I was in my bedroom reading a novel when somebody came banging on the door really loud, like the police. I thought it was the police until I got up, looked out the window, and saw one of Rina’s johns standing there. I wouldn’t have bothered to answer, but the fool was kicking at the door like he wanted to break it in. I went to the kitchen and got one of our small cast-iron skillets—the size just big enough to hold two eggs. Then I went to the door. The stupid bastard was drunk.
“Hey,” he mumbled. “Where’s Rina? Tell Rina I wanna see her.”
“Rina’s not here, man. Come back around five this evening.”
He swayed a little, stared down at me. “I said tell Rina I wanna see her.”
“And I said she’s not here!” I would have shut the door in his face, but I knew he’d just start kicking it again unless he managed to understand what I was saying.
“Not here?”
“You got it.”
“Well.” He narrowed his eyes a little and sort of peered at me. “How about you?”
“Not me, man.” I started to shut the door. I hate these scenes, really. The idiot shoved me and the door out of his way and came on in. That’s what I get for being short and skinny. Ninety-eight pounds. At nineteen, I looked thirteen. Guys got the wrong idea.
“Man, you better get out of here,” I warned him. “Come back at five. Rina’s the whore, not me.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to learn.” He stared at me. “What’s that you got in your hand?”
I didn’t say anything else. I had done my bit for nonviolence.
“I said what the hell you got in your—”
He lunged toward me. I side-stepped him and bashed his stupid head in. I left him lying where he fell, got my purse, and went out. Let Rina or Emma see to him.
I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from the house. I had a headache, and every now and then I would hear voices—a word, a scream, somebody crying. Hear them inside my head. Doro said that meant I was close to my change, my transition. Doro said that was good. I wished I could give him some of the pain and the craziness of it and let him see how good it was. I felt like hell all the time, and he came around grinning.
I walked over to Maple Avenue and there was a bus coming. A Los Angeles bus. On impulse, I got on. Not that there was anything for me in LA. There wasn’t anything for me anywhere except maybe wherever Doro was. If I was lucky, when Rina and Emma found that idiot lying in our living room, they would call Doro. They called him whenever they thought I was about to blow. The way things were now, I was always about to blow.
I got off the bus in downtown L.A. and went to a drugstore. I didn’t remember until I was inside that the only money I had was bus fare. So I slipped a bottle of aspirin into my purse and walked out with it. Doro told me a few years ago that he’d beat the hell out of me if I ever got picked up for stealing. I had been stealing since I was seven years old, and I had never been caught. I used to steal presents for Rina back when I was still trying to pretend it meant something that she was my mother. Anyway, now I knew what I was going to do in L.A. I was going “shopping.”
I didn’t try very hard, but I got a few things. Got a nice little Sony portable radio—one of the tiny ones. I just walked out of a discount store with it while the salesman who had been showing it to me went to stop some kid from pulling down a display of plastic dishes. Got some perfume. I didn’t like the way it smelled though, so I threw it away. I took four aspirins and my headache kind of dulled down a little. I got a blouse and a halter and some junky costume jewelry. I threw the jewelry away, too, after I got a better look at it. Trash. And I got a couple of paperbacks. Always some books. If I didn’t have anything to read, I’d really go crazy.
On my way back to Forsyth, somebody screamed bloody murder inside my head. Along with that, I felt I was being hit in the face. Sometimes I got things mixed up, I couldn’t tell what was really happening to me and what I was picking up accidentally from other people’s minds. This time, I was getting onto a bus when it happened, and I just froze. I had enough control to hold myself there, to not scream or fall on the ground from the beating I felt like I was taking. But you don’t stop half on and half off a bus at Seventh and Broadway at five in the evening. You could get killed.
I wasn’t exactly trampled. I just kept getting shoved out of the way. Somebody shoved me away from the door of the bus. Other people pushed me out of their way. I couldn’t react. All I could do was hang on, wait it out.
And then it was over. I was barely able to get on the bus before it pulled away. I had to stand up all the way to Forsyth. I did my best to knock a couple of people down when I got off.
I didn’t want to go home. Even if Rina and Emma had called Doro, he couldn’t have gotten there yet. I didn’t want to hear Rina’s mouth. But then I started to wonder about the john—how bad I had hurt him, if maybe he was dead. I decided to go home to see.
There was nothing else to do, anyway. Forsyth is a dead town. Rich people, old people, mostly white people. Even the southwest side, where we lived, wasn’t a ghetto—or at least not a racial ghetto. It was full of poor bastards from any race you want to name—all working like hell to get out of there. Except us. Rina had been out, Doro told me, but she had come back. I never have thought my mother was very bright.
We lived in a corner house—Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue—so I walked home on the side of Dell Street opposite our house. I wanted to see if there were any police cars around the corner before I went in. If there had been any, I would have kept going. Doro would have gotten me out of any trouble I got into, I knew. But then he would have half killed me. It wasn’t worth it.
