Jerry scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed the door
behind him. He threw the car into reverse, but not before the man
brought the hockey stick down on the front of the hood—
somewhere near, Jerry felt sure, the spot where the car had
crashed into poor Tammy Jameson.
*
Jerry had no idea what was the right thing to do. He suspected
that the bassett hound was correct: the police would laugh him
out of the station if he came to them with his story. Of course, if
they’d just try driving his car along Thurlbeck, they’d see for
themselves. But adults were so smug; no matter how much he
begged, they’d refuse.
And so Jerry found himself doing something that might have
been stupid. He should have been at home studying—or, even
better, out on a date with Ashley Brown. Instead, he was parked
on the side of the street, a few doors up from the man’s house,
from the driveway that used to be home to this car. He didn’t
know exactly what he was doing. Did they call this casing the
joint? No, that was when you were planning a robbery. Ah, he
had it! A stakeout. Cool.
Jerry waited. It was dark enough to see a few stars—and he
hoped that meant it was also dark enough that the old man
wouldn’t see him, even if he glanced out his front window.
Jerry wasn’t even sure what he was waiting for. It was just
like Ms. Singh, his chemistry teacher, said: he’d know it when
he saw it.
And at last it appeared.
Jerry felt like slapping his hand against his forehead, but a
theatrical gesture like that was wasted when there was no one
around to see it. Still, he wondered how he could be so stupid.
That old man wasn’t the one who’d used the hockey stick.
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Oh, he might have dented Jerry’s hood with it, but the dents in
the garage door were the work of someone else.
And that someone else was walking up the driveway, hands
shoved deep into the pockets of a blue leather jacket, dark-haired
head downcast. He looked maybe a year or two older than Jerry.
Of course, it could have been a delivery person or something.
But no, Jerry could see the guy take out a set of keys and let
himself into the house. And, for one brief moment, he saw the
guy’s face, a long face, a sad face … but a young face.
The car hadn’t belonged to the old man. It had belonged to
his son.
*
There were fifteen hundred kids at Eastern High. No reason
Jerry should know them all on sight—especially ones who
weren’t in his grade. Oh, he knew the names of all the babes in
grade twelve—he and the other boys his age fantasized about
them often enough—but some long-faced guy with dark hair?
Jerry wouldn’t have paid any attention to him.
Until now.
It was three days before he caught sight of the guy walking
the halls at Eastern. His last name, Jerry knew, was likely
Forsythe, since that was the old man’s name, the name Jerry had
written on the check for the car. It wasn’t much longer before he
had found where young Forsythe’s locker was located. And then
Jerry cut his last class—history, which he could easily afford to
miss once—and waited in a stairwell, where he could keep an
eye on Forsythe’s locker.
At about 3:35, Forsythe came up to it, dialed the combo, put
some books inside, took out a couple of others, and put on the
same blue leather jacket Jerry had seen him in the night of the
stakeout. And then he started walking out.
Jerry watched him head out, then, he hurried to the parking
lot and got into the Toyota.
*
Jerry was crawling along—and this time, it was of his own
volition. He didn’t want to overtake Forsythe—not yet. But then
Forsythe did something completely unexpected. Instead of
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walking down Thurlbeck, he headed in the opposite direction,
away from his own house. Could it be that Jerry was wrong about
who this was? After all, he’d seen Forsythe’s son only once
before, on a dark night, and—
No. It came to him in a flash what Forsythe was doing. He
was going to walk the long way around—a full mile out of his
way—so that he wouldn’t have to go past the spot where he’d hit
Tammy Jameson.
Jerry wondered if he’d avoided the spot entirely since hitting
her or had got cold feet only once the cross had been erected. He
rolled down his window, followed Forsythe, and pulled up next
to him, matching his car’s velocity to Forsythe’s walking speed.
“Hey,” said Jerry.
The other guy looked up, and his eyes went wide in
recognition—not of Jerry, but of what had once been his car.
“What?” said Forsythe.
“You look like you could use a lift,” said Jerry.
“Naw. I live just up there.” He waved vaguely ahead of him.
“No, you don’t,” said Jerry, and he recited the address he’d
gone to to buy the car.
“What do you want, man?” said Forsythe.
“Your old man gave me a good deal on this car,” said Jerry.
“And I figured out why.”
Forsythe shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
“Yes, you do. I know you do.” He paused. “She knows you
do.”
