Read Online The Visible Man and Other Stories by Gardner Dozois - Free Book Online Page B

thing or another knocks them off. They become easy to touch off, like tinder. Most of them don’t change their minds in the middle, though, like that fat old sow.”
    Wilbur Phipps, who had been leaning on the counter listening, ventured the opinion that modern medical science had never produced anything even half as good as the old-fashioned mustard plaster. Everett flared up instantly.
    “You ever bejesus try one?” Phipps demanded.
    “No, and I don’t bejesus intend to!” Everett said.
    Jacobs turned toward Sussmann. “Wheah you been, this early in the day?” he asked. “A’n’t like you to haul yourself out before noon.”
    “Up at the Factory. Over to West Mills.”
    “What was up? Another hearing?”
    “Yup. Didn’t stick—they aren’t going to be injuncted.”
    “They never will be,” Jacobs said. “They got too much money, too many friends in Augusta. The Board’ll never touch them.”
    “I don’t believe that,” Sussmann said. Jacobs grunted and sipped his coffee.
    “As Christ’s my judge,” Everett was saying, in a towering rage, “I’ll never understand you people, not if I live to be two hundred, not if I get to be so old my ass falls off and I have to lug it around in a handcart. I swear to God. Some of you ain’ got a pot to piss in, so goddamned poor you can’t afford to buy a bottle of aspirins, let alone, let alone pay your doctor bills from the past half-million years, and yet you go out to some godforsaken hick town too small to turn a horse around in proper and see an unlicensed practitioner, a goddamn back-woods quack, an un mit igated phony, and pay through the nose so this witchdoctor can assault you with yarb potions and poultices, and stick leeches on your ass, for all I know—” Jacobs lost track of the conversation. He studied a bee that was bumbling along the putty-and-plaster edge of the storefront window, swimming through the thick and dusty sunlight, looking for a way out. He felt numb, distanced from reality. The people around him looked increasingly strange. He found that it took an effort of will to recognize them at all, even Sussmann, even Everett. It scared him. These were people Jacobs saw every day of his life. Some of them he didn’t actually like —not in the way that big-city folk thought of liking someone—but they were all his neighbors. They belonged here, they were a part of his existence, and that carried its own special intimacy. But today he was beginning to see them as an intolerant sophisticate from the city might see them: dull, provincial, sunk in an iron torpor that masqueraded as custom and routine. That was valid, in its way, but it was a grossly one-sided picture, ignoring a thousand virtues, compensations and kindnesses. But that was the way he was seeing them. As aliens. As strangers.
    Distractedly, Jacobs noticed that Everett and Sussmann were making ready to leave. “No rest for the weary,” Everett was saying, and Jacobs found himself nodding unconsciously in agreement. Swamped by a sudden rush of loneliness, he invited both men home for dinner that night. They accepted, Everett with the qualification that he’d have to see what his wife had planned. Then they were gone, and Jacobs found himself alone at the counter.
    He knew that he should have gone back to work also; he had some more jobs to pick up, and a delivery to make. But he felt very tired, too flaccid and heavy to move, as if some tiny burrowing animal had gnawed away his bones, as if he’d been hamstrung and hadn’t realized it. He told himself that it was because he was hungry; he was running himself down, as Carol had always said he someday would. So he dutifully ordered a bowl of chili.
    The chili was murky, amorphous stuff, bland and lukewarm. Listlessly, he spooned it up.
    No rest for the weary.
    “You know what I was nuts about when I was a kid?” Jacobs suddenly observed to Wilbur Phipps. “Rafts. I was a’ways making rafts out of old planks and sheet