Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 97

She's too proud to wear a wig, but her hair's coming back in patchy now that she's stopped poisoning herself. She keeps her head shaved and it makes her look elegant, Egyptian.

I maintain it for her: a couple of times a month I settle the moist, warm, tender skin of her nape against the palm of my living hand, my thumb resting behind her ear, the vibrations of the electric razor carrying up my machine arm.

I used to do the same for some of the guys in my platoon.

She closes her eyes while I shave her, dreaming like a cat. Her lips move, shaping words; her fuzz clings to my sleeve. I could cut myself touching her cheekbones; there's a dead woman just under her skin.

I thumb the razor off. "I didn't hear you, sweetie."

When people are dying, it's easier to tell them you love them. You know they're not going to hold it over you later.

She nibbles her thumbnail, a nervous tic, and presses her skull into my hand. "Maker." And then she says my real name, her eyes still shut. "Jenny. When I'm gone, you ought to marry him. Before he thinks to play it tough."

By the time I get him to the displaced persons camp, the kid's attached to my hip like he grew there. The dressing on his scalp is white and bulbous; I made the duty nurse shave the whole thing, and not just the part she was st.i.tching, so at least both sides match, but he still looks like he's farming mushrooms up there. His name turns out to be Dwayne MacDonald; he's ten, not eleven, and he's got a fouler mouth than I do, which is saying something.

So yeah, all right, I like the kid. And the clerk at the resettlement office gets up my nose in about thirty seconds flat. "Name?" she says, without looking up at either of us, and he doesn't answer, so I say it for him. She taps it into her interface and frowns. "MacDonald's a pretty common last name. Parents? Street address?"

I look at him. He shrugs, shoulders squared, hands in his pockets. Cat's got his tongue. "What if you can't find his family?"

"He'll stay at the camp until we can find a foster situation for him." She still hasn't lifted her eyes from the interface. "It might be a while. Especially if he won't talk. Where'd you find him?"

"Downtown." Five more seconds, and I'm going to be as silent as the kid. I fold my arms and lean back on my heels.

"Look." She pushes back from her desk, and I catch her eyes, contacts colored blue-violet with swimming golden sparks. Distracting as h.e.l.l. "We get a couple dozen porch monkeys through here every week. Either you can help me out, or-"

The kid presses against my side, and it's a good thing he's in the way of my gun hand, because there's a rifle across my back and if I could reach it, she'd never have gotten to the second syllable in "monkey."

"Or I can try to find his parents myself. Thank you, miss."

She a civilian, more's the pity. And they won't do a f.u.c.king thing about her, but I'm still going to file a complaint.

G.o.d, I hate these people.

I take the kid back to my billet. Halfway there, as we're trudging along side by side, I run into Brody. "New boyfriend, Casey?"

I look at the kid. The kid looks at me. "He's like a mascot, Sarge."

"Like the camp cat, Casey? Not gonna happen."

But Brody's okay on a lot of levels, laid back and easy-going with a full measure of sun- and laugh-lines. He likes to talk about his grandkids, though he can't be much more than fifty-five.

Yeah, so at eighteen, fifty-five is like the end of the world. The light from fifty-five takes a million years to reach eighteen. Brody sighs and hooks his thumb in his belt and says, "Get some dinner in him. And some breakfast. Tomorrow, you get his a.s.s home, you understand?"

"Yes, Sarge," I say. "Thank you."

"Don't get too used to it, Casey."

One more shake of his head, a self-annoyed grunt, and he's gone.

We all want to die at home.

Geniveve gets close, but even her stubborn isn't quite enough to pull off that one. There's the hospital and then there's hospice care and Genie's way too young for this, and too sick, because she's stressed out and flares up. Don't ever tell me babies don't understand.

So G.o.d help Gabe, he's mostly with Genie, because somebody has to be and she wants her Papa. She wants her Maman too.

And Leah and me, we stay with Geniveve. I haven't really got a lot to say about it.

Except, Geniveve is so fragile by the end, a soap bubble. You know in movies where there's a Chern.o.byl event and then people die, crying from the pain in their joints, bruising in huge terrible flowers anyplace their bones press the inside of their skin?

