Brutal Women (2 page)

My brother had followed me in. He
waddled up to the desk, stared at the gun.

“You’re in trouble,” he said.

“Quiet,” I said. “We’ll play a
game. Sit here. I’ll give you more cookies.”

When the women came in behind my
mother, my brother and I were sitting up on the big leather sofa by the window.
I opened up father’s screes board. My brother stared at the women.

The women went right to the desk. I
tried not to look at them. They opened up the gun drawer.

The largest woman turned to me. She
wore a long dark coat, even in all the heat. Sweat beaded her big face.

“Come here,” she said.

“He’s only—” my mother began.

“Here,” the woman said.

I got up. She put her big hands all
over me, patted me down. She looked around the room. Looked back at us.

“Get out,” she said. “We’re
cleaning this room.”

I took my brother by the hand. The
three of us went to wait in the living room. My mother kept staring at me. I
gave my brother more cookies. We sat and listened to the sounds of the crashing
and tearing coming from my father’s study.

After a long time, the women came
out. They stood in front of us and put their hats back on.

“Good evening,” they said.

“Good evening,” my mother said.

When they were gone, my mother held
out her hand to me. I pulled up the back of my brother’s shirt and took out the
gun and the papers. My mother cried. She pulled us both into her arms.

My father did not come home that
night. Or the next night. We got a telegram from the women. They had taken my
father away for questioning. He would be kept for an undefined period.

We were alone.

With father gone, we had no money.
The lab he worked for wouldn’t send us anything. They were afraid that the
women would accuse my father of something.

The neighbors came and brought over
food and ration tickets. My mother went to each house afterward and asked if
they needed laundry done, or shirts mended, but they all said the same thing.
They were saving their own money.

No one could help us.

“What about the women?” I said.
“Who mends their shirts?”

My mother frowned at me. “Certainly
not their husbands,” she said.

So my mother allowed the women into
our house, and she mended their shirts. She cleaned and pressed their dress
pants, their stiff white collars. My brother and I shined their boots.

It was strange, to have the big
women in the house, wearing their long dark coats and guns. My mother did not
speak to them any more than she had to. When they came in she held herself very
stiffly. She pursed her mouth. Her eyes seemed very black.

I tried to hate the women, too. They
always greeted me like the man of the house, because they had taken my father.
If I was the one who answered the door, they always asked my permission to see
my mother. They were very polite. Sometimes they would talk to each other in
low voices, in their own language. It was soft and rhythmic, like the memory of
my mother’s voice before I could understand the words.

After a month of this, one of the
women said to my mother, “It will be a shame when your husband returns. We will
have no clean shirts.”

My mother just stared at her. I had
never seen her look so angry.

When my father did come back, red
dust filled the seams of his face. His hair had gone white. The spaces under
his eyes were smeared in sooty footprints, a dark wash against his sallow skin.

He had no marks or scars that I
could see. He still had all of his fingers. But he walked with a limp that he
had not had before, and he could not close his left hand into a fist. He became
very quiet. He spent most days sitting in a chair by the big window, staring
out. He did not speak to us. He could not go to work.

My mother had to keep mending
shirts. When the women came, my father moved his chair into his study and shut
the door. He started smoking opium.

The air inside the house was heavy
all the time. My mother sent me out more often to run errands for her. She
didn’t have time to go to the market herself. Father never left the house. My
brother tried to go with me, but mother made him stay behind to shine the
boots.

On the street, I met other boys with
homes like mine. Their fathers had all been taken in as well. I went out with a
group of them to throw rocks at the windows of a women’s barracks. But the
women were waiting for us. They grabbed the oldest boys. They shot them in the
head.

I didn’t leave the house for a
while, after that. I hated the women. I hated them, and I dreamed of them.

The women were making changes. They
draped their country’s colors over ours. They did it first at the police
buildings, then the government buildings. Fewer trucks of bodies and mortar
rubble passed through the gates. There were fewer night sirens.

After a year, I noticed something
else, though my mother said I imagined it, said I was giving the women more
power than they had. The summers were not as hot. The air wasn’t as humid. The
women were changing the weather, too.

My mother tried to make things
normal. She tried to get me and my brother to go to the new schools, the ones
the women opened after shutting down ours. In those schools, all of the
teachers were teenage girls. Our girls, but girls just the same.

What were we supposed to learn,
from girls?

The women in our house kept coming.
Some of them lived just down the street now, in houses where the owners were
killed or deported for being part of the resistance. When I asked one of the
women if she ever got lonely in the big house, she said no, she never got
lonely.

“I live with my sisters,” she said.

“Why don’t they do your laundry?” I
said.

My brother was shining her boots.
My mother looked up sharply, but I didn’t care. I was the man of the house. I
could say what I wanted.

The woman just laughed like it was
the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

Some time later, I met a girl at
school I liked, and she liked me, I think. But the next year, she left school
because she wanted to join the new fighting squad that the women had started.
Girls were allowed to join when they were fourteen. I got angry when she told
me she was going.

“What,” I said, “you want to learn
how to kill people like those women do? You’ll be just like them.”

She glared at me. Black eyes, like
my mother’s. “They won,” she said. “It won’t be so bad to be like someone who
wins, will it?”

“Won? What did they win?”

“Everything,” she said.

I left school, even though it made
my mother angry. I got a job unloading fishing boats in the bay. There were
mostly men down there, though the women were posted around as guards and they
had put a bunch of girls in charge of customs. Those women made a lot more
money than any of us working the boats.

I once heard one of the men say
something nasty to the customs girls. He called them whores, and traitors, and
said he could fuck the traitor out of them. He said it in front of two women
working as customs guards. One of the women pulled out her gun and shot him. I
still stayed on in my mother’s house.

