If All Else Fails (12 page)

"Nila," she say,
noticing how that girl is looking, "what you done to your hair? What you done to eyes? What is
eye blackness? Sick, maybe? Work too much, maybe?"

"I just cut hair,
is all, like white girls at work cut it. Too hot in restaurant for long hair. Eye stuff is
makeup; all the white girls at restaurant wearing it now."

"Shame," say the
old lady. "You not proud of the face Great Spirit gave you, putting that white man's stuff on,
shame. Cutting hair like them white women's. Think Horse­boy like you better that
way?"

"I never think of
it," say Nila, but she has, and she looks over at Horseboy. Horseboy is still busy not looking at
her.

"Do you like hair
cut this way, Horseboy?"

Horseboy looks over
at Nila but it is hard for him to an­swer her question. He just shrugs and then look away
again.

Leon gets up,
favoring his leg and looks around, like he is ready to go.

Horseboy gets up
too.

They move over to
the door, fast, like they trying to es­cape.

The old lady pokes
Nila in the shoulder. Nila is kind of just sitting there, staring at the old table. "Can't there
some way you stop this foolishness. Can't there some way you keep this boy from going?" say the
old lady.

Nila shake her head
no, not lifting her eyes. "If he wants to go, let him. It is his life." Still staring at that
table.

Horseboy been
looking at her out of corner of his eye and

IF ALL ELSE FAILS
... 85

when he hears her
say that, his shoulders sink a little and he turn to the door and open it.

Horseboy and Leon
go out the door and then Horseboy stops and look back through the screen door.

"You got a white
girl, don't you?" says the old lady, look­ing at Horseboy through the screen in that clever way
she have when she find the truth in things.

"Yes," say Horseboy
very softly. "In Austin."

"Gone marry her?"
ask Nila, holding back tears.

"Maybe," say
Horseboy and then he turns and is gone, him and Leon is gone and in their car and going
away.

Nila and the old
lady silent there for a while and then Nila run to the door and shout through the screen. "I'll
scratch her eyes out!"

But her words only
reach out through the dust of the car as it leaves and fall like wingless birds in that hole
Horseboy was digging.

Nila stand there
and her hands reach up there, feeling where all that hair used to be. She touch the corners of
her eyes and the black makeup comes away on her fingers. Then, then the tears start.

The old lady comes
over to her and puts her arm around her shoulders. "Once my daughter, Sky, went and cut her hair
for a man. He went off and married white then any­ways, thought he wasn't Indian no more, like
that. Horseboy don't be knowing this. Joseph Eagle was name of that mans. White woman leave him,
so he come back here Indian, die Indian, even if couldn't live Indian."

"I cut my hair for
him," say Nila, crying. "I thought he would like it."

"You ain't stop
being Indian, hair ain't stop growing. It get long again. It don't matter. It don't matter, mind
what I say, you just be true what you are, be Indian." The old lady give her a hug and Nila just
against her, crying soft on her shoulder. "You hush crying up now. You lucky to be knowing who
you are. Horseboy ain't learn that yet."

"But I love him,"
cries Nila.

"And he loving
you," says the old lady, "and he be back, you wait see, back before hair all get long
again."

"Do you really
think he be back?" ask Nila, hope on her face.

"Sure," lie the old
lady, looking away from Nila's face, "they always come back."

No help from the
audience, please!

The tour guide
pulled the curtain aside. The tour members waved their antennae with astonishment. Peter Renoir
was removing his clothes. He looked up startled as he heard the shower curtain rustle. He saw the
aliens staring at him from the bathtub.

"You will note the
clothes that bind, the jaws that snap," said Raffi the tour guide. "Also you will note,"
continued Raffi, "the accouterments which denote that this culture limits tactile
communication."

"Communication with
the self by masturbation is no doubt universal," suggested a little Koapa.

"I note that he is
rather pale, so unlike the black one we saw last week," said a larger Koapa.

"Visual
identification," said the tour guide. "Who to avoid and what not to touch."

"What keeps them
from becoming universally poignant, a heart-throb for the galaxy?" asked the little Koapa. "They
seem so frail, so tragic."

"It has no
appreciation of sculpture for one thing," said the tour guide. "There are social restraints
against touching art objects, for another."

"How would it feel
if we touched it?" asked the little Koapa, carving himself into a beautiful hand.

"Better not," said
the tour guide. "They are used to the il­lusion of separating art from life. We might confuse
it."

Peter Renoir
fainted dead away.

"You see," lectured
the tour guide, "we've already con­fused it."

"Is it dead?" asked
the little Koapa, forming into a golden stream of tears.

"No," said the tour
guide, speaking from experience. "It is simply experiencing self-criticism."

In the fall of 1939
Benito Mussolini condemned the Marx Brothers and ordered his subjects not to laugh at
them.

"Somehow," said
Semina, letting the bathrobe fall at her feet, "it just doesn't seem real this way."

Renoir turned out
the room lights, pulled the window drapes closed. He moved in beside her and said, "Perhaps it
will seem more real this way." His hand reached out and hit the switch. The projector whirred and
the screen burst into color. Renoir appeared naked on the screen. Semina moved in beside him and
let her bathrobe fall at her feet. He dragged her down on the waterbed and together as the
cam­era tilted and zoomed in, they reached for squishy delight. The film clattered along, the
leader winding off the spool and beating madly against the projector housing.

Semina sighed and
took Renoir's hand off her knee. "It seemed so much more real that way, didn't it?"

