by Steven Gould
I nicked them.
I nicked the generator.
I nicked the lights, too.
Hell, I stole everything these days.
I hated to think what Mum would say.
The gunpowder I used to blow the mine tunnel was the start, of course. I justified it-they would never have sold it to me-but it didn't take long at all to run out of money. The batteries alone would've wiped my savings.
The batteries came from a marine supply place in San Diego, down where the jets heading into the airport thunder overhead and it seems like you can count rivets when you're done ducking. I don't know what I looked like. Maybe a bit dirty, a bit furtive, but one of the floor clerks followed me around as I checked off the stuff on my list. Batteries, Deep Discharge Gel Acid, pretinned battery cables, a three-bank automatic battery charger, and the generator.
They had it all, I hadn't pulled anything off the shelf, but I was careful not to linger in front of any of the stuff I was looking at. I asked a bunch of questions about their self-furling headsail gear and then bought a small anchor for my dingy.
I hadn't left the dingy in Oaxaca. I could just pick up the hull if I first removed the mast and the rudder and the daggerboard and oars. It sat in the Hole, upside down, all of its accessories stacked neatly around, the life jackets spread on top. My boat in a cave with no exit, in the middle of the desert.
They had a monitor at the checkout counter, one of those things with a four-way split, showing the counter, the door, the emergency exit, and the counter where the marine electronics were. They didn't seem to be monitoring the batteries or any of the other stuff on my list.
Batteries are heavy. I took twelve that night and, since I'd emptied it, I took their sturdy display shelf, too, and the rest of the stuff from my list.
I wore gloves.
The furniture came from Ikea. The bed, the desk, the bookshelves. That was easy. Assembling them was easy. Getting them level?
Stupid cave.
Home Depot "donated" concrete and a level and a mortar mixing tub and the stuff I needed to level sections of the floor. They had lots of cameras but their own shelving blocked them. If I crouched under one of their racks, I could jump unobserved, even during business hours.
The batteries were heavy, but ready-to-mix concrete is heavy, too. I could barely move the eighty-pound sacks but they jumped okay, and when I was mixing I tore them open and used an old coffee can to scoop the mix out.
It was ugly when it was finished, rough, coarse, but it was level. My futon bed sat level. The desk was level. The three bookshelves were level. The dining table was level, but looked weird. It could sit four but I'd only taken one chair.
I mean, after all, why did I need more than one chair?
But it bugged me and bugged me and finally, one night, I jumped back into Ikea and completed the set.
Of course that bugged me, too, but at least when my eyes passed over the table I didn't flinch any more. It was the right number if I ever wanted to bring Sam, Consuelo, and Alejandra there.
It took Sam five days to get Consuelo out of detention. By the end of it, a border patrol supervisor was facing an official investigation. He was unable to account for a large deposit into his bank account around the time he'd ordered her arrest.
"One of his own men tipped the lawyer," Sam explained. "I'm not sure if he was pissed because his boss took a bribe or because he didn't split it."
We met at the Texaco petrol station where we'd met the ambulance. I'd jumped in four hours before, even before it opened, and waited in the brush, with a book.
Consuelo told me there was a new bellman at the Hotel Villa Blanca, a foreigner-meaning a Mexican from the north, not an Oaxacan-who took his breaks where he could watch Alejandra's house and in his off time walked in the hills above the family compound, with binoculars.
Alejandra had found an old schoolmate from the Instituto de Idiomas who wanted a change and was willing to take over the translation agency. Alejandra took a job on Saona Island in the Dominican Republic, translating for English- and French-speaking tourists, and studied the local caribeho espanol, switching her fs and r's with abandon.
Consuelo tsked-tsked about the boyfriend who returned to Huatulco "still friends." Too much closeness had finished the relationship and I was glad until she told me that Alejandra was seeing someone else, a Dominican local.
C'est la vie.
They dropped me in El Centro and drove home. I jumped back to the Hole from there, a good hour after they'd left.
