Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  The sunlight swept across his chair.

  The President of the United States stirred and sighed, lifting his arms and setting them down again, stamping his feet to restore circulation. Creakily, he got up. He stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden warmth, willing life back into his bones. His arms were gnarled and thin, covered, like his chest, with fine white hair that polarized in the sunlight. He rubbed his hands over his arms to smooth out gooseflesh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stepped across to the gable window for a look outside. It seemed wrong somehow to see the neat, tree-lined streets of Northview, the old wooden houses, the tiled roofs, the lines of smoke going up black and fine from mortar-chinked chimneys. It seemed especially wrong that there were no automobiles in the streets, no roar and clatter of traffic, no reek of gasoline, no airplanes in the sky—

  He turned away from the window. For a moment everything was sick and wrong, and he blinked at the homey, familiar room as though he’d never seen it before, as though it were an unutterably alien place. Everything became hot and tight and terrifying, closing down on him. What’s happening? he asked himself blindly. He leaned against a crossbeam, dazed and baffled, until the distant sound of Mrs. Hamlin’s voice—she was scolding Tessie in the kitchen, and the ruckus rose all the way up through three floors of pine and plaster and fine old tenpenny nails—woke him again to his surroundings, with something like pleasure, with something like pain.

  Jamie, they called him. Crazy Jamie.

  Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Jamie collected his robe and his shaving kit and walked down the narrow, peeling corridor to the small upstairs bathroom. The polished hardwood floor was cold under his feet.

  The bathroom was cold, too. It was only the beginning of July, but already the weather was starting to turn nippy late at night and early in the morning. It got colder every year, seemed like. Maybe the glaciers were coming back, as some folks said. Or maybe it was just that he himself was worn a little thinner every year, a little closer to the ultimate cold of the grave. Grunting, he wedged himself into the narrow space between the sink and the downslant of the roof, bumping his head, as usual, against the latch of the skylight window. There was just enough room for him if he stood hunch-shouldered with the toilet bumping up against his thigh. The toilet was an old porcelain monstrosity, worn smooth as glass, that gurgled constantly and comfortably and emitted a mellow breath of earth. It was almost company. The yard boy had already brought up a big basin of “hot” water, although by now, after three or four other people had already used it, it was gray and cold; after the last person used it, it would be dumped down the toilet to help flush out the system. He opened his shaving kit and took out a shapeless cake of lye soap, a worn hand towel, a straight razor.

  The mirror above the sink was cracked and tarnished—no help for it, nobody made mirrors anymore. It seemed an appropriate background for the reflection of his face, which was also, in its way, tarnished and dusty and cracked with age. He didn’t know how old he was; that was one of the many things Doc Norton had warned him not to think about, so long ago. He couldn’t even remember how long he’d been living here in Northview. Ten years? Fifteen? He studied himself in the mirror, the blotched, earth-colored skin, the eyes sunk deep under a shelf of brow, the network of fine wrinkles. A well-preserved seventy? Memory was dim; the years were misty and fell away before he could number them. He shied away from trying to remember. Didn’t matter.

  He covered the face with lathered soap.

  By the time he finished dressing, the other tenants had already gone downstairs. He could hear them talking down there, muffled and distant, like water bugs whispering at the mossy bottom of a deep old well. Cautiously, Jamie went back into the hall. The wood floors and paneling up here were not as nicely finished as those in the rest of the house. He thought of all the hidden splinters in all that wood, waiting to catch his flesh. He descended the stairs. The banister swayed as he clutched it, groaning softly to remind him that it, too, was old.

  As he came into the dining room, conversation died. The other tenants looked up at him, looked away again. People fiddled with their tableware, adjusted their napkins, pulled their chairs closer to the table or pushed them farther away. Someone coughed self-consciously.

  He crossed the room to his chair and stood behind it.

  “Morning, Jamie,” Mrs. Hamlin said crossly.

  “Ma’m,” he replied politely, trying to ignore her grumpiness. He was late again.

