Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (14 page)

But he had to be here. Why else the shed full of useless tools? Emily walked over to the mower, careless of being seen, and then froze. Her foot coming down had made a hollow thump. She looked down. At first it just looked like the same concrete as the rest of the floor, but then she saw the grain, and realized it was plywood painted gray. She dropped to her knees and looked again. Hinges and, under the mower, a padlock through a hasp.

“Hey!”

The shout stopped her heart. She looked up to see the man standing at the back door of the house. He was in a sweatshirt and jeans, half his jaw white with shaving cream, a razor in his hand. He had pale hair in a crew cut, pale eyes that looked lashless and raw. Fear in his face that mounted into fury.

“Hey! Get away from there!” He started down the stairs. “That’s private property!”

Emily threw herself at the mower. It started, sweet and quick, the rattle of its engine loud in the metal shed. She drove it forward onto the gravel, left it running as she scrambled off again. He was at the other door of the shed, still shouting, the neck of his shirt white with shaving cream.

“Get out of here!” he shouted. “Get out before I call the police!”

“I am the police.”

Bailor, his footsteps covered by the noise of the mower. The blond man spun, whole body braced with shock.

Bailor’s problem. Emily snatched a rake off the wall, jammed the end of the handle through the padlock hasp and heaved. Muscles honed over weeks of digging strained until they burned. The hasp didn’t budge. She wedged the rake handle further through the hasp and heaved again, using her legs and back as well as her arms. There was shouting behind her, a scuffle half drowned by the mower’s faltering engine. The rake handle digging into her collarbone, blood pounding in her temples, sweat stinging in her eyes.

A high shout, “No!” The crack of breaking wood.

The hasp came loose.

She threw the rake aside, hauled up the trap door. Blackness down below, a reek of sewer and mud. Bailor was at her side, panting.

“No ladder,” she said.

“Here.” There was one in the corner, aluminum, new. He dropped it into the pit.

The mower stuttered and died. Silence.

“Ben?” Emily kneeled at the edge of the hole. “Ben?”

And from below, a tiny voice. “No.”

Bailor was already on the ladder, climbing down.

A skinny little kid, black with filth and bruises. Eyes clenched shut against the light of day. It was Ben. He’d denied his presence there, not his name. That one
No
was all he’d say. But he was alive.

Emily pulled off her shirt and wiped him clean while he crouched, shivering, on the floor of the shed. She shivered too, in her undershirt. Bailor handed her his jacket. For the first time she saw his gun, black and snub in its holster on his belt. She wrapped Ben in the jacket and then wrapped her arms around him too, looking over his head toward the house. In the space between shed and steps lay the blond man. He was on his back, arms flung wide, legs twisted. The front of his sweatshirt was dark with blood.

The crack that she’d thought was the plywood breaking.

He wasn’t dead. As she stared, his hand weakly moved toward the hole in his chest. Ben shivered steadily in her arms.

“Jesus, Bailor,” she said.

He looked down at her. “Yeah,” he said. “The paperwork’s gonna be hell.”

They carried the boy to Bailor’s car and laid him curled in the back seat, then stood together on the side of the road, waiting for his backup and the ambulance to arrive. Emily shivering in her white undershirt.

“What did you touch?” Bailor asked her.

It took her a minute to understand. “The shed door, in back. The mower steering. The padlock. The rake.”

He nodded, looking wearier than ever. “I’ll go back, wipe your prints. Keep you out of this, like I said. You can hitch a ride into town.”

She looked at him. “Bailor . . .”

He looked off down the road. “He was carrying a straight razor. Did you see it? I didn’t think anybody used those anymore.” He shrugged. “I’ll get shit for not calling backup, but nothing worse. Believe me, with this guy, nothing worse.”

Emily nodded, wiping her dirty hands on her jeans. Her left palm stung. She looked at it and saw she’d torn a callus.

Bailor sucked in his breath. Looking up she saw him staring at the scar on her wrist, the neat red line with the staple holes to either side, like the track of a lizard in the sand.

He met her eyes. “Listen,” he said.

She shoved her fists in her pockets and shrugged. “Not your fault.”

“Emily.” A beat. “I won’t ask you again.” Another beat. “I promise.”

They both knew he was lying.

But it was nice of him to say.

Originally published in On Spec
Summer 2000 Vol 12 No 2 #41

Holly Phillips
published her very first story in
On Spec
in 2000. Since then she has published more than 30 stories, including two story collections, as well as two novels. Holly lives in the Lower Mainland with The Two Esses (Steven and Savoy), and is nurturing a fledgling consultancy in technical writing and document design.

Matthew Johnson

Nep Gao stood on his tiptoes in the quiet garden to the back of the restaurant, working his small silver knife along the thinnest branches of the prickly ash tree, and wondered when his father’s ghost would leave the party. He had died five days ago and was still holding court, entertaining all his old friends and customers.

It was just his luck, Gao thought, that his father had died in the middle of
qinshon
season, the few weeks when the tree’s buds had their best flavour. Already, chewing carefully, he could detect a bitter note in what he had just harvested. At the rate things were going his father’s ghost would still be around in a week, when the
qinshon
would be edible. This was usually their most profitable time of year, but so long as his father was enjoying the food and the company enough to stay on Earth, Gao was bound to provide food and drink to anyone who came to pay their respects. So far there had been no shortage of mourners, most of them just happening to come around dinner time and often even staying until past dawn.

