Outside In (13 page)

EIGHTEEN

Carts of Darkness

Monday lunchtime
the program of finding Blossom clicked into gear. Finding Dreadlocks from the base jump night was as easy as plunking down in the cafeteria. There he was, across the invisible line that divided the people that you could talk to from the people that you couldn't. Dreads, ring in the eyebrow, attitude. Eating noodles.

All she had to do was go over and talk to him.

All.

“
That's
the guy?” said Kas.

“Yes, you know him?”

“Yeah, Wolf Skapski. He hangs out with my cousin Mark.”

“So. I just need to go over there and talk to him. No big deal, right?”

“Right.”

“It's just a simple question, right?”

“Right.”

“Hey, Kas, since you know him, why don't you do it?”

“I don't know him. I've just seen him around with Mark.”

“Look. I'll do it.” Celia's voice was wobbly but she started to stand up.

“Oh, Celia, sit down.” Lynn reached out and grabbed Celia's sleeve.

Without even planning the script, Lynn stood up and walked across the room, aware of eyes shifting toward her. How far was it? Twelve steps? Several hundred kilometers?

When she arrived at the dangerous-guy table, courtesy seemed the way to go.

“Wolf, I don't want to interrupt your lunch, but when you're done, if you have a minute, can I talk to you?”

Complete silence. She could tell from their dazed expressions that it was as though the recycling bin had suddenly begun to sing the national anthem.

Wolf said simply, “Sure.”

“Thanks,” said Lynn. “I'll be right outside the door.”

Kas and Celia greeted her as though she had just returned from a space mission. Splash-down at Cafeteria Table #6!

“What did you say to him?”

“I asked him to meet me after lunch.”

It was bold. It was hopeful. It was even fun.

But it came to nothing.

“I don't know where he is. Haven't heard anything about new jumps. I guess he just took off.”

Then the cafeteria doors exploded open with the boys from the dangerous-boys table, and Wolf was carried away. Lynn watched them retreat, an amoeba-like mass of testosterone.

The following week all the strategies on Celia's list led to dead ends.

The folks at the garden hadn't seen Blossom and Larch.

The Diode went with Lynn to a Thursday night stakeout at Clara the dentist's. It was quite hard to do a stakeout on a regular city street. You couldn't just stand there in front of somebody's house.

“No wonder PI's need cars,” said Kas.

There was no sign of dog or dog walker.

On Saturday Lynn and Celia went to the north shore farmers' market. No tubeworlds. No leads.

They placed another I Saw You ad and netted a bunch of replies from a whole different set of creeps.

One garbage pick-up morning, Lynn woke up to the sound of bottles clanking. She jumped out of bed and stuck her head out the window. It was an elderly Chinese woman delicately sorting through the recycling.

This wasn't their patch. It never had been.

Finally, the only lead left was a place she dreaded going to. Kas and Celia had offered to go with her to any of the locations they had figured out. But for this one Lynn knew she would have to be alone.

≈≈≈

Most places looked
better on a sunny day. Not the Return-It depot. Lynn stood across the street and watched the comings and goings, remembering the day she had been there with the Underlanders. It had been a dark day, a sky of big black clouds and a weirdly cold breeze, fridge-open cold. Lynn had met them at the fountain — Fossick, Tron and Blossom, each steering a grocery cart full of neatly organized bottles and cans. Fossick was proclaiming, as usual — “I never saw the heavens so dim by day.”

As they paused at the top of the hill, Tron jumped on the back of his cart, gave a big push and rode it down the long slope, heading straight for a busy intersection. Lynn watched in horror, but Fossick and Blossom seemed unconcerned. At the very last minute, he stuck out one foot and braked.

“It's what they do up on the steep mountain roads,” Blossom explained. “It's kind of like the Olympics. They call themselves Carts of Darkness.”

As the slower party reached the bottom of the hill, it began to hail. Fossick pulled four garbage bags from a roll attached to his cart, and Tron pulled out a knife. In a second they had ponchos. Soon the hail was bouncing on the streets and popping into the ponchos. Each hailstone was a small attack. It was almost painful. Lynn's feet began to slip on the pavement, like walking on ball bearings.

“Circle the wagons,” said Fossick, laughing with the craziness of it.

