Girl in Landscape (6 page)

“And fish!” said Martha.

“I’m getting to that,” said Bruce. “Sour, meat,
green, cake, tea, uh, ice, and fish. Fish and ice are the hardest to find. Fish is the weirdest one.”

“How do they grow in there?” said David.

“Long time ago the Archbuilders took all their favorite foods and made them grow like this, under the ground, so they wouldn’t ever have to do any work. Efram says that’s what made them all lazy and stupid.”

“Who’s Efram?” said Pella.

“Efram won’t eat the potatoes,” continued Bruce, not quite answering the question. “Everybody else eats them, even if they’re trying to grow something else. But not Efram. He’s got Ben Barth working on his farm like a slave to get out enough food that isn’t Archbuilder potatoes.”

Pella heard adult words echoed unreflectingly in Bruce Kincaid’s speech.

“Efram who?” she said.

Raymond and David were prying at the cake potato, trying to break the skin, reducing the thing to a bag of pulp in the process.

“Efram Nugent,” said Bruce. “He’s not around now, or you’d of met him. He’s always out roaming around. That’s why Ben Barth’s got to run his farm.”

“Efram discovered the Planet of the Archbuilders,” said Morris Grant, a little defiantly.

“Did not, Morris,” said Bruce. “Don’t be stupid.”

Morris Grant turned and sidearmed a rock into the cracked valley.

“Show them fish potatoes, Bruce,” said Martha.

“Okay, okay. I’ve got to find one first.” Bruce went
back to gouging in the crevice. He rejected a series of potatoes, piling them gently to one side, then said, “Here.” He held it out. Raymond reached out with extended hands, but Bruce said, “No, cradle it. Like a water balloon.” He plumped it against Raymond’s chest.

“Take the others,” he said, and distributed the pile among Pella, David, Martha, and Morris. “E. G. Wa gives us a nickel for every potato we bring in. He bottles them and makes soup and stuff. Except tea potatoes—he’s always got too many of those. A nickel
credit
, that is. Forget that one.” He indicated the cake potato that Raymond and David had been struggling with. “You ruined it. It’s crap.”

“I’m keeping the credit for the ones I carry,” said Morris.

“Jeezus,” said Bruce. “Whatever.”

“Credit where?” said Raymond.

“E. G. Wa has kind of a shop,” said Bruce. “Much as you can have a shop with thirteen people in the entire valley. Seventeen now that you’re here.”

“I thought there wasn’t any money here,” said Raymond.

“Well, E. G. Wa and some other folks still use dollars and cents, just out of habit, I guess,” said Bruce Kincaid. “But mostly everybody just trades.”

“Also the Archbuilders sometimes buy stuff,” said Martha. “Wa gives them money for bringing potatoes.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of stupid,” said Bruce. “He gives them money, then takes it back. But it gives them something to do.”

Archbuilders sounded less than impressive. Pella
decided she would be as casual about them as Bruce and Martha Kincaid.

The six children trudged back across the valley, arms loaded with various potatoes, Raymond cradling just the one sloshy fish potato. Morris trailed, taking care to indicate his apartness from the group even as he joined them in the errand. They turned away from the path back to both the Kincaids’ house and to Pella and Raymond and David’s new home, and headed down a series of crumbled steps until those houses were out of sight.

E. G. Wa’s shop was just the front part of his house, which was itself just another of the prefabricated cabins they all seemed to have for homes. Where the Kincaids had their dinner table, Wa had a counter loaded with jars. Against the wall was a small table with an optimistically full pot of coffee heating on a burner, and arrayed for the nonexistent coffee drinkers were three rocking chairs.

As the six of them came clumping in from the porch, Pella caught sight of a pair of household deer skittering out of sight behind the counter.

“Look,” said Bruce, pointing to a shelf loaded with packages, foil- and plastic-wrapped goods imprinted with advertising logos. “My mother bakes this bread, see?” Now Pella saw the dusty loaves, more plainly wrapped in transparent plastic. “She trades it to Wa, and he sells it out of the shop.”

“But we get it free at home,” added Martha.

Pella had a sudden pang of hunger. For bread, for mother.

E. G. Wa came out of the back. He was tall, and his smile had a permanent, mummified look. He angled his spindly body over the counter and surveyed the group of children. After a moment he took the toothpick out of his mouth and said, “These the new kids, Brucey?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Got stuff for me already?”

