FSF, January 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  Next on the locking-up itinerary was the shed out behind his double-wide, but something about Fara's visit, and Little Boozy's veiled promises, made Ken reluctant to look at his collection tonight. He wondered if Fara had seen it; if so, she was one cool customer. He hadn't gotten a read on her either way, even though he'd thought her admission of sneaking around after hours had been leading up to a question about the shed. “Argh,” Ken said to the barn. He went back to the double-wide, put on Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, and boiled up some mac and cheese so he'd have something for his beer to wash down.

  The last thing in the world I want to do, he thought, is go over to Little Boozy's house and subject myself to his theories. Then he corrected himself. The truth was, he did want to see what Little Boozy had in his shed; he just didn't want Little Boozy around while he saw it. This was a dilemma, and sneaking around Boswell outbuildings wasn't a viable option, since Big Boozy was free with his buckshot and possessed neither the sensory sharpness nor the patience for Ken to identify himself before Big Boozy started shooting.

  "You know what,” Ken said out loud to an imagined group of Reptilian conspiracy types, “it's Little Boozy you should be talking to. Crazy bastards."

  He finished his beer, rinsed the mac and cheese crud out of the bowl, and fired up the truck. Little Boozy lived down a dirt road that angled off another dirt road somewhere between US-12 and Ohio. Remembering his directions, Ken drove past the turnoff that led directly to the Boswells’ ancestral manse and waited until he caught the outline of a shed in the periphery of the truck's headlights. He parked on the side of the road and killed the truck's lights, taking a minute to steel himself for the coming onslaught of lizard-man theories. The light of the waxing moon was enough for him to pick out a path through the brush to the shack, and by the time Ken had gotten to it his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could tell that a dim light was on inside.

  "Hey,” he said. The back of his neck prickled in anticipation of buckshot. “Little Boozy. You in there?"

  "Yeah, man, come on in,” came Little Boozy's voice from inside.

  Ken found the door and opened it with a squeal. Immediately upon entering he kicked over a jar of something and heard its contents dripping through gaps in the floorboards. “Goddamn, man,” Little Boozy said. “Watch your feet. That's money, there."

  The light in the shed came from a kerosene lantern that Little Boozy had turned down so low that its wick was barely glowing. There was a smell in the air, ghosting around the edges of Little Boozy's own emissions, that vaguely reminded Ken of chicken broth. He got a little queasy.

  "Money?” Ken said. He was thinking of Jamie's comment about Boozy's own stash. “Didn't know your family was still in this business, Little Boozy. Prohibition's been over a long time."

  "Not for what I got, it hasn't. Check this out."

  Little Boozy turned up the lantern a touch, and Ken saw that two walls of the shed were entirely taken up with metal shelves lined two and three deep with mason jars. It wasn't bright enough to see what was in the jars, but there was enough light to see that most of them contained solid bits suspended in a clear fluid. Now Ken was thinking of weird specimens in a biology lab and that thought in association with the lingering specter of chicken broth wasn't doing his stomach any good at all.

  "Ew,” he said.

  "Ew?” Little Boozy echoed. “Come on, Ken, you was in Vietnam."

  "I fixed trucks,” Ken said, with the horrible feeling he got when he knew he was about to be dragged into the Reptilian conspiracy again.

  "Whatever,” Little Boozy said. He picked up a flashlight from the table that took up most of the space not occupied by shelves. “I told you I was going to set you straight. How about this? On the house."

  He took down a jar from the top shelf nearest the table and poured its contents through a strainer into a watering can. Then he blew the dust out of a drinking glass he found somewhere in the tabletop debris and poured about an inch of liquid into it. “Give her a try,” he said, holding the glass out to Ken.

  "Right,” Ken said.

  "Seriously,” Little Boozy said. “Here, I'll show you.” He tossed the contents of the glass back like a shot of tequila. “Cures what ails you."

  "Don't know that anything ails me."

  "Trust me, this'll change your mind.” Little Boozy filled the glass and held it out to Ken again. Ken was more disturbed by the idea of drinking after Little Boozy than by whatever was actually in the glass, but to his astonishment he found himself accepting the glass and drinking from it. The liquid was cool, and had a faint burnt taste, along with a slight bitterness and behind that a little sting that got his eyes watering.

  "Okay,” he said when he'd put the glass down. “Now what?"

  "Lizard-man tea,” Little Boozy said. “You're in for a treat."

  The beam of the flashlight illuminated a row of jars, each of which had a small piece of one of the things that weren't turtles in it. Ken's stomach did a slow roll, and not just from nausea; he was thinking of his own shed with his own collection, and it was no easy thing to be forced into a confrontation with the fact that you had common interests with a guy like Little Boozy Boswell.

  Tomorrow morning I'm taking my collection out to the dump, Ken thought.

  "So,” he forced himself to say. “How is this money?"

  "First thing is, I'm saving all of these for when the government finally answers my letters,” Little Boozy said. “I figure they got some kind of interest in the lizard-men, and I'm like an authority on the topic. Because I observe, you know? I pay attention.” Little Boozy tapped himself on the temple with the flashlight. “Second thing is...."

