by Tim Pratt
We're standing outside a little tottery tarpaper house. Raggedy curtains drooping in the front window, front yard all mud and junk; an old water pump, a pile of car tires, door off a chicken coop. Clothes on the line, tired sheets and towels and a pair of man's coveralls, ripped and faded. Somewhere here, someplace not right now, I can hear a child crying.
She's beside me in the road, and she looks different. Stronger, more meat on her bones. Ugly boots gone, good walking shoes on her feet, big backpack, all shiny and new-smelling hooked on her shoulder. And something else, something I can't determinate.
"Here I go," she says, and turns her back on the house. She starts down the road, big long steps, and she doesn't look back, but I do. There's a face staring at us from that front window, looking angry and sad both at once, and then the tatty curtains twitch, and the face is gone.
"Dog! You coming?" she says, and I run to catch up.
We walk a long time. Mr. Moon lights the way. There's honeysuckle in the air, thick and sweet, and the further we get from that house the happier she is. Her step gets lighter, like she's shucking off some burden, and she starts in laughing from time to time.
We walk on and on. I flush a fat rabbit and chase it a while. She takes a big meat sandwich out of her bag and gives me half, and we drink our fill from a spring running by the road. She picks up an old stick and throws it as she walks along, and I bring it on back and she throws it again.
By and by the road under our feet changes, from hard-packed dirt to blacktop, smooth and oily and smelling from tar. The sky is changed now, the wind is dry and hot, the trees and brush all gone. And it's a puzzlement to me; I can smell the desert spread out all around us, sand and heat and open sky, but there's water up ahead too, a powerful lot of it.
"Look, dog. There it is." Off in the distance I can see a city, tall buildings and lights shining and blinking, and cars, and people--more than I've ever seen. And something else, a thick, rank smell the Dark Man taught me. Money. Bright lights and noise and money, that's the place her heart yearns for.
She pulls a pack of cards from her pocket, does a one-hand shuffle like she was born with the pasteboards in her hands. She spreads the cards out to make a fan and flutters them back and forth, and the ace of spades jumps out and dances along above us in that hot dry wind a second before she catches it neat as neat and slides it back in.
"They do what I tell them, now," she says. "I'm going to be the queen of the tables, dog, how's that sound to you?"
That's what's different about her, what I couldn't place. This dream is the future, after the Dark Man learns her what she wants to learn.
"Cards? You doing all of this to learn cards?" I ask.
"I'm going to be a queen," she says again, not paying me any mind. She's shuffling the cards again, makes the joker jump up this time. The breeze picks the card and pulls it up out of the deck, and it lands on the blacktop at my feet before she can catch it. The joker is the Dark Man, and he winks up at me. She makes a little tch sound and picks up the card, puts it back in the deck.
Her clothes are changed. She's wearing a dress, shiny spangles and beads, her hair is long and kind of curly, on her feet little bitty shoes with tall heels, and her fingers all covered in rings.
You're going to end up in the cupboard with all the rest, I think. But I won't speak. He'll beat me enough for what I've said already, I don't want more than that. No more. Nope.
Nope.
"Listen," I say. "Don't you understand? He don't work for free. You gonna lose your--"
Off in the desert comes a sound, raucous and ugly. It throws my mind into confusion and perplexes my tongue.
A rooster crowing.
Just like that we're back under the oak tree, air all moist and close, skeeters and no-see-ums digging at us. She's skinny again, and tired and sick, and I am just a dumb dog.
She jumps up and grabs her bag. "Three more Sundays, dog, and I'll leave this place forever." She runs on down the road, back to that tarpaper house.
Across the river, Red Rooster crows again. I head on home.
Seventh Sunday
My back hurts, and my head. The chain is too tight, and it's rubbing off all the fur about my neck.
Just after sunrise, Red Rooster comes strutting down the road like he owns it. He's been to the crossroads. I pick my head up slowly. My ear bleeds, little weepy drops.
"Was she there? She still sick?" I say.
