The Very Best of F & SF v1 (38 page)

He pulled up in
front of Sheb’s and tethered the horse, which lowered its head and grunted at
the ground. Around the back of the rig, he untied one flap, found a weathered
saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, and went in through the batwings.

Alice watched
him curiously, but no one else noticed his arrival. The rest were drunk as
lords. Sheb was playing Methodist hymns ragtime, and the grizzled layabouts who
had come in early to avoid the storm and to attend Nort’s wake had sung
themselves hoarse. Sheb, drunk nearly to the point of senselessness,
intoxicated and horny with his own continued existence, played with hectic,
shuttlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.

Voices screeched
and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming to challenge it.
In the corner Zachary had thrown Amy Feldon’s skirts over her head and was
painting zodiac signs on her knees. A few other women circulated. A fervid glow
seemed to be on all of them. The dull stormglow that filtered through the
batwings seemed to mock them, however.

Nort had been
laid out on two tables in the center of the room. His boots made a mystical V.
His mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed his eyes and
put slugs on them. His hands had been folded on his chest with a sprig of
devil-grass in them. He smelled like poison.

The man in black
pushed back his hood and came to the bar. Alice watched him, feeling
trepidation mixed with the familiar want that hid within her. There was no
religious symbol on him, although that meant nothing by itself.

“Whiskey,” he
said. His voice was soft and pleasant. “Good whiskey.”

She reached
under the counter and brought out a bottle of Star. She could have palmed off
the local popskull on him as her best, but did not. She poured, and the man in
black watched her. His eyes were large, luminous. The shadows were too thick to
determine their color exactly. Her need intensified. The hollering and whooping
went on behind, unabated. Sheb, the worthless gelding, was playing about the
Christian Soldiers and somebody had persuaded Aunt Mill to sing. Her voice,
warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull ax through a calf’s
brain.

“Hey, Allie!”

She went to
serve, resentful of the stranger’s silence, resentful of his no-color eyes and
her own restless groin. She was afraid of her needs. They were capricious and
beyond her control. They might be the signal of the change, which would in turn
signal the beginning of her old age—a condition which in Tull was usually as
short and bitter as a winter sunset.

She drew beer
until the keg was empty, then broached another. She knew better than to ask
Sheb; he would come willingly enough, like the dog he was, and would either
chop off his own fingers or spume beer all over everything. The stranger’s eyes
were on her as she went about it; she could feel them.

“It’s busy,” he
said when she returned. He had not touched his drink, merely rolled it between
his palms to warm it.

“Wake,” she
said.

“I noticed the
departed.”

“They’re bums,” she
said with sudden hatred. “All bums.”

“It excites
them. He’s dead. They’re not.”

“He was their
butt when he was alive. It’s not right now. It’s...” She trailed off, not able
to express what it was, or how it was obscene.

“Weed-eater?”

“Yes. What else
did he have?” Her tone was accusing, but he did not drop his eyes, and she felt
the blood rush to her face. “I’m sorry. Are you a priest? This must revolt you.”

“I’m not and it
doesn’t.” He knocked the whiskey back neatly and did not grimace. “Once more,
please.”

“I’ll have to
see the color of your coin first. I’m sorry.”

“No need to be.”

He put a rough
silver coin on the counter, thick on one edge, thin on the other, and she said
as she would say later: “I don’t have change for this.”

He shook his
head, dismissing it, and watched absently as she poured again.

“Are you only
passing through?” she asked.

He did not reply
for a long time, and she was about to repeat when he shook his head
impatiently. “Don’t talk trivialities. You’re here with death.”

She recoiled,
hurt and amazed, her first thought being that he had lied about his holiness to
test her.

“You cared for
him,” he said flatly. “Isn’t that true?”

“Who? Nort?” She
laughed, affecting annoyance to cover her confusion. “I think you better—”

“You’re soft-hearted
and a little afraid,” he went on, “and he was on the weed, looking out hell’s
back door. And there he is, and they’ve even slammed the door now, and you don’t
think they’ll open it until it’s time for you to walk through, isn’t it so?”

“What are you,
drunk?”

“Mistuh Norton,
he dead,” the man in black intoned sardonically. “Dead as anybody. Dead as you
or anybody.”

“Get out of my
place.” She felt a trembling loathing spring up in her, but the warmth still
radiated from her belly.

“It’s all right,”
he said softly. “It’s all right. Wait. Just wait.”

The eyes were
blue. She felt suddenly easy in her mind, as if she had taken a drug.

“See?” he asked
her. “Do you see?”

She nodded
dumbly and he laughed aloud—a fine, strong, untainted laugh that swung heads
around. He whirled and faced them, suddenly made the center of attention by
some unknown alchemy. Aunt Mill faltered and subsided, leaving a cracked high
note bleeding on the air. Sheb struck a discord and halted. They looked at the
stranger uneasily. Sand rattled against the sides of the building.

The silence
held, spun itself out. Her breath had clogged in her throat and she looked down
and saw both hands pressed to her belly beneath the bar. They all looked at him
and he looked at them. Then the laugh burst forth again, strong, rich, beyond
denial. But there was no urge to laugh along with him.

“I’ll show you a
wonder!” he cried at them. But they only watched him, like obedient children
taken to see a magician in whom they have grown too old to believe.

The man in black
sprang forward, and Aunt Mill drew away from him. He grinned fiercely and
slapped her broad belly. A short, unwitting cackle was forced our of her, and
the man in black threw back his head.

“It’s better,
isn’t it?”

