Borderlands Read online

Do you know…did you know…you know, Derick told me just last week that there is talk in the Station about me now, the patients who come in here, take their examinations, take their prescriptions, follow the instructions, and fade away. It used to be–deep breath, now, sorry the lens is so cold, a clichéd stethoscope hazard–it used to be that people preferred an older physician. A bit of gray in the hair. A few wrinkles. Experience. Manner. All things to all men. The patients expected it, demanded it.

  I imagine they'll all be gone soon.

  And from all that gossip, malicious and curiously amusing, I expect there'll be no one to take their place. All that talk might even force me to move on, leave the Station, establish myself in a new place.

  Not that I'm concerned, of course. I'm not exactly living in poverty, as you can see. I'll survive the innuendo, as I always have, as I always will.

  Well. A little liquid in the lungs. You're smoking too much, I daresay.

  I myself keep as trim as I can, and do my best to give my patients what they want. I have never in my life prescribed the wrong thing. A placebo sometimes, however, such a miracle they are, and sometimes, listening to them as you are so kindly listening to me, I hear what they're really saying.

  And I give them that as well.

  Now if you'll just hold out your arm, I can wrap this thing around it, pump it up, see what's cooking. Your heart seems sound, I can say that much. Your color is good. Except for those lungs, you really ought to quit smoking, I don't know that I'll find anything wrong. Of course, you never can tell just by looking, can you?

  For example, the moment you walked in, I knew exactly who you were.

  Mr. Vaulle.

  Don't be so surprised. Of course I did.

  Experience, remember?

  Your mother was a fine woman, and was my patient for many, many years. You think I wouldn't notice the uncanny resemblance even after all this time, even though I never treated you? You have her eyes and that blunt, oh-so-determined chin. No, I knew right away. And something else as well–you think I don't know who it is who's been talking about me to the others, my colleagues and friends, questioning my methods, remarking upon my age, the fate of my patients, suggesting of all things retirement before shame–or something like that–drives me away in some kind of disgrace?

  I am old, young man, not senile.

  In my dreams she holds me; she tells me things.

  In the cameo you can see nothing that lies below the shoulder, but I have. I have. Ageless. Soft. Gold to a physician's hands. A miser's hands. So few have been there, and have been as fortunate as Ito come away whole.

  So few.

  In my dreams.

  Please, Michael, stop fussing. You can dress now. We are done. The charade is over.

  No, put that checkbook away. There's no need. There'll be no charge. It was, if I may say so without giving offense, rather amusing, waiting to see how long it would be before you knew I had caught on.

  For your sake, I'll say nothing to anyone about your visit.

  You loved your mother. You are concerned. She was a wonderful lady. I miss her too. Before her time, as some might say.

  But I fear, Michael, that I knew her somewhat better than you did. It's true, no call to be upset. She was, and you know I'm right, the sort of parent who never, ever wanted to bother their children. Not a martyr, simply considerate, as she defined the word. You did not really know what she wanted when she learned of the cancer. I did.

  I always do.

  And if—please, come this way, to reception—if you are anything like your mother in temperament, you'll not let this crusade, if that's the proper word, drop, will you? I didn't think so. We see things differently, you and I, my friend, and while you have youth and vigor and a lifetime ahead on your side, I have something else.

  Would you like to see the cameo again?

  I thought not.

  THE GOOD BOOK

  By G. Wayne Miller

  My first encounter with G. Wayne Miller's work was a short story in an anthology that happened to be brimming over with work by new writers. That I still remember Miller's piece and have forgotten almost all the others speaks very well for it indeed. I met Wayne at a World Fantasy Convention in Nashville in 1986, and we became friends. He's visited me in Baltimore; and I've freeloaded on him up in Pascoag, Rhode Island. He sent me at least four stories that just weren't right for Borderlands, and I had to reject all of them. Dumping on stories by your friends can be a problem, but Wayne showed me how much of a pro he is. He never carped or bitched; he just kept sending stories until I read one I liked enough to buy.

