Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (29 page)

They were going faster and faster now, careening down the old state road like a moonshiner on a delivery run with the Alcohol Tax agents on his tail, and Hassmann was beginning to be afraid, although he did his best to sit still and look imperturbable. The old roadbed was only indifferently maintained, and every bump rattled their teeth in spite of the Caddy’s heavy-duty shocks; once Hassmann was bounced high enough to bang his head on the roof, and the car was beginning to sway ominously from side to side. Fortunately, they were on a level stretch of road with no oncoming traffic when they hit the patch of ice. For a moment or two the Caddy was all over the road, skidding and fishtailing wildly, its brakes screaming and its tires throwing up clouds of black smoke, and then slowly, painfully, Dr. Wilkins brought the big car back under control. They never came to a complete stop, but they had slowed down to about fifteen miles per hour by the time Dr. Wilkins could wrestle them back into their own lane, and you could smell burned rubber even inside the closed cab.

No one spoke; Mrs. Wilkins had not even moved, except to steady herself against the dashboard with one hand, an almost dainty motion. Slowly, almost involuntarily, Dr. Wilkins raised his head to look at Hassmann in the rearview mirror.
Almost lost it, didn’t you, old man?
Hassmann thought, staring impassively back at him, and after a moment, Dr. Wilkins looked shakily away. They began to slowly pick up speed again, wobbling slightly, although Dr. Wilkins was careful to keep them under fifty this time. This kind of compulsive speeding, obviously pushing himself to or beyond the edge of his driving ability, was the first real indication of strain or tension that Dr. Wilkins had allowed to escape from behind his smooth, hard-lacquered facade, and Hassmann greeted it with interest and a certain degree of vindictiveness.

A few minutes more brought them out of the hills. They slowed down to rattle across a small chain-link bridge over a frozen river. A tank was parked to one side of the road, near the bridge entrance, its hatches open for ventilation, grey smoke panting from its exhaust and rising straight up into the cold air. A soldier in a steel helmet popped his head up out of the driver’s hatch and watched them as they passed. They weren’t putting up roadblocks and regulating civilian traffic yet, Hassmann thought, in spite of the recent wave of terrorism, but it obviously wasn’t going to be too much longer before they were, either. There was a small town on the other side of the bridge, half a dozen buildings clustered around a crossroads. Political graffiti had been spray-painted on several of the buildings, particularly on the blank-faced side wall of a boarded-up gas station: YANKEES GO HOME . . . FEDS OUT OF WEST VIRGINIA NOW . . . SECESSION, NOT RECESSION . . . FUCK THE UNION . . . A sloppy, half-hearted attempt to obliterate the graffiti had been made, and only a few letters of each slogan remained, but Hassmann had seen them often enough elsewhere to have little difficulty reconstructing them. The restaurant was a mile beyond the town, a large stone-and-timber building that had once been a grinding mill—now hidden spotlights splashed the ivy-covered walls with pastel light, and the big wooden water-wheel was sheathed in glistening ice.

There was a network newsvan parked in front of the restaurant, and Dr. Wilkins, who had been anxiously checking his watch on the last stretch from town, grunted in satisfaction when he saw it. As they pulled up, a news crew with a minicam unit climbed out of the van and took up positions in front of the restaurant steps. Other reporters got out of their parked cars—pinching out unfinished cigarettes and carefully tucking them away—and began to saunter over as well, some of them slapping themselves on the arms and joking with one another about the cold in low, rapid voices. Hassmann heard one of the reporters laugh, the sound carrying clearly on the cold winter air.

Dr. Wilkins switched off the ignition, and they all sat motionless and silent for a moment, listening to the metallic
ticking
noises the engine made as it cooled. Then, with forced brightness, Dr. Wilkins said, “Well, we’re here! Everybody out!” Mrs. Wilkins ignored him. She was staring out at the gathering knot of reporters, and for the first time she seemed shaken, her icy composure broken. “Frank,” she said in an unsteady voice, “I—Frank, I just
can’t,
I can’t face them, I can’t—” She was trembling. Dr. Wilkins patted her hand perfunctorily. He noticed Hassmann watching them, and glared at him with murderous resentment, his careful mask slipping for a moment. Hassmann stared stonily back. “It’ll be all right, Fran,” Dr. Wilkins said, patting her hand again. “It’s just until we get inside. Julian promised me that he wouldn’t let any of them into the restaurant.” Mrs. Wilkins was shaking her head blindly. “It’ll only be a minute. Let me do all the talking. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.” He looked coldly at Hassmann. “Come on,” he said brusquely, to Hassmann, and got out of the car. He walked quickly around to the passenger side, opened the door, and said, “Come on” again, to his wife this time, in the low coaxing tone an adult might use to a frightened child. Even so, he had to reach down and half pull her to her feet before he could get her out of the car. He bent to look at Hassmann again. “You, too,” he said in a harsh, dangerous voice. “Come on. Don’t give me any trouble now, you little shit. Get out.”

