The Onion Girl (36 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“Ray?” Pinky says.
I got no time for words. All I got is a red haze over my eyes making everything look like it's got a film of blood covering it. I pull that switchblade outta my pocket and walk across the room to where this big painting's sitting on the shelf in front of a half dozen others. I keep the blade of that knife honed sharp as a razor, just like Pinky taught me to all them years ago, and it cuts through the first painting like it was hot and the canvas is butter. The smiling fairy looking at me splits in two and then three and then I got the damn thing shredded and I'm on to the next one.
It's a long time later, after I've cut me every damn one of them fairy paintings, broken most of the frames, knocked over a few things, that I finally start to see normal again. I find Pinky sitting on a battered couch, just a-looking at me. There's a sharp smell in the air—from one a them jars of turpentine I broke, I guess.
“You about done now?” Pinky asks.
I give her a slow nod.
“Are you feeling any better?”
I take a long slow breath. I look at the ruin surrounding me and slowly fold the blade of my knife into its handle and stick it back in my pocket.
“Some,” I tell her.
“Time we was goin' then.”
That night we take us a room at the Sleep Comfort Motel up on Highway 14 and once we get to sleep, we're a-hunting, fierce and wild, full of piss and vinegar and just a-spoiling for a fight, but we don't catch us one decent scent. I wake up in the early hours of the morning and stare at the ceiling of the motel room above our bed, feeling lost and hurt. The only thing that makes it bearable is the idea of my sister coming back to that apartment of hers and seeing all her dreams ripped to shreds the way mine was when she left me behind.
Things is kinda funny after that, like what I did stirred up something inside me instead of easing it away. Turned me into a stalker. We got us some money left, but I can tell Pinky's fretting about how I can't concentrate on much of anything these days. I go back to my sister's apartment pretty much every day, mostly looking the way I always do, sometimes
playing with wigs and outfits and makeup, like we used to do when we run our scams, so that it's a complete stranger going there.
Her friends have cleaned the place up, but I got back in easy enough. The first time I go up the front stairs and use me a couple a wires, kinda brushing up on my old lock-picking skills, though the lock on her door's not much of a challenge. Poking around in her things, I find a junk drawer with keys in it and try 'em all until I got me one that works and after that I don't need to play the cat burglar no more.
Twice I hear someone at the door while I'm still inside and I have to scoot under the Murphy bed and wait there while whoever it is dumps off some mail, does a slow walk around the apartment. I can tell by the feet it's a woman. The second time she sits on the sofa a whiles and I hear her crying.
I been by the hospital, too, and later the rehab, all dressed up like I'm someone else. I walk by her room, pause in the doorway sometimes, get me a good look. I don't know what I'm thinking, what I want to do. I just know that there's still a world of unfinished business lying there between us.
Then one night we have us an encounter in the dreamlands like we never had before, something that changes everything. We take us down another of them unicorns—the first one in a long time—and hardly get a decent wallow in its blood afore we're chased off.
Pinky and me, we wake up at the same time in that big king-size bed we're sharing in the Sleep Comfort Motel.
“That can't have been real,” Pinky says. “I mean, what the hell
were
them things?”
I'm still reeling myself. They had the bodies of men, but the heads of wolves or coyotes or something. A couple of dog boys, dressed up casual in jeans and all.
“Some kinda … animal people,” I say.
And then it hits me. The clothes they were wearing, the way they talked …
“You notice anything unusual about them?” I ask Pinky.
She gives me this look like all my brains done gone and drained outta my head. “Well, yeah. You mean like how they had dog heads on the bodies of men?”
“No,” I say. “That one guy was wearing a T-shirt with ‘Don't! Buy!
Thai!' written on it. Who the hell's going to advertise a boycott in the dreamlands?”
“What're you talkin' about?”
“And he
knew
we weren't real wolves.”
“You didn't need to be no brain scientist to pick up on that,” Pinky says. “But I still don't get the deal.”
“They come from this world,” I tell her, slapping my hand on the bedspread. “Just like you and me, 'cept I got the sense they was solid. That they can cross over without the need to go to sleep and dream first.”
Pinky takes the time to light a cigarette and gives a slow nod. “You think?”
“Oh, yeah. I ain't got no question in my mind.”
“But you'd think we'd've heard about guys walking around with dog heads—if they come from here, I mean.”
“They're not going to look like that here,” I say, wishing that just for once Pinky'd try and exercise them few brains god give her. “I'll bet they can decide how they want to look any old time they please.”
“Well, they scared the crap right outta me,” Pinky says.
I know what she means. It's the reason I backed off sudden as I done. There was some powerful mojo working in them dog boys. I got the feeling, real quick, that they coulda just shut us down without no more'n a word or two.
“You know what this means?” I say.
“That we ain't goin' to have us our fun no more.”
I shake my head. “Not a chance.”
“Then what does it mean?”
“That we got the chance of going over there our own selves. For real. Think about it. If we can figure it out, we don't got to worry about nothing in this world no more 'cause we'll be able to just walk us back and forth between the two like that pair can.”
“We don't know that they can,” Pinky says.
But I do. I can't even explain how I know. I just do. And if they can do it, then we should be able to figure out a way to do it, too.
“And why would we even want to?” Pinky adds.
“Well, for one thing, we'd never have to work again.”
“Like we ever did.”
