by Ray Hudson
Gram had just placed a cup of tea in front of a woman when I walked in.
That won’t last long in this weather, I said to myself when I saw the back of her stylized hair. Gram was on the school board, and new teachers sometimes came to introduce themselves.
“Aang, aang,” Gram greeted me. “Just in time.”
I placed the canned milk on the counter before looking at the visitor who lowered her designer sunglasses to better see who had walked in. Sunglasses on a cloudy day?
Definitely an Outsidery thing to do.
Maybe she’s the new math teacher, I thought. The last one had run off with the banker. I turned back to the counter, tore off a piece of aluminum foil, and started to wrap up four alaadika.
“Sophie?”
“That’s me,” I said, pocketing the fried bread. “Only I’m Anna now.”
A boy, maybe five years old, pivoted out from behind the woman’s chair.
“Davie,” the woman said as she ruffled his hair, “say hi to your big sister.”
What happened next? Maybe she got up. Maybe she hugged me. There was a lavender-like smell. Maybe I hugged her back, but static blared inside my head. Her voice was like wind outside a closed window. There were too many words. Too many colors. Her short hair. Her heavy face. She wasn’t the woman in the photograph Gram kept on the dresser.
“Does Dad know you’re here?”
“Your dad and me, well, we have an understanding. Yeah, I saw him.”
“And?”
“Anna,” Gram’s voice was real quiet.
But the words kept coming. “He’s got his life, Sophie. We move on.”
“Anna,” I repeated.
“Anna,” she said, catching on none-too-quickly. “You look real good.”
The woman saw my crumpled weaving on the table. “You weaving another basket?”
Gram shook her head a little.
Gram?
“You always wove real nice baskets,” this stranger said as her little turd of a boy reached for it. “I never could. I always wanted to, though.”
“Too busy with boys,” Gram said.
The woman laughed, and her fingers flashed with gold as she put a hand to her permed hair.
“Don’t tell Snyder that,” she chuckled. “Although I suspect he already knows.”
“You married?” I asked, still amazed. Gram had woven baskets?
“Her husband’s manager for North Pacific Fish,” Gram said. “She’s come up to see him over at Akutan and stopped here to see us, too.”
“And then?”
“That was real nice of her.”
“We live in Seattle now, Anna,” she said.
“Do you think I care?”
Did she really think I cared?
“She’s a lot like you, Mom,” the woman said. I steadied myself at the sink and looked out the window where the rain fell and the buttercups blossomed and everything was the way it had always been without her.
“It’s good to see you.”
She was talking to Gram. I needed air.
I yanked the raffia out of five stubby fingers and left.
The silver tape flapped as I pushed the door open to get out of the drizzle and walked straight into a sea of plastic ducks. Tourists off a cruise ship bobbed in every aisle. Every last one of them wore identical yellow rain jackets.
Just who did she think she was?
Gram was real. Dad was real. But she had never been anything more than a photograph. Long straight black hair and a narrow face with something like laughter hovering around her eyes and lips. More beautiful than that gross middle-aged woman in sunglasses. There were no photos of her at Dad’s. None on display, that is. Maybe one of his old girlfriends had gotten rid of them. Whatever. But whenever I slept at Gram’s I had studied the photograph.
But I had never even dreamed about her. As far as I could remember, I had never even seen her, so how could I dream about her except as a door that never opened? Only now here she was, flinging it wide and barging in.
I slammed it shut as Fred shouted for help. For about twenty minutes I gave him a hand and packaged whatever weird knickknacks the tourists bought. The old store didn’t have much in the way of actual souvenirs so people settled for fishhooks and hats. I had just handed a package to a woman when Captain Hennig cruised through the crowd like a dark tanker. He carried a small cardboard box and was headed toward New-Store.
“Gotta go,” I said to Fred.
“Thanks!” he said as I ducked out from behind the counter and wedged through the last of the tourists. I crouched behind a row of shelves just inside New-Store. I couldn’t see what Hennig showed Mrs. Skagit when he got her away from the cash register, but I heard her whistle.
