by Paul Park
There was nothing to be done. Miranda swam the few strokes to the boat. Ignoring the old man’s hand, she deposited her oilcloth bundle, then pulled herself over the side. Immediately the boat was underway, the two oarsmen making long, slow strokes. The oarlocks were wrapped in rags, but even so they jingled.
6
A Ribbon of Moonlight
FIVE YEARS AND a few months earlier, Peter had gone down to the pirogue and examined the footprints of the animal in the wet sand. He told himself that in the darkness he could not have seen how large it was. How could he have been so crazy as to think of fighting it, attacking it? He’d found the charred stick where he’d thrown it down, and it broke as he was using it to scratch away the prints.
He didn’t mention the incident and neither did Raevsky. There was no reason to remind him, particularly since he had lost his melancholy from the night before. Chipper and excited in the morning light, he tended to his feet. Then with mock exclamations of pain he slid them into his boots and hobbled in a circle around camp. Peter stowed the tent and gear while he relit the fire and made their porridge of sweet German crackers.
“Double food today,” he said. “Tonight we find the place, a few houses for the Africans.” Then he described two long portages.
The night before, Andromeda had run away, as usual when there was explicit danger. Now she picked her way back over the stones as if her feet were also sore. Careful of her dignity, Peter put some biscuits into a tin plate. Even so she growled as he came close, wrinkling her delicate muzzle, showing her teeth.
Before they left, Peter walked along the shore again, calling Miranda’s name. He stood on a promontory above the stream and cupped his hands around his lips. He wasn’t hoping for a reply. Instead, there was something valedictory about the sound and then the intervals of silence. After a few minutes, though, he’d had enough and he came back. Andromeda was already in the boat.
He didn’t want Raevsky to have to take off his boots. So he was the one who, barefoot, pushed the pirogue out, and later, barefoot, brought it in beside a downed tree. The portage cut off a wide bend of the water and some rapids. Whistling and singing songs, Raevsky pulled the canvas bags ashore while Peter took the boat on his back. He was surprised how light it was.
Or it was light at first. Because of its width, he had to stretch his arms out to support it. There was a special stick like a yoke that fit between the gunnels and over his back. Sometimes he lost his balance, and most of the time he couldn’t see where he was going. The path led through birch trees and the swamp. Luckily, many feet had widened it; he walked with his back bent, the boat perched like a turtle’s shell. He looked straight downward at his shoes and wet jeans, and at the boot marks in the frozen mud.
Many times he had to stop and rest. Away from the river, again Peter was struck by the silence of the woods. It was another cold clear morning, though he was sweating and his heart was pounding. Inside his woolen socks, woolen gloves, his hands and feet were cold.
Raevsky had gone ahead. Peter heard him cry out, heard the dog bark. He flipped the boat into the frozen grass and ran to join them.
A boy lay among the saplings beside the path. Maybe six years old, he lay curled up on his side. Someone had put a deerskin over the uncertain ground and wrapped him in a ragged blanket, which he’d kicked away. And though his feet and lower legs were bare, still he’d torn open his woolen shirt to reveal his ribs, his gaunt body and swollen stomach. His skin was dry and crusty, with patches of eczema on his neck and arms. His hair was cut close to his scalp.
Peter could see he was sick. His own memories of the cave, of lying listless in his own sweat, were too immediate. He remembered the vacant feeling and could taste again the bitter saliva in his mouth. The boy looked up at them with big, stupid eyes, too big for his emaciated face.
There was sweat on his high forehead, and even in the cold small wind his body stank. Andromeda was growling, scratching at the stones. Her yellow fur rose in a sharp ridge between her shoulder blades. Raevsky was on his knees, had pulled his gloves off. He’d thrown down the canvas bags and had produced a rag of cloth, which he reached out toward the boy as if to wipe his face. Or he made wiping gestures in the air without touching the boy’s skin; now doubtless aware of his futility, he seized the canteen that Peter found in the outer pocket of the larger bag. He unscrewed the top, poured in some water that he held to the boy’s lips, all the time muttering and crooning over him in a mixture of English and Roumanian. Peter understood the English part, which was a repetition of something he had said the night before: “Dead river, dead. Gulka, Ferenc, Alex…”
Peter stood light-headed, sucking in the cold air. The boy had been abandoned—not without love, not without regret. The deerskin and the blanket were proof of that. The water slid from his lips over his chin. He stared up at them, making no attempt to swallow.