  G. Wayne Miller works full-time for the Providence Journal Bulletin and lives with his wife, Alexis, and two young daughters. In a small mill town in the northwest corner of Rhode Island. His first novel, Thunder Rise, received good reviews and there are plenty of others on the way. In case you were wondering, the G. stands for George… even though I usually tell everybody it's for Gwynnplane…

  "Jesus save us," said the gray-haired woman as she looked out the kitchen of the solitary house that stood back apiece from Bob's Texaco. Bob's was the only gas for twenty-five miles in either direction on this backwater stretch of State Route 55.

  "What is it?" Bob asked. He sounded tired, as if not really caring to hear her answer. As if he'd never really cared to hear any of Phyllis Morton's answers over the thirty-seven childless years she'd been his lawfully wedded wife.

  "There's a man on the flagpole."

  "Say again?"

  "You heard me. A man on the flagpole. At the very top. Come here. See?"

  No question, Phyllis had lost more of her marbles of late, but a wife was a wife and so Bob trudged obediently across the kitchen floor to the window. He looked out at the rundown station on the deserted blacktop road, the yard littered with junk cars and washing machines and doorless ice chests. Across the road were the pine-covered Berkshire hills. The first pink of day already was painted across the eastern sky.

  "Well, I'll be damned!" Bob was focusing now on the flagpole—his flagpole, the backbreaking fruit of his labor three decades ago—still rising tall and straight from the shaggy lawn. There was no faulting Phyllis's eyes: sure enough, a man was impaled on the top of that pole, his body limp and bent like a piece of spaghetti draped over the tine of a fork.

  "I think he's dead," Phyllis said.

  "Sure'd be a miracle if he were alive," Bob said, his voice awakening. "I'll be damned."

  "Ain't no kid," Phyllis said, squinting. "Too big to be a kid. Anybody you know?"

  "Dunno," Bob muttered. "Can't tell from here. Have to get a closer look. I'll be damned. I'll be goddamned."

  They peered, the two of them, without saying anything for the next several minutes. It was the male species up there, all right, and no lightweight kid, as Phyllis had noted. The guy could've topped two hundred pounds and it wouldn't have surprised Bob one bit. He was clothed: wool jacket, jeans, work boots, just exactly what a reasonable sort would pull on for an April day in western Massachusetts. You couldn't see his face, only the back of his head—thick black hair, a strong neck—but you could well imagine nothing very pretty was written on that face. The pole had punctured his body at chest level, but had not penetrated straight through his back. No doubt it was the bones that made up the rear of his ribcage that had prevented him from dropping to the ground. At least that's the way Bob figured it.

  "Goddamn!" Bob exclaimed again.

  "Ain't moving 'tall," said Phyllis. "No question, he's dead."

  "Wonder how the devil he got there."

  "Probably just that way."

  "What way?"

  "The devil."

  "Now, Mother." That had always been his and everybody else's name for her, Mother, even though the Good Lord had denied her kids of her own. She'd had the name so long Bob could no longer remember how she'd earned it, whether as a bad joke or something else.

  "Don't now Mother me, you hear?" she said angrily. "You're o
nly showing your ignorance of these matters."

  "Ain't no spring chicken," Bob offered.

  "Thirty years old, if he's a day."

  "Guess I better call Sheriff Thompson."

  "Oh, no, you don't."

  Bob shrugged his shoulders. "Suit yourself. I suspect he'll be here soon enough, anyways."

  And he was. Less than two hours later, as Bob was outside switching on the stations' two pumps. Sheriff Thompson pulled up in the town's only cruiser, a 1979 Plymouth with 113,000 miles on the odometer. By then, Phyllis had locked herself into her room and was into the Good Book something serious.

  "Recognize him?" Sheriff Thompson asked Bob after he'd sized up the situation.

  "Never seen him before in my life," Bob answered. Like Sheriff Thompson, Bob was rubbernecking, looking up again and again at the man's face, which featured a closed mouth and eyes that were dark but expressionless.

  "Any idea how he got up there?" Sheriff Thompson asked.

  "Nope."