“The other is like this?” she asked.
“I said you’d like it,” he answered. “It’s even better.”
“Where’s it at?”
“Like I said, I’m taking birders over to the Baby Islands for a day or two. You think about it. I’ll bring it up when I get back. Your customer will pay whatever you ask.”
I exhaled a long breath before I stepped into the aisle as a wave of tourists washed up the ramp. Mrs. Skagit slipped something back into the box.
“Later,” she said as she returned to the cash register. Hennig growled his way to the door. I was sure his hands were empty. I backed into a row and waited.
And waited.
Finally, I stepped out.
“You find what you want, Sophie?” Mrs. Skagit asked. “If you do, take it to Fred.”
Four men in yellow jackets were still at the counter.
“Follow me, gentlemen,” she said and headed to the jug store.
The small cardboard box was below the counter. I fished among the packing pellets and pulled out a two-by-four-inch manila envelope. I tilted out a three-inch spear point, flaked from crystal or glass or the clearest agate in the world, a narrow wedge of light. It was perfectly symmetrical, with fine even ridges on both sides.
It’s not his and it’s not mine, I told myself as light angled out of it. But it’s more mine than his. It’s a lot more mine than his. This belonged to my Unanga ancestors.
Everything disappeared. Old things got yanked out from under us. The unique things that made us who we were kept vanishing, like the Old Priest’s House and the fox trap from Moses’s family.
I slipped it into my pocket.
I tucked the empty envelope into the box and returned it to the shelf.
I didn’t even nod at Fred as I left the store. I started toward Gram’s, pretty sure she’d tell me to take the spear point to Jennifer at the museum. Six steps and that woman and her fart of a kid barged into my head. I headed in the opposite direction to give myself some time.
Torgey was helping a limping Sanders into the passenger’s seat of the pickup when I got to the dock.
“He twisted his ankle,” Torgey said as I hurried up.
“Didn’t see the box,” Sanders said. “I’d dropped my glasses.”
“He’d just put the box down on the deck,” Torgey said. “I’m takin’ the old fool to the clinic.”
He climbed in on the driver’s side.
“That I am,” the old man laughed and straightened his glasses. “Up and tripped on it. Captain’s gone to the hotel to make arrangements for the birders to get to the boat. Will you tell him we’re at the clinic?”
The pocket with the spear point suddenly seemed heavier. They drove off before I shouted that I wouldn’t tell the crook anything.
I took the spear point out and saw again how it concentrated the light.
Or maybe I will. I would tell Hennig. I’d look right up at him, innocent and all, and tell him. I remembered the fried bread I had brought for Sanders. I might even offer some of it to him. Then I’d take the point and whatever else I might find on the King Eider to Jennifer. She could call the cops. By the time I got back to Gram’s, that woman would be gone, off to Akutan. I’d move on, like she said.
The sun came out for a bit as I crossed to the gangplank, like it was giving me a green light.
I left the fried bread on the table after a quick inspection of the galley. I flew down a flight of stairs and stuck my head into a small room with compact bunk beds. I closed the door and opened another. This was more like it: a spacious bunk and a built-in desk, a chart of the Islands of Four Mountains pinned to the wall. I flipped on the light and shut the door. Hennig’s desk was littered with papers. I pulled open the drawer and ran my hand over nothing more than pens and pencils. There was a cardboard box on the bed with crackers, cookies, and a couple of bottles of alcohol. Two more boxes were on the floor behind a pair of duffle bags. I had just moved one of the duffle bags when Sander’s dog started a yapping fit in the hall. I stepped to the door, flipped off the light just as a rockslide of thumps and yelps exploded outside. A kid was at the bottom of the stairs rubbing his butt. He started to stand up when Sander’s mutt snapped another pathetic bark from the top of the stairs.
“Shut it, Halibut Bait!” I ordered and jerked the kid to his feet.