“Yeah.” Bruce lumped his armload of potatoes onto the counter, then helped the others do the same, except for Raymond, and Morris, who managed alone.

E. G. Wa pointed his toothpick at the potato Raymond held. “That a fish?”

“Yeah, we’re keeping it,” said Bruce.

“Give a quarter for that one.”

“Nope.”

“Ha-ha. You bargaining, young Mr. Kincaid?”

“No, we want it.”

Martha whispered, too loud, to Pella, “He makes soup of it. It’s yucky.”

“Okay,” said E. G. Wa, “fifteen, thirty, forty-five—you got seventy cents here.”

“Morris’s are separate,” said Bruce, with sardonic emphasis.

“Fifty-five and fifteen, then,” said E. G. Wa. “Dollar seventy-five for you with what you had before, Brucey.”

“Give me a package of those cookies,” said Bruce, pointing.

“Yes, sir! Earth imports. Good deal trading Archbuilder crap for nice Earth stuff, eh? Only problem is the Archbuilder emigration tax—that’s fifteen cents per new kid in town, comes to, uh—”

“Cut it out,” said Bruce. He rapped his knuckles against the counter directly over the cookies. “He’s just making that stuff up,” he said to Pella and Raymond. “There’s no such thing as Archbuilder tax.”

“Hah.” E. G. Wa gestured honorifically with toothpick in hand, then pulled out the package of cookies. “Very good, Mr. Kincaid. And what’s the names of you new kids?”

“Pella Marsh,” said Pella, just as Raymond said, “Raymond.” E. G. Wa nodded, though it seemed unlikely he had made them out. And then Pella added, “And David.”

They went out and sat on the porch, Raymond with the fish potato resting in his lap. Bruce crinkled open the cookies and handed them out, two to each, except to Morris.

“Hey,” said Morris.

“It was your idea to keep yours separate,” said Bruce.

“Fifteen cents isn’t enough to buy anything.”

“It was your idea.”

“You can build up credit,” said Martha consolingly. “Like Bruce did.”

“Yeah, but make sure Wa writes your fifteen cents down,” said Bruce. “He’ll forget it.”

“He didn’t forget yours.”

“Well I’m in there all the time.” Bruce said this through a mouthful of cookies. Morris glared resentfully.

Pella gave Morris one of her cookies. He didn’t thank her, just wolfed it down, then scooped up some
rocks to throw from the porch into the gully. After a minute he said, “Potatoes growing out everywhere, I don’t even get why he gives you any credit at all.”

“It’s work digging them up, something you wouldn’t know about,” said Bruce. “Worth a nickel to him. That’s the reason.”

Pella thought she knew a better reason, having to do with the full pot of coffee and the empty rocking chairs.

“Fish, fish, fish,” said Martha softly.

“Okay,” said Bruce, exasperated. “Let’s go. We’ll do it at your house,” he said to Pella and Raymond. “You can keep them.”

“Keep them?”

“You’ll see.”

Clement wasn’t there when they went in. Bruce rummaged confidently through the cabinets in the kitchen of the new homestead until he found a large glass jar. Pella and Raymond and David sat and waited, still as much strangers in this house as the other children. The fish potato sat waiting on the kitchen table, quivering slightly when someone walked nearby.

Bruce filled the half-gallon jar two-thirds full with water from the well tap at the sink, put it on the table, and sawed a small hole in the top of the potato with his pocketknife. Pinching the rupture shut, he tilted the potato up, then opened his fingers and squeezed the contents into the water like a baker writing with a bag of frosting.

Seven little bodies flooded out into the jar. Sardines with legs. They drifted toward the bottom, but before the first bumped down it was beginning to squirm and
thrash. Within a minute they had untangled and begun swimming around inside the jar in frantic darting movements, and the amniotic gunk that floated away from their bodies dissolved and made the water gray. Bruce took it to the sink, and covering the top with his fingers poured off most of the floating sediment, then refilled the jar from the tap with fresh water.

“There.”

Even Martha, who had obviously seen this before and had been clamoring to have it demonstrated to others, crowded closer. And Morris forsook his distance to have a look. Everyone peered in at the swimmers. The legs of the fish groped back and down, like swimmers searching for the bottom in the deep end of a pool, and though their tiny blistered eyes were still shut they avoided collisions with one another or the walls of the jar.

“You can feed them whatever,” said Bruce. “They don’t grow or anything, you can’t train them. They’ll die, eventually.”

“That guy makes soup out of them?” said Raymond, incredulous. “That makes me want to retch.”

