Cottonwood (12 page)

Someone inside spat out a wordless snake-like rattle.

“Get your husk out here, you piss-drinking pain in the ass!” Hobart snapped, and dented in the side of the trailer with a hard kick.

Verne opened the door and glared at them.

“God, guide my hands before I wrap them around your useless neck,” Hobart said, and pointed one long black finger directly into the other alien’s face. “Be nice. You know nice? Nice is what I am when I don’t kick your chitin open. Behave your fucking self.” He turned around and looked at Sarah. “We’re done, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He stalked off, muttering, and left the two of them alone.

“Get on with it, meat-sack,” said Verne.

She fumbled out a second questionnaire, and twenty minutes later, she was tucking it back in her case and walking away, a little shell-shocked but pleased. Encouraged. Happy, even. She caught herself humming twice, stifled it, then went ahead and let it happen. Things were looking up. Maybe the bad days were over.

And there was Samaritan, sitting on his car with a pop bottle dangling between his knees, staring at her.

Her stomach tightened up as she neared him. She tried not to look at him, but her skin crawled, expecting at any moment his sarcastic greeting, the first insult, the first touch of his hand.

Nothing. He ignored her.

She didn’t breathe easy until she was not only past his house, but the two empty lots beyond it. Then she had to look back, just like Orpheus in the mouth of Hades, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up behind her.

He was watching. He waved, sending a mocking buzz at her, and took a long drink from his bottle.

Oh wow, it really was going to be a good day. She headed for Che Baccus’s house (it bothered her that he wouldn’t come out. If she could just see for herself that he wasn’t sick or injured…) and stopped when she saw Sanford’s door swing open.

It stayed open. Empty, but open.

An invitation?

Sarah started over, uncertainly at first, then quicker, lighter, when he didn’t shut himself away again. She reached the house, hesitated, and knocked on the wall. “Sanford? It’s Sarah.”

Nothing from the big one, but the child popped through the door at once. “I can behave,” he announced, wringing his hands.

“Well, you’re one up on me at that age,” Sarah answered, taken aback. She smiled. “Is your father in?”

The child pointed. Sarah peeked in and there he was, his back to her, working. “May I come in?” she asked.

Silence, but for the tinker and tap of his work.

It didn’t feel right to barge in, even with the door open. Sarah loitered, losing some of that buoyant feeling, and finally stepped aside, moved some hubcaps, and sat down in the dirt. She thought his head turned towards her, just slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

The child disappeared and then came scuttling out with his tin cans and milk jug. He gave her a can and sprawled in front of her, carving a quick road in the loose layer of rusty soil for his trucks to ride on.

“How you holding on, jellybean?” she asked. “You and your dad doing all right?”

“Yes. What’s jellybean?”

“Oh. Well, it’s a kind of candy, I guess. It’s just what my dad used to call us kids when we jumped around a lot. Jumping jellybeans.” She scraped some dirt into a mountain and marked it with some burnt pieces of plastic. It had been a long time since she’d played Trucks. She wasn’t sure she was doing it right. “Does it bother you?”

“I jump a lot.”

“Better than I ever did.”

“That’s because your legs are on backwards.”

Sanford clicked loudly inside. The boy looked back and his antennae lowered.

“They still go all the way to the ground, just like yours.” She reached down to scratch at some sand on her ankle, and the boy stopped making truck noises to watch. “I guess as long as they still do that, I can’t complain.”

“What are you doing?”

“Um?” She looked at her tin can and then at him. “Driving?”

“What is this?’ He made clumsy scratching motions over his leg.

“Oh. It’s nothing. I’m not used to the weather down here. My skin is dry.”

He stared at her. “Isn’t it supposed to be?”

“Well, yeah, but if it gets too dry, it itches.”

“What’s itches?”

The question took her completely by surprise. She stared at the boy in his unfeeling chitin shell, and finally stammered, “It’s…It’s kind of a more serious tickle.”

“What’s tickle?”

Sarah laughed a little. “Kind of a frivolous itch. I don’t know how to answer, honey. It’s just the way skin feels.”

He studied her, all of her, wringing his hands together. “It looks soft.”

“It is, relatively. Want to touch?”

Another loud click, hard enough to hurt her eardrums. The boy turned around and said, “She said I could!” in a protesting wail.

“It’s okay. You won’t hurt me.”

