Death's Excellent Vacation Read online

  “We are very honor for you take us fishing,” says the lazy man. He’s wearing a too-loose Red Sox cap turned backward and a Red Sox jacket much too big for him. The effect is oddly dangerous, as if he’s about to spring back to a much bigger size.

  They gaze at him as if he’s supposed to say something. Pointers, he thinks. I’m supposed to give them pointers. Advice. They all have big eyes. It’s like being surrounded by black-velvet pictures of kittens.

  They look at him.

  He looks back. The only advice he can think of is Don’t eat yellow snow.

  He clears his throat. “Come on. You’re going fishing. Don’t fall in.”

  They all giggle. Aargh.

  “Come get baggage,” the tall man tells the kids, and he and the compressed man trundle off toward the baggage carousel. The kids follow him in a whispering herd, looking back at Mr. Green.

  The girl with the pink ribbons whispers to the boy-rooster.

  “Secret-u identity,” the boy whispers back.

  Good, they’re disappointed. Mr. Green scowls at the red-haired travel agent, prickly-proud of himself.

  “Guess they expected—”

  “Green mask and cloak, glowing force field—”

  “I can finish my own sentences.” They expected the Green Force, Atom, Astounding, the Bat, Iguana, all grinning with perfect teeth and washboard abs. They expected to go fishing for the Fish, the Monster. Not a weather-beaten old fisherman in a plaid shirt and jeans with a bucket full of farm-raised trout. “What do they do? Giggle the villains to death?”

  “Please,” she says.

  He clears his throat, looking at the strutting boy trying to take all the heaviest luggage himself. “That boy and all the girls? I’m not having hijinks.”

  She looks at him like she’s about to burst into laughter. There’s something sad behind it. “Throw cold water over him,” she says.

  The kids and the men come back, lugging the gross national product of Japan on wheels.

  In the plane, on the way up to the lake, the red- haired Chinese girl gets them all singing old songs. He watches her. Red- haired like a flame, short-lived as a match. To care about humans is to care about leaves, about the frost on the glass in the morning. Breathe and it’s gone.

  Still, he surreptitiously cradles the overloaded plane.

  THERE is ice on the lake, thick, hard ice, no fog. The kids wrap themselves up like packages in parkas, hats, mittens. Mr. Green takes the girls out back and gets them to make a shelter. He does something he hasn’t done in years, gestures a hemisphere of glowing green. “Pile snow over that.” “Oooh,” the kids go. “Ano ne!” When they cover it with snow, there’s nothing but an igloo glowing faintly like a neon light in a snowstorm.

  Advice: “Anyone know why we cover it up? You protect your secret identity. You don’t want to advertise.”

  They bob their heads in agreement.

  “People laugh,” says the kid with the long braid bitterly, slouching out from the cabin. He has a butterfly on his jeans. Probably gay.

  “No. Not just people laugh. Your enemies find you. People who are going to hurt you find you.”

  The kid considers.

  “Same thing. Laugh. Hurt.”

  The kid knows nothing.

  The boy and the men get settled down in the clients’ loft, and the girls giggle in the new igloo.

  The red- haired travel agent gets the spare room in the cabin. She uses the shower until the mirror is steamy. He showers after she’s finished and smells lavender soap, woman smells. It’s been twenty years since Lana died. It’s been forever since he was a human man with Lana. He feels bothered and self-conscious with so many people in his privacy.

  He pads out in socks to find the red- haired girl in front of the fire, toweling her wet hair from mahogany back to flame. She’s wearing a green sweater that goes too well with her hair and jeans that fit her like a thin coat of paint. He realizes, embarrassingly, there’s a question he hasn’t asked.

  “My name is Lan,” she says.

  He winces.

  “I know,” she says. “Your wife’s name. I am sorry. My name is just Lan.”

  He pulls herself together. “That’s your Talent name?”

  She shakes her head, smiling. “Just my name.”

  “Funny name.”

  “Not as funny as the Green Force.”

  “Green,” he says. “Bill. Bill was the name my foster parents gave me. The last name changes, but I’m always Bill.”

  He looks into the fire, remembering streams of fire, falling, falling, gravity screaming around him, catching and shaping it in his pudgy hands, turning it into a cradle—

  “Bill,” she says. “Nice. Why do you want to die, Bill?”

  She’s probably twenty, twenty-five. Before he gets to know her, she’ll be dead.

