The Radio Magician and Other Stories (11 page)

“What about you, Henry. You said you loved me once. Will you stay with me?”

She couldn’t tell in the dark if he turned to look at her or not.

“You couldn’t shape me into what you wanted either.”

He started the car, which turned on the dashboard controls, but made no noise. The light revealed his hands on the wheel.

“My days of shaping are done, Henry.”

He drove them the long way home, over hills and around the lake. They didn’t speak. Neither knew what to say to the other, yet.

DIFFERENT WORLDS

T
en-year-old Jenny crossed the street first, staying low until she reached the broken wall and had to clamber over. Robbie cleared the rubble in one clean leap, then looked at her, eyes wide, panting, ready for the next adventure. Then his ears flicked up, and he cocked his head to one side. His tail quit wagging. Jenny watched closely. He was her early warning system.

In a moment, from up the street, came a familiar hum. “Don’t bark,” she whispered. If they caught her, all would be lost: Robbie, her dad, herself.

Heart in her throat, she stood. Visible above the broken rooftops a block away, the top of one of the alien’s vehicles lumbered toward them, its legs moving. Across the street, Dad peeked through the busted door. She waved her hand in a frantic stop sign.

“Don’t come, Dad. Don’t come,” she mouthed.

For a second he paused as if he didn’t understand, and Jenny had a vision of him wandering into the street in clear view. Earlier in the day he’d walked off, talking to himself when she found him. “It’s a states’ rights issue. Just like the old South,” he had been saying. She’d held his hand as she led him away from the open where he could be spotted so easily.

This time, though, he nodded, then dropped out of sight.

Jenny knelt, holding Robbie. The dog pressed a wet nose under her chin and licked her once. “You’re safe with me. They won’t get you,” she said.

The house had no roof, and the sun was a light spot, low in the smoke-filled sky. Jenny crawled to the shattered frame where the picture window had once been. Grit and ash permeated the carpet, itching at her palms; the air tasted oily in the back of her throat, and it burned her nose to breathe. From the window, she could see smoke rising from several ruined houses, but no flame.

The humming grew louder.

Jenny pushed back out of sight, then drew herself in tightly. I’m a little stone, she thought. They can’t see me if I’m just a little stone.

The alien craft, with glassy-eyed monitors gyrating this way and that, stepped between her and her father. Jenny stared through a crack in the wall. None of their vessels looked right. They were too broad at the top, inverted pyramids slapped together with wrinkled metal, supported by six spindly legs. They should tip over.

“Don’t be scared,” she murmured. The vessel stopped. It lowered itself until its narrow base almost touched the street, while its mirrored legs reached above its top, as if the machine had been modeled on a cricket. The metal eyes rotated in their sockets. Jenny trembled, holding the dog close.

After a long moment, the machine stood tall and resumed its march down the street.

Jenny peeked both ways, then beckoned Dad across. He stepped gingerly over glass shards on the sidewalk before crossing the asphalt, bent double, holding his book close.

“It almost got us,” Dad said. “If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d have been in the street.” He squeezed the book to his chest.

“No it didn’t. We just have to be careful.” But she couldn’t tell if he had heard. His focus, like it had been more and more over the last few days, was on some middle distance. Hardly ever on her.

Dad cleared rotten sheet rock off the floor before sitting down on the carpet so stained that Jenny had no idea what color it had once been. He leaned against the remains of a couch, its stuffing bursting from a dozen places, oozing a mildewy, fetid smell. Robbie sniffed at it, decided there were no rats, then put his snout on his front paws.

He was a white dog with black patches and a black head. When Mom gave him to Jenny, she’d said he would be “medium sized,” but he turned out rather small. She’d brought him home in a shoe box from the small animal clinic she ran. A mix between a spaniel and a terrier. Short haired. Prone to running circuits around Jenny’s back yard that wore ruts eventually. When Jenny still had a back yard.

Dad shifted uncomfortably against the couch.

Jenny said, “Does it hurt?”

He moved his shoulder. The bandages under his jacket gave him a humped look. “It’s fine. If we find a doctor, it will be fine. But I need to rest. Can I rest, Delaney?”

Jenny winced. “I’m Jenny, Dad. Sure, take a nap.”

Within seconds he was breathing deeply. She put her palm against his forehead and then against her own. He felt warm. She studied his face. Under his eyes were dark smudges, like bruises, and his beard was black and fierce, as if he’d become a Viking. She’d teased him a week earlier for not shaving. Most of the men they saw now needed shaves, and the women needed their hair done. Jenny looked down at her own smudged hands and dusty jeans. I could use a bath myself, she thought before closing her eyes.

