Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  But he was caught in slow traffic, and she disappeared around the corner before he could get any closer. Sighing, making a face at himself for acting like a fool, he drove on. By the time he got to the computer shop, he had convinced himself it had all been his imagination.

  He dropped off the computer and headed back through town, taking it easy and keeping a wary eye on the traffic, wondering as always how so many people still managed to drive, despite fuel shortages and sky-high prices; and all the new restrictions, not that anybody paid them any mind, the government having all it could do just keeping the country more or less together.

  An ancient minivan, a mattress roped to its roof, made a sudden left turn from the opposite lane. Davis hit the brakes, cursing—a fenderbender in a tribal patrol car, that would really make the day—and that was when he saw the red-haired girl coming up the sidewalk on the other side of the street.

  Some asshole behind him was honking; Davis put the car in motion again, going slow, looking for a parking place. There was a spot up near the next corner and he turned into it and got out and locked up the cruiser, all without stopping to think what he thought he was doing or why he was doing it.

  He crossed the street and looked along the sidewalk, but he couldn't see the girl anywhere. He began walking back the way she'd been going, looking this way and that. The street was mostly lined with an assortment of small stores—leftovers, probably, from the days when Waynesville had been a busy tourist resort, before tourism became a meaningless concept—and he peered in through a few shop windows, without any luck.

  He walked a couple of blocks that way and then decided she couldn't have gotten any farther in that little time. He turned and went back, and stopped at the corner and looked up and down the cross street, wondering if she could have gone that way. Fine Indian you are, he thought, one skinny little white girl with hair like a brush fire and you keep losing her.

  Standing there, he became aware of a growing small commotion across the street, noises coming from the open door of the shop on the corner: voices raised, a sound of scuffling. A woman shouted, “No you don't—”

  He ran across the street, dodging an oncoming BMW, and into the shop. It was an automatic cop reaction, unconnected to his search; but then immediately he saw the girl, struggling in the grip of a large steely-haired woman in a long black dress. “Stop fighting me,” the woman was saying in a high strident voice. “Give me that, young lady. I'm calling the police—”

  Davis said, “What's going on here?”

  The woman looked around. “Oh,” she said, looking pleased, not letting go the girl's arm. “I'm glad to see you, officer. I've got a little shoplifter for you.”

  The girl was looking at Davis too. If she recognized him she gave no sign. Her face was flushed, no doubt from the struggle, but still as expressionless as ever.

  “What did she take?” Davis asked.

  “This.” The woman reached up and pried the girl's right hand open, revealing something shiny. “See, she's still holding it!”

  Davis stepped forward and took the object from the girl's hand: a cheap-looking little pendant, silver or more likely silver-plated, in the shape of a running dog, with a flimsy neck chain attached.

  “I want her arrested,” the woman said. “I'll be glad to press charges. I'm tired of these people, coming around here ruining this town, stealing everyone blind.”

  Davis said, “I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't have any jurisdiction here. You'll need to call the local police.”

  She blinked, doing a kind of ladylike double-take, looking at Davis's uniform. “Oh. Excuse me, I thought—” She managed to stop before actually saying, “I thought you were a real policeman.” It was there on her face, though.

  Davis looked again at the pendant, turning it over in his hand, finding the little white price tag stuck on the back of the running dog: $34.95. A ripoff even in the present wildly inflated money; but after a moment he reached for his wallet and said, “Ma'am, how about if I just pay you for it?”

  The woman started to speak and then stopped, her eyes locking on the wallet in his hand. Not doing much business these days, he guessed; who had money to waste on junk like this?

  While she hesitated, Davis pulled out two twenties and laid them on the nearby counter top. “With a little extra to pay for your trouble,” he added.

  That did it. She let go the girl's arm and scooped up the money with the speed of a professional gambler. “All right,” she said, “but get her out of here!”

  The girl stood still, staring at Davis. The woman said, “I mean it! Right now!”

