by Robert Reed
Cody giggled, and I did too. I knew she was joking. Then she asked, “So? What did you learn?”
“Well, I think I know her. Sort of. She’s in my literature class, and she’s new. Her name is Beth…Beth Something. Her folks are foreign. Asian. And she’s real quiet.”
I focused, trying to summon the girl’s face from hundreds—
“She’s younger than us,” said Marshall. “Good at literature and real good at music. But she misses a lot of time from class. A whole lot.”
“Why?” asked Cody.
“I don’t know,” Marshall admitted. “I don’t know her!”
“Do you remember her, Ryder?”
I found a suitable face, and Marshall said, “Yeah. That’s her,” when I described the shy pretty face. Afterwards I found myself fascinated. Intrigued. Maybe it was because Beth was pretty in odd ways. Maybe it was her singing. She seemed very much alone to me, and lonely, and I would remember her singing in the woods…something tired and sad in the notes. I began to watch her at school, on the sly, and I imagined all sorts of sadnesses in her heart. Compassion would well up inside me, often without warning. I felt she had to have great secrets that made her sad, and endless pains. Sometimes I would sit and recall tiny details about Beth—the angle of her gaze, the pursing of her lips, the dampness of her eyes—and I convinced myself that I knew her in some special, intimate way.
One day, on a blue November afternoon, Cody said, “You know that girl? Beth, was it?”
Marshall said, “What about her?”
“I got the poop from my moms. I know the story.” Cody looked at both of us, then she said, “It’s pretty crazy. You want to hear—?”
“Yes,” we said.
“Well,” she said, “okay. Listen.”
Beth’s folks were Indians, it seemed. The Indians. They’d come to the States after the civil war, and this was their second house. Or their third. Of course we knew about the war itself, Marshall fancying himself an expert on the subject—naming the enormous battles, the famous generals, and telling us with a matter-of-fact voice that more than one hundred million people died from all sorts of causes. Cody watched him for a minute, then she said, “Shut up.” She said, “I’m talking about the big prison camps. What do you know about them?”
Not much, Marshall conceded.
“So shut up!”
There were special camps for special prisoners. The prisoners were fed and clothed and treated with medicines, pampered in most senses, the enemy doctors wanting them healthy. Hospitals were built beside the camps, and when enemy soldiers were injured and in need of spare parts—tissues and organs, glands and living bone—matches were found and plucked from the prisoners. As required.
Those prison camps were quick and easy sources of living matter.
And if the doctors were smart, not taking too much too fast, those poor prisoners could be coaxed into regrowing what was stolen from them. With new medicines. With cloned tissues and such.
Cody explained the grisly business with a steady dry voice, something odd in her eyes. Then she stopped and breathed deeply and said, “That’s where her folks come from. Those camps.”
Marshall said, “No,” stretching out the word. “NNNooooo.”
“It’s true,” she maintained. “That’s why they never, never come outside. They’re scarred and sick, and I guess maybe crazy too. A little bit. Because of all the shitty things that happened.”
“What kinds of scars?” asked Marshall.
She blinked. “They got skinned alive. At least once. Maybe twice.” She paused, then she said, “The doctors made them grow new skin, only it’s not the same. I guess they’re all smooth and shiny and pale—”
Marshall said, “No!”
“It’s true.”
I remembered stories about these things. But they had happened a long way away, a long time ago, and nobody liked talking about them.
“You’re telling me what?” Marshall persisted. “Someone plucked out their guts too. Their kidneys and lungs—?”
“I don’t know what else,” Cody admitted. She narrowed her eyes and breathed. “I guess their bug-fighting systems are shot. The prison doctors had this way of harvesting antibodies. White cells. Those sorts of things.”
“That’s crazy,” declared Marshall. “Why would anyone do that stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they wanted skin and stuff, I don’t know…they could have just frozen them whole instead. It would have been simpler.”
“Freezing people whole?”
“Yeah!” said Marshall, forever practical.
“You don’t get it!” Cody told him. “Beth’s folks were from the other side! They were hated! So why kill them neat and clean? Huh?” She snorted and said, “You don’t understand, do you?”
