San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  They had tracked him down in Oklahoma because the farm was his now; or, she should say, they had tracked down his wife; or, she should say, his ex-wife. Wash, Jr. was killed six years ago when a pipe fell off a rig and crushed his skull. His wife hadn’t even notified the family. Then she married a Mexican driller from Texas and was living in Tulsa, but what could you expect from one of them trashy O’Dell girls. It was a good thing she had had none of Wash, Jr.’s children, just three stillbirths, because she had no claim on the family at all now. Of course, she had two fat brown babies by her new husband, but you know how Mexicans are: like rabbits.

  Dwayne hadn’t wanted the farm. He just told them to sell it and send him the money. Dwayne was the logical person to take John Lee, being his closest kin. Her sister, Lilah, was in no shape to take care of him. If Dwayne couldn’t, then she didn’t know what would happen to the poor thing, him living with a prostitute and all.

  Aunt Rose and her husband flew back to Hawley.

  The judge told him how sorry she was but, if one of his relatives didn’t assume custody, as a minor he would have to be declared a ward of the state. But it wouldn’t be too bad. He’d have a nice place to live, could finish school, and would have the company of lots of other boys his own age. He asked her why he couldn’t live with Sue, but she said it was out of the question and wouldn’t discuss it further.

  But Dwayne did assume custody and he moved into the small apartment on Beachwood near Melrose. “Half the money from the sale of the farm is rightfully yours,” Dwayne said, dressing for work. “You’ll have to go to school this fall. The judge said so. Other than that, your time is your own. But you’re not supposed to see that woman again.” He showed John Lee how to turn the couch into a bed, and left for work. He was a bartender at a place on Highland and worked from six until it closed at two in the morning.

  John Lee caught the bus at Melrose and Vine and rode to Hollywood and Highland. He took a taxi to the house on Laurel Canyon. Sue wasn’t at home and he couldn’t find Punkin. The three paintings had been framed and were hanging. She had repaired the damaged one. No other paintings were in sight. Everything had been pushed against the walls, leaving most of the floor bare. There were blue chalk marks on the base boards that had been hastily and inadequately rubbed out. The room smelled odd.

  He found an envelope on the kitchen table with his name on it. He removed the folded piece of notepaper. “John Lee, my little lamb,” it read, “I knew you would come, although they told us we mustn’t see each other again. You must stay away for a while, John Lee. Only a little while, then it won’t matter what they say. There’ll be nothing they can do. I love you. Sue.”

  Pearl wasn’t home either, so he went back to Dwayne’s apartment, watched television for a while, took a bath, and went to bed on the convertible sofa. He didn’t know when Dwayne came in about two-thirty.

  Dwayne always slept until nearly noon. John Lee found little to talk to him about and Dwayne seemed to prefer no conversation at all. John Lee watched television a lot, went to many movies, and waited for Sue.

  He fell asleep in front of the television a few days later and was awakened by Dwayne and the man who was with him. Dwayne frowned at him and the man smiled nervously. The man said something to Dwayne, but he shook his head and led the man into the bedroom, closing the door. John Lee went to bed and didn’t know when the man left.

  The next morning he looked into the bedroom. Dwayne was sprawled on the bed, naked, still asleep. A twenty dollar bill lay beside him, partially under his hip. John Lee closed the door and fixed breakfast.

  Dwayne came in while he was washing the dishes. He didn’t say anything for a while, fixing a cup of instant coffee. He sat at the table in his underwear, sipping the coffee. John Lee continued with the dishes, not looking at him. Then he felt Dwayne’s eyes on him and he turned. “I don’t want you to think I’m queer,” Dwayne said flatly. “I don’t do anything, just lay there. If those guys want to pay me good money to swing on my joint, it’s no skin off my nose.” He turned back to his coffee.

  John Lee hung up the dishtowel to dry. “I understand,” he said but he wasn’t sure that he did. “It’s all right with me.”

  Dwayne didn’t answer, but went on sipping coffee as if John Lee weren’t there. He made sure, from then on, he was asleep before Dwayne came home.

