Complete Short Fiction, page 92
I was starting to remember now. A fight. Not even on the trail, but before. I’d hauled his tent out of the garage, where he’d packed it up wet, cleaned all the dirt and grass off of it, and re-waterproofed the bottom. It had taken me all afternoon, patiently coating every square inch with the goo. While I was at it, I sealed all the seams. My father never really understood that they sold you the tent with the seams unsealed, so rain had always run down the stitching. When I was done you could have used that tent as a boat. I stood back, hands on my hips, and admired it as it stood in the backyard.
“What are you doing?” my father had said behind me, and I turned to explain.
I didn’t remember the anger itself. All I remembered was his car driving away, his friends Bill and Frank sitting in it instead of me, both of them incredibly embarrassed. I had solved a problem for him, and that was something he just couldn’t stand. All of my mother’s entreaties had been useless. I had to stay behind. I was too young, he said. Too much trouble to take along. Maybe when I was older. . . . That had been the last time.
“Maybe we can just go for a hike sometime,” I said.
“Let’s count this as a start.”
For a moment we moved in synch through the trees, as if we were together, heading for the same place.
“Let me take advantage of your expertise for a moment, Bert,” he said. My dad had always known exactly what I did, though he had never approved of it. “Could you find us? I mean, if you were back in your office. Without knowing anything about us, would we pop up when you searched for unusual patterns in purchases?”
“Sure.” I’d already been thinking about it. “This operation can’t just bootstrap up from nothing. You had to have bought all sorts of things, gotten all sorts of technical information. All of that can be traced.”
“But that’s not so bad, is it? All you’d want to do is sell us more things. My dinner of antelope and tree bark will be interrupted by a call from someone trying to offer me a zone electrophoresis setup or a subscription to an Embryo of the Month club. Free samples of restriction enzymes and mammoth kibble in the mail. Right?”
He wanted me to reassure him. This was my territory.
I couldn’t do it.
“You know. Dad, when I met Stacy, she was just a research assistant. Not mine, understand, just in the department. But she was eager to learn. She had a Ph.D. in sociology, but thought her whole life would be studying something like the distribution of ethnic first names in middle-class households. I showed her the ropes.”
“She seemed . . . I don’t know, Bert. She never seemed like your type. Dumb word, I know. Not clear at all. But what upset your mother was that, when you visited, you never seemed . . . yourself. Now, that’s natural when you’re starting out, I guess. . . .”
“I worked it, Dad. I mean, I really worked it. You have no idea how far I went. I wanted her . . . at first it was just sort of ambition. She was beautiful, right? But that wasn’t all. She was so sharp, so crisp. So focused. For a while she focused on me. I melted. I resisted, that wasn’t my plan, but it happened before I knew it. I don’t know . . . I don’t know if she ever did. There comes that moment, you know? Where the other person . . . melts. I always deluded myself into thinking it had happened. My game just wasn’t good enough.”
“Your mother, for example, was very resistant.” Dad was reminiscent. “Somehow, my line of nonsense didn’t particularly charm her. Imagine that! But one day, we went out canoeing. There were a lot of toppled cottonwoods in the river, and several times we had to pull the canoe over them. It was hot, and there were a lot of bugs. It should have made us cranky with each other, but instead, each drag across made us more of a team. I fell in the mud, more than once. Your mother wore white shorts and a light blue blouse with a collar. I remember her staying completely clean, she remembers herself getting covered with drying mud. That was all fine, it was a step forward. Mosquito bites and all, it was something we’d shared. Then, just as we were getting ready to turn around and go home, a water moccasin swam slowly out to us. Now, I knew a thing or two about poisonous snakes at the time—I had a Pentecostalist friend who made a great living at county fairs—and I was able to . . . hypnotize it, I guess you’d say. It fell asleep on my paddle, eyes still open, and your mother stroked its head. She wasn’t afraid. She trusted me. Then she looked at me and . . . I knew it had happened. Nothing would ever be the same again. After that—”
“Dad—” He was pushing it.