Rina and Emma were waiting for me. I wasn’t surprised. There was this little drama we had to go through.
Rina: Do you realize you could have killed that man! Do you want us to go to prison!
Emma: Can’t you think for once in your life? Why’d you leave him here? Why didn’t you at least—at least—come and get me? For God’s sake, girl …
Rina: What did you hit him for? Will you tell us that?
They hadn’t given me a chance to tell them anything.
Rina: He was just a harmless old guy. Hell, he wouldn’t have hurt—
Emma: Doro is on his way here now, Mary, and you’d better have a good reason for what you did.
And, finally, I got a word in. “It was either hit him or screw him.”
“Oh, Lord,” muttered Rina. “Can’t you talk decent even when Emma is here?”
“I talk as decent as you taught me, Momma! Besides, what do you want me to say? ‘Make love to him?’ I wouldn’t have loved it. And if he had managed to do it, I would have made sure I killed him.”
“You did enough,” said Emma. She was calming down.
“What did you do with him, anyway?” I asked.
“Put him in the hospital.” She shrugged. “Fractured skull.”
“They didn’t say anything at the hospital?”
“The way he smelled? I just shriveled myself up a little more and told them my grandson drank too much and fell on his head.”
I laughed. She used that little-old-lady act to get sympathy from strangers, or at least to throw them off guard. Most of the time when Doro wasn’t around, she was old and frail-looking. It was nothing but an act, though. I saw a guy try to snatch her purse once while she was hobbling down the street. She broke his arm.
“Was that guy really your grandson?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
I glanced at Rina with disgust. “You can’t find anybody but relatives to screw? God!”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I wouldn’t pretend to be so disgusted with the idea of incest if I were you, Mary.” Emma sort of bared her teeth at me. It wasn’t a smile. She and I didn’t get along most of the time. She thought she knew everything. And she thought Doro was her private property. I got up and went to my room.
Doro arrived the next day.
I remember once when I was about six years old I was sitting on his lap frowning up into his latest face. “Shouldn’t I call you ‘Daddy’?” I asked. Until then, I had called him Doro, like everybody else did.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said. And he smiled. “Later, you won’t like it.”
I didn’t understand, and I was a stubborn kid anyway. I called him “Daddy.” He didn’t seem to mind. But, of course, later, I didn’t like it. It still bothered me a little, and Doro and Emma both knew it. I had the feeling they laughed about it together.
Doro was a black man this time. That was a relief, because, the last couple of visits, he’d been white. He just walked into my bedroom early in the morning and sat down on my bed. That woke me up. All I saw was this big stranger sitting on the side of my bed.
“Say something,” I said quickly.
“It’s me,” he said.
I let go of the steak knife I slept with and sat up. “Can I kiss you, or are you going to jump me, too?”
He pulled back my blankets and ran his hand down the side of the bed next to the wall. Of course he found the steak knife. I kept it sheathed in the tight little handle you’re supposed to use to pick up the mattress. He threw it out the door. “Leave the knives and frying pans in the kitchen, where they belong,” he said.
“That guy was going to rape me, Doro.”
“You’re going to kill somebody.”
“Not unless I have to. If people leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone.”
He picked up a pair of jeans from the floor, where I had left them, and threw them in my face. “Get dressed,” he said. “I want to show you something. I want to make a point in a way that even you might understand.”
He got up and went out of the room.
I threw the jeans back on the floor and went to the closet for some clean ones. My head was aching already.
He drove me to the city jail. He parked outside the wall and just sat there.
“What now?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“Doro, why did you bring me here?”
“As I said, to make a point.”
“What point? That if I’m not a good little girl, this is where I’ll wind up? God! Let’s get away from here.” Something was wrong with me. Or something was about to be wrong. Really wrong. I was picking up shadows of crazy emotions.
“Why should we go?” he asked.
“My head …!” I could feel myself losing control. “Doro, please. …” I screamed. I tried to hang on. Tried to just shut down, the way I had the day before. Freeze. But I was caught in a nightmare. The kind of nightmare where the walls are coming together on you and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re locked in some dark, narrow place and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re at a zoo locked up like the animals, and you can’t get out!
I had never been afraid of the dark. Not even when I was little. And I’d never been afraid of small, closed places. And the only place I had ever seen a room where the walls formed a vise was in a bad movie. But I screamed my head off outside that jail. I started flailing around, and Doro grabbed me to keep me from jumping out of the car. I almost made him have an accident, as he was trying to drive away.
Finally, when we were a good, long way from the jail, I calmed down. I sat bent over in the seat, holding my head.
