Valentine's Exile (13 page)

Of course conversing without really talking was an old habit of his and Molly's. They'd been that way ever since the zoo. She grew more animated when she described her duties as a civilian horse trainer.

When they said good night under a moth-shrouded lamp, both bled relief into the chill spring night.

Valentine spent the next day with Valdez, who wanted an opinion on some beadwork one of his men had found in a bush. On the way there he expounded on the virtues of sandals for soldiers, waxing eloquent on both their hygiene and durability benefits. They examined the site where the piece had been found, but neither Valentine nor any of the men could find tracks, and they returned to Valdez's office in the cool of the concrete redoubt.

“It's pretty dirty,” Valentine said, evaluating what he supposed was a bracelet. “The leather's dried. Looks like Grog work, but I'm thinking a crow spotted it somewhere and decided to add it to his collection. Weren't the Grogs in this area during the occupation?”

“Fighting with the TMCC,” the sergeant who brought it to Captain Valdez's attention added, referring to the Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps. Valentine had worn their uniform during his ruse in Little Rock.

“How'd it go with the Carlson girl?” Valdez asked after the sergeant had left, with an order to pass news of the find up to the brigade headquarters in Forrest City. He filled two glass tumblers with water and added a splash of something that smelled like it was trying to be gin.

“Why isn't she the ‘Stockard girl'?”

“That
chulo
gave up on his family when he ran.” Valdez opened an envelope resting in his in box, tossed it back like a fish too small to be kept, and sat down. He waved to a chair against the wall. Valentine pulled it up and thanked him for the drink by raising his glass halfway across the ring-stained desk.

“Ran?”

“Yes. I heard he and a few other cowards ran north into Grog land. He left a note saying that he'd send for her once he was established. I understand the Grogs sometimes employ men as mechanics and so on.”

“She told you this?”

“No. As I said, it is a small post.”

“Then what do you know about me?”

“From gossip? Nothing. But I've been around enough men to know when one is thinking about losing himself in a woman. You should do whatever you came here to do and leave again.”

Valentine at once liked and disliked his temporary host. He liked the open way Valdez offered what could be construed as criticism, and disliked him because the criticism was so near the mark.

That afternoon he kept Molly company while she worked, cooling and calming the horses down after they'd been trotted on a long lead. Edward spent his days in the company of a B-dependant, an older woman who'd lost her husband and two sons to Southern Command's Cause.

They quit early when an afternoon drizzle started up.

Afterward, Molly hung the traces up in the tack room to dry.

“Is Mary still horse crazy?” Valentine asked, smelling the rich, oiled leather and remembering the preteen's currycomb obsession in Wisconsin.

“She discovered boys just before . . . everything.”

“Where is she now?”

“They took her away.”

“I thought she tested negative,” Valentine said, and realized the implications of his words.

“Tested negative? What does that have to do with it?”

“I—”

“A gang of soldiers saw a fourteen-year-old girl they liked in a bread line and just took her.” Valentine heard a fly futilely buzzing in a spider's web from the tack room's corner; in the stalls a horse nickered to an associate. Only human ears had the capacity to appreciate the grief in Molly's voice. “They killed her for the fun of it. According to our mouthpiece, they did get a trial and one of them was convicted for murder. Who knows what really happened.”

“They do, for a start. I wouldn't mind talking it over with one of them.”

“They're probably dead, Dave. Was it always like this in the Free Territory? When you talked about it with me in Wisconsin . . . seems like everyone's either dead or has dead family.”

“You're not saying it was better back there?”

“No, not better. Easier. You always had the option of believing all the lies, too. Why are you here, David? It's not the sort of place soldiers spend their leave.”

“Let's find somewhere to sit.”

“I'll take you to my spot,” she said, and extended her hand.

Valentine took it, wondering.

She took him out of the barn and to a portion of fence that projected from a side door. Extra hay bales sat here on wooden pallets, under a wooden awning to keep the rain off, a sort of ramshackle add-on to the aluminum structure that a pair of carpenters had probably put up in a day.