"Yes," said Renoir,
folding his hands in his lap. "It was realer than real. Let's watch it again instead."

A film critic
peeping through the keyhole said, "The cam­era thrusts us into the depth of things."

Realism was too
easy. The movies offered themselves as substitutes. The American woman watches film to learn how
to become a better female impersonator.

FROM: Peter
Renoir

SUBJECT: Rewrite of
"Who Was the First Oscar to Win a
Negro?"

Obviously this one
can't wait. Let's dump the jerk who wrote it and get one of our people on it. We don't want to
blow this one. How about we give it to Sam Bernardino. You remember him. He's the one who did
that TV quickie about the attack of giant roaches or was it chickens? Let's get a Screen Guild
member on this for Christ Sakes! What we're talking about here is our survival!

Peter Renoir,
Producer

"Must you always
think like a marshal? Can't you think like a human being just once?" Semina wept openly on the
set of her latest movie.

Her five-year-old
son, not to be upstaged, pointed at the Marshal's gun and said, quite distinctly,
"Daddy!"

"You can take it up
your movie," said the alien, holding Lillian Gish in his extended forepaws. "I been sitting in
the front row for twenty-seven silent years and I’ll be damned if my baby is going to
talk!"

"Damn you, damn
your naked eyes!" cursed Peter Renoir. "We can't afford a transition like this! Not now! We were
just learning how to talk with our eyes and now we are being interrupted by sound!"

"Peter!" breathed
Semina. "The cheers! The shouting!"

"It's nineteen
hundred and thirty," he said. "And I've had fourteen lovers and want you to bring back the
Auk."

FROM A LETTER
WRITTEN IN THE FUTURE!

The guarantee
against limits is a sense of alternatives. Back in Oregon, I dreamed all my life of being the
Bank of California. We lived across from the debtors' prison. I used
to sit in the darkest of theaters and watch the light and shadow. I
was hypnotized by Marilyn Monroe and a known associate of the Seven Dwarfs. I was hypnotized, the
dreams provided. Did I dream of being me instead?

I turned in a fire
one day, after letting it burn for a while to make sure it was a good one, and got my name in the
newspaper. Later, I became convinced that people were so blank, so destroyed, that no mad
scientist was ever neces­sary to destroy their souls.

Perhaps everything
terrible is something that wants to help me. Perhaps it is only that other people's fantasies
have nothing to do with reality.

Vonda
Mclntyre

P.S.: "Remember the
night we met and I lost my glass slipper?"

"Yes," he said, low
angle, soft focus, violins beginning.

"That was when I
discovered my existence was insufficiently interesting."

The director
screamed cut after the word existence and turned to his assistant and said, "Print it, it's a
wrap."

Peter Renoir was an
alien and didn't know any better. He came here for a good education. A good sex education. He was
an alien and didn't know any better. He turned to tele­vision for advice, for the facts, for the
inside info. He found what he sought. He never had a minute of regret.

"It could have
happened to anyone," he said. And indeed he might just have been right. He was an alien and he
came here from another galaxy, came here with a problem of sorts. It was the kind of thing that
can happen to anybody. The people on Peter Renoir's planet, they had this culture,
see, really a ball-breaker, see, with
everything wired for sound, juiced right up to the limits. See, they had perfected perfection.
They had it made, only they were so busy being perfect, they forgot how to do it.

"What do you mean,
do it?"

"I mean do it, do
it," said Peter Renoir. "It's a natural."

Semina scratched
inelegantly. "It'll never sell product," she said.

"Oh, man!" shouted
Peter Renoir. "You cannot see the frig­ging unbelievable scope of this thing! I mean, see, he
comes eight million miles or whatever in this big frigging flying space something or other! See
what I'm getting at?"

"Jesus!" said
Semina. "That's a hell of a long drive for just one person. Don't he let somebody else take a
turn driving?"

"That's what I'm
getting atl" shouted Peter Renoir. "See him and his girl, course she looks just like a real girl
like on TV or something. You know, what was the name of that broad with the gaps in her teeth,
you know the one on the acne commercial, the before one?"

"Norma Jean, you
mean," said Semina, finally catching some of his enthusiasm.

"See, they got the
hots, they got 'em so bad and they don't know which end is which."

"Right!" screamed
Semina. "And that's where we hit them with the commercial, our plug for toilet paper!"

"Aw, shit," said
Peter Renoir, "you should of let me say it first! You're always taking all the fun out of
it!"

I know he's out
there. I know he's reading my story, won­dering about the size of my breasts, missing every
single word of what I had to say. How many times have I told him. Explore other people's
metaphors. It isn't only a metaphor. It's an angle of vision.

I've based my Me on
the theory of the persistence of vision. You can't throw up three thousand years of art in three
minutes and not see something.

Joanna
Russ

"Jesus!" said Peter
Renoir. "That name, Joanna Russ. Sounds very Hollywood. I think we can go with it. I really think
this one is our baby. How does she look in a bikini?"

I am an alchemist,
the father of science, the death of us all. I am the real root of science. I am an erotic
science. I am deeply involved with buried aspects of reality, from novel to film and back
again.

Rain is copulation.
The sexual activity of man is an en-ergy-to-matter conversion. Mineral formations are sexual
crystal trysts. The creation of the world was a sexual activ­ity. I am an alchemist. I can
remember love affairs of chemi-, cals and stars, romances of stones, fertility in fire. I am an
al­chemist.