  Sue called a few nights later. He had never heard her voice over the phone, but it sounded different: brighter, less throaty, younger. “Come over, John Lee, my little lamb,” she laughed gleefully. “I’m ready. Come over for the showing.”

  The taxi had to stop a block away because of the police cars and fire trucks. John Lee ran terrified through the milling crowd but when he reached Sue’s house there was nothing to see. The rickety wooden steps went up the hill for about twenty feet and ended in mid-air. There was nothing beyond them, only a rectangle of bare earth where the house had been. But nothing else, not even the concrete foundation.

  He felt a touch on his arm. He whirled to stare wide-eyed at Pearl. He couldn’t speak, his throat was frozen. His heart was pounding too hard and he couldn’t breathe. Pearl took his arm and led him into the house where he had spent his first night in Hollywood.

  Pearl gave him a sip of brandy which burned his throat and released the muscles. “What happened? Where’s Sue?” he asked, afraid to get an answer.

  “I don’t know,” Pearl said without any trace of corn pone accent. He seemed on the verge of hysteria himself. “There was a fire…”

  “A fire?” he asked, uncomprehending.

  “I think it was a fire…” Pearl nervously dropped the brandy bottle. He picked it up, ignoring the stain on the carpet.

  “Where’s Sue?”

  “She… she was in the house. I heard her scream,” he said rapidly, not looking at John Lee.

  John Lee didn’t feel anything. His body was frozen and numb. Then, he couldn’t help himself. He began to bawl like a baby. It was all slipping away. He could feel the good things escaping his fingers. Pearl sat beside him on the purple fur chair and tried to comfort him. “She was over there all evening, singing to herself. I could hear her, she was very happy. I went over but she wouldn’t let me in. She said I knew better than to look at an artist’s work before it was finished. She said anyway it was a private showing for you. I didn’t hear her singing for an hour or so and then, a little while ago, I heard a noise like thunder or an explosion. I looked over and there was a bright green light in the house, like it was burning on the inside, but not like fire either. I heard her scream. It was an awful, terrible scream. There was another voice, a horrible gloating voice, I couldn’t understand. Then the whole house began to glow with that same green light. It got brighter and brighter, but there was no heat from it. Then it went away and the house wasn’t there anymore.”

  Pearl got up and handed John Lee an envelope. “I found this on the deck. She must have tossed it down earlier.” John Lee took the envelope with his name on it. He recognized her handwriting, but more hurried and scrawled than usual. He opened it and read the short note.

  He went back to school that fall and lived with Dwayne. He said his name was Johnny, because John Lee was home and Sue. He met a lot of girls who wanted him, but they were pallid and dull after Sue. He went with them and slept with them but was unable to feel anything for them. He never turned down any man who propositioned him either, and there were many. He didn’t care about the money, he only needed someone to relieve the pressures that built up in his loins. It didn’t make any difference, man or woman, it was all the same to him. He let lonely, middle-aged women keep him, but he never found what he was looking for.

  By the time he was eighteen he had grown a couple of inches and had filled out. He moved out of the apartment on Beachwood and got a place of his own. He never saw Dwayne again.

  The envelope with his name on it was soiled and frayed from much handling. He read it every night.

  “John Lee, my little lamb,�
��

  it read,

  “I tried very hard, so very hard. I thought I had succeeded but something is going wrong. I can feel it.

  “I wish you could have seen me when I was fifteen, John Lee. I wish you could have seen me when I was fifteen.

  “I’m afraid.”

  It was unsigned.

  Dinosaurs

  The bluebaby swam suddenly in a tight circle. The maneuver caught the others by surprise and their outstretched arms failed to make contact. Gleeful thoughts rippled between them.

  But, even in victory, the bluebaby had tired of the game. It swam downward, shutting out the joyful thoughts of the other bluebabies as they continued to race about. It paused near a dreamer and poked among the stones until it found one to its taste. It deposited the stone in its mouth and listened idly to the dream.

