“Well now, Hap Collins,” he said.
I recognized him. A little older. Still fit. James Dell. We had gone to school together.
“It’s been a while,” he said. “What I remember best about you is I don’t like you.”
“It’s a big club,” Leonard said. “Hap even has a newsletter.”
“Me and Jim dated the same girl,” I said.
“Not at the same time,” Jim said.
“He dated her last,” I said.
“That’s right. And I married her.”
“So, you won,” I said.
“Way I like to see it,” James said. “You boys raised some hell. And you shot people. And you hit people. And Hap, you killed a guy. I also got word there’s two boys with broken legs over in No Enterprise. They gave themselves up to the sheriff over there.”
“Nice guy,” I said.
“One of the men you shot was a police officer,” said James.
“I know. He was waiting in line to rape a young woman. How is she, by the way?”
“Hospital. Touch-and-go for a while. But she made it. Apparently she’s no stranger to drugs, so maybe she had some tolerance. Hadn’t eaten in days. Buster Smith, we talked to him. He came apart like a fresh biscuit. He was only tough when his money worked for him. That cop, by the way, he was the police chief.”
“Oh,” Leonard said. “Then, what are you?”
“The new police chief. I should also mention that the mayor is the one that caught a stray bullet and is as dead as an old bean can.”
“Mayor. Police chief. We had quite a night,” I said.
To make this part of the story short, we had to stay in the jail till our friend Marvin Hanson could get us a lawyer, and then we got out, and then we got no-billed, in spite of the fact we had hunted the bastard down and caused quite a ruckus. The former police chief was dead, by our hand, and the mayor was on the deceased list as well, by a stray slug, and the others who had been in the row of chairs were all prominent citizens. It was best to take it easy on us, let them cover their own dirt in their own way.
Thing was simply this: the crime being done to Tillie was so bad they let us pretty much skate on self-defense. Hell, after all, it is Texas.
Brett and I climbed into bed and she lay in the crook of my arm.
“Tillie is going to be out of the hospital tomorrow,” Brett said.
She had spent about three months in there. She had been in a bad way. I had to say this for the kid, she was tough as yesterday’s fajita meat.
“I have to go get her, then,” Brett said.
“All right,” I said.
“I know you don’t like her.”
“Correct.”
“You didn’t have to do what you did.”
“Yes, I did.”
“For me?”
“You and her.”
“But you don’t like her.”
“I don’t like a lot of things,” I said, “but you love her. You think she’s a bent twig, and maybe you’re right. No one deserves that.”
“But she sets herself up for it, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She does. I don’t think she’ll ever change. Sometime soon, she doesn’t, she’s going to be dead. She picks men like ducks pick June bugs. At random.”
“I know. I tried to be a good mother.”
“I know that too, so don’t start on how you failed. You did what you could.”
“I did set her father’s head on fire,” Brett said.
“Yes, you did,” I said. “But by all accounts, he had it coming.”
“He did, you know.”
“Never doubted it.”
“I love you, Hap.”
“And I love you, Brett.”
“Want to lose five minutes out of your life the hard way?” she said.
I laughed. “Now, that’s not nice.”
She laughed, rolled over, and turned off the light. And then she was very nice.
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-four years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1996 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2004, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions in Time.” His other books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of SF. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing with Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at: www.michaelswanwick.com and maintains a blog at www.floggingbabel.blogspot.com.
Here he takes his famous rogues Darger and Surplus, con men extraordinaire, to a surreal Post-Utopian New Orleans full of pygmy mastodons, sea serpents, and lots and lots of zombies, where they learn that making money—literally—may be easy, but hanging on to it and staying alive is very, very hard.
TAWNY PETTICOATS
Michael Swanwick
The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie laborers to docks where cargo was loaded into wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses. So none thought it particularly noteworthy when, for three days, an endless line of young women waited in the hallway outside a luxury suite in the Maison Fema for the opportunity to raise their skirts or open their blouses to display a tattooed thigh, breast, or buttock to two judges who sat on twin chairs watching solemnly, asked a few questions, thanked them for their time, and then showed them out.
The women had come in response to a handbill, posted throughout several parishes, that read:
SEEKING AN HEIRESS
ARE YOU …
A YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 21?
FATHERLESS?
TATTOOED FROM BIRTH ON AN INTIMATE PART OF YOUR BODY?
IF SO, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO GREAT RICHES
INQUIRE DAYTIMES, SUITE 1, MAISON FEMA
“You’d think I’d be tired of this by now,” Darger commented during a brief break in the ritual. “And yet I am not.”
“The infinite variety of ways in which women can be beautiful is indeed amazing,” Surplus agreed. “As is the eagerness of so many to display that beauty.” He opened the door. “Next.”
A woman strode into the room, trailing smoke from a cheroot. She was dauntingly tall—six feet and a hand, if an inch—and her dress, trimmed with silver lace, was the same shade of golden brown as her skin. Surplus indicated a crystal ashtray on the sideboard and, with a gracious nod of thanks, she stubbed out her cigar.