Peter found the sight of him intolerable—his skin dry as paper, stretched over sharp bones. He wondered if this kid was just the bait in a trap, and he looked back down the path to where the boat lay on its side, propped against a broken stump. He studied the woods on either side of them, partly from caution, partly because he could not endure that wasted face.
“What should we do?” he asked.
Raevsky held a lump of snow against the boy’s forehead. “You go on. Africans not far. African will help.”
Peter looked at the boat. Then he bent to pick up one of the canvas bags. “No,” Raevsky said. “Leave with me. Find help. Africans—”
Africans, Peter thought. It was hard to imagine what Raevsky was talking about. The old man had taken off his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, uncovering, as he worked over the boy, his corded, liver-spotted arms. Peter saw he had some blood on the collar of his checked shirt and on the cloth around his neck. He had taken off his cap. His hair stuck out like wire.
Something now occurred to Peter, irrelevant words his mother had taught him about six months before she died. Often now they came back to him, snippets of poems. “… you and I are old,” he thought. “Death closes all.…” It was from Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a poem (his mother had said) that should not necessarily be taken at face value.
“No time! You come back!”
What did he mean? Already Andromeda had disappeared up the trail. Peter stared after her. His mind was moving slowly, but to tell the truth, he thought, he couldn’t bear to stay here with the boy, his sharp dry face.
“Go!” Raevsky shouted. “Go, go!” Then he relented. His face lost some of its exasperated look. He even smiled, showing the toothless gap in his upper jaw. “Dead river—no! Is chance for us. Conjure and death. Always we fight it, now to end.”
He shook his head. “Go!” and Peter went. He ran and walked along the path by the Hoosick riverbank. He ran and walked, ran and walked along the path. Sometimes Andromeda raced on ahead. Sometimes she stayed with him.
“Africans not far,” Raevsky had said, but it was far. Out of breath, the cold air sharp in his lungs and in his teeth, Peter had time for useless thoughts. What was he doing here, running by himself along this trail through the woods? Miranda was gone and now Raevsky was behind him. Only Andromeda was left, someone who had always laughed at him all the way through school. Even now she was making fun of him as best she could, mocking his slowness. She would wait for him in the middle of the path, yawning and stretching as he came close, pushing at the leaves and snow with her stiff forelegs while her tongue curled out.
Sometimes in high school she had stood in the middle of the west corridor with her hands on her hips, wearing a T-shirt and short skirt or something—she’d never seemed to carry any books to class. Her short yellow hair, dark eyebrows, and gray eyes. Now she pricked her ears, sniffing at the air, running back and forth through the woods parallel to the trail. As apprehensive as he felt—always he had to wonder whether he projected feelings onto her, and whether there was anything left inside her of the girl he had known in Williamst
own. Sometimes, looking into her gray-and-blue-flecked eyes, he thought he saw … something, some remnant of a complicated thought.
In the transformation to this world, at the moment, Peter supposed, when he’d gained his new right hand, the girl had changed her shape. That first morning Miranda and Peter had found her on Christmas Hill, curled up in a nest of fancy underwear.
And maybe what had happened was even stranger than that. Maybe there was something else in her besides the girl and the dog, some connection to a Roumanian officer named Sasha Prochenko, a blob of connection that grew inside her like a tumor.
Peter stopped running. He put his arms over his stomach and bent over. He had a stitch in his side, and besides that he felt sick, and it wasn’t just because the phrase he’d put together in his mind recalled his mother and the disease she’d died of. He wiped his mouth with his left hand, which still ached from carrying the boat. But his big right hand was strong and serviceable, horribly so.
