Keeper of Dreams (61 page)

Mack was outraged. “You mean somebody
called
you?”

“Well I didn’t have no psychic vision if
that’s
what you’re thinking!”

“She’s a minister, Miz Smitcher, it was a . . . a Christian kiss.”

“Well, there’s a billion Christians in this world, and most of them got started with a kiss like that. So you’re not to go near her again, you hear me? I’ll get her out of this neighborhood if I have to buy a gun and shoot that bike.”

“All right,” said Mack.

“You agreeing with me, just like that?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Well, now I know you’re lying. A boy your age doesn’t just say yes ma’am about staying away from a woman like that.”

Mack was thinking like crazy, trying to find a way to get Miz Smitcher out of this rage she was in. And then he got it. “Miz Smitcher, I just thought maybe she was my mama. Maybe she come back here to look and see what become of her baby.”

That was it. That was the answer. Because all of a sudden Miz Smitcher’s eyes got all teary and she pulled the car over in front of the
neighbor’s house and just hugged him to her and said, “Oh, you poor baby, of course you’d think she was your mama, her looking like she does. Exactly the kind of woman who’d have an abortion and leave the baby in the weeds.”

That wasn’t exactly what Mack had meant, but it would do.

“So you didn’t have the hots for her, you thought she was your
mama
!” Miz Smitcher began to laugh. She put the car back in gear and drove the thirty yards to the curb in front of her house and by the time she got the car parked she was laughing so hard tears were coming down her face.

Two things stuck with Mack from that car ride with Miz Smitcher. First one was, that was the first time he could ever remember her hugging him. Second thing was, You tell somebody something they want to hear, and they’ll believe it even if it’s the biggest old lie you ever made up.

He promised her everything she asked him to promise—that he’d never ride that bike again, that he’d never go to That Woman’s house again, that he’d never talk to her again, that he’d never even
think
of her again. The only true thing he said to her was when she made him say, “I know she could not possibly be my mama.”

That night he halfway hoped he’d dream Yolanda’s dream, but he didn’t. He picked up half a dozen other dreams, including one that he thought might be Miz Smitcher’s, and which he never watched all the way through. Yolanda’s dream never came, but in the morning he realized, Well of course I didn’t dream her dream and I never will again, because I gave it back to her and now it’s for
her
again.

But I still got my own dream, he thought. Nothing yesterday was really much like that dream of roads and rocks and cliffs and floods, except I was running down the street like hurtling along the canyon, and at the end of it, a woman reached out and held my head and kissed me and she tasted sweet as love.

Like “Waterbaby,” “Keeper of Lost Dreams” was conceived as part of
Magic Street
. Indeed, in a way it was this story where
Magic Street
finally came to life. I had known, ever since talking with Queen Latifah, that I wanted to have a motorcycle-riding woman of power in the book, and I
knew magic was going to erupt into Baldwin Hills, and I knew that I was going to build the story around a black man as the hero, because that’s what my friend Roland Brown had asked me to do. But I didn’t know who that man was going to be, or how any of the pieces of the story were going to fit together. I had a fleeting image in my mind of a bunch of people rising into the air in a great circle, but beyond that . . . nothing.

During the time when I thought I was going to have lots of short tales like “Waterbaby” in the book, I began to think: The hero needs to be someone who becomes aware of all their wishes. Somebody who knows all the people in the neighborhood and will understand the connection between their deep wishes and the terrible things that happen in the real world.

It was in that idea that the character of Mack Street was born. The actual dream in this story is the result of free association and the geography of dreams, the way that places flow into each other in unexpected ways that are often truer than the way they fit together in the real world. I free-associated the dream the way I did the things that Ender finds in the Fantasy Game after he passes the Giant’s Drink. It’s just whatever cool stuff came into my head while I was writing, and then I made sense of it as best I could after the fact.

In effect, then, this story was my exploratory first draft of
Magic Street
, the way that “A Plague of Butterflies” was a first draft of
Wyrms
. After writing this and then waiting for a while, I was able to start drawing together the elements that became the story as a whole. Without “Keeper of Lost Dreams,” there would be no
Magic Street
, which is, I believe, one of the best things I’ve ever written.

I assumed the story would never be published, but, as with “Waterbaby,” I received a request for a story from an editor, in this case Al Sarrantonio, who was putting together an anthology of stories called
Flights: Visions of Extreme Fantasy
. The concept was to do a
Dangerous Visions
in the fantasy genre. I wasn’t sure how extreme “Keeper of Lost Dreams” might be, but I had the story, it hadn’t been published, and so I sent it to him and he decided that it fit the concept of the anthology well enough.

I don’t really think of my work in terms of whether it’s “extreme” or not—at least not until after I’ve written it. I remember, early in my career, how shocked I was when people reacted to
A Planet Called Treason
as if I
had written something offensively violent. I was just telling what my character went through—and I didn’t write the violence graphically, either. There’s no gore in my work. Still, the book was published by the SF Book Club with a warning that some might find it offensive. I guess that made me an “edgy” writer. I had no clue. I just did what I still do: Tell the story that feels important and true to me as clearly as I can.

The same thing happened when my story “America” (part of
Folk of the Fringe
) was published. A reviewer commented that it was hard to believe that what might be the “sexiest” story so far that year had been written by, of all people, Orson Scott Card. I didn’t know what to make of the comment. Should I be offended or proud that the reviewer was so surprised that a sexy story could come from me? But as I was writing it, I didn’t think of it as a sexy story. I thought of it as the way this character would experience these events.

