Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  More and more, she was a little girl. But traces of the soldier remained. And probably always would.

  A few of her classmates played in the courtyard. They shouted and waved at Wally. He knew most of them; he and Ghost had been coming here since before the Institute opened. There was little Cesar, whom he’d known as long as Ghost, and who faced similar counseling issues; Moto, the boy who exhaled searing gouts of flame when he got excited, or frightened, or a case of the hiccups; Allen, whose mother and father were both in jail; Jo, who always wore the top half of a cow costume and refused to say anything except “Moo” and “Dickwad.” Some of the children had come from Africa, like Moto and Cesar, though not with Wally. Others had come to the Institute in the intervening years.

  The world was full of troubled kids. But you couldn’t save them all. Wally had learned that the hard way. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t forget the smell of the mass grave in Nyunzu, where his pen pal had been murdered. Failing Lucien was the worst thing he had ever done. The shame made Wally so sad and angry that sometimes he wanted to punch the whole world.

  He swallowed the stone in his throat and waved to the kids. “Howdy,” he said.

  An immense baobab tree shaded the sandbox. Wally laid a hand on its bark. “Hi, you,” he whispered. The surrounding building shielded the tree from wind, but sometimes it seemed as though the leaves rustled in response to his greeting. The baobab smelled of rain, and jungle, and a lost friend. It made Wally smile, but it also made him feel lonely. Sometimes it felt like his ribs were still shattered, pushing spurs of bone to pierce his heart. But he tried not to let it show.

  Wally knelt in the sandbox. “So what kind of trouble are you guys getting into today?”

  “Moo,” said Jo. Her cotton cow ears flopped up and down. “Dickwad. Moo.”

  “She says she’s glad you’re back,” said Cesar. “I’m moving to Brooklyn!” he added. “I’m going to have a room and my own bed and everything. And they even said I could have a birthday party! You’ll come, right?”

  “Heck yeah, pal. We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Moto sniffled. His tears wafted across the courtyard like smoke from an extinguished candle. Wally put an arm around him. The heat from his breath seeped into Wally’s skin, conducting through the metal across his back and sides, to soothe an old surgery scar/weld. It felt good.

  The poor kid didn’t get many hugs. Wally also knew, from what Ghost told him, that Moto had been bounced from his third foster home. Another accidental bedroom fire. His foster parents lacked the patience to sleep in shifts.

  “Hey,” he said. “You know what Ghost asked me the other day? She asked if we could throw a party for your birthday. Would you like that?”

  The sniffles trailed off. “Really?”

  “Well sure, why not?”

  Moto hugged him again. Wally made a mental note to buy another fire extinguisher.

  When Wally sifted his fingers through the sand they came back covered with random phrases: “The joy a.” “A rainbow it axe.” “Shadow the the running barn to under.” A few days earlier another foster parent had brought a set of refrigerator poetry magnets for the kids’ message board. At least half of these were already scattered in the sand.

  Wally didn’t understand poetry. He didn’t read much.

  Allen saw the magnets stuck to his iron fingers and tossed the letter “H” at his chest. It stuck with a muted click. Wally could feel the tug of the magnet through his coveralls, like a faint buzzing in the rivets of his sternum.

  “Gosh,” he said. “That tickles.”

  Moto saw what Allen had done and flung a handful of magnets and sand at Wally’s shoulder. He blinked the sand out of his eyes to see the letters “R,” “G,” and the word “cattle” stuck to his forearm. Moto covered his mouth when he giggled; little tongues of flame fluttered through his fingers. Then Jo got into the act. Wally lay sprawled in the sand while the kids climbed over him. Laughter and the stink of melted plastic filled the courtyard.

  Wally had to pluck the magnets from his scalp a couple of times. They made his head feel funny, like he had a mild fever, or as if his brain were stuffed with cotton. The game went for a few more minutes until Ghost’s session ended. Her therapist followed her into the courtyard.

  “Moo,” said Jo.

  “Hi, Ghost,” said Cesar.

  “Huh,” Ghost said, and shrugged.