“Oh, no details, no details. Not about the rest of that day, anyway. But after that, we got married and I started a viper ranch. I saw it as fate. Your mother helped raise the money to start it. After a year or two, it failed, and we had to let the snakes go. It still gives me a tear to remember the black mamba slithering across the parking lot toward the drainage ditch by the highway. . . . But, you know, your mom never faltered. She always stood by me. And she was already pregnant with you, by then. Given the amount of venom she encountered during her pregnancy, I’ll bet you’re immune to a wide range of toxins.”
“I’ve never really had the chance to check that out. But Stacy . . . I suppose it was a cliché man/woman relationship, mentor and pupil. But she was so sharp! It was like no one had ever listened to me before—”
“You know, son, I’ve been meaning to work on that, really I have. . . .”
“That doesn’t matter! For the first time, someone focused her full attention on me. It’s an incredible rush. I never knew. . . . We fell in love. You know the rest. We became a team. I molded her, taught her everything.”
My father cleared his throat. “For what it’s worth, Bert, I think she really did . . . love you. That one time you visited . . . maybe she didn’t melt. But you got her as close to it as anyone possibly could.” He shook his head. “Your mother would kill me if she heard me telling you that.”
I blinked my eyes and looked around. “Boy, this place really is a jungle.”
“Yeah. They’ve gone too far, is all I can say. We get together, try to recreate a few species, just a gentle hobby, like miniature trains or building ships in bottles . . . and these guys go completely berserk. That’s life in the exurbs for you. All sense of social control is lost. Your mom has to be somewhere around here. . . .”
My dad pulled a machete out of his golf bag and hacked at the trailing vines and lianas. Leaves flew around him, but he didn’t make much headway. He’d had muscle once. I remembered him mowing the lawn with his shirt off. He’d insisted on a push mower. It was an old one he’d bought at a yard sale. Being my father, he’d never lubricated it right, and the blades were so dull they sort of folded the grass instead of cutting it. But I remembered his delts and back muscles gleaming with sweat as he struggled and swore and dug gouges in the lawn. In later years, Mom would have me borrow an incredibly noisy and smelly power mower from the Hendersons next door and cut the grass while he was away for the day. If my father ever noticed anything, he didn’t think it worth mentioning, and eventually he stopped using the push mower. He left it outside by the side of the house and it rusted into a solid lump of metal.
But now his skin sagged down over slack muscle. I could tell his joints hurt by the clumsy way he swung the blade. Tomorrow he’d be awake before the first light of day with a rotator cuff on fire, slathering on the Ben-Gay. And he hadn’t sharpened the damn blade. Some things never change.
“Dad.”
“What?”
“Could I do that?”
He looked at me over his shoulder. “You ever handle a machete?”
“Just let me try it. Come on.”
“It’s not a toy, Bert. It’s a very specialized tool, regardless of what you might have seen in some damn blowgun epic—ouch, dammit!”
The blade rebounded from a particularly resistant vine and the blunt trailing edge bounced off his forehead. I caught him under the arms as he fell backward. The machete embedded itself dramatically into a rotting tree stump and stood there, cracked Bakelite handle up.
He looked up at me. He’d have a bruise, but he hadn’t broken the skin.
“Bert,” he said. “What finally happened?”
“With Stacy?”
“With whatever.”
I helped him to his feet. He’d lost a lot of muscle but he didn’t feel any lighter. Without any objection from him, I pulled the machete out of its tree stump and started hacking at the vines. It was harder than it looked. A lot harder. Blowgun epics . . . I couldn’t remember ever seeing any of those, no late-night TV viewings of Yamomano! or Death on the Amazon, but I suppose there could be such things, made on virtual soundstages in Malaysia.
