Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Up and down the street, people were packing things into cars, getting ready to leave. But no one was leaving Quiebra. The firemen standing at the corner, watching silently from their QFD cars, had insisted that everyone evacuated stay somewhere in town. An evacuation—but not far. They had to be there for some kind of health checkup. They’d all be told about it later, “when everything is ready.”

  Dad started the station wagon and they drove away, on their way to a room-and-board place over the Chinese restaurant in Old Town Quiebra.

  Larry wanted his mom.

  He wanted his dog.

  He wanted his dad.

  7

  December 3, late afternoon

  Bert Clayborn was sitting in the uncertain sunshine on the small deck of his duplex. His condo’s back door faced the ocean, and he was eating a late lunch of tomato-cheese salad and watching the gulls wheel and dive over the beach.

  A crash from next door; the wall vibrated. Another crash. Things breaking, the girl yelling something he couldn’t make out. That Derry girl, half Pakistani, all goth, who’d dropped out of Contra Costa College—an unpredictable, possibly bipolar girl with visible mood swings. Knowing that, he wasn’t inclined to call the police; it was more likely she was assaulting her own apartment than being assaulted.

  He drank off the rest of his chardonnay. He allowed himself one glass before going to teach a class. He had taken over a class at Diablo Valley College near the end of term for Darryl Winsecker, who had taught a literature class and who’d suddenly dropped out of the job for “the indefinite future.” There were rumors of long-term alcoholism rehab. Darryl hadn’t settled for one glass of chardonnay.

  The phone rang, and Bert grimaced. He was pretty sure he knew who that was. It was that time of year. He just didn’t want to answer.

  He knew it would be his younger brother, Errol, and he knew that Errol was going to invite him to spend vacation break with him and his wife, Dory. Dory with her ever-patient, faintly puzzled look whenever Bert spoke. And their videogame-obsessed kids. Errol would want him to come see the family for Christmas, and Bert knew he should go. It would be healthier to spend the holiday with someone; it’d be good for his relationship with his brother— but he just didn’t want to go. And he didn’t want to tell Errol why.

  Because I don’t want any more well-meaning “help” from my family, or any more pitying looks because you think I’m either gay or a loser just because I don’t get married.

  Another crash from next door, and weeping. Should he go over there? But every encounter with her had been like gazing into Edgar Allan Poe’s maelstrom. And the phone was still ringing.

  He sighed and stood up. But he didn’t go next door or to the phone. Instead he stood there and watched the gulls some more. White birds, starkly aerodynamic wings with black tips, Nature’s genius in their design—they could do maneuvers beyond the most cunningly wrought aircraft. Graceful and raucous, determinedly survivalist but brattily pushy, garbage-eating scavengers, too. Nature increasingly imitating people, having to accommodate itself to people. But then there had always been scavengers and parasites.

  The phone stopped ringing. The crashes from next door ceased, too—though he could hear her talking loudly and cursing.

  He could see a big swatch of plastic trash washing up on the beach. Thoreau would have been apoplectic, seeing what we’ve done to this planet, he thought. And in fact—

  The phone started ringing again. He sighed and went to answer it. “Yes?”

  “Bertie!”

  His heart sank. “Hi, Errol.”

  “Listen to that enthusiasm when he says my name! Bad time to call?”

  So he’s not without some perception, anyway, Bert thought. “No, I just have a class to teach this evening. Getting set to go.”

  “Right-o. But what about getting set to come and visit us? A Connecticut Christmas, Bertie!” Errol began doing his Bing Crosby imitation. “ ‘I’m dreaming . . . of a white . . . Christmas . . . bah bah booh dah booh dee oh . . . with every Christmas card I write!’ ”

  Although Errol was a, God help us, science fiction writer, he was heavy into old movies. “Are you trying to torture me into agreeing to come?” Bert asked, sighing.

  “You can make fun of me all through Christmas vacation. I’m paying the airfare, the whole shebang.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  Bert was distracted by a sudden shout from next door. “Fuck you, you’re not going to do it to—” There was more, but it was garbled.

