Someplace to Be Flying (65 page)

It was early evening and Hank was watching the sunset from one of the lawn chairs in front of Moth’s trailer. He had a tape in Moth’s boom box of some classic tunes from the mid-thirties, Lester Young playing with a quintet that included Count Basie on piano and Carl Smith on trumpet. On the ground beside the tape player was a thermos of tea, in his hand a half-full mug. There were dogs sprawled all around his chair, but Bocephus wasn’t among them.

Hank couldn’t see the sun anymore from where he sat, but the sky behind the deserted tenement buildings of the Tombs was still smeared with pinks and mauves. Bo was out there somewhere, haunting the streets that ran between the empty lots and buildings.

He liked this recording a lot. The basic Kansas City grittiness of the playing, particularly Young’s staccato style on his sax. The understanding expressed between Young’s horn and the piano. They were just finishing up a version of Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” when Moth’s cab pulled into the junkyard, dirt crunching under the tires. The dogs jumped up, but didn’t bark. Like Hank, they’d recognized the car by the sound of its motor. Moth came over to join him and the dogs crowded around the chair he took. Hank reached over to the tape player, turning off the music.

Moth smiled. “And here I was hoping to catch you playing one of my Boxcar Willie tapes.”

“You think that’s going to happen in this lifetime?”

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Moth told him.

Hank raised his eyebrows.

“Comes from something Alexander Pope wrote,” Moth said. “You’d know that, too, if you’d spent more time in the prison library.”

“You know me. I was always too busy planning my big escape.”

Moth laughed. He shook a cigarette free from his pack and lit up.

“Saw that dog of yours when I was driving up,” he said. “You forget to feed him this morning?”

“He’s not my dog.”

“Whatever. He looked hungry.”

“Bocephus always looks hungry.”

Moth blew out a wreath of blue-gray smoke. Beyond the tenements the sky was losing all of its color and the shadows grew long.

“Bocephus,” Moth repeated. “Now I would have thought you’d name him after one those horn players you like so much instead of after Hank Senior’s boy.”

“I didn’t name him.”

“Yeah, you told me that.”

Lily had pointed out an odd fact to Hank, though she hadn’t needed to since he’d already twigged to it himself: Nobody really remembered anything about the corbæ. In her case it was Rory. In his, except for Moth, what personal experience the rest of his family had had with the corbæ had slipped out of their memories; everything else was just stories Jack had told. Katy and Kerry hadn’t vanished from the middle of the junkyard. They’d only wandered off. Hank hadn’t had a bullet hole miraculously heal. It was just some old wound he’d been carrying from before he and Moth had met up in prison. Jack wasn’t a magic man, and he certainly wasn’t dead. He’d hit the road like he’d do from time to time and he’d be back. The cuckoos were only a bunch of mob-connected punks from New Orleans. Dangerous, sure, but not magical either.

Hank had already given up trying to argue any of those points with Paris and the others, and he and Moth didn’t bother to talk about any of it around them anymore. There was no point.

“So where is everybody?” Moth asked.

“Lily’s at her place writing some letters and that’s about all I know. There was nobody around when I got here.”

“I think Benny’s been hitting the track again.”

Hank nodded. “He’s about due. What’s it been this time? Two months without laying a bet?” “Two and a half.”

Moth took a last drag and butted his cigarette out under his heel. His gaze traveled over to where the dark bulk of Jack’s school bus was slowly being swallowed by the encroaching night.

“I miss Jack,” he said after a moment. “Without him and his stories, it’s going to make the winter seem long.”

Hank sighed, remembering that last look of Jack he’d seen when the chalice came back together in his and Lily’s hands. Remembered the things that Katy had explained to him. Like Lily, they were things he kept repeating to himself, holding them in his head so he wouldn’t lose them like the others had. Trouble was, that remembering also made him know that Jack wasn’t coining back.

“Yeah,” he said. “I miss him, too. But Katy knows a lot of those stories of his and she’ll be around.” “Won’t be the same.” “Won’t be bad either-just different.”

