by Robert Reed
Beth lived on the opposite side of the parkland, on the high hillside west of the thick woods. Her house personal said, “A minute, please,” with its silky Indian accent. We waited and Beth opened the front door with a rush of scrubbed warm air. She was wearing a filter mask, like always. The mask trapped dust and microbes. She said, “Oh, I can’t. No.” I knew by her face and posture that one of her folks wasn’t well tonight. I said, “That’s too bad.”
She said nothing.
I could smell the air pouring through the opened door. There was a faint stink of medicines and soaps, and I caught a glimpse of the silvery shower built into the hallway. Beth was wearing a bright robe. She’d have to clean herself before returning to them.
“We’re going to catch it,” Marshall declared. “You wait.”
Beth heard something and turned. “Just a minute,” she called, the filter mask muffling her voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Marshall said, “We’re going to build a trap.” He seemed too eager, I thought. Something was wrong. He said, “See? We’ve got our bait.” A little striped rat sat on its haunches inside a wire cage, the cage strapped to the bike’s rack. Marshall was wearing a backpack full of collapsing shovels and ropes, flashlights and an enormous net. The trap was Marshall’s. He had designed it on his own personal, running simulations that tested a thousand factors. The speed and strength of the dragon, for instance. The ideal drop height for the net, and so on. “It’ll be simple, once we get everything just so.”
She glanced backwards again. She had heard someone—
“How are things?” I asked.
She said, “Okay,” and for an instant I saw someone in the hallway—her father or mother, I couldn’t tell which—and then I blinked and the figure was gone. The medicine smell got thicker. It was sweet and halfway intoxicating, and I could practically taste it in the air.
Beth said, “You poor thing,” to the rat. She slipped outside and closed the front door, asking, “Are you the bait?”
The rat stood against one wire wall. Beth placed a finger against its pink nose, and it took a cautious sniff.
“The dragon won’t eat it,” Marshall promised.
I saw motion in one window, then nothing.
Beth straightened and said, “They’ve got fevers,” meaning her folks. She would never complain about their illnesses or the time she had to spend with them, missing school or time with us. “Little fevers,” she added, “but I should stay here. Okay?”
I said, “You’d better stay.”
“We’ll have the dragon in this cage,” Marshall told Beth. “Next time you see us—”
“Take care, you three.” She shut the front door, its seals fastening, and I heard the shower running and Marshall coaxing me to hurry up. It was getting dark, he warned. We needed to set up.
I got on my bike and followed him, riding south and then east again. We approached the almost-pond by way of the paved street, dismounting again and pushing the bikes along the widest trail. Evening was drawing up around us. I looked and noticed how the weeds had grown since yesterday. I said so. Marshall said, “Sure. It rained buckets last night,” and I touched one of the juicy stalks, remembering it and saying, “An inch, some of them. Nearly an inch of growing.”
“Ryder? Would you hurry?” Marshall made an exasperated sound. He had no patience tonight. “Would you come on?”
The almost-pond was black in the long shadows. I looked across its smooth face and saw feral bambis, spotted and long-limbed, plus a family of little feral pigs—pets gone wild, or wild animals descended from lost pets. And there were all the usual nervous birds too. Marshall saw none of them. He was thinking hard and moving fast, his legs crunching the weeds and tiny brown bugs flying in all directions. Once someone shouted, “Howie!” and I turned, seeing kids up on the pasture. Strange kids. I could just see their faces, and I didn’t know their voices. Maybe I’d seen them around town, sure, but that kind of remembering took time and hard concentration. What I knew was that they weren’t locals, and weren’t we getting a lot of outsiders lately? It was the TV business. Cody said so and Marshall had agreed. These kids had seen the biggest, fastest dragon released here…and so they came here to hunt. They wanted our dragon. They knew it was the very best one.
Farther up the bottoms were other springs and smaller stone basins filled with the dark spring water. Our trail passed close to a basin, and we spooked a midget pony as it drank. It was dark and shaggy, maybe twenty inches at the shoulder, and it shot away without any sound, between the trees and gone.
