[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  He entered the public gardens. A truly lovely spot, he decided, sauntering past a slave team planting flower beds—impetuous tulips, swirling gladiolus, purse-lipped daffodils. Not far beyond, a white family cruised across a duck pond in a swan-shaped boat peddled by a scowling adolescent with skin like obsidian.

  Leaving the park, Abe started down Boylston Street. A hundred yards away, a burly Irish overseer stood beneath a gargantuan structure called the John Hancock Tower and began raising the scaffold, thus sending aloft a dozen slaves equipped with window-washing fluid. Dear Lord, what a job—the facade must contain a million square yards of mirrored glass.

  Hard-edged, ungiving—and yet the city brought Abe peace.

  In recent months, he had started to grasp the true cause of the war The issue, he realized, was not slavery. As with all things political, the issue was power. The rebel states had seceded because they despaired of ever seizing the helm of state; as long as its fate was linked to a grimy, uncouth, industrialized north, Dixie could never fully flower. By endeavoring to expand slavery into the territories, those southerners who hated the institution and those who loved it were speaking with a single tongue, saying, “The Republic’s true destiny is manifest: an agrarian Utopia, now and forever.”

  But here was Boston, full of slaves and steeped in progress. Clearly the Seward Treaty would not prove the recipe for feudalism and inertia Abe’s advisors feared. Crude, yes; morally ambiguous, true; and yet slavery wasn’t dragging the Republic into the past, wasn’t retarding its bid for modernity and might.

  “Sign the treaty,” an inner voice instructed Abe. “End the war.”

  Sunday was the Fourth of July, which meant the annual backyard picnic with the Burnsides, boring Ralph and boorish Helen, a tedious afternoon of horseshoe tossing, conspicuous drinking, and stupefying poolside chat, the whole ordeal relieved only by Libby’s barbecued spare ribs. Libby was one of those wonderful yard-sale items Marge had such a knack for finding, a healthy, well-mannered female who turned out to be a splendid cook, easily worth ten times her sticker price.

  The Burnsides were an hour late—their rickshaw puller, Zippy, had broken his foot the day before, and so they were forced to use Bubbles, their unathletic gardener—a whole glorious hour of not hearing Ralph’s thoughts on the Boston sports scene. When they did finally show, the first thing out of Ralph’s mouth was, “Is it a law the Sox can’t own a decent pitcher? I mean did they actually pass a law?” and Walter steeled himself. Luckily, Libby used a loose hand with the bourbon, and by three o’clock Walter was so anesthetized by mint juleps he could have floated happily through an amputation, not to mention Ralph’s vapid views on the Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots.

  With the sixth drink his numbness segued into a kind of contented courage, and he took unflinching stock of himself. Yes, his wife had probably bedded down with a couple of her teachers from the Wellesley Adult Education Center—that superfluously muscled pottery instructor, most likely, though the drama coach also seemed to have a roving dick—but it wasn’t as if Walter didn’t occasionally use his orthodontic chair as a motel bed, wasn’t as if he didn’t frolic with Katie Mulligan every Wednesday afternoon at the West Newton Hot Tubs. And look at his splendid house, with its Jacuzzi, bowling alley, tennis court, and twenty-five-meter pool. Look at his thriving practice. His portfolio. Porsche. Silver rickshaw. Graceful daughter flopping through sterile turquoise waters (damn that Happy, always using too much chlorine). And look at his sturdy, handsome Marge, back-floating, her pregnancy rising from the deep end like a volcanic island. Walter was sure the kid was his. Eighty-five percent sure. He’d achieved something in this life.

  At dusk, while Happy set off the fireworks, the talk got around to Blue Nile. “We had Jimmy tested last week,” Walter revealed, exhaling a small tornado of despair. “Positive.”

  “God, and you let him stay in the house?” wailed Ralph, fingering the grip of his Luger Parabellum P08. A cardboard rocket screeched into the sky and became a dozen crimson starbursts, their reflections cruising across the pool like phosphorescent fish. “You should’ve told us. He might infect Bubbles.”

  “It’s a pretty hard virus to contract,” Walter retorted. A buzz bomb whistled overhead, annihilating itself in a glittery blue-and-red mandala. “There has to be an exchange of saliva or blood.”

  “Still, I can’t believe you’re keeping him, with Marge pregnant and everything.”

