Though I Hold You While We’re Dancing
by Max Christopher
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“It’s the transmiracite. It does something. Ramps up the chemicals a woman’s body produces to make a uterus. The end of the vaginoplasty canal develops into a cervix. The womb grows on that. Ovaries develop. Fallopian tubes. And it all works. Say one of these new women is thirty-five. She finds herself in possession of a brand-new female reproductive anatomy with a full complement of brand-new eggs. And these new women want nothing more than to stay at home and have babies. Even the girls.”
“Lot of women want that.”
“Not like this. There’s a hard glitter in the eyes of these new ones. And their bodies produce estrogen and crave folic acid. Their hips spread with new bone growth. And they are, ah...” — his eyes clouded — “extremely attractive.”
Spike squinted at him. “How do you know?”
Dick clenched his jaw. He jerked the red bar towel from his hip pocket and wiped the bar in stiff, regular strokes.
After a moment, Spike said, “What about the new fellows? Can they, uh...”
“Impregnate women? And how. And most of them can’t wait.” His eyes darted to the woman at the table with the two men. Their eyes met. An electric charge seemed to arc crackling in the air between them. Dick lowered his eyes. “The world population is growing lopsided. More women than men, many times more in places. Enough men kept to breed with the women. Both men and women growing stupider, lazier, more easily led...” He trailed off.
“Dick, how long you tended bar here?”
“Three years.”
“Why don’t you talk about what you did before? You sound like a professor half the time but then you clam right up.”
Dick shrugged. “I’ve been a bunch of things.”
Spike picked up the letter from the Gender Affirmation Board. He read it morosely, brow furrowing.
“These, ah, escapes,” said Spike.
“Lower your voice,”
“Who else is in on ’em?”
“I only know the names in my immediate cell. Just two, and one may be an alias. That way—”
Chairs scraped. The three came up to the bar.
“We’ll square up,” said one of the men.
“Sure thing,” said Dick. “I would have come over.”
“We need you to settle something for us,” said the other man. He leaned an elbow on the bar.
“What?” said Spike.
“That Patsy Cline tune a few minutes ago,” said the woman. Her eyes sparkled as she watched Dick. He kept his gaze on the bill he was writing. “Does she say, ‘Though I hold you while we’re dancing’ or ‘Though you hold me while we’re dancing?’”
“What’s riding on it?” said Spike.
“Loser pays for the drinks,” said the second man.
“It’s ‘though I hold you,’” said Spike. “The song is ‘A Stranger in My Arms.’ She has to be holding him. ‘Though I hold you while we’re dancing, you’re a stranger in my arms.’”
“Ha!” The second man slapped the bar.
“Nuts,” said the first man.
The woman said, “What about the song where she says, ‘It’s hard to know another’s lips will kiss you, and hold you just the way I used to do?’”
“She misses her fella,” said Spike.
“But the way the line is written, the woman’s lips will do the holding as well as the kissing.”
“I guess so,” said Spike.
“That leads the alert listener to wonder what those lips were holding,” said the woman.
“Never thought about it,” said Spike.
Dick set down the bill, took the money and set down the change. Then he slipped out from behind the bar. He muttered something about inventory downstairs as he shut the basement door behind him.
“Men never do,” said the woman, darting her eyes at the two companions who flanked her. “Most men are really quite hopeless. Your friend has a beautiful mouth. And he dropped his red rag.”
“He’ll be back for it,” said Spike.
“Won’t he need it to mop the sweat off his brow, lifting those cases?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think that naughty Patsy slipped one past the censors?”
“Now, Wilhelmina,” said the first man.
“It was a Hank Williams tune first,” said Spike.
“The maybe he was the naughty one.” The woman sauntered across the floor to the dropped rag.
“Let me,” said Spike. He slid off the stool.
“I’ve got it.” She bent double and scooped up the rag in one elegant motion. “It’s got sweat on it already,” she said, kneading the cloth in both hands. “Do you know, a study was conducted at a university years ago. Half a dozen clean — really clean, sterilized — chairs were placed in a room. One drop of a man’s sweat was applied to one of the chairs. So minute an amount it could not be smelled. A woman was let into the room and invited to sit down. She sat on the chair with the drop of sweat.”
“Huh,” said Spike. His gaze drifted from the woman’s hands to her body, top to bottom. If she saw, she didn’t seem to mind.
“The exercise was repeated a number of times with a number of women. In every instance the woman went right to the chair with the drop of a man’s sweat on it.” She looked at Spike and smiled. “What do you think of that?”
“Funny.”
“And telling. It makes a body wonder.”
“’Bout what?”
“Would women who’d been men before sex reassignment surgery have been drawn to the chair with the man’s sweat?”
“Hey, we were just talking about—”
“And what about the other way? When they were women who felt like men?” She drifted toward the basement door.
“Miss, that’s for employees,” said Spike.
“He won’t mind.”
“But you shouldn’t—”
“You heard the lady,” said the first man. He stepped casually between Spike and Wilhelmina.
“No problem here,” said the second man, patting Spike’s big shoulder. “It’ll be fine.” The hand stayed.
“The boss’s private office is down there,” said Spike.
“All the better,” said the first man.
“A little privacy, sure,” said the second.
Wilhelmina whisked the door open and darted down the stairs. A soft groan that didn’t sound like Dick floated up.
“He sounds hurt,” said Spike.
“He is, terribly,” said the first man.
“But he’s about to feel better,” said the second.
“It don’t seem right,”
“Many things are not right,” said the first man.
“But they are being made right,” said the second. His hand squeezed Spike’s shoulder.
Spike turned his head to face the second man. “You want to remove that hand.”
“Just a friendly pat.”