  "Wasn't her, was it, Bob?"

  "Phyllis?" Bob crackled. "She's sixty-five, sheriff, can't hardly get to the john without that cane of hers. How's she gonna be putting dead folks up on flagpoles? Have any idea, sheriff?"

  "Can't say as I do."

  "Didn't think so."

  "Guess we better give a ring to the electric company," Sheriff Thompson said. "They got a cherry picker. Going to need one to get the poor turkey down."

  "Can't let you do that," Bob said matter-of-factly.

  "Can't? How's that again, can't?"

  "Mother won't permit it. Until she's had time to think on it, she says he's got to stay there. She's got her nose buried in the Book, even now."

  "What's going on here, Bob?"

  "She says he must be some kind of sign."

  "Sign? What the hell's that mean, Bob, sign?"

  "Dunno. She ain't saying. You know how she can be, sheriff, with her religion. You knowed her long enough."

  "Well, Phyllis or no Phyllis, I'm gonna get that poor sucker down," Sheriff Thompson announced.

  "No, you ain't," Bob said.

  "And why's that?"

  "Cause you're standing on private property, sheriff, that's why, and this here's America, last I checked," Bob said. "You're gonna have to get some kind of warrant before you come back here. Now don't go getting all shook with me. Them's Mother's words, not mine. You know how Mother can be."

  Turns out Sheriff Thompson wasn't able to get that warrant. Try as he might, he couldn't put his finger on any law pertaining to removal of dead folks from private flagpoles. But law wasn't the only issue as far as Sheriff Thompson was concerned. There was another sticky wicket: Bob had warned him that Phyllis was threatening to shoot anyone who tried to get the man down until she was good and ready. And while he doubted she would go that far, he knew she was off her rocker just enough not to want to chance it.

  That first day and that first night, Phyllis stayed locked inside her room. Every now and then, Bob could hear her voice, hushed and somber, and he could smell burning beeswax, but he knew better than to barge in on her. When she had the Good Book out—there was never any predicting when she would have the Good Book out—there was nothing you could do but kick back and wait. These things just had to run their course.

  Until dark, Bob spent the majority of his day outside. Mostly, he was settled into his plastic-web lawn chair, pulling on a pipe and listening to talk shows from over the mountain on his radio. Occasionally, he had a customer. All told, perhaps eight or nine that day—not an unusually slow day for this time of year, and not an unusually busy day, either, but just sort of right there in the middle.

  About half of those eight or nine didn't notice the man on the flagpole. It was kind of funny, Bob thought, how folks could be. Wasn't just people on flagpoles they missed, either. Why, it was impossible to count the tourists who'd asked him what road they were on, when the sign saying this was State Route 55 was bigger than the side of a barn. And Lord only knew how many folks wanted to charge their gas, when the sign requesting cash only was taped right to the pump, both sides.

  Those who did notice the man were set off by it. In his conversations, Bob allowed as how he couldn't blame them. It was, after all, not a pretty sight; for sure, you wouldn't be seeing a color shot of it on next year's Chamber of Commerce brochures. In fact, about the only good you could say about the stranger was he didn't have any guts showing and there wasn't any blood to speak of dripping down the pole or splattered on the ground below.

  "How'd he get there?" they all wanted to know after their initial queasiness had quieted down some.

  "Ain't got the foggiest," Bob answered.

  "Why doesn't someone get him down?" was their inevitable next question.

  "The wife won't let them. Oh, she will sooner or later, it's just that there's gonna have to be a little wait."

  And with every one of those motorists, all of them out-of-towners, that was the end of the questioning.