Marshall said, “Here…maybe.”
We left our bikes standing and studied the basin. It was a modest round thing filled with tar-colored water. The ground around the stones was covered with tracks and little piles of shit. I found a clean spot and kneeled, Marshall circling the basin and me watching him. He was so very tall and clumsy, his face like a little boy’s face. Sometimes he boasted that he wouldn’t have chest hair or a beard. He wouldn’t need to shave, not ever, and he would always keep his scalp hair. His folks had promised him so.
Marshall was going to live to be one hundred and twenty years old.
His folks had promised him that too.
They told him he had winning looks and platinum brains, and they were forever assuring him that people were jealous of his skills. That’s what he’d heard since before he could understand words. That’s where he got his hothouse pride and the little boy’s temperament, and to be Marshall’s friend meant giving him a whole lot of maneuvering room.
“There’s no place to hang the net,” he decided. “Damn.”
“Too bad.” I felt the stones under my knees and smelled the dried shit, but the strongest odor was the black spring water itself. It was seeping through ducts in the earth, rising from the special cleansing sands. Several yards below us, night and day, every kind of sewage was torn apart and built over again. Heavy metals were removed; poisons were denatured; and the leftovers were water and amino acids, sugars and tailored bacteria—an edible concoction. The water itself smelled like a cool, thin soup. The feral pigs and bambis and such drank it for food; otherwise they would starve come winter. I recalled a day when Cody, on a dare, had filled a bucket with this very water and pulled it up into the oak and boiled it hard for a long while. Then she put it into a flask inside a freezer, and when she poured an icy glass she smiled and drank half of it, saying it wasn’t so bad. Not really. Not if you tasted around the turds and the dead bugs, she said. And if you ignored the grit on your teeth.
Marshall had dared her to drink it.
Cody had done it. Then she said, “Your turn,” with her blackened lips, and she chased Marshall around the big room. She played with him. She cornered him and pulled him to his knees, jerking back his head and dribbling in just a few black drops. And he got ill. He moaned and rose and stuck his head out a window, throwing up on the branches and weeds below; and Beth said, “Now there,” and knew just what to do. Of course. She put a damp rag to his face and sang a little song to calm his nerves, mopping up the worst of the mess. He had had no color, and he was wobbly weak. Cody said, “You worry me sometimes,” but she didn’t push him anymore. She knew when to quit. I remembered her shaking her head and asking if he was all right. “Are you? Huh? Are you sure?”
“Let’s go, Ryder,” Marshall told me. He was shaking me.
I blinked and found myself kneeling beside the stone basin. I stood and Marshall said, “I know the place. The perfect place.” We pushed our bikes north. “I’m glad you’re along, Ryder. You’ll stick with me. I know you will.” He paused, then he said, “You’ll see me catch it and be my witness and tell everyone everything later. Won’t you?”
“I’ll try.”
He pushed his bike with urgency. He was thinking hard about some important thing, I sensed. Not just the dragon, no. I stayed close to him, watching the poor rat bouncing in its cage. I saw the rat’s pale eyes and its stripes, and for a moment I imagin
ed myself in such a cage, frightened, countless strange shapes and stinks rushing past me. I seemed to know exactly how it would feel—
Marshall was my first best friend.
He lived up the street from me, on the crest of a hill, his house made from old-fashioned bricks with old-fashioned rectangular windows. It was a big, fancy house, huge and sturdy, and Marshall’s room alone was larger than any room in my house. Deep shelves covered two walls, and there were two enormous closets. He had toys that danced and toys that flew and toys that spoke like prime ministers. Plus he had his own fancy personal. One day my folks explained wealth to me. Marshall’s folks had wealth, they said, and I realized we were poor in some fashion. Never mention Marshall’s good fortune, they warned. Not to anyone ever. Money was one of those things not given out fairly or often enough, they told me. “And be sure to be a gentleman too. Maybe he’ll invite you back again. If you’re good. Okay?”
