The New Voices of Fantasy by Peter S. Beagle
Bernard blushed.
“It was something to do with women, wasn’t it?” Hazel said.
“How did you know?”
“I know that suit very well.”
“When I woke up, I was wearing it in a strip club in Cocoa Village.”
“The Chi Chi’s,” Hazel said. That had been Pete’s favourite, of course.
Bernard raised his eyebrows. “Well, the girls loved it. They thought it was my bachelor party. It took me ages to get the lipstick off.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Hazel said.
Bernard took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t really . . . like girls,” he said.
“Oh.”
“After that, I was sure I had a brain tumour. The scans showed nothing. I thought it might be hallucinogenic chemicals from decaying materials. More nothing. Last night, I locked the damn thing in a titanium suitcase and swallowed the key. And here I am.” Bernard closed his eyes. “There must be a rational explanation for this, but I can’t figure out what it is. You must think I’m crazy.”
“Not at all,” Hazel said. “I’m just a little offended.”
“Offended? Why?”
“That it took Pete until night number three to come to me.”
“Oh, come on, don’t look so surprised. You may deny it, but you said it: it’s haunted. You remind me a lot of my late husband, Tyrone. He was a dentist. A good man, but he always had to have an explanation for everything. Well, here’s one. That suit there has four thousand elements and we adjusted every single one of them thirty times to fit every part of Pete until he could wear it like a glove. Where else is he going to go when his body stops working?”
“I’m not taking it back,” Bernard said. “I paid half a million dollars for it. I’ll figure out what’s wrong with it, haunted or not.” He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Look, ma’am, listen, if it is a matter of compensation, I’m sure we can work out something, living on a pension can’t be easy these days—”
“You listen, Bernard,” Hazel said. “Pete Turnbull was a real hero, a real spaceman. You don’t get to be one just by putting on a moon suit that does not fit you, or by writing cheques. You would do well to remember that, if you want to go to space for real.”
“Listen, ma’am, I don’t know what gives you the right to—”
She folded her arms across her chest.
“Because I made it,” she said. “Me and Jane Butchin and Mrs. Pilkington and all the others. The boys went up there but we kept them alive, with every seam and stitch and thread. So you are going to take that A7LB off, right now, and then you are going to go home and get a good night’s sleep. And that’s the only deal you are going to get, do I make myself clear?”
Bernard withered under her gaze. Clumsily, he started unbuckling the straps of the suit.
“What are you going to do?” he asked. His face was ashen with fear.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to rat you out. But Pete and I—we have things to discuss.”
After Bernard was gone, Hazel sat and looked at the suit, at her moon landscape reflection in the helmet. Pete’s A7LB sat sprawled on the couch, spread out like it was enjoying itself.
“You bastard,” she said and got up. “You stupid arrogant bastard. What makes you think I want you anymore?”
She grabbed the suit and hauled it to the workshop, breathing hard with its fifty-pound weight, ignoring the pain in her hip. She took out her scissors—the ones she used on heavy fabrics—and started cutting the suit to pieces, slowly and deliberately, her mouth a hard line.
It was hard work. The scissors slipped in her aching fingers and the metal of their handles bit into the flesh of her thumbs. She cut through the Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment and the insulation layer and all the twenty-one layers of the Pressure Garment, one by one. She only stopped at the pressure bladder, the one that had taken sixteen straight hours to finish on time.
Then she felt it: an irregularity, somewhere between the layers. She probed the space there with her fingers and found something flat and crumpled. She pulled it out.
It was a picture of Hazel, from almost fifty years ago, her dark cloud of hair glossy and shining, her smile wide and bright.
They met in the fitting sessions that somehow had to be squeezed into his training calendar. One late night in 1967, it had been just the two of them, in the back room of the workshop in Delaware.
She gave the picture to him as they lay together amongst the discarded parts of the suit, in the smell of fabrics and latex and plastic and their own bodies. She cried, afterwards, sure he wasn’t going to keep it, certain that she was just another notch in his belt, certain he was just like the other space boys the girls talked about.
Except that he kept coming back. He took her to Aspen for a week, and to see a musical on Broadway, and to a small place in Florida to watch flamingoes. He brought her to the Cape to watch a launch and she told him how much she had wanted to go to space, not just to make suits but to wear one. She thought that he would laugh at her but instead he held her tenderly and kissed her as the Saturn 5 went up like a giant fiery needle through the fabric of the sky. “One day,” he had said. “One day.”
He only stopped coming when they made him commander on the fourth mission to the Moon. An astronaut and a black seamstress. That was the way it had to be. He married his high school sweetheart a year later.
She grieved and moved on: found Tyrone who fitted her better than any suit. And then, after he was gone, the bitterness stung sharply only now and then, without warning, like Mrs. Pilkington wielding a safety pin.
Hazel put the scissors away. Pete had taken her to the Moon with him, after all. But why had he come back?
One day, she thought.
She assessed the damage she had done to the suit and turned on her electric sewing machine. She had a lot of work to do.
