Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

Rance used that pause to take a swig from the Lion Lager and to draw a couple of breaths. He went on, “I guess it makes sense, the way they did what they did. They don’t give a damn about white men and black men. And there are more blacks than whites here, and the whites are the ones who fought ’em hardest, and so-”

“So it’s nigger heaven.” Penny rolled her eyes. “You know what? Till the Lizards came, I never even saw a nigger-not for real, I mean, only in the movies. Weren’t any where I grew up. I didn’t figure it’d be like this when we came here.”

“Neither did I,” Auerbach admitted. “How could I have? You wanted to go to a place where people speak English as much as I did. That didn’t leave us a whole lot of choice, not to anywhere the Lizards were willing to send us.”

“ Some people speak English-a lot fewer than I thought.” Penny aimed that second cigarette at Rance, too. “And a lot fewer than you thought, too, and you can’t tell me any different about that, either. At least in the United States, the colored people can talk with you. And they mostly know their place, too.” She got up from the sofa and walked quickly to the window of the third-floor flat. The stairs were hell on Rance’s bad leg, but he couldn’t do anything about that. Staring out onto Hanover Street, the main drag of Cape Town’s disreputable District Six, Penny gestured to him. “Come over here.”

Though his leg felt as if he’d jabbed a hot iron into it, Rance rose and limped to the window. He looked down and saw a trim figure in a khaki uniform and a cap like the ones British officers wore. The man had a bayoneted rifle slung on his back. “What did you get me up for?” he asked. “I’ve seen Potlako on his beat plenty of times before.”

“He’s a cop,” Penny said. “He’s black as the ace of spades, and he’s a cop. Almost all the cops in Cape Town are black as the ace of spades.”

“He’s a pretty good cop, too, by what I’ve seen,” Rance said, which made Penny give him a furious look. Ignoring it, he went on, “The Lizards aren’t stupid. They tried playing blacks against whites in the USA, too, but it didn’t work out so well there. A lot more smokes than white men here, and I guess the South Africans treated ’em worse than we did our colored fellows. So they’re happy as you please, working for the Lizards.”

“Sure they are. You just bet they are,” Penny snarled. “And now they treat us like we was niggers, and I tell you something, Rance Auerbach: I don’t like it for hell.”

Auerbach limped into the kitchen, opened another beer, and went back to the couch. “I don’t like it, either, but I don’t know what I can do about it. If you can’t stand it any more, I bet the Lizards would fly you back to the States after all. By now, they’ve probably figured out you’d last about twenty minutes after you got off the plane. That’d suit ’em fine, I bet.”

She put her hands on her hips, looking, for a moment, like a furious schoolgirl. She sounded like one, too, when she wailed, “Look what you got me into!”

He was sipping from the Lion Lager. He started to laugh, and choked, and sprayed beer out his nose, and generally came closer to drowning than he ever had in his life. When he could talk again-which took a little while-he said, “Who called me out of the blue after more than fifteen years? Whose fault was it that I shot those two nasty bastards? Whose fault was it that I ended up in a Lizard jail for running ginger down into Mexico, or in a Nazi jail for trying to get Pierre the damn Turd to quit running it out of Marseille? You know anybody who fills that bill?”

By the time he got through, he was speaking in a rasping whisper, that being as much air as he could force out of his ravaged lungs. He waited to see how Penny would take a little plain home truth thrown in her face. Sometimes she went off like a rocket. Sometimes…

He thought she was going to ignite here. She started to: he saw that. Then, all at once, she laughed instead. She laughed as hard as she would have raged if she’d stayed furious. “Oh, you got me, God damn you,” she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her checked cotton blouse. “You got me good there. Okay, I had a little something to do with getting you into things, too.”

“Just a little something, yeah,” Rance agreed.

Penny got herself a fresh beer, too, then came over and sat down beside him, so close they rubbed together. She swigged, set down the bottle, and leaned over to look into his face from a distance of about four inches. “Haven’t I done my best to make it up to you?” she asked, and ran her tongue over her lips.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rance said evenly.

For a second, he thought he’d blown it and made her angry. But, to his relief, she decided to laugh again. “Well, then, I’ll just have to show you, won’t I?” she said, and brought her mouth down onto his. She tasted of beer and cigarette smoke, but he did, too, so that was all right.

The kiss went on and on. Auerbach brought up his hand and tangled his fingers in her yellow hair so she couldn’t pull back. Finally, he was the one who had to break away. It was either that or quit breathing altogether. She let his hand slide down to the back of her neck, where he started undoing the buttons on the blouse.

“Aren’t you a sneak?” she said, as if she’d never expected he would do any such thing. She took matters into her own hands, yanking the blouse off over her head. He undid her bra and grabbed for her breasts; she still had a hell of a nice pair. When she laughed this time, it was down deep in her throat.

She unzipped his fly, pulled him out, and bent down over him. His gasp had very little to do with bad lungs. She had a hell of a mouth, too.

If she’d felt like going on that way till he exploded, he wouldn’t have minded a bit-which was putting it mildly. But, after a little while, she pulled down his chinos, took off her skirt and her girdle, and swung astride him as if she intended to ride him to victory in the Kentucky Derby.

His mouth closed on her nipple. Now she grabbed his head and pressed him to her. He slipped a hand between her legs and rubbed gently. Her breath came almost as short as his, and she’d never taken a bullet in the lungs. When she gasped and shuddered and arched her back, she squeezed him inside her almost as if she had a hand of her own down there. He groaned and came and had to work very hard to remember not to bite.

“God damn,” he said sincerely. “It’s worth fighting with you, just on account of the way we make up.”

“Who says we’ve made up?” Penny demanded. But, whether she wanted it to or not, her voice held a purr that hadn’t been there before.

She slid off him-and dribbled on his thigh. “God damn,” he said again, this time in mock anger. “I put that stuff where it was supposed to go. I’m not supposed to be wearing it.”

“I don’t want it staying where you put it, either,” she retorted. “That’d be the last thing I need-getting knocked up at my age.” She shook her head in what was either real horror or a pretty good imitation. Then, gathering up her clothes, she hurried off to the bathroom.

Auerbach sat there in just his shirt, waiting for her to come out. He wanted another cigarette. All of him except his lungs wanted one, anyhow. What with all the trouble he’d had breathing while Penny straddled him, he let them win the argument for once. Instead of the smoke, he finished the rest of the Lion Lager sitting on the table. It felt like what it was, a consolation prize, but life didn’t hand out so many prizes of any sort that he could turn one down.

When Penny did come out, she smiled to see him still mostly naked. He picked up his pants and used the arm of the sofa to help lever himself to his feet. That took some of the strain off his bad leg, but made his ruined shoulder groan. “Can’t win,” he muttered as he limped past her toward the john. “Christ, you can’t break even, either.” If being in Cape Town didn’t prove that, he was damned if he knew what would.