“It’s pretty rotten soup,” agreed Bruce. “But they make pretty bad pets. Efram says they’re not real animals, just some kind of screwed-up Archbuilder food thing. All the potatoes are just stuff the Archbuilders wanted to have big supplies of around to eat.”

“Why are they alive, then?” said Raymond, his forehead screwed up. It was an urgent question.

“Maybe the way you can wake them up if you put them in water is just some weird mistake.”

“The Archbuilders eat them,” suggested Pella. She understood Raymond’s objection. She too wanted the confusing and horrible fish to have a clear place in the order of things.

“Nope,” said Bruce. “The Archbuilders ignore them. When they dig them up they throw them out in the sun to rot. That’s why Efram says that it’s a mistake.”

“Only E. G. Wa eats it,” said Martha, wrinkling her mouth and nose. “In soup.”

“Dad eats the soup sometimes,” said Bruce. “Ben Barth eats it too, when Efram’s not around. E. G. Wa’s always handing it out when you go in there—probably
all
the grown-ups eat it sometimes.”

The assertion went unanswered.

“Speaking of
not eating,
” said Morris Grant to Pella, “Martha told me you’re not eating the pills.” The words could have been neutral, but his voice rose tauntingly at the end.

“Mind your own business,” said Bruce.

“Martha told me.”

“Then Martha should mind
her
own business.”

“Efram isn’t going to like it,” said Morris.

“Efram isn’t their dad.”

Pella felt she should speak up, not leave it to Bruce, but she didn’t know what she would be defending, what it meant to the people here that her family wasn’t taking the little blue pills. It was her battle, inherited from Caitlin, but she didn’t understand it.

David sat with his chin resting on his crossed arms, staring at the swimming figures inches away.

Morris went to the door. “I’m telling Efram.”

“Efram isn’t even
around
,” said Bruce. “You can go tell anybody you want. Tell some old Archbuilder. Get out of here.” He moved suddenly at Morris, stomping on the floor threateningly. Morris shrank through the doorway out onto the porch. “Go, already,” said Bruce.

Morris peered through the door once more, then ran away over the porch and off into the paths of the valley.

Raymond went out of the kitchen, into his new room. David just sat hypnotized by the things in the jar.

“But what’s going to happen?” said Martha to Pella.

“What?”

“If you don’t take the pills.”

“I don’t know,” said Pella.

“Misplaced intensity,” said Hiding Kneel.

Hiding Kneel was the first Archbuilder the girl had seen in the flesh—flesh and fur and shell and frond. In fact flesh was barely visible, just the black leather of its ears and eyelids. Whereas the fur was everywhere, under the papery clothes, and it was black, too, smooth and tufted, perhaps faintly musky. Shell shone beneath the fur in odd places, sleek natural armor; cheeks, wrists, what might be breastplates. The Archbuilder’s fronds seemed less horns or hair or limbs than flowers, a bundle of calla lilies topping the Archbuilder’s head, twisted, drooping elegantly to the side, tucked behind the large, clownish ears. The fronds were a kind of rhyming rebuke to the smashed towers that littered the planet: Bend, they said, and you may not crumble.

The girl and her brother had been sitting on the porch, gazing at the distant arches, when a pickup truck rumbled over the wastes, driven by the man named Ben
Barth. Their father sat in the cab. Hiding Kneel rode in the back of the truck, with the supplies. When the truck stopped beside the porch, the Archbuilder clambered out in a supple, slinking motion, its limbs seeming to flow in a ripple of two-way knee joints, of double elbows.

The girl felt the sight of the Archbuilder move through her, a physical thing. She clutched the porch where she sat, not looking at her brother. Her body slowly adjusted to the fact of the Archbuilder, its walking and speaking, scuffling in the dust, seemingly made of scraps, stage props, but alive, cocking its head curiously like an attentive dog, moving around the truck now beside the unconcerned men. She stared, perfectly still, fighting the urge to run. In one sense the Archbuilder was nothing, a joke, a tatter, too absurd to glance at twice. It seemed pathetic that they’d honored this thing with their endless talk, back in Brooklyn. That Caitlin had wasted her breath. At the same time, the Archbuilder burned a hole in the world, changed it utterly. It made the far-off towers loom up, made the glaring horizon draw closer. The place wasn’t rubble everywhere. Somewhere there were more Archbuilders. The rubble and what grew in the rubble belonged to them. The girl felt her body understand.