Free Cottonwood by R. Lee Smith Page A

brushy tips could flick at the air. “Lucky me,” he mused and looked at her again. “Go on, next question.”
    After that, he found a post on his decrepit porch to lean on, and there he stood, occasionally rubbing at the delicate plates between his bloodshot eyes, or picking at the palms of his hands, but answering her questions without too much trouble. His little arms—his claspers—came out now and then, and once, one of them actually bumped up against her, but he didn’t seem to be doing it in a mean way, so she just inched back a bit and politely ignored it.
    When it was all over, as he finished making his mark on the last page, he suddenly said, “Want to join me for a can of bug food?”
    “For what?”
    “Call me a romantic, but you’re the first woman I’ve seen in years.” Samaritan pushed the papers back at her and disappeared into his house. The asthmatic screen door didn’t have time to wheeze shut before he was back with two cans with pull-tab tops. He gave her one as he stepped down off the porch, then went around to the road-side part of his house to lift the hood on the top half of a rusted, derelict car. The engine was long-gone. The inside was charred black, some kind of improvised barbeque pit. He fished around, breathing on coals until he had a bit of smoke, added some scraps of paper from the debris surrounding them, and laid in some nuggets of charcoal. When he was satisfied with that, he straightened up and casually jabbed his elbow down into the side of the can. The spikes growing out of his chitin popped through the metal with ridiculous ease. Samaritan nestled the can carefully among the coals, then wiped at his spikes and licked his fingers.
    Sarah just stood there.
    He jumped up onto the car’s roof and hunkered down, scratching at his eyes, then gave her a look. “You going to eat that shit cold?”
    She looked at the can, as though more intense study could possibly tell her something. The can was just a can, the standard twelve-ounce size, with a pull-tab top and no label. None at all, not even a stripe of dried glue to suggest there had ever been one. Had it not been for the reservoirs and the culvert and the stench of it all, she would be starving right now—her morning was gone, noon just a memory—but there was something so indescribably sinister about that labelless can that she had no appetite at all.
    Samaritan stared at her while she fidgeted. His hangover percolated obviously behind his eyes. “Woman,” he said finally, “that is my three food chits a day you’re holding. Now you pop that top and eat it.”
    “If it’s your daily food allotment,” she began hesitantly, “I couldn’t possibly—”
    “Good enough for the fucking bugs, but not for humans, huh?”
    “No! I mean…It’s just that—”
    “I know what the fuck it is. I also know that I’m making an extremely civil gesture here and you’re shitting on it. Open up that can and show me some fucking respect, caseworker.”
    Hardly aware of what her fingers did, Sarah pulled back the tab. The stink of it was like a slap to her sinuses in this muggy heat. Clots of grease clung to the top in a half-inch scum. The meat beneath was the greyish color of stagnant dishwater. She lifted it up, not knowing whether she could do it or not, only knowing that she was right on the verge of tears and hating this place and everyone in it, when a black-plated hand came out of nowhere and snatched it away, knocking her sprawling in the road.
    “You piss-brain fuck!” Samaritan bellowed, leaping up, but he didn’t give chase. The alien food-snatcher was over the next car and gone in two jumps.
    “I have to go,” Sarah said, fumbling for her case. “I still have clients to see. But I’ll be back.”
    “Oh yeah?” Samaritan clicked, resettling to watch his own can blacken. “I’ll be here, caseworker. You just knock on my door anytime.”
    She went on, past a number of empty lots to a burnt-out ruin of what