Marshall shrugged.
“I give up,” she decided.
Then he said, “No, I understand,” with a stiff, lying voice.
Cody didn’t seem to hear him. We were sitting on a downed tree, Cody at the highest point, her thick legs dangling and her square face slack and calm.
“You know what we ought to do?” asked Marshall. “Do you?”
I was thinking about poor Beth. Now I knew her terrible secret, and it was worse than I could have imagined—a thousand times worse. I tried imagining my own folks being so sick and strange, and I couldn’t believe anyone might live under such a burden. Not for one day, I thought. Not me, surely. The girl must be an angel. Surely—
“We ought to scout trees for our new treehouse,” said Marshall. His face was bright and cheery. “Cody? Ryder? What do you say?”
Cody was thinking about Beth’s folks. She said, “No,” and lifted her hand into a beam of sunlight. Her meat turned pink on its fringes, and then she put her hand on her lap and said, “Let’s just sit awhile. Okay? For a little while.”
We had gone to the mansion and the surf room on a Saturday. Sunday morning saw more rain, steady and cold; but then the skies cleared after church and I changed clothes and ate and went down to the oak. Everyone was supposed to meet there. Cody was already working, hammering sheets of tough metal over the surface of the maze. Nobody with a saw was going to break their way inside. Not again. She was hanging in the air, ropes tied to her waist and to the beams of the roof, and she looked as brown as a nut against the shiny metal surfaces, her hair bleached and her hammer pounding with smooth, easy strokes. Bang-bang-Boom! Bang-bang-Boom!
I climbed into the big room and looked down at Cody.
She said, “Ryder! How was God today?”
“God was fine.”
“Great!” Bang-bang-boom-Boom! “Do me a favor? Ryder? Check the super-loops. Make sure their juices are up, okay?”
“All right.”
There was a tiny hatch in the center of the roof. I popped it open and climbed into the brilliant sunshine. There were no handrails or any substantial branches to hold, and I stood with my knees and back bent, feeling the gentle swaying of the far-below trunk. It was a frightening sensation, and fun.
The roof was built from weathered boards and rain-proofed with clear plastic sheets, and maybe half of it was covered with old-fashioned solar cells, their slick black faces soaking up the light and feeding the old super-loop batteries. Cody had pulled the super-loops from old cars. They were heavy and scattered so their weight didn’t buckle a beam. Newer batteries were built from organics, nothing else. Nowadays they were grown in vats, just like people grew steaks and human hearts. They could hold enormous amounts of energy too, almost forever, and they weren’t touchy to abuse. Not like our super-loops were touchy. Not at all.
Rain and lightning could make ours fail. I kneeled over each of them, peering at gauges, every needle well into the green zone. The wind gusted one time and pulled my shirt up my sweating back. I pulled it down and sat while my heart pounded, waiting for the wind to cease. I was very close to the edge of the roof, and I happened to notice a certain old board. Mars
hall had carved his mathematical figures in that board when it was part of the old treehouse. Here they are, I thought. The bones to the universe.
I fingered them for a moment.
Without trying, I recalled what each figure meant and some of what each equation said. Definitions are easy. But for my life I couldn’t have appreciated the significance of the equations. Did Marshall really see their deepest meanings? I wondered. I felt the hard old boards under my butt and wondered about Dr. Florida and his talk about the empty skies. If they were truly empty, like he claimed, then only people knew the essence of everything. All the stars and all the galaxies, and it wasn’t even people who understood these bones. It was people like Marshall. A few of us. A very few.
I climbed downstairs and found Beth and Jack in the big room. Beth was reading. Jack was making notes on a big sheet of liquid crystal paper. A sack of snakes was between his feet, and when he wasn’t writing he was fixing tags to each of their tails. They were last night’s catch. “Look.” He handed me a thick-bodied bull snake. I held it by the neck, watching its strange, hard eyes, and then he took it back and put it away, tying the sack closed and saying, “You want to see where it bit me?”
“It bit you?”
He stood and said, “Yeah! You want to see?”
