He held onto Rachel tightly, whispering endearments, saying, ‘Baby, it’ll be okay in a minute, just lie back, just take it easy,’ trying to reassure her, to help her through this part of things. He could tell the light was bothering her as well by the way she buried her face in the crook of his neck.
If this shit kept up, he thought, he was going to have to buy them both some sunglasses.
HUMAN HISTORY
Stories, I’m told by old Hay (who’s told enough of them to pass for an expert), must have a beginning and middle and end that taken altogether form a shape, a movement that pleases the mind of the listener. And so in order to give my chronicle of those weeks in Edgeville and the land beyond a proper shape, I must begin before the beginning, create a false beginning that will illuminate the events of later days. I’m not sure this is the most truthful way to go about things. Sometimes I think it would be best to jump right in, to leap backward and forward in chronology like an excited man telling his story for the first time; but since I’ve never written anything down before, I guess I’ll play it conservative and do as old Hay has advised.
This happened in the summer, then, when the apes and the tigers keep mostly to the high country, the snow peaks east of town, and strangers come from Windbroken, the next town north, and from even farther away, with goods for trade or maybe to settle, and it’s more or less safe to ride out onto the flats. Edgeville, you see, is tucked into a horseshoe canyon of adobe-coloured stone, its sides smoothly dimpled as if by the pressure of enormous thumbs; the houses and shops—shingle-roofed and painted white for the most part—are set close together toward the rear of the canyon, thinning out toward the mouth, where barricades of razor wire and trenches and various concealed traps are laid. Beyond the canyon the flats begin, a hardpan waste that appears to stretch into infinity, into a line of darkness that never lifts from the horizon. Out there live the Bad Men and the beasts, and on the other side…well, it’s said by some that the other side doesn’t exist.
I’d taken a little roan out onto the flats that morning to look for tiger bones, which I use for carving. I rode east toward the mountains, keeping close to the cliffs, and before I’d gone more than a couple of miles I began to hear a mechanical hooting. Curious, I followed the sound, and after another mile I caught sight of a red car with a bubble top parked at the base of a cliff. I’d seen a couple like it last time I was to market in Windbroken; some old boy had built them from plans he’d gotten from the Captains. They were the talk of the town, but I didn’t see much point to them—only place level enough to drive them was on the flats. Whoever was inside the car wore a golden helmet that sparkled in the sun. As I drew closer, I realized that the driver was pressing the middle of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, and that was causing the hooting noise. He kept it up even after I had pulled the roan to a halt beside the car, acting as if he didn’t notice me. I sat watching him for half a minute, and then shouted, ‘Hey!’ He glanced at me, but continued beating on the steering wheel. The sound was wicked loud and made the roan skittish.
‘Hey!’ I shouted again. ‘You don’t quit doin’ that, you gonna bring down the apes.’
That stopped him…for a moment. He turned to me and said, ‘You think I care ’bout apes? Shit!’ Then he went back to beating on the wheel.
The helmet had a funny metal grille across the front that halfway hid his face; what I could see of it was pinched, pale, and squinty-eyed, and his body—he was wearing a red coverall that matched the car’s paint—appeared to be starved-thin. ‘You may not care ’bout ’em,’ I said. ‘But you keep up with that nonsense, they gonna start droppin’ rocks down on you. Apes like their peace and quiet.’
He stopped making his racket and stared at me defiantly. ‘Ain’t gonna happen,’ he said. ‘I’m a man of destiny. My future is a thing assured.’
‘Yeah?’ I said with a laugh. ‘And how’s that?’
He popped open the bubble top and clambered out. The roan backed off a few paces. ‘I’m gonna cross the flats,’ he said, puffing up his chest and swaggering in place: you might have thought he was ten feet tall instead of the puny piece of work he was.
‘That right?’ I said, gazin’ west toward nothing, toward that empty land and dark horizon. ‘Got any last requests? Messages to your kinfolks?’
‘I ’spect you heard that before,’ he said. ‘You probably get lots out here tryin’ to make a crossin’.’
‘Nope, never met anybody else that much of a damn fool.’
