Firebirds Soaring (39 page)

Bill looks even more horrified than I feel.

Is this all my fault? Should I have done something?

They put her in a police car and off she goes, talking, talking, talking—not even a backward glance at Bill.

If Mother gets put away somewhere, I guess we’ll, more or less, be orphans. How will that be?

Then I and Bill and Matt and the dog—we all go down to the police station. Even Bill’s teacher comes with us. She saw the whole thing.

Turns out Mother went to the school yelling—
screaming,
that is—down the school halls. Bill heard her coming all the way from the front door. She punched anybody who tried to stop her, she dragged Bill out of class, but once they were outside, he got away and climbed straight up the side of that building. I’m proud of him. I can’t help it.

 

Turns out Mother’s going to be locked up next town over. It’s bigger and has a place for people like her. She’s already on her way there.

Good this is a small town. People look out for each other. Matt’s to be our temporary guardian, even though he’s only twenty-eight. The Senior Center people contributed money so Matt won’t have to. Bill’s teacher’s in it, too, and the people at the gallery. It’s as if the whole town is our friend.

Turns out Matt actually owns that house—as of four months ago. His fiancée left him, so he never bothered to really move in. He was feeling bad until Bill came. We’re going to stay with him.

He’s had the water and electricity turned on. So far he’s bought a lawn mower for Bill (Bill can’t wait to be just a regular boy and have to mow the lawn and take out the garbage) and seeds and a trowel for me.

Where they put Mother is her castle—finally. The asylum is in an old Victorian mansion with a tower, a lot of black ironwork all over it. Even the fence is beautiful filigree. Looks more like decoration than to keep people in. They say she calmed down the minute she went through the gates. She likes it there: “Her” beautiful garden; “her” servants; from her third-floor bedroom, “her” beautiful view of the mountains. . . .

 

Turns out Mother had been spending all her time in the woods working on a ring, not looking for a job. She was making it out of a silver coin. She stole the stone for it from the Indian store in the museum. A shiny piece of worthless fool’s gold. They were selling chunks for a quarter. She never steals valuable things, though she might have since it was for Bill. She shows it to me when I visit her.

She often said, “If I just had something . . . just one thing that Guillaume could wear to show who he is.”

I say, “But, Mother, he won’t wear a ring. Besides, fool’s gold just makes it all a joke.”

“He’ll wear it when he gets older.”

And she’s right, he will.

CAROL EMSHWILLER
grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and France. She has written six novels and five short story collections, and has won two Nebula Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, as well as a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

She went through music school and then art school. It wasn’t until she was thirty that she fell in love with writing.

Her two most recent books are the novel
The Secret City
and the short story collection
I Live with You
. She divides her time between New York City and the California desert.

Her Web site is
www.sfwa.org/members/emshwiller
.

“The Dignity He’s Due” started with a memory from long ago when I was about eight years old. When I was in France, my parents went to a party where there was a boy who was umpteenth . . . I don’t know how far away . . . in line for the French throne. (Of course there was no French throne anymore, anyway.) He was two or three years older than I was. He wore Mary Jane shoes, the shortest black velvet shorts I ever saw, and a lacy silk blouse. His hair was cut like a girl’s, too. When he arrived he circled the guests, kissing all the women’s hands and bowing to the men. All us children were supposed to be across the hall in the playroom, but I was so fascinated with this boy that I spent most of the time standing in the doorway watching him. He never came into the playroom; he stayed and talked with the grown-ups. All the rest of my life, I have been fascinated by the memory of this boy. That was how the story started, though it wandered far away from the idea.

POWER AND MAGIC

M
y neighbors had broken twigs from a low-hanging branch and were dusting their cheeks with the pink-and-gold flowers of the mimosa. A sheen of oil lay on their faces and legs, and on everything else—a humid dew that was nasty and didn’t cool.

“What are you doing, stupid little girls?”

I was slung between the two boles, with nothing stirring in me—just hot and lazy in the summer sun.

They didn’t listen, so I shouted, “I’m talking to you!” “Who’s stupid?” Clarisse looked around for somebody else.

“She’s so stupid,” Maudie drawled, cocking her hip and slipping a flower behind an ear.

“You little old girls,” I said, “y’all bore me.”

“We’re not talking to you.” Clarisse flounced away, a half-decapitated doll under her arm.

“Go right ahead,” I told the pair of them. I thought about going inside and sitting on my grandmother’s fan stool in the shack. It’s an old army-green metal thing made out of mesh with a fan inside. Next year’s math book was sitting on top, waiting for me to breeze through the final chapter. But I was too weary to move.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Maudie had stuck mimosa blossoms along her hairline. It’s amazing how some people can make nature look so tacky. They have a kind of gift for it.

My hand dangled down from the mimosa bough, and she came up and tickled my fingers with a flower.

“Stop that.” I didn’t reel my hand back in but left it hanging.

“So what’s the matter, anyway?” She held her ground and didn’t walk off when I hissed.

I stared at her, resenting the gold-tipped puffs of the pink mimosa flowers and the flat chest and the skinny legs with knees like saucers.

“There’s something wrong with my arms, my spine, my brain, my everything.” I marveled at the viciousness in my voice. “They took out all my blood and pumped in honey and molasses. That’s why I can’t move. My heart can hardly pump all that molasses and honey.” The moment I said the words, I felt it was the truth. It explained the heavy feeling that weighed me down and kept me from going inside, where my gran was expecting me to mop the linoleum. It was too blazing hot to mop anybody’s floor; she ought to have known that.

“You’re up in a tree,” she pointed out. “How’d you get there, then?”