There's a field in Oxfordshire nowhere near the Thames or the hills or historic ruins but it is a few miles away from a village train station on the Redding line twixt Oxford and London. There's a bull there, too, but he's with his cows so he's pretty calm, except when I pop out of thin air right next to him. Even then, he usually just snorts and shambles away.
Mostly in the rain.
At least it seemed that way. Picking my way between the cow patties through the damp grass, letting myself out the gate, and then slogging along the asphalt to the station was a good walk, but it was a bit damp.
More than once, I showed up in the pouring rain and jumped to the station directly. But it really had to be unpleasant for me to do that.
All it took was one of them to be riding through on the 9:52 to Paddington Station and they'd be waiting for me in the field one foggy day.
Enough to give one nightmares.
It's not that I wouldn't jump into London or Oxford proper, occasionally, but if I did, I hurried away from that spot as quickly as I could.
I wanted the run of the place.
I wanted the world.
Phuket was easier than Oxford. My memories were stronger, the smells, the unbelievable colors of the ocean, the Portuguese-influenced architecture. I bought garlic sausage, sticky rice mixed with banana and shredded coconut or red beans wrapped in banana leaves from vendors carrying their wares in rattan baskets. Or satay sold from stainless steel carts pulled by motorbike.
I was running out of money.
I could've earned it, I suppose. Translating, perhaps, in Spain or France, but I was just a kid, and a short kid at that. Without someone like Alejandra to steer work my way-well, it would've been a hard scrabble.
But still it took me a while to get up the courage.
My first attempt would've been a miserable failure if it hadn't been for the fact they didn't even know I'd been there. I saw the armored-car guards (one of them the driver) leave the locked vehicle right outside the Safeway and head in with their canvas bags. I walked up to the other side, peeked in the thickly armored window, walked back between two vans, and jumped.
The truck was empty. This was their first pickup.
I took an assembled bicycle from WalMart that afternoon and filled the tires. The next day, I followed the armored car as it meandered through that neighborhood going to three grocery stores, two jewelry stores, and then the Horton Plaza Mall. It took them multiple trips at the mall, back and forth I made my move when they made their next stop, servicing an ATM at a Henry's Marketplace.
Didn't have to move close-I'd seen the inside of the truck the day before.
Good thing I'd been moving batteries and cement bags. I cleared out the back of the truck in under five minutes, jumping back and forth to the Hole.
Had to cut the bags open.
Three hundred thousand dollars. Give or take twenty thousand.
It was one of the big security companies. Surely they had insurance?
Mum would not be happy. Nor Dad.
Well, they're not here, then, are they?
The tourists drove me out of Oxford-them and their buses. The buses are the oddest thing. The companies run them and the tourists use them to get from place to place, but it's more like a city bus, running all the time, and mostly empty.
I hate diesel fumes.
I found a karate dojo in Knightsbridge run in conjunction with a fancy gym. It was expensive and I had to fake my da
d's signature on a release, but they had a really nice locker room with showers. I paid for a year.
It was my birthday present to myself-I was thirteen.
I'd had it with cold sponge baths in the Hole, but the local solution called for more construction, maybe a propane water heater, and let the soapy water flow away with the clean under the flowstone wall, but I hated the idea. I pictured some desert spring where the bighorn sheep came to drink, foaming up with soap suds. It was the reason I used a bucket toilet odorized with pine-scented disinfectant back in the smaller chamber and, when I needed to, dumped it at one of the park's picnic area pit toilets late at night.
I was still careful. I certainly didn't jump anywhere near the dojo. I used the Underground a lot, jumping to lots of different stations, always trying to pick a place, before I left, that I'd never jumped to before. Also someplace the video-cameras didn't cover-where phone stalls or info signs made a blank spot.
Leaving, going back to the Hole, I just jumped from the moving subway, whatever train came. I'd either pick a mostly empty car and jump when no one was looking, or I'd move to the next car, jumping when I was between the doors in the noisy, rattling space.
But having classes to go to was good; it meant I had a schedule, a structure that I didn't have before.
It meant I had to buy a watch.