  He’s told his own story a hundred times, seen it in the comics, until he almost believes that Mom baked pies for church socials and Dad drove a tractor round the farm. But he remembers the First World War and the Civil War and the Revolution, and before his name was Bill it was Will and Gwillhem and Willa-helm, and his parents were Mutti and Dadu.

  Demon, the villagers called him. The villagers tried to burn him, drown him, stone him. Fire flowed around him. When they threw him into the pond, he shaped air in a bubble around him. He is your angel, the priest said. Call him Willa-helm, Protector. Do not be afraid of him.

  For a long time he protected them from a distance, like a guard dog, half-angel, half-wolf.

  Then he got involved.

  He had friends.

  He fell in love.

  Now he fishes.

  “Death is what people do.” Not so long ago, a moment ago in his long life, the other Talents showed up. Each of them unique, wild, strange. Together, a gang. Friends. And Lana. He thought he was people. They proved he was wrong.

  “What do those kids have for talents?” he asks.

  “Oh, one thing, another. They look after each other,” she says. “That’s talent enough.”

  Yeah. “They got long life?” he asks. “Is that one of their Talents?”

  She sits with the towel on her knees, looking into the fire. “No. I’ve known lots like them. The others are dead.”

  “What’s their story? Born with Talent? Made?”

  “Made.”

  “How?” Atom, an atomic explosion. Poor Elastic, a vat of chemicals. Himself falling like a star.

  And he has touched something. The Chinese girl stares into the fire, her eyes dead black and her mouth widening into a grimace. Her hands tighten around the towel.

  “I made them,” she says. “I cursed them. Me.”

  And she gets up abruptly and leaves.

  FOUR of them went on that long-ago fishing trip: Iguana Man, Astounding, Atom, and the Green Force, who kept the mortals safe and dry. In ordinary ice fishing you shine a light into the murk under the ice. At the bottom of the water, they shone Atom. They could barely see past the yellow ball of light that Atom threw. They were all wasted, laughing so hard they were falling down. Suddenly scales turned in the murk like ragged hands and a single dark eye glared at them before it flashed away into darkness. The world’s last monster, trapped in her lake.

  “Shit, boys,” Iguana said.

  “It’d be bad to be like that,” Atom said soberly.

  “No,” the Green Force said. “Not us. We won’t be like that.”

  He thought there was an us. They’d all live forever. There would always be big, colorful villains to fight, Nazis and Yellow Perils, and beings like himself to fight them. He had seen something but it took him years to know it: the Great Fish, trapped in her size and strength, with no path out; too big to get out; without the talent to die.

  IT’S two days into an endless fishing trip before he finds out what their talents are.

  As far as he can tell, they’re normal annoying teenagers. They bundle themselves up in parkas, stare into the ice hole for fif
teen minutes, get bored, and move the light around so they scare the fish. They forget to watch the flags. They play with Game Boys and plug their ears with iPods. They giggle and bicker, and kick and punch, and yell “Pow! Wham!” like they are making up their own soundtrack. The boy with the long braid farts like an elephant; nothing worse than the smell of teenage boy. The fathers are polite and heat endless hot water for tea.

  It’s clear what Lan’s talents are. She makes popcorn and sushi, cleans the trout they occasionally catch, braids pigtails, dries little-girl tears.

  On the afternoon of the second day the fog comes in.

  “We aren’t going fishing today,” Mr. Green says. “Probably not tomorrow. You can play with your Game Boys in the cabin.”

  They give him the big-eyed stare.

  “Ice is dangerous. Can be a foot thick one step, two inches thick the next. Worse when there’s a thaw. Where the Muskeag comes into the lake, the river water’s eating the ice from below. Where the ice got broken up by our old fishing holes, where the fish gather, where there’s a lot of weed, the ice is thinning out and not healing yet. By the shore the level of the water goes up and down and the ice breaks. But it’s foggy, so you’re not thinking about that, just trying to find your way to the shore. Unless you know to respect the ice, and you kids don’t, you don’t fish.”

  The kids mutter in Japanese.

  He and Lan go outside, and she checks the weather report on her magic phone. “Above freezing for the next two days,” she points out.

  “You foresaw that, right? So it’s your problem.”

  “Come on. They could have a more interesting time.”

  Their boots slush through the runny snow.

  “You could do for them what you did,” she says. “You and the others. Back then.”

  “That’s what you want for your kids? Bam, pow, monster? I don’t do that anymore.”

  “They can’t even go out in this,” she says.

  “Just can’t fish.”

  “They can’t. No. I mean they don’t want to go out in this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”

  “Which are?” he says.

