“I’m so sorry, Colonel,” she said to the Army man. “They’re all lent out right now. It’s been such a popular book. I’ll try to get one for you by tonight. In the meantime, let me check those other books out for you.”
The colonel responded to her warm tone with a slight relaxation of posture. The lightening of his expression was not yet sufficient to call a smile. While Alexandra stamped his books, she glanced through her lashes at the window again. Ben and his unter-cavemen had separated and now walked in different directions. Her twin James aimed straight toward the café’s back door. It was, unfortunately, too late to escape.
She handed Colonel Fikes his books and smiled again, and this time he did smile in return. He would be back. She knew her customers, and, for better or worse, she knew men.
The colonel headed through the adjoining bookshop toward the front door, even as brother James pushed through the back into the café.
“Good morning, Sandy,” James said cheerfully.
Her twin used her childhood nickname only to annoy her. Since these days he preferred the proletarian Jim, she paid him back in kind. “Hello, James.”
James stared at her customers significantly. Despite the Army’s prohibition on civilian assembly, and the loss of power that made it impossible to open her café (only locally grown herbal or mormon tea anyway, alas), she could still let up to seven civilians and any number of soldiers into the bookshop. She no longer sold books or videos these days, with no new stock arriving in the foreseeable future, but she did lend them out, and since the demise of TV and radio, her store had always been busy. “Can we talk?” said James.
Alexandra waved at her assistant, deep in conversation with a soldier, to signal her departure. “Come on,” she said to James. She led him through the door marked Private, into her stockroom’s little office. “What do you want, James?”
“We need your help,” he said.
We meant Ben, of course. How flattering that when Biggest Dick caveman needed a woman’s help, he still thought of his ex-wife—though he was too cowardly to show up in person.
“I can’t imagine what use I could be to you deputies.”
“The Army stole some things from us,” James said, “and we need to get them back.”
“You mean your weapons.”
“Sandy,” James said, “we’ve been protecting you with those weapons.”
“Isn’t the Army going to take over that job?”
“Are they acting as if they came here to fight eetees?” James’s foot jittered suddenly as Alexandra fixed him with a frown. “And what will you do when you need protection from the Army?”
The soldiers had come yesterday: hard men, and a few women, too, in desert camo and heavy boots, laden with guns. She hadn’t liked them. But they hadn’t dragged her off to “quarantine.” When the very first tanks rolled into Lewisville, Alexandra had undertaken serious thinking on the subject of boss cavemen and the very biggest rocks. By the time the soldiers showed up at her door, her shop and house had been cleared of all eetee artifacts. She had smiled and offered them tea.
They had frightened her nevertheless.
“I don’t particularly like this… occupation,” she said. “But the soldiers are acting under orders from our government.”
“Our government?” said James. “The eetees nuked our government. These folks are enforcers for a military dictatorship.”
“And just what is Sheriff wonderful Ben Gundersen setting up? How much has he been promoting your precious civil rights and rule of law?”
James’s foot jittered again. Poor James. He fancied himself such an independent thinker. But when the other cavemen start heaving around rocks and grunting, you have to join in. Otherwise they might think you have a really little dick.
Okay, so it wasn’t the actual, physical dick (obviously, in Ben’s case!) that determined where you stood in Neanderthal hierarchy. It was all the subtle, almost imperceptible inflections of display, of action and reaction, dominance and deference, intimidation and submission, and meanwhile the metaphorical dick grows bigger and bigger. Fear, manipulation, and mind control. The boss caveman is created by attitude, his, theirs. Hers—although she had at last won free.
“I grant you,” James said, “Ben’s gone overboard sometimes. But he’s kept the town together in difficult times, he’s really done a tremendous job. He’s preserved… civilization here, when the war turned the rest of our country into rubble.”
Alexandra knew there was some truth in what her brother said. Behavior that was bad for a marriage might be less bad for a town. Because of Ben’s diligent ruthlessness, she could sleep at night, she could still open up her store and serve customers. But it wasn’t the whole story, was it?
“Order,” she said, “is not the same as civilization. Order is about the strong controlling the weak. Civilization is about protecting the weaker from the stronger, about us all living together in empathy, cultivating the connections between us—”
“Sandy,” said James, “empathy is what we’re after. We want the Army folks to empathize with our point of view.”
“With the aid of weapons,” she said sharply. James made no reply, but he jiggled his foot again. “I don’t want part of it. I’m a civilized person. I won’t participate in violence against fellow human beings, moreover against people who are serving my country. And I thought I had made myself clear. I have no interest in doing anything for or because of Ben, ever, I want to have no connection with him at all, ever again, and this is his plan. Don’t tell me it isn’t.”
“Don’t make this personal—”
“It is personal. It’s all personal. You want to belong to a cause that’s bigger than you and, and—then you don’t have to think about your actions. Your violence is good, theirs is bad. And then it’s a big flashy Hollywood story, small-town heroes fight off aliens and the bad Army guys at the same time. But it all begins with you, James, and me, and Ben. Good and evil begin in each person’s heart and mind. That’s the story.”
James began to laugh. “You and Ben were a Hollywood story, all right. The problem was, you both wanted top billing.” Alexandra flushed, enraged at his mockery, yet another betrayal of her, his twin sister. He ducked his head and said, hastily, waving his hands, “No, no, forget about Ben, okay?”
“How can I? This is all about him, and his ego. He just can’t stand not being the one on top!”
“It’s only about Ben for you, Sandy. And doesn’t that mean you’re making it all about you?” That stopped her. James went on: “It’s the town that needs your help. Your neighbors. Individuals. It’s your choice to do good and not evil to them.”
“And you,” she said coldly, “are so sure this is for their own good.”