by Various
She went on and on. Well, I asked for it, didn't I? Only I didn't bargain on all that talk about food, not that I believed it, a turkey and a ham and roast beef all on one table? A little onion chopped in with our brown rice was a special treat for us. We were even going to have meat — a dumb rattlesnake bit one of the clones that morning but she had been immunized and it was no more than a tickle to her and there I was waiting with my chopping knife. Batter-fried snake, incredible.
Christmas would have been perfect if only Mom had come, but she hates the Air Stream even if it is almost an antique trailer and she hates the desert even worse. I tell her it's not so bad, at least she could get to see her grandchildren and then she really clams up. I think the clones make her uncomfortable. As for Grandma, she went bonkers long ago, like most of the people of her generation who just couldn't adjust to suddenly doing without all the things they were used to.
Me, I can adjust to anything — being alone, being cold nights, being a little bit hungry all the time. Sometimes, especially on Christmas Eve, I wish I could go to church though. There's this faith healer who came through a couple of years ago and he held a service you wouldn't believe — raw lizards! There wasn't too much Christ in the Christmas, but, wow, what religion!
Grams' story about the electric lights gave me an idea. I sent the clones out on the sands with buckets looking for all the nonbiodegradable plastic they could find. They came back with all kinds of stuff — razors, can tops, cups, pieces of what could have been old toys — and we stuck them all on the nearest cactus. I guess it must have looked kind of garbagy to Grams, but we liked it.
I didn't sleep much that night. I keep waking up to see if Grams was still breathing. And I felt guilty about the clones' Christmas. They were three that year, old enough so they might remember, and clothespins aren't really dolls. I did have some black market candy — they hadn't tasted sugar in I don't know how long — maybe it would be enough.
Christmas morning I pushed Grams out to sit in front of the cactus. Not that she couldn't do it herself, I swear that wheelchair works if you wiggle your eyelashes, but I kind of wanted to do something for the old lady. I put her present in her hands. It was a real orange, fresh from Florida, cost me close to a day's pay.
"Poor Treena," she said, "thank you, but poor, poor Treena. You know when I was a girl and too little to go shopping, my mother used to give me an orange and a dish of cloves. I'd stick the cloves all over the orange — that made a pomander — and whoever I gave the pomander to would hang it in a closet so that all the clothes would smell nice."
"Grams! You're not going to hang that orange in the closet!"
"No, child. We're going to share it. Will you peel it for us, please?"
I peeled it with my fingers, not a knife, so that my hands would smell good, and I broke it into four pieces. Stacy and Tracy, the clones, stuffed it down as fast as they could, but Grams and I took a long time over ours, and when we had finished I chewed on the white inside peel.
"I have a present for your children," Grams said.
"You didn't have to do that, you're our guest."
"Tracy and Stacy, look under my afghan, right next to my feet. There should be something tied there for each of you."
The kids pulled out two boxes wrapped in what must once have been pretty paper. It was brittle and crumpled now, and it shredded before they could take it off.
"Go on, open them up," Grams said.
They were very careful, my clones. Each piece of paper, no matter how torn, had to be smoothed out and saved. Every corner of the boxes had to be lifted separately. Never before had they gotten boxed presents — maybe never again, unless things changed drastically.
When they finally got the boxes opened and the tissue paper undone, they took out twin Raggedy Anns — handmade, bright painted faces like in the story, and I was willing to bet that each had a candy heart sewed inside that said "I love you." I don't know how she could have made them with those hands of hers, but there they were.
She looked sad sitting in her wheelchair, sad and kind of happy at the same time. The Japanese have a name for it, mono no aware, the pity of things. "Merry Christmas, Treena," she said.
"Merry Christmas, Grams."
Ruth's Story
The kids just won't squat outside unless I force them, and sometimes in the middle of the night I find myself using the back of the cave, but I'm getting used to the smell, and the cold, and the wind. The thing that bothers me is the darkness, especially now that the days are so short. I remember once going to Grams' trailer and there were candles everywhere — there used to be so many animals that people could burn the fat instead of eating it.