  Davis tilted his head in the direction of the door. The girl nodded and started to move, not particularly fast. Davis followed her, hearing the woman's voice behind him: “And if you ever come back—”

  Out on the sidewalk, Davis said, “I'm parked down this way.”

  She looked at him. “You arresting me?”

  Her speaking voice—he realized suddenly that this was the first time he'd heard it—was surprisingly ordinary; soft and high, rather pleasant, but nothing to suggest what it could do in song. There was no fear in it, or in her face; she might have been asking what time it was.

  Davis shook his head. “Like I told that woman, I don't have any authority here.”

  “So you can't make me go with you.”

  “No.” he said. “But I'd say you need to get clear of this area pretty fast. She's liable to change her mind and call the law after all.”

  “Guess that's right. Okay.” She fell in beside him, sticking her hands in the pockets of the blue dress. He noticed her feet were barely covered by a pair of old tennis shoes, so ragged they were practically sandals. “Never rode in a police car before.”

  As they came up to the parked cruiser he stopped and held out his hand. “Here. You might as well have this.”

  She took the pendant and held it up in front of her face, looking at it, swinging it from side to side. After a moment she slipped the chain over her head and tucked the pendant down the front of her dress. “Better hide it,” she said. “Ricky sees it, he'll steal it for sure.”

  He said, “Not much of a thing to get arrested for.”

  She shrugged. “I like dogs. We had a dog, back home in Georgia, before we had to move. Daddy wouldn't let me take him along.”

  “Still,” he said, “you could have gone to jail.”

  She shrugged, a slight movement of her small shoulders. “So? Wouldn't be no worse than how I got to live now.”

  “Yes it would,” he told her. “You've got no idea what it's like in those forced-labor camps. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” she said. “Well, next month.”

  “Then you're an adult, as far's the law's concerned. Better watch it from now on.” He opened the right door. “Get in.”

  She climbed into the car and he closed the door and went around. As he slid in under the wheel, she said, “Okay, I know what comes next. Where do you want to go?”

  “What?” Davis looked at her, momentarily baffled. “Well, I was just going to take you home. Wherever your family—”

  “Oh, come on.” Her voice held an edge of scorn now. “You didn't get me out of there for nothing. You want something, just like everybody always does, and I know what it is because there ain't nothing else I got. Well, all right,” she said. “I don't guess I mind. So where do you want to go to do it?”

  For a moment, Davis was literally speechless. The idea simply hadn't occurred to him; he hadn't thought of her in that way at all. It surprised him, now he considered it. After all, she was a pretty young girl—you could have said beautiful, in a way—and he had been living alone for a long time. Yet so it was; he felt no stirrings of that kind toward this girl, not even now with her close up and practically offering herself.

  When he could speak he said, “No, no. Not that. Believe me.”

  “Really?” She looked very skeptical. “Then what do you want?”

  “Right now,
” he said, “I want to buy you a pair of shoes.”

  * * *

  An hour or so later, coming out of the discount shoe store out by the highway, she said, “I know what this is all about. You feel bad because you run us off, back last week.”

  “No.” Davis's voice held maybe a little bit more certainty than he felt, but he added, “Just doing my job. Anyway, you couldn't have stayed there. No water, nothing to eat, how would you live?”

  “You still didn't have no right to run us off.”

  “Sure I did. It's our land,” he said. “All we've got left.”

  She opened her mouth and he said, “Look, we're not going to talk about it, all right?”

  They walked in silence the rest of the way across the parking lot. She kept looking down at her feet, admiring the new shoes. They weren't much, really, just basic white no-name sport shoes, but he supposed they looked pretty fine to her. At that they hadn't been all that cheap. In fact between the shoes and the pendant he'd managed to go through a couple days’ pay. Not that he was likely to get paid any time soon; the tribe had been broke for a long time.

  As he started the car, she said, “You sure you don't want to, you know, do it?”