Hassmann climbed out of the car. It was colder than ever, and he could feel the clammy sweat drying on his body with a rapidity that made him shiver. Dr. Wilkins came up between him and Mrs. Wilkins and took each of them by the arm, and they began walking toward the restaurant. The reporters were looking toward them now, and the camera lights on the van came on, nearly blinding them with brightness.

Dr. Wilkins kept them walking right at the reporters. The small crowd parted and re-formed around them, swallowing them, and then it seemed to Hassmann as if everything was happening at once, too fast to follow. Faces jostled around him, faces thrust forward toward him, their mouths opening and closing. Voices gabbled. A reporter was saying, “. . . with the ratification vote on the Act of Secession coming up in the statehouse Wednesday, and similar votes later this week in Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado,” and Dr. Wilkins was waving his hand airily and saying, “. . . more than enough support on the floor.” Another reporter was saying something to Mrs. Wilkins and she was dully muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” Flashbulbs were popping at them now, and they had climbed partway up the restaurant steps. Someone was thrusting a microphone into Hassmann’s face and bellowing “. . . make you feel?” and Hassmann was shrugging and shaking his head. Someone else was saying “. . . latest Gallup poll shows that two-thirds of the people of West Virginia support secession,” and Dr. Wilkins was saying, “. . . everything you hear, love?” and the reporters laughed.

Hassmann wasn’t listening anymore. Ever since last weekend he had been walking around like a somnambulist, and now the feeling had intensified; he felt feverish and unreal, as if everything was happening behind a thin wall of insulating glass, or happening to someone else while he watched. He barely noticed that Dr. Wilkins had stopped walking and was now staring directly into the blinking eye of the minicam, or that the reporters had grown curiously silent. Dr. Wilkins had let his face become serious and somber, and when he spoke this time it was not in the insouciant tone he’d been using a moment before, but in a slow, sincere, gravelly voice. The voice seemed to go on and on and on, while Hassmann shivered in the cold wind, and then Dr. Wilkins’ heavy hand closed over Hassmann’s shoulder, and the flashbulbs went off in their faces like summer lightning.

Then Julian was ushering them into the restaurant—fawning shamelessly over Dr. Wilkins and promising to “take their order personally”—and shutting the reporters outside. He led them through the jungly interior of the old mill to a table in a corner nook where the walls were hung with bronze cooking utensils and old farm implements, and then buzzed anxiously around Dr. Wilkins like a fat unctuous bee while they consulted the menu. The menu had no prices, and as far as Hassmann was concerned might just as well have been written in Arabic. Mrs. Wilkins refused to order, or even to speak, and her rigid silence eventually embarrassed even Julian. Impatiently, Dr. Wilkins ordered for all of them—making a point of asking Hassmann, with thinly disguised sarcasm, if the coulibiac of salmon and the osso buco would be to his liking—and Julian hurried gratefully away.

Silence settled over the table. Dr. Wilkins stared blankly at Hassmann, who stared blankly back. Mrs. Wilkins seemed to have gone into shock—she was staring down at the table, her body stiffly erect, her hands clenched in her lap; it was hard to tell if she was even breathing. Dr. Wilkins looked at his wife, looked away. Still no one had spoken. “Well, Jim,” Dr. Wilkins started to say with leaden joviality, “I think you’ll like—” and then he caught the scorn in the look that Hassmann was giving him, and let the sentence falter to a stop. It had become clear to Hassmann that Dr. Wilkins hated him as much as or more than his wife did—but in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that he had already gotten as much use out of Hassmann as he was going to get, he was too much the politician to be able to stop going through the motions of the charade. Dr. Wilkins locked eyes with Hassmann for a moment, opened his mouth to say something else, closed it again. Abruptly, he looked tired.