He struts on past, like I'm not there.
I'm hungry.
Eighth Sunday
The Dark Man takes the chain off and gives me dinner.
Thank you, boss, I say.
Red Rooster has just come back from the crossroads again. He tosses his head, comb waggling. The Dark Man squints at him and Red Rooster finds elsewhere to be, quick as he can.
The Dark Man lays his hand on my head, and it hurts less.
Have you learned your lesson? He asks.
Yes boss, I'm sorry, I say.
He gives a little grunt and goes back into the shack. I wait until the door shuts. I go up onto the porch and sniff around 'til I find the spot where he poured the dream dust on me. There it is, sweet and spoiled-milky, settled into the cracks of the boards. Mebbe enough. Mebbe not.
The Dark Man will go to her at the ninth sunrise; she's got one Sunday still to wait. Next week Mr. Moon is ripe and full. Mebbe a big moon can help a little bit of powder do its work.
Ninth Sunday
The Dark Man is rearranging jars in the cupboard.
Boss? I ask.
Yes, he says, not turning around.
Boss, how come that cupboard never gets full? How many jars can that old cupboard hold?
He laughs, tosses the jar in his hand up in the air and catches it. Inside, something wretched flutters, then goes still.
It's a funny thing, he says. There's always room in this cupboard for one more.
He glances at me over his shoulder.
It's an hour 'til sunrise. You can go if you want, he says. Say goodbye to her.
Why I need to do that, Boss? I ask. She'll be back here soon enough.
He laughs at that, sets the jar down and touches my head.
You are my good dog, he says, my creature.
That I am and nothing else, I say.
Go on and catch a rabbit, he says, and takes up the jar again.
Yes boss. Thank you, boss.
I go out and pause on the porch to take a back scratch against the rough old boards. A good long scratch.
I run down the road, stop just before I reach the crossroad. I know he's here.
Come on out, Fussybritches, I say.
Red Rooster bustles out of the grass, all puffed up with vexation. He hates that name.
What do you want, dog? I'm busy on the Dark Man's task. I got this girl to watch for him, he says.
Do tell, I think. I expect a dumb dog like me wouldn't know much about it.
The Dark Man wants you to fetch him up some John the Conqueror root, I say.
I'm not the fetch-it boy round here, he says.
The Dark Man says you pick it nice and clean, like he needs it. But if you don't want to go--
He's off and down the road at a trot. When that big waving flag of a tail disappears over the hill, I run on to the crossroads.
So thin. Like she's the one been chained up all those days.
"Dog! You're back! Where'd you go? Bad dog, not coming to see me. I had to sit here all alone, with a nasty rooster staring at me all the time. He wouldn't move, not even when I threw rocks at him."
I wish you had better aim, I think.
She's petting me, but we don't have time. I shake myself hard, throwing up dream powder all around us. She sneezes, and I do too. We sneeze again and she commences laughing, then coughing, so hard she can't stop. I'm still sneezing--that bad milk smell is all up in my nose--and when I stop, she's breathing like she's just run a race, with a big smear of blood across her lip.
Oh,
Mr. Moon. Help this dumb dog.
"What've you been rolling in?" she says, and coughs again. Then her eyes do a flutter. "I'm so tired, dog. I think now you're here, I'll close my eyes...."
And just like that we're out on the dream road, not near the house, but not near the city either. We're somewhere in between, where we took our walk and she threw that stick. She's strong again, and pretty, all done up in her sparkly dress.
"You listen to me, girl," I say. "You get on outta here, straight you wake up. The Dark Man wants your soul for his cupboard. You stay here, he'll get you for sure."
"He's going to help me." She smiles and takes the cards out again. She starts that fancy one-handed shuffle.
"How far you going to get sick as you are? What good playing cards do you in the graveyard? He means to have your soul, and he'll get it if you tarry here."
"He can't take my soul, dog."
"He's the Dark Man and it's Sunday number nine. He can take what he pleases now."
