Kevin Anderson - The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

Betty Ann stands outside where the porch used to be, stands there naked and watches the corner past the Smiths and the Harpers and the Roers, looks at the lamp that’s black instead of white, at the murky light on the street down below. Now, the thing on the corner, the thing that seemed to shimmer, seemed to tremble, seemed to hide behind a veil, isn’t something maybe there anymore, isn’t something maybe not, isn’t waiting in-between anymore….

John-William’s mother can feel her heart pound, feel the big clock down far-far below begin to chime. Whatever wasn’t there is coming on slow, dark and heavy, faint and distant, closer, closer still, hardly even there, turning, turning, past the Roers and the Smiths and the Harpers, coming right up to where John-William’s mother stands naked where her first brick house used to be….

They glide down the street now, slide on in without a sound, slip on in without a hum from their engines, a whisper from their tires. One before the other, one behind the next, hazy Buicks, Franklins, and Cords. Cloudy Chryslers, Lincolns, and Fords. Plymouths, Packards, Porsches, and Rolls, dusty and obscure. Duesenbergs, Dodges, Ramblers, and Olds, scarcely present, hardly there at all. Studebakers, Chevys, Rovers, and nearly invisible Saabs. Bentleys, Austins, Minors, and — goodness sakes, cars Betty Ann never heard about before.

They keep on coming, gliding down the street in a motion so slight they hardly stir the air. Each one black where they ought to be white, white where the black ought to be. Everything backwards, inside out. Just the way the big stone clock down, down, way below likes to see.

Betty Ann knows she shouldn’t ought to move, shouldn’t do anything at all. Ought to just mind her own business, shouldn’t ought to pry. Still, she feels she’s got to know, got to see what it’s all about, got to know why these peculiar cars are driving by. Ought to see who, ought to see what’s inside.

Betty Ann walks naked in the street, gets close to the windows, peers inside an old Franklin, looks inside a Saab. Can’t see anything at all. The glass in each and every window is cold, cold, icy to the touch, covered with frost, dark and river deep.

John-William’s mother wipes a little hole free and peers inside a l930 Cadillac. And, to Betty Ann’s surprise, there’s Grandmaw Wilcher sitting up straight, straight as you please, hand-bones clutching the wheel, shriveled, shrunk, stiff as a board, hair hanging this way and that.

“Grandmaw Wilcher,” Betty Ann says, “why, you can’t even drive!” Driving she is, though, nothing you can do about that.

There’s no one she knows in the Lincoln or the Cord. No one in the Nash. Helen, though, is there in the back seat of the Packard, caught in what seems intimate, dark coagulation with the soldier boy from Fort Sill. Ruin and rot have set in and a coat of fuzzy green. Still, Helen looks happy as a clam and, as Betty Ann’s mother Sarah always said, happy’s better than not.

Mama Steck looks not much worse than the night Betty Ann watched the dark slide in and slide out again, and suck her life away. Betty Ann can’t recall anyone drove a Studebaker back then, but there’s lots she can’t recall.

“Jack, Jack, Jack,” thinks John-William’s mother, as she peeks into the LaSalle, “I got to say you do look a sight.” Except for the blight and the ruin and the dent where she’d hit him with the axe. Except for that and the gross degeneration — well, time is going to take a toll, that and ancient ulceration of the soul — “Told you to stop,” says Betty Ann. “Told you hit me one more time, that’s it, and by God it’s just what you did, you got nothing to complain about that.”

Papa is in the rusted-out Ford, not looking all that good, something like tar and tallow dried on his overalls down into his shoes and some distortion of the bones.

Betty Ann thinks she might cry when she gets to the Chevy, she knew she’d find him there. That truck had hit him head on, wrapping the brand new Schwinn around him twice, penetrating bodily parts, leaving limbs twisted, badly out of whack.

Still, he did the best he could, God bless him, holding the wheel real steady, one hand sort of going this way, the other going that.

“You were my pride,” says Betty Ann, “and I never forgot you, not for a minute, John-William, not for all the years that passed. I kept that Krazy Kat button and the Nehi cap as well. You tore that Ferdinand shirt real bad, but I don’t guess you care about that.”

Betty Ann opens the door, and slides real quiet inside. Looks at JohnWilliam, pictures in her head that he’s looking back.

Just for a moment, no more than that, Betty Ann glances behind her, sees the two she lost sitting quiet, sitting still, looks there once and doesn’t look back.

Nobody said it was time to drive on, but real soon everybody did. Rolling down the window, she listened to the music playing on the car radios: “Moonlight Cocktail,” “Twilight Time,” “One for My Baby,” “Laura,” “Willow Weep for Me.”

And, coming from somewhere, out of the hot and inky night, just before the clock deep-deep in the earth strikes again, a whisper in the hot night air:

FROM THE AUTHOR: “The Gambler” was conceived while I was still working at High Country News , an environmental news magazine that covers the Western United States. As the online editor, one of my jobs was to find ways to increase hits and web traffic, and it quickly became apparent that a simple blog post and an in-depth piece of investigative journalism had exactly the same value in terms of hits and traffic revenue. “The Gambler” was an attempt to follow the implications of this to its logical conclusion. One of the great kicks for me about “The Gambler” was later hearing that it found its way to the offices of Gawker Media and was circulated amongst the people who are actively building the new media future. As a science fiction writer, that’s pretty much the best reward I could ever ask for.

MY FATHER WAS a gambler. He believed in the workings of karma and luck. He hunted for lucky numbers on license plates and bet on lotteries and fighting roosters. Looking back, I think perhaps he was not a large man, but when he took me to the muy thai fights, I thought him so. He would bet and he would win and laugh and drink laolao with his friends, and they all seemed so large. In the heat drip of Vientiane, he was a lucky ghost, walking the mirror-sheen streets in the darkness.

Everything for my father was a gamble: roulette and blackjack, new rice variants and the arrival of the monsoons. When the pretender monarch Khamsing announced his New Lao Kingdom, my father gambled on civil disobedience. He bet on the teachings of Mr. Henry David Thoreau and on whisper sheets posted on lampposts. He bet on saffron-robed monks marching in protest and on the hidden humanity of the soldiers with their well-oiled AK-47s and their mirrored helmets.

My father was a gambler, but my mother was not. While he wrote letters to the editor that brought the secret police to our door, she made plans for escape. The old Lao Demo cratic Republic collapsed, and the New Lao Kingdom blossomed with tanks on the avenues and tuk-tuks burning on the street corners. Pha That Luang’s shining gold chedi collapsed under shelling, and I rode away on a UN evacuation helicopter under the care of kind Mrs. Yamaguchi.