That's leukemia. That's how leukemia kills you.

You know that thing where they say that G.o.d never gives you more than you can shoulder?

It's a vicious, obscene lie.

You know what happens. What with one thing and another, he stays a night, and then three nights, and then by four days in he stops being "Casey's kid" and turns into the whole camp's mascot. They call him half a dozen stupid nicknames-mouche-noir, first, which turns into Mooch overnight. Moustique, which is "mosquito" and also "punk." One of the guys starts singing the black-fly song at him-a-crawlin' in your whiskers, a-crawlin' in your hair, a-swimmin' in the soup and a-swimmin' in the tea-and pretty soon the whole camp is doing it, which drives him as nuts as the black flies would've.

Poor kid.

I ply him with hockey cards and cigarettes, and even get him half-interested in the games. We get them on satellite, and it's a camp-wide event when they're on. You really have to p.i.s.s somebody off to draw picket that night. They're the old-fashioned cards mostly, you know the ones with the limited memory and just a little chip screen, maybe 90 seconds of highlights? He's fascinated by a couple of the "cla.s.sic" ones-Bill Barilko, that kind of stuff-players from the previous century in grainy black and white, images set to radio broadcast clips. There's more highlights on those, and he listens to them for hours, curled up in the corner with his elbows on his knees.

And then after a week of this, I get my leave. Thirty-six hours, back in Toronto, and a unit transfer.

Everybody knows what that means.

I guess I'm going to get my wish. I'm going overseas.

Between us, Hetu and me hack one of the hockey cards-they have an uplink so you can check these dedicated web pages with scores and biographies and stuff-so the kid can use it for email. I show him the trick; it's awkward, but hey, it's free, right? Last thing I do, before I shake his hand, is rip the unit patch off my shoulder and hand it to him.

I won't be needing it anymore.

He takes it, crumples it in his fist until I can't see it.

"You gonna be okay?"

Jerk of his chin.

"Really okay?"

And he gives me this stiff little nod. He's not going to cry. He's not even going to look like he wants to cry.

Brave little toaster. But I'm dumb enough to push it. "I'll come back if you want me to. After. I'll come get you." What am I gonna do with a kid? What is Carlos going to want with some American refugee kid with PTSD who cries in his sleep like a puppy? How the f.u.c.k old are we both going to be before I could come back?

f.u.c.k it. Sometimes you just have to pretend you're not lying.

But he stares right through me and says, "You won't come back." The finality of abandonment, of somebody who knows the score.

I don't argue. "Write me?"

And he licks his lips and jerks his chin down once, like he was driving a nail. Sure thing, Casey.

I don't lose my s.h.i.t, myself, until I'm on the transport. Until I'm safe in Ontario, getting off the bus, and then it's okay because Carlos thinks I'm crying over him and it never does any harm to let your fiance think you can't live without him.

Carlos has lousy feet and worse ankles. He works for the quartermaster. He's not going anywhere. From each according to his ability.

I get my orders for Pretoria. And the rest is history. I dear-john Carlos from the hospital, after burning half my f.u.c.king face off in South Africa. I never have the heart to find out if he makes it through the war.

Dwayne doesn't write. It's three months before I figure out that he'd been too proud to tell me he didn't know how.

I stick around Toronto for a little while after the funeral, until things are settled and the girls aren't constantly asking when Maman is coming home. I want to stay forever.

I... can't. Every time I look at Gabe now, I hear Geniveve telling me to marry him, and the h.e.l.l of it is, boy, it would make the kids happy. It would even make me happy, for a little, until the whole thing went pear-shaped. As you know it inevitably would. Love affairs forged in crisis, they're like trashfires. They burn out hot and leave a lot of stink behind.

He says he'll call. I tell him I'll come visit for Leah's birthday, which is May. It's only a five-hour drive from Hartford. There's a lot of rundown old dumps there, and I buy one. On the worst street in the worst neighborhood of town, but who's going to give me a hard time?

It's barely got electric.

They call that area the North End. It's the kind of place where men in bedroom slippers drink forties of malt liquor from paper bags on bus benches that haven't seen service since the war. It's full of immigrants and poor blacks and West Indians. Which is fine with me; you can never have too much Jamaican food.