Now Andromeda came running and whining. They had joined the river again, and Peter could see the wide, still water through the tree trunks. When he looked up, the light was glittering in the trees. Andromeda snarled at him to get him moving; after half a mile they left the stream and turned south again into heavier woods and bigger trees, birches and evergreens. They climbed uphill for ten minutes, and then the ground leveled out, and they came into a clearing against a low cliff face. The houses were there, bark-covered, dome-shaped wooden huts, and also some scaffolding against the cliff. Smoke rose from three of the huts. The ground was dry and chalky under crusts of snow.
Cold and exhausted, Peter bent down with his hands on his knees. Why was he so weak? It was because he’d eaten nothing but biscuits these past days, nothing nourishing since they’d killed the wendigo. With his hands on his knees, smelling the smoke from the settlement, he found himself bombarded with fantasies of food. Wordless smells and tastes overwhelmed him, phantoms of past meals. Memories of Snickers bars. His mouth filled with thick drool.
At the same time he thought about the boy Raevsky had found, the mother or father who’d abandoned him. Feelings were sifted over with questions—what was Peter doing here? What would he do in Albany? Where would he go? Who was the African that could help him—were there Africans here? Why Africans? Andromeda ran into the space between the houses. Poised on three legs, she lifted her forepaw above the snow.
Now suddenly Peter imagined enormous superhuman figures with black skin who would stride out of these tiny huts and tell him what to do, how this strange world worked and where to find Miranda in it. So it was with more disappointment than fear that he watched someone approach out of the scaffolding and the tent in front of it, an ominous small person in a turban and surgical mask, brandishing a short-barreled rifle.
Andromeda made the high snuffling whimper that sufficed her for a bark. But she didn’t budge. She stayed with her foreleg curled.
“Hello,” Peter called out. Light-headed, he stood up straight, raised both hands.
Someone was in the flapping doorway of the tent, a small person who said something and the woman with the gun relented—Peter saw she was a woman now. Red hair hung down her back, and under her unbuttoned quilted coat she wore a dress, a shapeless dirty garment of bleached cotton. Her mask also, looped behind her ears, was streaked with dirt.
She put up her gun. “Death closes all, but something ere the end.…” thought Peter. Tennyson, and with the words of the poem Peter found himself remembering his mother’s cancer smell. He caught a whiff of it, mixed with her perfume—he’d thought about his mother a lot today. Or else memories of her had gotten stuck to whatever he was thinking, words and images with hooks like burdocks, burrs—a simile she might have liked, though not the way he was expressing it, the proclivity, the prolixity—was that the word? Was it even a word? She was the one who told him that memory and perception were part of the same thing. She’d audited some courses at the college—what was wrong with him? He stood with his head whirling, his mouth full of saliva, his stomach and intestines like a dirty engine, and all he could think about were scraps of color (Raevsky’s checked shirt-collar with blood on it, his rolled-up sleeves, spotted arms), scraps of memory. He found himself staring at the red-haired woman’s surgical mask, while at the same time he realized all these stupid thoughts were not just the result of hunger and exhaustion. But he was trying to hide something from himself. He could hear a roaring in his ears, feel a twitch in his right hand. He had an impulse to drag the woman down, bat her gun away. She was no match for him. None of these people were any match for him. “Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.” Where was Miranda now?
He felt a hand on his elbow and he pulled away. Someone was talking. “You may rest here. Come.”
He couldn’t look into the person’s face. “Come,” she said. Peter saw the black hand on his arm, the small plump fingers underneath his elbow guiding him back toward the tent while the guard in the mask made threatening gestures at the trees.
“Where is Miranda now?” he asked himself. “Right now?”
* * *
“NOW” IN THAT context had no meaning. Five years later there were cotton blankets in the bottom of the boat. Miranda wrapped herself in one of them. She sat beside the man on the stern plank while the girl Ludu sat at his feet. His heavy hand was on the tiller and he said nothing to Miranda as he steered the boat out to sea. With his other hand he pushed his daughter’s wet, knotted hair back from her forehead while she spoke to him. “You saw him on the dock. He was this close. But I said a prayer to Saint Lucia with no eyes. We were covered in the blackness. Oh, but I was frightened!” It was true—her teeth were chattering. She seized hold of her father’s hand and held it near her cheek.