  Ten fiery spheres popped from a Roman candle and sailed into the night like clay pigeons. “Matter of fact, I’ve got an appointment with Grant on Monday.”

  “You know, Walter, if Jimmy were mine, I’d allow him a little dignity. I wouldn’t take him to a lousy clinic.”

  The piece de résistance blossomed over the yard—Abe Lincoln’s portrait in sparks. “What would you do?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’d do.”

  Walter grimaced. Dignity. Ralph was right, by damn. Jimmy had served the family with devotion and zest. They owed him an honorable exit.

  The President chomped into a Big Mac, reveling in the soggy sauces and sultry juices as they bathed his tongue and rolled down his gullet. Were he not permanently lodged elsewhere—rail splitter, country lawyer, the whole captivating myth—he might well have wished to settle down here in 2010. Big Macs were a quality commodity. The entire menu, in fact, the large fries, vanilla shakes, Diet Cokes, and Chicken McNuggets, seemed to Abe a major improvement over nineteenth-century cuisine. And such a soothing environment, its every surface clean and sleek, as if carved from tepid ice.

  An enormous clown named Ronald was emblazoned on the picture window. Outside, across the street, an elegant sign—Old English characters on whitewashed wood—heralded the Chestnut Hill Country Club. On the grassy slopes beyond, smooth and green like a billiard table, a curious event unfolded, men and women whacking balls into the air with sticks. When not employed, the sticks resided in cylindrical bags slung over the shoulders of sturdy male slaves.

  “Excuse me, madame,” Abe addressed the chubby woman in the next booth. “What are those people doing? Is it religious?”

  “That’s quite a convincing Lincoln you’ve got on.” Hunched over a newspaper, the woman wielded a writing implement, using it to fill tiny squares with alphabet letters. “Are you serious? They’re golfing.”

  “A game?”

  “Uh-huh.” The woman started on her second Quarter Pounder. “The game of golf.”

  “It’s like croquet, isn’t it?”

  “It’s like golf.”

  Dipping and swelling like a verdant sea, the golf field put Abe in mind of Virginia’s hilly provinces. Virginia, Lee’s stronghold. A soft moan left the sixteenth President. Having thrown Hooker and Sedgwick back across the Rappahannock, Lee was ideally positioned to bring the war to the Union, either by attacking Washington directly or, more likely, by forming separate corps under Longstreet, Hill, and Ewell and invading Pennsylvania. Overrunning the border towns, he could probably cut the flow of reinforcements to Vicksburg while simultaneously equipping the Army of Northern Virginia for a push on the capital.

  It was all too nightmarish to contemplate.

  Sighing heavily, Abe took the Seward Treaty from his vest and asked to borrow his neighbor’s pen.

  Monday was a holiday. Right after breakfast, Walter changed into his golfing togs, hunted down his clubs, and told Jimmy they’d be spending the day on the links. He ended up playing the entire course, partly to improve his game, partly to postpone the inevitable.

  His best shot of the day—a three-hundred-and-fifty-yard blast with his one-iron—carried straight down the eighteenth fairway and ran right up on the green. Sink the putt, and he’d finish the day one under par.

  Sweating in the relentless fifth-of-July sun, Jimmy pulled out the putter. Such a fine fellow, with his trim body and huge eager eyes, zags of silver shooting through his steel-wool hair like the aftermath of an electrocution, his black biceps and white polo shirt
meeting like adjacent squares on a chess board. He would be sorely missed.

  “No, Jimmy, we won’t be needing that. Just pass the bag over here. Thanks.”

  As Walter retrieved his .22 caliber army rifle from among the clubs, Jimmy’s face hardened with bewilderment.

  “May I ask why you require a firearm?” said the slave.

  “You may.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to shoot you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Shoot you.”

  “What?”

  “Results came Thursday, Jimmy. You have Blue Nile. Sorry. I’d love to keep you around, but it’s too dangerous, what with Marge’s pregnancy and everything.”

  “Blue Nile?”

  “Sorry.”

  Jimmy’s teeth came together in a tight, dense grid. “In the name of reason, sell me. Surely that’s a viable option.”

  “Let’s be realistic. Nobody’s going to take in a Nile-positive just to watch him wilt and die.”

  “Very well—then turn me loose.” Sweat spouted from the slave’s ebony face. “I’ll pursue my remaining years on the road. I’ll—”

  “Loose? I can’t go around undermining the economy like that, Jim. I’m sure you understand.”

