IGMS Issue 19 Page 13

  Luckily, the assembly started before Augie could think of some way to make my life miserable. The program was actually pretty cool. They had five real football players on stage. These guys made Augie look like -- well, they made him look like he made me look. That's how big they were.

  They talked about stuff like studying hard and staying in school. It wasn't really a message I needed to hear. I did okay in school, and I didn't have any plans to drop out of seventh grade to enter a life of crime.

  They also talked about eating good food, and paying attention to nutrition. The biggest player in the group held up a sack of oranges in one hand and a head of lettuce in the other.

  "This is what your body needs."

  Another guy lifted a two-liter bottle of cola. "This isn't what you need."

  The third guy showed us a picture of a cow. "Balanced meals are important," he said.

  I zoned out as they went over all the food groups. I knew that stuff. They also warned us about steroids and all that stuff.

  "Kids," one of the players said, picking up a small bottle of clear liquid, "this will do all sorts of evil things to your body. It just isn't worth it."

  "Your young bodies are still growing and changing," another of the player said. "There's no telling how much this stuff could mess you up."

  When the assembly ended, I realized I'd survived 45 minutes sitting right next to Augie. For the first time in my life, I was actually eager to get back to my class. Before I could stand, Augie grabbed my shoulder and said, "Come on. Let's meet them."

  "What?"

  He pointed to the stage. "Let's sneak back there and meet the players. I've never met a real football star."

  "But we'll get in trouble." I didn't feel like spending the next week in after-school detention, or writing a three-page essay.

  Augie tightened his grip enough to let me know I'd find myself in even more trouble -- or at least, more painful trouble -- if I didn't do what he wanted.

  "Why do you care if I come?"

  "I might need a distraction."

  I didn't like the sound of that. I could picture him ripping my arm off and batting me to the ground with it. Then he could stroll past the teachers who were busy trying to stop the spurting blood. As I was imagining various ways I could be used as a distraction, Augie dragged me out the side exit and down the hall to the door that led back-stage.

  After we slipped in without getting caught, I relaxed a bit. It would be amazing to see the players face to face -- okay, face to bellybutton -- even if I got in trouble later. Maybe this would turn out all right. It would definitely be cool to get an autograph.

  Except, there was nobody there. The players must have headed out the instant the assembly ended. Oh boy -- Augie was going to be unhappy about that. But at least it meant I'd be able to get to my class quickly enough to avoid trouble.

  "Hey, wait," Augie said. He lumbered over to the far corner of the room, where all the music stands had been shoved. "Someone forgot a bag. Cool. Maybe there's a football or something in there."

  Augie slid a large canvas bag out from under a folding chair. He unzipped it and started pulling stuff out. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I was pretty happy he was distracted.

  He tossed out a bunch of clothes, and some posters like the ones that they'd put up in the classrooms.

  "Anything interesting?" I guess I was sort of curious.

  He shook his head. "Nothing good." He started to pull his hand out, then reached in again. "Wait. What's this?"

  He pulled out a small bottle. There was one word on the label, right beneath where his thumb curled around it. GROWTH. Augie looked at it the way a starving kid looks at a whole pepperoni pizza.

  "Be careful," I said. 'You don't know what's in there. And you don't know how much to take. You're a lot smaller --"

  "I'm what?" Augie said. "Are you calling me small?"

  I managed to gulp and say, "No," at the same time. It hurt my throat. I'd just wanted to warn him that the right dose might depend on how much he weighed.

  Augie unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle to his lips. I had a tough decision to make. I could try to talk him out of it, and maybe get hurt. Or just keep my mouth shut. One bottle couldn't do all that much harm, could it? It was a pretty small bottle, and he was a pretty big kid.

  Yeah, it could do a whole lot of harm. It could be super concentrated. For all we knew, there might be 100 doses.

  I walked over and grabbed Augie's arm. "Stop!" It was like grabbing a fence post.

  Augie stared at me the way I'd stare at a chihuahua that was tugging at me sneaker laces. "What are you doing?"

  "Don't drink it. You don't know what'll happen. They're all grown up already. This stuff is for them. You're still growing normally. Why mess with that?"

