Three weeks later, everything ends.
“Come look at this here,” Daddy calls through the screen door. He’s sitting at the kitchen table in front of our new terminal, researching what he calls “ad futures” on the Subnet. His friend Denny, with the truck, showed him how. Daddy won’t tell me how Denny learned, or what Denny’s buying or selling that he needs underground ads. But I know the Subnet’s not easy to ride. It isn’t all that hard to log onto, but after that it has a way of melting away unless you know all the key underground code words and procedures, which keep changing all the time. “The shadow economy,” vidnews calls it, or sometimes “the ghost market.” Supposedly you can get anything there, if you know how.
“Carol Ann!” Daddy calls again, louder. “Come see this.”
“I’m busy,” I call back from the yard. I’m watching Precious dig a hole with a kitchen fork. She sits in the slanting fall sunshine, covered with sweat and dirt, happy as day. Somewhere in the woods I hear Donna yelling at dogs. They still aren’t training properly. She’s having a terrible time with them.
“I said come here, Carol Ann, and I mean come here!” Daddy yells. Reluctantly I get myself up and go into the house.
It’s funny about getting a little money. All last winter and spring, when I was scrounging for rice and beans enough for us, and Daddy was working his ass off to get the money to buy the genemod embryos implanted in Leisha, and Donna had just one dress—all that long cold winter everybody was in a good mood. Sunny, hopeful. We were nice to each other. But since we got Tony Indivino’s credit chips, everybody’s been tense and snappy. Maybe I’m always that way, but Donna and Daddy aren’t. Or weren’t.
The stakes are higher now. Daddy has to figure out the right places to buy ads: Subnet sites that will be profitable, as well as safe from the law. We can’t afford to make mistakes. And the news is full of the feds closing illegal genemod labs, and the pups won’t listen to Donna unless she’s right there with a piece of meat—that’s what she meant when she said they’re like cats, they only do what you want them to if you’re standing right there with a prize or a poke. Everybody’s nervous.
For once, we have something to lose.
“Tell me what this means,” Daddy growls, and I bend over the screen. It’s an FDA recommendation to Congress about making genemod animals. The sentences are long and difficult, with a lot of scientific words I don’t understand.
“It’s about what a new law should allow in genetic engineering,” I say. “The summary says ‘No genemods that alter external appearance or basic internal functioning such that a creature deviates significantly from other members of not only its genus and species but also its breed.’ ”
“I can read!” Daddy snaps. After a minute he says, “I’m sorry, Carol Ann. But I need to know what every bit of it means. You explain it. One sentence at a time.”
“Daddy, I can’t—”
“Sure you can. You’re the smartest one of us, and don’t think I don’t know you know it.”
“But—”
“Please, baby. Help me understand.”
So I do. One sentence at a time, guessing at words, groping around to lay my hands on the meaning. It takes a long time. Right up until the minute I hear Precious start screaming.
We’re out the door in half a second. But I can’t see her anywhere. And then the screaming stops.
Donna comes running from the woods, yelling “Richard! Richard!” and it takes me a minute to realize she’s yelling for the dog. Her eyes are crazy. We all stop like the air holds us, only our heads swiveling. I can’t see Precious. I can’t see her. And then Donna, who’s got hearing almost as good as the dogs’, tears off into the woods to the left of the house.
I hear the snapping before I see Richard. His jaws are working over a piece of meat that Donna must have given him, a piece of reward meat. He lies down peacefully eating it, the shifting of his head and body on the fallen leaves making little rustling noises. I hear the rustles, because suddenly these woods are the quietest things I ever heard. The quietest things I ever will hear again.
Precious lies about eight feet away, down a little hill with a stream at the bottom. Her neck is broken. Her hands are smeared with beef juice, from the steak she tried to take away from Richard. Maybe she wanted a bite. Or maybe she thought it was a game: tug-of-war. But Richard wasn’t playing. He tossed Precious away—the bite marks are clear on her little arm—and Precious fell down the hill and landed wrong. She hit her head, or twisted her neck, or something. Later on the coroner would say it was a freak accident. Except for her arm, she isn’t bruised at all, or wet from the stream. She lies there in her new dirt-resistant pink overalls like she’s asleep.
Daddy shatters the quiet with a howl like hell breaking open. I run to Precious and pick her up. I hardly even hear the rifle going off not ten yards from me. The other shots—four more, and then a last, senseless one for Leisha—I don’t hear at all. Not an echo, not a whimper. Nothing.
I don’t know what makes people stay glued together inside, or not. Maybe it’s like Tony Indivino said: Behavior is just chaotic, mostly sensitive to small differences in initial conditions. I don’t know. Anything.
Daddy doesn’t stay glued together. He starts drinking right after the funeral, and he doesn’t ever stop. He doesn’t get mean or weepy. He doesn’t explain why he could ride out Mama’s death but not Precious’s. Maybe he doesn’t know. He just sits at the kitchen table, night after night, and quietly empties one bottle after another. During the day, he waits for night. Pretty soon, I think, he won’t bother to wait.
Donna doesn’t stick around to find out. She cries all the time for a few months. She wants to talk on and on about Precious, and I can’t listen. I can’t. Eventually she finds someone who will, a government counselor in Kellsville, who also finds her a job waiting on customers in a fancy restaurant. Customers like her. Bit by bit Donna stops crying. She makes some friends, then a boyfriend. I don’t see her much. And when I do, it’s hard to look straight into each other’s eyes.
And me. I don’t know if I stayed glued together or not. I’m too mad to know.
“You’re Dave’s girl,” Denny says, just like he hasn’t taken me back and forth from Kellsville in his truck for years. He’s one of those men terrified of female scenes. “What can I do for you, uh…”
“Carol. You can let me stay here and keep house for you.”
He looks like I could be rabid. “Well, uh, Carol, I don’t know about that, I thought you were keeping house for your father, he sure needs you since, uh—”
“He doesn’t need anybody,” I said. “And you do.” I looked around me. Denny’s wife left him, finally, last month. Denny had one girl too many. Since she moved, Denny hasn’t washed a dish or a sheet or a tabletop. His girlfriends, who he mostly meets at the Road Nest Bar, aren’t the type given to housekeeping. The two cats stopped using their litter box. Denny’s got all the windows open to control the smell, which it doesn’t, even though it’s pouring outside and rain is blowing in sideways on what’s left of his cat-piss-soaked couch. Everybody’s got a limit how much reeking mess they can tolerate. Denny’s must be pretty high, but I’m still betting he’s got one.
“I’m a good housekeeper,” I say. “And I can cook. Daddy says he’d take it as a favor if you let me live here. He knows I need to get away from the memories in our house.”
Denny nods slowly. It makes him feel better to think that he’s helping Daddy. But he still has doubts.