Newford Stories (18 page)

He watched her go up the walk to her
building, the branches of the pine and maple entwining above her,
waited until she was inside before he put the Chev in gear and
pulled away from the curb. He got the sense she wasn't like Andrea,
the last uptown woman he'd dated, that she didn't look at him as a
project, something to clean up the way other people went to garage
sales, buying junk that they could polish into antiques.

But then, Andrea hadn't been the kind to go
out walking the streets at night looking for animal people.

He knew what Moth would say: You've got to
ask yourself, what's in it for her? Because everybody's playing an
angle, working the percentages. That's just the way the world
turns, kid. Look out for yourself, because nobody else'll be doing
it for you.

Except for a couple of kids with
switchblades who could rub spit on a gunshot wound and make it go
away like it had never happened.

Animal people.

Bird girls.

He wasn't sure whether he would tell Moth
about what had happened tonight. Moth wasn't going to believe it
anyway. Hank had been there himself and he wasn't really all that
sure what had happened. It felt too much like he'd dreamed the
whole thing.

But as he took a sharp corner and Lily's
business card began to slide down the dash, he grabbed it and stuck
it in the pocket of his jeans.

2.

Lily waited just inside the front hall,
studying the cab through a slit in her landlady's lace curtains
until it pulled away. Without her glasses, the receding taillights
and the red reflections trailing behind them on the wet street
smeared and blurred. She waited until the cab turned a corner, then
moved away from the window.

Well, she'd certainly made a good impression
on Joey Bennett, she thought. She leaned her back against the wall,
shoulders slumped. What could she possibly have been thinking,
talking to him about the animal people? He probably thought she was
ready to check into the Zeb where the shrinks could deal with
her.

When Jack was telling his stories, she
hadn't believed in the animal people either. Not really. But she
wanted to. She wanted to because, for all that she clearly knew the
difference between what was real and what wasn't, those strange
animal spirits of his still called out to her. When he spoke, she
could almost see them lift their heads to peer at her from the
spaces where he took a breath, the idea of their existence
resonating against something that ran deep in her own blood. But
that didn't mean she actually believed in them.

I was out looking for animal people …

She cringed as she remembered saying that.
She hadn't needed her glasses to read the look on Joey's face, the
polite way he didn't come right out and tell her he thought she was
nuts. But he didn't have to.

Jack could get away with it, telling those
stories, believing in animal people. He was such a character,
living in that old school bus of his, the way he put himself in so
many of his stories, as though he'd actually been there when they
happened, no matter how tall the tale.

Lily understood the temptation, perhaps too
well. She might even call it a need because, while she didn't know
Jack well enough to be able to say why he did it, she was familiar
enough with the process. The stories he related were like the ones
she and Donna used to tell each other when they were kids, the two
of them thrown together because no one else in the neighborhood
wanted to play with the fat kid with the Coke-bottle glasses or her
gimpy friend. They were both voracious readers, as much by
circumstance as by choice, and the stories they made up were a
natural outgrowth of all that reading, born out of the need of two
tomboys trapped in bodies that didn't look or work properly, having
to make up a place where they could fit in. Because the real world
didn't have such a place for them.

All these years later, Donna still had her
limp. She'd moved to the East Coast where she worked as an editor
for a small publishing house and was doing well for herself, though
she often mentioned missing Newford when she wrote. Lily was no
longer fat; in fact, if anything, she was slightly underweight, but
inside she was still that tubby little kid and she still wanted to
believe. She thought maybe Donna felt the same; that what Donna
really missed was being able to believe. But that was something
they never talked about in the emails they sent each other every
day.

Lily sighed. Pushing herself away from the
wall she made her way upstairs and let herself into her apartment.
She didn't know why she even cared what Joey thought of her. It
wasn't likely she'd ever hear from him again—she'd recognized that
look in his eyes when she'd asked him to call her. It was the same
look men always got when they promised something they never meant
to do. "I had a great time tonight. We should do it again. I'll
call you." And then you waited all week before you realized it
wasn't going to happen. And you never learned. You always thought,
maybe this time it'll be different.