It's exactly what I want. A hole I can crawl into and pull up snug.

That's a joke, isn't it? Vets going back where they fought, where they served. Marrying a brown native girl who only speaks horizontal English. Happens every day.

It's the peak experience, maybe. Or maybe the thing where we can't go home and we can't stay here. Wherever here might be. Maybe they ought to just shoot the warriors when we come home.

That way, it would be over quick.

Anyway. I'm standing on a street corner smoking my last cigarette when I see him. This gangster, and he's like a kick in the chest. Threat response, predator response, because he's the king of the street. Swaggering down Albany Ave in a black T-shirt, boots, jeans, and a black leather jacket zinging with chains. His shaved head's glossy in the sun. Pink proud flesh catches the sun on his crown; he taps knuckles with a skinny guy headed the other direction. He's huge; shoulders bulging the seams of his jacket. And he's flanked by two toughs that trail him like pilotfish after a shark.

I'm supposed to be impressed.

One falls back a half-step to have a word with the guy the big man deigned to notice, and that's when I catch a flash on the head man's shoulder. Red and white and gray, sewn to black leather.

It stops me in my tracks. I stare uncomprehendingly and take a step forward. That sharp pink scar, the heavy neck, the ma.s.sive hands, the swagger. The way he dips his head when he turns to his friend and half-nods.

The friend catches me staring and moves in. The big man turns, notices my face, recoils. I'm used to that, but it stings from him. If it is. Him.

The scars, of course. And I'm in mufti. I hope I can talk my way out of this before I get my head handed to me.

They move toward me, the big man and both his toughs, and the newcomer trailing like a remora hoping to attach itself to an apex predator. Four of them.

I can do it.

I can't promise to keep that many safe.

They pause three meters distant, the big one sizing up my scars and my face. His pistol's under his jacket, a hilt-down shoulder holster. I can tell through the hide.

I wear mine in plain sight, strapped to my thigh.

"There a problem?"

Right on script, but he reads it too softly. It could be an honest question.

I treat it that way. "No problem. I was wondering if you knew a Dwayne MacDonald, grew up near here." Pause. "He'd be about your age."

The silence stretches. He looks at me, into my eyes, at the shape of my shoulder and the angle of my nose. "Beat it," he says, finally, and he's not talking to me. I catch a glitter, steel teeth behind his lips. Some sort of cosmetic mod.

Not cheap.

Without protest, with a few unanswered promises to catch-you-later-man, the other three recuse themselves. Dwayne stands there looking at me, hulking behemoth with his hands shoved in his pockets. I think I could get a ting! out of the tendons on his neck if I flicked them with a thumbnail.

"What do you go by now?"

"Huh?" As if I've shattered his concentration. "Oh. Razorface." The sibilants hiss through his teeth. "They call me Razorface. This my street." A shrug over his shoulder. Sure. Lord of all he surveys. "War's over, Casey."

"Yeah." We stand there staring at each other for a minute, grinning. People cross the street. "Call me Maker. I live here now. Hey, you know what?"

"What?"

"You should come over some time. And watch a hockey game. In fact, can I buy you a drink?"

"It's ten in the morning, you f.u.c.king drunk," he says, but he takes my elbow and turns me, like he expects me to need the support. "f.u.c.k, you look like h.e.l.l."

"Yeah," I say, 'cause it's true.

But that's okay. Because on the other hand, he looks like he's doing... all right.

So that's something, after all.

Two Dreams on a Train The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience's left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn't bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist's bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the p.r.i.c.kle of tears.

Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a ma.s.sive s.p.a.celighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a s.p.a.ceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall s.h.a.ggy with peeling paint.

Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted-like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real-in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience's hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn't look down and she didn't close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist's, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor's.

The p.r.i.c.k and shift of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.

A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, "Thank you."

She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he'd stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he'd been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.

"Won't be long before you'll have the whole hand done." He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists-dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. "You've earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time."

"I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound," Patience said, meeting the scarrist's eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. "I don't want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did." She smiled. "I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there."

The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. "There's more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know."

Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. "Like this?"