Father’s health got worse. We lost
more and more of him to opium.

I sat with him one hot night during
the monsoon season. All of the windows were open, letting in the rain, but he
wouldn’t let me close the house up.

Mother had taken my brother to the
hospital. He had an infection in his lungs.

“I have such dreams,” my father
said. He reached for my hand. I let him take it. His hand was cold and clammy
in mine, despite the heat.

“I dream that the women came from
another world,” he said. “They came on boats made of spice and spun sugar. We
disappointed them. They’re too hungry for us.” He turned his blank stare to me.
“They’re going to eat us.”

There was a new woman on watch at
customs. She looked at me only once, but I couldn’t help but follow her with my
eyes. She was big and tall like the others, and her face and hands were broad.
She had a dark complexion and tilted green eyes, like jade. She looked twenty.
I wasn’t even sixteen. I didn’t think she noticed me. But she caught me heading
home and said, “The streets are not safe for boys. I’ll bring you home.”

She was a head taller than me, but
she moved like water. We walked through the maze of deserted streets bordering
the harbor and passed under a gaslight. She suddenly took me by the arm and
pulled me into a dark alley. I choked on a cry. She pressed me against the
gritty wall of an abandoned warehouse and shoved her hand down the front of my
trousers. I struggled, but didn’t say anything. Her big body and long coat
shielded me from the street. No one could see me. No one at the dock. Not my
mother. Not my father.

I gripped the back of her neck, dug
my fingers into her hair. She pulled me into her.

When I saw her again, she was with
a group of women by the customs house. I nodded at her. She turned to the other
women, said something in their language.

The women all looked at me. They
laughed.

All of the women kept looking at
me. They kept laughing. I had to leave the docks.

I got a job driving mortar trucks
through the gates. Most of the women had given up those jobs by then. They were
all working in government and security positions.

During the day, I went to the ruins
of old houses. I could still smell the yeast of old bursts. I shoveled up all
the raw material and loaded it into the truck. I met other young men like me. I
met men who had wanted to be teachers and doctors. It was the women, they said,
who held them back. The women took all of the jobs. The women were too
intimidating. The women owned the world.

One night, I drove my mortar truck
through the gate and stopped at the big pit where the bodies and rubble were
heaped. The women had bombed out the original government offices, long before.
They used the deep pit left behind as a waste dump. I sat in the truck and stared
out at the pit for a long time.

I got home sometime just before
midnight.

My mother sat alone in the dark
living room. She sat staring into the empty fireplace. A pile of neatly folded
laundry sat at her hip. Shirts hung on the line in the kitchen.

“Do you want some light?” I asked
her.

She was very still.

“Is father all right?” I asked.

“He’s passed,” she said. Her
dishrag lay in her lap. She did not touch it.

I went upstairs. Father lay in bed.
A single gas lamp flared, casting dark shadows. There was a bloody, clotted
smear against the far wall. Half of father’s head was gone. I saw the gun near
his limp hand. His eyes were still open.

He had left no note.

Some women came to collect the
body, though a man drove the body truck. One of the women turned to me just
before they left. “We all battle dragons,” she said. “There’s no shame in
losing.”

“There’d be no battle,” I said
coldly, “without the dragons.”

She grinned, slid her hat back on.
“There will always be dragons,” she said. “It’s only a matter of who plays the
dragon, who plays the sheep. Which would you rather be?”

I spent the rest of the night in
the market square, watching the women. Sunrise rent the sky like the remnants
of a red dress. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a red dress. I didn’t
miss them.

I watched the changing of the
guard. I bought a newspaper. It was in two languages now, ours and the women’s.
I kept turning the page back and forth, back and forth, but I could see no
difference between one and the other.

All the news was the same.

This is one of my favorite
stories, and the least popular with readers. It was published by
Deep
Outside SFFH
in 2001, just a few months after I’d come home from the Clarion
West writers’ workshop. At the time, it felt like a major win. I couldn’t
believe anybody had seen fit to pay for this odd little story about screwed up
gender politics and birthing compounds and organic weapons. However, there’s
also a lot of deep-seated unease with being female here, which translates to
outright misogyny in the narrator. All purposeful, yes, but also uncomfortable.
When what you are is hated and powerless, you’ll do anything to disassociate
yourself from it – even participate in the oppression of your own kind.

They told me the vessel could
dream. I told them that was no concern of mine because vessels are of the dirt
and of the desert and live only to sweat and breed and die, and I am a teacher
of men and androgynies and Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and
worth. Vessels are no longer my concern.

“But Kadru,” they said, “she can
dream.”

I told them it was foolish to
utilize me this way; I questioned their purpose.

It was not my place to question
them, they said.

And they sent me to the desert.

If you have never been to the
desert, you must know that the sun casts an orange shadow across the craggy red
hills and sunken pits and gullies of this part of the world. The vessel’s
world. The red desert looks endless here, and touches the gray-blue of the sky
in all directions. The agricultural compounds are here, stained the same color
as the desert, and it is here the vessels grow the starches that feed the
cities. Here the vessels labor until they are old enough to breed. When I
stepped out of the transport vehicle and onto the red sand I thought of blood
and remembered the fluids of the vessels, remembered their filth, their stink,
and I hated the vessel that dreamed. I hated her because she had brought me
back to this dirty terrestrial place. The dormitory mothers led me inside the
compound. I traveled alone, and they did not understand this. They talked of
the arrival of “the others.” They expected the Kell. A man, they believed, was
not sufficient to understand their vessel’s complication. I was not angry with
them. The mothers are vessels; cleaner, stronger, perhaps, than the younger
ones, but still they exist only to work and sweat and die. They will never
leave the desert.