Boys of Blur (11 page)

Cotton spat out a mouthful of water. “It was them,” he said. “On the stone. All those animals, all these months.”

On the bank, the smaller Gren pulled a long bone knife out of his belt and raised his arm to throw.

The blade flew.

Charlie dreamed.

In his dream, an alligator ate his leg.

In his dream, Molly wore a rotting panther skin and chased him around, laughing.

In his dream, an old woman kissed him on the head and sang to him. She sang about love. She sang about running. About wind. About heroes and beauties and spicy rice. She sang about chains breaking and seas rising up to kiss the sun. But mostly, she sang about sleep. And when she did, he slept. And when he slept in his dream, he dreamed a new dream.

In his new dream, he ran barefoot on a dirt path between fields of cane. The dirt was a strange powder of forests, of fish, of birds, of men and women and children and wolves, of huge reptiles, and of mushrooms. It swirled beneath him as he ran, and every grain sparked into white
flame when he touched it, and the flames swirled up in a cloud behind him, and he laughed, because he knew Molly would laugh and because he felt like a comet. His flaming tail was made of life, and every spark told a story about every living thing that had ever been and every living thing that would ever be.

Charlie laughed from the sheer joy of it, and he ran faster. His tail of sparks grew into a tornado, a hurricane, a galaxy of living dust, and still he ran.

He looked back at the cloud of life behind him and saw it rising up from the cane higher and brighter than any field fire and its smoke. But also in the cloud, there was a writhing shape. It had many limbs and wings and heads and hates. It was as black as nowhere and as empty as never, and it was swallowing the cloud of sparks. A long arm of dark emptiness lashed out and whipped itself around Charlie’s ankle.

Pain. Terror.

In his dream, Charlie would scream.

In his dream, the old woman would kiss him on the head and sing a different song, not about sleep. She would sing her song about spicy rice. Or the moon. Or a river. Or a tree with roots so deep that they grew straight through the whole world and became a forest on the other side.

Charlie yawned. He could hear the rain. It sounded like there was a big puddle just outside his window. Molly would be happy. She would jump in the puddle in her bare feet because feet were meant to be in puddles and toes had been invented so that mud could squirt between them.

“Molly …,” Charlie said. He sat up in bed and looked out his window.

Except there was no window. There wasn’t even a wall. He was on a low cot beneath an old green blanket. The cot was on an uneven plank deck suspended between two massive tree trunks. Above him, thick living branches grew out of one tree and into the other, belonging to both trees equally. Beyond the deck and the roof, there were more trees, all of them rising up out of black water that was puckered and rippling with raindrops.

Charlie kicked off his blanket and swung his feet over the side of his cot. His right leg throbbed, but the pain wasn’t sharp. He wasn’t sure what had happened. Something about Cotton throwing rocks. Had Cotton hit him?

Charlie pulled his knee up to his chest and twisted to get a look at his ankle. His shoes and socks were gone, and a large square of sticky gauze covered the source of his pain. He peeled it off. A rough gash at least three inches long and one inch wide decorated the outside of his ankle. Thin lips of white flesh shone where it had been torn open.

The wound wasn’t bloody at all. It was packed full of busy, glistening maggots.

Charlie shut his eyes hard and swallowed, his throat tightening. He was waiting for something, something that would change what he had just seen, that would carry it all away and make it disappear.

Slowly, his mind crawled out of its sleep shell, and he knew that he had been waiting for the old woman and her kiss and a song. He was waiting for the dream to change.

But this was no dream.

Charlie opened his eyes and leaned slowly over his ankle. The wound was real. The maggots in the wound were very real. He wanted to shout and jump and shake them off. Instead, he shivered. Someone had put them there on purpose. And as disgusting as they were, they seemed tidy. He carefully pressed the gauze back down over those little wriggling gray backs. He shivered again at their squishiness, and then lowered his foot back to the floor. The pain grew as he stood. Everything from the knee down hummed.

Engravings swirled across the dark planks of the floor. Animals—panthers and gators and rabbits and birds. Snakes. Boys running. Charlie recognized the church carved on its mound. Canals. Even a few odd little buildings and streets that had to represent Taper. And there was a cane field burning—flames carved like looping waves. In the cane, crudely engraved men hacked with machetes. Crudely engraved women carried bundles of cane on their backs toward wagons waiting on a road. A man on a horse swung a whip.

Against the bottoms of his bare feet, the engravings felt like pinecones, or barnacles on a rock.

On the ceiling, the planks had been carved with moons, suns, and stars. Paths had been traced between the moons, connecting them all. The same was true of the suns and the stars. There were so many lines it was impossible to follow a single thread. Around the edges, strange creatures had been carved as well—three eyes clustered together between spread wings, a lion with hooves and wings and a roaring man’s bearded head.

“Honey,” a woman said behind him. “What are you doing up?”

Charlie spun around and winced, lifting his injured foot and balancing awkwardly on his left leg.

The woman had white hair pulled back into a loose single braid. Her eyes were blue, and her skin was pale beneath a thick spray of dark freckles. She was thin but not bony. Her shirt was square and loose and a shade of white that approached yellow. Everything about her was soft—everything but her eyes.

“You were in my dreams,” Charlie said. “Singing.”

The woman smiled and nodded.