“I did.”
Pinky nods. “I forgot about all them years you was in that copy shop.”
“But this works out, we won't have to work, and we won't have to risk our asses running no scams no more, neither.”
Pinky leans back against the headboard. “So how you figure that?”
“Say we need us a little money,” I tell her. “We just slip outta the dreamlands into a bank vault, say. Help ourselves to whatever we need, and then slip back out the way we come.” I grin. “Hell, even if we ever got caught, how're they going to hold us? They put us in a cell and we just up and disappear ourselves back into the dreamlands.” I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”
In the neon light coming from the sign outside, I can see the understanding dawn on Pinky and she gives me that big old grin of hers.
“How're we gonna learn how to do that?” she asks.
“I dunno. Let me think on it a spell.”
Come morning, I get me an idea.
“You remember that old woman, used to live at the head of Copper Creek?” I ask Pinky. “Had that bottle tree in front of her house.”
Pinky turns from the mirror above the vanity where she's been putting on her makeup. It's pretty clear from the look on her face that she don't like where this is going.
“You think she's still living there?” I go on. “She had to be a thousand years old, that time we saw her.”
We was still in school back then, sneaking out into the woods to have us our little parties. That day there was only the three of us-me, Pinky, and Rolly LeGrand, this fella Pinky had taken a liking to that week. We was smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, wandering off from where we'd parked Rolly's Duster by the rickety little bridge on Early Road where it crosses over Copper Creek, when suddenly we come upon this old log cabin, the bottle tree out front and the old woman just a-setting on the porch.
She was dark-skinned, but you couldn't tell if she was a black or got herself burned brown in the sun, setting out on that porch of hers, day after day like she done. She had dark hair—not a speck of gray in it—hanging down either side of her face in a pair of braids and was wearing
a gingham dress, smoking a pipe, and just a-staring at us when we come outta the trees and stumbled on her place. Her eyes were so dark you'd've thought they was all pupil.
I remember a wind come up and shook them bottles on her tree against each other, making this strange hollow clinking sound. Supposed to chase the bad spirits away, is how I heard it. The wind fell off and the bottles stopped moving. We wasn't moving neither, just a-looking at her looking at us. Then she raised her hand and that wind come up again, rattling the bottles. I don't know about spirits, but it sure enough chased us off that day.
“We don't want to go messin' 'round with the likes of Miss Lucinda,” Pinky says.
That's what everybody called her. I don't know if anyone ever knew her family name, or if she'd ever had one. I 'spect every small town's got itself some peculiar old woman, people think she's a witch. The difference being in this case, I think Miss Lucinda most likely was.
“You know the kind of stories they tell about her,” Pinky tells me. “They don't call her a juju woman for nothin'.”
“That's exactly why we need to talk to her.”
“Ray. The reason Orry Prescott had that gimpy leg of his was on account of his trying to steal a bottle off'n that tree of hers.”
I'd heard that story, too, but I didn't set me much store by it. The Prescotts was as inbred as the Morgans and I'm pretty sure Orry grew up with that gimpy leg of his, though I didn't know for certain. I never saw him 'round until junior high and he already had that leg of his then, walking with a wooden crutch. You never seen shoulders like he had. Most of him was built like some football player, 'cept for that one leg all shriveled and wasted away.
But that didn't mean Miss Lucinda hadn't put some juju on him.
“We ain't going there to steal nothin',” I tell Pinky. “You got my promise on that.”
“And if she don't want to talk?”
“Then we say a polite ‘Thank you, ma'am,' and we take ourselves away from there.”
“I don't know,” Pinky says.
“Then how about you just drive me there and let me off and you can wait for me at the bridge. I'll walk back to meet you.”
We had some more discussion on the matter, but in the end we made
the drive up to Tyson together. It's a beautiful day, the skies clear and blue above us, but not so warm that we have the top down on the Caddy. Once we get outta Tyson, we take the back roads until we find ourselves on Early Road.
Here nothing's changed, 'cept maybe the woods are deeper, trees growing closer to the road. We leave that long pink car of ours where the bridge goes over the crick and follow the path to Miss Lucinda's cabin, the two of us making our way between the trees, Pinky nervous, me feeling a kind of eagerness I ain't known in a long whiles, which is a surprise on a lotta counts, considering how I feel about this kinda thing, hoodoo and magic and all.
Truth is, I'm not even sure the old woman's still going to be alive after all these years. But when we step outta the trees, there she is, still a-setting on her porch like she ain't moved in the thirty or so years since we was last here. That bottle tree of hers is still there, too. Only difference is it's grown somewhat bigger and it's got more bottles on it.
We stop within hailing distance of the cabin. Pinky's eyeing that tree, waiting for the wind to come up and rattle the bottles. But me, I give that old woman a wave.
“Howdy, ma'am,” I call over to her. “I was wondering if we could have us a word or two.”
A couple of the bottles on the tree clink against each other, but I don't feel no wind. I can tell Pinky's about to bolt so I grab ahold of her arm.
“You mind if we come up there on the porch with you?” I ask. “We brung you something.”
There's a long moment of silence and I'm almost beginning to wonder if maybe the old woman's up and died and is just a-setting there, waiting for the undertaker to come and cart her away. But then I make note of them eyes of hers, glittering and dark and alive.
“What do you have?” she asks.

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