“That’s different.” I sighed. I felt as lazy as a catamount, lolling on a bough with a belly too full to care about bunching up its muscles and racing to drag down a wild boar. Wild Russian boars are all over in this part of the mountains. Over at the boat shop, they’ve got one for a pet that goes
tickticktick
with its nails all day long. The owner says that the cement floor is hurting Ivan’s little pig hooves, and that they’ll have to keep him at home before long.

I’m sorry because this whole place is boring—yeah, it’s a dumb joke—and about the only thing I like to do is walk down to the corner and stare at the pet boar and scratch him on top of his head.

“You know Ivan the Terrible? Down at the boat shop? He’s twice as smart as you, Maudie.”

“Don’t listen to her.” Clarisse had put on a pair of her mother’s high heels and was stumping about the yard.

“Oh, yeah? And Ivan, he’s—
she’s
three times as smart as Clarisse. You hear me, Clarisse? Three times as smart.” I think it’s funny that Ivan the Terrible is a girl. Maybe not a lot funny, but a little bit. Enough to keep me going down there to scratch his head. Her head. Somebody’s.

“PMS,” Clarisse told her sister. “That’s what it is.”

“What’s that?”

Clarisse didn’t know. I thought that was funny. It was so funny that I fell out of the tree laughing. It was funnier than Ivan the Terrible. But it hurts to flop four feet onto hard-packed ground, so I yelled, sprawled out and feeling sorry for myself, though I still wanted to laugh.

“What if you breaked all your bones? Who’s stupid now?” Clarisse marched over in her mama’s emerald-green shoes, gouging the dirt with stiletto heels. They came to a point at the toe and were embroidered with gaudy little stuck-up flowers made out of ribbons.

The English language just about buckled under the strain of those shoes. I thought. I mulled. I drew together the considerable resources of my eyebrows and started knitting. It would take a ten-dollar word to cover those babies.

“
Phenomenally
ugly,” I said at last.

“What?” Maud came to look.

“Your mother’s shoes,” I said, propping myself on an elbow and addressing them. “Shoes, you are the ugliest, stupidest shoes I have ever seen in my life. You are a disgrace to cobblers everywhere.”

The shoes didn’t answer, even though they were the loudest damn things I’d ever seen. But the girls and I wrangled back and forth about whether these were the ugliest shoes or whether they might be somehow special and even a dratted work of the shoemaker’s art. I won, of course; they’re just kids of eight and nine, and besides, I’m dead smart. Afterward, I suggested that Maudie stick a mimosa blossom on the toes of the shoes. She did, but the flowers wouldn’t stay on.

“You’re just growing. That’s why you’re such a slug. That’s what our mama says.” Clarisse lifted her chin as though she had ambitions to be snooty, even though she’s nothing but trailer trash.

“Oh, she does, does she? I’ll have to have a word with your mama. This just happens when you grow. If you ever grow—which I doubt, because you’re probably doomed to be a midget forever—you’ll find out. Your blood turns to honey.” I rolled onto my back and stared at the branches.

“I thought you said somebody took out the blood and pumped in honey and molasses,” Maudie said suspiciously.

You can’t fool her.

“Yeah, well,” I said, “that, too. It was bad enough before they started in with the needles and pump.”

In the silence that followed, we could hear the cicadas throwing their rackety summer shindig in the pines behind the yard.

“I’ve got a mind to call the sheriff and get him to lock up those cicadas.”

Before I could hear what Maudie had to say to that one, I let out a yowl and erupted onto my feet.

“She got up,” Clarisse noted.

“Fire ants,” Maudie said with authority, watching me rip open my shirt.

By the time I was done tap-dancing around the yard, shaking down ants, I had five big welts already starting to itch.

“I hate this place.” I buttoned up and then bent to inspect my legs for ticks.

“Want to go look at the crickets at the bait shop? ” Maudie put her hands on her hips. “Take your mind off things.”

“What things? You sound like your mama,” I said.

“We can’t go down there alone,” Clarisse said, “but we can go with you, if you want to go.” She gave me a sly look.

“You could ask, if you really want to go.” I felt thoroughly disgusted. My arm was bruised from the fall, I’d been bitten up, and I was still stinking hot.

“Will you take us?” She looked ridiculous in those shoes, with the broke-necked doll under her arm.

“You could ask in a polite fashion,” I said. “If you know how.”

“Will you please take us?”

“No.”

After that came another silence. Clarisse looked as if she wanted to hurl the shoes at me, but she didn’t.

“Can I give you some advice, Clarisse?”

She didn’t answer.

“Don’t have sex, okay?”

Maudie was outraged. “She’s only just turned eight.”

“Yeah, I know, but the way she acts . . . She’s going nowhere fast.”

“Says who? ” Maudie kicked me in the shins, and I escaped into the crotch of the mimosa tree.

“Says me. Look at those shoes. Clarisse is going to get pregnant if she doesn’t watch it. I bet she can’t even add in three columns.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Maudie thumped on the tree.

“I am not going to get that—what you say,” Clarisse shouted.

“She’ll be thirty years old, banging on a cash register at the Piggly Wiggly, and giving everybody the wrong change,” I said.

“I will not give everybody wrong change!”

Just when they were going at me and I was ranting in fine style, Erl Jack Falchion shot into the yard, throwing up gravel, and jumped out of his truck. He wasn’t born Erl Jack Falchion, but that’s his name now. People hardly remember what the other one was, and I’m not going to tell them. I’ve known Erl Jack since we were babies parked nose to nose on a bed. He got his name fixed when he was twelve. My gran says he paid for the change with his own money that he earned picking in the fields. His mother signed for it. He probably had to pay her for the signature, too.