Senses Three and Six Read online

  Senses Three and Six

  David Brin

  Senses Three and Six

  by David Brin

  I lean here against this polished wooden surface, while the drums pound and the smoke blows around, and my mind feels like a wild thing, completely out of control. For days I’ve hardly slept, dreading the dreams that have come back… eyes in the sky and a fiery mountainside.

  Even as I stand here, this damned day keeps throwing memories at me, like soggy rags dragged out of a pile of old discarded clothes—things I thought I’d buried away for good.

  Right now, for instance, I can’t help remembering how weird I thought my old man was, when I was a kid.

  Oh, he was a pip, he was. Whenever he caught me in a lie, he would beat me twice.

  The first thing he’d do was he’d take me into the house and lecture me really reasonable-like about how it was immoral to tell lies, how a real man would face the truth, and all that stuff. Then he’d make me bend over and take my licking like a man. That part was okay, I guess. I didn’t like the lecture, but he didn’t hit very hard.

  It was later in the day he’d scare me half to death. And all the time in between I’d be so frightened I couldn’t hardly breathe. I think, now that you get right down to it, he punished me three times each time he found out I’d lied… a spanking indoors for being unethical, a Chinese water torture of a wait, and then a terrific pasting out next to the garage for getting caught.

  I think the wait was so I could think about how I could have talked my way out of it without lying… or come up with a better lie, one without holes in it.

  When he knocked me around outside he kept telling me how stupid it was to waste an untruth—how a man’s credibility was as important to his survival as his wind, his stamina, or his ability to make friends.

  My lather was like that. Indoors he talked as if he were trying to teach me how to be moral and upright. Outside, in the twilight, he acted as if tomorrow I was going to be dumped into the Amazon, or Devil’s Island, or deepest darkest Wall Street, and it was his job to see to it I could make it in a jungle.

  One of the good things I can say about him is that he never got mad when I told him to his face he was nuts. He just laughed and said it was an interesting proposition—and that his duty to teach me to survive didn’t include policing my opinions.

  In all mis smoke and noise and stream-of-consciousness rambling tonight, it occurs to me for the first time that maybe my old man was right after all.

  Maybe he had a feeling I’d wind up in a place like this, hunted, trapped, my survival depending on the credibility of a lie.

  These eyes in the sky keep coming back. And the picture of a burning mountain. I try to shrug them aside, but another image comes, uninvited, unwelcome …

  A closeup of the moon…

  Hey, I’m not illiterate. Though my life depends on seeming as if I am. Like Bogart said to Bacall, I been to college and I can read a book. It’s just that I adapt real good. And right now I’ve got to adapt to being Chuck Magun.

  Chuck. Yeah. Cut this memory crap and think about Chuck. Reinforce Chuck.

  Chuck looks a lot like I used to look, naturally. I couldn’t change that. He’s a big guy with shoulders and everything heaped up six three or so. He looks mean. He lifts weights every day and runs a few miles along the riverfront.

  He’s got an old Harley torn apart in his living room, and either a country western station or the TV is on all the time.

  Chuck drinks in local bars, curses at all the right bad plays when football is on, and enjoys tearing up a patch of back road with his dirt bike, time to time. When he races he uses a lot of profanity, but he never loses his temper.

  He reads motorcycle racing magazines and maintenance manuals with a guilty, hungry nervousness. He can’t scan more than six or eight sentences without suddenly looking up with a shy grin on his face, as if he expected to be kidded, or maybe killed.

  Mostly he doesn’t read. He’s a fully qualified member of the Great Unwashed. At least I hope so.

  Chuckie may also be getting married soon…

  (… A closeup of the moon… the stars bitterly bright… purple cat-slitted eyes…)

  What was that? An earthquake? Did the bar shake? Why is my hand trembling?

  Maybe I should stay away from provocative topics for a little while. As long as I’m standing here mumbling to a pretend listener in my own mind, I might as well do some background. It’ll take up the time.