  He sat down. Mrs. Hamlin stared at him disapprovingly, shook her head, and then turned her attention pointedly back to her plate. As if this were a signal, conversation started up again, gradually swelling to its normal level. The awkward moment passed. Jamie concentrated on filling his plate, intercepting the big platters of country ham and eggs and corn bread as they passed up and down the table. It was always like this at meals: the embarrassed pauses, the uneasy sidelong glances, the faces that tried to be friendly but could not entirely conceal distaste. Crazy Jamie, Crazy Jamie. Conversation flowed in ripples around him, never involving him, although the others would smile dutifully at him if he caught their eyes, and occasionally Seth or Tom would nod at him with tolerably unforced cordiality. This morning it wasn’t enough. He wanted to talk, too, for the first time in months. He wasn’t a child, he was a man, an old man! He paid less attention to his food and began to strain to hear what was being said, looking for a chance to get into the conversation.

  Finally the chance came. Seth asked Mr. Samuels a question. It was a point of fact, not opinion, and Jamie knew the answer.

  “Yes,” Jamie said, “at one time New York City did indeed have a larger population than Augusta.”

  Abruptly everyone stopped talking. Mr. Samuels’ lips closed up tight, and he grimaced as though he had tasted something foul. Seth shook his head wearily, looking sad and disappointed. Jamie lowered his head to avoid Seth’s eyes. He could sense Mrs. Hamlin swelling and glowering beside him, but he wouldn’t look at her, either.

  Damn it, that wasn’t what he’d meant to say! They hadn’t been talking about that at all. He’d said the wrong thing.

  He’d done it again.

  People were talking about him around the table, he knew, but he could no longer understand them. He could still hear their voices, but the words had been leached away, and all that remained was noise and hissing static. He concentrated on buttering a slice of corn bread, trying to hang on to that simple mechanical act while the world pulled away from him in all directions, retreating to the very edge of his perception, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach.

  When the world tide came back in, he found himself outside on the porch—the veranda; some of the older folks still called it—with Mrs. Hamlin fussing at him, straightening his clothes, patting his wiry white hair into place, getting him ready to be sent off to work. She was still annoyed with him, but it had no real bite to it, and the exasperated fondness underneath kept showing through even as she scolded him. “You go straight to work now, you hear? No dawdling and mooning around.” He nodded his head sheepishly. She was a tall, aristocratic lady with a beak nose, a lined, craggy face, and a tight bun of snowy white hair. She was actually a year or two younger than he was, but he thought of her as much, much older. “And mind you come right straight back here after work, too. Tonight’s the big Fourthday dinner, and you’ve got to help in the kitchen, hear? Jamie, are you listening to me?”

  He ducked his head and said “Yes’m,” his feet already fidgeting to be gone.

  Mrs. Hamlin gave him a little push, saying, “Shoo now!” and then, her grim face softening, adding, “Try to be a good boy.” He scooted across the veranda and out into the raw, hot brightness of the morning.

  He shuffled along, head down, still infused with dull embarrassment from the scolding he’d received. Mr. Samuels went cantering by him, up on his big roan horse, carbine sheathed in a saddle holster, horseshoes ringing against the pavement; off to patrol with th
e Outriders for the day. Mr. Samuels waved at him as he passed, looking enormously tall and important and adult up on the high saddle, and Jamie answered with the shy, wide, loose-lipped grin that sometimes seemed vacuous even to him. He ducked his head again when Mr. Samuels was out of sight and frowned at the dusty tops of his shoes. The sun was up above the trees and the rooftops now, and it was getting warm.

