Surrender (2 page)

I unfold into the wind. I whistle Surrender from the mountain’s spine. He runs and pinecones tumble in his wake, but there isn’t any hurry. In the grave they’ll have found only bones, and bones don’t require hurry. “Surrender,” I say. “Surrender.”

What they have found will be bone, because it’s been a long time. Femur, fibula, tibia, humerus; clavicle, mandible, scapula, vertebrae. Tiny little phalanges gnawed on by a rat. Animal becomes vegetable becomes mineral and it happens quickly, but everything mineral knows how to wait. Bones have the patience of the moon.

Now that they have been found, Finnigan will start to move. Wherever he’s been holed up will suddenly feel precarious to him. If he is smart he will resist the urge to leave a trail of destruction behind him. There is nothing like a burning bush to cast light upon your face. And Finnigan is far from stupid — he is sharp as a trap. His cleverness has been his saving grace, and mine. Finnigan roams unhindered through the valley and town, the midnight raider of kitchens, the sleeper-in-woolsheds, the bareback horse-rider, the bather in rushing streams. He is dirt under fingernails and the stick of sap on skin. This clean wan bed is my citadel, this room my continent. My powdered skin is silken, tinted airless-blue. If you touch me I will bruise; if I shift, to ease my weight, blood rivers from my nose. I am saintly, poetic; I am demise, otherworld. But when Finnigan runs, I run with him.

I am Gabriel, the messenger, the teller of astonishing truths. Now I am dying, my temperature soaring, my hands and memory tremoring: perhaps I should not be held accountable for everything I say.

I remember my first sight of him — the sound and scavenger look of him — surrounded by summer; I remember the stillness of the day and the density of the air. Neither of us was older than nine or ten. I was skimming a car along the garden fence when Finnigan crossed the brink of my vision. At first I feigned ignorance or disdain of his presence, but the car beneath my fingertips bunny-hopped and soon stalled. I slid a glance at him. At school we had seen a wildlife film projected onto a wall, and the boy who was watching me was a hyena. His dark eyes were set apart and seemed to have no arena of white. He didn’t move or say a thing but I knew, just from his watching, that he could sever my arm. We were the same height and same age and built along similar leggy lines, but he was a hyena while I was a small, ashy, alpine moth. From the footpath side of the fence he stared at me, and my gaze floated grudgingly from the toy. He swiped a fly from his face. “You’re that boy,” he said.

“. . . What boy?”

“You know. That boy. You know. What you did. Everybody knows.”

I pressed my thumb on the bonnet of the car. I looked my interrogator up and down. His clothes were shabby and ill-fitting. The fly had returned to his face. “You’re the kook boy,” he elaborated, conversationally. “Your mother and father are kooks, too. Everybody knows.”

I considered the situation, his evident supremacy. Diplomatically, I laughed. “Kooks,” I said, and found it a sweet word, confectionery. I hopped illustratively from one foot to the other, waggling my head. The boy smiled; I saw myself jumping inside his lush eyes. “Kooks,” I chirruped again, to prove I’d taken no offense.

He leaned on the pickets; his gaze dipped to the car and away. “Your mother is a witch,” he said. “Everybody knows.”

There seemed no response required to this so I smiled and, suddenly inspired, pretended my knee itched, and attended to scratching it. The gypsy boy watched silently, the fly sniffing the corner of his mouth. I stamped my foot on the soft garden earth. The wind shifted shadows on our hands. I had never seen this boy before, and was honored that a stranger should have given my family such thought. I didn’t want him to go away. I asked, “How come you don’t go to school?”

“Why would I?” he replied.

His eyes returned to the car parked on the fence railing. I poked it so it rattled forward over the terrain. My father’s sister Sarah had sent the car in the mail, my name printed clearly on the gray cardboard box. The plaything had so far managed to escape my mother’s ruthless confiscation. The visitor’s eyes lingered on the car until I felt a twitch of nerves — then, mercifully, his gaze moved on, traveling the walls of the house. The wind rolled, scattering dust; I smelled the paint on the fence, the heat in the leaves, the parched conclusion of the afternoon. The boy, so close, smelled of nothing. He slipped a fist between the pickets and asked, “What do I have in my hand?”

I looked at the fist curled under my nose, the wrist lightly touching the rail. His fingers were brown as the legs of a huntsman, the skin on the knuckles broken. In my mind’s eye I pictured what such fingers could hide. A tooth, a stone, a beetle. “Money?”

He smiled. “You cheated.” His fingers unfurled; there lay three damp coins. I had never seen such riches in the palm of a boy. “Where did you get it?” I asked.

“Took it from Mother’s purse.” His smile grew.

“Won’t she find out? You’ll get in trouble.”

“She won’t find out. Not unless you tell.”

“I won’t.” I would always do whatever he wanted. “What will you do with it?”

He shrugged; his gaze again brushed the car. He looked too poor to own toys or to have an aunt who could send them. My heart was gripped with sudden horror. “This is mine!” I squeaked.

The boy stared evenly at me; then the tawny lips bent in scorn. “Why would I want it?” he asked.

My face drenched scarlet, I glanced away. In that moment I hated the car, hated my aunt for giving it to me, felt painful pity for them both. I scooped up the toy gently, as if it were injured, and slipped it between the buttons of my shirt. I knew I would never play with it again. The dark boy watched in silence, slouched against the fence. After a time he said, “Come out into the street.”

I shook my head unhappily, unable to look at him. “I’m not allowed. I have to stay in the yard.”

The boy pinched the fence with his toes. “That’s a kook thing.”

“On Saturdays I can play in the street.”

