The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

TRAINING TALK David R. Bunch

It was one of those days when cheer came out of a rubbery sky in great splotches and globs of half-snow and eased down the windowpanes like breakups of little glaciers. I decided it was as good a time as any to talk to them about Geryl.

Little Sister was doing cutout angels on the floor, her thin mouth a red hyphen of do-or-die centered in the squiggly yellow parenthesis of her long, raggedy hair. And Little Brother, muscled like a sweaty boxer, with his shirt off near the fire, was hammering at a train track that had got twisted. She was four. He was five.

“Little Sister,” I called, “Little Brother. Could you leave off the toys long enough to discuss sense, maybe? You’re both growing up, growing up. No doubt about that, no doubt about that.” I had turned moody there that winter day, in the soft chair with my pipe lit and my shoes off and my feet stretched tautly toward the electric logs in the mock fireplace that glowed off-fire red. They came and stood before me, trembling slightly in the attention attitude that I insisted on out of respect for me. “Little Brother!” I snapped, “you’re not dressed for a conference. Little Sister! your hair’s all raggedy.” He ran to put his shirt on; she ran to comb her hair.

They were back. “Kids,” I said, growing reflective, “do you, either of you, have any idea what really happened to Aunt Geryl?” “She’s in heaven!” Little Sister said, and her face glowed with a memory and the beautiful-story-line of cutouts she had been doing. “She’s dead,” Little Brother said forthrightly, “and either in heaven or hell. It’s not my place to say. But probably hell.” He’d never liked Aunt Geryl. She was always after him about his toys on the floor, especially the train tracks that seemed to curve everywhere. She and Little Sister had been favorites with each other.

“Where’s Mother?”

“Chicago!”

“Los Angeles!”

“Well, you can stop guessing,” I said. “It’s Kansas City. But who cares? And that wasn’t what I called you over about anyway. If it were just Mother, you could go on beating your train tracks all afternoon and cut out those silly angels till supper. I wouldn’t care. I’d just sit here and let this north-pole stuff slam down on the windowpanes and run down to the ground and form a gray ice blanket from here to the graveyard. Which is what it’s doing, in case you hadn’t looked.—But I think we all liked Geryl. At any rate, she helped us out... at a tragic tragic time . . . when your mother—But enough of that! And anyway I think it only fair that we not go into any nonsense about what’s happened and where Geryl’s gone.—You kids will probably learn as you grow older that I’m a little different from some people. What I mean is, I believe in calling a thing a thing. That is, I don’t believe in dressing it up. Especially about my friends. I don’t think they should be lied about. People I don’t like, people I don’t know—all right, dress it up. Say they went to the moon, or Mars, or heaven, or hell, or star XYZ. I don’t care. Why should I?”

“No reason, Pop,” Little Brother said.

“You shouldn’t care, Daddy,” Little Sister said.

“All right! How hungry are you going to be tomorrow? And which do you like best, chicken or baloney? Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know.”

“chicken!” they both squealed.

“All right! Go get me the baloney then, one of you, out of the cold box. I don’t care which one goes. We’ll keep the chicken.”

Little Brother beat Little Sister in getting started for the baloney. “All right, Little Sister, instead of just standing there, you can get me the best two of your angels.” She went and, after a long time, selected her prizes.

When they got back, I told them, “All right, we’re going to take a little time and do something with this sausage. We’re going to carve out a Geryl for each of you, taking our time and making them as nice as we can. Oh, we’ll doll them all up! with crepe paper and ribbons and bows and string, and maybe even a little hair from that real-hair doll we’ve been meaning to send to the hospital! We’ll probably need both the butcher’s knife and the paring knife to do the job right.”

They got the knives, and I plunged into the baloney skin with the butcher’s knife and maneuvered around in there until I had two cylinders of sausage cut out, each about six inches long and an inch or more in diameter. I proceeded to sculpt them to look like Geryl as nearly as I could, long sausage nose, long dish-pan-hands face, and little short shaggy-bob hair fixed on. Little Sister and Little Brother watched all the time with interest, exchanging nervous glances with each other now and again and trembling violently once in awhile. My training talks with them were always a little tense, and I could tell they lost weight at such times, but I couldn’t help that. A lone parent has the whole load of the training obligation toward his children on his hands.

When the Geryls were ready, as near as I could get them, I said, “All right, you know those two cigar boxes we’ve been saving, that I said might come in handy for a training talk. Get them. We’ll line them with shiny paper.” When we had the cigar boxes ready, all glinty and coffin-looking, we put the baloney figures in and the gold angels and sealed the lids down with red sealing wax. “Now we have a baloney stick, carved, and a gold angel in each box,” I said. “So before the ground starts to freeze,”—the rain-snow had taken a turn toward pellety sleet by now—”you chaps just hustle right out and get this stuff under the soil.” They bundled into their winter heavies, took tiny shovels from sand pails and strode into the slingshot sleet. I watched from the window and saw Little Brother do his burial quickly by a young plum tree. Little Sister, taking more time, did hers in the open and marked it with a stone white with ice.

