“Why d’you think?” Jennings sounded hopeless, too. “I was hungry. I was broke. Haven’t hardly worked since that goddamn thing blew up. Had to get me food some kind of way. So I figured, what the hell, and I went and did it.”
If he’d just stolen food, they might well have turned him loose. They might even have let him keep the canned meat. Even in cases like his, where the hungry thief pulled a gun to get what he wanted, juries often didn’t care to convict. Too many jurors were either in the same boat themselves or had friends and relatives who were. But… “Why did you have the checker empty out the register, too?”
Jennings shrugged. “Like I said before, what the hell? I was already a robber. After I ate what I took, I could buy some more food with the money.” His mouth twisted. “You guys’ll be feeding me now, won’t you?”
Colin and Gabe looked at each other. The way things were these days, nobody at any level of government wanted more than the barest number of prisoners locked up. Feeding and guarding prisoners cost money, and money had been as hard to come by as work since the eruption. After a longish pause, Gabe answered, “That’s not up to us. That’s up to the DA.”
Although Colin didn’t blame him for passing the buck, he did add, “We’ll have to hold you till the DA makes up his mind—a few days, anyhow.”
Victor Jennings brightened. “A few days my belly won’t be scraping my backbone, anyway. I know it won’t be fancy food, but there oughta be enough of it.” He went off to his cell a happy man.
“What does it say about us when somebody wants to get locked up so he can eat?” Colin asked when he was gone.
“Says we’re fucked, man,” Gabe told him, and he couldn’t very well argue.
VIII
Naked on the bed with Vanessa, Bronislav Nedic stretched luxuriantly. As the afterglow faded, she found herself chilly. He seemed plenty warm. Maybe that was because of the fur on his hair and belly: no surprise, what with how thick his beard grew. Vanessa didn’t mind it; she found hairy guys more a turn-on than the reverse. Or maybe he seemed warm enough just because he was a guy. Something was wrong with half the human race’s thermostats, though which half’s had sparked arguments for thousands of years.
He rolled toward her. Did he feel like another round? She wasn’t sure she did. But instead of reaching for her, he asked a question out of the blue: “Do you ever finish story you started during last winter?” His English was excellent, but he often left out articles.
“Huh?” Vanessa said brilliantly—no, she hadn’t expected that.
Bronislav let his patience show. “Do you ever finish story?” he repeated, and went on, “I see—I saw—in Playboy story your brother wrote. Pretty good story. Not great story, but pretty good.”
“Mrmm.” Vanessa ground her teeth instead of answering. She thought it was a dumb story. She thought almost everything her kid brother wrote was dumb, so that came as no great surprise. She didn’t mind that Bronislav had looked at the Playboy—and, no doubt, not just for the story. Men were going to look at women, and that was all there was to it. She did mind that Marshall had got a fat check from the magazine. It griped her belly as much as bad fish would have.
“You do not finish story.” This time, Bronislav was telling, not asking.
“Well, what if I didn’t?” Vanessa flared. “I didn’t like the way it was going, so I put it away till I figured out how to fix it.” She hadn’t figured it out yet. She hadn’t tried for a while. When she had time, she had no inspiration. When she wanted to do something with it, she was too busy.
“You should finish,” Bronislav said. “If your brother can do, you also can do.” Since Vanessa was convinced that was true, she found herself nodding. But then Bronislav asked, “Do you—will you—let me see what you do so far?”
She didn’t want to. Then he’d see she hadn’t done much more since the last time he looked at it. But if she told him no, she’d also have to tell him why not. Or, more likely, she wouldn’t have to. You didn’t need to belong to the FBI to work that one out for yourself. And so, with no great warmth, she said, “Um, okay.”
Naked, he padded out to the dinette and brought the laptop back to bed. Since the power was on, he plugged it in. Then he said, “You find story for me. I have no GPS to find where you put things on your computer.”
The way she organized her hard disk seemed perfectly logical to her. She quickly called up the story, not wanting Bronislav to see it lived in the same folder as one called “Strange Fish,” which she also hadn’t come close to finishing. Feckless lunges at fiction. Marshall could get things done, get them out, and get them sold, goddammit. Why couldn’t she? She didn’t know why. All she knew was that she didn’t.
She felt nakeder while he was reading her prose than she had with him on top of her a few minutes earlier. Sex came naturally and, for guys, just about always had a payoff at the end. Writing, on the other hand, was almost the definition of an unnatural act.
He gave the screen his usual close attention. He didn’t do anything halfway, which was one of the things that attracted her. She was like that herself, even if she’d never crawled under barbed wire clutching a Kalashnikov.
When he got done, he asked, “Why do you not go on more?”
“I couldn’t find a way to end it that I liked,” Vanessa said. That had the virtue of being at least partly true. The rest of the truth was that her enthusiasm for the story had dribbled away once she got past her opening burst. Sitting at the laptop till beads of blood came out on your forehead seemed much too much like work.
Bronislav made three suggestions. They were quick and neat and close together, like a burst from his assault rifle when he was fighting the Fascist Croats. Vanessa was sure one of them wouldn’t work, but the other two easily could. The only thing wrong with them was that she hadn’t thought of them herself.
“Maybe I’ll try one of those,” she said after a pause she hoped wasn’t too awkward.
“Or do something you think of. Only do!” Bronislav said. “Your brother does, so why not you?”
Yeah, why not me? she wondered. Envy of Marshall was part of what had got her writing, or trying to write, in the first place. The other part was hating the crap she had to deal with at the widget works. She was still jealous of Marshall. She still hated the crap Nick Gorczany and the other linguistically challenged nerds at the widget works dropped on her desk.
But writing stories—all the way through, from beginning to end—proved harder than it looked, at least for her. It wasn’t a way out, a way to keep from having to go in to the widget works every day. That was what she wanted. That was what she needed, before dealing with idiots forty hours a week plus overtime drove her postal.
Could she explain that to Bronislav? She felt herself yawning. Not tonight, she couldn’t. She was too damn sleepy. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Bronislav took the hint. He shut down the computer, made his own ablutions, and came to bed with her. She turned off the light.
When she woke earlier than she wanted to the next morning, Bronislav was sitting up beside her. His face, illuminated from below, looked scary—faces weren’t meant to be lit that way. But the way he was lit wasn’t what bothered Vanessa. “What are you looking at?” she asked sharply—she didn’t want him or anybody else snooping on her computer.
“Oh, good morning. I am sorry if I bother you,” he answered. “I am reading your story again. I managed to find it, you see.” He turned the screen her way. Sure enough, there was the story, or as much of it as she’d done. “You need to write ending. It will be outstanding. It will be amazing.” That was his all-purpose word of praise.