  He brought his attention back to the phone call. “If I want to come, Errol, I can go on-line, get a good fare.” He was touched, despite himself, that Errol wanted him to come out there badly enough that he would offer to pay his way. Errol could be a little cheap sometimes. Maybe he was genuinely lonely. Sure, he had the wife and those kids—but she had that weird little martyred thing going, those sad smiles, and the kids were completely indifferent to their father except when he didn’t show up to see them play soccer. Then they trotted out their own sulky mockeries of their mother’s crucified smiles.

  “I’ll try to come.” He heard a police siren from the complex’s parking lot, and the disappointed whine running down as it was switched off. Maybe the cops were coming for the slightly mad girl next door, after all. He hoped she was all right.

  Errol chattered on, asking, “So how’s the old love life? And I don’t mean old in the ‘needing Viagra’ kind of way. You dating anybody?”

  “There must’ve been a mix-up, Errol, when they were making Jewish mothers. You got accidentally put into a male Gentile’s body instead.”

  “ ‘So, vy don’t you get married, already?’ But Jewish mothers are usually right, man. And listen, there’s someone I want you to meet. I mean I know, she lives in Hartford, and you’re on the West Coast, but, you know what, I was talking to Professor Shremminger, over at Connecticut State U, and he thinks that it’s been enough time since that wrangle over tenure. You could come back—”

  “I don’t want to go back there. I’ve bought a place out here.”

  “You can sell that little hovel.”

  “Errol, you’re my younger brother. I’m supposed to tell you what to do. You’re role-reversing on me here.”

  “Sell that place, come back here, go back to work at the university. I mean, you and I know they passed you over, but a lot of those guys are gone now. I think there’s a chance you could get the Thoreau chair.”

  Bert hesitated. That was tempting. But it wasn’t really likely.

  “No, Errol. I burned my bridges. I called them Nazis. And unfortunately they aren’t Nazis. I mean, it’s unfortunate because I’d be vindicated if they were. They’re cronies of Bill Buckley, but they’re just conservatives, and I sounded like a crank.”

  A doorbell chimed next door, and he heard the young woman screaming, “No no no, you can’t come in, I know what you are, I won’t I won’t!”

  “My neighbors are having a run-in with the cops here,” Bert muttered.

  Errol slid that right into his thesis. “You see? Living out there in California, with the lunatics? And sometimes you are a crank. Like with the women. I swear sometimes, Bert, it’s like you stick to bachelorhood because it’s some kind of political ideal. Hey, married people live longer, man.”

  I just don’t want to settle for comfortable misery like you’ve got, Bert thought. But he said, “I just don’t feel I can relate to the women I meet. If they’re not shallow, then they’re insanely career driven. And I can’t believe you’ve got me talking about this crap again. I’m proud of being an aging bachelor, and let’s leave it at that. Maybe I’ll come out for Christmas. I got to go, man. Work. Thanks for calling. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

  Bert hung up and looked at the gulls once more. They were diving for garbage floating in the ocean.

  Then Derry—with her bone-white hair and dark skin and four separate piercings at her nose and mouth—burst through her back gate and ran
onto the beach. She was wearing nothing but a long T-shirt that didn’t quite cover her ass, her short brown legs pumping as she ran away from the cops. She stumbled in the sand and fell—and two Quiebra PD officers stalked up to her. One of them glanced over at Bert; smiled and shook his head ruefully.

  “Drugs!” the cop said. Bert recognized the guy—Officer Wharton.

  Bert nodded, watching as they caught the writhing, sobbing girl, one of them expertly pinning her, the other locking the handcuffs in place. “I’m not on any fucking drugs!” she yelled, turning her dark eyes to Bert. “I’m not! They put their conversion thing in me—” Her eyes dilated, terrified, her mouth quivering between the words. He could see some other piercing, flashing at the back of her tongue. Kind of far back in the throat for a piercing. She was yammering on and on as they manhandled her—not too roughly— toward her condo. “—they tried to change me and I was fighting it. If you get mad and you try, you can stop it from taking you over— sometimes you can—and they can’t let you fight it and—please call somebody outside. They have to be outside the—”

  They dragged her back into the condo, and presumably out the front. After a while he heard the cop siren Dopplering away.