  It was supposed to be a very special dream, but the bluebaby found it tedious and dull. It had listened on a number of occasions since its hatching in the spring and found the dream never changing.

  The dream was about the surface. In the dream the surface was green and thick, and liquid flowed in large grooves. Two-legged surface creatures moved about haphazardly and lived in odd structures. The dream made the bluebaby impatient and it couldn’t understand why it kept returning to listen.

  A dreamer without a dream had attempted to explain it. The dreamer, with a faint note of envy in his thought, had explained that it was a very special dream because it was about the time before the world; before there were dreamers (or bluebabies, either); when there were only surface creatures.If it was before the world, the bluebaby questioned, how did the dreamer know anything about it?

  The thought of the dreamer without a dream was amused. That’s the reason it is a very special dream.

  The bluebaby swam away in search of a more exciting dream and paused suddenly.

  There was something on the surface. It sensed a spot of heat where a surface creature was remaining in one place.

  Curious, it swam upward.

  Flan raised the edge of the breather slightly and scratched the corner of his mouth with a stubby finger. He took one sip of water from the tube snaking to the pouch under his arm and leaned back against the gravel dune with a sigh. He let his muscles relax almost completely; his rest would be a short one. A few bits of gravel dislodged and rolled down the slope of the dune with soft clicks. Ran was unconcerned. His own movement had caused it.

  He dropped his hairless head back against the cold gravel and looked at the sky. The stream of debris from the fractured moon stretched from horizon to horizon like bits of broken glass. Flan tried to imagine how it had looked a million years ago, but couldn’t.

  He raised a pale hand and jiggled the breather, settling it more comfortably over his mouth and nose. It smelled of ancient breath; breath so ancient the exhaled molecules had become a physical part of the plastic and metal. And the pack snuggled under his chin was definitely making an audible noise. He had thought so for years, but had dismissed it as imagination and apprehension. How much longer would it last? A hundred years? Two hundred? It didn’t really seem to matter. Already there were many, many spares.

  The cold crept quickly through the surface suit and into his bones. He wrapped the cloak tighter about him and hunched his shoulders against his neck, shivering slightly. The odors of the cloak were as ancient as those of the breather. His effort had little effect. When he was younger, when obstacles were trivial and easily overcome, the cold had bothered him not at all. Besides, it was hardly cold, only early autumn.

  Flan sighed again, admitting his years. All fourteen of them.

  But he had sired the child.

  The breather moved with his smile. He had sired the only child that year. No shame on him or Triz. Seven in all; two surviving; the new one not yet old enough for naming—but in a few days. He had long ago decided on the name for the new son.

  He thought of the other, his first born: Sith, the arrogant, prideful young pup. Prancing and displaying the instrument that would produce a child every year—maybe even two at a time. Poor Sith—eight years old and still childless. Naturally, he put the blame on sweet, hapless Brin. He knew he had no real reason for disliking Sith other than his own peevishness, but Sith wore his glory not well.

  Flan slipped his fingers into the small pouch he wore on a cord around his neck and felt the warmth of the whispering stone. His fingertips caressed it for a moment, then slid it into his hand. It was circular and flat, thicker in the center and tapering to a rounded edge. It was half as wide as his palm, white, and faintly translucent like porcelain. It began to whisper.

  Flan had seen others. There were always a few lying around. They had a simple beauty and the children liked to play with them. But this one was different. He had found it when Sith was a baby; picked it up where the child had left it lying. It had grown warm in his fingers, seemed to mold to his hand, though it had not changed its shape in any way. It had not begun to whisper until years later.

  No one knew the purpose of the little discs; they were pretty stones that amused the children. Even Old Frel, an ancient of almost thirty years, who had a theory about everything, could not produce one for the stones. There had been interest and curiosity when he told of the way it warmed in his hand, but it remained cool in the hands of others and the interest waned. He had not mentioned the whispering because he knew that only he could hear it.