  The therapist beckoned to Wally. He rolled gently to his feet, careful not to pinch little fingers or toes under his bulk. He hugged Ghost just as gently, but more firmly.

  “How was your day? I broke another parking meter.”

  She shrugged, and then became insubstantial to pull away from his hug. She floated to the sandbox, toes dangling an inch above the ground, before settling to earth alongside Allen. It had been a while since she’d been so withdrawn. Wally wondered if he’d find her standing over his bed in the middle of the night with a knife in her hands, like the haunted little girl he’d met in the jungle.

  “Okey-dokey. You guys just hang out for a sec,” said Wally. He followed the doctor into a cloister alongside the courtyard. “What’s going on, Doc?”

  The psychiatrist wore her hair pulled back, and the scarf around her neck matched her earrings. She looked fancy, like somebody on TV. Her name tag read “Dr. Miranda.” She shook her head.

  “Yerodin threatened a classmate with a pair of scissors today.” Yerodin was Ghost’s real name. All the adults at the Institute used it, but she hated it when Wally called her that.

  “Awww, cripes,” said Wally. He ran a hand over his face and added “new bedspread” to the mental shopping list, just under “fire extinguisher.” “How come?”

  “She’s been acting up all week. Since we told the children that Mr. Richardson was ill.”

  Wally remembered Richardson. Ghost talked about him a lot. He taught math, and sometimes he gave the kids rides on his carapace. He could fit three or four of them on the flat of his back, between pairs of detachable legs. He kind of reminded Wally of Dr. Finn, except more like a bug than a horse. He also told really corny jokes, which Ghost loved.

  “Well that’s a bummer. What’s he sick with?”

  Dr. Miranda lowered her voice. “That’s what we told the children, but he hasn’t called in sick. N-nobody has seen him since last Friday.”

  Wally said, “She’s been doing real good at home, you know. Real good.”

  “Well, she wasn’t today. She still reverts to using sharp objects when she feels angry or frustrated.”

  “Okay. I’ll have a talk with her.” Wally frowned. “Will this affect the adoption?”

  She started to answer, but then her face crumpled into a scowl a second before Jo started to bawl.

  “DickWAAAD!”

  Wally turned just in time to see Ghost, scissors in hand, stuffing a trophy in her pocket: a cotton cow ear from Jo’s costume. The sobbing girl didn’t pull away when Ghost pulled the second ear taut and opened the scissors.

  Wally vaulted the cloister railing. He crossed the courtyard in one hard stride. But rather than pulling Ghost away, or lifting Jo out of reach, he gave the blades a gentle flick of his finger. They dissolved into a fine orange mist. Ghost floated away.

  “Cripes, kid,” he called after her.

  Wally spent a few minutes consoling Jo. “Don’t you worry. We’ll fix your ears right up. You’ll hear good as new, okay?” Wally couldn’t sew. But maybe he and Ghost could learn together. That sounded like a good idea.

  “Moo,” said Jo between sniffles. “Moo … moo…”

  Wally found Ghost with Dr. Miranda. Silently, they packed up her teddy-bear backpack, plastic bag of dry cereal, and Dr. Seuss book. The doctor gave Wally a Look as he led Ghost down the corridor. His feet left deep imprints in the carpet, but not as low as Jo probably felt.

  He said, “That was a pretty crummy thing you did.”

  “I don’t care,” said Ghost. “She’s dumb.
I hate her.”

  “No you don’t. She’s your friend. Remember the time I forgot to pack your juice and she shared hers with you?”

  “No.”

  “Really? I know a guy, an ace like us, and he can tell if somebody is lying or not. But when he does it to you, it feels like having a hundred spiders crawling all over your body.” Ghost shrugged. She’d spent a lot of time in the jungle. Creepy-crawlies didn’t bother her. “But they don’t bite like normal spiders. No. You know why? Because … they … tickle!”

  Wally reached for her, careful to miss as she squealed and danced away. She took his hand as they stepped outside. Good. Maybe she’d open up a little bit.

  Ghost stopped to stare at the flashing lights when they reached the street. The meter maid’s cart flanked Wally’s dented Impala. She pointed at Wally’s car, then at the parking meter, while two more police officers listened.