So it may be that readers who encountered my story in Sarrantonio’s anthology found mine the tamest and least “extreme” of the stories; or maybe this tale fit right in. I have no idea. I guess that’s what editors are for. Of course, at this stage of my career, I have no idea whether they’re buying a story because they actually like the story, or because it’s worth wasting a little space on it in order to be able to put my name on the cover. That’s the danger of being an established name in the field—my name carries a certain weight because of other things I’ve already written, so that it can be one of the reasons a potential buyer might pick up a book, irrespective of whether it’s one of my better stories.

It’s one of the dangers of being an established writer with a long track record—you can get careless and lazy and people will still publish your work. The trouble is, I don’t ever
feel
careless or lazy; would I even notice it if I did become that way? I have to watch the reactions of people around me very closely. I know how to write a story that feels professional, so I can fool even the people closest to me into thinking that a work is “done” long before it’s really ready. So I look for a spark of enthusiasm and surprise in them before I’m sure I’m on to something with a new story.

Of course, that can backfire. I mean, at some point aren’t the people who love me best
not
supposed to show surprise when I actually write something good?

Tim Bushey was no athlete, and if at thirty-one middle age wasn’t there yet, it was coming, he could feel its fingers on his spine. So when he did his hour of exercise a day, he didn’t push himself, didn’t pound his way through the miles, didn’t stress his knees. Often he relaxed into a brisk walk so he could look around and see the neighborhoods he was passing through.

In winter he walked in midafternoon, the warmest time of the day. In summer he was up before dawn, walking before the air got as hot and wet as a crock pot. In winter he saw the school buses deliver children to the street corners. In summer, he saw the papers getting delivered.

So it was five-thirty on a hot summer morning when he saw the paperboy on a bicycle, pedaling over the railroad tracks and up Yanceyville Road toward Glenside. Most of the people delivering papers worked out of cars, pitching the papers out the far window. But there were a few kids on bikes here and there. So what was so odd about him that Tim couldn’t keep his eyes off the kid?

He noticed a couple of things as the kid chugged up the hill. First, he wasn’t on a mountain bike or a street racer. It wasn’t even one of those banana-seat bikes that were still popular when Tim was a kid. He was riding one of those stodgy old one-speed bikes that were the cycling equivalent of a ’55 Buick, rounded and lumpy and heavy as a burden of sin. Yet the bike looked brand-new.

And the boy himself was strange, wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a short-sleeved shirt in a print that looked like . . . no, it
absolutely was. The kid was wearing clothes straight out of
Leave It to Beaver
. And his hair had that tapered buzzcut that left just one little wave to be combed up off the forehead in front. It was like watching one of those out-of-date educational films in grade school. This kid was clearly caught in a time warp.

Still, it wouldn’t have turned Tim out of his planned route—the circuit of Elm, Pisgah Church, Yanceyville, and Cone—if it hadn’t been for the bag of papers saddled over the rack on the back of the bike. Printed on the canvas it said, “The Greensboro Daily News.”

Now, if there was one thing Tim was sure of, it was the fact that Greensboro was a one-newspaper town, unless you counted the weekly
Rhinoceros Times
, and, sure, maybe somebody had clung to an old canvas paper delivery bag with the
Daily News
logo—but that bag looked new.

It’s not as if Tim had any schedule to keep, any urgent appointments. So he turned around and jogged after the kid, and when the brand-new ancient bicycle turned right on Glenside, Tim was not all that far behind him. He lost sight of him after Glenside made its sweeping left turn to the north, but Tim was still close enough to hear, in the still morning air, the faint sound of a rolled-up newspaper hitting the gravel of a country driveway.

He found the driveway on the inside of a leftward curve. The streetlight showed the paper lying there, but Tim couldn’t see the masthead or even the headline without jogging onto the gravel, his shoes making such a racket that he half-expected to see lights go on inside the house.

He bent over and looked. The rubber band had broken and the paper had unrolled itself, so now it lay flat in the driveway. Dominating the front page was a familiar picture. The headline under it said:

I thought he died years ago, Tim thought.

Then he noticed another headline:

Truman? Tim looked at the masthead. It wasn’t the
News and Record
, it was the
Greensboro Daily News
. And under the masthead it said:

T
UESDAY
M
ORNING
, A
UGUST 17, 1948
. . .
PRICE: FIVE CENTS
.

What kind of joke was this, and who was it being played on? Not Tim—nobody could have known he’d come down Yanceyville Road today, or that he’d follow the paperboy to this driveway.

A footstep on gravel. Tim looked up. An old woman stood at the head of the driveway, gazing at him. Tim stood, blushing, caught. She said nothing.

“Sorry,” said Tim. “I didn’t open it, the rubber band must have broken when it hit the gravel, I—”

He looked down, meant to reach down, pick up the paper, carry it to her. But there was no paper there. Nothing. Right at his feet, where he had just seen the face of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, there was only gravel and moist dirt and dewy grass.

He looked at the woman again. Still she said nothing.

“I . . .” Tim couldn’t think of a thing to say. Good morning, ma’am. I’ve been hallucinating on your driveway. Have a nice day. “Look, I’m sorry.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s OK. I never get it into the house anymore these days.”

Then she walked back onto the porch and into the house, leaving him alone on the driveway.

It was stupid, but Tim couldn’t help looking around for a moment just to see where the paper might have gone. It had seemed so real. But real things don’t just disappear.

He couldn’t linger in the driveway any longer. An elderly woman might easily get frightened at having a stranger on her property in the wee hours and call the police. Tim walked back to the road and headed back the way he had come. Only he couldn’t walk, he had to break into a jog and then into a run, until it was a headlong gallop down the hill and around the curve toward Yanceyville Road.