  Sitting there on his lawn chair that day, Bob had occasion to remember when, and why, he'd put up that twenty-five-foot pole. It was going on thirty years ago now, the summer Phyllis had miscarried and they had to do emergency female-type surgery to save her life, and for a spell there, it was touch and go, no one knowing if she would make it. Acting on an impulse he never bothered to try to understand, Bob, who'd always had a knack for woodworking and carpentry, had built that pole while she was still in the hospital recuperating—recuperating and discovering the Good Book. He built it "to last forever," as he sometimes later boasted. He cut the ash himself from a grove up in the Berkshire hills, planed the ash into straight pieces, sectioned and glued the pieces, painted the completed pole white, and dug the hole and poured the concrete for the foundation. He even erected it himself, alone, with the help only of an ingenious series of cables and pulleys attached to nearby trees. It was nice, every now and again, remembering when he'd still been young enough to tackle a project like that.

  By morning of the second day, word about the man on the pole was spreading through town, and more than a few of the locals were making the drive out to Bob's Texaco to have a look-see for themselves. Unlike the out-of-towners, the locals were not so queasy. Weird things had happened before in Hancock (all those people over the years who'd disappeared under strange circumstances up at Windham's Folly, the old quarry, just to give one example), and more likely than not, they would happen again. Especially when Phyllis was involved. Everybody knew how different she'd been since losing her baby so long ago. Everybody had heard the talk of the strange goings-on out at her place, talk of funny noises and tourists who'd mysteriously disappeared and Bible-thumping and candles burning late into the night. Who knew the truth of any of it, but since when did truth ever get in the way of rumor?

  None of the locals seemed to care one whit who the man on the pole was, long as he wasn't one of their own—and Sheriff Thompson had already established that by taking pictures with a Polaroid camera, then comparing those shots to his missing persons file (which had only two entries: Billy Williams, who wandered away in a drunken fit from time to time but always did turn up again; and twenty-three-year-old George Allens, a faggot since eighth grade, rumored to have run off to live with a guy who wore dresses).

  How the stranger had wound up there thirty feet in the air was, however, a subject of great debate.

  "He must have dropped from a plane," was one theory.

  "Ain't no doubt he shinnied up there drunk and then stuck hisself," was another. "Got what he deserved for trying some fool stunt like that, you ask me."

  "Phyllis's got something to do with it, mark my words," was a third.

  "You oughta charge a buck a head admission, Bob," allowed one man. "You'd be on easy street in no time."

  Phyllis came out of her room just once the second day. She stood at the door of the house, looked up at the top of the flagpole, and went back inside without uttering a word.

  On the afternoon of
the third day, a thunderstorm of frightening proportions ripped through Hancock, spawning tornadoes that ripped up Elise Brett's barn and knocked Jimmy Carson's trash truck over and blew all of the windows out of the Hancock school bus, unoccupied at the time, thank the Good Lord. Bob, who took cover inside a garage that hadn't seen business since before the flagpole went up, was betting-sure that the storm would snap the pole. It did not, although the pole did sway and creak terribly, all the while producing sounds like an animal in pain. Neither did the man up there become dislodged, although his clothes became a tattered mess. Phyllis emerged briefly after the storm had passed. Seeing that the stranger was still aloft, she pronounced that fact to be the work of the Lord and then disappeared back inside.

  Morning of the fourth day broke clear and cool. When Bob went out to switch on the pumps, he noticed a flock of crows had found the body and were picking at the head, exposing the skull in one spot; he scared them off with his shotgun, the same weapon Phyllis had threatened to turn on Sheriff Thompson.

  Along about noon, Phyllis walked into the sunshine. Her face was drawn, her gait tired and unsteady, but for the first time since the whole affair had begun, she was smiling. She told Bob that it was time, the man could now safely come down.

  Those were her precise words: "It's time. He can now safely come down."

  "Who is he, Mother?" Bob asked.

  "The son we've waited for all these years."

  "Say again?"

  "He's my baby."

  "But that can't be," Bob said, ruffled for the first time since this whole dang thing started.

  "But it is."

  "How can you know?"

  "It's written here," she said, patting the Good Book. "It was only a matter of finding it."

  "But it don't make no sense."

  "Some things weren't meant to make no sense."

  "But how'd he get up there, Mother?"

  "The Lord works in strange and mysterious ways," she said. "Now let's get him down. I want him off of there before that sheriff comes nosing around again. It's only a matter of time 'fore he hooks up with the DA."