‘Well, you never met nobody with a map, neither.’ He reached into the car, pulled out some bedraggled-looking papers and shook them at me, causing the roan to snort and prance sideways. He glanced from side to side as if expecting eavesdroppers and said, ‘This world ain’t nothing like you think it is…not a’tall. I found these here maps up north, and believe you me, they’re a revelation!’
‘What you gonna do with the Bad Men? Hit ’em over the head with them papers?’ I got the roan under control and slipped off him; I must have stood a head taller than the driver, even with his helmet.
‘They’ll never spot me. I’m goin’ where they ain’t got the balls to go.’
There was no point in arguing with a lunatic, so I changed the subject. ‘You ain’t gonna have a chance to hide out from the Bad Men, you don’t quit hootin’ at the apes. What for you doin’ that, anyway?’
‘Just gearin’ up,’ he said. ‘Gettin’ up my energy.’
‘Well, I’d do it out away from the cliff if I was you.’
He glanced up at the clifftop. ‘I ain’t never seen them apes. What’re they like?’
‘They got white fur and blue eyes…least most of ’em. ’Bout the size of a man, but skinnier. And ’bout as smart, too.’
‘Now I don’t believe that,’ he said. ‘Not one lick.’
‘I didn’t neither.’ I said. ‘But I know someone who went up amongst ’em, and after he come back, well, I believed it then.’
He looked at me expectantly. I hadn’t been meaning to get into it, but seeing that I had nothing pressing, I told him a little about Wall.
‘The man was huge,’ I said. ‘I mean I never seen anybody close to that big. He musta stood close to seven feet…and he wasn’t just tall. He was big all over. Chest like a barrel, thighs like a bull. Man, even his fingers were big. Bigger’n most men’s dinguses, if you know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.’
The driver chuckled.
‘One peculiar thing. He had this real soft voice. Almost like a woman’s voice, just deeper. And that just accentuated his ugliness. Shit, I seen apes better lookin’! He had these big tufted eyebrows that met up with his hairline. Hair all over him. He come from one of them ruined cities up to the north. A hard place, the way he told it. Lotta Bad Men. Cannibalism. Stuff like that. But he wasn’t no savage, he was all right. Didn’t say much, though. I figger he liked the apes ’bout as good as he did us.’
‘He went and lived with ’em, did he?’
‘Not “lived”,’ I said. ‘Not exactly. Kinda hung around ’em, more like. He was helpin’ us, y’see. The apes they steal our babies, and he thought he might be able to get ’em back.’
‘And did he?’
The roan grunted and nuzzled the driver’s chest; he swatted its nose.
‘He said we wouldn’t want ’em back, the way they was. But he told us a lot ’bout how the apes live. Said they had this cave where they…’ I broke off, trying to remember how Wall had described it. The wind blew lonely cold notes in the hollows of the cliff; the sky seemed the visual counterpart of that music: a high mackerel sky with a pale white sun. ‘They’d taken the skulls of the people they’d killed, busted ’em up and stuck ’em on the walls of this cave. Stuck ’em flat, y’know, like flattened skull faces all over the walls and ceiling. Painted ’em all over with weird designs. Our babies, our kids, were livin’ in the cave, and the apes, they’d go into the cave and fuck ’em. Girls, boys. Didn’t make no difference. They’d ju
st do ’em.’
‘Damn,’ said the driver, sympathizing.
‘Now don’t that sound like they smart like men?’ I said. ‘Don’t it?’
‘Guess it does at that,’ he said after a bit. ‘Damn.’
‘You don’t wanna mess with them apes,’ I told him. ‘I was you, I’d be movin’ my car.’
‘Well, I reckon I will,’ he said.
There was nothing more I could do for him. I mounted up, swinging the roan’s head so he faced toward the dark end of everything.
‘What you doin’ out here?’ asked the driver.
‘Just huntin’ for tiger bones,’ I said. ‘I carve shit from ’em.’
‘Huh,’ he said as if this were a great intelligence. Now that he saw I was making to leave, he didn’t want to let me go. I could tell he was scared.
‘You don’t think I’m gonna make it, do ya?’ he said.
I didn’t want to hex him but I couldn’t lie. ‘Not hardly. It’s a long way to forever.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I got maps, I got secret knowledge.’