“I’m a peaceable man,” said Spike, “but that’s your warning.”
“Now, now—”
Spike stomped on the second man’s instep, then delivered a clumsy but powerful punch to the groin. The second man folded and lay on his side. He drew up his knees and moaned.
The first man seemed, absurdly, to be holding a fat black beetle with silver horns. Spike’s second look revealed it to be a box with two electrodes, now pointed at his chest.
“This button will stop your heart,” said the first man.
The bar’s front door swung open. Cletus stepped in and fired. The first man crumpled, electrodes sputtering impotently. Cletus bent and administered a hypodermic needle to the man Spike had injured.
“Come on,” said Cletus. He made for the basement door. Spike followed.
Dick and Wilhelmina had not troubled to lock the office door. The top of the desk was a wreck. The heel of Wilhelmina’s right shoe was stuck between the spokes of the office fan. The couple took no notice of Spike and Cletus.
“Sweet fancy Moses,” said Spike.
“Dick’s cover is blown. He’ll have to come with us.”
“What about her?”
Cletus produced another needle. “She’ll have to cope.” The woman gave a snarl of fury and dropped unconscious.
Dick looked up, face sweaty, eyes blazing.
“Sorry, Buddy,” said Cletus. “This will leave you awake, just a little floppy.” Yet another needle. “Come on, there’s a good fella.”
“How many of those you got?” said Spike.
“Just hoist his dungarees up,” said Cletus.
“I can’t quite close them over — ah, there it goes.”
Dick’s body shook like a plucked string.
“Flabadap,” he said. “Rattan furniture.”
“How’s that?” said Spike.
“Pop said I should go into rattan furniture.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Snipperlappy,” said Dick. “Who the hell can afford quality rattan?”
Wilhelmina’s eyes fluttered. “It can... be nice... in a conversation pit,” she said, slurring the last word as she went out again. Cletus covered her decorously.
“More crap for a man to spend money on,” said Dick. “That’s a funny word. Rattan. Rat tan. Raaa—”
“Hurry up,” said Cletus. “Just get an arm under him. Julie and Sam are already in the wagon.”
At his children’s names, Spike threw Dick over his shoulder and carried him up the stairs. “How did you know—”
“Cells at my level monitor cells at Dick’s.”
“So you knew Dick was gonna lure that woman down there?”
“The new ones don’t need luring. We had to divide the team so I could get the drop on the two men.” Cletus chuckled. “But you did half my job for me. Here, let me take Dick.”
“New ones? So she used to be a—”
The sight of Sam and Julie running to him drove all other thoughts from Spike’s mind. He gathered his children to him and hugged them fiercely.
The five piled in the wagon and it roared away. Bill Henkins’s boy was at the wheel.
“How’d you get the kids to come along?” Spike asked, arms flung over his children’s shoulders. In the front seat, Dick was lolling bonelessly between Cletus and the Henkins boy. “Gableah, gableah,” he said. “Rattaaaaaaaaan.”
“The school knows Cletus is our safe person,” Julie said.
“The man you shot,” said Spike. “Is he dead?”
“Rubber rounds. He’ll sting like hell, but he’ll live.”
“Why were they here in the first place?”
“Dick was one of theirs. Went rogue.”
Dick giggled.
“One of whose?” said Spike. “The Gender Affirmation Board?”
“What they cover for,” said Cletus.
“Here’s one,” said Dick. “The conversation pit and the pendulum. Huh? Jot that down, Cletus.”
“Wait,” Spike said. “You can’t mean that Dick used to be—”
“It’s a brave new world,” said Cletus.
“But what the hell... how long have you—”
“Spike, can you wait until the story of my life is a series on Netflix?”
“I’ll need money,” Spike said.
“Taken care of,” Cletus said.
Spike, still holding his children, looked from one to the other of them.
“Sam. Julie. I didn’t even ask if you were up for this.”
“We’ll go where you go, Dad,” said Julie.
“But your things, your friends.”
“Just stuff,” said Sam. “And it’s hard to know who your friends are. The other day I was joking with my gym buddy, then I got pulled from class and taken to the principal. She said my buddy reported me. And he’d been saying the same stuff.”
“What gym buddy?”
“Herbie Lermisk.”
“I told you steer clear of that little peckerwood.”
“Mr. Diggot put us together.”
“He’s not supposed to. I wrote a note.”
“I don’t think he read it.”
Julie said, “And I told my friend Brianna what you said about who decides what we get to joke about. How you have to be able to joke about everybody or one day they’ll stick a gag in your mouth if you joke about anybody.”
“Surprisingly deep, Spike,” said Cletus.
“I got it from an old recording of a fella called Lenny Bruce.”
“Brianna told her father, and he made her unfriend me,” Julie said. “Or that’s what she told me at school.”
“Going on the lam is looking better and better,” said Spike. “Your mom would be so proud of you kids. She had your kind of guts.”
“Loofah,” said Dick. “Feldspar. Molybdenum.”
“Here’s the exit,” said Cletus.
“That Wilhelmina was a nice girl,” said Dick. “But what the hell, so was I.”
“How long till that wears off?” said Spike.
“He’ll be fine by the time we get to Israel,” said Cletus.
Julie gasped.
“How’s that?” said Spike.
“Have to leave the West entirely. How’s your Hebrew?”
“Not good,” said Spike.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll get along fine in English.”
“And those Israeli boys are so cute,” Julie said.
“How do you know?” said Spike
“I’m Facebook friends with — um — one or two.”
Spike leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Lord help me.”
“Hava nagila,” said Dick.
“What?”
“Let us rejoice.”
The wagon accelerated.
Copyright © 2021 by Max Christopher