She scooted up onto one of the bales and sat looking at the springtime green of Crowley's Ridge, rising less than a mile away. “I like the view,” she said. “Normally I eat with Edward and the other kids, but sometimes Carla takes the kids out for the day to the duck pond. Then I just eat my lunch here.”

“Remember that day we sat on the hill and talked about your dad's setup for us?”

She tilted her head back with eyes closed. “Yes. God, I was young.”

“You're still young.”

“You're not,” she said, startling Valentine a little. “Afraid of a little honesty? You're not that earnest young lieutenant anymore. You used to look at me. It gave me— kind of a tickle. Now you stare through me. Through that ridge, as a matter of fact.”

“I'm here because your name came up in something we're looking into. A test that you—and your sister—took involving a blood draw.”

“That's it?” she asked.

Valentine nodded.

“This has nothing to do with Graf?”

“Should I be asking you about him?”

“He's a good man. Was a good man. Guard duty was his world. When that went away he had nothing.”

“He had you and a child.”

“A prison camp's not much of a place for either. Don't you want to know about the boob test?”

Valentine wasn't so sure any more. “Why do you call it that?”

“That's what we called it in Wisconsin. They gave all the girls the same thing at about thirteen or fourteen. Just when you got your boobs so we called it the boob test.”

“How do you know it's the same?” Valentine asked.

Molly twisted a piece of straw around her finger. “They did the same thing both times. Line up all the girls—well, it was all the women in Pine Bluff, I suppose, since they were just getting us organized. Usual health check with a tongue depressor and thermometer and listening to your heart and lungs.”

“Okay.”

“At the end they took a little wooden stick, smaller than a knitting needle, and scratched you with the end. Some gals got a big welt from it. To get released from the exam you had to show your arm. Most of us got a red mark, on some it raised a welt—it didn't on me or my sister—then, for those who didn't react, the nurse drew some blood and dropped it in a test tube.”

“I don't suppose you asked—”

“Both times. They said it checked for infection.”

“What happened when they put the blood in the test tube?”

“Nothing. It just dissolved.”

“Do you remember if there was anyone who had it do anything else?”

Molly's face scrunched up. “Not in Wisconsin, but they only checked about eight of us. They plucked out some women from the group in Pine Bluff, I recall. A bunch of others kind of kicked up at that, and the women taken were yelling out messages to friends, but the soldiers said something like, ‘They've got it made, they're going to Memphis priority style,' or something like that. Maybe it was just to calm everyone down.”

“Memphis?” Valentine said.

“Yes, I'm sure about Memphis. Memphis in style.”

“Wait here a moment, okay?”

“Sure.”

Valentine trotted up to his pack and extracted Post's flyer. He returned to Molly and showed her the picture.

“Did you see her there?”

“That wasn't the woman I saw taken away. She was sorta black.” She looked more closely at the picture. “She's pretty.”

“She's my friend's wife. He wants to know what happened to her.”

She yanked some more straw out of the bale and tossed it piece by piece into the breeze. “When they take you away it's never good. Never. That guard was just talking for the sake of talk.”

“I don't suppose you saw the train leave or the uniforms of the men who took her.”

“No. You know how they are with that stuff. Someone disappears through a door or behind a curtain and then they're just gone.”

She stood up with a little hop. “Now. Your question's been answered. You can go.”

“I wasn't the one who got married and quit writing,” Valentine said. He saw her eyes go wet.

“Go join one of the nightly card games with Valdez and the corporals, David. Go and learn about a bad hand. We were a bad hand, that's all. You played it well back in Wisconsin, you did right by me and my family, but it was still a bad hand. Leave me—us—alone.”