Aunt Mill
cackled again, suddenly broke into cracked sobs, and fled blindly through the
doors. The others watched her go silently. The storm was beginning; shadows
followed each other, rising and falling on the giant white cyclorama of the
sky. A man near the piano with a forgotten beer in one hand made a groaning,
grinning sound.

The man in black
stood over Nort, grinning down at him. The wind howled and shrieked and
thrummed. Something large struck the side of the building and bounced away. One
of the men at the bar tore himself free and exited in looping, grotesque
strides. Thunder racketed in sudden dry volleys.

“All right,” the
man in black grinned. “All right, here we go.”

He began to spit
into Nort’s face, aiming carefully. The spittle gleamed in the cut troughs of
his forehead, pearled down the shaven beak of his nose.

Under the bar,
her hands worked faster.

Sheb laughed,
loon-like, and hunched over. He began to cough up phlegm, huge and sticky gobs
of it, and let fly. The man in black roared approval and pounded him on the
back. Sheb grinned, one gold tooth twinkling.

Others fled.
Others gathered in a loose ring around Nort. His face and the dewlapped
rooster-wrinkles of his neck and upper chest gleamed with liquid— liquid so
precious in this dry country. And suddenly it stopped, as if on signal. There
was ragged, heavy breathing.

The man in black
suddenly lunged across the body, jackknifing over it in a smooth arc. It was
pretty, like a flash of water. He caught himself on his hands, sprang to his
feet in a twist, grinning, and went over again. One of the watchers forgot
himself, began to applaud, and suddenly backed away, eyes cloudy with terror.
He slobbered a hand across his mouth and made for the door.

Nort twitched
the third time the man in black went across.

A sound went
through the watchers—a grunt—and then they were silent. The man in black threw
his head back and howled. His chest moved in a quick, shallow rhythm as he
sucked air. He began to go back and forth at a faster clip, pouring over Nort’s
body like water poured from one glass to another glass. The only sound in the
room was the tearing rasp of his respiration and the rising pulse of the storm.

Nort drew a
deep, dry breath. His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the table. Sheb
screeched and exited. One of the women followed him.

The man in black
went across once more, twice, thrice. The whole body was vibrating now,
trembling and rapping and twitching. The smell of rot and excrement and decay
billowed up in choking waves. His eyes opened.

Alice felt her
feet propelling her backward. She struck the mirror, making it shiver, and
blind panic took over. She bolted like a steer.

“I’ve given it
to you,” the man in black called after her, panting. “Now you can sleep easy.
Even
that
isn’t irreversible. Although it’s... so... goddamned...
funny!”
And he began to
laugh again. The sound faded as she raced up the stairs, grunting and heaving,
not stopping until the door to the three rooms above the bar was bolted.

She began to
giggle then, rocking back and forth on her haunches by the door. The sound rose
to a keening wail that mixed with the wind.

Downstairs, Nort
wandered absently out into the storm to pull some weed. The man in black, now
the only patron of the bar, watched him go, still grinning.

When she forced
herself to go back down that evening, carrying a lamp in one hand and a heavy
stick of stovewood in the other, the man in black was gone, rig and all. But
Nort was there, sitting at the table by the door as if he had never been away.
The smell of the weed was on him, but not as heavily as she might have
expected.

He looked up at
her and smiled tentatively. “Hello, Allie.”

“Hello, Nort.” She
put the stovewood down and began lighting the lamps, not turning her back to
him.

“I been touched
by God,” he said presently. “I ain’t going to die no more. He said so. It was a
promise.”

“How nice for
you, Nort.” The spill she was holding dropped through her trembling fingers and
she picked it up.

“I’d like to
stop chewing the grass,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it no more. It don’t seem
right for a man touched by God to be chewing the weed.”

“Then why don’t
you stop?”

Her exasperation
startled her into looking at him as a man again, rather than an infernal
miracle. What she saw was a rather sad-looking specimen only half-high, looking
hangdog and ashamed. She could not be frightened by him anymore.

“I shake,” he
said. “And I want it. I can’t stop. Allie, you was always so good to me—” He
began to weep. “I can’t even stop peeing myself.”

She walked to
the table and hesitated there, uncertain.

“He could have
made me not want it,” he said through the tears. “He could have done that if he
could have made me be alive. I ain’t complaining... I don’t want to complain...”
He stared around hauntedly and whispered, “He might strike me dead if I did.”

“Maybe it’s a
joke. He seemed to have quite a sense of humor.”

Nort took his
poke from where it dangled inside his shirt and brought out a handful of grass.
Unthinkingly she knocked it away and then drew her hand back, horrified.

“I can’t help it,
Allie, I can’t—” and he made a crippled dive for the poke. She could have
stopped him, but she made no effort. She went back to lighting the lamps, tired
although the evening had barely begun. But nobody came in that night except old
man Kennerly, who had missed everything. He did not seem particularly surprised
to see Nort. He ordered beer, asked where Sheb was, and pawed her. The next day
things were almost normal, although none of the children followed Nort. The day
after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel.
The uprooted corn was gathered together by the children, and a week after Nort’s
resurrection, they burned it in the middle of the street. The fire was
momentarily bright and most of the barflies stepped or staggered out to watch.
They looked primitive. Their faces seemed to float between the flames and the
ice-chip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting
despair for the sad times of the world. Things had stretched apart. There was no
glue at the center of things anymore. She had never seen the ocean, never
would.

“If I had
guts
,” she murmured. “If I
had guts, guts,
guts...”

Nort raised his
head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from hell. She had no
guts. Only a bar and a scar.