Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

and clean sheets and, you know, *went for it*.

Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her
back. Found myself staring at.

Two little wings.

The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her
shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey
neck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it.

#

"How did you get out?"

"With my wings?"

"Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead
over the tub?"

She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it
again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.

"I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear.

He arched his back. "You don't know?"

"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."

He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs,
making her shudder and jerk her wings back.

That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.

#

He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all
the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed
them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered
up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and
put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a
spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the
mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a
hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes
after it rose.

They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then
Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside,
skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the
hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited
for him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his
shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic
demonstrativeness.

He marched right into Mr. Davenport's office with his brothers in tow.

"We're back," he said.

Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his glasses. "You are, are
you?"

"Mom took sick," he said. "Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt,
and she was too far away for us to get to school."

"I see," Mr. Davenport said.

"I taught the littler ones as best as I could," Alan said. He liked
Mr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everything
to be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and his
brothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excuse
when they came back. Alan could respect that. "And I read ahead in my
textbooks. I think we'll be okay."

"I'm sure you will be," Mr. Davenport said. "How is your mother now?"

"She's better," he said. "But she was very sick. In the hospital."

"What was she sick with?"

Alan hadn't thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but he
was out of practice. "Cancer," he said, thinking of Marci's mother.

"Cancer?" Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.

"But she's better now," Alan said.

"I see. You boys, why don't you get to class? Alan, please wait here a
moment."

His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, looking
at the class ring on Mr. Davenport's hairy finger, remembering the time
that Davey had kicked him. He'd never asked Alan where Davey was after
that, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shared
a secret.

"Are you all right, Alan?" he asked, settling down behind his desk,
taking off his glasses.

"Yes, sir," Alan said.

"You're getting enough to eat at home? There's a quiet place where you
can work?"

"Yes," Alan said, squirming. "It's fine, now that Mom is home."

"I see," Mr. Davenport said. "Listen to me, son," he said, putting his
hands flat on the desk. "The school district has some resources
available: clothes, lunch vouchers, Big Brother programs. They're not
anything you have to be ashamed of. It's not charity, it's just a little
booster. A bit of help. The other children, their parents are well and
they live in town and have lots of advantages that you and your brothers
lack. This is just how we level the playing field. You're a very bright
lad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it's no sin to accept a
little help."

Alan suddenly felt like laughing. "We're not underprivileged," he said,
thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love of
his father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced by
the handful. "We're very well off," he said, thinking of home, now free
of Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. "Thank you, though," he said,
thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror of
Davey's bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar.

Mr. Davenport scowled and stared hard at him. Alan met his stare and
smiled. "It's time for classes," he said. "Can I go?"

"Go," Mr. Davenport said. He shook his head. "But remember, you can
always come here if you have anything you want to talk to me about."

"I'll remember," Alan said.

#

Six years later, Bradley was big and strong and he was the star goalie
of all the hockey teams in town, in front of the puck before it arrived,
making desperate, almost nonchalant saves that had them howling in the
stands, stomping their feet, and sloshing their Tim Horton's coffee over
the bleachers, to freeze into brown ice. In the summer, he was the star
pitcher on every softball team, and the girls trailed after him like a
long comet tail after the games when the other players led him away to a
park to drink illicit beers.

Alan watched his games from afar, with his schoolbooks on his lap, and
Eric-Franz-Greg nearby playing trucks or reading or gnawing on a sucker.

By the ninth inning or the final period, the young ones would be too
tired to play, and they'd come and lean heavily against Alan, like a bag
of lead pressing on him, eyes half open, and Alan would put an arm
around them and feel at one with the universe.

It snowed on the afternoon of the season opener for the town softball
league that year, fat white wet flakes that kissed your cheeks and
melted away in an instant, so soft that you weren't sure they'd be there
at all. Bradley caught up with Alan on their lunch break, at the
cafeteria in the high school two blocks from the elementary school. He
had his mitt with him and a huge grin.

"You planning on playing through the snow?" Alan said, as he set down
his cheeseburger and stared out the window at the diffuse white radiance
of the April noontime bouncing off the flakes.

"It'll be gone by tonight. Gonna be *warm*," Bradley said, and nodded at
his jock buddies sitting at their long table, sucking down Cokes and
staring at the girls. "Gonna be a good game. I know it."

Bradley knew. He knew when they were getting shorted at the assayers'
when they brought in the golems' gold, just as he knew that showing up
for lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushrooms
and lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the high
school hierarchy, as was dressing like someone who'd been caught in an
explosion at the Salvation Army, and so he had money and he had burgers
and he had a pair of narrow-leg jeans from the Gap and a Roots
sweatshirt and a Stussy baseball hat and Reebok sneakers and he looked,
basically, like a real person.

Alan couldn't say the same for himself, but he'd been making an effort
since Bradley got to high school, if only to save his brother the
embarrassment of being related to the biggest reject in the building --
but Alan still managed to exude his don't-fuck-with-me aura enough that
no one tried to cozy up to him and make friends with him and scrutinize
his persona close in, which was just as he wanted it.

Bradley watched a girl walk past, a cute thing with red hair and
freckles and a skinny rawboned look, and Alan remembered that she'd been
sitting next to him in class for going on two years now and he'd never
bothered to learn her name.

And he'd never bothered to notice that she was a dead ringer for Marci.

"I've always had a thing for redheads," Bradley said. "Because of you,"
he said. "You and your girlfriend. I mean, if she was good enough for
*you*, well, she had to be the epitome of sophistication and
sexiness. Back then, you were like a god to me, so she was like a
goddess. I imprinted on her, like the baby ducks in Bio. It's amazing
how much of who I am today I can trace back to those days. Who knew that
it was all so important?"

He was a smart kid, introspective without being
moody. Integrated. Always popping off these fine little observations in
between his easy jokes. The girls adored him, the boys admired him, the
teachers were grateful for him and the way he bridged the gap between
scholarship and athleticism.

"I must have been a weird kid," he said. "All that quiet."

"You were a great kid," Alan said. "It was a lot of fun back then,
mostly."

"Mostly," he said.

They both stared at the girl, who noticed them now, and blushed and
looked confused. Bradley looked away, but Alvin held his gaze on her,
and she whispered to a friend, who looked at him, and they both laughed,
and then Alan looked away, too, sorry that he'd inadvertently interacted
with his fellow students. He was supposed to watch, not participate.

"He was real," Bradley said, and Alan knew he meant Davey.

"Yeah," Alan said.

"I don't think the little ones really remember him -- he's more like a
bad dream to them. But he was real, wasn't he?"

"Yeah," Alan said. "But he's gone now."

"Was it right?"

"What do you mean?" Alan said. He felt a sear of anger arc along his
spine.

"It's nothing," Billy said, mumbling into his tray.

"What do you mean, Brad?" Alan said. "What else should we have done? How
can you have any doubts?"

"I don't," Brad said. "It's okay."

Alan looked down at his hands, which appeared to belong to someone else:
white lumps of dough clenched into hard fists, knuckles white. He made
himself unclench them. "No, it's *not* okay. Tell me about this. You
remember what he was like. What he...did."

"I remember it," Bryan said. "Of course I remember it." He was staring
through the table now, the look he got when he was contemplating a
future the rest of them couldn't see. "But."

Alan waited. He was trembling inside. He'd done the right thing. He'd
saved his family. He knew that. But for six years, he'd found himself
turning in his memory to the little boy on the ground, holding the loops
of intestine in through slippery red fingers. For six years,