Joey wasn't her type, anyway. He was too
good-looking, in a tough sort of a way, rough around the edges,
perhaps, but so sure of himself. Like the cool rebel kids she'd
always admired from a distance in school, the ones who never had to
worry about whether people liked them or not, who just strode
through life, pulling everybody else along in their wake. Things
didn't happen to them, they made them happen. They were in control
of their own destinies.

What a load of crock, she thought, dropping
her camera bag on the sofa. Because really, wasn't there something
pathetic about a grown man making his living by driving an illegal
cab in the middle of the night? What kind of a "destiny" was that?
The destiny of a loser.

She sighed. It was a nice try, but putting
him down didn't work. She felt attracted to him. It wasn't even the
mystique, that edge of danger that clung to him like an aura. It
was … the unexpected kindness in him, she realized. The way he'd
stopped to help her without any consideration of the danger he'd
put himself into. He could have been killed. He could have …

She sat down on the sofa beside her camera
bag. Kicking off her shoes one by one, she leaned back against the
cushions. Closed her eyes.

He'd been shot. She remembered that. She
remembered how loud the gun had sounded and seeing the bullet hit
him, how the impact had slammed him against his car, remembered the
blood that smeared the side of the door and soaked his shirt. But
then those girls had come with their little penknives, almost as if
they'd stepped out of one of Jack's stories, and her attacker was
dead. She and Joey were all better, wounds healed, neither of them
traumatized, and the man with the gun was dead. Just like that.

She knew she should be feeling something
about what had happened, but it really was like a story—not like
anything that had happened to her outside of her imagination. She'd
been prowling about in those lanes and alleyways for hours, feeling
like a cat, invisible, very proud of herself for not being scared,
feeling like one of the animal people she was looking for.

Then her attacker had appeared. He'd come up
to her out of nowhere, sliding from the shadows, demanding she hand
over her camera bag, and she, still in her story, feeling
impossibly brave and sure of herself, had simply told him off. That
was when he hit her. As random an act of violence as Joey's
kindness had been. He hit her and kept hitting her until …

She sat up slowly, fingers exploring her
face, the back of her neck, her shoulders.

There was no swelling, no pain. She knew if
she got up to look in the mirror, there wouldn't even be a
bruise.

She remembered the girl kneeling down beside
her, her face so close, and even without the aid of glasses, oddly
in focus: the sharp features below that ragged thatch of black hair
and those dark, dark eyes. The smell of her like cedars and wet oak
leaves and something sweet. Apple blossoms.

And she'd said something so odd, just before
she'd taken the pain away. No, not said. She'd half-sung,
half-chanted a few lines that returned to Lily now.

The cuckoo is a pretty bird,

he sings as he flies.

He sucks little birds' eggs,

and then he just dies.

She was sure they were from some song,
though not one Lily knew. Sucks little birds' eggs. What was
that
supposed to mean? She tried repeating the words aloud,
but they remained doggerel, as enigmatic as the girl singing them
to her had been.

That girl. Those girls.

They were real.

The memory of them and what had happened
kept trying to slide away from her, to lose its immediacy and
become just another story, something she'd heard somewhere once,
not something that had happened to her only hours ago. She wouldn't
let it happen. She hung on to the memory, refusing to let it
go.

She'd really found them.

Jack's animal people were real.

3.

The red-haired woman came by Jack's place
early in the morning, as she often did. She called a greeting to
the crows who watched her suspiciously from the roof of the old
school bus. One of them cawed halfheartedly, then turned its head
away and began to preen its glossy black feathers. The others
continued to watch her, black eyes swallowing light. She supposed
they'd never learn to trust her.