“She was smarter even than I thought. Or maybe I was a better teacher than I ever imagined. You see, I’d marketed myself. I’d created an interest group for her, found what she’d secretly wanted, and gave it to her. Mom was right. I wasn’t myself. I was an ad for myself. A good one, much better than the actual product. So she finally figured out. By then she was good, better than I was at what I do. We had our last fight when I said I could become my ad, really be what I had for so long pretended. She’d never know the truth, I told her. She would be living with the man she’d always thought I was. I was pathetic.”
It was hard, remembering her contempt. I’d taught her to see clearly and here I was trying to get her to put blinders on again. I think it was that anger that drove her to what she did next. In the aftermath, I was forced to submit my resignation.
“She left the company when she left me and moved on to the Interrogator On-Line TV show. She uses what she learned for tabloid TV segments. She spots and exposes incipient cults, weird social groups, fads, that sort of thing. It’s the coming thing. There are more bizarre groups all the time. And the first group she outed was us, my company. A bunch of paranoid megalomaniacs who think that they control the private interests and identities of millions of Americans.
“Us,” he said. “Isn’t that right? You’re saying she’s after us.”
My old man wasn’t so stupid after all. That was exactly what I was saying, I realized. I just hadn’t known it myself. My dear Stacy could be floating above us right now in one of the media’s black helicopters, scanning us, getting ready to drop a camera team down and expose this place on national TV. That fisher wouldn’t make much of an image, but there had to be something more interesting around here. . . .
“Dad—”
“Look out!” He knocked me over.
I went down. The tawny shape of the springing animal blurred over us. It hit, turned quickly . . . but did not leap to finish us off. Instead, it sat back on its haunches.
It was a big cat, like a lion or a tiger. Except—I had to look again. I didn’t know a lot of biology, but I did know that there wasn’t anything in a zoo that looked like a tiger but had tusks like a walrus. It made a low rumble I could feel in my chest, and lashed its tail. In knocking me over, my father had twisted my ankle. All I could feel down there was that pressure that was the shadow of future pain.
“They’re pretty near-sighted,” my father said. “I don’t think we should move.”
“What the hell is that thing?”
“Eh? Oh. It’s a smilodon. Call it a saber-toothed tiger, though that’s not very accurate.”
“Whatever it is, it’s opening its mouth at us. I don’t think I can move.”
“If it’s anything like a tiger, that’s called flehmen. It’s using its vomeronasal organ—trying to smell us. Which way is the wind blowing?”
I looked up at the leaves to see if I could tell, and found myself mesmerized by the sky. The trees stretched what seemed hundreds of feet up, and their gigantic crowns spread out against the placid blue. Birds flew back and forth up there. I could smell the thick loam under my head, and a single shaft of sunlight pierced through the upper stories and lay on the side of my face, as warm as a mother’s kiss. Lacy-winged insects flickered through and were gone.
“Are you all right?” My father was so close I could feel his breath as he spoke.
“I don’t know. My ankle . . .”
My father prodded at it, which actually did make it hurt.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I have no idea whether it’s broken or not. I don’t know what to look for.”
The saber-toothed tiger, as if puzzled by our incompetence, lay down completely and yawned again.
“I’m sorry, boy.”
“That’s okay, Dad.”
“No it’s not. I shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s between your mother and me.”
“It’s between all of us,” I said.
“Will she . . . will Stacy find us, do you think?”
“If you’ve been buying the gear and subscribing to the magazines I think you have, yeah. I doubt the next development over buys as much as a single cloning setup a year, even as a gift.”
“You got that right,” he said. “The Menhir Manors people are mostly shamanistic fire worshippers. I think your mother has some bridge-playing friends over there. Buy briquettes by the truckload, but no restriction enzymes.”
“Oh, God.” I rubbed my forehead. “Another Internet newsgroup that decided to settle down in the exurbs?”
“Actually, I think most of them got a number to call off photocopied announcements on the walls of tattoo parlors. Traditionalists, the lot of them. But even they have to put gas-stack scrubbers on those big brazen idols of theirs, or they’ll catch an EPA raid. But what can we do, Bert?”