The hailstones popped off the plastic and pinged off the bottles. Cars stopped wherever they were on the road, the world whitened and the stones got bigger. Lynn, hiding under her poncho, couldn't see and couldn't hear. It was all about the cold smell of the wind and the small micro-attacks of hailstones.

Then, abruptly, it stopped. The cars started up and the Underlanders peered out from under their ponchos and set off again.

The depot was alive with energy. In the parking lot, carts of every sort milled, some still decorated with hailstones. Inside the warehouse, men stood at long tables accepting bottles, counting and calculating, handing out bits of paper. There was a lineup at the cash wicket.

Everybody knew the Underlanders. They called out greetings and jokes. “How's it going?” “My business is picking up every day, ha ha.” A woman with hair polished like mahogany, called out, “Hey, Fossick! Not dead yet?” and laughed a raspy laugh. Blossom astonished Lynn by having a long conversation in sign language with one of the cashiers.

The people glanced at Lynn, neither friendly nor unfriendly, not very curious.

After they cashed in their bottles, they stopped off at a van at the corner of the parking lot.
Coffee: fifty cents
. Fossick offered Lynn a cup. “On us.”

Lynn hated coffee. She thought it tasted like bitter mud. She didn't like coffee or coffee ice cream or mocha anything. She didn't even like the smell of coffee, which everybody else seemed to go nuts for.

But here was Fossick, newly rich and treating.

“Sure! Thanks!”

Lynn put in as much whitener and sugar as she could fit into the paper cup. She tried to sip without inhaling, which was harder than it looked. It was a struggle, but she made it, getting totally caffeine-hyped in the process.

Lynn crossed the street. That other time people had been covered in coats and garbage-bag ponchos. Now they were exposed, somehow seeming either too thin or too fat. Before, on the hail day, it seemed like a human place. This time it seemed like an animal place with everyone looking the same, shuffling and gray-faced. Even though it was dry outside, the concrete floor of the warehouse was wet, and it felt to Lynn as though the liquid was going to eat through the soles of her shoes.

The smell was breathe-through-your-mouth terrible. Not just unwashed bodies but something metallic, medicinal, almost toxic. That other time the noise seemed like the noise of work, of a factory or a big machine. Now it was just yelling and the sound of breaking glass. A couple of guys took half-hearted swipes at each other in the cash-wicket lineup. The few dogs looked mangy and mean. A young woman danced a high-stepping dance to her own internal music.

Lynn knew she stood out. She had no cart to hide behind, no Underlanders. She felt the stares of people willing her to go away.

Everything in her was pushing her to run back to the world that threw bottles away, far from the world that collected them.

But then she saw the woman with the mahogany hair dumping soft drink cans onto a table.

Lynn walked over and took a big breath.

“Excuse me. Have you seen Fossick?”

It was as if she hadn't spoken at all. She raised her voice. “Do you know where Fossick is?”

The woman crashed the cans onto the metal table. “I hear you. I couldn't tell you.”

Couldn't? Wouldn't? Didn't know? Hostility came off the woman like a chill.

A cart nudged Lynn in the bum. She spun around. A skinny guy grinned and looked her up and down. The tattoos on his arms looked like creeping mold.

“You're in the way, darlin'. What are you here for? Feeding time?”

The habit of politeness was all that Lynn had.

“Sorry.”

The moldy guy gave a sharp, knowing laugh.

It was no good. The courage it had taken to come here was all used up. She was nothing here. Nobody.

She strode across the warehouse, keeping her pace just below a run, dodging carts and people. Rounding the corner at the exit her foot hit a slippery patch and she went down in a slide that probably had some fancy name in figure skating. The shoe-dissolving sludge was all over her hands. She could feel it infecting her scabs.

Get up. Get away. Just get up. Don't look at anybody. Don't make a sound.

“Hey.”

She looked up. It was a woman in a wheelchair, white-haired and not one place on her face that was not a wrinkle. Bright black eyes.

“You looking for Fossick?”

Lynn nodded.

“I heard they was at Rainey's.”

Lynn picked herself up. “Do you know where that is?”

“No. That's all I heard.” The wheelchair began to turn.

“Thank you.”

Rainey. Just-in-case Rainey. It was a start.

She saw the bus approaching half a block away. If she sprinted. If the light turned red against the bus.

