Lightspeed: Year One

found all her things gone and a note on the kitchen table saying she wouldn’t be back, because she’d found true love with Jebediah Wilkins. She said she’d be praying for me, oh yes she would, praying that I’d change my sinful ways before the Lord struck me down and I burned in hellfire forever.

So naturally I was not happy to have a preacher at my front door, staring at a space cucumber staggering in circles around my living room. The one time I’ve got unwanted company, and that’s when the cucumbers have to go and do something different. I wish I could say I handled the whole thing calmly, but I didn’t. I flat-out panicked. I’m not sure I’ve ever moved that fast before; I got the chain off the door and grabbed Humphreys and yanked him inside, and grabbed my gun off the shelf and aimed it at him. “The safety’s still on,” I said, raising my voice over the cucumbers’ singing, “but if you do anything funny, it won’t be, I’ll blow your head off, I swear to God—”

Humphreys held his hands up and tried to say something, but it came out as a squeak. He was shaking worse than the cucumbers ever have, and I knew the cucumber behind me was too, although I couldn’t turn around to look, because I had to keep an eye on Humphreys. Don’t ask me what I thought he was going to do: go to the government, or start raving about Satan and try to burn my house down. All I knew was that I couldn’t let him leave, once he’d seen the cucumber, and I’d never killed a man before and didn’t want to, but I had no idea how else I was going to get out of this one, except that Sam was expecting Humphreys back with the crop and if Humphreys didn’t come back Sam would call the police and—

You can see how clearly I was thinking. About all I could figure was that I was doomed. I couldn’t see any way out that didn’t involve a jail cell or worse.

Humphreys found his voice, then. “Please,” he said. “Welly, don’t shoot me. I don’t—I don’t—”

It occurred to me right then that if I could get that cucumber back into the den, where it belonged, maybe I could convince him he’d just been seeing things. And he’d just bought a quarter bag from me, which made him a felon too. He wouldn’t want his flock to know about that, except Sam. Preachers may be hypocrites, but most of them try to hide it. I had some leverage here.

I started calming down. The cucumber in the living room stopped singing, too, so it was a little easier to think. “Sit down,” I said. “Right there. With your back to the wall.” He did, just slid down that wall with his hands still up, and I said, “If you don’t move, you’ll be fine. Got it?” He nodded, his eyes still big, but he was watching me and the gun, not the cucumber. “Close your eyes,” I said, and he did—he was still shaking, you’d better believe it—and I backed up, keeping the gun on him, and scooped that crazy lost cucumber back under my arm so I could take it back into the den.

But it picked that very instant to go sploosh, and Humphreys’ eyes flew open at the extra noise—I guess he couldn’t help it—and he saw that bag of cucumber gravy, and he turned green and gulped and whatever he’d had to eat that day came back up, all over his lap and my carpet. While he was heaving I backed up quick and opened the door to the den and tossed the gravy bag inside, and slammed the door shut again. I don’t know if Humphreys saw that or not; he was busy reviewing the contents of his stomach. When he’d finished losing his breakfast he looked up at me, his face wet the way it gets after you’ve thrown up, and said, “I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I’ll clean it up. If you bring me some soap and water and some rags—”

“Never mind that,” I said. “I’ll clean it up myself. You just get out of here, Reverend. You get out of here and bring Sam his medicine. You didn’t see anything unusual, you hear me?”

He shook his head. “What was that?”

“It wasn’t anything.” One of the other cucumbers stopped singing, and I said, “You haven’t seen or heard anything. Go on home, now.” He just looked at me. The third cucumber shut up, so the house was very quiet, all of a sudden. I still had the gun trained on Humphreys; the safety was still on. I clicked it off and said, “Reverend, you need to go home now.”

He swallowed. He’d stopped shaking. When he spoke again, his voice was a lot calmer than it had been before. “Mr. Smith, I’ve been in front of guns before. The worst you can do to me is kill me. I have to know one thing: That—that creature I didn’t see, is it dangerous?”

“Something you didn’t see can’t be dangerous, Reverend. Go home.”

