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  “Could be this could be that, nobody thinks the same thing; some people think they just ran into the water at the end of the point. State thinks pirates, D.C. thinks otherwise, government agencies are looking at it eight ways to Sunday but it’s not like they’re going to come out and tell you anything. State Health and Human Services thinks they all cleared out ahead of the plague, but like, how?”

  “What if they really did walk into the sea?”

  “Don’t be an asshole. Could be they’re locked up in a lab somewhere, like it really is science. It’s not like they took off in anything with a black box or sonar or transmissions that you can trace, and their phones? Forget it. No trace of a GPS. They’re just missing is what they are, like those people in that plane. They spent close to a billion hunting those poor souls.”

  “Which plane?”

  “The one that they never found. Those people are still out there, for all anybody knows.”

  Davy’s belly sinks. “They’re all dead.”

  “How they’re gonna prove that? When people go missing, you never know. It’s not like they got stolen, they didn’t run away. They’re not dead. Until proved otherwise, they’re just gone.”

  Davy rages. “There’s gotta be a reason.”

  “They’re still out there, get it!” Earl spreads his hands on the table. Nothing to see here, nothing up my sleeves. “They’re just not anywhere.”

  Still out there. Davy comes back into himself. “Boogie saw something.”

  “The flash?”

  “Something like it. In the sky.”

  “Dude, everybody thinks they saw something. Theda says it was blue.”

  “Wait!”

  Earl sighs. “But you know how Theda is.”

  Davy does. It’s sad. “Yeah, but Boogie…”

  “People think they saw something, they didn’t unelse they did. Meanwhile the DOD called a code red, so we’re pretty much locked down. Kraven is quarantined and we’re some kind of embargoed, nobody gets on Poynter’s from either bridge, they’re patrolling the channel, copters above and boats below…”

  Davy cuts him off. “I know.”

  “… and everybody that doesn’t belong here has to go. I love you, man, but it’s not safe. Dude, you’ve never seen paranoia like this. Lauren says…”

  Davy doesn’t get depressed, but the shadow of the black raptor blows across his face.

  Earl breaks off. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

  It’s my fault she’s gone. “It’s no big.”

  “I took half your sandwich.”

  “No prob.” Rocked by loss, Dave Ribault sits in front of his untouched half, considering. It’s quiet and comfortable here in Earl Pinckney’s house, with light striking the golden oak table where they sit. The first Gaillard Pinckney finished it by firelight the year he built the place and the third or fourth sanded and shellacked it and brought it to a shine. If he runs his hand along the bevel, he can trace the skulls he and Earl gouged into the wood when they were twelve, crude proofs of the existence of Earl Pinckney and Dave Ribault running up the heels of initials carved into the wood by generations of Pinckneys that came before, like proofs of the existence of God.

  Earl stays on Poynter because of his mother; they both know he could make better music in Nashville or New Orleans and hit the top of the charts: recordings, videos, world concert tour, he’s that good, but Earl’s OK. If he lived anywhere that he couldn’t look out on open water, he’d dry up and drift away. His aunt Maida comes in nights to stay with Theda so he can be with Lauren at her house; he loves his work and he loves to fish, he loves Lauren Pottinger enough to say so without hesitation or misgivings; they’re getting married next fall and after the wedding Theda will move in with her sister Maida, who’s been lonely since Jake died, everything neatly settled while idiot Davy, no, fuck the kid nickname, he’s thirty-two. Idiot Dave Ribault, assaholic indecisive full-grown shit, while Earl …

  It all piles in on him, but that’s not what comes out. “Boogie’s still out there. They hunted him down and caught him like a dog.” He chokes on the rest. “They grabbed him and I didn’t do shit to stop it. I let it come down.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “He’s forty-five.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Dave says, but does not explain. Good thing he doesn’t have to. He can’t.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just let me hang in here until night. I’m going back.”

  “Why the fuck?”

  “I have to.”

  Earl doesn’t ask him how. “Not yet. They’re still out there, tracking stragglers. You could end up like Boogie, or worse.”

