He tried to tell Jeff. "I saw a movie one night about a horse . . ." he dealt a few more cards . . . "it wasn't just any horse, it was a smart horse, and he loved his master, and even though it was war and the horse might be killed he went back and found his master . . ." he stopped, wondering how indeed the horse had picked up his master so that the man, wounded, lay across the saddle, but decided it didn't matter . . . "and he saved him from dying. Well, see, any one of these cards coming up could save you, you just don't know . . ." but Jeff frowned, his eyes stormy, and swept the cards up. "No," he said, "No," and dealt again, oddly ferocious, and bent over the table, tossing cards down so fast that they began flying off the table. SB watched for a moment, amazed, then gently pried the dirty cards from Jeff's hand, picked the cards off the floor, reshuffled, and calmly dealt. He straightened them out where Jeff had bent them. "There's always another game," he said.
SB left well before dark that day, because he was hungry, but after that he came back just about every day. His mom seemed pleased, and more gentle, and didn't ask where he was all day. He knew she wouldn't be real happy if she knew he wasn't climbing trees or playing Cowboys and Indians, but teaching someone else to play solitaire.
After the first week SB started wondering about Jeff's mom, but figured that maybe she had decided not to be tied down. Then he wondered why he never saw Jeff's dad, but decided that it was just as well.
But one day even he got tired of cards. "Look," he said, "Let's go out and do something. The big kids are playing baseball in the field across from my house. Want to go?"
To his surprise, Jeff nodded. But when they went outside, instead of going up the road, Jeff took off past the south edge of the cornfield, where SB had never been before. SB hesitated, then followed. Jeff could run real fast. SB could hardly keep up. But after ten minutes Jeff stumbled to a stop, SB on his heels, and crouched on the edge of the woods as SB looked over his shoulder, surprised.
They had come by another route to the ball field, and were well back from the third baseline, hidden by leaves.
Across the field he saw bleachers which he knew needed paint and were full of splinters. Spread out across them were the usual assortment of boys like himself who came on dull afternoons to watch the big kids play and hope the team would be short and one of them would be asked to fill in. There were only about five or six of them, hanging between bleachers by knees and back. SB recognized most of them.
Not far from him and Jeff a big kid was inching away from second base. SB felt weird, like he was spying on his own life, like he was watching himself over there on the bleachers. "Out," hissed Jeff, and SB was startled when the pitcher suddenly turned and burned a fast ball to the second baseman who caught it with a loud thump in his lovely big glove and tagged the big kid out.
SB looked over at Jeff, wanting to say how did you know but said nothing when he saw the rapt look on the eyebrowless face, the breathless, panting look of him. He looked steadily back at SB, at first helplessly. Then his eyes changed to fierce. "Home run" he whispered, defiance in his voice, and it was.
They walked back, and on the way, SB saw something strange in the woods, through the sunset.
He pushed his way through the brush, while Jeff pulled at him. "Come on," he kept saying, but SB shrugged him off.
SB saw, bent in the woods, crumpled metal. It was not like a car. It had a shape he had never really seen before. Light shone from it but it was just sunset, he told himself, standing in the small clearing which looked blackened as if by fire.
"Let's go," said Jeff, pulling at him, but when SB looked over at him his eyes were changed, so deep and sad, like when his mom said she was tied down, like when his dad said I'm a slave to the goddamned GE plant before piercing another beer.
SB stood for a moment looking at Jeff, at his queer face, so like his father's which SB remembered perfectly. Jeff looked at him helplessly, his eyes filled with tears which overflowed. "Like cards," he said then, over and over and over, and ran to hug the metal. "Can't win."
SB left him there, running through the woods for his Huffy.
But he was back the next day, and they didn't talk about it. They just played cards.
SB didn't tell his parents about Jeff but his dad followed him one day without him knowing it. He burst in on them playing cards, just stomped up the rickety stairs and said "What the hell! I might have known!"
SB was surprised when Jeff was added to his class at school when it opened a few weeks later. His mother told him that the social worker had found Jeff a home with the witch woman. She had the perfectly normal name of Mrs. Johnson, and that was now the last name Jeff answered to at roll call. He was surprised again when Jeff did so well at school that they pushed him forward into another grade the next week. They had different recesses, so SB hardly had a chance to talk with Jeff, or see how he liked it, or tell him that he was sorry, and then his mom and dad moved to a new house in a place SB hated. His mom told SB that they'd been talking about it for months, ever since his dad was promoted, but SB didn't even know about the promotion, whatever that was, much less talk about moving. The new neighborhood had no creek and it had no woods and it had no ballfield, no alley, no Jeff, just endless houses so identical that at first he had to count streets to find his way home, and no trees at all. It had another bunch of kids who were even more dull than the first bunch he had known, so that all SB did was read and play solitaire and after that his mom gave up on making him play outside. Even she understood that it was dull when none of the streets held mystery, he thought, then realized much later that she had given up on mystery a lot earlier than he ever could have, and was not quite sure why. He only knew that it was not his father's fault, as she always claimed.