“How long do you suppose you could stay even as sane as you are in the midst of a concentration of emotions like that?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“Most of the prisoners there aren’t half as bothered by their thoughts and fears as you were,” he said. “They don’t like where they are, but they can live with it. You can’t. Wouldn’t you rather even be raped than wind up in a place like this even for a short time?”
“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My head was throbbing so that I could hardly hear him. And for some stupid reason, I had left my new bottle of aspirin at home on my night table.
“In the glove compartment,” he said. “No water, though.”
I fumbled open the glove compartment, found the aspirin, and swallowed four. He was stopped for a red light, watching me.
“You’re going to get sick, doing that.”
“Thanks to you, I’m already sick.”
“You don’t listen, girl. I talk to you and you don’t listen. For your own good, I have to show you.”
“From now on, I’ll listen. Just tell me.” I sat back and waited for the aspirin to work. Then I realized that he wasn’t taking me home.
“Where are we going? You don’t have another treat for me, do you?”
“Yes. But not the way you mean.”
“What is it? Where are we going?”
“Here.”
We were on South Ocean Avenue, in the good part of Forsyth’s downtown shopping district. He was driving into the parking lot of Orman’s, one of the best stores in town.
He parked, turned off the motor, and sat back. “I want you to step out of character for a while,” he said. “Stop working so hard at your role as Rina’s bitchy daughter.”
I looked at him sidelong. “I usually do when you’re around.”
“Not enough, maybe. You think we can go into that store and buy—not steal—something other than blue jeans?”
“Like what?”
“Come on.” He got out of the car. “Let’s go see what you look good in.”
I knew what I looked good in. Or at least acceptable in. But why bother when the only guy I was interested in was Doro and nothing I did seemed to reach him? He either had time for me or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, I could have walked around naked and he wouldn’t have noticed.
But because he wanted it, I chose some dresses, some really nice pants, a few other things. I didn’t steal anything. My headache sort of faded back to normal and my witchy reflection in the dressing-room mirror relaxed back to just strange-looking. Doro had said once that, except for my eyes and coloring, I look a lot like Emma—like the young version of Emma, I mean. My eyes—traffic-light green, Rina called them—and my skin, a kind of light coffee, were gifts from the white man’s body that Doro was wearing when he got Rina pregnant. Some poor guy from a religious colony Doro controlled in Pennsylvania. Doro had people all over.
When he decided that I had bought enough, he paid for it with a check for more money than I had ever seen in my life. He had some kind of by-mail arrangement with the banks. A lot of banks. He ordered everything delivered to the hotel where he was staying. I waited until we were out of the store to ask him why he’d done that.
“I want you to stay with me for a few days,” he told me.
I was surprised, but I just looked at him. “Okay.”
“You have something to get used to. And for your own sake, I want you to take your time. Do all your yelling and screaming now, while it can’t hurt you.”
“Oh, Lord. What are you going to give me to yell and scream about?”
“You’re getting married.”
I looked at him. He’d said those words or others like them to Rina once. To Emma heaven knew how many times. Evidently, my time had come. “You mean to you, don’t you?”
“No.”
I wasn’t afraid until he said that. “Who, then!”
“One of my sons. Not related to you at all, by the way.”
“A stranger? Some total stranger and you want me to marry him?”
“You will marry him.” He didn’t use that tone much with me—or with anyone, I think. It was reserved for when he was telling you to do something he would kill you for not doing. A quiet, chilly tone of voice.
“Doro, why couldn’t you be him? Take him and let me marry you.”
“Kill him, you mean.”
“You kill people all the time.”
He shook his head. “I wonder if you’re going to grow out of that.”
“Out of what?”
“Your total disregard for human life—except for your own, of course.”
“Oh, come on! Shit, the devil himself is going to preach me a sermon!”
“Maybe transition will change your thinking.”
“If it does, I don’t see how I’ll be able to stand you.”
He smiled. “You don’t realize it, but that might really be a problem. You’re an experimental model. Your predecessors have had trouble with me.”
“Don’t talk about me like I was a new car or something.” I frowned and looked at him. “What kind of trouble?”
“Never mind. I won’t talk about you like you were a new car.”
“Wait a minute,” I said more seriously. “I mean it, Doro. What kind of trouble?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are any of them still alive?”
He still didn’t answer.
I took a deep breath, stared out the window. “Okay, so how do I keep from having trouble with you?”
He put an arm around me, and for some reason, instead of flinching away, I moved over close to him. “I’m not threatening you,” he said.
“Yes you are. Tell me about this son of yours.”
He drove me over to Palo Verde Avenue, where the rich people lived. When he stopped, it was in front of a three-story white stucco mansion. Spanish tile roof, great arched doorway, clusters of palm trees and carefully trimmed shrubs, acres of front lawn, one square block of house and grounds.
“This is his house,” said Doro.
“Damn,” I muttered. “He owns it? The whole thing?”
“Free and clear.”