My voice was hitched — somewhere there were tears. The boy considered me while the wind flipped his hair. The road had stayed empty for such a long time. “What day is today?”

I glanced up, surprised. “Don’t you know?”

“Why should I?”

His lack of shame was awesome. “It’s Thursday.”

“Every day’s the same to me.”

“Come back on Saturday.” I shifted closer. “Not tomorrow, the next day.”

I watched him intently, beggingly, felt I’d fall down if he refused. I knew I couldn’t bring him into the house, that I shouldn’t mention him to my mother or father, but I longed to have his promise, I hungered for the prospect of him. If my visitor walked away now he would seem like a daydream, like touching a tiger’s face in the dark. And my visitor seemed indifferent to the proposal, continuing to pinch the fence with his toes. He opened his fist, which still rested on the rail, and checked that the coins remained there. Unexpectedly he said, “Do us a favor?”

“Yes, I will! What?”

“Hide this money in your pocket.”

I shied away, gormless. “How come?”

“No pockets.” He slapped his trousers. “Just until Saturday.”

My throat went dry. Stealing from a purse was a crime with which I did not wish to be associated. “If your mother won’t know you took it,” I said, “why do you need me to hide it?”

The boy considered me coolly, then, disgusted, turned away. “Wait!” I yipped. He stopped, and stood there saying nothing while I flailed with my conscience. I desperately wanted to befriend this gypsy, but he would not return without reason. He would have no use for a friend who lacked a spirit as robust as his own. I pressed to the fence, my voice husky: “What would I do with it?”

“Bury it?”

“But — couldn’t you?”

He snorted. “If
I
hide it, it won’t be hidden, will it?”

I gulped and meekly shuffled as he dropped the coins in my shirt pocket, where they beat like a steely heart. He cocked his head to study me, and seemed satisfied. “Give them back on Saturday. Don’t tell anyone.”

I nodded breathlessly. “What’s your name?”

A cat’s smile touched his lips. I hung on the fence while he scouted in the gutter until he found a weathered piece of glass, which he held up ceremoniously to my gaze. He nudged my hands aside, and I watched with quickening disquiet as he applied the point of the glass to the thick paint on the fence rail. A hundred protests shrieked in my mind as he carefully carved one letter after another, and frail spirals of waxy paint curled away from the blade and blew off in the breeze. I dredged my voice from the depths: “Stop!” I gasped. “Don’t do that!”

“It’s finished now,” he said, as if the offense, completed, was somehow lessened. He wiped a palm across what he’d written and I leaned closer to look. He had carved a long word in a somersault language that seemed oddly familiar to me:

When I glanced up, he was watching me, an oily shine in his eyes. In them I saw the reflection of the house behind me, the crimson windows and door frame, the anorexic tangle of roses planted against the weatherboard.

“Anwell!”

I jumped, my heart skidding. I turned to see my mother standing at the flywire screen. Finnigan vanished instantly leaving no trace behind. “Inside,” my mother ordered. “Come inside.”

I come back to my room as if thrown into it. Inside my lungs the thunderstorm clashes, spliced by lightning. Coughing rakes my lungs, strains the cartilage between my bones. Blood splatters my chin and chest, warm, thick as cream. I hunch under the agony, pillows tumbling down my back, and across the chalk-white cotton sheets the ruby stains anchor, disperse, extend.

Then Sarah is beside me, holding the cloth to my lips, her strong hands circling my breaking spine. Like sailors on a raging sea, neither of us can do anything but wait until the storm is done. Sarah smooths my hair, murmurs words, lets me know I’m not alone. Tears slip to my chin but I’m not overcome, they mean nothing, they are simply a symptom.

Not yet, I’m thinking, not yet. I will, and soon, I promise, but not yet. Give me just a little more time: when she’s come and gone, I’ll go.

And it pleases itself to give me a little more time.

I do not look too closely at the cloth with which Sarah wipes my chest. Nothing sears the eyes more deeply than the sight of one’s own blood on cloth. She brings a glass of water and helps me drink from it: I swallow the blood that’s coated my teeth and the taste of dying swills away. The pain fades, my lungs fill, and the illness retreats good-naturedly — as if all this time it’s just been playing, as if all this has just been a joke.

There is blood on my nightshirt, its outline like a continent, detailed at the edges. The article is removed and discarded, as is the blemished sheet. The clean nightshirt my aunt drapes over me is freezing against my skin. I am shivering, stupefied.

Sarah asks me if I need the pan. I tell her to leave me alone. A house call from the illness always leaves me morose. I bury myself in blankets, into a dark private place. Inside my lungs, air is probing passages that are suddenly unblocked; other routes are newly closed, clogged with the debris of the storm. Every time the illness wreaks havoc, it leaves a few more passages irreversibly barricaded. I am suffocating.

When I close my eyes I see Finnigan as plainly as if he were beside me.

My mother discovered the coins almost immediately — I had no talent for secrecy then. The few sad coins she fished from my pocket looked like teardrops or bullet holes in her palm. She held them close to her nose, stared at them, nostrils flaring; I stood gazing at the bony flank of her hand. She wore a bruising diamond ring on her wedding finger. She sniffed sharply, her lip jerked. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

I could not say. The hallway of our house was long and always cold; the exit doors, back and front, were kept frowningly closed. The warmth of outside was shaved from my skin and fell in curls to the floor.

“Anwell? Answer me. Where did you get this?”

She was staring over her fingers at me, her face lean as a goat’s. I looked away, because I could never meet her eye. My gaze ran like a fearful mouse along the skirting board and up the wall. A field of pink rosebuds was wallpapered flatly there. My mother cuffed me to attention. “Anwell!”