Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (37 page)

(He brought speakeasy Ritalin, too, which my mom used to stay awake at work. I used one once, and it scared me so much I never touched it again. How strange and calm I felt—no sea inside, no dreams—my poor mother. She worked mostly nights, at a phone bank. She couldn't focus. She talked in her sleep all the time, in Hindi or Chinese, sleeping all day if she wasn't at work early or picking up an extra shift. (The time I let the goats out, she had been picking up an extra shift and Dolores was off at the store, or something, or making milk deliveries, and I was home alone, for once, and I took advantage of it.)

Petey called me Jujube because everyone called me Junebug or Jujube and not a one of what people called me was my Christian name: June Jimenez Nguyen. He asked me how old I was, and if I was old enough.

"Old enough for what?" I said.

He shrugged. "You'd know what I meant if you were," he said. It wasn't something sexual he was asking me. It was something else. It was like a slow joke, a bad joke, that got repeated until it became mythic between us. He sat at Dolores' kitchen table, waiting for her to come in and pay for the week's worth of weed he had shoved into the back of the freezer. He sipped cold coffee with goat's milk and honey. He ate bacon, if we had any sitting cold on the stove from breakfast.

"Do you ever think she's giving you the bad blood?" he said, while staring at the shunt.

I shrugged. "I make good blood enough for us both."

He frowned and popped some bacon in his mouth. "I don't know," he said. "I wouldn't let anyone do it to me."

He wouldn't leave until Dolores came up to the house and paid him and he'd gotten something to eat. Big Dolores, moving slow, hands unsteady, because she still had Parkinson's, and no amount of blood transfusion could slow that down forever.

Dolores stuffed some of the weed into a pipe and wandered out to the porch to sit with her cats. The goats had accumulated near the back porch where one of them had butted a compost bin over. They were rooting through the rotting eggshells and leaves and no one was stopping them. Big Dolores didn't have the strength to stop them, this late in the day. She called out to me. She asked me if I could chase him away from the mess. I pretended like I didn't hear her. I was not a good kid.

Petey grabbed his keys from his pocket and held them up like he was asking me to come with him. He was waiting for an answer.

I thought about it, and about how my mom would beat me black if I left right then. I shook my head. Still, I stood up and almost went with him. For a moment, I was going with him. I broke eye contact, though, and thought better of it. I went out back and cleaned up the mess. I kicked at the goats and howled at them, but they thought it was a game and they were eating the gross, fly-riddled garbage and kept at it. It took a while to rake it up, and get the compost upright, and get it chained back down and how on earth did they figure out that chain? Dolores was watching me, smoking, humming to her cats, and saying nothing.

Afterward, we went inside, and got our shunts open, and I got a little stoned from her blood in me.

Mom got up for night shift work and saw that I was glazed over, and I think she said something to Dolores about smoking before shunting, but Dolores just clutched at her head and said she had such pains. "Such pains, little girl. Oh, my lord the pain inside of me. I'll need to go to the doctor this week and get a new prescription."

"Be careful, Dolores," said Mom. "Our little Junebug's got school in the morning. She's got to get blood drawn by and by, too, for school things. They got to pass a drug test to do extra-curricular activities. What if she wants to do a sport? She ain't got a prescription for anything like that." I never wanted to do a sport. I never wanted to do anything.

"Oh my lord, the pain in this head of mine," said Dolores. "Only thing that slows it down a pinch is the devil's weed. Sorry, girls. Can't be helped sometimes."

She was big, but she wasn't as strong as she used to be. I remember when she could pick up two young goats under one arm to haul them back to the barn. They weren't the biggest goats, but they were big enough. I remember her fixing a fence by herself, slamming the posthole digger down and yanking it out, flannel and overalls flailing around, her sunburned face all beading with sweat.

Petey took me for a ride into the city. Mom thought it would be a good idea for me to get out of the house, as long as Petey promised to keep his hands to himself. That's not how she said it. "You know Dolores has a pistol as big as your arm, and a shotgun, too, and you know I know how to shoot like ringing a bell," is what she said. "I had to shoot her daddy, once, right before he got arrested. Damn near killed him, too. He still can't walk."