  He broke off and looked at Ken, a knowing grin on his face. What Ken initially thought was a wave of visceral horror washed over him. Then he fell over next to the table and during an indeterminate period of inspecting the debris washed up around the table's legs he realized that he was wasted. “Boozy, you motherfucker, you poisoned me,” he said, and Little Boozy cracked up.

  "Boo-yoom-fuck-poin'ee,” Little Boozy mimicked. “Ah ha ha ha ha. That's great. Told you you were in for a treat."

  The initial blast wave of the explosion in Ken's head passed, and he sat up. Something was moving in the darkness under the table. After intense examination he determined that it was his own shadow cast by the kerosene lantern. Except it wasn't. “Agh,” Ken said, and scrambled backward away from the table, banging into the shelves opposite it. The jars set up a clanking racket, and he ducked his head waiting for a hail of glass and bits of lizard-man. No, not lizard-man. Ken willed himself not to adopt Little Boozy's terminology, lest he go from there to believing Little Boozy's ideas, which event didn't bear contemplation.

  Still chuckling, Little Boozy said, “I may have gave you a little too much for your first time."

  Ken could feel the jars hitting the back of his head, but worse than that he could feel the fluid flooding down his collar, feel the bits of not-lizard-man stuck in his hair, feel the toxins from the fluid creeping through his pores and into his capillaries and from there to his already reeling brain—which was, or at least part of it was, singing. Okay, he told himself. This isn't the first time you've tripped. Okay, it is the first time you've tripped on some kind of secretion from the mysterious critters that keep showing up squashed on US-12, but a trip is a trip. “Is a trip,” he said.

  "It sure is,” Little Boozy said. “Business keeps up the way it is, I'm going to have to buy a bunker so's the big dealers from Detroit don't just take it away from me."

  Ken suffered a vision of Big Boozy blasting away at a band of Detroit gangsters. Out of nowhere he had a nearly irresistible urge to get up and start jumping up and down. Overlapping this compulsion, like a bubble popping in his mind, the thought arose: so that's what the kids at the minigolf course are up to. He lifted his head, and was vaguely shocked to discover that he was dry and free of biological flotsam.

  "They wouldn't know whe
re to find the...” What was the word, Ken wondered. “Product,” he finished.

  "That's my ace in the hole,” Little Boozy agreed.

  Ken struggled to his feet, supporting himself on the shelves. The clanking of jars terrified him, but he held himself together. Little Boozy's voice had acquired color, mostly red, and Ken thought it smelled funny too, but that might have been just Boozy.

  "But how—I mean, who drinks lizard-man roadkill, anyway?” he asked.

  Sensing he had the upper hand, Little Boozy got expansive. “There's a story there,” he said with as much bonhomie as a guy like him could muster. “My old man, you know, he grew up eating possum, skunk, turtle, whatever he could find, so one time when I had one of the more disfigured specimens in the house—left it on the kitchen table while I was in the can—he went and fried it up and ate the goddamn thing. Now that would have been okay, but then he took the parts he hadn't fried and used ‘em for soup stock. We ate that soup, and I'm here to tell you I don't remember a thing else about that day. Was good soup, too."

  This made Ken hungry. He was starting to get on top of the trip, in fact starting to like it. The edges weren't as hard as he remembered acid being, once you got through the first wave. All those kids pogoing up and down at the minigolf course, he thought. Little Boozy Boswell has ‘em stoked on alien juice.

  "I did some experimenting,” Little Boozy went on, “and I found out that you don't have to cook anything. Fact, it's better if you don't. Lizard-man tea."

  "If there's lizard-men at the bottom of Wamplers Lake,” Ken said, “and they find out you've been using their friends and loved ones for tea, you might find some trouble."

  "Let ‘em try,” Little Boozy said.

  Infected by Little Boozy's bravado, Ken thought, Yeah, let ‘em. Then he managed a moment of lucidity and concluded that one of the effects of lizard-man tea was a profound tendency to be suggestible. Even though he didn't believe in a city of lizard-men, he had a moment of stark terror at the thought of a wave of Reptilian (the part of his brain that had been singing what he now recognized as part of the same screwball ensemble piece favored by the kids at the minigolf course interrupted itself long enough to yowl aaaaahhhhh! Reptilian!) invaders from the weedy depths of Wamplers Lake. Or from the woods behind Mystery Hill, which was where Ken had found much of his own collection. Whoever the little critters really were, they tended to run afoul of the coyotes roaming around back there.

  Any alien monsters who can't stay out of the way of coyotes and tourists on US-12 won't pose much of a threat, he thought. He was a little disappointed at the evaporation of his alien-invasion fantasy; it was more fun than imagining that they were just a bunch of bumblers with a certain illicit chemical usefulness.

  "What do you charge for this, anyway?” he asked.

  "Five dollars a jar,” Little Boozy said. “I could go higher, but I read this book that said you shouldn't price yourself out of the market before you get brand recognition."