The Excelsior facility in the Johnson Space Center was a bustle of activity when the cab left Hazel there three days later. Bernard came to meet her. He greeted her politely if a bit coldly, and even offered to pull her heavy, wheeled suitcase through the hangar. Around them, T-shirted engineers argued, working on launcher modules that looked like oversized beer cans wrapped in tin foil. A huge deflated red balloon occupied much of the hangar, draped over containers. She had looked it up on the Internet. They had to invent new materials and layering methods to get it to survive in the stratosphere. In the end, it always comes down to fabric, Hazel thought.
Bernard’s office was small and cluttered, full of computers and sticky notes, with a window overlooking the workshop floor. He closed the door behind them carefully.
“I didn’t really expect to see you again, ma’am,” he said. “What is this about?”
Hazel smiled and opened the suitcase. The A7LB helmet peeked out.
“Try it on,” she said. “It should fit better this time.”
It took him less than fifteen minutes to don the suit. Hazel had to admit Bernard knew what he was doing, even if he touched it gingerly, as if it was going to bite. Then a grin spread on his face.
“It’s perfect,” he said, swinging his arms and jumping lightly up and down. Hazel smiled: she had gotten the measurements precisely right, even by eye. Some of the fabrics had come from a Space Shop replica, but she had to spend her savings on something.
“Absolutely perfect.” He hugged Hazel clumsily like a Michelin man. “What made you change your mind?”
“I had a chat with an old friend,” Hazel said. “I don’t think he’ll be bothering you anymore. But don’t get too excited, young man. My professional services don’t come for free.”
“Of course, anything, I’ll wire something through immediately, just name the figure—”
“I don’t want your money,” Hazel said. She looked at the Excelsior parts in the hangar. “That tin can of yours, it’s going to go to space, right?”
“Yes.” Bernard’s eyes were wide with wonder, full of a dream bigger
“Well, then,” Hazel said. “So am I.”
HERE BE DRAGONS
Chris Tarry
Chris Tarry is a multi Juno Award-winning musician, composer, and writer. He is the author of the collection How to Carry Bigfoot Home (Red Hen Press, March 2015) and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. His work has appeared in such publications as MAD, Funny or Die, the Literary Review, On Spec, the GW Review, and PANK. He is currently the co-creator and executive producer of the Peabody-Award-winning podcast The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel, chosen as one of the top 50 podcasts of 2016 by the Guardian. He lives and works in New Jersey.
“Here Be Dragons” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a clever take on the dragon slayer trade.
The one rule Géorg and I had when it came to slaying dragons was this: never let them see the dragon. And it was all well and good until we started throwing the money we’d made at our collective drinking problem and yammering on about how we had been milking Saint Beatus near the Nidwalden Forest for the better part of five years. Word got around that the dragons weren’t real and Géorg and I ended up at home with the kids while our wives shuffled off to work every morning, hands red-chapped and bleeding, to help keep the moneyed Count Heldenbuch in clean laundry.
Géorg was a new father and I’d barely seen my daughter, Constance, in two years. We’d been so busy hauling swords and crossbows and other fake dragon weaponry all around the valley that neither of us had been home much except for the odd rollick with the wives.
A few days after I’d been back, my daughter looked at me across our one-room shack and asked if I’d ever met her daddy the Dragonslayer.
“I’m your daddy,” I told her.
“My daddy’s stronger,” she said. “And a knight.” She was playing on the floor with a sack of grain. My wife had dribbled berry juice on the front to make eyes and a mouth. Constance looked up again and asked, “Where’s my mommy?”
“At work,” I told her. “I’m here now. Quiet, Daddy’s thinking.” I went back to whatever important thing I thought I was doing, and she threw me a look that suggested my out-of-work ass was hopefully just a temporary inconvenience in her world.
We were living nine furlongs from Feldkirch, which was twenty furlongs from nowhere, and it was hard to keep from wanting to rip every goddamn thing apart being cooped up like that. The rain never stopped, and the cold wind would barrel through the valley and find you no matter how thick the wool on your tunic. My wife would come home after a long day of laundering and Constance would go from the utmost nuisance to daughter-of-the-year in two seconds. “What did you and Daddy do all day?” Gerta would ask, and Constance would shrug her little shoulders and roll up on her mother, arms outstretched, offering up the hug of all hugs. It was hard for me to watch. There I was, at home with the kid all day, and you didn’t see me on the receiving end of something like that.
“Try taking an interest in her,” Gerta told me one night after we’d put Constance to bed and taken up some renewed passion in front of the cookery.
“What’s so interesting about a child?”
“How about the fact that she’s yours,” Gerta said coldly. She pulled herself off of me, re-buttoned her frock, and told me what I could expect as far as lovemaking if I didn’t pull myself together and at least try.
So, for a minute, I stopped daydreaming about the fake dragons, and Géorg, and all the money and trouble we used to make for ourselves, and focused on Constance. When I’d see her talking to her sack doll I’d ask her what she was saying. If she was off in the corner playing Bury the Stone, I’d pull up next to her and see if I could join in. If she needed help doing her business I’d take her outside and help her dig the hole and stand there, shielding her from the wind as she squatted over it. It took about a week, and then one day as we were outside watching the storm clouds gather, she reached up and took hold of my hand.
