The Best of Nancy Kress (43 page)

“Hey, Casey!”

“Hello, Rizzo. What’ll you have?”

“What do you want, Darlene?”

“Oh, I don’t know—pepperoni, for sure. Mushrooms, green pepper, onions. And anchovies, if they’re fresh. Are the anchovies fresh?”

“Are the anchovies fresh?” Rizzo asked Casey.

“No,” Casey said.

“Well, then, no anchovies. OK, Darl?”

She said, “Are they good frozen anchovies?”

“Are they good frozen anchovies?” Rizzo asked Casey.

“No,” Casey said.

“So what are you doing now?” Rizzo said, and added hastily, without glancing around the pizzeria, “What are you going to do? I mean your, uh, plans?”

“Bring you a pizza without anchovies,” Casey said, saw that he was being a bastard again, and tried harder. “Guess what, Rizzo? I sold one.”

Rizzo wrinkled his beefy forehead. “One what?”

“One story. I sold one.”

“You did? Hey, that’s great! Is it…is it one of those—”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Well, that’s still great! Do you mind if I ask you what you got for it? No, never mind. None of my business.”

“It wasn’t much.”

“I hear that market pays less. Comparatively.”

“Generally, yes. There are exceptions.”

“Of course—there always are. Speaking of exceptions, do you mind if
I
brag a little? I got a job. A real, tenure-track, full-time job. Starting as assistant professor.”

“Congratulations. Where is it?”

“Lunell College. It’s a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I really lucked out, you know what the market is, nobody wants humanities people. Only technology-gadget guys, computer specialists and all. But this is a bona fide good deal. Guess what the salary is.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Go ahead, guess.”

“I couldn’t.”

Rizzo told him. Casey smiled and underlined “no anchovies” on his order pad, thick and black. Twice. The pencil broke.

“I really did luck out,” Rizzo said. “They just happened to need a Keats man.”

He had not forgotten his childhood nomenclature for the stars, but now he learned everyone else’s. This was easy because there seemed to be fewer stars than there had been in Montana. He wrote out a list of the more mellifluous ones, set the list to the melody of a sixteenth-century English madrigal, and chanted it while he walked:

Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese

Ri-i-gel,

Arcturus Polaris Cano-o-pus

AL-TAIR.

The chant stayed in his head while he tried to write about galactic empires and interstellar battles; since he couldn’t get the tune out, he learned to ignore it. After a while he found it rather soothing and came to depend upon it while he sweated and thrashed and fought, motionless at his Salvation Army desk.

The actual presence of real stars was less soothing. Nightly he glared upwards, weather permitting, with real anger, while summer dew soaked his sneakers and a crick developed at the back of his neck. He didn’t try to understand his anger; it was more satisfying to revel in it. They had let him down, Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. They had all let him down. They had not delivered, somehow, what had been promised, promised to the Montana kids playing on the big flat rock in the middle of prosperous insignificance: Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine and Jerry Casey, playing UFO and Sirian Invaders and Would-You-Go? They had deceived. They were not what he thought them. They had refused to let him go, as they had let Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine go, but they had also refused to satisfy him. They were heartless, they were cold, they were shallow, and he himself was probably crazy to stand here thinking of them as anything but ongoing nuclear fusions. “Many thynges doth infect the ayre, as the influence of sondry sterres,” he quoted aloud, enormously pleased to have remembered the quote from Renaissance Lit. He only quoted aloud when in deserted areas, however; his angry craziness demanded privacy to be fully wallowed in. It was a lovers’ quarrel.

“Jerry! Happy birthday, dear!”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“So how does it feel to be twenty-six, son?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Dad. Not too different from twenty-five.”

“Your presents are in the mail, dear. I’m sorry they didn’t get East by your birthday, but I just couldn’t get to town to the post office; the car was acting up, and your father couldn’t figure out if it was the starter or that little black thing that goes from the—”

“Now, Mary, we don’t need to tell him all that long distance.”

“Guess not. How’s everything going, dear?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“Did you sell any more—”

“No. No, I haven’t. It takes time, you know, Mom.”

Fourteen hundred miles away, his father cleared his throat. Jerry held the receiver a little away from his ear and closed his eyes, waiting.

“Speaking of selling, son, I happened to talk to John Nielsen yesterday, and he still needs someone to help him and Carl at the Grain & Feed. Now I’m not pressuring you, you know that. Whatever you want to do is fine with your mother and me. That’s what we’ve always said, and we mean it. But I just promised John I’d pass along the information to you, so I am.”