I rose and he pulled a trick on me. He made me look at his bare shoulder, freckles but no bites, and when I wasn’t ready he popped me with his fingers. I hadn’t seen his hand. Then Jack was laughing, saying, “Gotcha!” and I had to sit down.
“You’re blushing,” said Beth. “Why, Ryder?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at Jack and then me. She smiled and went back to her book.
I picked up Jack’s snake notes. Touching the paper’s corners, I sifted through the pages, the liquid crystals flowing and flowing, remembering hundreds of snakes—
“Eleven hundred and nineteen,” said Jack. “Not counting recaptures, of course.” He was smiling and proud. “It’s taken a year and a half to get that many. And there aren’t many that I haven’t caught. I bet not.”
I said, “Gosh,” and let myself get a little lost in Jack’s work. I read about garter snakes and bull snakes, ringnecks and milk snakes and king snakes, and so on. Then Marshall was yelling. I blinked and heard him on the ground. “Let me have a rope, would you? I need a rope.”
“Marshall needs a rope,” cried Cody. She was still hanging in the air, still hammering from time to time. “Someone help him!”
“People? I’ve got to have help!”
Marshall had brought add-on equipment for the personal. I looked down at him and Beth said, “Here,” and dropped one end of a rope. Marshall had the equipment in cardboard boxes, stacked on his old red hover-style wagon, the wagon running, humming and blowing at the pasture’s grass. I watched him tie the rope to one box, saying, “There. Now lift it carefully,” and Jack, standing behind me, said, “Don’t warn him, Ryder. But I’m going to show him where the snake bit me. Okay?”
I said, “I won’t tell,” and smiled inside myself.
The three of us lifted the boxes through the window. Then Marshall came up and started to assemble everything. There were speakers and cable and special electronic gear. He plugged the gear into our personal—an old model, slow and quirky—saying, “I’ve got this great idea. You know what we’ll do, you and me? Ryder?”
“What?”
“We’re going to call the dragon. That’s what.”
I thought for a moment, then I guessed what he meant. “Like someone calls ducks? Is that it?”
“Right.” He was grinning. “Remember the screams we heard that first night. All right? We’re going to build our own scream with the personal, and we’ll pump it through these speakers. Pretty clever, huh?”
He seemed very clever.
“Because the dragon’s territorial, I bet. I bet.” He punched on the personal and plugged in a couple pairs of headphones. “I’ll hang the net right off the oak itself.” He started to laugh, saying, “We’ll lure it in with its own screams. They’ll be the perfect bait—”
“Can I watch?” asked Beth. She smiled, her eyes big and interested. “Ryder? Marshall? Could I come watch?”
Marshall told her, “You can’t make any noise.”
“I won’t.”
Jack said, “I saw the dragon last night.” I thought he was joking. I thought he would say, “It bit me on the shoulder. You want to see the bite, Marshall?”
Only he didn’t say that.
Instead he told us, “It was hunting near the almost-pond. I saw it catch a little pig in its mouth and eat it whole. Near midnight.”
“Oh yeah?” said Marshall.
“I didn’t get close to it. I didn’t want to spook it.”
“I bet not.” Marshall giggled, not believing a word of the story.
“What? You think I’m lying?” Jack laughed and snarled at the same time. “I’ve watched it plenty of times. Night and day.”
Cody grunted. One of her calloused hands gripped a windowsill, and she jerked hard and brought herself up through the window. Her hammer went bang on the floor, and she untied her ropes and asked us, “What’s going on? Ryder? Jack?” She was watching Jack.
Beth said, “I believe you, Jack. I do.”
Marshall ignored everyone. He was wearing the headphones, concentrating on sounds while he punched buttons. His eyes were fixed on some far point, and his head was cocked to one side. “Ryder?” he said. “Listen to this. Does this sound close?”
Jack said, “It won’t work,” with his voice soft.
“What did you say?” asked Marshall.
“What did you say?” asked Cody. “Jack?”
“That it’ll work,” he answered. “I’ve got a feeling.”
Marshall nodded. “Yeah, I got the idea last night.” I couldn’t think of a time when he was half this happy. “Out of the blue. I just got it.”