  Ever been a bouncer?

  You say no, my imagined friend? Well, let me explain. It’s not a trivial trade.

  Bouncers meet all the chicks. There seems to be a sort of fascination women feel towards that husky bearded type of guy who stands alone with watchful eyes at the edge of the bar with a big flashlight in his pocket and a beer that hardly gets touched during the night. Maybe it’s that here’s a big stud whose whole purpose in life is to make sure little girls don’t get bothered in or around the Yankee Dollar if they don’t want to be.

  Anyway, the girls here are always flirting with Chuck. He doesn’t mind, but I hate it. Their attentions make me nervous. I don’t like strangers looking too close. Sure, none of Them, the monsters who pursue me, could disguise himself as a young woman. Especially the way they dress these days. Still, I have Chuck’s girlfriend join him here each night to shake the chicks loose.

  Hell, it’s not the girls’ fault. Neither is it Chuck’s. So much for bouncer lesson number one.

  Lesson number two is pick a place where kids hang out. You get a hell of a lot more aggravation, minute by minute, but it’s a damn sight better than working bored sick in some topless place when some drunk jumps onto the runway to dance with the Girl, and you’ve got to jump up too, and grin and friendly-like ask him to join you in beer while the poor Girl has a stupefied smile on her face and only a little bikini bottom on her ass, and everyone in the house can see that big weighted flashlight you’re holding behind your back, and you’re wondering if your sphincters are going to hold because that drunk’s got six friends at the bar just as “friendly.”

  That happened twice in Weed. I damn near broke character, as well as some poor Indian’s head, before I quit.

  Weed was a lot like Crescent City, wet and pungent. Only here the fog is made of ocean spray and clouds crawling upriver on their way to skirmish with the mountains. In Weed the morning haze was pure mosquitoes.

  The kids who come to the Yankee Dollar to hear bluegrass and chivy sips of beer from their older brothers and sisters don’t know how to be mean yet. They’re so tied up in teenage smells and teenage aggravation. I remember when I was that age so I try to be tolerant.

  It’s funny how tonight I can recollect things like that from twenty years ago, but until recently I had trouble thinking much more than a week either way. Today I saw a jet flying high overhead. A fast little navy fighter, I guess. It got me thinking…

  …The growl of engines… launching to a fanfare from Beethoven… laughter and clean flight…

  Stop that! Divert! What is the matter with me? Where are these visions coming from?

  Ignore ’em. That’s what I’ll do. Nothing like that ever happened… Think about something else. Think about the kids. Think about the kids and bouncer lessons.

  I guess I like the kids enough. I watch ’em close, though. The worst they usually do is try to sneak pitchers outside or do J’s in the corner. I put a stop to that fast, and have a rep for the sharpest eye in bouncerdom.

  No way. I’m gettin’ hauled up before a judge for “contributing to delinquency.” A judge might be one of the ones They are watching. They catch wind of me, and pfff! There goes both Chuckie and me.

  “Hey, Chuck!”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, what! What you want?” I bellow. Full Chuck bellow from the edge of the bar.

  They stand in the doorway ten feet away, three underage lodgepoles in denim—scraggly moustaches and zits. They want to pull something I’d catch them at easy. So they’re about to appeal to Chuck’s sense of camaraderie. I gotta smile.

  “Hey, Chuck, can we bring in some beers? You’re cool, man. We’ll keep it under the table…”

  Turn grin to grimace.

  “Hell, no. You guys get that stuff out of here! Drink it at home and then come back. Or better yet, don’t come back!”

  They cuss me, laughing. I cuss back to maintain image, but my heart really isn’t in it tonight.

  Five minutes later they’re back. Must have chugged the whole six-pack from the way they slosh and giggle as they come in, giving me a wink. Jesus! Can you remember chugging just to get a stomach full of beer? Doing it because a boy’s got to have some sort of rite of passage when the girls just won’t put out and we don’t send young men after eagle feathers anymore?