She did. It did. She sank into the seat, feeling raw. To be so disliked by people you didn't even know. Anything she could have said, like, “But they're my friends,” or “I'm not a citizen like that,” would have been impossible, canceled out by her new-to-her clothes, her clean fingernails, her just-shampooed hair, her manners, her full stomach.

“But you don't even know me.” Another thing she could not have said.

And what did that man mean by “feeding time”? It wasn't like the Return-It was a soup kitchen.

Oh.

A hot jet of embarrassment washed over Lynn. Feeding time at the zoo. Like she had gone to stare at the animals.

That was so unfair! Stupid and mean and ignorant and … true. It had been like an animal place today, a wild place full of creatures without names. Creatures who were not like her.

The sun beat through the dusty bus window, too bright. Lynn scraped at her hands with the edge of her bus transfer, scraping away the dirt, sanding away the smell of what she had just seen in herself.

NINETEEN

The Air Most Sweet

Three weeks
passed. Exams happened. Alexis continued to play the tragic heroine for all she was worth. The countdown to summer holidays began. Clive took an extension on his time in Ghana. Shakti got a second interview call for a job. City council approved the casino development.

Rainey. Rainy. Ray Ni. Reni. Renee, René. There were too many hits and too few. Just-in-case Rainey was a start that quickly became a finish.

Not everybody was on the Internet.

The beginning of the last week of school, Lynn, Celia and Kas washed up at the bottom of the school steps, stuck together with the force of afternoon inertia. An unconvincing rain was falling, and they were huddled under the roof of three umbrellas, discussing summer volunteer hours.

“Essential for our resumes,” said Kas.

Celia was having mother issues.

“She won't let me volunteer anywhere dangerous or, you know, unpleasant.”

Kas and Lynn weren't surprised. Celia's mother, according to Celia's daily bulletins, was very worried about drugs, cults, boys (unless they were members of a designated and supervised “youth group”), gangs, smoking, sexualized fashions (which might be anything other than a nun's habit or a burqa), abduction and the erosion of good manners. She tried to keep Celia very busy.

“I'm looking for ideas.”

Lynn jumped in. “How about a preschool?”

“Are you kidding?” Celia hit her forehead with the palm of her hand. “When's the last time you were in a preschool? First of all, they are seething with disease. Second of all, all the kids are armed. Have you ever been strafed by stacking plastic doughnuts? Third of all — ”

Lynn was never to know the third hazard of preschools because at that moment Blossom stepped around the corner of the school.

Lynn's whole inventory of internal organs went into freefall.

Blossom didn't bother with hello.

“Larch needs you to visit.”

You're safe. Where were you? Where are you now? Are you mad at me? I'm sorry. I've missed you. Do
you
need me to visit? What happened that day?

Any of these would have been more sensible than what actually did tumble out of Lynn's mouth.

“You got your hair cut.”

“Larch needs you to visit
right now
.”

“Yes, of course. I'll come.”

She was a few steps away when she heard Celia.

“Lynn?”

Kas and Celia were looking at her with question marks for faces.

“Oh. Sorry. This is my friend Blossom. Her brother … Look, can we talk later?”

They both nodded.

“Go,” said Kas.

“Text me,” said Celia.

A bus airbrake-farted, and Blossom began to run. “Come on. We can catch it.”

They sprinted down the sidewalk, Lynn's pack bouncing on her back, and swung onto the bus. Blossom flashed a bus pass.

A haircut
and
a bus pass. What was going on?

There were no seats. They negotiated their way through the strap-hangers. Lynn could see how good Blossom was at disappearing. She slid through the standing crowd without touching them, like a cat slipping through a forest. Lynn's glasses fogged up. She tilted her head back to try to see Blossom, to read her.

What bus were they on, anyway? She tried to read the street signs through the double fog of her glasses and the misted bus windows. The tinny sound of headphones, a woman who smelled like an ashtray. And Blossom. Ordinary clothes. Short hair. Feather hair. Blossom who did not meet her eyes.

They got off in a neighborhood Lynn did not recognize. On the walk through the narrow maze of dead-ending streets and cut-throughs, Blossom remained silent and remote.

Questions built up in Lynn's head until she thought it would just crack open, like a watermelon dropped on a sidewalk.

She had to let one out.

“Did the reservoir people come?”

“I don't know. We left right away.”

“I don't think they did. The code is still the same.”