It was one of those time-zone clocks, showing the time in two different places at once. I kept it on U.S. Pacific Time, minus seven, and London, Greenwich zero. If I hit a button it would show me the time in Phuket-Greenwich plus seven.
Breakfast, cereal, I tended to eat in the Hole. Got a little twelve-volt fridge to hold the milk. Eight o'clock in the morning and it was time for the four o'clock afternoon teen class at the dojo. I wasn't the youngest one there, but I was the shortest.
But I made up for the lack of size.
"Fierce 'un, eh?" That's what the senior instructor, Sensei Patel, would say to Martin, the junior instructor who had our lot, after watching me spar. I was swathed in pads and usually picking myself up, yet again, but I was right back in there, punching and kicking.
"Not right, that one," Martin would say, a big smile on his face. He knew I could hear. He was just teasing. "Oi! Less blocking with the head, there."
After class I'd drop off my laundry (done by the pound), usually yesterday's clothes and the day's practice gi and the linens every week or so.
Lunch was whatever, usually in London, without jumping. Sure it was evening there, but if you want a particular type of food and you can't find it in London, you aren't trying very hard. Well, except Mexican, perhaps. I ate Paki, Indian, Chinese, and the occasional bit of fish and chips.
There was a library branch not too far from the dojo where I'd do my homeschooling workbooks. I was still working through the French science series and the Spanish math so the ladies who worked there kept coming up to try out their "Bonjour, mon ami" and "iComo esta?". They were a bit disappointed when they found out I wasn't so foreign, but they were always good for a pointer or two when I got stuck on a bit of math or a bit of chemistry.
Reference librarians, they explained, lived to answer questions. And I was a nice change from the kids who wanted them to tell them "where the reports are kept" or came to snog in the stairwell or score some weed back by the toilet.
Dinner might be anywhere. Morning in Phuket, something in San Diego. Not London, though-getting past midnight in London.
Sometimes I'd just jump my dingy down to Bahia Chacacual, a bay twenty miles west of La Crucecita, and I'd skindive for my supper, lobster or fish, cooked on the beach with limes and peppers.
Then home to Hole and hearth and up again, pick up my laundry and repeat as needed.
After six months, Sensei Patel said I could come to evening adult classes. They tested me for nikkyu, low brown belt, after that and I passed, barely.
Didn't really like forms, the kata. Didn't see the point, so I didn't practice them as much as I should.
"Well, then," said Sensei Patel when I expressed this opinion, "you're a right git, aren'tcha?"
He sat me down on the floor and said, "Watch."
He did the first two steps of Heian Shodan, a lower block and a stepping midlevel punch. He paused between the block and the punch. "That's how you do it. Now, come here and attack me. Front kick."
I got up and did my best kick. He blocked it to the side with the lower block and the knuckles of his fist brushed my nose and I fell backward, overbalanced. Hadn't even seen him step in but he had. For the barest second, I wondered if he'd jumped.
"How do you think I learned that? Made it mine? It wasn't from sparring. Now-watch." He did the whole kata, but this time there was a different rhythm and intensity to it. Block-punch, block-block-punch. He didn't even move that fast but everything flowed from one to the other.
"You want to spar better, you get on with your katas, eh?" He tapped me on the forehead. "Use a little imagination. You think you're out here by yourself but that's not what it's about. Enemies surround you. Start acting like it."
Ouch.
Every couple of months I'd give Sam a call, using a pay phone. I'd talk in Spanish and ask for Carlotta or Rosa or any of a bunch of different names. If he said tienes el numero incorrecto and hung up, we'd meet the next day down the road from the Texaco, on a rise where you could see for miles. If he said, "No la conozco," I'd have to postpone-he couldn't make it the next day or he felt like it wasn't safe.
But this time it was okay and Consuelo and he sat on their folding chairs and I perched on the tailgate and we ate a nice curry and spoke in Spanish.
"Alejandra is coming home," Consuelo said. "She said to tell you she misses the chupulines." She smiled briefly but she was clearly worried.