  That’s bouncer lesson number three. Like your clientele. Establish empathy. But never identify too closely. It’ll drive you nuts.

  The surface of the bar is smooth, like ivory keys, like the smooth-rubbed stick in a trusty airplane… With my eyes closed the pounding of the drums blends with the crowd noises and seems to become the growling of engines. A red haze under my eyelids turns into a fire… fire on a mountainside.

  My fingers press into the bar, the tendons humming momentarily as if to something from Stravinsky …

  And Parmin did have purple eyes.

  Agh! Ignore it. Ignore it!

  The Blue Ridge Mountain Boys are picking up a fast number beneath the spots, in a swirling haze of tobacco smoke. I imagine the smoke contains other things, as well, but it’s hard to tell as my sense of smell isn’t what it was. In fact, for reasons I’d rather not go into, it’s pretty well nonexistent. I do a quick scan around the room to make sure no one’s passing around a J too obviously. I’m no party pooper. Like I said, I have this thing about being busted.

  I’ll give the Boys credit. They sure do give that hillbilly music a shitkicking beat. The dancers on the floor are capering and screaming “Eeee-Haw!”… that city-boy version of the mountain yell.

  Chuck likes this band. He’s gotten drunk with them a few times and he fixes their bikes for less than he usually charges.

  Once, though, when he’d had a bit too much brew, Chuck let them persuade him to join them with a borrowed harmonica. He’d intended just to clown around, but got carried away. He bent over that mouth organ and played.

  By the time I came to my senses the crowd was whooping it up, the Boys thumping me on the back, and I was blinking in the spotlight, wondering what I had let happen.

  I almost left town then and there, but that’s when Elise had just broken her arm dirt-biking with Chuck for the first time. I guess he felt guilty, so I stayed.

  Strange purple eyes, hooded and cat-slitted… a smile as subtle as any man’s… A look of ages. You don’t hide from eyes like those.

  “You are a Protector,” he said. “A certain fraction of your species cannot help themselves in this respect. Without something or someone to protect, they wither and die.”

  “Parmin, you are full of it.”

  Again that smile. A voice like a reed organ.

  “Do you think I don’t know what you are, Brad? Why were you, after all, among the first I chose for my Cabal…?”

  There’s dancing out on the sawdust now. Single girls prance around the edges as if it’s some tribal custom to let the couples take the center. I always found that an interesting phenomenon.

  The kids don’t know anything about bluegrass, though some of the boys affect harmonicas. If it’s country it must be salubrious, so they hop around with thumbs in suspenders and fingers splayed to give their dance a superficial country air.

  I can’t believe it. Did I just subvocalize the word “salubrious”? Sweet heavens, I must have gone mad!

  What have I been doing, letting myself think like that? How long did I lapse? I look at my watch. No watch. I don’t wear one anymore. What’s wrong with me!

  Calm down. You’ve only been intellectualizing since the beginning of the set. Too little time to do any real harm.

  Besides, it’s not proven They can put a tracer on subvocalized thought. That was just a theory.

  Still, maybe they can. So cut the two-dollar words, hmmm? When did philosophy ever do anybody any good anyway?

  Joey asks me to help him move a keg. Sure. Anything’s better than standing here thinking. The crowd is too well behaved to serve as a distraction.

  Down at the other end of the bar we heave the monster onto the platform. Straightening up, I rub the grease off my hands and look around the room. That’s when I see her.

  She stands by the door; the coldness comes over me like an Amarillo norther. I cringe a little, momentarily thinking to make myself invisible as she peers around, blinking in the sharp light of the stage spots.

  But there’s no dignified way to make six and a half feet of hair and muscle transparent. She sees Chuck and smiles and starts to walk over. And while she’s between there and here the magic thing happens again. The coldness leaves me.

  She is very pretty, and she moves well.

  I try to look busy for a second, checking the place as she comes up beside me. Joey says hello. She answers him in a low alto voice—friendly, but with a hesitant sort of nervousness to it.