  He looked at her and she turned sidewise in the seat, moving her thin pale legs slightly apart, shifting her narrow hips. “Hey,” she said, “somebody's gotta be the first. Might as well be you.”

  Her mouth quirked. “If it ain't you it'll prob'ly be Ricky. He sure keeps trying.”

  With some difficulty Davis said, “Turn around, please, and do up your safety belt.”

  “All right.” She giggled softly. “Just don't know what it is you want from me, that's all.”

  He didn't respond until they were out of the parking lot and rolling down the road, back into Waynesville. Then he said, “Would you sing for me?”

  “What?” Her voice registered real surprise. “Sing? You mean right now, right here in the car?”

  “Yes,” Davis said. “Please.”

  “Well, I be damn.” She brushed back her hair and studied him for a minute. “You mean it, don't you? All right ... what you want me to sing? If I know it.”

  “That song you were singing that morning up on the reservation,” he said. “Just before we arrived.”

  She thought about it. “Oh,” she said. “You mean—”

  She tilted her head back and out it came, like a flood of clear spring water:

  "Oh, when this world is all on fire

  Where you gonna go?"

  “Yes,” Davis said very softly. “That's it. Sing it. Please.”

  * * *

  Her family was staying in a refugee camp on the other side of town; a great hideous sprawl of cars and trucks and buses and campers and trailers of all makes and ages and states of repair, bright nylon tents and crude plastic-tarp shelters and pathetic, soggy arrangements of cardboard boxes, spread out over a once-beautiful valley.

  “You better just drop me off here,” the girl said as he turned off the road.

  “That's okay,” Davis said. “Which way do I go?”

  At her reluctant direction, he steered slowly down a narrow muddy lane between parked vehicles and outlandish shelters, stopping now and then as children darted across in front of the car. People came out and stared as the big police cruiser rolled past. Somebody threw something unidentifiable, that bounced off the windshield leaving a yellowish smear. By now Davis was pretty sure this hadn't been a good idea.

  But the girl said, “Up there,” and there it was, the old truck with the homemade camper bed and the blue plastic awning rigged out behind, just like before. He stopped the car and got out and went around to open the passenger door.

  The air was thick with wood smoke and the exhausts of worn-out engines, and the pervasive reek of human waste. The ground underfoot was soggy with mud and spilled motor oil and God knew what else. Davis looked around at the squalid scene, remembering what this area used to look like, only a few years ago. Now, it looked like the sort of thing they used to show on the news, in countries you'd never heard of. The refugee camps in Kosovo, during his long-ago army days, hadn't been this bad.

  Beyond, up on the mountainsides, sunlight glinted on the windows of expensive houses. A lot of locals had thought it was wonderful, back when the rich people first started buying up land and building homes up in the mountain country, getting away from the heat and the flooding. They hadn't been as happy about the second invasion, a year or so later, by people bringing nothing but their desperation....

  Davis shook his head and opened the door. Even the depressing scene couldn't really get him down, right now. It had been an amazing experience, almost religious, driving along with that voice filling the dusty interior of the old cruiser; he felt light and loose, as if coming off a marijuana high. He found himself smiling—

  A voice behind him said, “What the hell?” and then, “Eva May!”

  He turned and saw the man standing there beside the truck, still wearing the red cap and the angry face. “Hello,” he said, trying to look friendly or at least inoffensive. “Just giving your daughter a lift from town. Don't worry, she's not in any trouble—”

  “Hell she's not,” the man said, looking past Davis. “Eva May, git your ass out of that thing! What you doing riding around with this God-damn woods nigger?”

  The girl swung her feet out of the car. Davis started to give her a hand but decided that might be a bad move right now. She got out and stepped past Davis. “It's all right, Daddy,” she said. “He didn't do nothing bad. Look, he bought me some new shoes!”