‘Then maybe you’ll be all right.’ I wheeled the roan around and waved to him. ‘Luck to you!’
‘Don’t need it!’ he cried as I started away. ‘I got more heart than that horse of yours, I got…’
‘Take it anyway!’ I shouted, and spurred the roan westward.
How did it happen, this world? Our ancestors decided they didn’t care to know, so they told the Captains to take that knowledge from them. Maybe I would have done the same if I was them, but sometimes I regretted their decision. What I did know happened was that one day the Captains came down from the orbital stations and waked the survivors of a great disaster, brought them forth from the caves where they were sleeping, and told them the truth about the world. The Captains offered our ancestors a choice. Said they could live up on the stations or on the earth. A bunch of our ancestors flew to the stations to take a look-see: it must have been pretty bad, because not a one wanted to emigrate. The Captains weren’t surprised; they didn’t think all that highly of themselves or of their life, and our ancestors got the notion that maybe the Captains felt responsible for what had happened to the world. But no matter whether or not they were responsible, the Captains were a big help. They asked our ancestors if they wanted to remember what had happened or if they wanted to forget; they had machines, they said, that could erase memory. Our ancestors apparently couldn’t live with the idea of all that death behind them, maybe because it was too close to deal with easily, and so they chose to forget. And they also chose further to reject many of the old world’s advantages, which is why we have rifles and horses and hydroponics and no more…except for our hobbies (like the man in the gold helmet with his bubble car) and the hospitals. The hospital in Edgeville was a long silver windowless building where we went to get injections and also where we talked to the Captains. We’d punch a black stud on a silver panel and their images would fade in on a screen. It was almost never the same Captain, but they looked a lot alike and they wouldn’t say their names. Ask them, and they merely said, ‘I am the Captain of the Southern Watch.’ They have these lean pale faces and wet-looking purplish eyes, and they are every one skinny and nervous and not very tall. The apes and the tigers? My guess is that there were animals in the sleeping caves, too. Our ancestors could have had the Captains do away with them; but maybe it was decided that enemies were needed to keep us strong. I used to hate our ancestors for that, though I suppose I understood it. They wanted a challenging life, one that would make us hardy and self-sufficient, and they got that sure enough. Gazing out from the Edge into that rotten darkness at the end of the flats, you had the idea you were looking back into that gulf of time between now and the destruction of the old world, and you’d get sick inside with the feelings that arose. That alone was almost too much to bear. And on top of that the Bad Men burned our houses and stole our women. The apes defiled our children, and the tigers haunted us with their beauty…Could be that was the worst thing of all.
How did this world happen?
That’s the whole of what I used to know about human history, and even now I don’t know a whole lot more. It wasn’t enough to make a clear picture, but for seven hundred years it was all the knowing most of us wanted.
I woke one morning to the smell of snow in the air. Snow meant danger. Snow meant apes and maybe tigers. The apes used the snow for cover to infiltrate the town, and sometimes it was all we could do to beat them off. I rolled over. Kiri was still asleep, her black hair fanned out over the pillow. Moonlight streamed through the window beside her, erasing the worry lines from her brow, the faint crow’s-feet from around her eyes, and she looked eighteen again. Visible on her bared shoulder was the tattoo of a raven, the mark of a duellist. Her features were sharp, but so finely made their sharpness didn’t lessen her beauty: like a hawk become a woman.
I was tempted to wake her, to love her. But if it was going to be a big snow, soon she’d be up in the high passes, sniping at the apes filtering down, and she’d be needing all the sleep she could get. So I eased out of bed and pulled on my flannel shirt and denims, my leather jacket, and I tiptoed into the front room. The door to Bradley’s room was open, his bed empty, but I didn’t worry much. Here in Edgeville we don’t baby our kids. We let them run and learn the world their own way. What little worry I did feel was over the fact that Bradley had lately been running with Clay Fornoff. There wasn’t much doubt in anybody’s mind that Clay would wind up a Bad Man, and I just hoped Bradley would have better sense than to follow him the whole route.