“Oh.”

Maybe you could come back. Maybe it's not too late.

But she couldn't say that.

≈≈≈

The house was
narrow and tall, bordered by a picket fence that had been green many rainstorms and sun-bakings ago. Inside the fence was a chaos of plants coming and going, to and fro, galloping tall and crazy, collapsing and dying. There were two cats on the fence, one in each of three front windows, one in a window box, and cat shadows and mewings in the garden jungle. Several greeted Blossom and did figure eights around her ankles.

The front door opened and an old woman stepped out onto the narrow porch. She was about the size of a ten-year-old. She looked like somebody you would meet in a fairy tale, the woman at the market selling a cow or some magic beans. Her metal-gray hair was braided, wound around her head like a pastry or Princess Leia. Her clothes were in layers. Dress? Shirt? Cardigan? Shawl? Her eyes were bright and sharp. In one claw-like hand she held a cigarette, delicately, as though it might shatter. In the other, a cane.

“More people dropping in! Blossom! And a newcomer. Come along, we must all have a glass of sherry.”

Lynn looked at Blossom. Sherry?

Blossom gave a small nod.

“We would like to visit but we have to study for an exam. We'll come up and see you later.”

The fairy godmother's face lit with a broad smile.

“Yes, you must study very hard. Young women must not neglect the sciences. They are
fundamental
.” She turned and went back inside.

A cracked concrete sidewalk led to a backyard. Lynn's first impression was of a junkyard, until it resolved itself, like an optical illusion, into a condominium development of miniature dwellings. Wooden crates piled high like blocks, some lined with blankets, some with tattered plastic door flaps. Some were shingled. Some, like leaky condos, were covered in blue tarps.

And everywhere, tails were twitching, ears flicking, long bodies stretching and eyes — amber, emerald and sapphire — judging the arrivals.

Blossom reached for a basement door.

“Blossom. Stop.”

Blossom froze, her back to Lynn.

“Where are we? What are you doing here?”

Blossom turned. She looked around the garden and then up into the air where the raindrops hovered, waiting to fall. Then she pointed to a couple of plastic lawn chairs.

“All right. Wait till I get a rag.”

Blossom sopped up the beaded water and they settled into the chairs, side by side like passengers on a plane. Cats nosed their feet and stretched up to the armrests.

Blossom didn't need more questions. She simply began.

“On that day …”

Whap!
A cat flap in the basement door flew open, and Catmodicum flew out. Other cats scattered to the four winds, protesting. Catmodicum jumped up onto Blossom's lap.

“Tron was the one who got the news. One of the jumper guys sent him a message. Then it was time for the plan. We have always had the plan. Fossick and Tron packed all our saves. Larch was very unhappy so I just sat with him. Then Tron's friend with the truck came. The plan was always that we would go to Rainey's. Just-in-case Rainey.”

As Blossom spoke, the cats came oozing back. Catmodicum peeked out of half-closed eyes and did not move.

“But Larch is miserable. He can't abide change. We've tried to make it as like to the Underland as we can, but the light comes from different places and the smells are different. He asked for you so I came to find you.”

Lynn waited for more. She waited for blame or anger, questions or more of the story. Nothing.

“Okay, let's go in.”

Catmodicum accompanied them.

The basement was the Underland transported, shipshape and spare. There was the work bench, the cardboard furniture, the maps on the wall and the dandelion-haired boy curled in an armchair, eyes downcast, rocking forwards and back. He wasn't dressed in a suit and tie, but in a stained tracksuit. Artdog was glued to the side of the chair.

Lynn stood in front of him.

“Larch?”

He stopped rocking and looked up — not at Lynn but at the wall behind her.

“The visitor came.”

“Oh, Larch, of course I did. I … well, I lost track of you for a while but now I'm here.”

“The toilet sucks the water down. Larch doesn't like it.”

Blossom sighed. “Fossick is going to get you the other kind.”

Lynn glanced at the work bench. There were no tubes.

“What new worlds have you made?”

“Larch doesn't care to make them in this place.”

“That's too bad because the other day when I was on the bus I thought what a good tubeworld it would make. It made me think of you.”

There was a pause. “What is on buses?”

Blossom opened her eyes wide.

