More Than Human

Hip went first, amused, then intrigued, then enthralled as his small movements were so obediently duplicated by the whip and weave of the massive gun twenty feet away. He missed the first ‘plane’ and the second; after that he had the fixed error of the gun calculated precisely and he banged away at every target as fast as they could throw them and knocked out every one. Janie clapped her hands like a child and the attendant awarded them a blurred and glittering clay statue of a police dog worth all of a fifth of the admission price. Hip took it proudly, and waved Janie up to the trigger. She worked the aiming mechanism diffidently and laughed as the big gun nodded and shook itself. His cheeks flushed, his eyes expertly anticipating the appearance-point of each target, Hip said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.’

Janie’s eyes narrowed a trifle and perhaps that was to help her aiming. She did not answer him. She knocked out the first target that appeared before it showed fully over the artificial horizon, and the second, and the third. Hip swatted his hands together and called her name joyfully. She seemed for a moment to be pulling herself together, the odd, effortful gesture of a preoccupied man forcing himself back into a conversation. She then let one go by and missed four in a row. She hit two, one low, one high, and missed the last by half a mile. ‘Not very good,’ she said tremulously.

‘Good enough,’ he said gallantly. ‘You don’t have to hit ‘em these days, you know.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Nah. Just get near. Your fuses take over from there. This is the world’s most diabetic dog.’

She looked down from his face to the statuette and giggled. ‘I’ll keep it always,’ she said. ‘Hip, you’re getting that nasty sparkle stuff all over your jacket. Let’s give it away.’

They marched up and across and down and around the tinsel stands in search of a suitable beneficiary, and found him at last – a solemn urchin of seven or so, who methodically sucked the memory of butter and juice from a well-worn corncob. ‘This is for you,’ carolled Janie. The child ignored the extended gift and kept his frighteningly adult eyes on her face.

Hip laughed. ‘No sale!’ He squatted beside the boy. ‘I’ll make a deal with you. Will you haul it away for a dollar?’

No response. The boy sucked his corncob and kept watching Janie.

‘Tough customer,’ grinned Hip.

Suddenly Janie shuddered. ‘Oh, let’s leave him alone,’ she said, her merriment gone.

‘He can’t outbid me,’ said Hip cheerfully. He set the statue down by the boy’s scuffed shoes and pushed a dollar bill into the rip which looked most like a pocket. ‘Pleasure to do business with you, sir,’ he said and followed Janie, who had already moved off.

‘Regular chatterbox,’ laughed Hip as he caught up with her. He looked back. Half a block away, the child still stared at Janie. ‘Looks like you’ve made a lifelong impress – Janie!’

Janie had stopped dead, eyes wide and straight ahead, mouth a triangle of shocked astonishment. ‘The little devil! ‘ she breathed. ‘At his age!’ She whirled and looked back.

Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.

‘Whew!’ said Hip, awed. ‘You’re so right!’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘What clever ears you have, grandma,’ he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. ‘I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.’

‘Didn’t you?’ she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. And the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. ‘Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.’

She smiled and everything was all right again.

Succulent pizza and cold beer in a booth painted a too-bright, edge-worn green. A happy-weary walk through the darkening booths to the late bus which waited, breathing. A sense of membership because of the fitting of the spine to the calculated average of the bus seats. A shared doze, a shared smile, at sixty miles an hour through the flickering night, and at last the familiar depot on the familiar street, echoing and empty but my street in my town.

They woke a taxi driver and gave him their address. ‘ Can I be more alive than this?’ he murmured from his corner and then realized she had heard him. ‘I mean,’ he amended, ‘it’s as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I couldn’t see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town and tonight as big as… well, a lot bigger,’ he finished weakly.

A lonely passing streetlight passed her answering smile over to him. He said, ‘So I was wondering how much bigger it can get.’