America Pacifica by Anna North

Author:Anna North [North, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Speculative Fiction,
ISBN: 978-0-316-13412-5
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
Published: 2011-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

The alkali desert was burning and bare

And Ike cried in fear, ‘We are lost, I declare!

My dear old Pike County, I’ll go back to you.’

Said Betsy, ‘You’ll go by yourself if you do.’ ”

It was the only part of the song she knew, and she sang it to herself over and over, until the words meant nothing, until time meant nothing, until she was nothing but a mouth that murmured the words. When she had almost erased the existence of even the mouth, the door opened again. She heard footsteps, and then a sound of cloth moving against Seaboard, and then the lamp went out, and someone was kneeling beside her. She smelled a woman’s sweat.

“Are you all right?” Sunshine asked.

“Fine.”

“You were shaking.”

Darcy turned away.

“I made you a bed. It’s just some shirts on the floor, but—”

Darcy ignored her.

“Listen, I know how you feel.”

Darcy sat up and looked at her. She was balanced on her knees with her long calm hands on her thighs. Her face was weary and haughty and knowing. Darcy abruptly hated her again.

“You don’t,” she spat.

Sunshine gave her a look of pity.

“You think you’re the first person to do something you didn’t want to do? How do you think everybody else around here gets along?”

“Don’t tell me how people get along,” Darcy said. “I’ve been getting along all by my fucking self for a while now.”

Sunshine’s face barely moved, but the tiny tightening at the corners of her eyes was enough to show her anger.

“Without Ansel,” she said, “you’d still be fucking around Las Vegas asking stupid questions.”

Darcy stood. The wall of the shack shook a little from her movement.

“And now I’m what?” she yelled. “Squatting in a box with two circus freaks whose idea of a plan is getting an arm bitten off by a retarded bear?”

The slap came fast, hard enough to shock but not to bruise. Darcy held the side of her face and felt her blood rising to meet her skin. No one had ever slapped her before. She was used to punches, scratches, school-yard fighting, but this was a new language.

“I can talk shit about Ansel,” Sunshine said, “and you can talk shit about me. But if you talk shit about Ansel, you leave here and you don’t come back.”

Darcy sat back down. Sunshine’s face was unreadable now.

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?” Darcy asked. “Just go, I mean.”

“It’s up to you. But I wasn’t all that different from you when I met him. I pissed off this guy from Death Row. He put a hit out on me. Ansel got it fixed, he never told me how. He gets things done. He seems like he won’t but then he does. That’s why I stay, in spite of everything.”

Darcy wondered now what Sunshine’s stake was. Why had she gotten Ansel the job at the Big Top in the first place? Were they lovers? Did she want Tyson gone too, or was there something else she wanted Ansel to do?

“What do you mean, ‘everything’?” Darcy asked.

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