Joey wasn't her type, anyway. He was too good-looking, in a tough sort of a way, rough around the edges, perhaps, but so sure of himself. Like the cool rebel kids she'd always admired from a distance in school, the ones who never had to worry about whether people liked them or not, who just strode through life, pulling everybody else along in their wake. Things didn't happen to them, they made them happen. They were in control of their own destinies.
What a load of crock, she thought, dropping her camera bag on the sofa. Because really, wasn't there something pathetic about a grown man making his living by driving an illegal cab in the middle of the night? What kind of a "destiny" was that? The destiny of a loser.
She sighed. It was a nice try, but putting him down didn't work. She felt attracted to him. It wasn't even the mystique, that edge of danger that clung to him like an aura. It was … the unexpected kindness in him, she realized. The way he'd stopped to help her without any consideration of the danger he'd put himself into. He could have been killed. He could have …
She sat down on the sofa beside her camera bag. Kicking off her shoes one by one, she leaned back against the cushions. Closed her eyes.
He'd been shot. She remembered that. She remembered how loud the gun had sounded and seeing the bullet hit him, how the impact had slammed him against his car, remembered the blood that smeared the side of the door and soaked his shirt. But then those girls had come with their little penknives, almost as if they'd stepped out of one of Jack's stories, and her attacker was dead. She and Joey were all better, wounds healed, neither of them traumatized, and the man with the gun was dead. Just like that.
She knew she should be feeling something about what had happened, but it really was like a story—not like anything that had happened to her outside of her imagination. She'd been prowling about in those lanes and alleyways for hours, feeling like a cat, invisible, very proud of herself for not being scared, feeling like one of the animal people she was looking for.
Then her attacker had appeared. He'd come up to her out of nowhere, sliding from the shadows, demanding she hand over her camera bag, and she, still in her story, feeling impossibly brave and sure of herself, had simply told him off. That was when he hit her. As random an act of violence as Joey's kindness had been. He hit her and kept hitting her until …
She sat up slowly, fingers exploring her face, the back of her neck, her shoulders.
There was no swelling, no pain. She knew if she got up to look in the mirror, there wouldn't even be a bruise.
She remembered the girl kneeling down beside her, her face so close, and even without the aid of glasses, oddly in focus: the sharp features below that ragged thatch of black hair and those dark, dark eyes. The smell of her like cedars and wet oak leaves and something sweet. Apple blossoms.
And she'd said something so odd, just before she'd taken the pain away. No, not said. She'd half-sung, half-chanted a few lines that returned to Lily now.
The cuckoo is a pretty bird,
he sings as he flies.
He sucks little birds' eggs,
and then he just dies.
She was sure they were from some song, though not one Lily knew. Sucks little birds' eggs. What was that supposed to mean? She tried repeating the words aloud, but they remained doggerel, as enigmatic as the girl singing them to her had been.
That girl. Those girls.
They were real.
The memory of them and what had happened kept trying to slide away from her, to lose its immediacy and become just another story, something she'd heard somewhere once, not something that had happened to her only hours ago. She wouldn't let it happen. She hung on to the memory, refusing to let it go.
She'd really found them.
Jack's animal people were real.
3.
The red-haired woman came by Jack's place early in the morning, as she often did. She called a greeting to the crows who watched her suspiciously from the roof of the old school bus. One of them cawed halfheartedly, then turned its head away and began to preen its glossy black feathers. The others continued to watch her, black eyes swallowing light. She supposed they'd never learn to trust her.
Kneeling by the steps of the bus, she reached under and pulled out the Coleman stove that Jack kept there. He had a woodstove inside the bus, but it was too warm to use it for cooking at this time of year and Jack didn't have any wood for it anyway. It took her a few tries to get the naphtha stove going, but soon she had a steady flame on the right burner. The left one didn't work anymore. She filled a battered tin coffeepot with water from the rain barrel, added ground coffee to the brewing basket from a plastic bag she was carrying in her jacket pocket, and put the pot on the stove. Once the coffee was brewing, she settled herself on the sofa out in front of the long length of the bus and leaned back, hands behind her head.
