Down to Earth (27 page)

Auerbach thought about it. He thought slower than he should have, but still thought pretty straight. When he was done, he shook his head, even though it made his ruined shoulder ache. “Nope. That’d be like raising with a pair of fives against a guy who’s got four diamonds showing.”

Now Penny did kiss him, a peck on the lips that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with gratitude. “See, Rance?” she said. “I knew you weren’t dumb.”

“Only about you,” he answered, which made her laugh, though he hadn’t been more than half joking. He sighed and went on, “But if you listen to them, half the guys in the Boomslang have sold the Lizards a taste one time or another.”

Penny laughed again. “How much have you had to drink, babe? Must be a hell of a lot, if you’re dumb enough to believe what a bunch of barflies say. And even if they have sold some poor damn Lizard a taste or two, so what? That’s nickel-and-dime stuff. If I ever do start playing the game down here, it won’t be for nickels and dimes, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“If you get in trouble, you want to get in a whole lot of trouble—that’s what you’re telling me.” Now Rance nodded; that did sound like the Penny Summers he’d known for the past twenty-odd years. Penny . . . you could say a lot about her, but she never did things by halves.

She knew it, too. “I stiffed my pals for plenty before I came running back to you,” she said. “If I ever take a shot at it again, I’ll do it once—once and then it’s off to Tahiti or one of those other little islands the Free French run.”

Free France was a joke, but a useful joke. The Japanese Empire could have run the French off their South Pacific islands. So could the USA. So could the Lizards, flying out of Australia. Nobody bothered. Neutral ground where nobody asked a whole lot of questions was too useful to everyone.

“I could go for that,” Rance agreed. The ginger he and Penny had run down into Mexico should have got them a stash that would have taken them to Tahiti. Auerbach liked the notion of island girls not overburdened with clothes or prudery. But things hadn’t worked out the way they’d had in mind, and so. . . .

Penny said, “I’ll tell you one more time, sugar: you won’t find anything that could head us toward Free France there in the goddamn Boomslang. And if you do find it in the Boomslang, it’s dollars to doughnuts somebody’s trying to set us up. You want to be a sucker, go ahead, but leave me out, okay?”

“Okay,” Auerbach said, and then he yawned. “Let’s go to bed.”

“How do you mean that?” Penny asked.

“Damned if I know,” he answered. “Meet me in the bedroom and we’ll both find out.” Five minutes later, two sets of snores rose from the bed.

A couple of evenings afterwards, Rance and Penny went to the Boomslang together. She didn’t go with him all the time, but then, she wasn’t in constant pain, either. When she did come into the saloon, she always drew admiring glances, not just from whites but from blacks as well. That was one more thing Auerbach had had to get used to in a hurry here. Those kinds of looks from Negroes in Texas might have touched off a lynching bee. He gathered the same thing had been true in South Africa before the Lizards came. It wasn’t true any more.

Rance drank scotch that had never been within five thousand miles of Scotland. Penny contented herself with a Lion Lager. A barmaid took one of the other regulars upstairs. “Don’t even think about it, buster,” Penny murmured.

“I won’t,” Rance promised. “She’s homely.” Penny snorted.

After a while, a big, broad-shouldered black fellow whom Auerbach knew only as Frederick—emphatically
not
as Fred—came over and sat down beside him. “It is the ginger man,” he said in a rumbling bass. His smile was broad and friendly. Too broad and friendly to be convincing? Rance had never quite figured that out, which meant he stayed wary where Frederick was concerned. The black man inclined his head to Penny. “And this is the ginger lady?”

His musical accent made the question less offensive than it might have been otherwise. Penny tossed her head. “There’s plenty of ginger in me, pal,” she said, “but I’m spoken for.” She put a hand on Rance’s arm.

In a way, Rance was annoyed that she thought she needed to say such a thing, especially to a Negro. In another way, he was relieved. He wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with Frederick even if he’d had two good arms and two good legs. With things as they were, the black man could have broken him in half without working up a sweat.

But Frederick shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not that kind of ginger, dear lady. The kind that makes the Lizards dance.”

“Ixnay,” Rance muttered to Penny. South African English was different enough from the kind he’d grown up with that he didn’t worry about Frederick’s knowing what that meant.