  One of the cops was a petite woman. Her tag read “Officer Moloka.” Her partner was a huge hairy guy who towered over Wally. With his wolf snout and long black claws, he looked like a drawing in one of Ghost’s books.

  “Uh-oh,” said Wally.

  The hairy guy, Officer Bester, nodded to him. “Hi, Rustbelt.” Ghost giggled at his deep voice.

  Most of the 5th Precinct knew Wally by sight. NYPD sometimes provided security for Committee events in the city. Wally didn’t recognize the officers, but he waved anyway. “Howdy.”

  The meter maid wheeled on him, red-faced and sweating. “You! Why can’t you park like a normal person?”

  “I’m real sorry about that meter. Did you get my note?”

  “Your note? This is—” She pointed at the broken meter so strenuously that she had to grab her hat with her other hand. “—destruction of city property!”

  “Yeah. Those things aren’t cheap, Rusty,” said Officer Moloka.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t you know it’s illegal…” The meter maid trailed off. “What is that on your face?”

  Wally’s fingertips scraped along his jaw and forehead. He found a blue plastic “E” stuck to his left ear, and the word “barrel” over his right eyebrow.

  “You really want us to take him in, Darcy?” asked the furry cop.

  The parking lady seemed ready to choke. Ghost hid behind Wally’s legs. “He—the—it’s—city property, and he’s a repeat offender! This is how it starts, the death of the city. First it’s jaywalking and littering, then it’s people ramming parking meters just for fun, and then it’s a short slide to lawless anarchy. This,” she said, again gesticulating at the destroyed meter, “is the bellwether of the decline of a civil society!”

  The policewoman sighed and crossed her arms. Her partner leaned over to look at Wally’s license plates. “Diplomatic plates. If we issue a citation they’ll just appeal and have it rescinded.”

  “He does this on purpose. He’s hiding behind his job!”

  “Oh. You mean them fancy plates? I didn’t even want those,” said Wally. “But Lohengrin insisted.”

  He was trying to agree, but that only seemed to make the meter maid—Darcy—more angry. Or, at least, the color of her face turned a darker red.

  She said, “Do you see what I mean? Practically boasting about his ability to flout the law. And he does! Broken windshield, broken taillight, parking beyond the allotted length of time at a broken meter, destruction of city property.”

  “Write him up if you want,” said Officer Moloka, “but we can’t walk him down to the precinct. First, I don’t want to be the one who has to explain to the chief why the UN is breathing on the mayor who’s breathing on him. And second, he’s got his kid with him.” She winked at Ghost.

  The meter maid flipped open her pad and clicked her pen. Officer Bester said, “Your funeral, Darcy.”

  “I’m doing my job.” She started to fill out the ticket, paused, and waved her pen at the cops. “And I’m going to find that van, too.”

  “Whoa, whoa. No.” Officer Moloka shook her head and waved her hands as if trying to fend off somebody with bad breath. “Those guys are dangerous. They won’t balk at hurting a meter maid—”

  “Parking enforcement officer!”

  “—and they won’t be intimidated by a parking ticket.”

  “Yeah,” said Officer Bester. “If you see them, call the cops.”

  “I am a cop.”

  The other police officers waved good-bye to Ghost and returned to patrolling their beat. The hairy one turned around and made a face at Ghost. She giggled.

  “I won’t try to get out of this ticket,” said Wally.

  Darcy wrote out the citation, tore a carbon copy from her pad, took the magnet from Wally’s hand, and used it to stick the ticket to his chest.

  “You’d better not,” she said. Wally waited until her cart puttered away to haul the Impala out of its parking spot. He really needed to learn how to parallel park.

  “That was funny,” Ghost said when the coast was clear.

  The run-in with the parking lady caused Wally to forget all about Ghost’s trouble at school until he saw the severed cotton cow ear on the floor alongside her bed when he tucked her in. Wally was too heavy to sit on the edge of her bed without causing her to flop onto the floor, so he knelt beside it. Ghost handed him Green Eggs and Ham.

  “Read it, Wallywally. With voices,” she said.