“Can I watch too?” asked Jack. “Please, Marshall?”
“All right. Sure.” He had no enemies today. No pains, and no suspicions. “Sit here, Ryder. Wear this and listen.” He told me to recall the screams we had heard, and he showed me how to use the dials to coax the right sound from the machinery. “You got it? You understand?” I could scarcely hear him speaking, the headphones snug around my ears and humming like air squeezed from a tiny leak.
The scream became truer every time.
I began to feel as if the dragon was calling to me, saying something meant for me. Then I removed the headphones and warned Marshall, “We can’t just play it over and over again.”
“Why not?”
“Dogs don’t bark the same way twice,” I explained. “You don’t say, ‘Ryder!’ with the same exact voice. There have to be little—”
“Fluctuations!” he said. “From the norm, sure!”
“I guess so.”
He seized the idea, changing the program. Then the scream was ready, nearly perfect, and everyone wanted to hear it for themselves.
“Cute,” said Cody.
Jack said, “That’s it, all right.”
“When have you heard it?” asked Marshall.
“Some nights when I’m hunting,” he confessed. “Plenty of times.”
Beth tilted her head and pressed an ear against the headphones. She listened to the scream and then began to sing, bending the dragon’s call into something bubbling and sweet.
“Everyone can come,” Marshall told us. “Tonight. But I’m going to hold the trigger string, and you people are just helping me. All right? You’ve got to promise to keep quiet and out of my way—”
“You’re such a jerk,” said Cody.
Beth kept singing the scream.
Marshall crossed his arms, saying nothing. He was too happy to be insulted by anyone now.
“Just don’t be such a jerk,” said Cody. “Please?”
Marshall glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining the thousand dollars hi
s folks would give him, and he was hopelessly proud of his cleverness, and he could almost feel the snow dragon in his two hands—
“I had a good time yesterday,” said Jack. “Ryder?”
“Yeah,” said Cody, “thanks for inviting us, Ryder.”
Dr. Florida had invited them, I started to correct them—
“It was great meeting him,” Beth admitted. “I think that was the best part of it. Don’t you guys think so?”
Everyone nodded. Yes, it was the best part.
Then Jack said, “A fish bit me when I was swimming—”
“When you were drowning?” snapped Marshall. He smiled at his wit and put the headphones snug over his ears.
“Don’t you want to see?” asked Jack. He rose and stared at Marshall, one hand pulling up his short shirtsleeve. “It’s an ugly bite—”
“Show me,” said Cody. She jumped to her feet and stood beside him. “Go on.”
Jack gulped. His hand was dangling between Cody’s legs, and I knew he wouldn’t do anything. Then I knew she knew what he might have done. “I don’t see anything,” said Cody. “You must have healed.”
“I guess so.”
“You must be eating right, huh?” She glared at him, her eyes cold and hard and never blinking. I decided something was going on besides the words. What else was I seeing? I blinked and looked at Beth, but she was looking at me, not them. And Marshall wasn’t aware of any of it, leaning forward in his chair and playing that scream again and again, his daydreams practically visible in the way his eyes danced and his head rocked and his soft hands played baby games with one another.
The moon was half full, a little past straight overhead, and the scream was going to begin in a minute. Beth was sitting beside me. We were in the underbrush close to the oak. The big binoculars were cradled in my hands, and every so often I would lift them and peer between the branches, catching quick partial glimpses of the moon itself.
I couldn’t find the moon’s moon.
I did see the faint green smudges of the big farms, however. They showed on the night side of the moon, lit by their own stored sunshine and obvious against the inky darkness. Those farms lay in a belt about the moon’s waist, built from the dead comet’s precious guts. I recalled Dr. Florida’s tales of impacting comets and worlds destroyed, and I was so very thankful he had corralled this particular comet. For a moment I tried picturing a future age, wondrous and safe, when every comet was corralled and the moon and Mars and Venus were fat with water and with happy, safe people, and I set the binoculars on the ground, smiling to myself, feeling certain that that age was surely coming.