Alien Nation #5 - Slag Like Me

by Barry B. Longyear

Matt’s face crashed into a glower. “What’re you talking about?”

  She dropped her purse on the couch and crossed the living room floor. When she was in front of Matt, she put one arm around his neck and touched his face with her other hand. “You look as if you’ve just lost your best friend.”

  “My best friend?”

  She placed a tiny kiss on his lips and smiled. “Tell me what’s bothering you, Matt. I can’t fix it ‘til I know what’s broken.”

  He placed his hands on her waist and drew her toward him as he looked into her eyes. The skin of her face was very smooth and pale, her ear folds little more than bumps on the sides of her head. But what was that thing that made her “feel” different to him? What was the thing in him that would make him “feel” different to a Tenct? Her eyes were captivating. Strange eyes. Were they a touch Asian? Or were they just a touch alien?

  “Well, now I know,” she stated.

  “Know? Know what?”

  “Now I know what it feels like to be a bug under a microscope.”

  “Sorry, Cath. It’s this new undercover assignment. It looks as though something might have happened to Ellison Robb.”

  Cathy’s eyebrows went up as her mouth fell open in shock. “The columnist? ‘Slag Like Me’?”

  Matt nodded. “That’s the one, except Ellison Robb is a pseudonym. His name’s Micky Cass. About something happening to him, remember I just said might. Nothing’s for sure yet. He seems to have missed a couple of appointments and that’s all we know right now. We’re taking every precaution, though, just in case.”

  She held him at arm’s length and looked into his eyes. “In case? Just in case of what? What does this have to do with you? What kind of undercover assignment?” He couldn’t meet her gaze. “This must really be good,” she cracked.

  Matt shrugged his shoulders slightly. “Oh, it’s good. Grazer wants me to follow Cass’s footsteps through the entire process of becoming a Tenct in case some Tenct purist wacko out there took offense—”

  “Bait,” she said, her voice flat, her expression angry.

  “Yeah,” Matt answered, nodding his head. “Now that you put it that way, that’s a good way to put it.” He elevated his gaze until he was looking into her eyes. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Micky Cass is famous enough to have enemies. I’m Elmer Q. Cop Nobody from Craphead, CA.”

  “For not having anything to worry about, you certainly look worried to me.”

  Matt scratched the back of his neck, still unable to meet her gaze. “Well, it’s going to involve a little bit of plastic surgery.”

  “A little bit?” One of Cathy’s eyebrows went up. “To turn a human into a Tenctonese? A little bit?”

  “Okay. Quite a bit. But it’s all reversible. I’ll still be the same jerk everybody ignores and hates when the job’s done.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Again he found it unbearable to look into her eyes. He focused instead on a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling that neither of them had found the time to remove. “I may be that way for a number of days.”

  “That way?”

  “Looking like a Newcomer. Here at home. Together, you and me, in bed, in the shower. It’s not like a Halloween costume. I’ve got to wear it until the doctors take it off. Is that going to change things? I mean, between us? If I look worried, I think that’s what I’m worried about.”

  “Mmmm,” she hummed, “kinky. It just might change things. Kind of like the time you wanted me to wear that lace postage stamp from Victoria’s Secret.” She grabbed him around the buttocks and squeezed. “I don’t care what they do to the rest, but they’d best keep their hands off your cute little tush. That’s mine.”

  “I’m serious, Cathy. Is me changing going to change things between us?”

  For a moment a look of pity crossed Cathy’s face to be replaced immediately by one of compassion as she put her arms around his neck and drew him close to her. “I know you don’t believe this, Matt, but you aren’t what you look like or what others think about you. You are you.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Matt. “So the undercover assignment doesn’t bother you?”

  She pulled her head back and looked into his eyes. “Police work bothers me, Matt.” She buried her face into his neck. “But this isn’t any worse than half a dozen other undercover jobs you’ve been given. You’ll have backup, others there to help.”