A smoothly silent waiter placed their appetizers in front of them, glided away again. Slowly, Mrs. Wilkins looked up. She had one of those smooth Barbie doll faces that enables some women to look thirty when they are fifty, but now her face had harsh new lines in it, as if someone had gone over it with a needle dipped in acid. Moving with the slow-motion grace of someone in a diving suit on the bottom of the sea, she reached out to touch the linen napkin before her on the table. She smiled fondly at it, caressing it with her fingertips. She was staring straight across the table at Hassmann now, but she wasn’t seeing him; somewhere on its way across the table, her vision had taken the sort of right-angle turn that allows you to look directly into the past.

“Frank,” she said, in a light, amused, reminiscent tone unlike any that Hassmann had heard her use, “do you remember the time we were having the Graingers over for dinner, back when you were still in city council? And just before they got there I realized that we’d run out of clean napkins?”

“Fran—” Dr. Wilkins said warningly, but she ignored him; she was speaking to Hassmann now, although he was sure that she still wasn’t seeing him
as
Hassmann—he was merely filling the role of listener, one of the many vague someones she’d told this anecdote to, for it was plain that she’d told it many times before. “And so I gave Peter some money and sent him down to the store to quick buy me some napkins, even
paper
ones were better than nothing.” She was smiling now as she spoke. “So after a while he comes back, the Graingers were here by then, and he comes marching solemnly right into the living room where we’re having drinks, and he says—he must have been about seven—he says, ‘I looked all over the store, Mom, and I got the best ones I could find. These must be really good because they’re
sanitary
ones,
see?
It says so right on the box.’ And he holds up this great big box of Kotex!” She laughed. “And he looks so intent and serious, and he’s so proud of being a big enough boy to be given a job to do, and he’s trying so hard to do it right and please us, I just didn’t have the heart to scold him, even though old Mr. Grainger looked like he’d just swallowed his false teeth, and Frank choked and sprayed his drink all over the room.” Still smiling, still moving languidly, she picked up her fork and dug it into one of her veal-and-shrimp quenelles, and then she stopped, and her eyes cleared, and Hassmann knew that all at once she was
seeing
him again. Life crashed back into her face with shocking suddenness, like a storm wave breaking over a seawall, flushing it blood-red. Abruptly, spasmodically, viciously, she threw her fork at Hassmann. It bounced off his chest and clattered away across the restaurant floor. Her face had gone white now, as rapidly as it had flushed, and she said, “
I
will not eat with the man who murdered my
son.”

Hassmann stood up. He heard his own voice saying, “Excuse me,” in a polite and formal tone, and then he had turned and was walking blindly away across the restaurant, somehow managing not to blunder into any of the other tables. He kept walking until a rough-hewn door popped up in front of him, and then he pushed through it, and found himself in the washroom.

It was cold and dim and silent in the washroom, and the air smelled of cold stone and dust and antiseptic, and, faintly, of ancient piss. The only sound was the low, rhythmic belching and gurgling of cisterns. A jet of freezing air was coming in through a crack in the window molding, and it touched Hassmann’s skin like a needle.

He moved to the porcelain washbasin and splashed cold water over his face, the way they do in the movies, but it made him feel worse instead of better. He shivered. Automatically, he wet a tissue and began to scrub at the food stain that Mrs. Wilkins’ fork had left on his cheap pin-striped suit. He kept catching little glimpses of himself in the tarnished old mirror over the washbasin, and he watched himself slyly, fascinatedly, without ever looking at himself straight on. They had
film
footage of him killing the Wilkins boy—that particular stretch of film had been shown over and over again on TV since last weekend. As the demonstrators rushed up the steps of the campus Administration building toward the line of waiting Guardsmen, there was a very clear sequence of him bringing his rifle up and shooting Peter Wilkins down. Other Guardsmen had fired, and other demonstrators had fallen—four dead and three others seriously wounded, all told—but there could be no doubt that
he
was the one who had killed Peter Wilkins. Yes, that one was
his,
all right.

He leaned against the wall, pressing his forehead against the cold stone, feeling the stone suck the warmth from his flesh. For some reason he found himself thinking about the duck he’d raised, one of the summers they still went to the farm, the duck they’d wryly named Dinner. He’d fattened that stupid duck all summer, and then when it was time to kill it, he’d hardly been able to bring himself to do it. He’d made a botch of cutting its head off, faltered on the first stroke and then had to slash two more times to get the job done. And then the duck had run headless across the farmyard, spouting blood, and he’d had to chase it down. He’d given it to his father to clean, and then gone off behind the barn to throw up. All the rest of the family had said that the duck was delicious, but he’d had to leave the table several times during the meal to throw up again. How his father had laughed at him!