Someplace to Be Flying (5 page)

Hank, he just got himself born into the wrong family, simple as that. Junkie mother, old man a mean drunk when he wasn’t doing time. The only surprise with Hank was that he’d turned out to have as good a heart as he did. In and out of foster homes and juvie hall since he was five, a couple of turns in county, and one stretch in the pen after that. He had more reason to be bitter than anyone here, maybe, but it didn’t pan out that way. He was always picking up strays, helping somebody out. Kept what he was feeling locked up pretty tight behind an easy disposition, which Moth didn’t think was necessarily a good thing, but he understood. Brought up the way Hank had been, you learned pretty quick not to give anything away.

Now Jack, he was the kind of? man who, one day, just up and walked away from everything he had. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was the only right thing to do. Hard to know for sure without understanding his history, but Moth knew the type. Once upon a time, people might’ve called him a hobo, now he was just another bum.

Moth leaned back in his lawn chair and shook a smoke free from the pack he kept in the sleeve of his T-shirt. As he fired it up, he considered the red-haired woman who’d taken to hanging around with Jack the last year or so. They were another kind of oil and water, didn’t seem to mix at all, but they broke the rules and got on well, so go figure. Katy had to be a third of Jack’s sixty-some years and two-thirds his size, a small street punk to his old-timey hobo with her hair shaved on the sides, long on top before it fell down in dreads going halfway down her back. Hard to tell what she looked like under those green leggings and the oversized purple sweater, but she had a sweet, heart-shaped face and the’ bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

He didn’t know what had put her on the street, but a nice-looking kid like that, it had to be something bad. She might have done time. She had that stillness down pat, the ability to sit so quiet she became pretty? much invisible. The only other place Moth had seen that was inside. He’d learned the trick from an old habitual con who’d taken him under his wing-back before he’d discovered the weight room and had needed an edge, just to stay alive. Once he’d put on some muscle and got himself a don’t-screw-with-me attitude he didn’t much need to be invisible anymore, but it wasn’t something you forgot.

Jack was finishing up his story with a new ending: Cody got a few of the foxfolk to help him trick Raven out of his magic cauldron-it looked like a tin can, this time around-and started stirring up some trouble out of it again. ‘Course Raven would get it back, but that’d be another story.

Moth took a drag from his smoke and flicked it away. The butt landed in a shower of sparks in the dirt and one of his dogs growled. Judith, the pit bull. Still jumpy after living with Moth for going on three years now. Her previous owner had turned her out on the dogfight circuit before he’d run into an unfortunate accident and Moth had inherited her. Moth never felt sorry? for the way things had worked out. Any time he got an attack of conscience, he just had to take a look at the webwork of scars that circled her throat and ran like a city street map along her flanks and stomach.

Beside his chair, Ranger stirred. He was a big German shepherd, the alpha dog in Moth’s pack, ninety pounds of goofy good humor that could turn instantly serious on a word from Moth. Ranger checked Judith out, then turned his attention to Jack, dark gaze fixed on him like he was thinking of taking a bite out of him. Jack brought that out in all the dogs, even good-humored Ranger. None of them ever took to him. “Too much crow in me,” Jack said when Hank mentioned it one time.

Jack and his crows. Moth shook his head. He’d never seen such a pack of badass birds before, always hanging around the yard, teasing the dogs. But he let them be because he could see they were just being playful, keeping the dogs on their toes, not being mean. Moth couldn’t abide meanness.

He leaned down to scratch Ranger behind the ear, then lit up another cigarette. Hank gave him a look. When Moth nodded, Hank got up and fetched another round of beer from inside Moth’s trailer. Four bottles. Jack and Katy were drinking some kind of herb tea they’d brought along in a thermos. Smelled like heaven, but Moth had tried it once before. It tasted like what you might get if you brewed up a handful of garbage and weeds.

“Didn’t that story have a different ending the last time you told it?” Benny asked.

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s a true story. What you’ve got to remember is that Cody and Raven never had just the one go at each other. Things that happen between them happen over and over again. Sometimes the one of them’s on top, sometimes the other.”