  “Yes,” he lied as he glanced up at the cobweb, his mind’s eye imagining a tiny fleck of protoplasm climbing into the Krakor’s mouth. “Someone to watch over me.”

  C H A P T E R 6

  DOBBS LEANED AGAINST the sink and closed his eyes. Words, regrets, and a curse on a planet’s science that could not come up with a practical time machine to aid the verbally impulsive to take back what they had said. The past is the past, however, and living in it and in the land of “what if” is the core of the sickness. Hence, empty the head. Wipe that slate; focus on the present moment.

  Taking out the mental garbage. That was always the first task of any day if it was to be a bearable day. Lesson one from the cop shrink. Detective Sergeant Richard Dobbs was still on lesson one.

  Many days weren’t bearable. Dobbs could always trace the cause of the disaster to failing to take out the head trash. He never would have listened to the police shrink if that’s all the guy had been. But the therapist had once carried the tin, and so Dobbs had listened.

  He looked at his half-shaved image in the bathroom mirror. His eyes were hooded, the jaw set, the face a wall built to hide himself from the world. “Rick,” he said to himself, “your head is full of shit.”

  He closed his eyes as he whispered the words the cop shrink had put on him after his partner had been killed the year before. “You can’t function, you can’t even survive, if you live in a constant state of rage, guilt, and shame. The consequence of cutting yourself off from those feelings, however, is you wind up being unfeeling and insensitive.”

  He felt the heat fill his face. He couldn’t make up his mind where the heat came from: his rage over Francisco’s Newton Street Nigger Nicker or his own guilt and embarrassment over his use of the term Soto Street Slag Slasher. “Both,” he whispered to himself, “Both.”

  There was more.

  It wasn’t so much that using the label had angered George. It was that Dobbs couldn’t see that it would hurt him. It had never crossed his mind. As he picked up his razor and scraped at his face, he remembered something his father had told him. It had been about the utter astonishment of some of the “white” people in his hometown of Waynesboro, Virginia, to learn back in the sixties that the “coloreds” in the town objected to the term “nigger.”

  When he had first heard the story, little Ricky had been eight years old. He hadn’t believed his father because he couldn’t bring himself to accept that any human could be so deadened in his feelings and perceptions not to know how that word landed on certain ears. As he rinsed and dried his face he mentally whipped himself with the fact that he had done the same thing with the Tencts.

  He had never called anyone a slag except when telling a joke to a non-Tenctonese. That he had done. Like any member of the blue frat in the locker room telling old Rastus jokes, that he had done. Some of the jokes were funny.

  “Just like some of the nigger, Hebe, and Polack jokes are really funny,” he muttered. “Yeah. How many humans does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

  What was it the cop shrink had said? Flogging yourself never was part of the recovery process. That’s easy for him to say. He didn’t believe that there were certain mistakes he just couldn’t make.

  Slag.

  The term had come easily to Rick’s lips. Too easily. That was the mistake he couldn’t make: to do to another what had been done to him.

  Slag.

  Why not? “Slag” didn’t have anything to do with him. The word “slag” didn’t touch him any more than the word “nigger” touched
the “whites.”

  How did the name “whitey” land on certain ears? What about Redskin? Chink? Spic? He didn’t really know. Why should he develop a case of nerves over it? Why, indeed?

  “Damned idiot,” he muttered to himself as he wiped up the sink and tossed the dirty towel into the laundry hamper and slammed the lid shut.

  “What was that, Rick?” came a sleepy voice from the bedroom.

  “Nothing.”

  There was a pause followed by the sleepy face of Kit Dobbs appearing in the door. “Nothing? You sure you don’t have a fork stuck in your garbage disposal?”

  Slowly he faced his wife, his eyebrows raised. “Say I’m tossing out my melon mush in a noisy bucket?”

  Her face grew serious. “What’s the matter, Rick?”

  “Honest. It’s nothing.”

