Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn’t much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any “interplanetary incidents.” Can’t have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariahs. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to Earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wetback aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the ships that brought them there was never any sign, and the Skoags weren’t saying anything. That didn’t stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked and heat lamps and carpeted floors and spraysulated walls. The Federal Budget Control Bill said that funds could be reapportioned, but the budget could not be increased, so folks like my mom and I took a giant step downward in the housing arena. But as a little kid, all I understood was that our place was cold most of the time, and everyone in the neighborhood hated Skoags.

Idon’t think it really bothered Mom. She wasn’t home that much anyway. She’d bitch about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she’d come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They’d be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They’d set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my mom would say stuff like, “Damn, look at this dump. That damn landlord, he still hasn’t been around. Billy, didn’t the landlord come by today? No? Shit, man, that jerk’s been promising to fix this place for a year now. Damn.”

Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, hell, their places were just as bad, all landlords were assholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn’t give its own citizens a break on rent. If there’d been a lot of Skoags at the café that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot shit, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they’d come to Earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn’t care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the United States if they would give us blueprints of their ships. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried. He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn’t afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those damn Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they’ve ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he passed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my mom’s parties were like that.

I’d usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cushions and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I’d never heard before and would never hear again. That’s what Mom was really into, struggling musicians who were performing their own stuff in the little “play for tips” places. She’d latch on to some guy and keep him with her aid check. She’d watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafés and clubs. They’d come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I’d come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It’s funny. The men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my mom would always be saying the same thing. “Don’t give up. You’ve got a real talent. Someday you’ll make it, and you’ll look back at them and laugh. You’ve really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can hear it. You’re gonna be big one day.”

The funny part is, she was always right. Those guys would live with us for a few months or a year, and suddenly, out of the blue, their careers would take off. They’d be discovered, on a sidewalk or in a café, or picked up by a band on its way up. They’d leave my mom, and go on to better things. She never got bitter about it, though she liked to brag to other women about all the hot ones she’d known “back when they were nothing.” Like that was her calling in life, feeding guitar humpers until someone besides her could hear their songs. Like only she could keep the real music flowing. One night she brought home a disc and gave it to me. It was called Fire Eyes, and the guy on the front had dark hair and blue eyes, like me. “That’s your daddy, Billy Boy,” she told me. “Though he don’t know it. He took off before I knew you were coming, and he was on a national tour by the time you were born. Look at those pretty, pretty eyes. Same as you, kid. You should have heard him sing, Billy. I knew he had it, even then. Even then.” I think that was the first time I ever saw her sit down and cry. I’m still not sure if she was crying over my dad leaving us, or something else. She didn’t cry long, and she went to bed alone that night. But the next night she brought home a whole pack of musicians from some open mike. By next morning, she had a new musician in her bed.

Sometimes during a party, if Mom was really stoned, or safe-sexing someone in the bedroom, I’d get up in my pajamas and make for the food, stuffing down as much as I could and hiding a couple of rice cakes or a handful of crackers behind the sofa cushion. I knew the mice would nibble on it, but hell, they never took much, just lacing around the edges. I figured they didn’t do much better than I did anyway. If I was really lucky, there’d be some girls in the group, and they’d fuss over me, telling me how my big blue eyes were such a surprise with my dark hair, and giving me gum and Life Savers from their purses, or maybe quarters and pennies. Like people in sidewalk cafés feed sparrows. If my mom caught me, she’d get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn’t I want to make something of myself? Then she’d smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweet voice, “If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music class, too. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” As if I gave a shit. She was always bragging that I had my daddy’s voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.

Dumb. Like singing “Farmer in the Dell” with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my mom did. She’d never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she’d been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn’t real to them because she couldn’t make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time; the stereo was always playing when she didn’t have an in-house musician of her own. I’d be half asleep watching her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she’d just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.