Robbie’s whining woke her. The sky had grown darker. Whether it was more smoke or the sunset, she couldn’t tell. Dad was awake too and thumbing through his book.

“I remember this one,” he said. His finger rested on a picture of Jenny standing at the end of a pier, a fishing pole in one hand and an empty net in the other. Robbie sat at her feet, tongue out.

“That was just last summer, Dad. Of course you remember it.” But the memory eluded her. So much had happened. She wrinkled her brow. “That was before the fighting started?”

Dad turned the page to the pictures from the anniversary party. Jenny remembered the cake. It had been white with chocolate letters on it: “Happy Twentieth, Dan and Delaney.” Mom held a piece to the cameraman in one picture, the cake huge and blurry in the foreground; her face glowing and white behind it. During the party, Jenny had caught her finger in a door. She remembered how she sat on Dad’s lap while Mom held ice against her swollen knuckle. She remembered how solid his hands were, wrapped around her, how Mom took the ice away and blew on the hurt. “Is that better, Jennybird?” she said. The memory wasn’t fuzzy like the days they spent fishing. Those mostly blended one to the next. In her memory, she could almost touch her mother’s cheek. She could smell the little bit of wine Mother had on her breath.

Jenny looked away. The animal clinic had been in the center of the first attack weeks earlier. Mom hadn’t come home.

Dad lolled his head back so that if he’d had his eyes open, he would have been looking straight up. Eyes closed, he said, “I had a student from Japan once. He wrote English better than he spoke it, but I never understood a single one of his papers.” He brushed his fingers against his beard. “I couldn’t grade his work. It wasn’t the language. It was his understanding of the concepts behind the words. We were from the same planet but different worlds.”

“We have to get out of here, Dad.” Jenny stood. The remains of someone’s living room were scattered about. Burnt drapes still hanging from a crooked curtain rod. Books splayed across the floor, moldering from the rains. Scorch marks flowed up a table top tilted on its side. She picked her way around the trash. The back half of the house was flat, as if an explosion had pushed it away from the partly standing front walls. Wire twisted out of the shattered woodwork. A broken porcelain base showed where the toilet had been, and on the partial wall beside it a dented medicine cabinet, its mirror a cobweb of cracks, drew Jenny over. There was nothing in it though. She sighed.

From the remnant of the porch, the city reached before her, smoke shrouded, stinking of burnt rubber and other, fouler things. A jet roared overhead, away from the city, but she couldn’t see it through the haze.

“We thought we understood them at first, Jennybird.” Dad put a hand on her head. “My job was to understand them.”

Jenny put her hand on his, their twin weight resting on her head like a heavy hat. “If we hurry, we might be able to get to the hospital before dark.”

Dad trembled; she could feel it through his hand. He said, “I should have known. In the end, it was the principle of the thing. Not everyone in the South wanted to keep their slaves, you know, in the Civil War. They just didn’t like being told that they couldn’t. Different planets, different worlds.” Jenny shook her head, nearly ready to cry. Almost everything he said he’d said before, and he jumped from topic to topic. She wanted to shake him, to shake out the old Dad. He’d tell her what to do. He’d hold her and keep her safe.

Dad opened the photo album. “Do you remember this one? I’ve always liked this one.”

He pointed to the same photograph of her on the pier.

“Come on, Dad.” She led him onto long, dry grass, past a swing set with bent bars and a swing dangling from a single chain. The fence at the back of the yard had been knocked over. A cedar plank groaned when she stepped on it.

Robbie paused at a dog house partly hidden under some tree branches. He poked his nose in, tail waving madly, then trotted beside Jenny, head high, sniffing everything.

It took an hour to go ten blocks. At each street, Jenny checked for the enemy’s patrol cars . . . vessels . . . she wondered what to call a vehicle with legs. They moved into a neighborhood where houses were standing, although most windows were gone and there was no evidence of life. Maybe people are in some of them, she thought. They haven’t been caught, but they’re afraid to be out. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a civilian car driving. Two days ago the streets were filled with military trucks and humvees, frantic with movement, but they’d left before the bombardment.

Then she heard the angry beating of an alien’s plane in the distance. They ducked behind a barrier of dried shrubbery. Behind them a half empty pool, its surface black with floating ash, reflected nothing. The throbbing of movable wings filled the air.