  “Honest?” Her very fair skin reddened as her brown eyes grew darker. “Honest? Don’t you let that word out of your lying mouth, baby. You know what the therapist said. You keep stacking it up inside, sooner or later it’ll come out the top of your head. Let me be honest, too. There isn’t anything that makes me happier than sending my man out the front door with a gun full of hot loads and a heart full of murder.”

  “I’m not going to murder anyone.”

  “So, Rick, you going to tell me what it is?”

  He glanced down, sighed, and folded his arms. “It’s George. You know, Matt Sikes’s partner?”

  “Sure. I remember George. Beaver burger raw, mushrooms and Swiss, hold the mayo.” She grinned, “At the cookout year before last.”

  “Yeah. Well, I said something to him. Something not very nice, he figured. I didn’t think much about it—hell, I didn’t think about it at all.”

  “And then George said something, and you said something more, and George said—”

  “You got the picture. I had to get out of there before I did kill someone.”

  Kit Dobbs came all of the way into the room, her delicate fingers pushing her auburn hair back from her eyes. She wrapped her hands around his arm, reached up, and kissed his cheek. “You’ve had fights before and gotten over them. What is it this time?”

  He turned his head and looked down into her eyes. “Kit, am I a racist?”

  Her eyebrows went up as her jaw dropped. “A racist? Rick, don’t you think marrying me is a pretty weird thing to do for a racist?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean it like that. I don’t think of you being ‘white’ anyway.”

  “Neither do I. Have you suddenly gone ‘black’ on me?”

  Dobbs burst out with an involuntary laugh. “I don’t know, but I sure had a black attack yesterday. I know because George Francisco had me smokin’.”

  A tiny frown creased her forehead. “Now, why would he do a thing like that, Rick?”

  “I guess I pushed a button of his.”

  “You guess?”

  Dobbs pursed his lips and arched an eyebrow at her. “Are you sure you’re not sneaking out nights to go to law school?”

  “All I do is teach piano, baby. Teach piano and love you.”

  “You’d make a great prosecutor.”

  “I still haven’t forgotten my question.”

  Dobbs shook himself free from her grip, took his fresh shirt from the hanger on the back of the door, and began putting it on. “Like I said. You’d make a great prosecutor.” He buttoned it up, turned up his collar, and took his tie from the hanger. “Okay. I pushed a button. I used the S word around him and he took offense.”

  She looked at her husband’s reflection in the mirror. “And he came back with the big N?”

  “Sort of. He was trying to show me that what I was saying was basically the same thing that he was saying.”

  “And?” She turned him around and began straightening his necktie.

  “And he was right. It was. It was, and I needed to be told that. But, damn, I don’t like it. I don’t like being told, and I especially don’t like the fact that I needed to be told.” He turned and looked down at her. “So, am I a racist? Am I just as bad as those New Republic liberals in the ’burbs, carrying their equality signs on prime time and telling watermelon jokes after hours?”

  She searched his eyes for a moment, then sat on the edge of the tub. “On a talk show once I heard a person—she was Tenctonese—I heard her say that anyone who uses racial labels and believes that they’re actually talking about something is a racist.”

  “Racial labels?”

  “The usual invectives, in addition to ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Asian,’ ‘native American,’ and so on.”

  “Hell, that makes pretty near everybody a racist. Everybody in the world.”

  “Almost everybody. The show I was watching was about persons, both human and Tenctonese, who reject the usual labels and refuse to use them.”

  “Well, what do they call us?”

  She shrugged and held out her hands. “Rick and Kit Dobbs.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, baby. What do they call us? You know, the brothers and sisters? African-Americans? Blacks? Negroes?”

  Kit smiled as she stared into space for a moment. “It was a very interesting program. They would take someone’s definition of a racial label, such as ‘black,’ and then they would search through the audience until they found one or more exceptions, invalidating the definition. Just for example, there was melanin. Anyone who has melanin in their skin is ‘black.’ They showed that all of the so-called ‘whites’ in the audience had melanin in their skin, and some of them had more melanin than some of the so-called ‘blacks’ in the audience. There was one person in the audience who had no melanin in his skin at all, and he was an albino who called himself ‘black.’ ” She grinned. “They did the same thing with nose shape, hair, eyes, ancestral origins, and everything else. The point they were making was that none of the labels refer to anything real. According to current science, every American, with the exception of the Tencts, are African-Americans.”