"No, dog." She bends down to me. "My soul was taken long ago," she says, and hikes up her long skirt for me to see a cicatrix of scars across her belly and thighs. She's been mistreated, this girl has.
"He can't hurt me any more than I been hurt," she says and I can see the beatings and the screams and bad times, swimming just below her skin.
You're a child and you're wrong, so wrong you can't imagine. You don't know about souls and what they worth. Don't know how much you can lose. You ain't seen the cupboard.
I say it, but no sound comes out.
No need for Red Rooster now; envious time has fled. The light is changing. It's dawn, and we're back at the crossroads.
The Dark Man steps from the high grass, takes off his best hat and gives her a bow. His coat is brushed, his boots polished to a killing shine.
Good morning, my dear, he says.
"Good morning sir. My name is Sally," she says.
Hello, Sally. How may I help you?
She hands over the cards, and he begins to shuffle. I know what comes next, and head to the oak tree to lie down.
The lesson takes about an hour. All that waiting, for an hour in his company. He hands the cards back to her one last time, and she shows him what she's learned. He applauds.
A pleasure to meet you, Sally, he says, I hope to see you again. He takes off his right glove and extends his hand to her.
I turn my head away as she reaches her hand over. They shake. Down by the river, Red Rooster screams in triumph.
"Thank you, but I'm heading west," Sally says, and picks up her bag. She slings it onto her shoulder, coughs with the effort. Then she looks the Dark Man right in the eye.
"Your dog is coming with me," she says.
He smiles. I don't believe that's so, Sally. He can be trouble, that dog, but he is mine.
"He's coming with me," she says. "We're going to take care of each other."
The Dark Man looks over at me, all quiet in the grass.
Is that so, dog? he asks. You leaving Red Rooster and me for greener pastures?
I look at her. Sally. She pats her thigh in a come-on gesture. I put my head down again.
No boss, I say to him. I am your good dog.
Sally calls me, pats her thigh again. I don't look up. The Dark Man laughs.
Good day, Miss, I think we will meet again soon, he says. Sooner than you might think.
She calls me one more time. I stand up and walk over to the Dark Man. He grabs me by the back of my neck, where my skin's rubbed all raw, but I don't wince. Not a bit. We watch Sally turn and walk down the road, stopping now and then to cough and shift that stinky bag from one shoulder to another. We walk home.
She's dying. She was a skinny thing at the start, and now that cold has turned on her, rotting out her lungs. I don't even think she knows it yet, but I can smell the death coming out of her when she breathes. She won't get even halfway to that bright city before she goes and then her soul's gonna come flying right on back here, and he'll put her in a jam jar and lock her away.
And me? Gonna be bad for me. He's gonna beat me and starve me and send that swaggering fowl to lord it over me. And I'll have to bear it. Because I know, someday, there'll be one second he won't be watching, one moment when I can get close. Mebbe some night when Mr. Moon is full so there's light for her to fly away by.
I'll tip that cupboard over, see if I don't.
Lull
by Kelly Link
There was a lull in the conversation. We were down in the basement, sitting around the green felt table. We were holding bottles of warm beer in one hand, and our cards in the other. Our cards weren't great. Looking at each others' faces, we could see that clearly.
We were tired. It made us more tired to look at each other when we saw we weren't getting away with anything at all. We didn't have any secrets.
We hadn't seen each other for a while and it was clear that we hadn't changed for the better. We were between jobs, or stuck in jobs that we hated. We were having affairs and our wives knew and didn't care. Some of us were sleeping with each others' wives. There were things that had gone wrong, and we weren't sure who to blame.
We had been talking about things that went backwards instead of forwards. Things that managed to do both at the same time. Time travelers. People who weren't stuck like us. There was that new movie that went backwards, and then Jeff put this music on the stereo where all the lyrics were palindromes. It was something his kid had picked up. His kid Stan was a lot cooler than we had ever been. He was always bringing things home, Jeff said, saying, You have got to listen to this. Here, try this. These guys are good.