  “OK then. Tonight.”

  “Earl Calhoun Pinckney, what have you two been up to?”

  Earl looks up, astounded. “Mom!”

  Theda Pinckney glides in for a landing behind her son’s chair. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  “We didn’t either of us hear you,” Earl says.

  She is groping her way back from a past that neither of them knew or could imagine and— thank God— stalled in a past they remember. “Your little friend looks even worse than you do. Honey, does your mom know you’re over at Earl’s?”

  “It’s Dave, Miz Pinckney. Dave Ribault.”

  “Of course you are!” She gives him a lovely, crumpled smile. “I’ll make you some of my poached eggs, and you’ll feel better.”

  “That’s real sweet of you, Ma’am, but I just ate.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m keeping care of him.”

  Theda’s aged to the point of transparency; for the first time Dave looks at her and thinks: frail. The soft velour suit hangs loose now, but the color matches her eyes and her smile’s the same, a little uncertain but sweet, sweet. She clamps both hands on the back of Earl’s chair to steady herself and goes on as though they’re still twelve and she’s herself again. “Oh, you boys. You just laugh and have the best time!”

  “Nice to see you, Ma’am.”

  The spark ignites. For a flash-second, Theda Pinckney is who she used to be. “Don’t say ‘Ma’am.’ You make me feel old!” Then she tightens her grip on the back of Earl’s chair, and as Dave watches, whatever carried her this close to real life floats right out of her and she slumps, clinging to the chair.

  Davy’s hands fly out. Oh, Ma’am. Ma’am!

  Earl gets up carefully, steadying his chair so his mother won’t shift off-balance and topple. He takes her by the elbow so firmly that Dave flinches.

  Reflexively, she clamps his hand to her side.

  Earl has been here so many times before that what comes next is a smooth, practiced operation. Gentle loosening of the arm, to free his hand. Careful maneuver to turn her and get her moving. Dave gets up to help and with a gracious smile she offers him her other elbow; together, they nudge her along an inch at a time, and like a dancer, she yields.

  “It’s OK, Mom. OK. Let’s get you back to your chair.”

  Which would have been it, but both men are so focused on the delicate transaction that the slam of a car door outside is lost in the blast of the TV set coming back to life.

  Theda hears. She lifts her head. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  “Nobody, Mom.”

  “Who’s out there?”

  “Nobody. It’s fine.”

  No to both.

  A scruffy supernumerary peers through the screen door as he pounds on the wood. With afternoon sunlight bouncing off the water at his back, he looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy in silhouette, fixing to pop out when the can explodes. “Police.”

  “Shit.”

  “Language, Earl. Company!”

  “Hide,” Earl says without moving his face, and Dave dodges into the kitchen.

  “Son, it’s company.”

  “I know you’re in there.”

  “Hang on.”

  “It’s company, honey.” Theda paddles air, bli
nking. “Aren’t you going to make your manners and let him in?”

  With Dave out of sight, Earl pushes his mother backward into her spot on the sofa, filling the empty moment with: “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, I’m the fucking police.”

  “I said, hang on, I have a sick woman here!” He takes his sweet time patting her in place. He waits for her to settle. Then he goes.

  “That car you hid in the woods ain’t there. It’s in impound down to the harbor…” the rent-a-cop says with a loaded look over Earl’s shoulder, scoping the living room: I know you’re in there. “In case the owner wants to know.”

  “Who?”

  “The owner.” Fool rattles paper at him. Registration? Could be. “One Donald Reeboat.”

  “Nobody I know. Now stand down.”

  “Is he here?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  “I know he’s in there.”

  “I said, stand down!”

  “I know you’re in there, come out or I’ll shoot.”

  Backed into the wedge between the refrigerator and the wall, Dave can’t see the door but he knows Earl is facing off with the rent-a-cop, pissed off and stretched too thin. In another minute one man will lunge through the screen and attack the other, and it could just as easily be Earl. Dave’s heard it before and he knows the tune. He tenses, set to throw himself into it, separate them, coldcock the cop or throttle him to get this over with, whatever it takes.