  A strange expressions flashed across Augie's face. I could almost see him thinking. I shuddered as he nodded. "Yeah. You're right. I'm growing. But you're not. You need this more than I do." His grin was pure evil now.

  "Why don't we share it?" I couldn't believe my mind was still working well enough to find a way to stall him. Half the bottle would do less damage to me than a whole bottle.

  "Not a bad idea." Augie drank down his share of the liquid. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  I tried to spin away, but he grabbed my jaw with his free hand. "Open wide."

  "No!"

  As he moved the bottle toward my mouth, I kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. I think he was more startled than hurt. Either way, the kick was enough loosen his grip. I raced for the door. Augie was right behind me. Just when I was about to grab the knob, I felt myself rise into the air. Augie had me by the back of my neck.

  He turned his wrist so I was facing him. "You're gonna suffer now, shrimp," he said.

  I braced myself for a flood of pain. Then I started to move away from Augie. Which made no sense, since I was dangling from his grip like a cheap sweater on a clothes hook. But I was definitely moving. Somehow, my body was inching away from his.

  I looked around for an explanation. When I found it, I was even happier that I hadn't drank any of that liquid.

  Augie's arm was getting longer. The growth stuff was working. I was also moving higher. I guess his legs were growing, too. Everything was growing.

  No. Not everything.

  That's the second thing I realized. As I watched his fingers curl around the bottle and his arm extend from his sleeve, I knew it wasn't his whole body that was reacting to the stuff he drank. Not his flesh, veins, or muscles. It was just his bones.

  Augie wasn't all that smart, but I guess he knew something was wrong. And I guess he forgot all about me, because he let go of my neck. I dropped from his grip and hit the ground hard, but I was happy to be free, and really happy that I hadn't taken a swig of that liquid.

  He was staring at his hands now, as his fingers grew even longer. He still had the bottle. When his thumb shifted, I saw another word above GROWTH. I guess I already knew what it was. BONE. Yeah, Augie hadn't found the football guys growth formula. He'd found one for bone growth.

  His bones were sure growing.

  His head was swelling, too. The flesh stretched tight on his face as his skull got bigger. He looked like one of those really old celebrities who'd made too many visits to the plastic surgeon.

  When he opened his mouth to scream, I noticed that even his teeth were growing.

  Well, I guess Augie got his wish. He was a lot bigger. But the growth seemed to have stopped, now. It's good for him he didn't drink the whole bottle. I don't think his skin could have stretched that far without tearing. He was pretty much pushed to the limit. I shuddered at the thought of his bones bursting through his flesh.

  He was still staring at his hands, but I don't think he was seeing anything right now. I was pretty sure he was numbed by the shock.

  "Augie? Hey, Augie?" I didn't bother to add, "Are you okay?" because that would have been one of the top ten stupidest questions of all t
ime.

  He didn't answer me.

  "I'll go get the nurse," I said. It was the only thing I could think to do. Not that it would help much. I opened the door, then stopped and went back. I pried the bottle from his hand, found the cap, screwed it back on, and put the bottle in my pocket.

  The stuff was obviously dangerous. But what if I just took one drop? Yeah, one little drop at a time. Just enough to make me grow a little bit. That would work. I knew I could handle it. I was a lot smarter than Augie. And one day, I'd be just as big.

  InterGalactic Interview With Andy Duncan

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  SCHWEITZER: I suppose the standard opening question is: What caused you to write all this weird stuff?

  DUNCAN: [Laughs.] I didn't start writing fiction with any seriousness until I was in my late twenties. I dabbled with it in high school. I dabbled some more when I was an undergrad. Then I just put it aside. I didn't think I was very good at it and I didn't think I had any interest in doing it either. I used to joke that I was the only journalist in America who did not have a novel in the drawer. I did not secretly long to be a fiction writer or a playwright; but when the Mac Classic came out, I got a home computer. I bought it off the back dock of Carolina Biological Supply in Burlington, North Carolina. I was almost like the woman in You Can't Take It With You who writes plays because the typewriter got delivered to her by mistake. I had this nice home computer sitting there, with all these nice word-processing programs, and I started noodling around.