Lynn thought fast. “Men and women in suits with briefcases, baby strollers, boys with long legs like Tron sticking them into the aisles, maybe a wheelchair, maybe a suitcase, maybe an octopus.”

Larch shook his head. “An octopus is silly.”

Then he gave a huge jaw-cracking yawn, leaned back against the chair and fell abruptly to sleep. Catmodicum jumped up to join him.

“Come on,” said Blossom.

Outside they stood silent on the cracked patio. Lynn pushed some sand into one of the cracks with the toe of her shoe.

So, was that it? They were together. They had a place to live. End of story. Blossom obviously didn't want her here. She should just leave.

There was a clanking in the side path, the sound of a slippery crash and a loud “Strewth!”

Fossick. If only she had been able to make a getaway before she had to see him.

The front half of a bike appeared, followed by Fossick carrying a large bag of cat food and kicking an equally large box.

“Lynn!”

“Larch asked for her,” said Blossom. “He's asleep now.”

Fossick paused. He met Lynn's eyes. “The visitor.”

“I'm … I'm just going,” said Lynn.

“No, wait. Wait until Larch wakes up.”

He slid the cat-food bag to the ground and tried to jump over the box but got tangled with his bike, which went crashing against the fence. “Your visit was obviously meant to be. I need four hands to help.”

Blossom grabbed the box and Lynn took one end of the cat-food bag. They hefted their way up rickety back stairs and through a rusty screen door into the oddest kitchen Lynn had ever seen.

There were cat-food dishes everywhere. On the floor, on the table, on the counters, on top of the fridge, even on the stove. At every dish there was a cat.

Were these the same cats as outdoors in the kitty condos, or another whole batch? Was it even possible that there could be so many cats?

At the base of each of the bottom cupboards there was a rough, semi-circular hole.

Lynn turned to Fossick. “What's with that?”

“The cats started to scratch at the door for their cat food and Rainey just let them and they scratched right through.”

“Now that you're here, can you fix them? Cupboard doors are probably an easy find.”

“I could, but Rainey likes them that way. She likes not having to open her cupboard doors and what does it matter?”

“More lovely guests!” Rainey appeared from the hall. “This is how it used to be. A house full of graduate students. Now, what shall it be, sherry or tea?”

“Tea, I think,” said Fossick. “I'll make a pot as soon as I stow these things away. Girls, I banish you from this place. I'll bring the tea outside.”

As Lynn edged around the cat paraphernalia toward the door, Fossick put his hand on her shoulder.

“Be truly welcome hither.”

The garden chairs had become occupied by several cats each. Blossom tipped them off to the tune of much complaining. She still wasn't meeting Lynn's eyes.

Lynn remembered that first meeting, sitting under the tarp at the lake, asking Blossom questions, trying to figure her out.

But everything she wondered at this moment seemed like a pretzel question.

“Who is she? Who is Rainey?”

“She's just-in-case Rainey. She always kept some things of ours in her basement. She knows Fossick from long ago when they were both professors at the university.”

Lynn did a fast recalibration of Fossick.

“A professor! Get out! What did he teach? Shakespeare?”

“No. Physics.”

“And what about Rainey?”

“Something called metallurgy.”

“Are you going to live here now?”

“Yes. At first it was just in case. But when we arrived it was a mess here, sad and dirty. There were dead things. Rainey had fallen and hurt her leg. She wasn't eating properly and she was muddled. Sometimes she thinks she is in a lab. She needs us. She needs something called round-the-clock care. We can do that. We've never minded about clocks because of Larch. This is our work now.”

Lynn scurried around in her mind for another safe question.

“Where's Tron?”

“He's in Europe.”

“Europe!”

“With homeless soccer. They fixed it, those citizen soccer people, those sponsors. He's in Paris, France, Europe.” Blossom seemed to unbend a little. “Fossick says that it's natural for Tron to leave and find his own home now and be his own person. But I still hate it.”

Lynn fished around for something comforting to say. While she fished, Blossom retreated again. “He left a few days after we … moved.”

Tron, not such a safe subject after all. The jump, the photo, the protest, the accident. There was nothing left for a real question that could avoid that string of events. There was nothing left but silence. Silence and the distant whistling of a teakettle.

She had to reach Blossom before Fossick and Rainey appeared.

“Blossom?”

Blossom finally met her eyes. She had a direct gaze like a baby or an animal.