Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef’s knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.

It was approximately the same size as the one he’d used on Davey, a knife that he’d held again and again, reached for in the night and carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint, taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger—a soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit—knew exactly what he was carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.

The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he’d forgotten about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the friendship.

He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out of his fingers and snap it back to the wall, picked up the wine glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.

“You spit in mine?” Krishna said.

Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the soft-spoken man’s hand when he’d handed over the sack of money. The touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of his desperation.

“I don’t normally drink before noon,” Adam said.

“I don’t much care when I drink,” Krishna said, and took a slug.

“Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender,” Adam said.

“Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It’s not a hard job.” Krishna spat. “Big club, all you’re doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters all night. I could do it in my sleep.”

“You should quit,” Alan said. “You should get a better job. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”

Krishna put a hand out on Alan’s chest, the warmth of his fingertips radiating through Alan’s windbreaker. “Don’t try to arrange me on your chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I’m not on the board. I got my job, and if I leave it, it’ll be for me.”

Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the wine. He set the glass down.

“I’m not playing chess with you,” he said. “I don’t play games. I try to help—I do help.”

Krishna swigged the glass empty. “You wanna know what makes you a monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don’t understand a single fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging them on your board, and you tell them and you tell yourself that you’re helping.

“You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock and leave the people’s world for people.”

Something snapped in Alan. “Canada for Canadians, right? Send ’em back where they came from, right?” He stalked to the railing that divided their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.

Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.

“You think you can make me feel like a racist, make me guilty?” His voice squeaked on the last syllable. “Man, the only day I wouldn’t piss on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak.”

Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.

He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.

Then he grabbed Krishna’s wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried spider’s nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.

“I’m every bit the monster my brother is,” he hissed in Krishna’s ear. “I made him the monster he is. Don’t squirm,” he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. “Listen. You can stay away from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world of terrible hurt. It’s up to you. Nod if you understand.”

Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan broke it by cracking him across the ear again.

“Nod if you understand, goddammit,” he said, his vision going fuzzily black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now, he would struggle free and they’d be in a clinch.

He remembered kneeling on Davey’s chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn’t know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.

Only Davey had struck him first. He’d only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. “Nod if you understand, Krishna,” he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.

Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.

He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he’d bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.

Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he’d just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.

He picked up Alan’s wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn’t one of the cheapies he’d bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he’d found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.

Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.

He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan’s forehead, moving like a bullet.

Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.

The taste of blood was in Alan’s mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.

He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.