  But Theda Pinckney knows the tune better than Dave. She wails, “Oh.” Then she rises up and staggers out to meet the enemy, shrieking, “Oh, oooh, oh! Somebody help me please, I’m dying, I’m choking, get the doctor, somebody, get 911!” All panicky old lady starved for breath and choking like to die, Theda howls to the heavens and crumples, and even Dave could not tell you whether her emergency is real.

  “Oh, lady.” The angry lump in the doorway is freaking. His voice shatters and falls to bits. “We can’t get 911. We can’t get nothing by phone.”

  Earl pounces. “Then get out of here and don’t come back until you get help. Find a doctor! Unless you want to do the mouth-to-mouth yourself.”

  “I can’t get no…”

  “If Momma dies, it’s on you!”

  Dave hears trouble running for the car.

  No need to help Theda. She sits up, grinning.

  “Mom?”

  Dave comes at them with his arms wide. “Ma’am, Ma’am!” Love hits him dead center. You were magnificent.

  It takes them a while to get her to her feet and back to the sofa. In the fragile seconds before she lapses into what she was when he first came in, Theda says, “You boys had better scoot before he comes back.”

  21

  Merrill

  Later

  This is just wrong. They are sitting too close in a wooden shed, Merrill and the Northerner who … This is a sentence she can’t finish. The slatted walls, the clutter are at odds with the purity of the tidy desert enclave where she’s lived ever since … How long has it been? In time either compressed or expanded by anxiety, Merrill has lost track. She’s wedged in chockablock with Rawson Steele, in …

  In terms of exact location, she’s lost. Even the packing crate where he first led her had a certain logic to it, but this is new. They’re sitting so close that she can feel the warmth. Still as he is in this new place, the man is whistling somewhere behind his teeth; she knows the tune. Once she’s grounded— grounded?— the words will come back, problem being that she has no idea where she is or what this is.

  It’s nothing like the uniform cubes in the compound. The houses that contain and control their lives sit shoulder to shoulder like good soldiers or ice cubes, tightly sealed against sun and sand and the unforeseeable, flying debris and disruptive elements— strangers, new ideas— that blow in on the desert wind. This is nothing like his packing-carton lair. There’s sand seeping into this new place: sand in her hair and sand on the dank prison floor.

  If, in fact, they are trapped here.

  She doesn’t know, any more than she knows how she got here. Minutes ago she was hunkered down with Steele in his cardboard shack. Now she isn’t. Did she black out? What? Now, they could be anywhere. Lit by LED strips bolted to four-by-fours overhead, the shed is at odds with everything in the compound where they landed, if landing is what they did.

  Beggared for words, she corrects. Arrived.

  In all their forays, she and Ray Powell never saw anything like this. In the last few days the two of them covered most of the territory inside the rim, troubled by the relentlessly clean lines, the sterile sameness, trying to figure out how they fit into the design. Groggy as she is, she thinks: If only you were Ray. Her tough, steady, impeccable friend would help her sort this out. No. He’d help her sit the fuck up. Why is she so weak? She’s slumped on the floor with no idea how she got here or how long it’s been, propped against Rawson Steele like a rag doll discarded by a giant child. She finds herself fitted into the curve of his arm so tightly that it’s as if they are connected. So warm.

  Worse: she has no memory of the transition.

  Fixed in place, she goes scurrying around inside her head. She doesn’t know why, but this is how. Fast. She left the house with Steele last night because she thought … Right. That he’d show her the path, tunnel, bridge to the rim and the territory beyond. The way out. Ned begged to come with, but she was so fixed on escape that she dropped off that porch and took off after Steele without a second thought. Be cool, Ned. I’ll come back for you. I’ll get us out.

  She left him behind, imagining that Rawson Steele would mastermind the great escape. Instead he showed her into his massed cartons like a realtor, she thinks, trying to sell off an unwanted house. She sat down with him in his shelter, bent on learning what she could— OK, she was excited. Unbroken days of uncertainty interrupted by this abrupt, forceful man with his odd, don’t-fuck-with-me eyes. Decisive, she thinks, unlike … Stop it, stop judging him! Davy, if we ever get out of here, when we come home, I’ll make this up to you.