  “No shit.” The man looked down at her feet, at the new shoes standing out white and clean against the muddy ground. “New shoes, huh? Git ‘em off.”

  She stopped. “But Daddy—”

  His hand came up fast; it made an audible crack against the side of her face. As she stumbled backward against the side of the truck he said, “God damn it, I said take them shoes off.”

  He spun about to face Davis. “You don't like that, Indian? Maybe you wanta do something about it?”

  Davis did, in fact, want very much to beat this worthless yoneg within half an inch of his life. But he forced himself to stand still and keep his hands down at his sides. Start a punch-out in here, and almost certainly he'd wind up taking on half the men in the camp. Or using the gun on his belt, which would bring down a whole new kind of disaster.

  Even then he might have gone for it, but he knew that anything he did to the man would later be taken out on Eva May. It was a pattern all too familiar to any cop.

  She had one shoe off now and was jerking at the other, standing on one foot, leaning against the trailer, sobbing. She got it off and the man jerked it out of her hand. “Here.” He half-turned and threw the shoe, hard, off somewhere beyond the old school bus that was parked across the lane. He bent down and picked up the other shoe and hurled it in the opposite direction.

  “Ain't no damn Indian buying nothing for my kid,” he said. “Or going anywhere near her. You understand that, Chief?”

  From inside the camper came the sound of a baby crying. A woman's voice said, “Vernon? What's going on, Vernon?”

  “Now,” the man said, “you git out of here, woods nigger.”

  The blood was singing in Davis's ears and there was a taste in his mouth like old pennies. Still he managed to check himself, and to keep his voice steady as he said, “Sir, whatever you think of me, your daughter has a great gift. She should have the opportunity—”

  “Listen close, Indian.” The man's voice was low, now, and very intense. “You shut your mouth and you git back in that car and you drive outta here, right damn now, or else I'm gon’ find out if you got the guts to use that gun. Plenty white men around here, be glad to help stomp your dirty red ass.”

  Davis glanced at Eva May, who was still leaning against the truck, weeping and holding the side of her face. Her bare white feet were already spotted with mud.

  And then, because there wa
s nothing else to do, he got back in the car and drove away. He didn't look back. There was nothing there he wanted to see; nothing he wouldn't already be seeing for a long time to come.

  * * *

  “Blackbear,” Captain Ridge said, next morning. “I don't believe this.”

  He was seated at his desk in his office, looking up at Davis. His big dark face was not that of a happy man.

  “I got a call just now,” he said, “from the sheriff's office over in Waynesville. Seems a reservation officer, man about your size and wearing sergeant's stripes, picked up a teenage girl on the street. Made her get into a patrol car, tried to get her to have sex, even bought her presents to entice her. When she refused he took her back to the refugee camp and made threats against her family.”

  Davis said, “Captain—”

  “No,” Captain Ridge said, and slapped a hand down on his desk top. “No, Blackbear, I don't want to hear it. See, you're about to tell me it's a lot of bullshit, and I know it's a lot of bullshit, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. You listen to me, Blackbear. Whoever those people are, you stay away from them. You stay out of Waynesville, till I tell you different. On duty or off, I don't care.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Because if you show up there again, you're going to be arrested—the sheriff just warned me—and there won't be a thing I can do about it. And you know what kind of chance you'll have in court over there. They like us even less than they do the squatters.”

  Davis said, “All right. I wasn't planning on it anyway.”

  * * *

  But of course he went back. Later, he thought that the only surprising thing was that he waited as long as he did.

  He went on Sunday morning. It was an off-duty day and he drove his own car; that, plus the nondescript civilian clothes he wore, ought to cut down the chances of his being recognized. He stopped at an all-hours one-stop in Maggie Valley and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses and a butt-ugly blue mesh-back cap with an emblem of a jumping fish on the front. Pulling the cap down low, checking himself out in the old Dodge's mirror, he decided he looked like a damn fool, but as camouflage it ought to help.