else lit a stick of patchouli incense.
Sheila chose that moment to send up the steerer. Good timing is what makes a manager, and Sheila was the best. The steerer was a blue jeans and Pink Floyd teeshirt type. He tapped me on the shoulder, said, “Hey Jerry, I’m cutting out now.”
“Yeah, well. That’s cool, man.” I threw Stringy a raised eyebrow, a sort of lookit-the-jerks-I-gotta-put-up-with look. Easing him carefully onto my side. Blue Jeans shifted uncomfortably.
“Uh. You promised to deal me a couple a keys.”
“Oh. Right.” I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Sheila, honey, bring me the basket, willya?” Then I looked at the steerer as if he were something unpleasant. “That’s sixty gee,” I said doubtfully.
“Got it right here.” He pulled out a wad of money that was eye-popping if you didn’t know that all the middle bills were ones. I negligently accepted it, and traded it to Sheila for a large Andean wicker hamper she fetched from the dark recesses of the loft.
If Sheila had no talent at all, I’d still stick her in the background during a play. She stands six-three and weighs about half what you’d swear was humanly possible. She always, even indoors at midnight, wears sunglasses. Creepy. Most people make her out to be a junkie.
“Thanks, sweet.” I stuck the top of the hamper under my arm. “Count the money and put it somewhere, willya?” She riffled through it, said, “Sixty,” in a startlingly deep voice and faded back into obscurity.
I rummaged through the hamper, came up with two brown bags. Then I weighed them judiciously, one in each hand, and dropped one back in. The other I opened to reveal a zip-lock plastic bag crammed to the gills with white powder.
“You want a taste?” My voice said he didn’t.
“Naw, I’m on the air in an hour. No time to get wasted.”
“Ciao, then.” Meaning: Get lost.
“Ciao.”
The steerer left, taking his midnight-doper pallor with him. I was playing Stringy against a roomful of very pale honkies: The only dark face in the joint was his. Which helped put him on the defensive, raised the fear of appearing to be . . . not cool . . . in front of all these white folk.
At the same time, I was busily snubbing them all, and yet being very warm toward him. Treating him as a fellow sophisticate. Getting him to identify with me. It helps create trust.
“Hey, I like your basket, man.”
“Yeah?” My voice was pleased. “I got it in S.A. Be going back there as soon as I unload the last—” I glanced in the basket “—eight keys. If you like, I could mail you a couple.”
“You do that. How much’d you say they cost?”
“Empty or full?” We all three laughed at this. “No, seriously, I’d be glad to. No charge.”
Stringy was pleased. “What can I say? I like your style, too.”
“Hey, man,” Jimmy interjected. “How about that blow, huh? I got me plans for a very heav-ee date!” Nobody laughed.
“Sure, sure,” I said distastefully. He scrabbled inside his pockets for his wad. “No hurry,” I said. He thrust it at my face, and I let it fall into my lap.
“Fifty thousand,” he said. “That’s two keys for me, ‘cause I’m going in with my brother here.”
Jimmy the Wit can be a very likeable guy. And when Stringy met him, that’s what he was. But once the mark has been roped in, a major part of the roper’s job is transferring the mark’s respect from himself to the insideman. He quietly makes himself unpleasant, and fosters the feeling in the mark that the roper is not really deserving of the great deal that is going down. Not at all a cool person like the insideman. So the mark’s loyalties shift. Then, when the blow-off comes, the moment in which the mark is separated from his money and from the insideman, the mark has no desire whatever to stay in the presence of the roper. There is a clean, quiet parting of the ways.
I looked down at the money, picked it up, let it drop. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” I said sadly. “I half-promised a friend that I’d hold out six keys for him.”
Jimmy the Wit looked stricken. Stringy didn’t say anything, but his face got very still, and there was a hungry look in his eyes.
Figure it this way: Coke sells for maybe a hundred dollars a gram. At that rate, Stringy’s four keys would be worth four hundred thousand dollars at what the police call “street prices.” Now admittedly Stringy is not going to be selling his coke in four thousand single-gram transactions, so he’s not going to get anywhere near that much for it. Still, I’ve strongly implied that the stuff is at least eighty percent pure. Which means that he can step on it lightly and get another key. Or he can step on it heavy and practically double the weight. Which he was likely to do, since his customers were all inner-city and doubtless had never had pure anything in their lives. There’s profit in the business, never doubt it.
“Hey, look, man,” Jimmy whined. “You promised.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” I said, annoyed. “It’s just—” I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Sheila!” She materialized by my side.
“Yes?” she said in that unsettlingly deep voice.
“How long do you think it’ll take Deke to come up with the money?”
“Two weeks.”
“That long?” I asked.
“Easily.” She paused, then added, “You know how he is.”
I sighed, and dismissed her with a wave of my hand. Thought for a moment. “What the hell. I’ll give him a good deal on the next batch.”
Everyone relaxed. Stringy let out a deep breath, the first real indication he’d given as to how deeply hooked he was. Smiles all around.
I sorted through the hamper, carefully choosing six bags, and laying them on the coffee table we were seated around. They made an impressive pile.
I took up a coke mirror from the edge of the table, and wiped it clean against my sleeve. Popping open a bag at random, I spooned out a small mound of lactose. Enough for three generous snorts. Following which, I began chopping it up with a gold-plated razor blade. Ritual is very important in these matters. Stringy and Jimmy the Wit were hanging onto my every move.
“Hey.” I paused midway through the chopping. “I’ve got an idea.” I put the blade down and reached for a small box. “As long as we’re doing this, I want you guys to sample something. It’s kind of special.” I looked at Stringy as I said this, implying that the offer was really—secretly—for him.
I opened the box and carefully lifted out the Rock.
Stringy’s eyes grew large and liquid, as I lif
ted the Rock up before me, holding it as though it were the Eucharist.
He was staring at a single crystal of cocaine, net weight over one full ounce. It’s an extremely rare and valuable commodity. Not for the price it would bring (two thousand dollars “street prices”), but for the status. I paid dearly for that crystal; a lot more than two thousand. But the effect was worth it. Stringy positively lusted after it. He was hooked.
Gingerly, delicately, I shaved three more lines from the Rock, and set it back in its box. I resumed chopping, keeping the mound of lactose and the mound of coke carefully separate. “Some jerk offered me twenty thousand for this the other day,” I said. “I told him to go fuck himself. He had no appreciation of the beauty of it. This is pure magic, friends. And you can’t buy magic, you know what I mean?”
Stringy nodded in a worldly fashion. I finished chopping, and began to lay out the lines with wide sweeps of the razorblade. I’d separate the mounds into three lines each, then merge two and divide them again. I shifted minute quantities back and forth, evening up the amounts. My hand flew gracefully over the mirror, shifting the lines to and fro like a circus grifter shuffling walnut shells under one of which resides a small green pea. Pretty soon you had to be paying very close attention to know which line came from which mound.
Sheila’s voice broke in suddenly. “Mind if I borrow the Rock?” I grunted assent without looking up. She faded back into the gloom, taking box and Rock with her. Stringy swiveled to watch it go. He’d have been less than human if he hadn’t.
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 28