"Is the bellman from the Villa Blanca still around?" "Oh, yes. Mateo buys drinks in the bars for my relatives. He's been letting Rodrigo use his car in the afternoon to drive around the girls."
"Estupido! Did no one tell him?" I wanted to go slap Rodrigo around. This stung. I thought he was my friend.
Sam shrugged. "Tell him what? Anything Rodrigo knows Mateo can find out from anyone. Someone tells Rodrigo don't talk to Mateo and suddenly Rodrigo does have a secret. Leave well enough alone. It won't last. Rodrigo's mother is forbidding it-he doesn't have his license-and she told him she'll have cousin Paco arrest him if he doesn't listen."
"He never listens," I said. "What about Alejandra? I'm worried."
Consuelo sighed. "She misses her family. And she broke up with her boyfriend, the Dominican."
"I could-"
"What?" Sam said. "You could show up and give them a reason to bother her?"
I dropped off the tailgate and kicked a rock. It flew over the edge of the hilltop, then crashed through the mesquite and cholla. My big toe throbbed and I tried not to limp as I stepped back to the tailgate.
"Right. What about you guys? You think this is safe?" I waved my hand around at the empty hillside. The highway was seven miles south of us and the dirt road running out to the hilltop was clearly visible and empty, a thin straight line that didn't bend until it hit the bottom of the ridge.
Sam shrugged. "As safe as it gets without no contact."
Consuelo shook her finger at me. "You are not a jaguar to live alone and solitary. It is unhealthy." She reached out and plucked at a hole in my jeans. "More like a coyote. But even coyotes keep together, eh?"
"Okay. I'll go howl at the moon. Maybe go through the trash cans."
Sam tapped his plastic fork against the Styrofoam container. "This didn't come from any trash can. Where did it come from?"
"Huh? Oh, Cafe Naz in the East End." At his blank look I added, "London."
"Ah." He mouth worked for a moment but nothing came out. Finally he said, "Not bad. Not bad at all." He poked a finger toward my upper torso. "You look healthy. Whatcha doing for exercise?"
"Karate. A dojo in- well, maybe I shouldn't say where."
"Right. Not if you go there regu
lar. And income? You got enough money?"
I looked away. "No worries. Don't have to worry about the rent. I'm saying my prayers and washing behind my ears and brushing my teeth, Papa." Teeth. I didn't want any more X-rays compared if I could help it. "I'm even doing my lessons. I'm up to Second Form, uh, tenth grade in the science and I'm starting precalculus."
"What is that, four grade levels ahead?"
I shrugged. "Whatever." I tried to be indifferent but it was nice to have someone make a fuss. Quite nice.
It made me afraid for them.
I waited thirty minutes after they left, watching the dust trail of the pickup all the way to the highway before I jumped away to the Hole.
Jumped to Embankment Station at the curvy underground part, not the aboveground platform, in a nook, behind a crowd of tourists, and someone started screaming.
Someone was shouting, "MOVE! MOVE YOUR BLOODY ASS!" The two women tourists in front of me were holding their hands above their head, cameras dangling, and one of them was screaming. Over their shoulder I saw someone running up the platform holding a big, oddly shaped gun- one I'd seen before.
He fired and something smacked into the wall on both sides of my nook and suddenly the two women tourists were thrown into me. I heard the breath leave their lungs and they stopped screaming, but they were spasming and I smelled ozone. I wasn't pinned-though the women were jammed across the opening of the nook there was still room behind me-and I jumped.
"Wait!" I yelled. I don't know why or to whom, but the sound echoed in the wash of the Empty Quarter. I jumped immediately to Charing Cross platform and stepped onto the northern train heading back toward the Thames and Embankment Station.
Nobody screamed and nobody shot at me but my eyes were wide open.
It took maybe three minutes for the train to reach the other station, but he was gone. There were transport police on the platform. They'd gotten the women out of the nook and seated on a bench. The cable was still there, taut between two areas of broken blue tile, so I guess they wiggled back into the nook and ducked under it. I didn't get off the train and as it left, we passed more transport police in the tunnel itself, flashlights waving as they searched.