  She sat down in that carton thinking to find out what Steele knows, but he wasn’t giving anything away. Instead he tugged on threads that tighten in her gut even as she slumps against him, trying and failing to break the connection that keeps her in place. As though they are somehow related via two best friends who ran off to fight the Civil War. Who are the long-dead Hampton Poulnot and Archie Rivard to her anyway? Is this vibrant, psychological shape-shifter sitting this close a reliable narrator or what?

  Desperately, she replays the sequence. The sweep. A physical manifestation of powers working behind the scenes, Steele told her as the machine rolled past, but he wouldn’t say which powers, or what scenes. What did she think when it ended, that Rawson Steele would open up and spill his soul? At the end he signaled that it was safe to talk. She spoke first.

  One question. All she did was ask him that damn question. She didn’t want much. Just an answer. Then she’d know whether to trust him or not. What were you digging for?

  She has no memory of what happened next.

  Now they are here.

  What happened in the long silence that he dropped into the space between them then? Did she fall asleep and this happened, or were they both gassed or poleaxed in a sneak attack? What force broke down their cardboard shelter, and who dumped them here? A flash of sense memory makes her shudder: her head bouncing against a dense, bony shoulder. They were carried here.

  Or she was.

  Drained by the long siege of dislocation and displacement, Merrill thinks, They did something to us. Unless it’s simply that the air in the shed is cold and still, and the man by her side radiates heat. I’m not weak, I’m just stupid. God, she misses Ray. Ray would know what to do.

  She tries to separate from him so she can stand, but her body won’t respond. All her working parts are numbed, as though something put her whole body to sleep. We were drugged. Steele sits next to her with hi
s head up and his back against the wall, and goddammit, she’s still leaning against him— not for support— for the warmth, she supposes, thinking, wrong. Listening to his breath coming and going behind his teeth— that almost-whistle; she can almost catch the tune.

  She needs to sit up straight, for God’s sake, separate, but it’s warm here and she’s too numb, or is it drawn— close, she thinks, oh, shit, we’re sitting way too close— to move away. There are things he said to her during that long night in the carton and things that have to be said. Yet here they are like a couple on a wedding cake, side by side. She needs to stand up and put the real question. What were you digging up? She needs to stand up, raise her fists and hammer the answer out of him with her fists if she has to, but she can’t. Quite. Move.

  OK, he doesn’t need to know you’re awake.

  When he runs a light hand over her hair, she doesn’t even twitch; she listens. A fragment of lyric comes back to her: “I was born about ten thousand years ago…”

  Leaning, she studies the wood-frame interior through half-closed eyes. After weeks spent roving the faceless streets of the compound, going back to her relentlessly spare and aggressively clean house, she is surrounded by so many foreign objects that she can’t identify them.

  The shed where they sit looks like the costume department for some makeshift country theater where kid actor-wannabes get together and stage Little Orphan Annie in the barn. Look at it long enough, and the jumble on the long wall opposite sorts itself out into masses of garments and personal effects, the kind you’d find in a thrift store or in the back room of a funeral home, but whose things are they, really?

  How did they end up here?

  The wall facing the one where she and Rawson Steele are parked like abandoned bikes is thick with ranks of clothing too rich and varied to identify at first. Garments hang on a rail that runs the length of the shed, fixed in brackets so not even the raccoon coats and officers’ greatcoats drag the floor. Boots, shoes, sandals are neatly lined up on the floor below. The few bizarre outfits— costumes?— that Merrill recognizes range from fur-trimmed, obscenely grand velvets and brocades out of forgotten throne rooms to homespun dresses to timeless cotton shifts that she could have worn to work in Kraventown before the instrument of their exile snatched her out of her life and dumped her here. She sees masses of coats, capes, jackets too old to place in time, and the more items she can identify, the worse it gets.