I cracked the front door, took a lungful of chill air and stepped out. Our house was at the back of the canyon, and the moonlight was so strong that I could see the shapes of separate shingles on the hundreds of roofs packed together on the slope below. I could see the ruts in the dirt streets brimful of shadow, the fleeting shapes of dogs, blazes of moonlight reflected from a thousand windows, and at the centre of it all, the silver rectangle of the hospital. Leafless trees stood sentinel on the corners, and darkness looked to be welling through the mouth of the canyon from the flats. If I strained my eyes, I thought, I might see eight thousand souls shining in their little frame shacks.
I walked at a brisk pace down through the town. The shadows were sharp, dead-black, and the stars glittered like points of ice. My boots made husking noises on the frozen dirt, and my breath steamed, turning into ice chips on my beard. From the sty in back of Fornoff’s store I could hear the muffled grunt of some pig having a dream.
Fornoff’s was a lantern-lit barnlike place, with sacks of meal and garden tools stored up in the rafters, the walls ranged by shelves stocked with every kind of foodstuff, most of it dried or preserved. Brooms, bolts of cloth, small tools, and just about everything else were stacked in corners or heaped in bins, and in the back was a cold box where Fornoff kept his meat. A group of men and women were sitting on nail kegs around the pot-bellied stove, drinking coffee and talking in low voices; they glanced up and gave a wave when I entered. Dust adrift in the orange light glowed like pollen. The fat black stove snapped and crackled. I wrangled up another keg and joined them.
‘Where’s Kiri at?’ asked Marvin Blank, a tall, lean man with a horsy face that struck a bargain between ugly and distinctive; he had a sticking plaster on his chin to cover a shaving nick.
‘Sleepin’,’ I told him, and he said that was fine, he’d pick her a mount and fetch her when it came time.
The others went back to their planning. They were Cane Reynolds, Dingy Grossman, Martha Alardyce, Hart Menckyn, and Fornoff. All in their early to mid-thirties, except for Fornoff, who was beer-bellied and vast and wrinkled, with a bushy grey beard bibbing his chest. Then Callie Dressier came in from the back with a tray of hot rolls. Callie was about twenty-five, twenty-six, with a feline cleverness to her features. She had a deep tan, blackberry eyes, chestnut hair to her shoulders, and a nice figure. You could see her nipples poking up her wool shi
rt, and her denims couldn’t have been any tighter. She was a widow, just moved to town from Windbroken, and was helping out at the store. According to Fornoff’s wife, the reason she’d moved was to kick up her heels. Windbroken is fairly strait-laced compared to Edgeville. Among the population of Windbroken we had the deserved reputation of not being too concerned over who was sleeping with whom…maybe because having to deal with the apes and the tigers gave us a less hidebound perspective on the importance of fidelity. Anyway, I was made both pleased and nervous by Callie’s presence. Kiri didn’t mind if I got it wet away from home once in a while, but I knew how she’d react if I ever got involved with anyone, and Callie was a temptation in that regard: she had in her both wildness and innocence, a mixture that has always troubled my heart. And so when old Fornoff announced that he was assigning me and Callie to guard the front of the store, I was of two minds about it. Not that the assignment didn’t make sense. What with Callie being new, me not being much with a rifle, and the store being hard to get at, it was probably the best place for us. Callie smiled coyly and contrived to nudge my shoulder with her breast as she handed me a roll.
I’d been intending to go back and wake Kiri myself, but the snow began falling sooner than I’d expected. Marvin Blank heaved up from his keg, said he was going to fetch her and stumped out. The others followed suit, and so it was that at first light, with snow whirling around us, I found myself sitting hip-to-hip with Callie in the recessed doorway, blankets over our knees and rifles at the ready. The sky greyed, the snow came in big flakes like bits of ragged, dirty wool, and the wind sent it spinning in every direction, howling, shaping mournful words from the eaves and gutters. All I could see of the houses across the street were intimations of walls and dark roofpeaks. It was going to be a bad one, and I didn’t try to avoid Callie when she nestled close, wanting all the creature comforts I could get.
We talked a little that first hour, mostly just things such as ‘You got enough blanket?’ and ‘Want some more coffee?’ Every so often we heard gunfire over the wind. Then, just when I was starting to think that nothing much was going to happen, I heard glass breaking from the side of the store. I came to my feet and told Callie to stay put.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 12