We played in Marshall’s room, sometimes for hours. I admired my new friend. We were seven years old, and he would look straight at me and say, “I’m this smart,” and give me numbers. “Those are my quotient numbers. Aren’t they huge?”
They sounded enormous, yes.
“That’s why I’m always beating you at games. Just like I beat everyone.” He knew himself. I didn’t know myself half so well, and I felt sad. I felt particularly sad when we went to his kitchen for drinks, and back in a special corner were drawn lines on top of lines. The lines showed how tall Marshall would be every year. When he was eight, then nine, and so on. His father had drawn the lines and dated them. “See? See?” It was like watching Marshall growing before my eyes, fast and then faster, and I had to climb a stool just to read the tallest dates. He would be a giant when he was twenty years old.
“So how tall will you become?” he wondered.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t even guess.
“What are your quotient numbers? Do you know?”
Not one of them. Nobody had mentioned them, and I was afraid to ask.
“I’ve got a scientist’s brain,” Marshall informed me one day. “And do you know what? I’m going to work for Dr. Florida someday. I’m going to become one of his top researchers.”
Nothing could be more wonderful than working for Dr. Florida. I blinked and looked at Marshall, then sighed. He would grow tall like Dr. Florida. Tallness was somehow vital, I decided. But when I asked my folks about my future height, they said, “You’ll be a good solid average. Not too much or too little.”
“When I work for Dr. Florida,” Marshall explained, “I’ll invent all sorts of neat things.” He grinned and said, “Huge things that’ll do what I tell them. You know?” He nodded and then asked me, “What would you build, Ryder? If you could.”
I thought of the mythical winged horse—
“You can’t,” he told me. “A horse is wrong for wings. It’s just too big to get off the ground,” and he shook his head. “Unless you made it real tiny. Like maybe this big,” and he held up his hands, showing me something the size of a rabbit. “
But that’s no horse,” I protested. “Horses are big. Huge.”
“I could make a horse any size. If I wanted,” he told me. “Even this small.” He squeezed two fingers together.
“But that’s no real horse.”
“It could be.”
“It isn’t!”
“It is too!”
I breathed and remembered my folks’ warning. If I wanted to be invited again I had to be good now. So I said, “Okay. You’re right,” when Marshall was wrong.
“Good.” He was happy with himself. “Let’s go play some more. I’ve got a new game. You want to learn it?”
“Okay.”
I envied Marshall. Everything seemed so clear to him. His life was something built, and he would grow to fill that life without having to try. I wished for that kind of purposeful ease. I wanted something solid, some scheme where I might fit even halfway. All my folks would say about the future was that they didn’t know, no one understood such things, and I should stick to my studies and do the best I could do. But what was my best? I didn’t even know my numbers…so how could I tell?
Marshall and I had the same classes in those days. We did different units, yes, but we always ate lunch together and stayed close to one another in recess. Our playground was huge and square and covered with a giant colored tent. The tent walls were rolled up in warm weather and made transparent in the winter, the sunlight baking the graveled ground. The games of dodgeball and kickball and baseball never seemed to quit, classes coming outside to replace those that were finished playing, the balls always flying and the kids always screaming and the scores huge and muddled by the end of the day.
We weren’t good at sports. I had trouble watching what mattered, and Marshall lacked speed and coordination.
“This is different than mind games,” he told me. He sounded proud and self-assured. “This stuff is nothing like anything we’ll do when we’re adults. You’ll see.”
Cody was in a different class. She had our teachers but at different times, and we wouldn’t see her every day. I didn’t know her as a friend, but I could recognize her strong looks from across the playground. She sprinted across the gravel with a surprising, effortless grace, on her toes, and she seemed quite ugly to me. Yet she had friends. More friends than either Marshall or me. Even older kids wanted her for their teams—her speed and strength were close to unique—and nobody got on her bad side. Not on purpose. She wouldn’t think twice about bruising someone, in warning, and there was even a story about Cody popping a teacher in an accidental, purposeful sort of way. The teacher had said something about her mothers, it seemed, and Cody never let that sort of thing slide past.