He never told anyone that he didn't think that Jeff was the kid's real name. One day at the beginning he had found an old shredded comic book fluttering on the road by the creek. He stopped and tossed it in his basket. When he was reading it after dinner the first balloon he read started "Jeff," and Jeff kind of glowed at him for a minute, and then he realized that it was colored, like with a yellow crayon. He remembered that, later.
And he never told anyone either that he thought that little Jeff was the same person as the large man he thought of as Jeff's father, made small so that he could have somebody to play with. Somebody to learn from. Someone to hold to, in the infinite reaches of space, on this small sphere, the smallness of which SB became increasingly aware the more he knew, which, eventually, was quite a bit.
SB grew up to win a scholarship first at OU and then at Cal Tech, in math. But it was about ten years later when he came across a paper that excited him greatly.
The author was a physicist who worked for a private French company that made a business of launching things into space.
He was describing, mathematically, a solitaire game. With growing excitement, SB thought ahead as if each new set of inferences was a new card dealt, understanding the absolute crystal rigor of the man's thoughts, the yearning perfection of the barely possible outcome. The author was linking the possibility of other intelligent beings existing, somewhere, with the possibility of developing, on Earth, the means of going there. Too many variables, really. SB--now Norm---knew the author's name before he read it.
He was also not surprised when he read later that one of the launches of the French company had left the solar system, headed, they thought, for Tau Ceti. It took a lot more digging to discover what few people knew, that it had been manned.
Godspeed, thought SB, the night he found that out, beneath brilliant stars, breathing chill air in his backyard, his kids asleep upstairs, his wife's reading light illuminating their bedroom, as he stared into space and thought ahead to possible outcomes.
He had not felt this way since he was a kid, since the day he had seen the twisted metal shape in the woods by Mill Creek, since the day he had heard the whispered pain in his new companion's voice. The day surfaced suddenly, forgotten, or pushed aside, for all the
se years.
"Like cards," he heard again. "Can't win," and saw his friend's eyes overflow with tears.
He opened his mouth and did not know what to say. He was reminded of how Jeff had known the plays of that ball game. But there was no one around to hear him.
Nevertheless he spoke, as if stars pulled it from him with the power of some previously unknown velocity.
"Win," he whispered.
[end]
Angels and You Dogs, by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Lulu was the fifth person to answer the ad, and frankly, I was tired.
I saw her through the frosted glass bricks Charles and I had paid a good sum to have installed, sure that it would make our retro-Florida dream even more perfect. Come to think of it, I suppose it was just me who believed that.
Because of the wavy glass, I was not sure what the brown thing she held close to her ribcage might be. She rang the bell imperiously even though she could have seen me, albeit with a rippled effect, coming to answer the door.
"You're Evan?" Her eyes were black, as was her long hair, looped in complicated ringlets held in place by all manner of clips and doodads rendered in primary colors. A strong scent of musky perfume wafted toward me on the breeze tickling the fronds of the rare, thickly spined burglar palms Charles and I had found with much difficulty. She wore a terrific outfit whose thrift-store origins I recognized. Vintage Ray-Bans dangled from a bejeweled noodle, and she wore bright red, open-toed shoes definitely born in the forties. Her black leather skirt was short. Her tight white silk shirt had a high oxford collar and showed lots of cleavage.
She looked like trouble to me, but not for the usual reasons. I appreciated her glorious seductiveness from an aesthetic distance, as a kindred soul. From the time I was thirteen, when I realized I was gay, I had often been told that I was quite attractive myself, although I certainly didn't believe it at the moment. My partner, Charles, had left me two months earlier, and during that time I had become deeply committed to feeling sorry for myself. I saw myself as an inexplicably betrayed, somewhat defeated accountant working out of—and paying ridiculous interest rates for—a Fort Lauderdale Hall of Broken Dreams. Lulu, with her self-assured brilliance, looked as if she might be impatient with the gloom, to which I had become as closely attached as a toddler to his blanket.
Without waiting for an answer, she deposited her squirming Chihuahua on the polished terrazzo floor. It sprang into the house, toenails clicking as it ran straight toward a rattan ottoman, and lifted its leg.
"No!" I said with the extreme sharpness one uses on dogs, children, and presumably horses, if immediate compliance is required. He twisted his tiny, Crazy-Ike head, looked at me with brief astonishment, abandoned his plan, and skittered into the dining room, no doubt to find a place to urinate which was free from the unexpected Voice of God.
"No pets," I said. "It's in the ad."
"Ambrose isn't a pet, honey. He's family." Her Southern accent, when I expected sharp, Cuban-provenanced tones, was startling. I think it gave her the advantage in any situations, and she did not hesitate to employ this weapon whenever remotely necessary … which, given her propensity for living on some edge I have yet to glimpse in its entirety, was more or less always.