“I didn’t recognize you then,” Charlie said. “But you were at the coach’s funeral. Beside the grave in a white chair. The man, the coach, was he …”

“He was,” the woman said. Her smile grew. “I’ve been Mrs. Willie Wisdom for fifty-nine years, and just because
he died doesn’t mean I have to stop. The boys called me Mother Wisdom.” She winked at Charlie. “Prester and his brother called me Mama Molly.”

Molly. Charlie wasn’t sure what to say. He lowered his right foot and eased his weight back onto it. He pointed at his ankle.

“Did you, uh …”

“I did,” she said. “Some poisons are beyond doctors.”

“Poison?” Charlie asked. When could there have been poison? He remembered being chased, but it all blended together with his dreams. Sparks of life swirling around him, and then brutal pain erupting in his ankle.

“Mrs. Wisdom, where’s Cotton? How long have I been here?”

Molly Wisdom took Charlie by the hand. She led him past the empty cot to the other open wall. More trees. More rain. And two flights of covered stairs that curled away behind the huge trees. On the right, the stairs went up. Mrs. Wisdom went left, to stairs that descended.

She took each step first, holding Charlie’s hand, supporting him with her soft shoulder as he limped behind. The stairs were just long enough to wrap around to a lower room on the other side of the tree. This room had trees on two sides, one wall open to the swamp, and one that connected to a narrow footbridge that seemed to run from tree to tree above the water. There was a soft rug on the little room’s floor, a bookshelf, a dresser, a cupboard, a small
bed, and two red chairs with worn but bulging cushions. Quiet embers glowed in a metal bowl on the open side of the room, and a bright blue teakettle hung on a hook above it. A few raindrops reached the kettle and the fire bowl and hissed themselves dry on impact.

Mrs. Wisdom helped Charlie to the nearest chair and then bustled over to the teapot. Charlie watched her pull heavy stone mugs from the cupboard. He watched her pack herbs into a little metal strainer above the mugs and then trickle steaming water through the leaves into the mugs. Finally, she pressed one heavy mug into Charlie’s hands and then nestled herself into the other chair, pulling her feet up onto the cushion beneath her. She held her mug with two hands, inhaled the steam, and then smiled.

“So, Charlie Reynolds, I suppose you’ll be wanting to know everything.”

Charlie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He looked down at his mug. It felt like a large hot rock. The rim was almost too thick for drinking. The liquid—tea, he assumed—was the color of caramel.

“Double honey and cream and a little extra something for that infection of yours, doll,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Do try it. Now, you learned some things in your dreams, but I never know how much sticks. So, how about you tell me what you’d like to know first.”

Charlie watched Mrs. Wisdom watching him as she
sipped her tea. He licked his lips and then looked at the rain.

“Where am I?”

Mrs. Wisdom laughed. “Why, you’re right here with me.”

Charlie shifted in his chair, frustrated. Mrs. Wisdom leaned forward and held up one hand.

“Don’t be squirming, honey. I know what you meant, and I’m sorry for making light. You’re in a swamp grove that once stretched strong all the way to Old Nick Slough, not too far from Moonshine Bay, in the shallow western waters of Lake Okeechobee herself. If it weren’t for the dike named after the lovely Mr. Herbert Hoover, you could see the lights of Taper glowing from the tops of these very trees. My dear departed Willie trained and built this part of the tree house, and Lio helped him. Most of the rest was trained and made by those who came before.”

Charlie raised his mug and decided against it. He let it rest on his leg, and then moved it quickly to the soft threadbare arm of the chair.

“Where’s Cotton?”

Mrs. Wisdom nodded. “You’re a good boy, Charlie Reynolds. You must be wondering all sorts of things right about now, but worrying about your friend comes first. And it should. Cottonmouth Mack is asleep. Across the bridge with all the others.”

“The others?” Charlie asked. “What others?”

“Sixteen of them,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Poor little dolls. Four more than Willie and I ever had to care for out here, but sadly fewer than actually needed my help.”

“I don’t really understand,” Charlie said. “You’re saying that Cotton’s okay?”

“He is,” Mrs. Wisdom said, but her voice grew heavy. “As okay as any of us are right now, and to be honest, that isn’t very okay at all. He could be dead by midnight. As could you be. As could every poor soul in the sweet little town of Taper, Florida.” She dragged her fingernails across the arm of her chair. “We’re outmatched, Charlie Reynolds. All places and peoples have their ends, just as much as they have their beginnings. I’m just one more selfish old woman who doesn’t want the sun to set just yet.” She smiled with tight lips, and her blue eyes were wet. “You’ve seen the mounds. The weak chalk stones. The Gren. Your eyes have seen the life magic in the muck.”

“All the dust that turned into sparks?” Charlie asked. “That was a dream. I’m not really made of fiery dust.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Wisdom said, “you are. You’re made of tiny spinning bits as fast as light. But those bits aren’t all of you. They fly off. They get lost, and new ones come on and join the swirling Charlie-shaped dance that is your body. And dwelling in that dance, woven through every racing bit, heating it all with life and guiding it, there is a fire, a soul—
you
. It takes a dream to see something like that, something closer to the way things really are.”

Charlie stared at the old woman. He’d listened in science class. What she was saying wasn’t really all that different from how Mr. Kahn had talked about atoms and electrons and all that stuff. Even the look in their eyes was the same—bright and wild, like they were talking about magic. Because they were.

“Charlie?” Mrs. Wisdom asked. “Are you okay?”

Charlie stared down at his untasted tea. “In my dreams, the muck was all fiery, too. But it’s dead.” He looked up.