  The stories that came out were, for one thing, better than what I was writing as a teenager, and I thought, "Gosh, all that journalism, all those interviews, all that dialogue and description, structure and stuff I've been writing all these years has helped the fiction. How about that?"

  Also, the stories that were coming out increasingly had supernatural elements or weird elements. Then I was reading a lot of Fred Chappell and John Kessel and Orson Scott Card, all of whom lived around where I was living in North Carolina. So then, armed with these stories, I started applying to creative writing programs, and I got into the one at North Carolina State where John Kessel was teaching. That was the slippery slope right there, because, far from discouraging me from writing this sort of thing, he actively encouraged it, and he said, "Have you read this?" and "Have you read this?" and "Have you heard of Terry Bisson?" "Have you heard of Howard Waldrop?" He was assuring me that there was indeed a market for what I was doing. There was a genre for it. That was, I guess, the start. I haven't really had any discouragement to stop writing this stuff either.

  SCHWEITZER: You seem to have come into the field, in the '90s, influenced by very contemporary writers, like Card and Kessel and Chappell. But did you also grow up reading the fiction of 50 or more years ago, Lovecraft and Heinlein and all that?

  DUNCAN: I had been a serious reader of this stuff for many years, when I was a kid and when I was in high school. I remember my neighbor Barry Johnson turning me on to Harlan Ellison, and that led me to the Dangerous Visions anthologies, and that led me to everybody who was in the Dangerous Visions anthologies, so I was reading, at twelve and thirteen and in high school, Philip K. Dick and Brian W. Aldiss and everybody I could find at the library in Batesburg, South Carolina. I actually read The Hobbit when the Rankin-Bass TV movie came out. At the end of the Ballantine edition of The Hobbit there is that deceptive fine print that says, "If you are interested in Hobbits you will learn a lot more about them in The Lord of the Rings." So I read that, too, buying the Ballantine editions but also checking the hardcovers out of the library. I remember reading Dune, which was also a big influence, about the same time. I'm pretty sure the copies of Dune and The Lord of the Rings that I checked out of the public library in Batesburg, S.C., in the 1970s were the hardcover U.S. first editions, from Chilton and Houghton Mifflin, respectively. I wish I had them now!

  But then I sort of got out of reading any SF or fantasy when I graduated college. I had not read any of it for years. I had never had much of any awareness that there were any science fiction and fantasy magazines out there, other than The Twilight Zone Magazine, which I read from its first issue because it showed up at the neighborhood convenience store and had Ellison's name on the cover. So after college, it was the purely local influence. It was the local author shelf; here would be Fred Chappell and Scott Card and John Kessel. And it was reading, particularly, their short-story collections that were out at the time -- Kessel's Meeting in Infinity, Card's Maps in a Mirror, and Chappell's More Shapes Than One -- that made me think, "Gosh, I haven't read this stuff in a while but it's doing a lot different stuff than I remember." It was a lot more diverse field than I remembered. Then, via John, I started reading the Dozois Year's Best anthologies. There was one in particular, the Eighth Annual Collection, covering the year 1990: It included James Patrick Kelly's "Mr. Boy," Bruce Sterling's "We See Things Differently," Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire," John Kessel's "Invaders," Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me," Connie Willis' "Cibola," Jonathan Lethem's "Walking the Moons," Lewis Shiner's "White City," and Joe Haldeman's "The Hemingway Hoax," among others. It was one terrific story after another, and I thought, this clearly is the place to be.

  But, yeah, as you say, there was this gap. I was very familiar with writers from mid-century -- even Manly Wade Wellman I got into as a teenager, when the Silver John novels were coming out -- but then there was this interruption. I was not aware of anything that was going on in the '80s, really, and I picked it up again, circa 1990. That was when I got aware.

  SCHWEITZER: It also seems that either you are part of a school or you are being herded into one. Your work has a lot in common with both that of Terry Bisson and Howard Waldrop. It may have something to do with a Southern tradition of tall tales. Do you see yourself as part of a group, or as a regionalist?