“Okay,” Casey said. “The information is passed.” He could see his father holding the phone—the upstairs extension, it would be—lightly in his big hand, still wearing his Stetson with his boots and plaid flannel shirt.

“Just so’s you know, son.”

“I know,” Casey said. There was a pause.

“Are you still seeing that girl, dear, that you wrote us about? The kindergarten teacher? Kara Phillips?”

“Yes. No. A little.”

“I have an idea! Why don’t you bring her with you when you come home for Christmas? You know we’d just love to have her!”

“Now, Mary, don’t push,” Casey’s father said.

“I wasn’t pushing, Calvin Casey! All I said was that we’d love to have Jerry’s friend stay with us over Christmas, if he’d like to bring her. She could have the spare room, it was just freshly papered, it’d be no trouble at all.”

“Thanks, Mom. Maybe I’ll ask her.”

“Of course, it’s up to you. Write us when your presents arrive, so I know they fit, and tell us if Kara is coming for Christmas.”

“Assistant manager,” his father said. “Did I mention that it’s assistant manager?”

“Well, bye, dear. Happy birthday!”

“Good starting salary, son.”

“Love you,” Casey’s mother said.

“Love you, too,” Casey said, and hung up the receiver carefully, with no sound.

He quit the pizzeria. One night in October he had waited on the Chairman of the Graduate Committee, Dr. Stine. The man had been so tactful, so diplomatic in chatting with Casey without once mentioning Casey’s failed novel-thesis, Casey’s inexpert self-haircut ($4.70 at the barber, and that without sideburns), Casey’s tomato-and-mozzarella smeared apron, that Casey had been unable to stand it. He smiled at the chairman, said yes, fall was beautiful in this part of the country, said yes, it was interesting that the papers always reported an increase in UFO sightings in the fall, said no, he didn’t think there was anything in it. Then he went into the kitchen and stuffed his apron into the pizza oven, where it turned the exact color of flabby frozen anchovies.

He found a job as part-time groundsman for an old, beautiful, tree-shaded cemetery. He wrote all morning and raked leaves all afternoon, avoiding funerals in progress. The metal rake prongs caught repeatedly at the bases of tombstones and then twanged back, a sound as monotonous and hypnotic as a pendulum. Sometimes he returned late at night and walked through the cemetery. The darkness was rich and velvety; it was the quick flashes of headlights beyond the iron gates that seemed like the ghosts. He read the oldest of the tombstones with a penlight, stooping to trace the letters with his finger when age had made them illegible:

ELIZABETH ANN CARMODY

1851-1862

Eleven years old, he thought. At eleven years old he had been playing Would-You-Go? on the big flat rock on the plains. Eleven years old.

JAMES ALLEN ROBERTS

1789-1812

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

Ha
, snorted Casey, child of draft card burnings and ping-pong detente.

CECILIA HARDWICK SMITH

1884-1940

BEYOND THIS NARROW VALE OF EARTH

WHERE BRIGHT CELESTIAL AGES ROLL

THE COUNTLESS STARS OF HEAVEN'S REALM

GUIDE AND LIGHT THE WANT’RING SOUL

Ha again
, Casey told the stars, the lovers’ quarrel having solidified into the cynical half-banter of an accepted marriage. So go ahead, guide and light. Send down knowledge. Send down enlightenment. Send down a publisher. Go ahead, I’m waiting, I’m a wandering soul, as duly specified, I’m ready. H- has arisen. Go ahead.

Clouds started to roll in from the west.

“And she said to tell you that it would be no trouble at all, you could have the spare room, and they’d love to have you.”

Kara raised herself on one elbow in Casey’s rumpled, un-spare bed. The neon barber pole just outside Casey’s window striped her breasts with revolving red and blue.

“I don’t think it’s fair of you to change the subject in the middle of a discussion just because you’re losing.”

“I was losing?”

“You know you were. And then you just drop in this invitation to your parents’ house for Christmas, and that really puts me at an emotional disadvantage, Jer. It’s not fighting fair.”

“So report me to the Geneva Convention.”

“There you go, getting nasty again, de-railing the argument just because you haven’t got a valid viewpoint that won’t stand up to close scrutiny.”

“I haven’t got a valid viewpoint that will stand up to close scrutiny? And what is it you’ve got, an airtight case?”

“I didn’t say that. I said—”

“More like a braintight case.”

“—that not being able to prove that a thing exists isn’t the same as being able to prove that it doesn’t exist, and—”

“Absolutely impervious to the osmosis of facts.”