2. Booker
For me, the beginning was a lot like the end. I tripped and went flying.
That’s not who I am. I like order. I want to know what’s going to happen next. I’m like my dad when he outlines the plots for the novels he and Mom write. Most of the time, though, he’s a lot more adventurous, and that’s when I stay out of his way. My parents, Spike and Tulip, write mysteries. They also love obscure scientific facts, which is probably why I have these odd snippets in my head. Did you know, for example, that thirty-six is both a square and a triangular number? Or that while there are infinite prime numbers, there are only three primary colors? I’m thirteen.
We live at the end of a gravel road west of Montpelier, the capital of Vermont. Our house is almost as old as Vermont. The walls are at weird angles, and the floor boards are super wide. The house is surrounded by apple and pine trees. The yard backs onto a narrow woods. My room is on the second floor, at the top of the stairs. I can look out the window toward the woods and beyond to the cottage where the Elder Cousin and Mrs. Bainbridge live. He’s a really distant relative, something like Dad’s father’s grandfather’s sister’s son. His name is Allen.
“But always,” he once told me, “even when I was a boy, I was called the Elder Cousin.”
“You were the oldest?”
“Older than all of them.”
Mrs. Bainbridge arrived after Mom found the Elder Cousin unconscious in his yard and called emergency services. When she answered the door, there was Mrs. Bainbridge.
“Like a great swan of a woman,” she said, “with a black bag.”
Filled with tea towels, it turned out. But Mom didn’t know that at the time. The Elder Cousin recovered, and Mrs. Bainbridge stayed. I have never asked, but I think she must have wandered in from the coast. She gives off a slightly salty air. She tells me stories about ships and distant lands where there are bears and wild horses and the wild horses feed on wild apples.
I like her stories, but Here is just fine for me.
When I started first grade, Mrs. Bainbridge announced to my parents that they were to start calling me by my real name. Before that Mom had called me Sparrow, and Dad had called me Mouse. Don’t ask me where those nicknames came from. But I think it was Mouse because I’m curious about things and Sparrow because, well, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m a little bit short for my age. Anyway, my parents were startled, but they agreed. I’m almost always Booker now. To tell the truth, sometimes they forget and I automatically answer to Sparrow and sometimes to Mouse. I don’t mind. I’m a pretty happy kid. Don’t expect any heroics.
Last Tuesday I was home by myself, pretending to be an orphan. Mom and Dad had driven over the Gap to Middlebury College. Something about Irish poets. She’s part Irish. The Elder Cousin and Mrs. Bainbridge had gone into Montpelier to shop and then have lunch at Sarducci’s. I’ve eaten there twice. Just thinking about their food makes me hungry. Being without parents has advantages when you’re on the edge of starvation and close to the kitchen.
I made a peanut butter and pickle sandwich and went into the living room.
Hopeless, I thought as I looked around. Books and jackets covered the living room chairs. The desk by the window had a shoe holding down what I figured was a pile of bills. I put the plate with my sandwich on an empty corner of the coffee table and shifted a pile of Sunday supplements on the couch. Then I squeezed in between them and a half-dozen copies of my parents’ latest mystery. The photograph on the back of Death and the Uphill Gardener looked nothing like Spike or Tulip, but everything about their books was a bit far-fetched.
If I were the king of the world, I said to myself as I looked around, I’d get things in order.
Orphan king or not, I had soon devoured the sandwich.
I remembered the candy bar in my backpack. My parents discourage candy unless it comes from the co-op and tastes like paste. I had traded this one for helping Robbie mow his lawn. I usually keep my backpack under an old school desk that Mom found at a yard sale and installed in a corner of the kitchen. But it wasn’t there. It wasn’t beside the fridge or on the washer in the pantry. I stepped into Dad’s study where a cork board mounted on the wall had three-by-five cards pinned on it as he worked out the plot for their next book. But no backpack. I went upstairs. It wasn’t on or under my bed. Something flashed outside the window. I looked out. The backpack wasn’t on the roof.