  DUNCAN: I certainly am. I can't help it. The Appalachian singer-songwriter Mike Cross says that wherever he goes, when he opens his mouth, the grits start flying out. That's how it is with me. Initially, it seemed I was always writing Southern stories and Southern folklore type stories, Wellman being my big influence there. But I was also writing other stuff simultaneously -- some of which ended up in Weird Tales -- stories like "From Alfano's Reliquary" and "Grand Guignol," what Mike Grimwood, who was on my thesis committee, referred to as my "tales of the macabre," the more Poe-like things, though Poe was a Southern writer too.

  But I was trying all sorts of things that didn't necessarily fit in my mouth, that weren't necessarily the Southern-accented things that I initially got known for, like "Liza and the Crazy Water Man" and "Beluthahatchie." So I think early on I was fighting the Southern pigeonhole. I didn't want to be thought of as just doing that. But then "The Chief Designer" helped, when I got attention for that, and it was so completely, at least on the surface anyway, non-Southern, all about the Soviet rocket program. I thought, OK, that sort of cleansed the palette. It took the curse off. I thought, now that I have demonstrated that I can do other things, it won't bother me to do more Southern things. I wanted to be an adjustable wrench. I didn't want to be thought of as the guy who does just this one thing over and over.

  SCHWEITZER: Do you think there genuinely is a Southern narrative voice, which goes from writer to writer?

  DUNCAN: I think Southerners, more than folks in most parts of the United States, are raised with an appreciation for oral tale-telling, whether it's, traditionally, from the politicians or from the folks at the hunting club or the gas station or the barber shop or the beauty parlor or whatever. I think every extended Southern family has people in it who are valued because they tell stories so well. I know that this is to some extent a universal, but it seems that, culturally, the folks that tell stories very well are honored in Southern life, not only around the kitchen table but in the pulpit and in the statehouse, in the courthouse, in all sorts of walks of public life. I think that at least in the traditional South -- and to a gre
at extent the traditional South is still alive and well, more than many people would wish, perhaps -- it is still pervasive in the atmosphere. It's in the water, in the soil. If you grow up there or spend any extended time there, it is hard to escape.

  Now, that being said, when you look at folks like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Truman Capote and Zora Neale Hurston and Terry Bisson and Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling and Mike Bishop, who has been there so long that he counts, surely, these are extremely diverse writers. There are things they have in common. You can characterize the subject matter, but it's hard to characterize the voice or anything, except that I do think it works really well read aloud. I think there are some brilliant writers who don't work so well read aloud. But I think that what you can say about most any Southern writer you can name, of any prominence, is that the story works really well when you put it in somebody's mouth and perform it or read it. It becomes like the story told around the campfire after the coon hunt, or the story told at the kitchen table or at the funeral or at the beauty parlor. And a lot of the problems that people have, for example, with Faulkner, would be cleared up if people would just read the thing aloud. His rolling, thundering, amazing, page-long sentences actually make some sense when they're read aloud. It's almost like getting students to pay attention to Shakespeare, to understand Shakespeare. If they are just reading it on the page, it doesn't make nearly as much sense as when you hear it actually performed in the mouths of people who are familiar with it and know the culture and know what they're doing.

  SCHWEITZER: Was there somebody in your family who was valued for storytelling like that?

  DUNCAN: A number of people. My aunt Evelyn in particular was a very good storyteller, and when we would go visit her in Columbus, Georgia, once a year, she would regale everybody with stories. She was fascinated with political corruption, celebrated crime cases with lurid scandals. She was an avid newspaper reader, and when we got there she would fill us in on everything that had been happening in Columbus, Georgia, that year, with her own spin on it. She made these mesmerizing stories out of it. When I was a kid, there was a serial killer making the rounds, preying on old ladies in Columbus, Georgia. They called him the Wynnton Stocking Strangler. The material she got out of that was more hair-raising than any Hitchcock episode, listening to her tell of the latest exploits of the Strangler. She was convinced that the Strangler had come to her door one night and that only pluck and good sense had allowed her not to let him in, not to become a victim. So I think about her too. But everybody in my family -- my brother tells very funny stories. My mother used to tell very funny stories. My father would tell stories on more than one occasion. There weren't really individuals singled out, but it was an accepted sort of communal thing to do when you got together. Other families played horseshoes or cooked big dinners and things. We would get together and we would all start saying, "Hey tell again about that time when Melinda saw the snake!" So I got it honest, as we say back home, I suppose.