Did the weight of his need make me feel lighter, or heavier? I wasn’t sure.
“Franklin.” My mother’s voice, from somewhere off in the underbrush. “What are you doing here?”
“Lulu!” He shouted, even though she wasn’t more than a few feet away. “It’s important.”
“Go away. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Please! And Bert’s twisted his ankle. That damn giant kitty. . . .”
“Don’t fuss about the smilodon. She doesn’t hurt anyone. Besides, she hunts large game. Those teeth aren’t any use against something as puny as a human being.”
A rustle in the leaves, and five women appeared, my mother among them. There was nothing remarkable about them, really. They ranged in age from their mid twenties to at least their sixties, and my mother wasn’t even the oldest. Several carried composite bows with pulleys on them. One had a dead rabbit hanging from her belt. They could have been students at some Adult Extension class.
A woman in her early thirties, with wild black hair, knelt down next to me. After silently examining my ankle, she pulled an instant-cold pack out of her bag and cracked the inside partition. Then she attached it to my ankle with an Ace bandage.
“RICE,” she said. “Rest, ice, compression, elevation. Can you handle it?”
“Sure. Particularly the rest part.”
I could smell the stink of her crudely cured buckskins, but somehow that did not make her seem less attractive. Her face looked like she’d spent a lot of time squinting into the sun.
“Stacy!” My mother shrieked at what my dad told her. “I knew it.” She knelt by me. “Oh, baby. I’m sorry. I know she meant a lot to you. You loved her.”
“Don’t embarrass him, Looly.”
“I’m not . . . am I embarrassing you, Bert?”
“Yes, Mom, you are.”
She sat back. “Well! Try to show a little maternal warmth—”
“He knows that, Lu. You know he does. But he has other things on his mind.”
“What? He’s a refugee, Franklin. When your marriage ends . . . you’ve lost your country. Your native language. Everything. And he’s come here to us. . . .”
Was that what had happened? I wasn’t sure any more. Sometimes what seems like free will is only the following of the deepest patterns, the ones you can no way resist. Stacy didn’t need me, and in the aftermath of her departure, it seemed that no one did. Except here.
“Ladies!” I said. “Do you mind if I explain a few things to you?”
“Of course not.” The black-haired woman patted my hand. “We know what helps a man relax.”
“Don’t patronize me. This is serious. I’ll give you the information, and you can decide what you want to do with it. Now, imagine if Old Oak Orchard was on the cover of Time, the subject of three tabloid news shows, and had tiger-striped tour busses coming through to look at the fauna. What would that mean to your lives?”
That got their attention, big time. They sat around me in a circle and watched me closely.
“You’ve concealed yourselves pretty well. From outside, you look just like any other exurban residential community centered on a golf course. Kudos for that. But, and this is even more important, all of your purchases can be tracked.” I told them how they could be found, how, in fact, I would have found them a few months before, if that had been my job.
I felt a sudden surge of power as I spoke. I had no idea why changing from predator to prey felt so liberating, but it did.
“But there’s one thing they aren’t used to, those searchers after fads. They aren’t prepared for a deliberate deception. They aren’t ready for someone to be on to their game. Fake purchases, odd magazine subscriptions, anomalous hits on Internet sites. If we massage the statistics just right, we can send them baying off after entire demographic shoals of red herrings.”
And a brilliantly specific deception came to me in a flash. A play with excavation equipment rental, freeze-dried food supply purchases, air recirculation systems, self-tanning gels . . . the works. It would show an incipient self-defining group. Call it Bomb Shelter Chic. Late-middle-age security-minded exurbanites moving into underground palaces. Stacy and her compadres would eat that up. The kitschy paranoia of the past made for the cool trends of the future. A few Morlock Madness Midnights at the local mall, and we’d have everyone from Malaysian marketeers to Hardcopy video journalists looking desperately for something that did not exist.