Petey said "Yes'm," and nodded, and offered me a stick of gum, right in front of my mom. "Here," he said. "It's so we can have good breath for the make-out session we're going to do all night."

She was going for the gun, and we ran, laughing. We ran into his truck and took off. Thinking about that, and how he was going to be dead in about a year, makes my mom's joke a little ominous, but she didn't kill him. He was in a car accident, and died in the hospital.

Anyway, we went out to walk around Main Street. He said he was broke, so it was up to me to get the ice cream from my allowance. We sat on the curb and watched people driving up and down Main Street. Petey and I were laughing about how stupid his real name was, and how crazy Big Dolores was, with her shaking hands, and how she couldn't even keep up with her own goats. I told him my earliest memory, and how it was Big Dolores that made me see such a thing when I was too young for it, right on my own bed. She had all those damn cats. She didn't know what to do with them, and she wouldn't fix any of them. Hell, half the cats in town probably wandered off our farm, got picked up and adopted somewhere. He let me talk and talk. He asked if I ever wanted to get off that farm, out of this town.

"Of course I do," I said. "I hate it here."

"We could go," he said. "I mean, just as friends. I got to get on a path to success before I can have a girlfriend. I heard that from a life coach my mom showed me on the Internet."

"What the hell kind of thing to say is that?" I said.

"Because I'm a dropout and I'm not going anywhere, and I don't want anyone getting stuck on me when I know exactly what I am, what I'm good for."

"Whoever said I liked you anyway?" I said. "I don't even like you. I just wanted out of the damn house." I think I was probably lying to him, and I think he could tell.

"That's a good thing, Jujube. Go find yourself a better man. I can't even buy your damn ice cream. We're pals. That's all."

"There's no one else around much, though," I said. "Not in this two-street little hole. I ain't a lesbian like Big Dolores. I need a man. We should both go and see if we can't find something better."

"See, you do need to get out more, girl. You need to get out and not be stuck in one place or with one person. You're, what... fourteen? Fifteen?"

"Sixteen," I said. I was lying, of course. I was fourteen.

"Well, I'm eighteen, and I'm a drop-out. Kids that didn't drop out like I did, they joined the army or went off to college or something. I'll be lucky to get a factory job in Rockaway when I get there."

"You're going to the city?"

"Where the hell else? I ain't staying here to be a prescription mule until I'm arrested. I'll be lucky to get on a factory line with sleeping quarters. One of the real sweat shops that work a man to death. I stay out of the company store, keep my head clean, don't drink anything but water... maybe I can save up enough to get out. I drink too much, though. I need to stop drinking the whiskey before I get there."

His dreams, for what they were, rolled off me like a cloud. I heard only that he wanted to go away, and that he wanted to take me with him and that he thought I was too young to go with him, that maybe he was thinking about Dolores' gun.

"You know my mom doesn't actually know how to shoot that damn hand cannon," I said. "She would have shot my dad dead bang if she could shoot for shit."

"Well, hell," he said. He had this sad look on his face. "I'm not much in this world, but I won't do that. I won't do that, Jujube. You're still a kid, and I'm not, and I know better than to think your mom ain't right to shoot a man for it. You're cute, though. I think you're cute as kittens. Come on, Jujube, and let's go see if we can't get you home before dark. Ain't you gotta earn your keep with Big Dolores?"

"Yeah, I guess," I said. "She can wait, you know. She's not my real grandma. I'm sick of it. It's so boring and there's that thing in my arm. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted."

"What do you want, Junebug?"

"I don't know."

"Well you let me know you figure it out. I'm the guy that brings things to people. I can find just about anything."

"What if I wanted something awful?"

He shrugged. "I do have limits," he said.

At home, my momma was sitting up with Big Dolores. They were both on the back porch, passing a joint between them. "Gotta watch it, girl," she said. "You've been here long enough to know the way goats get made, but you're too young, and that boy's no good. Like your daddy, and your granddaddy. He's no good."

Dolores snorted. "Hell, we ain't much good, either," she said. "Let her have her fun. We can take care of another baby around here and run him off, too, if he makes a stink about it. Why not?"