Penny nodded slightly, but leaned forward so she could see Frederick around Rance and said, “Yeah, I’ve done that. But so what? If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have ended up here, and so I’m not going to do it any more.”

If the Negro was a plant, if the Lizards were looking to get Rance and Penny in more trouble, that would put sugar in their gas tank. But all Frederick said was, “No doubt you are wise. Still, though, do you not miss the excitement of never knowing when things might turn . . . interesting?”

Damn him,
Auerbach thought. He’d made a shrewd guess there. Penny liked living on the edge. Once upon a time, Rance had known that feeling, too. Before Penny could answer, he said, “You lose excitement in a hurry the first time somebody puts a couple of bullets through you.”

“Yeah,” Penny said. If she sounded a little disappointed, then she did, that was all. Tahiti remained tempting—to her and to Auerbach both—but only if the potential gain made the risk worthwhile. And she was dead right about that being unlikely for any deal made in a no-account District Six saloon.

Frederick spoke a sentence in whatever African language he’d grown up with, then translated it into English: “Who is a hunter after the lion bites?” He beamed. “You see? We are not so very different, you people from a far land and me.”

“Maybe not,” Auerbach said. He didn’t want to start a brawl. A couple of bullets had ruined his taste for that, too. Penny nodded, which eased his mind. She was still looking for her big chance; she just didn’t think she’d find it here.

And damned if Frederick wasn’t doing the exact same thing. With a sigh full of longing, he said, “If only I could find enough ginger and the right Lizards, all my worries would be over.”

“Yeah,” Penny said, that same longing in her voice.

“Hell of a big if,” Rance said, and hoped she was listening to him.

Engine rumbling, Jonathan Yeager’s elderly Ford came to a stop in front of Karen’s house. He killed the engine, jumped out of the car, and hurried toward the door. Summer nights could be chilly in Southern California, but that wasn’t the only, or even the main, reason he wore his T-shirt striped with the fleetlord’s body paint. Karen’s parents were nice people—
for old fogies,
he added to himself, as he did whenever the thought occurred to him—but they weren’t the sort of folks who took bare chests for granted.

He rang the doorbell. A moment later, the door opened. “Hello, Jonathan,” said Karen’s father, a burly man whose own red hair was going gray. “Come on in. She’ll be ready in two shakes, I promise.”

“Okay, Mr. Culpepper. Thanks,” Jonathan said. He looked around the living room. The Culpeppers didn’t have so many books as his family did, but nobody he knew had as many books as his family did.

“Would you like a Coke, Jonathan?” Mrs. Culpepper asked, coming out of the kitchen. She was a blonde herself, but Karen looked more like her than like her husband. As far as Jonathan was concerned, that was all to the good.

But he shook his head now. “No, thanks. Karen and I will get our sodas and popcorn and candy at the movie.”

Karen came into the front room just then. “Hi!” she said brightly, and wrinkled her nose at Jonathan. She switched to the language of the Race, saying, “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” and dropped into the posture of respect. Then, laughing, she straightened up again. Her own body paint said she was a senior mechanized combat vehicle driver. Her halter top didn’t hide much of it—didn’t hide any, in fact, because she’d continued the pattern on the fabric in washable paint.

Her parents looked at each other. Jonathan saw them roll their eyes. They didn’t take the Race for granted, the way Karen and he did. Well, even his own folks didn’t do that, but they knew how important the Race was. The Culpeppers didn’t seem to get that, either, or to want to get it.

“Have fun at the movie,” Mrs. Culpepper said.

“Don’t get back too late,” Mr. Culpepper added. But his voice didn’t have a growl in it, the way it had when Karen and Jonathan first started dating. He approved of Jonathan, as much as any middle-aged man could approve of the lout going out with his precious daughter.

As soon as the car got moving east up Compton Boulevard, Karen turned to Jonathan and said, “Okay, now you’re going to tell me why you’re so hot to see
The Battle of Chicago
. I didn’t think war movies were your taste of ginger.” By her tone, if war movies were his taste of ginger, she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake by having anything to do with him.

But Jonathan answered, “Sure, I’ll tell you. It’s because my dad and mom were
in
the Battle of Chicago, or at least the first part of it. Their ship got shot up when it took them and everybody else who was working on our explosive-metal bomb out of Chicago when it looked like the Lizards would break in.”