Moth nodded. “I suppose.” A smile touched his lips. “I even miss those crows of his, though I don’t guess the dogs do.”

“No, I guess they don’t.”

Moth went and got himself a beer, sat back down, lit up another smoke.

“I’m thinking of getting an apartment,” Hank said.

” ‘Bout time,” Moth told him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Moth shrugged. “I always thought you could do more with your life. Getting yourself a place you can call home’s a good first step.”

“You never said anything before.”

“Didn’t want you to take it wrong. So are you going to be moving in with Lily?”

“It’s a little early to be thinking about that kind of thing. We’re taking it a day at a time for now. But it’s good.”

“You hold on to that,” Moth said. “There’s little enough of feeling good around as it is. You find some, it’s worth keeping a hold of.”

“I know,” Hank told him.

Moth dragged from his cigarette. “I didn’t warm to Lily right away, you know, but then I guess I don’t warm to most people first time I meet them. It’s an old, bad habit that I don’t know if I’ll ever break. Can’t seem to hang on to a faith in people the way you do. I look at a stranger and I see trouble. You, you see someone who could be a friend.”

Hank didn’t know if it was exactly so cut-and-dried, but it was something he worked at, trying to see the good in people. To see the Grace in them.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Hank said. “You didn’t exactly grow up in an environment that promoted trust.”

“And you did?”

Hank shrugged.

“I mean, I hear what you’re saying,” Moth went on. “It’s hard to have much faith in people when all your life everybody, starting with your own family, betrays that trust, but Christ. What a way to live.”

“You do what you have to survive.”

Moth took another drag. “Older I get, the more I wonder if that’s enough. If it’s really living, or just getting by. And then I start to wonder if the walls we put up are to keep others out, or keep ourselves in, and what we lose by walling ourselves away like that.”

“That’s something you can only answer for yourself,” Hank said. “Same as everybody.”

Moth nodded. “So how do you do it, kid?”

Hank thought for a moment.

“I guess what it comes down to in the end,” he said, “is that I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t try to look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I can’t change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.”

Moth dropped his butt on the dirt and ground it out. He looked out into the night that now lay deep around them.

“You think it’s enough?” he asked.

Hank shrugged. “Nothing’s ever enough. I know there’s crap out there, waiting to fall down on me. I know there are people looking to take advantage of me, who’d rob me blind and leave me to die in an alleyway. I just don’t want to be like them.”

“Makes you think about the work we do,” Moth said. “Some of those guys Eddie has us ferry around …”

Hank nodded. “Maybe it’s time for a career change.”

Moth shook out another cigarette, lit it up. He took a long drag.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

Saturday, October 26

“You moved again,” Kerry said.

She’d managed to get Rory to sit for a portrait but he wasn’t having an easy time of it. They were in her apartment, Rory on a kitchen chair by the window where the strong sunlight accentuated the shadows on his face, she on the other mismatched chair, drawing board balanced upright on her lap, a stub of charcoal in her hand.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s not as easy as I thought it’d be.” “Why do you think professional models get paid for what they do?” “I can’t honestly say it’s something I ever thought about.” “Do you want to stop?” she asked.

He shook his head, then shot her a guilty look. “Whoops. Sony again.” “It’s okay. Lift your head a bit … now move it to the right. No, your right, not mine. There. Perfect.”

The worst thing about this was that he was going to be so disappointed with what she was drawing because it was, in a word, awful. But that was why she was using him for practice. The odd thing she’d discovered about her art courses at Butler were that life drawing and portraiture seemed to have fallen completely out of favor. The profs were far more interested in having the students “express themselves,” which basically boiled down to slapping paint and whatever else was at hand onto a canvas and then being able to talk about it in such a way that it sounded like you knew what you were doing. Making a statement.

All Kerry wanted to do was learn how to draw properly. To be able to get down on paper what she saw in front of her. She figured there’d be time enough to express herself once she got the basics down. As soon as she could afford it, she was planning to take some actual drawing courses at the Ncwford School of Art to augment the art history that made up the bulk of her studies at the university. The history courses fascinated her, but they weren’t enough. She wanted hands-on experience as well.