  The five-story brick school building was the tallest building in Northview—now that the bank had burned down—and it cast a cool, blue shadow across his path as he turned onto Main Street. It was still used as a school in the winter and on summer afternoons after the children had come back from the fields, but it was also filled with stockpiles of vital supplies so that it could be used as a stronghold in case of a siege—something that had happened only once, fifteen years ago, when a strong raiding party had come up out of the south. Two fifty-caliber machine guns—salvaged from an Army jeep that had been abandoned on the old state highway a few weeks after the War—were mounted on top of the school’s roof, where their field of fire would cover most of the town. They had not been fired in earnest for years, but they were protected from the weather and kept in good repair, and a sentry was still posted up there at all times, although by now the sentry was likely to smuggle a girl up to the roof with him on warm summer nights. Times had become more settled, almost sleepy now. Similarly, the Outriders who patrolled Northview’s farthest borders and watched over the flocks and the outlying farms had been reduced from thirty to ten, and it had been three or four years since they’d had a skirmish with anyone; the flow of hungry refugees and marauders and aimless migrants had mostly stopped by now—dead, or else they’d found a place of their own. These days the Outriders were more concerned with animals. The black bears were back in the mountains and the nearby hills, and for the past four or five years there had been wolves again, coming back from who-knew-where, increasing steadily in numbers and becoming more of a threat as the winters hardened. Visitors down from Jackman Station, in Maine, brought a story that a mountain lion had recently been sighted on the slopes of White Cap, in the unsettled country “north of the Moosehead,” although before the War there couldn’t have been any pumas left closer than Colorado or British Columbia. It had taken only twenty years.

  There was a strange wagon in front of the old warehouse that was now the Outriders’ station, a rig Jamie had never seen before. It was an ordinary enough wagon, but it was painted. It was painted in mad streaks and strips and random patchwork splotches of a dozen different colors—deep royal blue, vivid yellow, scarlet, purple, earth brown, light forest-green, black, burnt orange—as if a hundred children from prewar days had been at it with finger paint. To Jamie’s eyes, accustomed to the dull and faded tones of Northview’s weather-beaten old buildings, the streaks of color were so brilliant that they seemed to vibrate and stand out in raised contrast from the wagon’s surface. He was not used to seeing bright colors anymore; except those in the natural world around him, and this paint was fresh, something he also hadn’t seen in more years than he could remember. Even the big horse, which stood patiently in the wagon’s traces—and which now rolled an incurious eye up at, Jamie and blew out its lips with a blubbery snorting sound—even the horse was painted, blue on one side, bright green on the other, with orange streaks up its flanks.

  Jamie goggled at all this, wondering if it could possibly be real or if it was one of the “effects”—hallucinations, as even he understood—that he sometimes got during particularly bad “spells.” After a moment or two—during which the wagon didn’t shimmer or fade around the edges at all—he widened his attention enough to notice the signs: big hand-painted signs hung on either side of a kind of sandwich-board framework that was braced upright in the wagon bed. At the top each sign read MOHAWK CONFEDERACY in bright red paint, and then, underneath that, came a long list of words, each word painted in a different color:

  HAND-LOADED AMMUNITION

  PAINT

  FALSE TEETH

  EYEGLASSES—GROUND TO PRESCRIPTION

  LAMP OIL

  PAINLESS DENTISTRY

  UNTAINTED SEED FOR WHEAT, CORN, MELONS

  FLAX CLOTH

  WINDOW GLASS

  MEDICINES & LINIMENT

  CONDOMS

  IRON FARM TOOLS

  UNTAINTED LIVESTOCK

  NAILS

  MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

  MARIJUANA

  WHISKY

  SOAP

  PRINTING DONE

  ALL MADE IN MOHAWK!

  Jamie was puzzling out some of the harder words when the door to the Outriders’ station opened and Mr. Stover came hurriedly down the stairs. “What’re you doing here, Jamie?” he asked. “What’re you hanging around here for?”

  Jamie gaped at him, trying to find the words to describe the wonderful new wagon, and how strange it made him feel, but the effort was too great, and the words slipped away. “Going to Mr. Hardy’s store,” he said at last. “Just going to sweep up at Mr. Hardy’s store.”

  Mr. Stover glanced nervously back up at the door of the Outriders’ station, fingered his chin for a moment while he made up his mind, and then said, “Never mind that today, Jamie. Never mind about the store today. You just go on back home now.”

  “But—” Jamie said, bewildered. “But—I sweep up every day!”

  “Not today,” Mr. Stover said sharply. “You go on home, you hear me? Go on, git!”