The guy told Jerry to go … well, to go do something that was
physically impossible. Jerry’s heart was racing, but he tried to
sound cool. “Sooner or later, you’ll want to come clean on this.”
Forsythe said nothing.
“Maybe tomorrow,” said Jerry, and he drove off.
*
That night, Jerry went to the hardware store to get the stuff
he needed. Of course, he couldn’t do anything about it early in
the day; someone might come along. So he waited until his final
period—which today was English—and he cut class again. He
then went out to his car, got what he needed from the trunk, and
went up Thurlbeck.
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When he was done, he returned to the parking lot and waited
for Forsythe to head out for home.
*
Jerry finally caught sight of Forsythe. Just as he had the day
before, Forsythe walked to the edge of the schoolyard. But there
he hesitated for a moment, as if wondering if he dared take the
short way home. But he apparently couldn’t do that. He took a
deep breath and headed up Thurlbeck.
Jerry started his car but lagged behind Forsythe, crawling
along, his foot barely touching the accelerator.
There was a large pine tree up ahead. Jerry waited for
Forsythe to come abreast of it, and …
The disadvantage of following Forsythe was that Jerry
couldn’t see the other kid’s face when he caught sight of the new
cross Jerry had banged togeth
er and sunk into the grass next to
the sidewalk. But he saw Forsythe stop dead in his tracks.
Just as she had been stopped dead in his tracks.
Jerry saw Forsythe loom in, look at the words written not in
black, as on Tammy’s cross, but in red—words that said, “Our
sins testify against us.”
Forsythe began to run ahead, panicking, and Jerry pressed
down a little more on the accelerator, keeping up. All those years
of Sunday school were coming in handy.
Forsythe came to another tree. In its lee, he surely could see
the second wooden cross, with its letters as crimson as blood:
“He shall make amends for the harm he hath done.”
Forsythe was swinging his head left and right, clearly
terrified. But he continued running forward.
A third tree. A third cross. And a third red message, the
simplest of all: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Finally, Forsythe turned around and caught sight of Jerry.
Jerry sped up, coming alongside him. Forsythe’s face was a
mask of terror. Jerry rolled down his window, leaned an elbow
out, and said, as nonchalantly as he could manage, “Going my
way?”
Forsythe clearly didn’t know what to say. He looked up
ahead, apparently wondering if there were more crosses to come.
Then he turned and looked back the other way, off into the
distance.
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“There’s just one down the other way,” said Jerry. “If you’d
prefer to walk by it …”
Forsythe swore at Jerry, but without much force. “What’s
this to you?” he snapped.
“I want her to let my car go. I worked my tail off for these
wheels.”
Forsythe stared at him, the way you’d look at somebody who
might be crazy.
“So,” said Jerry, again trying for an offhand tone, “going my
way?”
Forsythe was quiet for a long moment. “Depends where
you’re going,” he said at last.
“Oh, I thought I’d take a swing by the police station,” Jerry
said.
Forsythe looked up Thurlbeck once more, then down it, then
at last back at Jerry. He shrugged, but it wasn’t as if he was
unsure. Rather, it was as if he were shucking a giant weight from
his shoulders.
“Yeah,” he said to Jerry. “Yeah, I could use a lift.”
Robert J. Sawyer is one of only eight writers in history to win all
three of the world's top awards for Best Science Fiction Novel of
the Year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award. The ABC TV series FlashForward was based
on his bestselling novel of the same name. His 23rd novel,
Quantum Night , has just been published. He lives in Toronto.
Website: sfwriter.com.
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71
E.C. Myers made a huge splash on the YA scene with his debut
novel, Fair Coin, and its sequel. In this tale, the young
protagonist seeks the devastating truth about what happened to
his father and what it might bode for his own future …
M Y F A T H E R ’ S E Y E S
By E.C. Myers
My hands tremble as I swirl developer solution over the
photographic paper. I’ve never been more anxious to see one of
my pictures before. My classmates would say this is another
drawback to traditional photography over digital: delayed
gratification. I’ll never make that technological leap; I still shoot
in black and white. My father never dabbled with digital
photography either, and it’s because of him that I decided to
become a photojournalist in the first place.
A cloudy scene emerges on the paper floating in the tray.