Kneeling by the steps of the bus, she
reached under and pulled out the Coleman stove that Jack kept
there. He had a woodstove inside the bus, but it was too warm to
use it for cooking at this time of year and Jack didn't have any
wood for it anyway. It took her a few tries to get the naphtha
stove going, but soon she had a steady flame on the right burner.
The left one didn't work anymore. She filled a battered tin
coffeepot with water from the rain barrel, added ground coffee to
the brewing basket from a plastic bag she was carrying in her
jacket pocket, and put the pot on the stove. Once the coffee was
brewing, she settled herself on the sofa out in front of the long
length of the bus and leaned back, hands behind her head.

After a few moments she heard a stirring
inside, then the smell of the coffee brought Jack out to join her
on the sofa. He was a tall, gangly man, all long legs and arms,
smooth-shaven and raven-haired, with skin a few shades darker than
her own coffee-and-cream complexion. His cowboy boots were black.
His jeans were an old and faded gray, shirt black, as were the
flat-brimmed hat and duster he invariably wore. He had his hat on
this morning—like Dwight Yoakam, she doubted he ever took it off in
public—but he'd left his coat inside for now.

As soon as they saw him, the crows on the
roof began to squabble, filling the air with their racket.

"Hush, you," Jack called over his shoulder.
"Go make yourselves useful somewhere."

Still squabbling, the small flock erupted
from their roost and flew out across the empty lots that lay
between the bus and Moth's junkyard on the edge of the Tombs. Jack
shook his head as they watched them go.

"Going to tease the dogs," he said. "Silly
buggers."

Katy smiled. "Someone's got to do it. Moth
lets those dogs get too lazy. Do you want some coffee? I think it's
just about ready."

"You're spoiling me."

"I guess someone's got to do that, too."

"I won't say no."

She got up from her seat to get mugs from
inside the bus, filling them on her way back to the sofa. They both
drank it black. Squatting was easy to accomplish in the
Tombs—regular citizens didn't venture into its sprawl of abandoned
factories and tenements, and all you had to do was roll out your
bedding to stake a claim—but amenities, even such simple ones such
as sugar and cream, simply didn't exist unless you brought them in
yourself.

Jack took a few sips of coffee and smacked
his lips in appreciation. Taking out a pipe, he went through the
ritual of filling it, tamping the tobacco down just right, getting
it lit. He drank some more coffee. Katy watched the air show the
crows were putting on above Moth's place, dive-bombing the junkyard
dogs, swooping and darting in among the wrecked vehicles. The dogs
howled their frustration.

"You're feeling sorry for them," Jack
said.

"Them and me. But at least those dogs of
Moth's have a place to be—somewhere they fit in."

"Anytime you need a place to stay …"

Katy sighed. "It's not that. It's just …
she's coming. I don't know how I know, but I do."

Jack nodded to show he was listening, but
let her talk.

"I won't be able to stay away from her. I
know I promised her before, and it was hard, but I could manage it
because we had a few thousand miles between us. But now she's
coming here." She looked at Jack. "So it's like the promise is
broken, isn't it? She broke it."

"You're going to have to work that one out
for yourself," Jack told her.

"Maybe her coming means she's changed her
mind."

"Could be. You could ask her."

Katy shook her head. "Anybody else, but not
her."

"You've got nothing to be afraid of," Jack
said.

"She can kill me."

Jack wouldn't let her run with that. "You
can't die."

Because she'd never been born. But Jack was
wrong. She wasn't like some of the animal people in his stories who
kept coming back and back, their lives a wheel where most people's
were a simple line from point A to B. She could die. She knew that,
no matter what Jack said.

"Maybe the crow girls could help me," she
said. "You could introduce me and I could ask them."

Jack laughed. "You know how it goes. They do
any damn thing they please. But ask them right and maybe they'll
help you. Point you down a road, anyway. Could be where you want to
go. Could be where you need to go. That's not always the same
place, you know."