“You’ve done it,” he said.
“You see she is the answer to our prayers,” continued the girl. “It’s the face we saw in the glass. You begged for this and God heard you. Oh, but the vampire said he was to send the soldiers to Mamaia Sat.…”
What was she talking about—the glass? The mirror? Saint Lucia? There were torches among the dunes. “Hush now,” said the bearded man. He had a bulbous, porous nose and a thick chest. He was dressed in patched black clothes. “Miss,” he said, and smiled. His teeth were crooked, widely spaced. Miranda expected him to say something. But when she looked him in the face he dropped his eyes.
Soon he turned the boat north, parallel to the coast. The sea was calm and still. The two boys rowed with long quiet strokes, and they stared back at Miranda. Their long faces were expressionless. “Miss,” said the bearded man, trying again. “You won’t remember me. I saw you at Vama Veche when you were on holiday. On horseback with your aunt—a little sorrel mare. I gave your horse an apple. You won’t remember. My name is Dinu Fishbelly and these are my sons. You understand me?”
Why did he ask that? It was because he spoke Roumanian instead of French, the language of the rich. “I understand,” she said. She wanted him to go on talking. She wanted information, a clue to the role she was to play.
Sitting in the boat, listening to the jingle of the locks, she tried to think about what had gone wrong so far. When she’d imagined walking out the carriage road, she had prepared herself for a new beginning, for the vulnerability that comes from ignorance, at least at the very start. That was why she’d put off her departure a full day. Even so she had imagined herself holding back, traveling incognito perhaps to Insula Calia and perhaps to Bucharest, where no doubt she could learn a lot just from newspapers. She would wait and try to send a message across the ocean, and choose the moment when she could initiate events, either her aunt’s plan, which she’d ponder at her leisure (if, come to think of it, the message hadn’t gotten soaked in the water—no, it was still wrapped up in the oilcloth, so that was all right), or her own. But now these people had barged in and dragged her out into a game that had already started. In the stillness of the boat, listening to the sweep of the oars, she found herself irritated by thei
r deference, which seemed insincere. Irritated by their questions, which she was afraid she couldn’t answer. What could she do for them? Now already she was in their debt.
More than that, there was no longer any opportunity to hide, to pretend to be someone different than she was. But even your own self can be a role. Once Andromeda had gotten her to try out for a play at school, and she’d had nightmares about forgetting her lines, learning the wrong part. Now she stripped the blanket from around her shoulders and rubbed her arms in the rough cloth. She heard Ludu whisper, “There it is,” and knew she was talking about the bracelet, Miranda Brancoveanu’s golden bracelet.
It was a mistake to even wear it. These people were staring at her as if she had two heads. She sat up straight, then turned her face in profile. Aware of her wet shirt, she folded her arms over her chest. If she was going to play the white tyger among these people, even in the dark, she needed a new bra and some dry clothes.
“Where are we?” she asked.
She knew enough to know that Dinu Fishbelly was a Gypsy nickname. How did that work in? Blind Rodica had been a Gypsy, and she had died to save Miranda’s life.
“We’ll be coming in near Lake Tasaul,” said the bearded man, “That’s where my house is.”
They pulled toward shore. They had passed a small headland and were sliding in now toward the gravel beach. In shallow water the boys shipped their oars and jumped over the side, as did Ludu. The three of them pulled the boat up till it crunched ashore. With her oilcloth bundle under her arm, Miranda stepped onto the stones.
Fishbelly hadn’t moved. Miranda was surprised to see the older boy step into the surf until he stood at the boat’s stern. He took his father onto his back, and for the first time Miranda noticed that the man had no legs below his knees. The boy carried him up onto the beach, while Ludu and the other pulled the boat up to the dunes. There was a stake above the high water mark, and they tied the painter to it and then flipped the boat over with the oars underneath. Ludu had slipped back into her wet skirt.