One day Marshall got on her bad side.
We were playing kickball. I was concentrating, trying hard to do the simple things well. The strawberry-colored ball sang when it was kicked, a boinging note and then more boings as it bounced. I chased the ball, but Marshall was closer and closing when Cody happened past. She grinned and kicked the ball home. It didn’t bounce; it flew. Marshall lost his temper and said something harsh and stupid, then he took a stupid swing at her face.
Cody tripped my friend, neat and simple.
Marshall climbed to his feet and charged again, saying, “Dyke,” once. She smacked him once, and he was down and crying. I reached him and he rose, wiping at the tears and telling me, “That dyke! We’re going to sure teach her a lesson, that dyke! Aren’t we? Come on, Ryder! Aren’t we?”
This was during winter.
The textbooks and adults always talked about our warm winters, but to me they seemed plenty cold. I knew it was the greenhouse gases that heated the air. People once burned oils and coals and those sort of poisons. Now we had solar cells on all our roofs—efficient and durable—and they sucked up energy without making poisons. There weren’t any power lines anymore. Big industries got their energy from orbiting panels, or from inside the earth itself. And everything gathered could be stored forever in the super-loop batteries. That’s what we had in our attic, and in both of our cars. Dr. Florida hadn’t invented the superloops himself, no, but he had helped make them cheap and tough and simple. He had one big company that did nothing but tinker with the things.
But, like I said, the winters felt cold to me. On that day there was a half foot of snow on the ground, damp and clean, and the two of us waded into it after school. We followed Cody as she walked home, Marshall telling me that we were going to pull off an ambush. “That fat dyke bitch isn’t that strong. You’ll see,” he said. “We get our chance and we pulverize her, okay? We’ll smack her hard. We’ll pulverize her!”
Only there was no place good enough for an ambush.
Marshall delayed and delayed, and then she was inside her house. We were standing on the plowed street, side by side, and Marshall said, “Go ring the bell, Ryder. Ask if she’ll come out and play.”
I said, “All right.”
Cody’s house was on the corner of the intersection. It was a soft yellow, nearly gold, with round windows and a tiny round porch. I thought it looked small and neat with its walks cleaned and dried. I rang the bell, and the house personal started talking to me, then quit, and one of Cody’s mothers was facing me. I blinked. All the things I’d heard about her mothers, and this one seemed so unremarkable in person. She was just a plain woman, not large and by no means strong. A bright smile emerged, and she asked, “Can I do something for you?”
“Can Cody come play?” I wondered. “For a little bit.”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ll ask,” and she vanished from view.
I turned and saw Marshall beside the street. He was kneeling, making snowballs. I breathed and turned to my left, my eyes focusing on the old white farmhouse where no one lived. The Wellses were in the future, and the house and its yard had this lonely, empty look about them. Then Cody said, “Yeah?” I turned again. She wasn’t wearing a coat or shoes, or even socks. She had four toes on each bare foot, and I had to stare at such a strange thing.
“What do you want?” she asked
I blinked and saw her hard face and curious eyes.
She saw Marshall and said, “Shitstick! What are you doing?”
Marshall came halfway up the walk. He carried two snowballs in each hand, and his coat pockets were bulging. With a little voice he said, “Apologize,” and one snowball fell, shattering with a soft, powdery sound. He breathed and blinked, terrified, and with the tiniest whisper said, “Tell me you’re sorry.”
Cody stepped down to the walk.
Marshall gasped and straightened. His hands were shaking. He said, “Ryder? Help me. Go on and hit her, go on.”
But I couldn’t find a reason. Instead I watched Cody bend and pull a handful of snow from the lawn, making a perfect snowball in an instant, with bare hands. Where Marshall’s efforts were lumpy and crumbling, hers had the solid milky look of pure ice. Panic spread on Marshall’s face. His hands refused to throw his snowballs. Cody winked and asked, “Are you watching?”