"She's my daughter, that's why not," said my mom. "You don't know what it's like to be with the wrong person, Dolores. You never had to learn that."

Dolores stood up slow. "Like she's going to listen to you anyhow..." She was heading inside. Cats were trying to follow her. She bent over slow to pet them and push them back from the door.

"There are boys who are going places, and boys who are stuck where they are," she said.

"We're just friends. He's a grown man, and I'm just a kid, and he knows it, too. He said as much. Ain't you supposed to be working tonight?" I asked.

"I called in sick."

"You ain't sick," I said.

She shrugged. "I won't tell my boss if you don't."

Petey liked me, though. He liked me enough that he wasn't going to take advantage of my age. That, I knew. Later that week, when I was lying down on the couch with Big Dolores, watching the box with my arm open and the blood flowing between us, I wondered if Petey would still like me if he saw this. Here I was, my arm really naked, bones and arteries showing, shunted open, blood pouring in and out between me and Big Dolores, and that cat stink all over her, and goat shit stink, and weed and farm stink. God, she stank. I stank just being here, around this place. God, we always stank. She had only seven or eight teeth left. She had dentures that didn't fit right. She pulled out her dentures and put them in a jar beside the couch while we watched the box. She closed her eyes and napped.

"You're probably already too old to do a damn thing for me," she said. "Still, it feels nice. Goddamn, but aging is an awful thing. It is terrible to be so old, Junebug. I hope you never have to know what it's like to feel like this. I hope you never need anyone like this."

She rubbed around the shunt in her own arm, around her own shunt, and around her elbows and all the way up to her shoulder.

I had show and tell once where I talked about it. I opened it up and showed the class. This is where the blood goes in. The blood always goes in at blue. Indigo blue. In is for Indigo. Blood always goes out at red. Red for bleeding. I pointed it out. I said that my step-grandma was sick, and her blood couldn't keep her healthy, so every night I ate a big meal, and I opened my arm, and let the blood flow out of me and into her, and she sent her blood into me and back, and my body was young and strong and I could fill it up with all the things she needed to keep her Parkinson's and Alzheimer's back. There are two plugs involved. One is in and one is out. We have the same blood type, so I can donate to her. It only works if you have the same blood type. Even universal donors don't work right like this. Plus, we were Duffy type, which is an obscure kind from Africa that's even harder to match than the A's and B's and O's.

The kids in the class didn't laugh or joke or anything. They were too busy looking into my arm, right where they could see bone through the hard, clear plastic.

The one time I showed it to Petey, he threw up a little in his mouth, had to run to the bathroom and rinse his mouth out.

"Sorry," I said. "I thought you wanted to see."

"I was eating. You let her do that to you? You let her open you up like that?"

"I know, right? No one ever asked me about it," I said. I touched it. "I wish I could just rip it off and walk away. Will you take me with you to Rockaway? I can find something there. I'm sure I can."

"What would happen to Dolores if you stopped?"

I shrugged. "I'm getting too old for it, anyway. She needs a new kid around with Duffy blood. I think she wants me to get pregnant so maybe she can get a new donor."

"I wouldn't let anyone do that to me," said Petey.

"I hate it," I said. "I hate it so much. I wish she would just die. Then I could get my arm fixed. Then I wouldn't need the goddamn shunt anymore. I wish I had a normal arm."

"Ain't you old enough to say you don't want to do it anymore?"

"And hear her moaning and my mother... God, my mother."

We were at the kitchen table. He had come to make his delivery. He said he had to drive over three towns to get it on account of the cops busting down the illegal dispensary behind the Taco Jimmy Stand. He asked me if I had ever been way up north to Drummondville. I had gone there, only once, to take a standardized test for college prep, with my mom. We left long before dawn. By the time I was done, it had been snowing so hard we got stuck in the building overnight. I told him that, and all I could remember was coming home the next morning, exhausted and starving, and there was Big Dolores, sitting on the porch with her cats, scratching at her arm with her hands shaking and cold all over, pale white cold, like an ice statue on the porch, melted a little then frozen melted, and missing me and the blood that kept her tremors at bay.