  He huddled in his cloak, resting against the gravel dune, and listened to the whisper. It was, as always, maddeningly on the edge of understanding.

  Flan felt an almost imperceptible movement in the gravel. His rest had been shorter than he expected. He put the stone back in the pouch and the whisper died away. He stood quickly, with no noticeable effort, and stretched to his full four-foot height. He rolled the heavy muscles in his shoulders, working out the kinks. He checked the direction machine strapped to his forearm and walked away toward the north.

  Gray-blue chitinous claws like small shovels probed tentatively at the warmer area where Flan had been sitting. Finding nothing but rapidly cooling surface gravel, the claws withdrew from sight. Then the gravel bulged and rolled away as the bluebaby poked it head up to see the source of the warmth that had attracted it.

  The bluebaby’s eyes were small and limited but they caught Flan’s receding figure. It watched curiously, nose-deep in the gravel, until distance made detail a vague dark blur. It thought of following but knew the surface creature moved too rapidly. It had never seen one quite like it, but it did seem to be very similar to the ones in the dream.

  The bluebaby poked among the surface stones with hard wide fingers and selected one with a greenish tinge. It popped the stone into its mouth. Another blue head emerged silently nearby. The thoughts of the two bluebabies compared the flavor of the surface stones to those below and agreed that, while the surface stones might be the tastier of the two, the awesome openness was somewhat disturbing. The other head sank from sight.

  The bluebaby looked again in the direction of the surface creature, but could see only a small dark spot moving in the distance. It scratched absently at the fine wiry tendrils that had only recently begun sprouting from the joints of its homy body. The itching grew uncomfortable. It sank and swam away in the gravel sea, feeling the movement of the stones bringing delicious relief. The bluebaby’s digestive system was already at work on the greenish stone, breaking it down, releasing oxygen and water and other nutrients for the healthy young body.

  Flan’s stride was not hurried, but it ate away at the distance, bringing him nearer to the People and the summer Home, nearer to Triz and the child. His feet crunched at each step, sinking slightly. The gravel sea stretched to the limit of his vision in every direction, undulating in low dunes like frozen ocean waves. Flan knew the word ocean but found difficulty in grasping its meaning. He topped a dune and saw the thin white line across the flat northern horizon. He had made good time. The sun was only at twenty degrees in the west, small and
white. He had over six hours before it set, but already the night wind was stirring his cloak. He hastened his step though he knew he would be there in two hours, long before the wind grew too strong. By sundown a man would be unable to keep his feet in the gale, and a few hours later, the gravel dunes would begin to shift.

  Flan passed the wreckage of the air bus. He hardly noticed. It was a familiar landmark on the southward trek in the autumn as well as the northward trek in the spring. The air bus wasn’t exactly wrecked, not smashed, twisted, or ruptured. It was simply inoperative, lying half-submerged like an immense windowed lozenge. It had shifted almost a mile to the south since spring.

  Old Frel, a spinner of tall tales, claimed to remember riding in it as a child, claimed to have been riding in it when it crashed. Flan neither believed him nor disbelieved him. Who was to know if Old Frel spoke the truth or fancy? No one else was nearly as old. But the story faintly disturbed him, nevertheless. He wished the shifting dunes would cover the air bus, as they did some years, but permanently. No one spoke but eyes looked at it, thoughts of what it would be like if the trek were made by air bus rather than afoot trickled through their minds. It was unwise to think back on better times.

  The stone in the pouch around his neck began to whisper, softly, urgently, unintelligibly. It seldom whispered when he wasn’t holding it in his hand, but there were times and places where it did. The air bus was one of those places. He hurried on, not wanting to hear because he couldn’t understand.

  The white line of the receding glacier was more pronounced. Already the gravel was growing coarser. Soon it would be smooth flat rocks, then tumbled stones as big as his head, then solid rock. The teaching machine, or memories of memories of the teaching machine, said the gravel sea was growing larger. Something about the glacier and the wind—the memory was wispy. It would reach the Home… when? A thousand years? Ten thousand?