“Where?” the boy asked, his eyes moving hungrily up and down.

“Anywhere.”

“But
where
anywhere?”

“Anywhere.” She laughed again. “Skin can feel everything.”

He stared, pale eyes widening. “All over?”

“Yep.”

And now narrowed, suspicious. “Close your eyes.”

She did, smiling, and felt his tiny brittle hand poke her thigh. She touched the same place herself and said, “Here.” Her arm. “There.” One tiny finger on her cheek. She copied. “Right there.” And then a fourth touch, and she opened her eyes, blushing, to put an end to the game. “Yeah, I felt that, but for future reference, that’s not a polite place to touch.”

“Oh.” He eyed her chest curiously, then popped off the ground like, well, a jellybean. “I know why!”

Away he ran, and swiftly returned with a folded page from a magazine to thrust under her nose.

And suddenly, she was looking at Miss February from an esteemed gentleman’s periodical called
Cyber Sluts
. And Miss Feb was an adventurous little lady with a lot of power tools. “Oh wow,” she said, startled.

“You’re a woman,” the child said proudly. “Like her.”

“Well, yes, generally speaking, like her.”

The boy took his picture back and sat down slowly, smoothing the page out over the dirt and staring at it. He made a constant, low, staccato purring sound as he gazed at it, but that stopped when he looked up at her again. “Do you do that?” he asked.

“I can honestly say I never have, no,” Sarah admitted, eyeing the model and her visual aids. “Although I suppose there’s really nothing stopping me apart from a shop-vac and some self-respect.” Gently, she took the page from him and folded it again. She looked at the open doorway behind her; it remained empty and quiet. She supposed the least-offensive thing to do would be just to let it go, but that would mean leaving pornography in the hands of a minor. What was the responsible thing to do here? Tentatively, she said, “Honey…do you know what vulgar means?”

The boy’s excited posture became subdued, uncertain. He glanced into the house too, where his father sat out of sight, perhaps listening. “Is it…like a bad word?”

“Close. Bad words are bad because they’re vulgar, they’re lazy and mean-spirited, which is why we shouldn’t use them. But words aren’t the only things that can be vulgar.”

He looked at the paper in her hands. “Pictures too?”

“Some of them. And I know you have to have a lot of vulgar things around you sometimes. We can’t really control what gets said next to us, or put next to us…but we can control what we take home with us.”

He gave her an intense and puzzled look. “You sound like Father,” he said.

That was a relief. “I think that’s a good person to sound like, don’t you?”

“Sometimes. I have to pee.” Off he ran to the culvert, leaving Sarah holding Miss February.

A plated hand came through the door to take it. She heard it unfolded and then silence. “I did not know he had this,” he said at last.

“It’s kind of everywhere, I’m sure. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, I just—”

“He needs to hear such things from more than me.” Wood creaked. He came to the doorway, crumpling the page absently in one hand. He tossed it out into the street and it drifted away on the breeze until it fell into the ditch and soaked up with black. Sanford watched it sink, then looked at her. He clicked, glanced away a few times, but kept coming back to her. At last, he said, “Will you come inside?”

He would ask after her butt fell asleep.

Sarah struggled onto her knees and then up (“I told you they were backwards,” said the boy, breezing on by into the house), and managed a dignified stagger until she could collapse on the green, overstuffed chair. The boy climbed up and sat on the arm of it. His father resettled himself on the stool, but facing her.

“I found a paper of yours,” he said, and passed it to her.

“Oh.” Dull heat flooded her cheeks. “I must have missed that one.”

“Can you really order these things for me?”

“I don’t think so,” she admitted, scanning it. “It’s for emergencies only. Like, if a tornado sweeps your house away, that sort of thing. Then you can order them. In theory.”

“I see.”

“What did you want? Maybe I can get it through another channel.”

“I wanted to know what qualified as an emergency condition.”

She felt herself blush again and dropped her eyes.

“How do you do that?” the boy asked.

“Mr. Sanford, I’m trying—”

“Sanford only. I know you are.”

They sat there, the three of them. The boy kept touching her hair, surreptitiously, watching closely to see if she could feel him.

At last Sanford stirred himself, looked at the child, clicked to himself for a moment, and then said, “His name is T’aki.”

“T’aki,” said the boy, stroking her hair.

Surprised, she tried, minus the click in the middle. Hard, short T; broad a; strong ‘key’ sound. It wasn’t the same.