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you, Mr. Sherman.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I believe you are the biggest asshole in the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  “No need for that kind of talk, fellow. Just sit down on the green, and I’ll—”

  “No.”

  “Let’s not make this difficult. Sit down, and you’ll get a swift shot in the head—no pain, a dignified death. Run away, and you’ll take it in the back. It’s your choice.”

  “Of course I’m going to run, you degenerate moron.”

  “Sit!”

  “No.”

  “Sit!”

  Spinning around, Jimmy sprinted toward the rough. Walter jammed the stock against his shoulder and, like a biologist focusing his microscope on a protozoan, found the retreating chattel in his high-powered optical sight.

  “Stop!”

  Jimmy reached the western edge of the fairway just as Walter fired, a clean shot right through the slave’s left calf. With a deep wolfish howl, he pitched forward and, to Walter’s surprise, rose almost instantly, clutching a rusty discarded nine-iron that he evidently hoped to use as a crutch. But the slave got no farther. As he stood fully erect, his high wrinkled forehead neatly entered the gunsight, the cross hairs branding him with an X, and Walter had but to squeeze the trigger again.

  Impacting, the bullet dug out a substantial portion of cranium—a glutinous divot of skin, bone, and cerebrum shooting away from Jimmy’s temple like a missile launched from a brown planet. He spun around twice and fell into the rough, landing behind a clump of rose bushes spangled with white blossoms. So: an honorable exit after all.

  Tears bubbled out of Walter as if from a medicine dropper. Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy … and the worst was yet to come, wasn’t it? Of course, he wouldn’t tell Tanya the facts. “Jimmy was in pain,” he’d say. “Unbearable agony. The doctors put him to sleep. He’s in slave heaven now.” And they’d give him a classy send-off, oh, yes, with flowers and a moment of silence. Maybe Pastor McClellan would be willing to preside.

  Walter staggered toward the rough. To do a funeral, you needed a body. Doubtless the morticians could patch up his head, mold a gentle smile, bend his arms across his chest in a posture suggesting serenity…

  A tall, bearded man in an Abe Lincoln suit was on the eighteenth fairway, coming Walter’s way. An eccentric, probably. Maybe a full-blown nut. Walter locked his gaze on the roses and marched straight ahead.

  “I saw what you did,” said the stranger, voice edged with indignation.

  “Fellow had Blue Nile,” Walter explained. The sun beat against his face like a hortator pounding a drum on a Roman galley. “It was an act of mercy. Hey, Abe, the Fourth of July was yesterday. Why the getup?”

  “Yesterday is never too late,” said the stranger cryptically, pulling a yellowed sheaf from his vest. “Never too late,” he repeated as, swathed in the hot, buttery light, he neatly ripped the document in half.

  For Walter Sherman, pummeled by the heat, grieving for his lost slave, wearied by the imperatives of mercy, the world now became a swamp, an all-enveloping mire blurring the stranger’s methodical progress toward McDonald’s. An odd evening was coming, Walter sensed, with odder days to follow, days in which all the earth’s stable things would be wrenched from their moorings and unbolted from their bases. Here and now, standing on the crisp border between the fairway and the putting green, Walter apprehended this discomforting future.

  He felt it more emphatically as, eyes swirling, heart shivering, brain drifting in a sea of insane light, he staggered toward the roses.

  And he knew it with a knife-sharp certainty as, searching through the rough, he found not Jimmy’s corpse but only the warm hulk of a humanoid machine, prostrate in the dusk, afloat in the slick oily fluid leaking from its broken brow.

  ANOTHER GODDAMNED SHOWBOAT

  Barry N. Malzberg

  “Montmartre,” Hemingway said to Hadley. “We’ve got to go there, try something different. Barcelona, the running of the bulls, maybe. Got to get out of here; can’t take it any more. Scott has really thrown a wrench. All of it a stink, an ooze—”

  This was during the period when he was still writing science fiction, desperately trying to slip something by long distance past Campbell or at least Alden H. Norton, but nothing, nothing was connecting there and, despairingly, Hemingway was thinking of going back to westerns or maybe trying Black Mask. Stubborn old Cap Shaw with his special rules. At the moment it was geographic change which enticed him. “We’ll take a peek south at Lisbon. After Lisbon, we can go back to Portugal.”