He shook his head again. “I wish that were true, but it’s not. What we pretend not to see is what harms us. And if anyone’s in danger—”

“Nobody’s in danger but you, Reverend.” I was starting to panic again. This guy wasn’t going to let himself be convinced that the cucumber had just been his imagination. “As far as I know, the creature you didn’t see isn’t dangerous to anybody. Now go home!”

He just looked at me. He looked very sad. “If it’s not dangerous, then why did you kill it?”

I lost it, then. Everything piled into my head in that one instant: how Nancy Ann had told me I was evil and how she’d left me even though I tried to make her happy, and all the work I’d done over the years to try to keep those cucumbers comfortable, to keep them from shaking. Jim Humphreys didn’t understand a single goddamn thing. “I didn’t kill it! It just died! That’s what they do! They die! That’s how they die! They’ve been coming here to die for ten years and you don’t know a single thing about it, but you think you know everything, don’t you? You think those creatures are the minions of Satan and you think I’m going to hell for taking care of them and for having pictures of naked women on the walls and for selling pot, and you think you can come in here and —”

“Welly!” he said. He sounded like I’d hit him over the head with one of those beanbag chairs. “Welly, if I thought you were going to hell for selling marijuana, why would I have come here to buy some for Sam?”

“How do I know? So you could preach to me about it! So you could preach to Sam and tell him he’s going to hell! He probably confessed that he’d been smoking because he’s dying and scared for his soul, because you people have your hooks in him just like you got them into my wife. I bet you smoke yourself, don’t you? I bet you stand up every Sunday and preach about how drugs are a sin and everybody has to give you their money so they’ll be saved, and then you come out here and spend that money on pot for yourself. All those fives and singles came from the collection plate, didn’t they? Little old ladies giving you their last dollar and then you turn around and spend it on —”

“It’s Sam’s money,” Jim Humphreys said. “The marijuana’s for him, Welly. You can call and ask him. I have a phone in the car.”

“I’m not done!” I said. “You just listen to me.” It felt awfully good to yell at him like that, to have a man on the floor in front of me and to be able to point a gun at him and tell him exactly what I thought of him and have him not be able to do anything about it. It felt better than anything had felt in a long time. “I know about you people! Don’t think I don’t! I know how you ministers act in the pulpit, trying to scare ordinary folks who are just trying to get by and do the best they can, and then you turn around and you run off with people’s wives after you’ve had the goddamned fucking nerve to make all that noise about the devil! Your kind think they’re better than the rest of the world, don’t they? Don’t they, Reverend? You think you can tell me everything about who I am and how I should live my life, like you’ve got God in your pocket. Your people think that all they have to do to be saved is to put somebody else down—”

“My people,” said Jim Humphreys, very quietly, “believe in welcoming all strangers as Christ.” I squinted at him, because I couldn’t believe how calm he was, and he said, “Even strangers who aren’t human. I don’t think I need to tell you anything about that, Welly. I think you’ve been welcoming strangers as Christ for—what did you say? Ten years? And if you’re doing a better job with them than you’re doing with me, well, that’s because you think I’m not a stranger. You think you know who I am. But you’re wrong, Welly. I’m a stranger, too.”

I was ashamed, then, of how good I’d felt when I was yelling at him. And then I got angry again because he’d made me ashamed, which was what Nancy Ann and Jebediah had always tried to do. “High and mighty, aren’t you? I bet you think I’m the scum of the earth—”

“I think you’re scared,” he said. “I think that if I were in your place, I’d be scared too. And I think it must be awfully hard, having to watch things die like that for ten years, without being able to talk to anybody about it.”

I got a lump in my throat when he said that. It shocked me, because I hadn’t cried since Nancy Ann left, and I was damned if I was going to start in front of this preacher. “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like I know them. They all look the same and they all die the same way, and I don’t know how to talk to them. This is where they come and I do the best for them I can, but I don’t get attached, Reverend. So don’t get all sentimental.”

He smiled, sitting there on the floor in his own puke. “All right. I won’t. But would you mind if I cleaned up the floor here?”

Kicking him out hadn’t worked. I might as well let him clean up his own mess. “Go on,” I said, and used the gun to wave him into the kitchen. “Bucket and rags are under the sink.” I watched while he filled the bucket with soapy