“Close enough,” said Sanford. He looked away.

They sat.

“You did not write it on your form,” he said finally.

“As far as they’re concerned, he has a name.” She hesitated. “Do you want me to change it in his file?”

“No. But I will not stop you.”

“I work for you, remember?”

He clicked, staring at her. The boy, T’aki, touched her ear, tracing it in quiet awe.

“So, um, I don’t mean to offend you,” she began, very aware that she was probably about to. “Do you have garbage service in Cottonwood at all?”

Sanford’s head cocked.

“Trucks?” she asked. “That come for the garbage?”

T’aki made the engine-idling sound.

“Yes,” said Sanford.

“There is?” Gosh, what a relief. “Do you know when?”

“Every day.”

“Now see, this is something I can help you with!” she said, excited. “I can pick up some heavy bags and maybe some tags for the larger stuff and we can start cleaning up, um, around your house, because the situation here with the trash is kind of terrible, but I can help!” she finished quickly.

“Put in bags?” T’aki chirped. Now his head was cocked too.

“For what reason?” Sanford asked. He didn’t look as though he didn’t know. His eyes were calm on hers.

“To take it away. Sanford, I can see that you work hard at keeping things in check, but some of what you’ve got lying around here is dangerous, particularly for a small child to—”

“Trucks don’t take away,” T’aki said, utterly baffled.

“That’s because you have to bag it up, jellybean, then they’ll…”

Sanford was just looking at her.

The trucks came every day.

How did busted lawnmowers and old refrigerators even get into Cottonwood?

The Recycling Program.

Sanford stood up and opened the door. “Would you like to see?” he asked.

“No,” she said numbly. She felt like she’d been socked hard in the stomach; her guts twisted on her, sick and cramped and sinking. “But I think maybe I’d better.”

T’aki jumped down and ran out the door ahead of them, chirping something her translator gave back as, “Heaps! Heaps! Heaps!” Sarah’s feet carried her out the door and she walked behind Sanford on the rust-red road out beyond where it turned at the end of the causeway and followed the aqueduct wall.

It was a long walk, past the trailers and storage sheds where aliens who could have been her clients watched them pass and sometimes followed for a while. They left her territory and continued walking on streets she knew only from her map. It wasn’t until they’d left the tenebrous borders of Section Seventeen that Sarah understood how it could be considered the ‘upscale’ side of town. The droning shrill of summer insects scraped across the constant click-and-buzz of alien speech until she might as well be deaf, but she still had her eyes and she saw it all—row upon tumbled row of ramshackle structures resembling chicken coops more than homes, choked with flies and with people. The streets were nothing but tire-tracks in the garbage where noisome fluids pooled, forming swamps of filth knee-deep around the leaking aqueduct Sanford followed as he led her even deeper into Cottonwood. She pulled out her paz, holding it before her like a talisman against the terrible power of this place, as if the tiny blinking light she saw in its little screen was the only proof not only that she was really here, but that she could get out again.

The houses did not appear to be thinning out, but they must be, because beyond their rusted, sunken roofs, Sarah could see the razor-wire coils of a tall mesh fence, and beyond that, nothing. But the smell was getting worse. She tried to brace herself, because by now she knew what she was going to see, but the mere intellectual idea of the Heaps could do nothing to prepare her when she squeezed out between two miserable shacks and saw it.

It was a pit. A pit the size of ten city blocks, surrounded on all sides by a tall chain fence crowned with razor wire. The roads where the trucks came through criss-crossed mountains of compacted trash, forming an intricate pattern which was almost pretty at this distance. Up close, she supposed it would be like disappearing into a maze, walls of unstable garbage on every side, and only one true path up and out.

There were hundreds of aliens in there, hundreds of them. They crawled over the trash, over the
Heaps
, picking through the human waste for treasures to put into sacks, into boxes, or even into their own mouths. She saw children as small as T’aki burrowing in and out of crevasses, chasing things that eluded adult eyes, or just chasing rats, which they squabbled over like candy bars. She saw someone pull a scum-heavy swath of fabric out of a mound of rotten food gone black with decay, shake the worst of it off, and wrap it around his own waist to wear. She saw three aliens together leap on the same broken section of aluminum sheeting and begin a fight so fierce, she thought someone was going to be killed. And everywhere she looked, there were more of them.