Little Brother waited patiently for her to finish.

When they came in stamping and wheezing and all fired up with the cold, I told them simply, from my usual iceberg distance of dignity, “You may each go back to your own kettle tendings and pot watchings now—whatever you were doing before, I mean. In about six months we’ll try to get together on this thing again, dig into these burials and finish up this training talk about Aunt Geryl. We’ll reach a conclusion about what really happened to her, where she’s gone, the efficacy of heaven and hell, the Promise and all that. Or we’ll certainly try to.”

Little Sister went listlessly back to her angels, and Little Brother seemed old—old, going for his train tracks... .

When six months had gone by on the baloney sticks and the angels and it was May, green May, we went to open the caskets, “where’s mother?” I yelled to the children suddenly and without warning as we strolled above the green grave sites of our serious grim keen experiments before we started to dig. “New Orleans!” Little Sister cried, and Little Brother guessed, “Boston!” “who cares?” I raved back. “It’s neither of those hell places, and I wouldn’t have asked you, except I glanced and saw a black heavy heart up there on those two tiny limbs in that elm tree, and I spoke without volition. And never mind that big word ‘volition.’ Just say that I spoke without meaning to. Just say that the spring sometimes bemuses one until he is unguardful; all brainwashed to giddiness and standing caught with his words down—he knows not—

“LET’S DIG!” We fell to delving then where Little Sister had buried her Geryl and, after about five seconds of spading fast and tossing, my spade all at once fell on a hollow thuddy noise. I sprang forward to claw with my hands, and soon I lifted the box forth. Then I dropped it.

There was a rattling sound! There was a slithery and slathery sound, there was a rasping, like rope being pulled through crushed paper. The box lived! It lived?? Out of one carved baloney stick and a little girl’s gold angel something had hatched!! Something had hatched? ? ? what had hatched! ! I ?

For a moment I stood in awe while sunlight flooded the falsely pleasant world of May and that queer dry sound of slithering continued in the cigar box that was our training-talk casket. Then, recovering my sure knowledge of the world and casting awe to the ground, I cautiously shattered the wax that sealed our casket lid shut and, using the spade for my safety, I pried open the box.

“Kill it, Father, kill it! Don’t let it get away!” Little Brother shrieked, and he jigged, and he held his nose from the sausage that was now well over six months of age.

“My cutout! He’s done a nest in my cutout!” Little Sister cried and jumped, and then she clutched her nose and her chest and went still and white-faced as cathedral statuary.

But I stood brave with heavy hands, as stones, while we looked at each other, measured each other steadily. It had two sharp cold eyes in a head shaped like the forward end of a spear. It hoisted a calm slick-stick part of itself upon three circles of chill, and it weaved the spearhead there in the sunny air of May, a wedge that I could not stop regarding. Then noislessly it left, not even rattling the angel, deftly unslung from its orbs and, feeding the straightening circles over the side of the box, slipped itself to the ground.

“We’ll all come back tomorrow!” I yelled. “This is all for today!” I cried. “We’ll try to draw some conclusions. Later. We’ll dig—we’ll spade—we’ll bring up Little Brother’s casket! We’ll assess.” And suddenly, my legs going to jelly-mush and water, I sat hurriedly down to the freshly dug ground. I handwaved the children from me, told them to go do some kind of games, while I watched a thing that I thought was going deeper into the safety and gloom of the cold and dark-turned soil. Then, quite unexpectedly at the edge of an especially large clod I had turned in the early digging, it brought up its head, and it looked at me for a cold instant from its camouflage, almost the color of wet soil. Then, breaking for open ground, it glided into the emerald grass of May and completely disappeared from my straining eyes, leaving me to my fears and my fresh confusions. But it was scared! I clung to that thought. It knew it had met a master.

Idly, weakly, I reached for the training-talk casket, my thoughts struck numb with wonderment. I had problems. Yes, real problems now. What miracle? What dark miracle? How into the box, the carefully sealed box? What’s to know? And what’s ever to know after this? And then my eyes fell upon it. Oh, the saving of all the cold judgments. What joy! At a corner of the box there was a place of warping—the glue had given way, the short nails had been bested—caused, no doubt, by dampness in the soil. A hole gaped there, quite small, but big! big as the world. . . .

But my joy was short-lived and my extreme relief cut down to its death almost before its real borning. In my mind that night, thinking and thinking, I knew, yes, knew! that such a snake, if it was a snake—such a creature—had never been seen in that part of the country before. I could hardly wait for next day. yes! What strange sign might we not find to help us in the very next training-talk casket. ...