It was Katy who’d suggested she use people around her to practice on for now.

“Like who?” Kerry had said.

“Well, for starters, you could ask Rory. Maybe it’ll get his mind off of Annie.”

That was easier said than done. The only thing Rory seemed to recall out of all the strange things he’d experienced was a conversation he’d had with Annie during the blackout when she’d asked him why he’d never made a pass at her. He didn’t even remember the things Kerry had told him about her time in the institution or Katy. He thought she’d only discovered that she had a twin sister after moving to the city, that Katy had been adopted by other people than she’d been, and wasn’t it cool?

But he did remember the conversation with Annie and decided it meant that he should actively pursue more than a platonic relationship with her. Annie’s reaction was to immediately embark on a tour.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Annie told Kerry the night before she left. “That I’m making the same mistake Jack did with your mother, but this kind of thing never works out in the long term. It’s better he gets hurt a little now, than hurt a lot later on.”

“But then why did you talk to him the way you did?” Kerry had to ask.

“I don’t know. I thought the world was ending. Or maybe that it was beginning again, starting fresh. I’ve always liked him. I was giddy with the light of the Grace and I thought he’d finally be able to accept that there’s more to the world than what’s sitting in front of his nose. But he doesn’t. He can’t. And I’m tired of shifting into my corbæ skin and going through all the shock and disbelief over and over again. It gets old real fast.”

Kerry had nodded, understanding all too well. She’d come up against the same baffling wall herself whenever she tried to talk to Rory about any of it. And she couldn’t even confront him with physical proof the way Annie or the crow girls could. She tried taking him through some of the shortcuts and into the hidden folds that Katy had taught her how to find, but they only left him confused and disoriented and she’d finally given up as well.

But she liked Rory, so she accepted his foibles the way you’re supposed to with a friend. She did her best to cheer him up when he got too glum about how it hadn’t worked out for him with Annie, though that got a little hard sometimes. She liked having him as a friend, but she kept finding herself wishing they could be more. All that meeting other people at the university had done was remind her of how much more she liked him.

“I think I’m getting a crick in my neck,” he said now.

“That’s okay,” she told him. “I’m pretty much done anyway.”

She turned her drawing board around so that he could see what she’d drawn.

“I know, I know,” she said before he could try to find a polite comment to make. “It’s awful. But that’s the whole point.”

“To draw awful pictures?”

She had to laugh. “No, to practice until I get to a point where they’re not awful anymore.”

“You should get the Aunts to give you some tips.”

Kerry did spend time with them and she loved their art, but it wasn’t what she wanted to do. That realization came as a surprise because in many ways, the Aunts’ watercolor were very much in the same mode as her mother’s art had been. She’d thought that was what she wanted to do until she began to seriously apply herself to practicing and discovered what she wanted to draw were people. Wildlife, landscapes, plant studies … they were all interesting and she liked looking at them, but they didn’t call out to her the way the human face and figure did.

“I would,” she told him, “but their work’s not really my style.” She put down her drawing board and stretched. “Not that anything seems to be my style at the moment. But that’s okay. I’m enjoying the process. Do you want some tea?”

“Sure.”

He followed her into the kitchen, sitting on the counter while she got the water boiling, took the canister of tea bags down from the cupboard, set out their cups.

“You’re really different now,” he said.

She gave him a questioning look.

“I mean, in a good way. You were so shy when you first moved in a couple of months ago.”

“Oh God, don’t remind me. I can still remember how shocked I was when I realized the apartment was unfurnished.”

Rory smiled. “But you’re way more confident now. I told you. You just had to give it some time. Everybody feels overwhelmed when they first move to the big city.”

“I know,” Kerry said.

Though that wasn’t really it at all. Who she was today had started with that morning when Maida had shown her how to look inside and use the echo of the Grace that everyone carried in them to stabilize herself. But there was no point in explaining that to him.