“Ornithopter,” Dad said. “I bought one for you, Jenny, at Christmas. It didn’t fly well.” He coughed, covering his mouth with a fist. “What made us build aircraft with fixed wings? How strange we must look to them, ignoring our models in nature.”

The enemy’s plane dipped from the clouds a block away, its shiny cockpit turned partly away from them. Jenny thought about dragonflies, although it wasn’t really dragonfly-shaped. The body was as wide as it was long, except for a tail section connected to the ship with a long, slender tube that was almost invisible at this distance. Its short, blurred wings held it at a hover for a few seconds. Then it darted left, dropped out of sight, the rhythmic, vibrating pulse all around them. Jenny felt it in her chest, like music with a heavy bass turned too loud.

“Do you think it’s trying to find us, Dad?” Jenny tugged on his arm. He didn’t look at her. With his free hand he pulled a leaf from the bush, crackling it between his fingers.

“They knew English and Chinese. We were so surprised. First contact. But they couldn’t make an ‘S’ sound.”

The plane rose suddenly, straight up, vanished into the low haze, until its thrumming voice was lost. Jenny pulled Dad forward. When he stood, he grimaced and leaned his head against his shoulder.

“It was pretty funny when they said ‘Sister Sally.’ Do you know ‘Sister Sally?’”

She wished he would quit talking. It didn’t scare her as much when he was quiet.

“Zister Zally Zold Zea Zells by the Zea Zore.” Dad laughed, his voice reverberating in the silence. His cheeks were flushed and his red-rimmed eyes looked gummy.

A man wearing a brown coat, blue jeans, and bright yellow running shoes jumped over the low fence on the other side of the pool and rolled against the wood, trying to look small.

Robbie barked.

The man looked up. Jenny couldn’t tell how old he was; his face was so dirty, but when he spoke, she decided he was a teenager. “Christ! Get down. They’re all over the place,” he hissed.

Jenny listened carefully. Their vehicles made distinctive sounds. She’d never seen one that didn’t. Now that the ornithopter had gone, there was no noise in the neighborhood.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

He got up and brushed his pant legs, but she didn’t think they looked any cleaner.

“Do you have an aspirin, mister? My dad has a fever.”

The man shook his head as he slid along the house’s wall until he reached the corner, then glanced around it. “They’re going to get me. There’s no place to hide. I saw them herding people toward the stadium this morning. Thousands of people in the streets. None of them saying a word, but I could hear their feet shuffling. What do you think they do to them in the stadium? I don’t buy that ‘reorientation’ garbage.”

Dad kicked some gravel into the pool and watched the ripples. For a second, Jenny believed he might fall in, but he didn’t make a move. He stared instead.

“I really need to get him to the hospital, the one at the university. Do you know how much farther we have to go?”

The man’s attention snapped skyward for a moment, as if he expected something to swoop out of the smoke. “Yeah, sure. I was a student. You’re only about a mile away.”

Jenny sighed in relief.

He continued, “But I don’t know if any of the doctors are still there.”

Robbie joined Dad at the pool’s edge. The man flinched. “You have a dog! I haven’t seen a dog in weeks.”

“That’s Robbie. Are you sure you don’t have aspirin?”

Dad sat on the edge. His feet dangled a few inches above the black water.

“No, none. Can I pet him?”

Jenny nodded.

The man approached Robbie at a crouch, his hand out, gently, as if stalking a rabbit or a small bird. Robbie tilted his head to the side, and when the man stroked his ears, he licked his hand. “Isn’t that something? I used to have a dog. A hairy little mutt. I left him at home when I came to school. Don’t know what happened to him.” He sounded very sad to Jenny, like he needed a hug.

“Did he have a name?”

He ruffled Robbie’s fur on his back. Distracted, he said, “Ralph. We got him from the pound when he wasn’t bigger than a football. Always thought we were doing him a favor.” Suddenly angry, he looked at Jenny. “We were good folks, taking that dog. Mom wanted a purebred, but Dad said we should save a castaway. They kill dogs at a pound. We were good folks. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

Jenny retreated a step—he was so intense!—and Robbie growled. The man snatched his hand to his chest.

“They’re going to get me if I stay still. They’ll get you too.” He stood. “You keep that dog close to you. Nobody should have to give up a dog. Fucking aliens.” Looking at the sky again, he stepped back. “Hope you find a doctor. Your dad needs something.” With three long strides and a jump, the man was over the fence and out of sight.