She brushed past me, head high, taking in the Floridian ambiance we had so carefully built up over four years. I was still in shock over the fact that Charles now lived with a man thirty years older than he on the fortieth floor of a gleaming modern condominium tower in Key Biscayne where gigantic stone lions poised on high pedestals over the most obscene and bizarre of the six swimming pools, looking hungry for human flesh. It was the kind of place we had always made fun of.
We'd bought this house just before a wave of tear-down fever receded after briefly washing over a few blessed houses on the next street. Charles had suddenly decided it would never return, and we had hurriedly divvied up the property. In the final accounting, he owed me a good chunk of change, which he'd paid. I realize now that I wanted to rent his half of the house quickly, to fill up the empty space with a stranger with whom I would not get emotionally involved. Back then I thought I was just worried about my dwindling savings. Charles's payment barely covered the second mortgage we had taken out for improvements.
"Do you smoke?" she asked, looking around.
"Occasionally." More than occasionally for the past month, but I would cut back. Soon. "Cigars."
"I can't stand smoke."
"I can't stand dogs."
"Fiestaware!" She stood entranced before our—my—china cabinet, which held one of the most complete collections of Fiestaware in South Florida. There were a few gaps, pieces which eluded the most dedicated collector, but it was magnificent, and had created the most bitterness when Charles left, because we had created it together, scouring countless yard sales, swap meets, thrift stores, and the Internet.
Looking back, I think this was the point where I forgave the existence of Ambrose, whose name and function were much more mysterious than I could have possibly imagined.
Three of the people I had interviewed couldn't speak English and seemed affronted that I had neglected to master the local language, one was most certainly a drug dealer, and the fifth was an astonishingly thin powerhouse of fifty who insisted that she be allowed to work on an ongoing collection of mailboxes thinly disguised as flamingoes, manatees, and palm trees in the living room. She had a thriving business at the Swap Meet. I was on the verge of going with her, just to get it over with, although the idea of opening the exaggeratedly stretched metal mouth of a grouper or yanking open a hole in a manatee's chest always struck me as unpleasantly exploitative and grotesque. Lulu gave me the happy power to reject this particular future simply on the grounds that having a living room of such creatures might prove a waking nightmare.
Lulu clasped her hands behind her back. "Honey. Where in the world did you find those tumblers? I've only seen pictures of them, and the seller wanted a hundred bucks apiece."
The French doors were open onto the patio, and Ambrose dashed outside. Lulu ran after him with stunning quickness, considering her shoes. She scooped up the dog and donned her Ray-Bans in one economically swift movement. "We'll need a ramp at this dock for Ambrose to get out of the canal when he goes for his … little swims." If her voice caught slightly at this point, I put it down to dust in her throat.
"Maybe he should just wear a life jacket. Look out. Don't step back."
She whirled around. "What is this?" She stared into a gaping excavation gnawed from coral rock, which she had apparently not noticed in her haste to rescue Ambrose.
"A lap pool." I lacked funds, as well as interest, right now, to take it to the next stage. I was going to mention the just-completed hot tub, tucked into the corner of the yard inside a bougainvillea-wrapped gazebo, but she held up her hand when I opened my mouth.
"You will definitely have to cover this up. Ambrose could be seriously injured if he fell in here. As could a member of the general public. A Fed-Ex delivery person or something. A child—a small, vulnerable, adorable child who would thereafter require lifetime custodial care. This hole in the ground is purely amonster suit waiting to happen."
"Maybe it would be a good place to keep the dog."
"Yes," she said, gazing around. "Thank you, I forgot. We will have to have a fence. We'll have to sink it into the ground so he can't dig underneath. Don't you have a little outdoor table? It would be so darling. Dining al fresco. Coffee and beignets in the cool of the morning. I found a really good beignet mix." Her smile was predictably dazzling—even white teeth, red lipstick, crinkled-up eyes above a long, straight nose. She reached out, inclined her head to gaze at me over the top of her Ray-Bans, and gave my forearm a slight, intimate touch. "Don't bother yourself, though, sweetie. I'll look for one at the yard sales this very Saturday."
· · · · ·
Lulu was a law student at Atlantic University. I had her father come up from Miami, since he would be paying Lulu's rent. I suppose
d he was good for it; he was a physician and ran a well-advertised liposuction and laser clinic in Coral Gables which I imagined had a long waiting list of congenitally displeased women, not to mention the huge supply of youth-seeking men who needed all those services. Charles's new lover, for instance, who was so old that he could probably stand to have the deep, sun-etched wrinkles he most certainly had accumulated dermabrased. I had never seen him, because Charles, apparently, kept us carefully apart while closing his new deal, but I couldn't help but imagine him being at the clinic and one or another of the expensive procedures getting out of control. What a damned shame that would be.
Lulu's two young teenaged half-sisters accompanied their father, thin as wands, straight dark hair parted down the middle, tight shirts not meeting their tight pants so as to display the gold rings in their navels. They did not remove their tiny headphones the entire time they were there, though they checked the message screen of their cellphones often enough for the gestures to qualify as tics and were completely unimpressed by the soaking tub in Lulu's bathroom, which I was beginning to wish I had taken for myself.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 199