  “Mrs. Hamlin’s going to be awful mad,” Jamie said sadly, resignedly.

  “You tell Edna I said for you to go home. And you stay inside, too, Jamie. You stay out of sight, hear? We’ve got an important visitor here in Northview today, and it’d never do to have him run into you.”

  Jamie nodded his head in acceptance of this. He wasn’t so dumb that he didn’t know what the unvoiced part of the sentence was: run into you, the half-wit, the crazy person, the nut. He’d heard it often enough. He knew he was crazy. He knew that he was an embarrassment. He knew that he had to stay inside, away from visitors, lest he embarrass Mrs. Hamlin and all his friends.

  Crazy Jamie.

  Slowly he turned and shuffled away, back the way he had come.

  The sun beat down on the back of his head now, and sweat gathered in the wrinkled hollows beneath his eyes.

  Crazy Jamie.

  At the corner, bathed in the shadow cast by the big oak at the edge of the schoolyard, he turned and looked back.

  A group of men had come out of the Outriders’ station and were now walking slowly in the direction of Mr. Hardy’s store, talking as they went. There was Mr. Jameson, Mr. Galli, Mr. Stover, Mr. Ashley, and, in the middle of them, talking animatedly and waving his arms, the visitor, the stranger—a big, florid-faced man with a shock of unruly blond hair that shone like beaten gold in the sunlight.

  Watching him, the visitor—now clapping a hand on Mr. Galli’s shoulder, Mr. Galli shrinking away—Jamie felt a chill, that unreasoning and unreasoned fear of strangers, of everything from outside Northview’s narrow boundaries that had affected him ever since he could remember, and suddenly his delight in the wonderful wagon was tarnished, diminished, because he realized that it, too, must come from outside.

  He headed for home, walking a little faster now, as if chivied along by some old cold wind that didn’t quite reach the sunlit world.

  That night was the Fourthday feast—“Independence Day,” some of the old folks still called it—and for Jamie, who was helping in the kitchen as usual, the early part of the evening was a blur of work as they sweated to prepare the meal: roast turkey, ham, wild pigeon, trout, baked raccoon, sweet potatoes, corn, pearl onions, berry soup, homemade bread, blackberries, plums, and a dozen other things.

  That was all as usual; he expected and accepted that. What was not usual—and what he did not expect—was that he would not be allowed to eat with the rest when the feast was served. Instead, Tessie set a plate out for him in the kitchen, saying, not unkindly, “Now, Jamie, mind you
stay here. They’ve got a guest out there this year, that loud-mouthed Mr. Brodey, and Mrs. Hamlin, she says you got to eat in the kitchen and keep out of sight. Now don’t you mind, honey. I’ll fix you up a plate real nice, just the same stuff you’d get out there.”

  And then, after a few moments of somewhat embarrassed bustling, she was gone.

  Jamie sat alone in the empty kitchen.

  His plate was filled to overflowing with food, and he’d even been given a glass of dandelion wine, a rare treat, but somehow he wasn’t hungry anymore.

  He sat listening to the wind tug at the old house, creaking the rafters, making the wood groan. When the wind died, he could hear them talking out there in the big dining room, the voices just too faint for him to make out the words.

  An unfamiliar anger began to rise in him. “Crazy Jamie,” he said aloud, his voice sounding flat and dull to his own ears. It wasn’t fair. He glanced out the window, to where the sun had almost set in a welter of sullen purple clouds. Suddenly he slashed out at the glass of wine, sending it spinning to the floor. It wasn’t fair! He was an adult, wasn’t he? Why did he have to sit back here by himself like a naughty child? Even if—In spite of—He was—

  Somehow he found himself on his feet. He deserved to eat with the others, didn’t he? He was as good as anybody else, wasn’t he? In fact—In fact—

  The corridor. He seemed to float along it in spite of his stumbling, hesitant feet. The voices got louder, and just at the point where they resolved into words, he stopped, standing unnoticed in the shadows behind the dining room archway, hanging onto the doorjamb, torn between rage and fear and a curious, empty yearning.