After a few moments she heard a stirring inside, then the smell of the coffee brought Jack out to join her on the sofa. He was a tall, gangly man, all long legs and arms, smooth-shaven and raven-haired, with skin a few shades darker than her own coffee-and-cream complexion. His cowboy boots were black. His jeans were an old and faded gray, shirt black, as were the flat-brimmed hat and duster he invariably wore. He had his hat on this morning—like Dwight Yoakam, she doubted he ever took it off in public—but he'd left his coat inside for now.
As soon as they saw him, the crows on the roof began to squabble, filling the air with their racket.
"Hush, you," Jack called over his shoulder. "Go make yourselves useful somewhere."
Still squabbling, the small flock erupted from their roost and flew out across the empty lots that lay between the bus and Moth's junkyard on the edge of the Tombs. Jack shook his head as they watched them go.
"Going to tease the dogs," he said. "Silly buggers."
Katy smiled. "Someone's got to do it. Moth lets those dogs get too lazy. Do you want some coffee? I think it's just about ready."
"You're spoiling me."
"I guess someone's got to do that, too."
"I won't say no."
She got up from her seat to get mugs from inside the bus, filling them on her way back to the sofa. They both drank it black. Squatting was easy to accomplish in the Tombs—regular citizens didn't venture into its sprawl of abandoned factories and tenements, and all you had to do was roll out your bedding to stake a claim—but amenities, even such simple ones such as sugar and cream, simply didn't exist unless you brought them in yourself.
Jack took a few sips of coffee and smacked his lips in appreciation. Taking out a pipe, he went through the ritual of filling it, tamping the tobacco down just right, getting it lit. He drank some more coffee. Katy watched the air show the crows were putting on above Moth's place, dive-bombing the junkyard dogs, swooping and darting in among the wrecked vehicles. The dogs howled their frustration.
"You're feeling sorry for them," Jack said.
"Them and me. But at least those dogs of Moth's have a place to be—somewhere they fit in."
"Anytime you need a place to stay …"
Katy sighed. "It's not that. It's just … she's coming. I don't know how I know, but I do."
Jack nodded to show he was listening, but let her talk.
"I won't be able to stay away from her. I know I promised her before, and it was hard, but I could manage it because we had a few thousand miles between us. But now she's coming here." She looked at Jack. "So it's like the promise is broken, isn't it? She broke it."
"You're going to have to work that one out for yourself," Jack told her.
"Maybe her coming means she's changed her mind."
"Could be. You could ask her."
Katy shook her head. "Anybody else, but not her."
"You've got nothing to be afraid of," Jack said.
"She can kill me."
Jack wouldn't let her run with that. "You can't die."
Because she'd never been born. But Jack was wrong. She wasn't like some of the animal people in his stor
ies who kept coming back and back, their lives a wheel where most people's were a simple line from point A to B. She could die. She knew that, no matter what Jack said.
"Maybe the crow girls could help me," she said. "You could introduce me and I could ask them."
Jack laughed. "You know how it goes. They do any damn thing they please. But ask them right and maybe they'll help you. Point you down a road, anyway. Could be where you want to go. Could be where you need to go. That's not always the same place, you know."
Katy sighed again. "Tell me a story," she said.
"What kind of story?"
"Something about the crow girls."
"The crow girls," Jack repeated.
He leaned his head back against the sofa, which made his hat push up and fall down over his eyes. "I can do that," he said.
4.
This is how it was in the long ago: Everyone respected the crow girls. Didn't matter where you were, walking the medicine lands or right here in this world with the roots and dirt underfoot. You could look up and call their names, and there they'd be looking back down at you, two pieces of magic perched high up in a forever tree, black feathers shining, dark eyes watching, heads cocked, listening.
Some people say Raven was older, and wiser, too, but the crow girls were kinder. Any mischief they got into never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it. Knew all the questions and most of the answers, always did. Never had rules, never told you what to do, but they would teach you how to find your own answers, if you asked nicely enough.
Now no one remembers them. Not that way.