  “Lisbon is in Portugal,” Hadley said. She had been beside him, old girl, for more than twenty years of this craperoo, had kept faith, kept things together with odd jobs and unmentionable duties but now, even as she still humored him, constraint seemed to radiate from her to say nothing of a certain lofty disdain. Hadley was running out of patience, of attitude. “Portugal and Spain are separate countries, Hem. They aren’t the same. Pretty close together, though.”

  “Just a slip of the tongue,” he said, embarrassed. “I know geography.”

  Campbell was bouncing everything, it all was coming back. A novelette in the post today, still reeking of the damp hold in which the envelope had spent weeks. Alternate worlds, immortality, far galaxies, extrapolations of robot technology: Hemingway was trying the whole range but the stuff was getting through only far enough to inspire mean little handwritten notes: No constellations around Antares or Overstocked on robots. All right, perhaps it was a foolish idea to try something as insular as science fiction from across the ocean but soon enough all the money would run out and that would be the end of this last desperate plan of his. Meanwhile, it helped to sit around the cafe and plan an itinerary. Science fiction or pseudo-science as they called it was probably the last shot before he packed in the whole thing, sailed home in disgrace, went crawling to some hot little country weekly, begging for a chance to run type.

  “Pretty good, this new Story,” Hadley said, showing him the magazine. It had come in on the boat with the rejections. “This Saroyan is a prospect.”

  “Don’t tell me about Saroyan.”

  “He can do fantasy for Burnett. Maybe you’re trying the wrong places; his stuff is really weird.”

  “It’s not fantasy I’m trying. That’s for Unknown. I’m writing science fiction.” Hadley stared incomprehendingly. “They’re different fields,” Hemingway said. “Sort of. I don’t want to talk about Saroyan or Burnett or even writing now. It’s not the way to go, I told him that years ago.” Indeed he had; the fiftieth rejection note (he had counted) had caused Hemingway to finally lose patience and he had written Burnett a letter which still m
ade him blush. He looked at the manuscript on his lap, resisted the impulse to crumple it. “It’s all an inside job for Burnett, people he meets at parties or sleeps with.”

  Hadley shrugged. They had been through this, of course. “Algren, Farrell, Fuchs, Saroyan, he can’t be sleeping with them all, can he? You gave up too soon; you should have kept trying.”

  “For five years. Papers in and out, papers on the boat—”

  “Joyce paid to publish Finnegan’s Wake. Ulysses was banned—”

  “Am I to answer that?” He clutched the manuscript, stood, looked at his still beautiful middle-aged wife through a haze which might have been recrimination or then again just the damned Parisian smog. Conditions here were really impossible; his sinuses were clogged all the time and the French had become evil to Americans. Pseudo-science, of all things. But the detective magazines had been full of fake-tough writing which no man could take seriously and after scuffling around with the Loyalists how could you take Ranch Romances seriously? He was in a hell of a box. Ulysses. Why did Hadley have to mention that? Ulysses was what had broken him, seeing what had happened to that crazy novel, the crazy Irishman. Seeing evidence that the failure and ban had driven Joyce crazy, Hemingway had said: Get hold of yourself There is a darkness out there that is not for me. But the pulps. Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe it had all been a mistake. So—

  “Sit,” Hadley said. “Come on, it’s too early in the day. Have a glass of Cotes de Rhone, enjoy the mistral. Maybe we’ll drift back to the pensione for a fuck. And maybe we’ll go to Lisbon. Maybe we’ll swim the channel. We’re still expatriates, we’re not supposed to have responsibilities.” She signalled a waiter. “Get him a glass of yin ordinaire,” she said. The waiter shrugged. “Go on,” Hadley said. “It’s not that early in the day.”

  “I shouldn’t drink before noon.”

  “But you do, Hem. You drink before ten. Why don’t you stop fighting the truth? Get him the wine,” she said to the waiter. “He wants it.” The waiter muttered and turned away. It occurred to Hemingway—with no surge of jealousy, just a dim, middle-aged man’s curiosity—that Hadley could as easily be fucking the waiter as not. She could be fucking any number of people. How would he know? How would he know anything? It was hard to keep things sorted out: Scott’s heart attack, the war, the trouble with the magazines, they were muddling his mind. Less and less was he here. Vin ordinaire.