  Bert sagged into his deck chair, surprised at the emotion he felt after seeing the girl dragged away. He’d barely known her. He’d suspected she was crazy. But he’d have felt this upset, he supposed, even if he hadn’t known her at all. She was in distress, and with mental illness, real paranoia like that, there was so little they could do. The poor kid. There were so many insane people around— especially living on the streets in Berkeley and San Francisco— sometimes you wondered if some pollutant was behind it, or some sort of epidemic virus.

  He sighed, and thought, Move on, Bert. Work up ahead.

  He got up to toss the remains of his salad over the low wall to the beach—hoping his neighbors didn’t see it, they hated it when he did that—and watched first one gull, then a scrapping flock of seagulls converge on it.

  Then he went to find his coat and car keys. He hoped the car would run.

  Adair was at school, trailing along after Waylon, after-hours. He was going to Mr. Morgenthal’s electronics shop. Waylon was working on some kind of radio that could, he thought, pick up “secret government frequencies” he’d read about at disinfo.com, only he told Mr. Morgenthal it was an ordinary CB and that he wanted to use some school equipment.

  Adair was feeling shitty. First of all, she still felt uncomfortable around her parents. That weird ritual in the garage. Some kind of sex thing? Hard to believe. But what else could it be?

  She felt like she was a mute, or a ghost; she was around people, but she couldn’t talk to them, not about what was on her mind. There was Waylon, but she felt reluctant to talk to him about what was happening with her parents. His theories about things were always so extreme. She had opened up a little at lunchtime, though, saying, “You know what, I just feel like there’s something wrong with my parents, like the whole town is off, but—maybe I’m just imagining it. But my mom and dad, I don’t get it.”

  He just chuckled dryly and shook his head. “Tell me about it. My mom is so-oo fucked up. And my dad—he got mad and just said, ‘the hell with ’em both.’ Well, maybe he didn’t say the hell with ’em both, but he acts like that. We haven’t heard from him in . . .” There was a little catch in his voice when he said that. He seemed to brood about it for a while, and she didn’t feel like she could say any more. Even though she felt that whatever was going on was a whole lot worse. She didn’t want to diminish what he was feeling, but she didn’t know how to explain. It sounded insane when she tried.

  So even though she was walking down the hall with Waylon, she felt a stab of loneliness. Cleo hadn’t even called to tell her she’d dyed her blond hair with Day-Glo blue streaks.

  Danelle had moved away, and Siseela was someone she saw mostly only at school.

  And here came Cleo and Donny around the corner, walking together but not as close as they used to, Cleo with her blue streaks, Donny’s hair in short dreads. Cleo on her cell phone; Donny checking his beeper. Handsome with high cheekbones, a strong chin, Donny could be an actor, but he wanted to run for office someday.

  Siseela came up then, too, from behind—a gangly girl with corn-rowed hair, bland blouse, and always a long skirt, because her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. She got a lot of sympathy for being stuck with Jehovah’s Witness parents, and her having to pretend she believed in that bullshit just to get along.

  All of them carrying books or backpacks, the kids clustered near the door of the shop. Waylon, who was “about as social as the Unabomber,” as Cal put it, sighed and leaned against the wall with an impatient look toward Morgenthal’s classroom; not wanting to talk to the group, wanting to go in, but knowing that Adair wanted him to wait for her.

  She thought, Maybe he’s into me, if he acts like that. Waiting for me when he wants to do something else. But then why doesn’t he make a move or something?

  “Lookit Cleo’s hair,” Siseela said. “She all like that singer Pink, only she’s Blue.”

  “I think it look good,” Donny was saying, talking to Siseela.

  Adair knew him: he’d say “it look good” to Siseela. Adair had heard him say, “I’m fittin’ to go to UC Berkeley, I get accepted,” to Siseela. Black English. But the day before, he’d said to Adair, “I’ve applied to Berkeley, and I think I can get in. I’m not totally sure.” With perfect diction.

  But then, half the white students were deliberately talking in Black English. White kids affectionately calling each other “nigger,” even. The black kids called them “white niggers”—or “wiggers.”

