Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

  “He used to be a practical joker, give old man Boeing a hotfoot soon as look at him,” he continued. “Always cutting up.”

  “Well, what was they doin’?”

  “Eating hamburgers, shakes, and fries.”

  “I didn’t think Charlie and his girl ate that kind of stuff. The kids neither.”

  “I said the kids wasn’t there. And they was sure as hell eatin’ that way today.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “Hell, no. I was so astounded it was Lindbergh I just sat down in that far booth, the one halfway in the kitchen. Couldn’t hear ’em neither, place was crowded. Had a roast beef sandwich.”

  “We don’t care what you had for lunch. What’d Lindbergh do?”

  “Talked. Ate. Went outside. By the time I was through they was gone.”

  “Nothing about Lindbergh in the papers,” said Ed.

  “Can you beat that? Guy like that in town, nobody thinks it’s a big deal.”

  “Well, it was more than thirty years ago,” said the blowhard. “Still, you’d think somebody would mention it.”

  “Maybe it was personal,” said someone.

  “Yeah, right. The Lone Eagle and Crazy Charlie and his girl.”

  They all laughed.

  * * *

  Charlie died in 1985. His common-law wife Estelle died in 1989. Quemoy and Matsu own motion picture production in Seattle like the Krays owned London in the sixties. Neither fishes.

  Epilog

  He reached in his pocket, took out the envelope, put it on the inside of the sill.

  Then, with both hands he lifted the sack.

  The rung broke with a sharp snap and his foot hit the next one.

  There was a sudden instant of chill blind panic. The sack had thudded onto the concrete sill. He eased his other foot down the outside of the ladder to the rung he’d fallen to. He made it the rest of the way down, filled with adrenaline, cradled the bundle in his arms, and made off for the woods and his car.

  Halfway through the trees, he realized the kid hadn’t moved.

  When he got within sight of the car, he put the sack down, lifted the blanket and child out. The kid was limp as a bunch of leather. One side of the head was misshapen. He felt around for a heartbeat.

  He went further back into the woods from the road, laid the kid down, kicked some leaves over him, and took the blanket and sack to his car and sped away toward Manhattan.

  * * *

  The biggest manhunt in history was on. There were shady intermediaries, ransom was paid. There was no Boad Nelly, no child.

  Two truck drivers, one black, one white, on their way into Hopewell two months later, stopped their truck and went into the woods to take a pee.

  They saw what was left of the kid on the ground. He had been gnawed by animals.

  They ran for the cops.

  Three years later, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, on trial for his life for essentially passing hot gold certificates, was shown the ladder used in the kidnapping. “I did not make that,” he said. “I am a carpenter.”

  AFTERWORD

  I’d wanted to write a tripartite story for years. That is, one with three separate takes on the same event,

  Originally (you’ll see that word a lot in these afterwords; sometimes the story that happened had absolutely nothing to do with the initial impetus) it was to have been a story set at three different Peenemunde’s and what happened when von Braun et. al. launched the first A-4s (what we called V-2s).

  Well, that one didn’t work and that was about 1982. Comes May 29, 1997 in Oso, WA. I sat down and started writing this one. I finished it on June 8 because (once again) I had a reading in Seattle that night. Hie me hither (@ 60 miles) and read.

  Andrew Hooper (see the afterword to “Mr. Goober’s Show”) was there and knew instantly from the first sentence who and what the story was about—but then, he’s a polymath and an autodidact and can usually be ignored.

  I finished to raucous applause, which is the way I like to leave ’em.

  And, for the first time in years, I sent this one to The New Yorker first.

  I really thought I had a shot.

  Of course I didn’t. They took two months or so to send me a form reject slip.

  I sold this one to Event Horizon.com which was where Ellen Datlow was between the end of Omni Online and the start of Scifiction at SciFi.com. It went up in October of 1997 and you might as well have taken it out in the deep woods (like the evil queen’s huntsman) and killed it, for all the notice it got.

  Well, Gardner Dozois did pick it up for his YBSF the next year, but you know what I mean. . . .

  It was only later that I realized I had written the story across the 70th anniversary of the Linbergh flight. I didn’t set out to do that, honest.

  What astounded me (as a writer) about the story is that I had no idea, in the “Call Me Chucky” section, that the kidnapper was going to walk into the gallery and confess to Charles Jr. He came in out of nowhere and I just kept writing, because the story was telling me something I and the reader needed to know that I hadn’t planned on. As I’ve said elsewhere—the story wrote itself. I was just privileged to be in the room while it was happening.

  THE DYNASTERS

  Vol. 1

  On the Downs

  Ug and his friends stood in front of the hillock, wondering how to get the bear out of the good cave. It was getting colder, and the other cave leaked.

  Meanwhile the women and children were doing something useful like finding stuff to eat.

  The men looked at the cave.

