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

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.

#

The mountain path had grown over with weeds and thistles and condoms and
cans and inexplicable maxi-pads and doll parts.

She clung to his hand as he pushed through it, stepping in brackish
puddles and tripping in sink holes. He navigated the trail like a
mountain goat, while Mimi lagged behind, tugging his arm every time she
misstepped, jerking it painfully in its socket.

He turned to her, ready to snap, *Keep the fuck up, would you?* and then
swallowed the words. Her eyes were red-rimmed and scared, her full lips
drawn down into a clown's frown, bracketed by deep lines won by other
moments of sorrow.

He helped her beside him and turned his back on the mountain, faced the
road and the town and the car with its trunk with its corpse with his
brother, and he put an arm around her shoulders, a brotherly arm, and
hugged her to him.

"How're you doing there?" he said, trying to make his voice light,
though it came out so leaden the words nearly thudded in the wet dirt as
they fell from his mouth.

She looked into the dirt at their feet and he took her chin and turned
her face up so that she was looking into his eyes, and he kissed her
forehead in a brotherly way, like an older brother coming home with a
long-lost sister.

"I used to want to know all the secrets," she said in the smallest
voice. "I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little
things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big
things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or
medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water, your eyes
won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterward with lemon-juice
they won't stink.

"I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I
felt like I'd taken -- a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination:
To be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone
around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew
enough secrets, I'd be like them.

"I don't want to learn secrets anymore, Andrew." She shrugged off his
arm and took a faltering step down the slope, back toward the road.

"I'll wait in the car, okay?"

"Mimi," he said. He felt angry at her. How could she be so selfish as to
have a crisis *now*, *here*, at this place that meant so much to him?

"Mimi," he said, and swallowed his anger.

#

His three brothers stayed on his sofa for a week, though they only left
one wet towel on the floor, only left one sticky plate in the sink, one
fingerprint-smudged glass on the counter.

He'd just opened his first business, the junk shop -- not yet upscale
enough to be called an antiques shop -- and he was pulling the kinds of
long hours known only to ER interns and entrepreneurs, showing up at 7
to do the books, opening at 10, working until three, then turning things
over to a minimum-wage kid for two hours while he drove to the city's
thrift shops and picked for inventory, then working until eight to catch
the evening trade, then answering creditors and fighting with the
landlord until ten, staggering into bed at eleven to sleep a few hours
before doing it all over again.

So he gave them a set of keys and bought them a MetroPass and stuffed an
old wallet with $200 in twenties and wrote his phone number on the brim
of a little pork pie hat that looked good on their head and turned them
loose on the city.

The shop had all the difficulties of any shop -- snarky customers,
shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough
money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of
it. He'd never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of
energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last.

Until his brothers arrived.

He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he'd
wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he'd inspire them to see
what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they'd
gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon,
as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George's hangdog
expression at the thought.

They'd walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them
over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely
purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a
Bakelite coffee carafe.

The arguments went like this:

George: Look, it's a milk container!

Ed: I don't think that that's for milk.

Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable.

George: Why don't you think it's for milk? Look at the silver inside,
that's to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold
and fresh.

Fred: Put it down, you're going to break it.

George: Fine, I'll put