“Oh, Lord.” Something occurred to me suddenly. “Is he white?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Doro. Man, what are you trying to do to me?”
“Get you some help. You’re going to need it.”
“What the hell can he do for me that you can’t? God, he’ll take one look at me and … Doro, just the fact that he lives in this part of town tells me that he’s the wrong guy. The first time he says something stupid to me, we’ll kill each other.”
“I wouldn’t pick any fights with him if I were you. He’s one of my actives.”
An active: One of Doro’s people who’s already gone through transition and turned into whatever kind of monster Doro has bred him to be. Emma was one kind of active. Rina, in spite of her “good” family, was only a latent. She never quite made it to transition, so her ability was undeveloped. She couldn’t control it or use it deliberately. All she could do was pass it on to me and put up with the mental garbage it exposed her to now and then. Doro said that was why she was crazy.
“What kind of active is he?” I asked.
“The most ordinary kind. A telepath. My best telepath—at least until you go through.”
“You want him to read my mind?”
“He won’t have much choice about that. If you and he are in the same house, sooner or later he will, as you’ll read his eventually.”
“You mean he doesn’t have any more control over his ability than I do over mine?”
“He has a great deal more control than you. That’s why he’ll be able to help you during and after your transition. But none of my telepaths can shield out the rest of the world entirely. Sometimes things that they don’t want to sense filter through to them. More often, though, they just get nosy and snoop through other people’s thoughts.”
“Is it because he’s an active that you won’t take him? No moralizing this time.”
“Yes. He’s too rare and too valuable to kill so carelessly. So are you. You and he aren’t quite the same kind of creature, but I think you’re alike enough to be complementary.”
“Does he know about me?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He feels just about the way you do.”
“Great.” I slumped back in the seat. “Doro … will you tell me, why marriage? I don’t have to marry him for him to give me whatever help I’m supposed to need. Hell, I don’t even have to marry him to have a baby by him, if that’s what you want.”
“That might be what I want once I’ve seen how you come through transition. All I want now is to get the two of you to realize that you might as well accept each other. I want you tied together in a way you’ll both respect in spite of yourselves.”
“You mean we’ll be less likely to kill each other if we’re married.”
“Well … he’ll be less likely to kill you. The match is going to be pretty uneven for a while. I’d keep low if I were you.”
“Isn’t there any way at all that I can get out of this?”
“No.”
I felt like crying. I couldn’t remember when I’d done that last. And the worst of it was, I knew that, as bad as I felt now, it was nothing to what I’d be feeling when I actually met this son. Somehow, I’d never thought of myself as just another of Doro’s breeders—just another Goddamn brood mare. Rina was. Emma was for sure. But me, I was special. Sure. Doro had said it himself. An experiment. Apparently an experiment that had failed several times before. And Doro was trying to shore it up now by pairing me with this stranger.
“What’s his name?”
“Karl. Karl Larkin.”
“Yeah. When do I have to marry him?”
“In a week or two.”
I would have put up more of a fight if I had known how to fight Doro. I never much wanted to fight him before. I remember, once when he was staying with Rina, an electronics company out in Carson—one of the businesses that he controlled—was losing money. Doro had the guy who ran the company for him come to our house to talk. Even then I knew that was a hell of a put-down to the guy. Our house was a shack compared to what he was used to. Anyway, Doro wanted to find out whether the guy was stealing, having real trouble, or was just plain incompetent. It turned out the guy was stealing. Big salary, pretty young wife, big house in Beverly Hills, and he was stealing from Doro. Stupid.
The guy was Doro’s—born Doro’s, just like me. And every dime of his original investment had been Doro’s. Still, he cursed and complained and found reasons why, with all the work he’d done, he deserved more money. Then he ran.
Doro had shrugged. He had eaten dinner with us, got up, stretched, and finally gone out after the guy. The next day, he came back wearing the guy’s body.
You didn’t cheat him. You didn’t steal from him or lie to him. You didn’t disobey him. He’d find you out, then he’d kill you. How could you fight that? He wasn’t telepathic, but I had never seen anyone get a lie past him. And I had never known anyone to escape him. He did have some kind of tracking sense. He locked in on people. Anybody he’d met once, he could find again. He thought about them, and he knew which way to go to get to them. Once he was close to them, they didn’t have a chance.
I put my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”
He took me back to his hotel and bought me lunch. I hadn’t had breakfast, so I was hungry. Then we went up to his room and made love. Really. I would call it screwing when I had to do it with his damn fool son. I had been in love with Doro since I was twelve. He had made me wait until I was eighteen. Now he was going to marry me off to somebody else. I probably loved him in self-defense. Hating him was too dangerous.
We had a week together. He decided to take me to Karl when I started passing out with the mental stuff I was picking up. It surprised him the first time it happened. Evidently I was closer to transition than he had thought.