  “Tell ya what. I’ll read a little bit if you tell me about what happened at school today.” He picked up the scrap from Jo’s costume. “This wasn’t very nice.”

  “I hate Jo. She’s dumb.”

  “No you don’t. Tomorrow you’ll forget all about it and want to be pals again. But she won’t forget it, because you hurt her feelings real bad. She’ll remember you as a mean person. You should tell her you’re sorry.”

  Ghost looked away. She went insubstantial, as she sometimes did when she wanted to run away from trouble. But she didn’t float away through the ceiling. Good kid.

  Wally asked, “Is this about Mr. Richardson?”

  She rematerialized. “He’s gone. He didn’t say good-bye.” Her voice broke; her accent grew thicker. She sounded much more like the girl she’d been when she first arrived in New York when she added, simply, “He was nice.”

  Ghost still didn’t trust many adults, but she talked about Richardson from time to time. That counted for a lot.

  Wally read to her. He did the voices.

  Later, he took out the telephone book. Richardson, unfortunately, wasn’t an unusual name. There were several Richardsons in and around Jokertown. But one of those had to be Ghost’s teacher. A guy like that, if he worked in Jokertown he probably lived nearby, too.

  It took half an hour to work his way down the list of telephone numbers. The first number he called belonged to a man—or a woman, it was hard to tell—whose voice sounded like two people speaking not quite in unison with each other. They (he? she?) didn’t know any schoolteachers. The second number rang fifteen times with no answer. When Wally called the third Richardson on the list, he got an earful from a lady whose telephone number was apparently quite close to that of a popular Chinese takeout place and who was pretty sensitive about wrong numbers. The fourth number belonged to Mr. Richardson-the-teacher’s cousin, but she said she didn’t keep in touch and hadn’t spoken to him for a while. She gave Wally her cousin’s telephone number, apologizing that it might be out of date. It was the number that rang without answer. Wally gave her his name and number and asked her to please have Mr. Richardson get in touch if she happened to hear from him.

  Ghost floated through the wall from her bedroom just as he was hanging up. She mumbled to herself in a language Wally didn’t understand; it was spoken only in the PPA. Her fingers curled as though clutching a knife hilt. He had to wake her because his hand passed through her shoulder when he tried to lead her back to her bedroom. She yawned. He carried her back to bed, wondering about her dreams.

  It seemed part of Ghost would always dwell in the dark ju
ngles of the Congo, in a land of mass graves and Leopard Men. Some wounds healed; some turned into scars.

  She had enough of those. He wanted to be a good foster dad for her. That meant protecting her from new scars and new traumas when he could. He couldn’t always be there; the world was a big place. You couldn’t protect everybody all the time. But the way he saw it, this meant it was important to save Ghost from the little hurts of life when he could.

  He thought about it while preparing for bed. He took a fresh pad of steel wool from the box under the bathroom sink. As he scrubbed himself, Wally decided it wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to stop by Richardson’s place. He’d find him before picking up Ghost tomorrow.

  He touched the photo of Jerusha Carter on his bedstand. It wasn’t a real photo—he’d printed it from the American Hero web site. It was all he had. But it was something.

  “Miss you,” he said, and turned out the light.

  On weekday mornings, Ghost took the subway to school with Miss Holmes, their neighbor across the hall. Miss Holmes was a bat-headed physical therapist who worked at Dr. Finn’s clinic, next door to Ghost’s school. Sometimes she let Ghost ride on her shoulders, and when she did Ghost practically disappeared between the enormous hairy ears.

  Before they set off, Wally said, “Remember our talk last night? About Jo?”

  Ghost looked down, scowling at the thin fuzz atop Miss Holmes’s head. “Yes.”

  “You’re a swell kid. See you later, gator.”

  “Not now cacadile!” Her English was pretty good, but sometimes Ghost had trouble remembering rhymes.

  Wally stood in the hallway, watching and waving until they got in the elevator. Then he went back inside and called the Committee offices in the UN building up near Forty-second Street. He had plenty of vacation built up, so taking a day off was easy. They were happy as long as he wasn’t running off to a remote corner of the world on a personal mission.