Mercedes Lackey - Lamma's Night (anthology)

"CB radios, ma'am."

"Yes, and he called the sheriff and the sheriff came, and I stayed because I'd seen the accident and I didn't want the driver to get into trouble even though I probably didn't have to. Everybody knows how Jimmy White drove."

The night: a smoldering hot thing that hung about the town as a dipsomaniac vagrant might linger on the corner of an otherwise unremarkable neighborhood. But she did not notice the heat, for across the town square that was deserted but for those few who had come through the simmering night to see the last showing at the movie theater and who were now returning to their cars to go home to outlying towns even smaller than this one and to the tiny farms that dotted most of Oktibushubee County (their size both a relic of the Reconstruction that had burst the wide plantations asunder and a defiance to the agricultural practices of the future which would see those same plantations reestablished under different names), visible through the lamp and firefly-lit darkness was the library, itself deserted because not even the cool floors and the vaulted ceilings that held the heat high and away from the books and the reading tables could tempt the town from its televisions and its air conditioning and its fans and along through the July heat that was slowly preparing to transform itself into August heat (there being but a few hours now remaining before the shops and the homes and even the library itself would tear one more page from the calendars that were both almanac and advertisement for a hundred things, from motor oil to shoe polish to light bulbs to insurance).

"It was Jimmy White, wasn't it?" Mrs. Gavin had said, and Greta, on the other side of the marble table that Mrs. Gavin had made her sit down at because there were no other customers in the soda shop (and if Mr. McCoy wanted to say anything about it he would have to say it to Mrs. Gavin, and anyone who knew either Mr. McCoy or Mrs. Gavin would know that he would therefore not say anything at all, even if he had at that instant walked into the soda shop, which he did not), broke down because Mrs. Gavin had looked at her and had, with sixty years of childlessness behind her, known .

"Yes, ma'am."

"About four months ago."

"How...?"

"I know," Mrs. Gavin had said. "I know."

And into the library now: past the front desk with its own marble top that had been set upon its oaken pedestal at least one hundred years before the electronic things that now occupied its surface, that scanned magnetic strips and bar codes with sensors and lights, had been thought or even dreamed of; the librarian looking up first at her and then at the big clock that registered twenty minutes to closing time (and that was all the hint that she was going to give and she assumed that it would be enough), across the floor that had, years ago, been wood but which now was linoleum because the wood had stained and warped with the heavy rains coming in through the roof during the big storm when she was a girl and there had not been enough money in the town to redo it properly, up to the ranked rows of the card catalog that was much larger than might have been expected just as the library was much larger than might have been expected, but the town was the county seat and had wanted a big library to rival the one going up in Magdalene on the other side of the county line.

And Greta had looked at Mrs. Gavin, and then she had understood.

And Mrs. Gavin had nodded.

"It's going to be like him," Greta had said, and her voice had been hoarse, husky as, no doubt, Jimmy had wanted it to be when he had demanded that she ask for what he was going to give her in any case, demanded that she ask in the accents of a seductress who would take anything he had to give, who would ask for his arrogance and his manhood in the way that only a woman who had been weaned and raised on the saccharine milk of motion pictures and syndicated television could ask; or maybe he had not wanted that at all, maybe he had wanted instead exactly what he had gotten: a terrified acquiescence, a hoarseness and a huskiness as sexless as fear. "It's going to be just like him. He said—" And Mrs. Gavin, taking her strawberry phosphate that was as dated and as deceptively simple as herself, sipping at it, and then holding the cold, dripping glass against her hot cheek

"They all say that. My Tom was the same way." Another sip. "And I believed him. And so..."

And with fifteen minutes to closing time at the library (and the librarian at the desk not looking up every minute or two, because she had given the only hint she was going to give and that was that), Greta was kneeling at a bottom shelf in a dark corner, pulling out a book that, according to the stamped date on the library form pasted on the flyleaf, had not been pulled out for twenty years (and the card in the pocket, she saw, bore among its five or six antique signatures that of Mrs. Gavin herself), standing and opening it to the color plates, turning page after page until she found what she was looking for, thereafter closing the book and taking it up to the desk as she fumbled in her purse for her library card.

Mrs. Gavin had put aside her empty phosphate glass and had leaned toward her. "They all say it. And we all believe them. Sometimes we believe them until it's too late." And Greta, as though her hands were suddenly around something of which she had not dreamed five minutes before, something of which she had not dreamed since that April evening with the scratch of what she thought was her cat on her sash window

"Ma'am?" And Mrs. Gavin, shaking her head, taking out her handkerchief to dab once more at her temples

"You'll have to learn, too. Just be careful. Don't take too much."

They all say it. And we all believe them. And the next day, when she called Mr. McCoy and told him that she was not feeling well and could not come to work, and when she lied to her mother and told her that she was feeling quite well and was going to work, she found that she could not forget even a particle of Mrs. Gavin's words, could not forget either the precious or the (seeming) dross of what had been said over the table in the soda shop, the two having become so commingled that the second had taken on the nature of the first, the knowledge of a certain weed growing in a certain place and steeped in boiling water in a certain way (and it was imperative that she have the book, because one weed might look much like another, and only the right one would do) infusing with something of a quintessential imperative the knowledge that all men believed that they were magic, that all of them believed that their offspring would be boys when they wanted them to be boys and girls when they wanted them to be girls, believed, too, that their boys would be like them down to the last baseball glove and bottle of hair tonic and even desire for women.

But if that were true, then Jimmy's belief was indeed one with his father's and his grandfather's, one with, in fact, the belief of all men; and Mrs. Gavin had said that it was belief only , that experience, (and she had sixty childless years of it) had taught her that the belief was unfounded. And, suddenly, the fluttering in Greta's belly (even as, book in hand and knee on the warm forest floor, she was finding what she was looking for, finding it and gathering it in, filling a paper bag that had, three days before, brought ice cream home from the supermarket) took on a different meaning, for all men thought they were magic, and none of them were, and Jimmy's now-dead thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans and his driving and his words seemed to be now no more than a small part of the continuing protestations of men everywhere, no more than a few urgent but obscure words in that unspoken language of masculinity that attempted to deny what was, that tried, with every resource, to declare what was not: that children belonged to them and to them alone, that fantasy would make reality kneel to them as Jimmy had made Greta, shaking and in her nightgown, kneel to him before he had reached down and lifted her and carried her to her own bed.