  Donny, anyway, had a jump on being a politician. He had the instincts.

  With Waylon squirming restlessly, the group talked about movies, complained about the jenky dances at the Youth Center, how the school was getting all shabby and “hella ghetto,” Cleo said, oblivious to Donny’s glare; he thought that expression was racist. And about how Siseela was getting her navel pierced without her parents knowing, and how she was going to hide it from them. Then she related with horror that they were going to make her do that door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness thing soon.

  “I’m not gonna be no JW pod people, yo,” she said. They talked about how a bunch of people had had their home PCs or Macs stolen. Donny said he’d heard that sometimes the computers had just been torn apart, parts stolen, and that brought up how there had been some kind of big rip-off from the electronics class, and some people’s cars had been stripped—and how freaked out they were. One of the kids was suicidal without his computer: ate two bottles of Tylenol and half his mom’s Valium, had to have his stomach pumped.

  Adair was covertly watching Waylon all this time. He had perked up at the talk about the thefts, then went back to ticking away at his Palm Pilot screen with the little stylus.

  Finally he stared into the tiny screen, nodded to himself, blew his lips out noisily, and walked off, going into Morgenthal’s electronics shop.

  The vice principal stalked down the hall with that why-are-you-guys-hanging-around-here-after-hours look, so the kids broke up. Waving good-bye to Siseela, Adair started to go after Waylon.

  Cleo stopped her. “Hey, is he your big thing now?”

  “Waylon? He’s my friend. And guess what, a friend is a big thing for some people.”

  Cleo didn’t take that bait. She just gave her hair a toss. Donny was backing toward the door, gesturing to Cleo come on, if you’re coming, but not necessarily urgent about it, and it looked to Adair as if Siseela was waiting for Donny at the exit door, maybe hoping that Cleo wouldn’t come.

  Adair thought, Good for you, Sissy.

  “So you going to get a piercing now, too, Cleo?” Adair asked, just to keep Cleo there.

  But Cleo shot Adair a cold look and went off to try to retrieve him. Adair shrugged and for Siseela’s benefit—behind Cleo’s back— made a fuck-you finger at Cleo.

/>   Siseela, looking Adair’s way, laughed and made an I-got-your-back sign with her hand.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Mr. Morgenthal was saying to Waylon, as Adair walked into the electronics shop. “Why would the kids do this? I mean, it’s all for them—for their lives! For their future .”

  He was almost in tears, looking around the ravaged electronics shop. There was something shocking in seeing a teacher about to cry. Especially a big, round, red-faced man like Mr. Morgenthal. He was always jolly and patient—except some days, when you could tell he was hungover. He wore his shop overalls and had his thinning brown hair slicked back. His thick-fingered hands were trembling on his desk as he sat behind it looking at the smashed-open oscilloscopes, the torn-open ham radios, the gutted hard drives.

  “Whoa,” Waylon said, staring at the wreckage.

  “Now you sound like Mason,” Adair muttered.

  “And there’s no room in the budget to buy everything again.” Morgenthal’s voice quavered.

  “You can probably get a lot of new stuff donated by some of those Silicon Valley places,” Waylon said. “Get better stuff now, maybe.”

  Mr. Morgenthal brightened a little. “You have a point.” But then he scowled again. “Still, I don’t understand this. Now, maybe I shouldn’t assume it was the kids who did this. Only, I thought it was some of our kids because, you know, it looks more like vandalism than burglary.”

  He went on and on like that for a long time, speculating, trying to understand.

  He was such an emotional man for a vocational electronics teacher, Adair thought. You’d think they’d be all cool and analytical, like a Vulcan. “You could get extra credit, helping me clean up, Waylon,” he said finally.

  “Actually,” the man in the doorway said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t touch anything just yet.”

  The three of them went silent and stared at the stranger. But was he a stranger? He looked sort of familiar, though his clothes didn’t belong to the vague memory Adair had of him. He was wearing chino slacks, an Arrow shirt, an open zip-up windbreaker. Tall, lean, good-looking guy. Then she knew what it was: he should’ve been in uniform. She’d seen him out at the satellite crash site, hadn’t she?