Valentine stood up too, and regretted it. He was a good six inches taller than Molly and the last thing he wanted to do was physically intimidate her. “What ‘us'? You and me or you and your son? I've got a daughter, Molly. She's a thousand miles away and all I know is that she was born, but she's a piece of me. Just like you.” He took a step back.

“A piece, you mean.”

“Don't! Molly, just don't. It wasn't that way, not with us, not with Mo—Malita. Don't play with words and think that'll change what happened.”

An arch collapsed inside her. “Crap,” she said, and sniffled.

“You want me to go?”

“Yes. No—no. Do what you have to. You're built for it.”

He spoke softly. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“One of the old hands in Weening used to say you Wolves and whatnot, the aliens came and took out your hearts and put in those of horses and pigs and lions or whatever to make you so you could stand up to them. You weren't human anymore, not on the inside.”

“We drank some kind of medicine. That's it.”

“You can eat with us tonight if you want. Or just leave— I'll understand. That trail you're on's cold enough.” She turned and went quickly into the barn, and Valentine got the distinct feeling she didn't want to be followed.

She didn't want anything from him at all.

He borrowed a horse from Valdez—“We've got plenty that need exercise; take one!”—and rode the big quarter horse hard down to Forrest City. He posted a letter summarizing the relevant pieces of his conversation with Molly to the Miskatonic and saw to the feeding and care of his borrowed gelding. A few hundred dollars of back pay disappeared into the stalls and markets the next morning, and a hard afternoon's ride later he was back at Quapaw Post.

“What's all this?” Molly said at her screen door. Edward interposed himself in front of his mother.

Valentine set down canvas mailbags, and the child reached out with both hands. He was sophisticated enough to know what a big bag promised.

“Season's Greetings,” Valentine said. “It's customary to give a little something in exchange for valuable information. ”

He reached in and extracted three bolts of fabric. “Denim, of course, and I hope you like that green. You're the kind of blond who can wear green.”

A big bag of buttons came next. “Most of them match. I looked. I figured you could trade any you didn't like.”

Shoes in various sizes for Edward came next, a heavy slab of bacon in waxed paper, great loops of sausage like ox yokes, some lemons and limes, candied dates, and a black-and-white ceramic cow that had probably once been a cookie jar.

He'd let Molly discover the cookies inside on her own, if Edward didn't first.

“Thought it looked like the cows in Wisconsin.”

“Holsteins,” Molly said, her hand at her throat.

Tea, powdered sugar, a bottle of brandy, even elastic-banded socks and underwear—luxuries all, smuggled from the Kurian Zone, no doubt, but it was considered bad taste to ask a trader questions beyond quality—all joined the growing pile on the tiny table.

“And some cans of jelly,” Valentine finished.

“Jelly!” Edward said.

“You're too . . . too much, David. They were just words, and I was angry.”

“I thought it was kind of refreshing. First time we'd been honest with each other since . . . well, your dad's basement. ”

Molly blushed, but just a little. “We were just about to have macaroni and ration cheese.” The tiniest pause after “macaroni” told Valentine all he needed to know about what she thought of Southern Command's “cheese”—an oily yellow concoction that tasted faintly like axle grease. “I can fill another plate.”

“Fine.”

They ate on the steps of the porch rather than clear off the table. “It occurred to me on the ride back that I didn't know if you could sew,” Valentine said. “I recall you were good with leather.”

“Not like my mom. But I'm getting better.”

One of Molly's civilian neighbors, a tight-faced, tan woman, walked by and took a second look at Valentine. Then she turned her face straight to home with everything but an audible
hmpff
.

After Edward went to bed they talked. Looking back on it Valentine realized that he talked and Molly listened. Beck and leaving the Wolves, Duvalier and training as a Cat, the Eagle D Brand in Nebraska's sand hills, the wild night of fire in the General's hangar, Jamaica, Haiti, ratbits, finding out that he'd be a father one rainy day in the Texas pinewoods. The deaths of M'Daw and the Smalls, Hank. He raised his shirt and she touched the burns on his back.