“But how true are they?” Hank wanted to know.

Moth caught an odd note in Hank’s voice, like the question was more important than he was letting on.

“True as I can tell them,” Jack said.

Anita nodded. “Truth’s important.”

“But it’s not the most important thing we can offer each other,” Katy said.

Now Moth was intrigued. Katy never had much to say of an evening. She’d sit there, smiling, listening, quiet. Her voice had a husky quality, like she didn’t use it often.

“And what would that be?” he asked.

Katy turned to him and Moth was struck all over again by the blue of her eyes. It was like a piece of the bluest summer sky had got caught in them and decided to stay.

“Playing fair,” she said.

Moth could go with that. Sometimes the truth did nobody any good, but playing fair-that never hurt. Karma was the big recycler. Everything you put out came back again.

Benny stood up from his lawn chair and added a couple of pieces of an old wooden chair to the fire they had going in the oil drum. It was a good night. The moon was hanging low, like it was playing hide-and-seek with them, just the rounded top showing up from behind the roof of the abandoned factory that loomed over the back end of the junkyard. The sky was clear-not like last night. Moth had been out doing a couple of deliveries and for awhile there he’d thought he might drown every time he had to leave the cab. The dogs were quiet. Nobody prowling around looking to get a piece of the fortune in cash that he didn’t have but was still supposed to be stashed somewhere in the yard.

He did have a fortune here, but nobody who came looking for it ever recognized it for what it was. Family.

Jack told another story, one Moth hadn’t heard before, then he and Katy headed off into the night, Jack making for his trailer, Katy walking with him across the rubble-strewn yard before cutting off on her own. Nobody knew where Katy slept and Moth had never tried to find out.

Benny was the next to leave. He had a room in the basement of a rooming house over on MacNeil this month. Moth had the feeling he wouldn’t make his September rent. Benny’d never had the same address for more than a couple of months for as long as Moth had known him.

“You need me tomorrow?” Anita asked.

Moth shook his head.

“Think I’ll visit my sister then. We were talking about taking the kids over to the island for the day and here the summer’s almost over.”

Her sister wasn’t blood family. She’d met Susie while she was still working at the diner, helped her out, got close in the way a crisis can bring people together. It was something neither of them had been looking for and maybe that was why they found it.

“You need any money?” Moth asked.

“Nah, I’m still flush.”

She left, walking deeper into the junkyard to the old VW bus she’d been sleeping in all summer, and then there was only Moth and Hank and the dogs, sitting out under the sky, smelling the night air, watching sparks from the fire jump over the rim of the oil drum to die in the dirt.

After awhile Moth turned to Hank. “Tern said you asked him to run Eddie to the bank tonight.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Why should I?”

“No reason.”

Hank picked up a pebble and tossed it against the side of the oil drum. The soft
ping
it made lifted all the dogs’ heads.

“You ever wonder about Jack?” he asked, not looking at Moth. “Where he gets those stories of his? Why he tells them?”

Moth shook another smoke out of his pack, lit it. “Helps him make sense of things, I guess. Or maybe it’s just something he’s got to do. Like Benny has to take a bet.”

“I think maybe there’s more to it than that.”

Moth remembered that question Hank had asked Jack earlier. He took a drag from his cigarette, watched the glow from the oil drum through the gray wreath the smoke made when he exhaled.

“How so?” he asked.

“I saw two of them last night. Bird girls. Like the people in his stories.”

He’d known all day that something was bothering Hank, but Moth was never one to push. If Hank wanted advice, needed help, he’d ask. Moth had thought maybe Hank was trying to get some girl off the street again, or wanting to help somebody make bail. Something simple. Nothing like this.

“You want to run that by me again?” he said.

He sat and smoked while Hank told him about the woman he’d stopped to help last night, how he’d been shot, how these two girls came out of nowhere, killed the guy, healed up Hank’s shoulder with nothing more than spit.

“The guy shot you,” he said when Hank fell silent.

Hank nodded and started to lift his shirt.

“You don’t have to do that,” Moth told him. “I believe you.”