Joe came home early again tonight — there's no game to be found anywhere — and he looked at Grams like it was all her fault.
"We've waited long enough. Tomorrow she goes," he said.
"Not tomorrow, please. It's Christmas."
"Don't give me that bullshit about Christmas.
"It's the Christmas God that got us into this in the first place. What did they expect when they stopped praying to the tree god and the water god and the fire god? How long did they think the almighty ones would be patient?"
"Joe, that's ridiculous!"
"Shaddup. First thing tomorrow we turn her loose. And if any of the rest of you give me any lip, you know what you'll get," He raised his fist threateningly.
The others were the other wives, his, the other men's, it didn't matter which, I didn't expect much from any of them. After all, all their Grams' had been lost in the bombings, and their grandmothers, and their mothers as well. All it meant to them when my Grams went was that there'd be a little more room in the cave.
Not that she wasn't helpful at first. Even though she lived in the desert (that's why she survived the bombings), she knew the city very well, and if it wasn't for her we'd never have known where to dig for supplies. But she couldn't get to the city any more. There was something wrong with her head — she kept falling down. Her hands were so warped she couldn't even dig in the dirt. A lot of our babies are born with hands like that, but Grams says her hands used to be smooth, just like mine. She also says it's thanks to God's mercy we can have children again, but sometimes I don't feel very thankful. There are so many of them. I get tired having a baby every year and I don't know how to stop. There used to be ways, Grams says, but some of them are forgotten and some of them need factories, and besides we need the kids, somebody's got to start the world over again. Only I wish more of the boys would live, poor things, they're just not strong enough. My twins are boys but people are scared of them — Joe says they remind him of clones and one of these days he's going to get rid of one of them, turn him out on the ice. I don't know whether or not I believe him. I don't know whether or not I blame him either. When I tie the babies up so they won't hurt themselves, when I send the toddlers out half-naked to gather fire scraps, when I make the five-year-olds look under tree barks for grubs, I know it's not a good world to grow up in.
The kids never play. I don't think they know what the word means. I think I've forgotten what it means too.
It's Christmas Eve. There used to be churches — I went to one once — there was singing and praying and a warm feeling — Peace on Earth, they called it, Good Will to Men.
We have peace now. Nobody has anything to fight with except rocks, and that doesn't count, there's no fallout from rocks. Besides, who has the energy to fight, we're all too hungry, and tired, and cold, and it's so very dark.
Good Will to Men — no, that's gone. Joe says if things get any worse we're going to have to start eating the kids. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I don't want to die either. Damn.
I saw Grams huddled up in a corner because no one would let her near the fire. I'm her clone's clone's clone, and that might just as well have been me there, seventy years from now. In a way it was me, only it's very unlikely I'll ever be that old. She used to talk about a Christmas cactus and dolls some
one once made her clones — one of her clones was my grandclone — but she didn't talk much any more.
"Grams, you want me to call the dogs over?" I asked. (Dogs! Of course! Why didn't I think of it before? Surely Joe would rather eat a dog than one of the twins! Surely.)
"Dogs? What would I want them for?"
'To warm you. You look so cold and those animals generate a lot of body heat. This is going to be a two-dog night, and you don't get much colder than that."
'Those dogs — they're hungry?"
"Sure they're hungry, they've had even less food than we've had — oh, I see what you mean. Grams, those dogs are our pets, they'd never...."
I could hear her bones creak as she pulled herself into a tighter ball. "No dogs," she said.
"Have it your way."
I went to the mouth of the cave and watched the glacier creep closer. Sometimes I could hear it crack, like the lakes Grams used to skate on, or was that her grams, and what were skates anyway, she told me once but I forgot.
We can't stay here much longer. There's still land to the south and to the south of that, and somewhere it must be warm and bright. Somewhere.
Looking on the darkness, I knew Grams wouldn't come with us. Tomorrow Joe would put her out on the ice, and the worst thing was I wasn't sure it was the wrong thing to do. My Grams.