  “They’re shape-changers.”

  He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.

  “You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.

  She doesn’t say a word now.

  “You cursed them?”

  He doesn’t believe in personal curses.

  “None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.

  She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.

  “What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”

  “Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”

  Ten years is a moment.

  “I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”

  “What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”

  “How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”

  “I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”

  “Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”

  WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.

  She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.

  It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.

  “—foresaw this?” he pants.

  She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”

  “I don’t fly—”

  He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.

  He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.

  He hears screaming from the lake.

  And he flies. Nothing superhero- like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.

  There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.

  The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.

  When he hits the ice, it tilts.

  Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll hold.”

  But it doesn’t. He tries to extend a cradle of force all the way across the ice, over the hole, without trapping the boy and his father. But there are too many of them, the kids all together are too heavy on all that tipping ice, it’s too far, it’s been too long.

  The ice cracks; she slips and flails and is gone. One by one the kids slide in after her and in a moment the ice is empty.

  His giant invisible hands of force reach out and tilt the ice back, find a struggling body here, a furry parka there. His giant invisible fingers sieve the black water, hunting the kids. He shapes a globe of air and shoves a drowning kitten into it. A bear is grabbing at the ice, breaking more chunks away. A Red Sox hat, a Hello Kitty backpack, but no flaming red hair—

  He touches something, touches her. Pulls Lan out of the water, her hair a river of blood down her back, her face blue. Throws her down onto the bank. How to get water out of lungs? He makes up something, moving air, moving water. Feels something in her dark and alien as death. Then feels her retching cough.

  “What am I looking for?” he yells at her. Another part of him is a net, dredging. “Help me find them!”

  In the end he recognizes them only because there are the same number of them as before. There were five girls, one boy, two men; now, one girl, a snake, a great brown bear, five little beasts. A bedraggled kitten stares up at him, a sobbing round badger clutches a girl’s glasses in one wet paw. The girl has a long braid. The bear has a Red Sox cap.

  They look at him with adoration, as if he could solve all their problems, and their superhero is so lonely he could howl.

  HE and Lan have sent the kids back to the cabin to bathe, and they stand outside to give the kids privacy. Lan says they want privacy. Lan’s changed her clothes, but she’s still shivering. He warms the air around her, moving it gently. Protector. They watch through the windows. Through the steamy glass he sees them, bedraggled, silt-smeared animals filing into his shower, little girls coming out wrapped in his towels. A kittenish girl, a round brown girl with a tilted chin and pointed nose. The bear has the lazy man’s lumbering, rolling walk, the boy has a girl’s shy smile.

  “Cold water makes them—change. They change their shape. Hot water turns them back into human,” Lan says, her teeth chattering still.

  “Ho
w did you do that to them?”

  “I don’t know! As if I knew!”

  “There’s got to be some way to undo it.”

  “There was another spring. It’s gone.”

  It’s another kind of Talent from anything he knows. “I don’t believe in this. It’s magic.”

  “But you can fly,” she says, half laughing and half shivering.

  “I don’t have to believe in myself.”

  She watches the kids through the window. “Maybe all kinds of magic exist. Somewhere, in a cave, a family of werewolves is reading old Green Force comics and saying, ‘Of course he isn’t real.’ Ghosts are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and saying what you’re a metaphor for. And the bats sleep through the day and dream of all of us.”

  He thinks of the Bat in his Cave. “And we’d all rather be human.”

  “I thought you could make them human again. Or at least give them time. You don’t get old—”

  “No,” he says sharply. “No.”

  When his parents began to get old, he thought about fixing their aging bodies. “There are stories about things I did. Humans getting old but not able to die. People turning into trees. They weren’t trees. You don’t want me messing with those kids.”

  I want to die. I want to get old and older and oldest and die, and turn into a tree, into a rock. I’ve been a man.

  She shudders, cold or dispirited. “What can you do, then?”

  “When my wife got old, I did nothing. That’s what I could do for her. I did nothing.”

  “No.” She turns toward him. In the half dark where they are watching, her eyes have turned dark as prophecy. “What can you do?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Move the light,” she says. “Move the light from the window. Can you do that?”

  He moves it an inch to the right. Parlor trick.

  “You can move light. But you got the kids to cover up the igloo because you were worried about satellites. You moved the water out of my lungs, but you didn’t move the fog off the lake. You heated the air for me, but you didn’t cool it for them. Here we are standing out in the cold. What can you do? I mean, have you ever thought about it? In an organized way?”