With his basket full of tightly curled green buds clutched under his arm, Gao went back into the restaurant. Though it was only midmorning, someone in the room was playing a zither, shouting out parts of the
Epic of the Hundred and One Bandits
. Louder, though, was his father’s commentary on the action as it was sung, “That bandit’s pretty clever, but not as clever as that butcher that used to try to sell tame ducks as wild. Nobody but me could smell the difference from the blood in the carcass!”; and, “I heard the great Xan Te play that verse once when I was on a trip to Lamnai. He hardly had a tooth in his head, but he ate two whole boxes of my pork dumplings.”

Gao could not help blushing when he heard his father telling the same tales he had told a thousand times before. He had never done anything but run the restaurant, never traveled except to buy food or collect recipes, but to hear him tell it he had had more adventures than all the Hundred and One Bandits put together. Gao could not count the number of times he had heard his father tell the story of how he had gotten his trademark recipe—the garlicky duck from which he had taken his name, Doi Thiviei—from a hermit who had lived in a hut that was at the top of a mountain when he arrived in the afternoon, but at the bottom of a valley when he left at dawn. The zither player had fallen silent to hear the story, and Gao could see a half-dozen others kneeling on mourning stools, listening and chatting as they ate the leftovers of the previous night’s meals.

“And then, just when I opened my eyes, I saw—nhoGao, is that you? Don’t lurk in the doorway, son, come in and sit down. I’m just at the good part.”

“I’m sorry, Father, but I must start to cook for today’s mourners.”

“Oh well, all right then. Bring us some fresh tea and some red bean dumplings, will you? Now, where was I? Oh yes—when I opened my eyes, I saw that the hut, which the night before had been on a mountaintop—”

Gao picked up the empty bowls, hurried on to the kitchen before his father could think of anything else to ask for. He could not help but notice that his father looked no more vaporous than he had the day before, and felt guilty for wishing it otherwise. For most people the mourning party was a formality, a way to make the spirit linger for a day or two at the most. It was supposed to be an expense—if it was too short, cost too little, there would be doubts about one’s respect for one’s father—but not a ruinous one. Sighing, Gao laid the
qinshon
buds onto a square of silk which he then tied into a bundle; any rougher cloth would rub their skins harshly and make them lose their flavour. That done he put a pot of water on to boil and looked around the kitchen, wondering what he could make as cheaply as possible that would not offend the mourners. He sipped the chicken broth that had been simmering since the night before, tossed in the bones from last night’s dinner. He could put pork dumplings into the broth, make a soup with noodles and fava beans, top it with chive flowers from the garden. For the next course, he could deep fry thin strips of pork in batter; if he made it hot enough he might be able to use a pig that wasn’t so expensive.

Feeling hungry now, he pried one of the stones in the floor loose, lifted the lid off the shallow earthenware pot that lay below, reached in and pulled out a pickled pig’s knuckle. Looking carefully over each shoulder he took a bite. He had promised to give up eating pork when he and Mau-Pin Mienme had become engaged, but nothing calmed him down when he was nervous the way pork knuckles did. Her family were followers of the Southerner—her name meant Sweet Voice From the South—and so did not eat meat at all. When she had insisted that he at least give up eating pork it had taken him less than a second to agree. It had taken him only a day, following that, to realize that he could not possibly keep his promise, so he had bought a pot of pigs’ knuckles one day while she and her family were at prayer and hidden it under the floor in the kitchen, so that she would never know what a dishonourable man she was marrying.

His mouth was now full of the sweet, salty, vinegar taste of the pigs’ knuckles, and he could feel it easing his mind. It was true: he was a dishonourable man, dishonest and unfilial, breaking his word to his wife-to-be and wishing his father’s ghost would leave him alone. He doubted that even Mienme, who, like all those of her faith had studied to be an advocate to the dead in the Courts of Hell, could convince the Judge of Fate to send him back as anything nobler than a frog. He sighed. It was only because he was due to inherit a good business that Mienme’s father, a lawyer on Earth as well as the next world, was allowing her to marry him at all. He had always known how unlikely it was that he should be able to marry a woman like Mienme. She was beautiful and intelligent, while he was cursed with an overfed body and the doughy face that had made his father call him “Glutinous Rice.” He knew better than to question the divine blessing that made her love him, though, and he had believed since they were children they would one day be married. In all that time he had never imagined it might be
his
father that would be the problem.

Thinking of Mienme made him want to see her, have her listen to his problems as she had so often done. Like other women who followed the Southerner she was allowed to go out alone, to spread His word, and he thought she would most likely be at South Gate Market this time of day. That would work out well enough; he could get all of the vegetables he needed there, and buy the pig later in the day when he was alone. Seeing her face, and hearing her advice, would be more than worth the extra trip. After carefully putting the pot back under the floor stone he opened a small jar in the shelf, took out a boiled egg marinated in soy sauce and popped it into his mouth to cover the smell of the pork knuckle. Then he poured boiling water into the large teapot, put a few of the red bean dumplings he had baked the night before onto a tray, took tray and tea into the front room where his father was still spinning his tales to a rapt audience.