  “Stick holes in same time?” asked Ab.

  “You seen thing?” asked Nu.

  “No,” said Ab.

  Ug spread his arms wide, hairs fluttering in the cold wind. Then his son Nu jumped up on his shoulders and held his hand up as high as he could.

  “That big?” asked Ab, and looked at the cave again.

  Mo was chewing one of the last leaves. They turned to him.

  “Stick fire in face,” he said.

  They ran around gathering up stuff.

  Afterwards, he was known as Mo the Smart.

  * * *

  They stood at the water’s edge, in the snow, under the high white cliffs.

  From the top of them you could see more land way way off, across the Big Water. Only now, where the bottoms of the cliffs used to be covered, there was much sand and rock. It went far out before the water began there.

  “Bad feeling,” said Ug.

  “What happening?” asked Ab.

  “No know,” said Ug. “Will ask Mo.”

  On the way back to the cave, on the path, they threw their pointy sticks into one of the Big Head-horn things that was browsing in the crusted snow. It took them half the day to drag it back to the other people.

  * * *

  “Uh-oh,” said Nunu.

  She ran back to the cave as fast as she could through the thick snow, putting her feet in the holes she’d made coming out.

  “Quick!” she said. “Stoop-shouldered guys big jaws coming!”

  They grabbed their clubs and pointy sticks and all ran to the top of the cliffs.

  Out a ways on the mud and sand ramp that divided the two parts of the Big Water, which stretched out toward the land far away you could almost see when it was clear, men were coming. They could see their big jaws this far away, and their skins flapped around them, dark in the breeze.

  Mo counted.

  “We more,” he said.

  “Get ’em,” said Ug.

  * * *

  Afterwards, they found that the big jaws belonged to the men themselves, and admired them. They were large and were out in front of the mouth. Some of the
children wobbled those of the dead ones—yaga yaga yaga. Their teeth were all different too, the front ones not as sharp.

  But the skins, which had flapped and fluttered around them while they were fighting, were not theirs at all. They belonged to dead animals. They could be taken off the stoop-shouldered men.

  Ug wrapped one around himself. After a while he said, “Hey! This warm!”

  They rushed to grab them.

  Mo was looking at the sandy causeway.

  “Next time, bring more,” he said, pointing toward the far land. “They tough. Take long time die.”

  Ug had two skins wrapped around him. He danced.

  “Hey!” he said. “What have supper?”

  * * *

  Nu looked for the bug crawling in the fur of his leg, found it, pinched it to pieces.

  It was his time to watch from the top of the tall cliffs as he had done many many times before in his youth and early manhood. Now he had children of his own. The stoop-shouldered guys big jaws never had come back. It had gotten colder, though there had been a few golden summers in there.

  He sighed, and watched, and waited, and hummed the song about the big animal with the horn in the middle of its nose.

  * * *

  Mo the tenth Smart sat at the edge of the cliff on a cool summer night and looked at the quarter moon. His grandson little Nu lay beside him, looking up at the summer stars and the pictures they made—the Big Thing, the other Big Thing, the Ugly Thing, the Little Boy with the Snake.

  “Which that?” he asked.

  “That Woman with Stick,” said Mo the tenth Smart.

  “Over there?”

  There was a long pale light across the sky with a bright dot at the front.

  “That Girl Look for Husband,” said Mo. He poked little Nu in the ribs. “Maybe marry you. She come round long time between. Mo the fourth Smart saw; told Mo seventh Smart who saw, Mo tell me.”

  Little Nu rolled over and looked at the moon.

  “Will Moon get eaten tonight?” he asked. It had happened when he was very little and it had scared him.

  Mo pointed. “Remember words Mo fifth Smart: ‘Quick bites come out Moon only full.’”

  “Forget.”

  “Learn not forget,” said Mo the tenth Smart.

  He looked over at the big strip of land that went between the two shallow Big Waters. As usual there was just dirt and the bushes that grew there.

  Little Nu propped himself up on his elbows.

  “Where come from, Grandad Mo?”

  “From cave,” said Mo, and laughed.

  “No! Where come from? All us?”

  “We always here,” said Mo the tenth Smart.

  * * *

  Weena and Oola lashed together the summer hut with tendons from one of the big red deer. The breeze was warm. They were setting up the hut near the break in the cliffs where the stream came through.

  Mo the many Smart stood looking at the mouth of the stream. Some of the men and boys floated on logs, sticking things in small fish, or falling off into the water beyond its mouth. There was once more Big Water all across in front of the cliffs though it was not very deep.

  “Something bother?” Oola asked him.

  “Yummy fish not back.”

  Every year big fish had shown up at the mouth of the stream, which was up the coast from where the land used to divide the Big Water. They came up in the stream. You could stick things in them, or hit them with rocks, or pick them up with your hands. They ignored you, only continuing to make eggs and sticky stuff and flopping around. They did that for most of a moon, and everybody ate and ate until they made fish puddles from their mouths.