Shapes and shadows magically replace the blank white surface,
gradually forming trees and rocks. I’ve had this image burned
into my mind ever since I glimpsed it through my lens and my
finger instinctively clicked the shutter. It’s a bad photo, the
subject slightly unfocused and too far away, though I’ve blown
it up as much as I can. It won’t help my thesis project or launch
a career, but it’s the single most important picture of my life.
As I squint at it in the dim red glow of the safelight, a
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crouching figure fades into the scene like a ghost. His face is
blurred, captured in motion just as he’d turned and darted away.
Despite the blurring, and the fact that I haven’t seen him in
fifteen years except in other pictures, I know he’s my father. I
knew it even before I unloaded the film from my camera.
In my haste to fish the page out of the developer, I fumble
the metal tongs into the tray with a splash. I lift the photo out,
but I don’t bother to let the chemicals run off completely before
dunking it in the stop bath and submerging it in the fixer.
I study the damp photograph at the kitchen table, with an old
family photo beside it for comparison. My father’s hair has
grown long, falling below his waist and draping his broad
shoulders in mangy tangles. He’s bigger than he used to be, his
large muscles taut and defined as he springs into motion. A bushy
beard obscures much of his face, and his naked body is patched
with dried mud. He seems feral, more animal than man, except
mine. When I looked into those eyes, I knew.
By the time my mother comes home from her late shift at the
hospital I’ve made multiple prints of that photo, enlarging it over
and over. I cropped many of the prints around his eyes, his most
human feature. I’ve also scanned the image into my computer,
trying to enhance it into something more recognizable as my
father. He’s in there, somewhere. Alive.
“What’s all this?” my mother asks as she enters the kitchen
and drops a bucket of fried chicken onto the table with a hollow
thump. She looks around at the drying photos I have suspended
on wires across the room, the warped and curling prints scattered
on the table, the family portrait that was taken a little after my
fifth birthday. A little before my father disappeared.
She never told me what happened to him. He was just gone;
that’s what my mother said whenever I asked, until I stopped
asking. “Gone,” she would say, which could mean anything. He
left, he died, he was killed. Whatever I wanted it to mean, really.
In my favorite fantasy I made him a secret government agent on
an important mission. Kids want their dad to be someone they
can be proud of, someone they can brag about—especially if he
can’t be someone they can come home to. Who thinks that his
dad might be running around naked in the wilderness?
“When were you going to tell me, Mom?” I ask.
“Tell you what?” she says distractedly. She looks at the
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pictures, but doesn’t see them. I toss her a printout of one of my
best efforts and she picks it
up. She drops it a moment later.
“Why didn’t you tell me my father’s a devol?” I ask.
“Don’t use that word,” she says. She sounds tired. She
suddenly looks old and weary, like life has defeated her at last.
Like she’s given up. Maybe she has—or maybe she gave up
fifteen years ago.
She sits down at the table across from me, the evidence
spread between us. She covers her face with her hands, then
removes them, like a game of peek-a-boo. She does it again, and
now her face and palms are wet.
“What’s a better word? Is this what you call ‘gone’? When
people go, they usually end up somewhere.”
“It’s all the same, Ambrose. This—” She picks up the
printout and crinkles it up. “This isn’t your father.”
“It sure looks like him,” I say.
“Your father was go—He stopped being Randall Welling a
long time ago.”
“Did you ever visit him at the reservation?”
“There was no reason to.”
“He would’ve liked to see you. Us.”
She shakes her head.
“Well, I’d have liked to see him,” I say.
“I hoped you’d never see him like this.” She bows her head,
eyes shut and tears falling. “I wanted you to remember him as he
was, before.”
The sound of her tears dripping onto the photograph fills the
silence.
“I barely remember him at all. I had a right to know!” I tell
her. I stand up and leave her alone. Her sobs follow me all the
way to the basement until I close the darkroom door and shut
them out.
*
Devols, Neo-anderthals, or, to be politically correct,
regressives—whatever you want to call them—have been around
for almost sixty years. They all suffer from a rare form of
dementia called Hollander’s disease, named for Dr. David
Hollander, who diagnosed it in 2017. Or maybe it was named for
the first case he studied: his teenage daughter Alessandra.
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Most victims of this degenerative disease, unable to function
in society, end up in one of three national reservations. Some are
sent to smaller asylums that specialize in managed care for
devols. Dr. Hollander contributed millions to the development of