But Hank already had his T-shirt off. Moth leaned closer and saw the white pucker of a scar on Hank’s shoulder. They’d been moving scrap to the back of the junkyard yesterday, shirts off, sweating under the hot afternoon sun. Hank hadn’t had that scar yesterday.

“Guy was a pro?” he said.

“It wasn’t the first time he shot someone,” Hank told him. “I could see it in his eyes when he was standing over me-just before the second girl killed him.”

“Hard to kill someone like that-blade in the back. Usually takes awhile to die.”

“I thought about that-later.”

Moth had to laugh. “Maybe she was using spit on the blade, too.”

Hank smiled. He put his shirt on again and settled back in his chair.

“You ever hear of anything like this before?” he asked.

“Only in Jack’s stories. Maybe you should talk to him.”

“I don’t know,” Hank said. “Jack’s not much of a one for straight answers.”

“Well, that kind of depends on whether you take him literally or not.”

He finished his cigarette as Hank worked that through.

“Jesus,” Hank said after a moment. “You’re saying his stories are true?”

Moth shrugged. “They’re true for him. He makes no secret about that. How that translates into things other folks can experience, I don’t know.”

“True for him,” Hank repeated softly. “And now for me.”

“Maybe you should call that woman, too.”

Hank gave him a blank look.

“Think about it, kid,” Moth said. “The guy was trying to kill her.”

“Animal people.”

“Say what?”

“She said she was out looking for animal people.”

Moth sighed. He looked out across the junkyard. The moon was almost down now and the familiar shapes of the junked cars and scrap had taken on odd shapes and shadows in the starlight. He’d never taken Jack’s stories at face value, but right at this moment, he didn’t know what to think anymore.

“Sounds like she found them,” he said finally.

Hank nodded thoughtfully. “Found something, anyway.”

After the events of the previous night, the last place Lily wanted to be was in the basement of some punk club, taking pictures of kids half her age who had way too much attitude and too little sense of personal hygiene. She’d touched a piece of magic last night and this was anything but. The three members of Bitches in Heat made her feel like a tired and worn-out old woman, especially the lead singer/guitarist with her wasted junkie body and practiced sneer. She called herself Vulva de Ville.

This is not innovative, Lily wanted to tell her, having shot hundreds of bands and seen far too much attitude to be charmed by this same-old, same-old anymore. Billy Idol and Sid Vicious were there before the Bitches. And Elvis long before any of them.

The other two members of the band were merely surly, but they had the same emaciated bodies. Looking at the three of them through her camera lens, all she saw was a clot of leather and denim, piercings and tattoos, stringy hair and wasted faces. They were either junkies, or trying too hard, and neither appealed to her. She didn’t like capturing that kind of an image on film. It felt too much as though she was pandering to the same asinine art directors who thought bruises on anorexic models would sell clothes or makeup. It was like using child abuse to sell product and the concept repulsed her as much as equating heroin use with having a good time the way bands like this did. You didn’t romanticize those sorts of activities, she believed; you tried to eradicate them.

“Hey, this’ll be cool,” the lead singer said.

Lily had been focusing on the drummer, so she wasn’t aware of what de Ville had been up to until she lifted her head from her viewfinder. De Villc had tied off one of her twig-thin arms with a piece of rubber tubing to make the veins pop up and was clowning around with a hypodermic needle.

Lily turned to Rory. “If she starts shooting up, I’m out of here.”

“Christ,” de Ville told her, the sneer having slid into caricature by this point. “Lighten up why dontcha?” But she tossed the needle onto the cardboard box that stood in front of the sofa and was serving as a table.

“You almost done?” Rory asked.

“A couple more shots,” Lily told him. She looked at the band again. “If you could all get together on the sofa and maybe lean a little in toward each other… .”

She immediately regretted the suggestion. The three women fell into a tumble on the battered sofa and began groping each other, hands going up T-shirts and cupping crotches, faces attempting lusty sexual expressions that only came off as pathetic leers. Lily sighed, returned her eye to her viewfinder and finished the roll.

“You owe me,” she told Rory afterward as they climbed the stairs toward the smoke and noise of the club above.