The wind and my thoughts drove me back into the cave, past my friend Mary, who was sleeping. At this stage of her pregnancy she was always hot and she had kicked away the pelt that was covering her. It was just horsehide and it smelled but it would help.
I made Grams lie down and covered her as best I could, but still her lips were blue with chill, so I spooned around her and drew her tightly to my pregnant belly. My Grams would not be cold on this last Christmas Eve.
Edward Bryant ("Teeth Marks," June 1979; "Stone," Feb. 1978) returns with a gripping story about an encounter with a ghost from the distant past in the Rocky Mountain West. Mr. Bryant has two story collections coming out this year: PARTICLE THEORY from Pocket Books and PRAIRIE SUN from Jelm Mountain Publications.
Strata
BY
EDWARD BRYANT
Six hundred million years in thirty-two miles. Six hundred million years in fifty-one minutes. Steve Mavrakis traveled in time — courtesy of the Wyoming Highway Department. The epochs raveled between Thermopolis and Shoshoni. The Wind River rambled down its canyon with the Burlington Northern tracks cut into the west walls and the two-lane blacktop, U.S. 20, sliced into the east. Official signs driven into the verge of the highway proclaimed the traveler's progress:
DINWOODY FORMATION TRIASSIC
185-225 MILLION YEARS
BIG HORN FORMATION ORDOVICIAN
440-500 MILLION YEARS
FLATHEAD FORMATION
CAMBRIAN 500-600 MILLION YEARS
The mileposts might have been staked into the canyon rock under the pressure of millennia. They were there for those who could not read the stone. Tonight Steve ignored the signs. He had made this run many times before. Darkness hemmed him. November clawed when he cracked the window to exhaust Camel smoke from the Chevy's cab. The CB crackled occasionally and picked up exactly nothing.
The wind blew — that was nothing unusual. Steve felt himself hypnotized by the skiff of snow skating across the pavement in the glare of his brights. The snow swirled only inches above the blacktop, rushing across like surf sliding over the black packed sand of a beach.
Time's predator hunts.
Years scatter before her like a school of minnows surprised. The rush of her passage causes eons to eddy. Wind sweeps down the canyon with the roar of combers breaking on the sand. The moon, full and newly risen, exerts its tidal force.
Moonlight flashes on the slash of teeth.
And Steve snapped alert, realized he had traversed the thirty-two miles, crossed the flats leading into Shoshoni, and was approaching the junction with U.S. 26. Road hypnosis? he thought. Safe in Shoshoni, but it was scary. He didn't remember a goddamned minute of the trip through the canyons! Steve rubbed his eyes with his left hand and looked for an open cafe with coffee.
It hadn't been the first time.
All those years before, the four of them had thought they were beating the odds. On a chill night in June, high on a mountain edge in the Wind River Range, high on more than mountain air, the four of them celebrated graduation. They were young and clear-eyed: ready for the world. That night they knew there were no other people for miles. Having learned in class that there were 3.8 human beings per square mile in Wyoming, and as four, they thought the odds outnumbered.
Paul Onoda, eighteen. He was second-generation Wyoming; third-generation Nisei. In 1942, before he was conceived, his parents were removed with eleven hundred thousand other Japanese-Americans from California to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northern Wyoming. Twelve members and three generations of the Onodas shared one of four hundred and sixty-five crowded, tar-papered barracks for the next four years. Two died. Three more were born. With their fellows, the Onodas helped farm eighteen hundred acres of virgin agricultural land. Not all of them had been Japanese gardeners or truck farmers in California; so the pharmacists and the teachers and the carpenters learned agriculture. They used irrigation to bring in water. The crops flourish. The Nisei not directly involved with farming were dispatched from camp to be seasonal farm laborers. An historian later laconically noted that "Wyoming benefited by their presence."