  “Next moon,” said Oola.

  “No,” said Mo the many Smart. “Next moon when come while land there.” He pointed. “Land not there. They come this moon when used come before land there. All Mo’s know when that was. Now should come this moon.”

  “Me see day before day,” said Oola.

  “Is where?”

  “There.” She pointed down the coast where the Big Water curved around into the Big Big Water. “Them come. Them swim round. Then go that way.” She waved her hand, indicating the Big Big Water. “Go round all land-world. Here next moon.”

  “Why them do that?” asked Mo. “Them right here!”

  Oola lifted her shoulders and raised her hands.

  “Hmmm,” said Mo the many Smart.

  * * *

  A moon later, in the middle of the night, they heard flopping in the creek. They all ran down there with sticks with pointy deer horns on them and clubs and rocks. For most of that moon they ate and ate and ate.

  Mo the many Smart lay between two big broken chalk boulders. His stomach was stretched tight under his fur. He could barely move.

  Oola walked up to him.

  “Told so,” she said.

  “Not forget,” said Mo. Then he made another fish puddle from his mouth.

  * * *

  After a storm, Nu the many-many ran into his hut.

  “Stop dinner!” he said.

  “Make leg-of-wolf roasted tubers,” said A-la the many.

  “Change plans,” said Nu the many-many. “Blue painted guy some jaw wash up, log thing. Jabber a lot. Ug the many-many poke him, no feel ribs. Big feast coming, yum yum eatem up. Have wolf day-add-day.”

  “Blue paint some jaw?” asked A-la. “Not pictured up guy some jaw?”

  “No. That one-back-one. This blue all over. Paint come off. White as cliff.”

  A-la sighed. Men!

  * * *

  Ab the many-many had troubled eyes, yellow and farseeing.

  He was on the cliff, looking toward the land you could barely make out.

  He came up to look at it often. He did his work in the village on the downs, but his mind was not in it.

  He came down to where the men and boys were making log-boats that would hold man-add-man for fishing.

  “What there?” he asked Mo the lot Smart.

  “Big Trouble,” said Mo.

  “How know? Every time man come we eat,” said Ab the many-many.

  “Goes back long way land here,” said Mo. “Land come. Stoop-shouldered guys big jaw come. More try come before land go way. Then grandfather time pictured up guys some jaw and blue painted guys some jaw wash up. No be too careful.”

  “What we know them?” asked Ab.

  “Them trouble,” said Mo.

  “Me find out!” said Ab, jerking his thumb toward his chest fur.

  “Smart of ages, Ab,” said Mo. “No look trouble. Trouble find anyway.”

  “Me find out,” said Ab.

  * * *

  They had watched him build a boat-log that would hold man-add-man-add-man. It had taken him day-add-day-add day. Then he put his pointy stick, his club, hide cloak, and food into it. Then he launched it, pushed out, lined up on the big white cliff and began to paddle hard.

  They sang him the song of safe journey, Ug the lot himself beating on the big singing log. Then they went up to the top of the cliff and watched until he was lost from sight.

  * * *

  It was almost a moon later that one of the fishermen called them all from their huts in the village on the downs, and they went to the shore beneath the cliffs.

  It was late afternoon and there was a dot on the water. It got bigger but very slowly.

  “It Ab,” called down the watchman from the cliffs.

  He came to shore slowly. He paddled with only one arm. When he was close enough they saw one of his eyes was missing and his head was swollen up on that side. His right arm flopped at his side. He beached the log and hopped out, bracing himself with his left arm. (Some things a person
has to do themselves.) His right foot was missing toe-add-toe- add-toe.

  “Hello, Ab,” said Mo the lot Smart.

  He was looking back across the water with his good eye. “No understand, Mo,” he said. “They kill each other over there all the time.”

  “All the time?”

  “All the time. Every day.”

  “Come. Me fix up,” said Mo.

  “Something do first,” said Ab. He leaned down in the log-boat and made a big fire, and they all watched it burn.

  “Mo?” asked Ab, as cinders drifted over them on the beach.

  “What, Ab?”

  “Mo. Me ever want go somewhere again, kill me with club.”

  “Can do,” said Mo.

  Then they led him back toward the village huts.

  * * *

  Then came big nosed guys some jaw, and they brought with them the Great Big Things with Long Noses and Two Big Curved Teeth. They came in big log-boats with big square hides on trees and many many paddlers.

  Ug the lot-many-lot said, “Get all people up down coast, jump on them.”

  The big nosed guys some jaw lined up all together in one place with shiny pointy sticks all sticking out in one place. In front of them they put the Great Big Things with the Long Noses and the Two Big Curved Teeth.