Of course, it wasn’t on the roof.
There was a raven on the roof reading a letter.
Back downstairs, I fished the remote out from behind a couch pillow where I’d put it for safekeeping. I sat down and turned on the TV.
Reading a letter?
I was outside in a flash. And straight into a cyclone of flying paper. It was like every letter and envelope, every piece of graph paper and colored paper, every sheet of anything was flying through the air. I latched onto a couple sheets and saw they were addressed to the Elder Cousin. He needed to know. I ran for the path into the woods, plowing through a snowstorm of paper. Then I remembered he wasn’t home. Then I remembered why I had rushed out in the first place. I looked back. The raven on the roof was only a crow with a coupon in its beak.
I ran like crazy toward the old shed just where the woods ended and their lawn began. It was really ancient, with square nails and everything. The shed door had blown open, and papers were gushing out, just swirling into the air in all directions. I stepped onto the lawn and everything froze, like a gigantic screenshot with paper just hanging in the air. The shed door slowly closed. I heard the latch click, and the old building quivered and stomped and exploded.
I pried open my eyes. The tops of the trees bellowed overhead, weaving in and out of swirling paper. Like a tent made of cauliflowers, I thought. I pushed a few sheets away and tried to sit up as Mrs. Bainbridge stuck out her hand.
“They’re gone, Booker,” she said and gave me a tug to my feet.
“Gone?”
“Back. I mean they’ve gone back. Allen is driving. He’ll be back soon. Come inside.”
I stumbled after her, but I glanced behind. Sheets of paper were evaporating like fireflies into the darkness.
I sat at the kitchen table. Mrs. Bainbridge fished inside a cookie jar. I half expected her to bring out a fistful of paper. She kept looking at me. Like maybe I’d float away, too.
“Did you see what happened?” I asked.
She set a plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the table.
“Have a cookie.”
It was like my arms were paralyzed.
Cookies? I had just seen part of the world break into pieces.
“Good for you,” she insisted and inched the plate closer.
Okay. I had taken a bite when the Elder Cousin arrived. His eyes went to Mrs. Bainbridge, who was shaking her head. “We’ll tell him later,” she said in a whispered rumble.
Later. I liked that word. Much
later.
“Thanks,” I said and licked a chocolate chip off my finger.
“Don’t forget what I told you,” Mrs. Bainbridge said as I stood up.
I walked past a rectangle of earth where the shed had stood. Every slip of paper was gone. What had she meant? She hadn’t told me anything. The path back home was paper-free. The crow was sitting on the roof. Sunlight turned some of its black feathers silver and some of them chalk. The coupon was in its beak. It bounced to the edge and tilted its head as I stood directly beneath and looked up. The narrow slip of paper twirled down, down, down, and right into my hand. The bird launched itself into the air and twisted toward the woods with a sharp graw-caw. I looked at the paper in my hand. It wasn’t a coupon at all. It was heavy, like if the paper were made out of oatmeal. It was covered with Russian letters. I knew that because that’s the sort of thing I know. I also knew it was a bookmark. Around our house, bookmarks are as common as books.
I went inside. I turned off the TV.
I sat on the couch and tried to think.
We’ll tell him later, she had said.
I picked up Death and the Uphill Gardener. I put it down and laid the bookmark on it.
I needed to pee.
I went into the bathroom and shut the door. Finished, I turned around and there was my backpack, minding its own business in a corner. I carried it back to the couch and tried to put my thoughts in order.
She had said for me to remember something. But she hadn’t told me anything.
I studied the Russian letters on the bookmark. I flipped it over. There was a photo of a bookstore with a bench in front of it. When I started to turn it back over, the photo turned into one of bleachers above a football field.
Like a fancy holograph, I thought. But while I held it still, the football field gave way to somebody’s living room. A porch with a wooden swing on it was pushed away by a bus filled with people reading or staring out windows. I felt sucked into the changing scenes.