Géorg lived a plot of land away. We were neighbors if you consider a half-hour walk neighborly. Since I’d been back I hadn’t worked myself up to visiting him, but eventually I took Constance across the muddy field that separated our hut from Géorg’s to check on how he was making out in the fatherhood department. At his front door Constance asked if her doll could do the knocking.
“Of course,” I said, and lifted her up so she could reach high on the door. Earlier that week I’d given her doll a pair of arms by tying a rope around the middle of the sack and letting the ends hang loose. She grabbed one of the arms and knocked a ropy knock. “Great job,” I told her, and placed her down. She took my hand again and we stood there as the fog and rain rolled in from the valley and set upon Géorg’s hut like it could tear the roof off the place.
“No one’s home,” Constance said.
That’s when I heard the baby scream.
When I pushed open the door, Géorg’s hands were around little Jonah’s throat. There was water all over the floor and he was thrusting the baby’s head into a soot-stained cauldron of dirty water.
“Stop!” I yelled, and pushed Constance aside. The drink fell off Géorg so strongly I could smell it across the room. I jumped in, kicked him, and tried to pry his fingers from the baby’s neck. I took a fistful of his hair, yanking it so hard that he dropped the child and collapsed, sweaty, drunk, and sobbing on the floor.
“I can’t do this,” he kept saying. “I can’t do this!”
Jonah was motionless on the ground, his eyes open, staring into space like he was watching the last bit of his short life slip away and didn’t want to miss a second of it. I picked up his body and held it out in front of me. They say time stops in the moments we wait for our children to breathe, and I can tell you it’s the gods’ honest truth. I remember thinking so much in that moment. Like, what would we do if the kid kicked it? Or how long can a child go without breathing? Mostly what I was thinking was, We could really use a little more kid experience in this hut, because Jonah’s skin was a bloodless shade of purple and we were about to lose him.
Then it was like some unseen force reached down and gave the boy a slap across the ass. He coughed and screamed as his tiny lungs struggled to expel the water that had been forced inside. He cried with an intensity I’d never heard from a baby before. The child was back from wherever he’d been, and either he did not want to return, or he was outraged at the brutality of the world and what he’d just come to understand of it.
“Look!” I said to Géorg, still lumped up on the floor. “He’s alive!”
“So I hear,” Géorg said from behind strands of soaking wet hair. It was the crying, he told me, that drove him to it. “Like a damn banshee,” he said. “If drinking can’t drown out the sound, then what choice do I have?”
Later that evening, when I told my wife what had happened, she marched across the dark field in only a smock and broke the news to Hildegunn, Géorg’s wife. Even over the wind that night you could hear her yelling clear across the valley. Winkelried the Elder often said his goats stopped giving milk when Hildegunn tore into it, but this time he worried he might have to put a few of them down. My wife asked if I’d ever seen Géorg try anything like that before, and I lied and said I hadn’t. But I knew better. I’d seen him threaten a local mouthpiece with a lot worse when the dragon scam was falling apart, and then there was the time during the Lenzburg job when a hunter caught us in the forest pumping the bellows for sound effects. What Géorg did to that man I can’t bear to think about. But he had a dark resolve, Géorg, a grim sense of purpose that made anything possible. The head of a goat, the head of a hunter—these things were equal to him. He had asked more of me but the best I could do was hold the guy down.
After Jonah and the cauldron, Géorg kept himself scarce and drunk in the village for a long while. Then word got out that Hildegunn required his fix-it skills to thatch some roof that had given way to the weather, and s
“That idiot’s back?” Gerta said. She was at the hearth stirring a pot of goulash.
“He’s not so bad,” I said.
“You’d forgive him for kicking in your face,” she said without turning around.
“He’s my partner.”
“I’m your partner,” she said.
Géorg and I were a team if ever there was one. It was common knowledge among every clan in the valley that when it came to a certain brand of surliness, we were not to be messed with. We were destruction in the wake of confidence. Strength where it mattered and deception when it counted. “We’re men being men,” Géorg used to say, and that was usually good enough for me.
After Hildegunn took Géorg back, things were actually pretty good for a while. On days when it wasn’t pouring rain, Géorg and I would take the kids into the middle of the field and set up a mock dragonslaying. We’d bring out the old swords and I’d do the whole bit where I pretended to hear a dragon approach and Géorg would come in with the bellows. Constance was nearly four and she loved it. “How do you make the growling sound, Daddy?” she’d ask, and I’d show her the gadget Géorg had built from two pieces of bark and a catgut string that vibrated just right. Jonah was still too young to understand. He was barely crawling, but the swordplay seemed to calm him.
Those were the days of the barley blight and rotten beetroot, so Géorg and I weren’t the only ones lacking in gainful employment. Pretty soon, other out-of-work dads from the village brought their kids around and Géorg and I would drag out the catapult, battle axe, and other heavy artillery and put on a real show.
Géorg would run around and cue me when I was to trigger a piece of equipment. The dads would cheer when something big like the catapult went off, and a thick, vigorous energy would wrap itself around all of us. Lots of snorting and clapping and spitting on everything, and it felt good to be back doing our thing, even without the thrill of the con and the promise of money.