Joe Haldeman - The Coming

She could blow the whistle on them. She could have her fingers broken, one by one, too. She could have them broken off, and fed to her. Willy Joe was just a hood with delusions of grandeur. But the people he collected for played for keeps.

She sat down again. Busy, slack; busy, slack. Were all businesses like this? Did whores spend two hours on their backs and then two hours doing crossword puzzles?

Here comes Suzy Q., the poor daft thing. Sara stood up and went to the bar, but José was a step ahead of her. He’d filled a large foam cup with sweet coffee and hot milk.

She took it outside with some pastry from yesterday. Suzy Q. accepted her morning gift with calm grace. Fix up the random hair, the pungent rags, and she could look like Queen Victoria or Eleanor Roosevelt. Stern ugliness, imposing.

“How goes it this morning, Suzy Q.?”

“Oh, it’s hot. But hot is what you got. Am I rot or not?”

Sara laughed. “You’re rot, all rot.” She patted the old woman on the shoulder and went back inside.

Now she knows how to treat somebody. She has so much pain herself she sees other people’s pain clear. I remember when she had the fire and that thing in her throat, she had to use a crutch to come out but she come out with my coffee. Wish I could kill someone for her, there must be someone she needs killed, I could do them like old Jock and put them in the swamp. But it’s not a swamp no more, no, it’s all apartments on top of old Jock, would he be pissed? Always carrying on about so many people come to Florida, and himself come down from Wisconsin. The Big Cheese, he used to work in some Kraft plant up there, but he got too cold and come down here to pick at me until I couldn’t take no more and had to hit him, hit him four times with that frying pan, till the brains come out his ears. More brains than you’d think he had, the way he carried on.

My lordy lord, this coffee is good. I do miss old Jock sometimes, I should have wrote down the date the year, so I’d know how long he’s been gone. I told people he just run away with some little girl from Café Risque, and they say sure, Suzy Q., he always was that way, and by the time they get around to building on the swamp I guess there’s not much left. I did go out there once to check and he was all white and wormy and popping out of his clothes. I found a big piece of old plywood to put on top of him. He did smell something fierce. But I guess nobody went out to the swamp back then.

I could use a tomato. I got six paper dollars and some change. The Lord provides for this believer but he don’t provide tomatoes in this town, just coffee. I could chop up a tomato in that rice, and a little sugar.

Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. Seems like everyone talking about aliens from outer space today. I try not to listen but there it is.

Bet I can get a tomato for two dollars, I don’t mind a few spots. And who’s in my way but Normal Norman.

He had a small bouquet of flowers. “Suzy Q. How’s by you?” He handed her a blossom.

She took it, sniffed it, and stuck it in her scraggly hair. “The usual. Except for the aliens. You know anything about the aliens?”

“Nope. Just that they’re coming.”

“Everybody wants to come to Florida.” She waggled a hand at him. “You’re in the way of my tomatoes.”

“Sorry.” He stepped aside and she pushed her grocery cart past him. It held about a dollar’s worth of bottles and cans, and some random newspaper sections, neatly folded.

The old lady was really only one year older than Norman. In high school she had been the quintessential cheerleader, always there if you had a football or basketball letter. Norman was band and orchestra, no letters. Alien Boston accent.

They used to call her Snowflake. It had snowed in Gainesville the day she was born.

She’d started to go crazy with her first husband, didn’t do too well with the second, and when the third ran away she just popped. Had she ever gone to a shrink? Norman didn’t know; he’d stopped going to reunions and didn’t have any other source of gossip about his generation.

He looked up at Hermanos and considered going in to have a cup with Sara. No, better get on home and record the theme that was building in his head.

He unlocked the bike and loaded the groceries and pedaled slowly back across campus, humming the new melody as he went. It was between classes, a lot of attractive undergraduate bodies hurrying, but he wasn’t distracted. This might turn out to be something interesting.

He left the bicycle in the atrium and set the produce bag next to the refrigerator; sort it out later. He hurried into the music room and snapped on the antique Roland and slipped a blank crystal in the recorder, labeling it Alien concerto/1st pass.

He chorded out the twelve-bar opening with the screen off, and then turned it on to review what he’d done. He played a second version, looking at the screen, simplifying here, elaborating there. But he wasn’t happy with his changes; they were moving the piece toward a conventional kind of drama, almost like a march.

Should not have had that ouzo. Booze in the morning wasn’t conducive to work. He left the keyboard on but stretched out on the couch, asking the room for Hermancina’s rendition of the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique. He closed his eyes and let the slow, stately passage fill him.

The phone chimed, of course. He asked the music to hold and picked up the wand. “Buenos.”

The voice at the other end identified itself as People magazoid and asked whether Professor Bell was in.

Norman didn’t bother to point out that he was Professor Bell, too. “She’s at work. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

They asked for her number at work. “It’s unlisted,” he said, and hung up. Of course it wasn’t unlisted, but a reporter ought to be able to figure that out.

He pushed a button on the wand. “Rory’s office,” he said.

Rory sighed and picked up the wand. “Yeah?” She smiled at her husband’s voice. “Oh, hi.” He told her about the People magazoid call. “Well, if they don’t track me down in the next half hour, this number won’t work. At eleven-thirty they’re going to start routing everything through some publicity office.”

He asked whether she was getting any work done. “No, we’re just killing time before the big meeting. Barrett and Whittier live.” University chancellor and dean of sciences, respectively. “Some government people beaming in.” She checked her watch. “Five minutes. Anything interesting at the market?” He described the dinner menu and told her about meeting Suzy Q. and giving her a flower.

“Poor damned thing. She’s been on the street since I was a kid… yeah, I’ll give you a call if I’m going to be late… ’dios.”

Pepe looked up from his work. “Who’s on the street?”

“Poor old woman named Suzy Q. Pushes a grocery cart around?”

“I’ve seen a few of those.”

“She went to high school here with Norman. You don’t remember Bolivia.”

“Rory. I was two years old then.”

“Sorry… anyhow, her first husband was a marine, went down there and won the war. But he came back with a time-bomb virus. She woke up one morning and he was dead, melted in a puddle around his own skeleton. She just came undone.”