  “You can’t define racism away.”

  “No. Racism is very real. It’s only races that are fictions . . . according to the show.” She held out her hands and shrugged. “It was just another talk show.”

  “What do you think about it? What they said. Do you believe it?”

  “They were very convincing and I haven’t heard anything since that disproves what they were saying.”

  “Kit, if you go along with that stuff, that makes me a racist.”

  “It makes me a racist, too, baby. Everybody’s got a heap of head trash to toss out, including me.” She stood up and placed her hand against his cheek. “That trash is some damned sticky stuff, too.”

  After breakfast, Dobbs’s partner, Jerry Kirk, drove over to the edge of Monterey Park and pulled up in front of Dobbs’s house. As his partner stood on the stoop with his wife, Kirk turned his head and looked away. “Damn!” he swore beneath his breath. It just didn’t go. It didn’t go at all. Dobbs, blacker than the proverbial ace, married to a white woman. They didn’t have to do that stuff in public view—all that kissing and ass-patting. Why can’t they at least keep it indoors? It’s wrong! It’s flat damned wrong!

  He looked to his left at the house across the street from Dobbs’s. Some Chicano guy in a suit was walking from his front door across his tiny lawn to the curb where he got into his bright red Mazda sports coupe. The woman at the door looked Korean. Maybe Japanese or Chinese. Maybe Indian or Chicano. A lot of them looked Asian. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  “Man, what in the hell is eating you?”

  Kirk turned his head and saw Dobbs’s face looking at him through the passenger-side window. His face flushed as he looked to the front. “Nothing. Get in, we’re late.”

  Dobbs pulled open the door, dropped into the passenger seat, and shut the door. As he pulled the seat belt across his body, he kept looking at his new partner. “Give, son. If you’ve got a problem, I need to know.”

  He started the car, put it in gear, an
d pulled away from the curb. “You don’t need to know anything about my personal life.”

  “If it affects your performance, I do. I know we haven’t hit it off together, Kirk, but we have to work together. When we get jammed, my life is going to depend on you, and if you’re worried about your leather bar date dumping you—”

  “I am not gay!”

  “I didn’t say you were. But you better tell me what’s eating your ass, man. If you don’t, you can forget about checking out Trassler, Rantu, the makeup man, and the slaghunters because we’re going straight to the command center where I am going to have Grazer send you to the shrinker. You got me?”

  They drove in silence for a long time. As Kirk turned the car south onto Atlantic, he said, “Okay, Dobbs. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me, and you’re not going to like it, okay?”

  “Get it off your chest.”

  Jerry Kirk nodded in silence for a moment, and then said, “Okay. Understand I got nothing against blacks. I grew up around them, worked with them in the army, and went through the academy with them. I even had one for a training officer when I was assigned to University division. I think I could’ve even worked with you. We wouldn’t be taking showers together, but we could’ve been okay. Understand?”

  “Is it my deodorant?”

  “No! It’s not your damned deodorant! Now if we’re going to be serious about this, let’s get to it. Otherwise, let’s just drop it.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  Jerry Kirk moistened his lips and nodded again as if to give himself permission to proceed. “Okay. I’ll just say it. It got me the first time I picked you up.”

  “I thought you might want to use the car. Would you rather I picked you up?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s not picking you up. I’m glad to do it, and you’re right, I needed the car. Thanks.” He glanced at Dobbs, frowned, and returned his gaze to the street ahead. “It’s—you know—your wife.”

  Dobbs’s eyebrows went up. “Kit? What about her?”

  “Not her exactly. It’s her and you. You know what I mean?”

  “No. What do you mean?”