Stan was the kid who got drugs for the other kids when there was going to be a party. We had tried not to be bothered by this. We trusted our kids and we hoped that they trusted us, that they weren't too embarrassed by us. We weren't cool. We were willing to be liked. That would have been enough.
Stan was so very cool that he hadn't even minded taking care of some of us, the parents of his friends (the friends of his parents), although sometimes we just went through our kids' drawers, looked under the mattresses. It wasn't that different from taking Halloween candy out of their Halloween bags, which was something we had also done, when they were younger and went to bed before we did.
Stan wasn't into that stuff now, though. None of the kids were. They were into music instead.
You couldn't get this music on CD. That was part of the conceit. It came only on cassette. You played one side, and then on the other side the songs all played backwards and the lyrics went forwards and backwards all over again in one long endless loop. La allah ha llal. Do, oh, oh, do you, oh do, oh, wanna?
Bones was really digging it. "Do you, do you wanna dance, you do, you do," he said, and laughed and tipped his chair back. "Snakey canes. Hula boolah."
Someone mentioned the restaurant downtown where you were supposed to order your dessert and then you got your dinner.
"I fold," Ed said. He threw his cards down on the table.
Ed liked to make up games. People paid him to make up games. Back when we had a regular poker night, he was always teaching us a new game and this game would be based on a TV show or some dream he'd had.
"Let's try something new. I'm going to deal out everything, the whole deck, and then we'll have to put it all back. We'll see each other's hands as we put them down. We're going for low. And we'll swap. Yeah, that might work. Something else, like a wild card, but we won't know what the wild card was, until the very end. We'll need to play fast--no stopping to think about it--just do what I tell you to do."
"What'll we call it?" he said, not a question, but as if we'd asked him, although we hadn't. He was shuffling the deck, holding the cards close like we might try to take them away. "DNA Hand. Got it?"
"That's a shitty idea," Jeff said. It was his basement, his poker table, his beer. So he got to say things like that. You could tell that he thought Ed looked happier than he ought to. He was thinking Ed ought to remember h
is place in the world, or maybe Ed needed to be reminded what his place was. His new place. Most of us were relieved to see that Ed looked okay. If he didn't look okay, that was okay too. We understood. Bad things had happened to all of us.
We were contemplating these things and then the tape flips over and starts again.
It's catchy stuff. We could listen to it all night.
"Now we chant along and summon the Devil," Bones says. "Always wanted to do that."
Bones has been drunk for a while now. His hair is standing up and his face is shiny and red. He has a fat stupid smile on his face. We ignore him, which is what he wants. Bones's wife is just the same, loud and useless. The thing that makes the rest of us sick is that their kids are the nicest, smartest, funniest, best kids. We can't figure it out. They don't deserve kids like that.
Brenner asks Ed if he's found a new place to live. He has.
"Off the highway, down by that Texaco, in the orchards. This guy built a road and built the house right on top of the road. Just, plop, right in the middle of the road. Kind of like he came walking up the road with the house on his back, got tired, and just dropped it."
"Not very good feng shui," Pete says.
Pete has read a book. He's got a theory about picking up women, which he's always sharing with us. He goes to Barnes & Noble on his lunch hour and hangs around in front of displays of books about houses and decorating, skimming through architecture books. He says it makes you look smart and just domesticated enough. A man looking at pictures of houses is sexy to women.
We've never asked if it works for him.
Meanwhile, we know, Pete's wife is always after him to go up on the roof and gut the drains, reshingle and patch, paint. Pete isn't really into this. Imaginary houses are sexy. Real ones are work.
He did go buy a mirror at Pottery Barn and hang it up, just inside the front door, because otherwise, he said, evil spirits go rushing up the staircase and into the bedrooms. Getting them out again is tricky.
The way the mirror works is that they start to come in, look in the mirror, and think a devil is already living in the house. So they take off. Devils can look like anyone--salespeople, Latter-day Saints, the people who mow your lawns--even members of your own family. So you have to have a mirror.