  Ken's earlier conversations with Fara Oussemitski had been slowly steeping in the lizard-man tea, and now an idea occurred to him that was so preposterous he wrote it off as part of the hallucinogen. After all, when Little Boozy Boswell's voice was red and you almost ran screaming from the room because of a bunch of broken and seeping jars that were neither broken nor seeping, it was prudent to regard your intuition suspiciously. But—if gravity could be used to talk between universes, between branes, what if it could be used to travel? Yow, Ken thought. That's what the feds would be interested in. If the Pentagon got hold of this....

  I have to talk to Fara, he thought.

  "Boozy,” he said. “You are a piss-poor human being to be selling this shit to kids."

  Little Boozy shrugged. The action set off visible convection currents in the air around him, and the convection currents bent the notes in Ken's head, and he could have sworn that he was sliding sideways along the floor.

  "I mean it,” Ken said. “This is bullshit."

  "Whatever,” Little Boozy said.

  Ken went to the door. Wonder if I can drive, he thought. He entertained the idea of cruising US-12 until he saw Fara's van in a motel parking lot. Then he entertained the idea of being pulled over on US-12 and dealing with an annoyed state trooper who would know Ken was under the influence, but not of what. Recipe for a night in jail, he thought, and reluctantly came to the conclusion that if he could drive in a straight line, it ought to be back home.

  "If you call the cops, I'm gonna burn your place down,” Little Boozy said.

  "Okay, Boozy,” Ken said, and let the door bang shut behind him. The moonlight made him itchy, and the stars were moving in funny directions, but he found the truck, got the key in the ignition on the first try, and didn't even get stuck in the ditch turning around. Not bad, he thought. I can still handle it. Those old Sixties-honed reflexes never quite go away. He got home, found another beer in the fridge, and sipped it while he waited to come all the way down. The lizard-man tea—dammit, he told himself, stop calling it that—was a fast trip. Already he felt almost normal again, only with some ragged edges at the boundaries of his senses and that damn droning music in the back of his mind. The carbonation in the beer organized itself into a sort of percussion ensemble; Ken tapped his foot in time with it and thought that he wouldn't mind doing this again.

  Also he wouldn't mind getting back in the truck and seeing where Fara was staying, partially just so he would know something she didn't know he knew. This was an impulse for payback, he knew, spawned by her sneaking around his place in the middle of the night. Argh, introspection. The camp whore that followed the army of intoxication. Ken chuckled to himself at his ridiculousness, and fell asleep, only to be awakened by a merciless hammering on the double-wide's door. Still on his couch, and still in his clothes, Ken shambled to the door and opened it to find Fara on the front step.

  "Jesus Christ,” he said, keenly aware that he looked like eight miles of bad road. She, on the other hand, looked like she was ready for a nightclub instead of a physics experiment. “What time is it?"

  "Seven-thirty. I wanted to talk to you before you opened up."

  He left the door open and went into the kitchen in search of coffee. She came in and followed him into the kitchen. There was no coffee, so Ken got a glass of water instead. “Want one?” he asked her.

  Fara shook her head. She was wearing long spangly earrings that drew Ken's attention uncomfortably to the line of her throat. He drank off the glass of water and said, “Okay. What are we talking about?"

  "Grammar,” she said. “What if I told you that there really were alien beings communicating from another brane, and that I was starting to figure out what they were saying?"

  Still feeling little aftershocks of the lizard-man tea, Ken had a hard time not telling Fara that Little Boozy Boswell was way ahead of her. He managed, though. She was rummaging through her bag looking for something, and Ken also had a hard time not saying something along the lines of How about we have dinner sometime. But he managed that, too. “Look,” she said, coming up with a much-folded and -annotated sheet of paper. “These are the times when I've detected signals that I can understand. They're sending on a twenty-four-cycle, do you know what that means? Either they've heard something from us—which means someone out there is doing something veeeerrrrry secret—or they've been here.” Her eyes shone with the excitement of discovery.

  I can't do it, Ken thought. She can't know about Little Boozy yet.

  He could, however, show her his own collection. “Fara,” he said. “You haven't, you know, snooped around any of the buildings here, have you?"

  "Ken,” she said. “I was here—am here—to do science. You afraid I'm going to steal your extra golf balls?"

  "If you knew how much the colored ones cost, you might. Come on,” Ken said. He found his shed key on top of the fridge. “Something you should see."

  * * * *

  He was a little afraid that she would be angry, or disbelievin
g, or scornful, or something; but Fara took one look at Ken's collection and said, “Oh. My. God. Fabulous."

  There were nine of them. For most of the seven years since he'd seen the first, Ken had been feeling guilty about stuffing them, but now that he had Little Boozy as an ethical barometer, taxidermy seemed positively beneficent. He'd staged them in a couple of different ways, remembering museum trips as a kid when from one visit to the next, new information about dinosaurs or something would result in completely changed exhibits. So a couple of them were posed as if hunting, a couple standing upright, and in a fit of silliness he'd set two of them up on either side of a chessboard. “That's Boris and Bobby right there,” he said as he pointed them out to Fara. She picked up one of the standing specimens and turned it over in her hands.