“Oh.” Karen thought about it, then nodded. “Okay. I guess I can put up with it for that. But it won’t be much like what really happened, you know.”

“Of course it won’t—it’s a movie.” Jonathan stopped at the light at Vermont, waited for a couple of southbound cars to go by, and turned right to follow them. On the radio, a fellow with a soft drawl shouted above twanging electric guitars. Jonathan’s parents found modern music raucous—all the more reason for him to like it.

He drove with his left hand for a couple of seconds so he could poke Karen in the ribs with his right forefinger. As she squeaked, he went on, “And don’t tell me you’re just putting up with it, either, not when you’ll be drooling all over everything every time James Dean shows up—and since he’s the star, he’ll show up most of the time.”

She made a face at him. “Like you won’t be leering at that French chippie, whatever her name is—you know, the one who keeps trying to fall out of her clothes all the time. What was
she
doing in the battle of Chicago?”

“Decorating it?” Jonathan suggested. Karen poked him in the ribs for that, which made him swerve the car and almost nail a station wagon in the next lane. The fellow in the station wagon sent him a dirty look. Jonathan gave Karen one, too, and added, “You were the one who said it wouldn’t be much like what really happened.”

“I didn’t mean like
that,”
Karen said. They kept teasing each other till they got to the Vermont drive-in, a little past Artesia. Houses were thin that far south; some of the little farms and orchards and nurseries that had been there since before the war still survived. The drive-in movie theater made a raucous addition to the air of rural charm.

Jonathan chose a parking space well, away from the snack bar, though a good many closer to it were open. Karen raised an eyebrow—she knew what he had in mind aside from watching the movie. She stuck out her tongue at him, but didn’t say anything. If she had said something, he might have moved the car. As things were, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed off to bring back a cardboard carton full of grease and salt and chocolate and fizzy, caffeinated water and other nutrients essential to human life.

When he got back, he found that Karen had mounted the little speaker on the window of the front driver’s-side door. She was waiting in the back seat, and opened the rear door for him so he wouldn’t have to put down the carton and maybe spill all the goodies.

They grinned at each other as they started eating Milk Duds. She hadn’t come along with him just to watch the movie, either. They didn’t do anything but grin, not yet; cars were still coming in, the glare of headlights blasting into their faces every few seconds. Jonathan didn’t even put his arm around her. They’d have plenty of time for that later.

By luck—and also by Jonathan’s strategic choice of parking space—nobody parked close to the Ford. He looked out at the white lines painted on the asphalt as if he’d never expected such a thing. “How about that?” he said.

“Yeah, how about that?” Karen did her best to sound stern—that was one of the rules of the game—but a giggle lurked somewhere down at the bottom of her voice. They’d been going out for a good long while now. Sure enough, she knew what he had in mind, and he knew she knew, and had it on her mind, too. It wasn’t as if they’d just started discovering each other.

They’d made a good-sized dent in the big bags of popcorn when the screen lit and music blared out of the tinny speaker. An announcer’s voice followed: “Here are scenes from our coming attractions!”

Now Jonathan slipped his arm around Karen’s shoulder. Her flesh was warm and smooth under his hand. She slid closer to him—carefully, so as not to disturb the surviving food and what was left of the sodas. One of the coming features had dinosaurs that looked remarkably like overgrown Lizards tearing up the landscape, one was a tear-jerking love story, and one had Red Skelton and Bing Crosby wisecracking, strutting their stuff, and outwitting real Lizards (one of whom Jonathan thought he recognized) left and right.

“My father would like that one,” Karen said with a sigh.

“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said. “So would mine, even if he spent half the time telling everybody else in the car with him what all was wrong with it.”

“How are Mickey and Donald?” Karen asked as the cartoon came on—a rascally rabbit who eluded Lizards and bumbling human hunters at every turn.

“Growing like weeds,” he answered. “Eating us out of house and home.” Clichés were safest when he talked about the hatchlings. His father surely wished he wouldn’t talk about them at all, but hadn’t ordered him not to do it. He tried not to betray the trust he’d earned. Adding, “They keep learning things all the time, too,” seemed safe enough.