Paul remembered the Heart Mountain camps only through the memories of his elders, but those recollections were vivid. After the war, most of the Onodas stayed on in Wyoming. With some difficulty, they bought farms. The family invested thrice the effort of their neighbors, and prospered.
Paul Onoda excelled in the classrooms and starred on the football field of Fremont High School. Once he overheard the president of the school board tell the coach, "By God but that little nip can run!" He thought about that, and kept on running even faster.
More than a few of his classmates secretly thought he had it all. When prom time came in his senior year, it did not go unnoticed that Paul had an extraordinarily handsome appearance to go with his brains and athlete's body. In and around Fremont, a great many concerned parents admonished their white daughters to find a good excuse if Paul asked them to the prom.
Carroll Dale, eighteen. It became second nature early on to explain to people first hearing her given name that it had two r's and two l's. Both sides of her family went back four generations in this part of the country, and one of her bequests had been a proud mother. Cordelia Carroll had pride, one daughter, and the desire to see the hereford Carrolls retain some parity with the charolais Dales. After all, the Carrolls had been ranching on Bad Water Creek before John Broderick Okie illuminated his Lost Cabin castle with carbide lights. That was when Teddy Roosevelt had been President, and it was when all the rest of the cattlemen in Wyoming, including the Dales, had been doing their accounts at night by kerosene lanterns.
Carroll grew up to be a good roper and a better rider. Her apprenticeship intensified after her older brother, her only brother, fatally shot himself during deer season. She wounded her parents when she neither married a man who would take over the ranch nor decided to take over the ranch herself.
She grew up slim and tall, with ebony hair and large, dark, slightly oblique eyes. Her father's father, at family Christmas dinners, would overdo the whisky in the eggnog and make jokes about Indians in the woodpile until her paternal grandmother would tell him to shut the hell up before she gave him a goodnight the hard way, with a rusty sickle and knitting needles. It was years before Carroll knew what her grandmother meant.
In junior high, Carroll was positive she was eight feet tall in Lilliput. The jokes hurt. But her mother told her to be patient, that the other girls would catch up. Most of the girls didn't; but in high school the boys did, though they tended to be tongue-tied in the extreme when they talked to her.
She was the first girl president of
her school's National Honor Society. She was a cheerleader. She was the valedictorian of her class and earnestly quoted John F. Kennedy in her graduation address. Within weeks of graduation, she eloped with the captain of the football team.
It nearly caused a lynching.
Steve Mavrakis, eighteen. Courtesy allowed him to be called a native despite his birth eighteen hundred miles to the east. His parents, on the other hand, had settled in the state after the war when he was less than a year old. Given another decade, the younger native-born might grudgingly concede their adopted roots; the old-timers, never.
Steve's parents had read Zane Grey and The Virginian, and had spent many summers on dude ranches in upstate New York. So they found a perfect ranch on the Big Horn River and started a herd of registered hereford. They went broke. They re-financed and aimed at a breed of inferior beef cattle. The snows of '49 killed those. Steve's father determined that sheep were the way to go — all those double and triple births. Very investment-effective. The sheep sickened, or stumbled and fell into creeks where they drowned, or panicked like turkeys and smothered in heaps in fenced corners. It occurred then to the Mavrakis family that wheat doesn't stampede. All the fields were promptly hailed out before what looked to be a bounty harvest. Steve's father gave up and moved into town where he put his Columbia degree to work by getting a job managing the district office for the Bureau of Land Management.
All of that taught Steve to be wary of sure things.
And occasionally he wondered at the dreams. He had been very young when the blizzards killed the cattle. But though he didn't remember the National Guard dropping hay bales from silver C-47's to cattle in twelve-foot deep snow, he did recall, for years after, the nightmares of herds of nonplused animals futilely grazing barren ground before towering, slowly grinding, bluffs of ice.
The night after the cropduster terrified the sheep and seventeen had expired in paroxysms, Steve dreamed of brown men shrilling and shaking sticks and stampeding tusked, hairy monsters off a precipice and down hundreds of feet to a shallow stream.