  I didn’t put the nervousness there. She had it when I met her, so don’t blame me.

  I’m not bothered by sky-eyes or fiery mountains now. The Boys are picking out one of my favorite silly tunes, “Old Joe Clark.”

  I went down to Old Joe Clark’s,

  Never been there before.

  He slept on a feather bed,

  And I slept on the floor.

  Oh, fare thee well, Old Joe Clark,

  Fare thee well, I’m gone.

  Fare thee well, Old Joe Clark,

  Better be movin’ on!

  She looks up at me.

  “Hi.”

  I look back down at her. “Hi, yourself. How’s the nursery?”

  “Pretty good today, but we had a late afternoon rush. I hurried home and changed, but this saleslady came by and I couldn’t resist letting her show me some things. I bought some nice scents so… so… that’s why I’m late.”

  She suddenly looks a little scared, as if she’s said something she shouldn’t have. Oh, yes. Chuck hasn’t got a sense of smell and hates to be reminded of it. It’s true I haven’t been able to pick up anything weaker than a six-day-dead steer in almost two years, but has Chuck really been so irritable that Elise should be frightened by a passing remark?

  I shrug. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “I had a snack earlier.” She looks relieved. “I can fry us up a couple of steaks when we get home, if you want me to.”

  She wears her light brown hair in a permanent—swept around the ears like Doris Day. I always hated that style so Chuck tells her he likes it. She’s too damn pretty anyway. A flaw helps.

  “Come on.” I grab her elbow and nod at Joey to take over watching the door. He’s flirting with a teenybopper but I take the hand stamp with me. No one gets brew here unless he’s been stamped. By me.

  Elise steps a little ahead of me. She knows her walk drives me crazy, even after seven months or so of living together. It’s like the way she is in bed. Totally committed. Every move is a caress. If it’s not me or her plants she’s stroking, it’s the air, her clothes, the sawdust she’s walking on.

  She’ll do. She’s unsophisticated and decorative. Ideally, I’d have found someone without any education, but hell, everyone’s been to college these days. At least she doesn’t remind me of things, and she tries awful hard to please me.

  The thing I guess I feel guilty about is leading her on. She obviously thinks she’s going to work on me real hard
and maybe I’ll ask her to marry me. She’s wrong.

  I’ve already decided to marry her. But I have to keep up appearances. I’m the strong, silent type, remember? Chuck will have to be coaxed.

  Damn it, I’ve got to stay in character! Would it do her any good to have Them catch up with me?

  Old Joe Clark has got a house.

  Sixteen storeys high,

  And every storey in that house,

  Is filled with chicken pie.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Her hand is on my arm, playing with the thick hairs that gather under the shirt cuff. Those deep brown eyes of hers—she uses them like fingertips to touch my face lightly, shyly, as if to make sure I’m really there—they seem to show concern. Is it that obvious I’m not myself tonight?

  That jet, flying so high in the sunshine… young Allan Fowler coming by later, to pester me with his foolishness… then all this philosophical crap I’ve been internalizing all night. Yeah, I’m going to have to pay attention to the old facade.

  The secret of lying well is to do as little as possible.

  “Oh, I was just thinking about that song they’re doing now. We used to sing it when I was a kid. There’s about a thousand verses.” I take a long pull from my beer.

  “I didn’t know you used to sing, too. Is that when you learned the harmonica?” Her voice trembles just a bit, but the part of me controlling the mouth doesn’t seem to notice. I’m on automatic.

  “Um, yeah. Some of the other kids with folks at the Institute and I, we formed the Stygian Stegosaurus Band. Thought we were pretty hot shit. We played frat houses and the like. Nothing serious. Father bought me a banjo, but it never really took like the piano.”

  My next exhalation feels like a sigh. The song ends and so does the set. I look around and everything is peaceful, but I still check twice. When I was in the service I used to be able to smell trouble. Now I have to use my eyes.