I think maybe we started to forget when we stopped looking up. Instead of remembering there was a world of sky up there above our heads, we'd sit on the ground and look at our feet. We'd get together around the trunk of some old tree and tell stories, consider how it was that the world began, try to make sense of how we got here and why—same as people do now, except we did it first because we were here first. Back then, we were the people. Animal people. Same as you, but feathered and furred and scaled. Those stories you tell each other, you got them from us, all of them. First World, the Garden, the Ocean of Blood, the Mother's Womb.
Everybody would take a turn, make up how they thought it was. Except for Raven and the crow girls. They didn't have to speak. They didn't have to make up stories. Because they knew. They were there, right from the beginning when the medicine lands came up out of the long ago and this world began.
Only the corbae remember that first story. But Raven and the crow girls never needed to tell it and no one ever really listens to me. Problem is, I didn't always remember it. It took me a long time, trying on different sets of words the way some of us try on skins, until I finally got past guessing and into remembering. I guess I ended up like that little boy crying wolf, told so many stories that when I finally got hold of the real ones, no one was ready to listen to me anymore.
No, that's not true. People listen. They just don't believe.
5.
Didn't he go on, Moth thought as they sat around listening to another of Jack's stories later that night. But this was a good one. Moth had heard it before. All about how you didn't fall from grace, but into it.
Jack continued the tale:
"Cody, he's looking around. Trying to get the corbae to understand, but they're not listening. Those crows don't listen to much except for what they've got to say themselves.
" 'See,' Cody, he tries again, 'If you're going to be pure and good, you can't be sexy. You can't be creative. You can't think for yourself. You want to get along with the big boss, you've got to be an obedient little sheep.'
"Raven, he laughs. 'You think we don't know that?' he says.
" 'Maybe some of you still do,' Cody says right back. 'But most of you forgot.' "
Moth nodded. Cody and the crowfolk never got along in Jack's stories. Canid and corbae, they were like oil and water. Sometimes Jack told a story from one viewpoint, sometimes from the other, but it always came back to how most of the time they agreed, they just didn't know it, which didn't make them all that different from ordinary folks. 'Course there was one thing hardly anybody agreed on: Everybody thought sex and knowledge was what got folks booted out of paradise, but like so much else, the churchmen got it wrong. People didn't find the potential for paradise until they left the garden and started thinking for themselves. Screwed up more often than they didn't, but hell, everybody made mistakes. Another word for that was "experience." The only reason any of them were here tonight was because of some mistake or other.
Take Benny; he never could hold down a life. Man had a serious gambling jones, would bet on a traffic light if he could find the percentage in it. One day he lost the big one—had the moneymen on his ass and the next thing he knew, job, house, family were all gone, just like that, whole life changed from one day to the next. Says his mama used to take him to the track when he was a kid, that's where he caught the fever, but Moth didn't see that as an excuse. A man had to take responsibility for his own life at some point. Benny had been a good-looking man once, before the alcohol poisoning settled in. He could clean himself up. He just wasn't ready yet. Maybe he never would be.
Anita, now she was a piece of work. On one hand, she was a first-class accountant—did Moth's books for the junkyard, the ones he showed the feds and the real ones—on the other, a sensei-level mechanic. If she couldn't fix it, sometimes with no more than bobby pins and duct tape, well, it probably couldn't be fixed. A stand-up woman. Stuck to her man through a lot of bad times, put him through law school, the whole number, then got dumped for a trophy wife when he made partner.
A handsome woman, but not pretty enough to be an important lawyer's wife. The man didn't even see that she'd be looked after. Took her for everything and laughed when she tried to fight back. Moth didn't think she'd ever fully recovered from the betrayal. But she wasn't one to quit. When her husband stole away her old life, she turned around and made herself a new one, worked in a diner where Moth first met her while she took a few of those courses you see advertised on matchbook covers. Did so well on them she could've got a job with anybody, but she was through with the high-roller crowd and came to work for Moth instead. She never said why, but Moth knew. He and his crew could give her the one thing nobody else was interested in offering: a sense of family.
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.
The Newford Stories Page 14