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Of course I recognized him, and the breath clogged in my numb throat.

“Hello?” came the voice again. “Am I talking to a short circuit?” Yes, I thought.

That oil tank in San Pedro hadn’t been in use for years, but it had once been equipped with an automatic-dial switch to call the company’s main office when its fuel was depleted; a stray power surge had apparently turned it on again, and the emergency number it called was by that time ours. Probably the oil tank hadn’t had any fuel in it at all anymore, and only occasionally noticed. Certainly there had been nothing we could do about it.

“Gunther!” It hurt my teeth to say the name. “Jesus, boy—this is—Doug Olney, from Neff High School! You remember me, don’t you?”

“Doug?” said the half-drunk, middle-aged man at the other end of the line, befuddledly wondering if I had throat cancer. “Olney? Sure I remember! Where are you? Are you in town—”

“No time to talk,” I said, trying not to choke. What if Doug Olney, the real one, had been in town, in Santa Ana? Would this unhappy loser have suggested that the two of them get together for lunch? “I don’t want to—” Stop you, I thought; save you, for damn sure. “—change any of your plans.” My eyes were watering, even in the dim kitchen. “Listen, a woman’s gonna call your number in a minute; she’s gonna ask for me. You don’t know her,” I assured him; I didn’t want him to be at all thinking he might. “Say I just left a minute ago, okay?”

“Who is she—”

I just hung up. You’ll find out, I thought.

My uncle’s beer appeared in the yard today, two cases of it, still cold from the cooler at Top Cat. The roses are still fresh, and I looked at the clip-cuts on some stems and tried to comprehend that my mother had cut the flowers only a few hours earlier, by the rosebush’s time; the smears in the white dust on the rose hips were probably from her fingers. Sitting in the dirt driveway in the noonday sun, my uncle and I got all weepy and sentimental, and drank can after can of the Bud-weiser in toasts to missing loved ones, though probably nobody was in the house, and the two children were by then long gone from the backyard.

I’ve planted the golf-ball-sized seeds from the avocado, right where the tree was in the picture—if it was in fact a picture of this house. Eventually it will be a tree, and maybe one day the duck will be there, leaning on the trunk, on his way back from Disneyland and Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the house where my sister and I are still seven years old. I plan to tag along, if he’ll have me.

Nancy A. Collins

CATFISH GAL BLUES

Nancy A. Collins made quite a name for herself with her Sonja Blue vampire hooks; she won a 1990 Bram Stoker Award (why don’t they call them Brammies instead of Stokers?) for Sunglasses After Dark, which was followed by In the Blood and Paint It Black—the three of them have been issued together as The Sonja Blue Collection.

Which isn’t to say she’s restricted herself to vampires. She’s done comic book work (Swamp Thing), comic book novelizations (a novelization of the Fantastic Four), edited anthologies such as Forbidden Acts (with Edward E. Kramer and Martin H. Greenberg), and even penned westerns (Walking Wolf. A Weird Western).

Here she gives us none of the above—but rather a folk tale, kind of a country legend that turns out for its protagonist to be … well, read on.

Flyjar is the kind of Southern town where time doesn’t mean much. Maybe that’s because there’s little in the way of change between the seasons—the difference between winter and summer a mere fifteen degrees on average. And when you’re as poor as most folks in Flyjar, there’s not a whole lot of difference between one decade and another—or century, for that matter.

The two constants in Flyjar are poverty and the river. The town clings to the Mississippi like a child to its mama’s skirt, and its fortunes—for good or ill—have been tied to the Big Muddy tighter than apron strings. At one time it had served as fueling stop for the river-boats that once traveled up