by Douglas Rees
“Devonian fishes and cod?” she said. “That’s totally lame. It should be a comparison of Devonian fishes and sharks. Then you might have something valid. Well, what have you got so far?”
“‘The,’” I said. “And thanks for the mocha, by the way.”
“Whatever,” Turk said. “Talk fish to me.”
And it was weird, but talking to Turk worked. She wasn’t even in the same class I was, but she knew what questions to ask. And by answering them, I got the framework of my answer. By the time we were done, I had five pages of notes. I could write that essay in a couple of hours now.
To celebrate, we went down to the espresso machine and made two more mochas.
“I got to tell you, Turk,” I said. “That was a huge help.”
“What else you got?” she said.
I had a rewrite of a history assignment, I had two lessons in high jenti, I had a math assignment that could have had Einstein reaching for his cheat sheet, and I had a few other things.
“Let’s take a look at ’em,” Turk said.
By midnight, we had the math knocked off, the history thing redone, and everything else except the high jenti, which Turk didn’t know any more about than I did. It was amazing to work with her. Her mind was like a machine, slicing the assignments into doable chunks, and showing me how to fit them back together. By the time we were done, I felt like there was nothing I had to learn that I couldn’t handle—as long as I had Turk to help me.
“Want to kick back?” I said when we were finished.
“What’ve you got in mind?” she said.
“Something wild and crazy,” I said. “Like watching an old movie, maybe.”
“Something with vampires,” Turk said.
Mom and Dad were already in bed, so we took over the watching room. This was the name Mom had given to the room downstairs where she and Dad curled up with their movies after Dad had brought in our gigantic new flat-screen.
Turk picked out something with a title like Dracula’s Third Cousin. It was a typical vampire flick. Castles, dark and stormy nights, and Count Casimir, a tall, dark guy with an English accent who went around sucking blood until somebody put a stake in his heart after about an hour and a half.
I’d seen this movie five or six times. It was a joke. But tonight, it wasn’t funny. Somehow, the stupid script and the hammy acting were real in a way they’d never been. Not scary real, sad real. And damn it, when the vampire nailed his third victim, I started to cry.
That was weird enough. But what happened next was even weirder. Turk put her arms around me.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, go ahead, stupid. It’s about time.”
And I did.
When I was wiping my nose and the movie credits were rolling up the screen, I felt better, the way you do, and I hugged Turk back.
“Easy,” she said. “I can’t take too much touchy-feely family stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning, my voice shaky. “Why are you being so nice to me, anyway?”
“I feel sorry for you,” Turk said. “I figure you’re finding out what I’ve known since I was six. People always leave you.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “A lot of people hang together forever.”
“How many friends from California are still in your life?” Turk said.
“I still get e-mail from some of them,” I said.
“When was the last time?” Turk asked.
I couldn’t remember.
“A few months,” I said. “I guess. But my parents. I mean, a lot of people. People in New Sodom. Jenti stick together like they’ve got Velcro on their wings.”
“Not so much,” Turk said. “A lot of the people you think are tight with each other aren’t. It just looks that way. From the outside.”
“You still haven’t said anything about my mom and dad,” I said.
“How long have they been together?” Turk said. “Eighteen, twenty years? It’s a long time, Cuz, but it ain’t forever. Forever hasn’t happened yet. And when it does, there’ll still be one of them left, alone.”
“You sure know how to cheer a guy up,” I said.
“It’s just the way it is.” Turk shrugged. “And the sooner you get it, the sooner you can stop worrying about it.”
“Like you don’t worry about it?” I said.
“I don’t,” Turk said. “I’ve figured out how to deal.”
“Yeah, how?” I said.
“Always leave first,” Turk said.
I didn’t think I believed her. Actually, I didn’t think she believed herself. If she did, why was she being so good to me when I needed it so badly? But if there was one thing I’d learned about Turk, it was that she wasn’t easy to figure out.
19
I’m thinking we want to open on Halloween,” Turk said.
She was standing in the big open space on the first floor, gnawing delicately on her thumbnail. Above her head were a couple of seniors, wings spread, working on the ceiling fixtures.
“Good choice. Halloween’s on Saturday this year,” I said. “But what’ll we open with?”
Turk gave me a disgusted look.
“My show. Duh,” she said. “It’s going to be right here.”
“Oh. Yes. I meant, ‘What else will we open with besides your magnificent creations?’” I said. “You know—like the basic idea of the whole thing?”
“Yeah. You’re right,” Turk said, brushing her chin with her sleeve. “We ought to hit up every community arts organization in New Sodom and offer them space here that night. It’s time to start getting political.”
“Political how?” I said.
“Come on, Cuz. Do I have to explain everything on the planet to you? We need people on our side. And the best way to get that is to give them something first. We offer them a venue. They come in and do their thing. Their friends come, and pretty soon they’re our friends, too. That’s when this thing will really take off.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s political already,” I said. “Political enough that my best friend and my girl broke up with me. Political enough that whatever friends we do have have had to help us in secret. The only jenti who’ve worked here up front are Gregor and his gang, and Ms. Vukovitch and her guys. And all of them are from Europe. The Crossfield thing doesn’t mean as much to them. And just for the record, no gadje at all are showing up to help.”
“That’s what I mean. They need to get past that,” Turk said.
I had deep reservations about Turk being able to make friends with anybody. But even if she could, we only had about a month. And whatever arts groups we had in New Sodom probably weren’t sitting around with ready-to-run programs in their pockets. Say somebody wanted to put on a play: it would have to be selected, cast, and rehearsed. Same thing for a concert. Even I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
But that was the same day they finished the wiring, and Ms. Vukovitch purred, “Okay, guys, time to test the whole system. Turn on every light in the place.”
When we did that, the mill changed into something it had never been before. It glowed. The walls were deep, warm red; the scarred old floors had a soft yellow gleam.
The little wigwam we’d built in the lobby looked shabby and out of place, but it seemed to be saying, “Remember how all this started.”
All of us—me, Turk, Ms. Vukovitch and her boys, and Gregor and his guys—went from room to room admiring what we’d done.
“Great job,” Turk said at last. “Gregor, you and your thugs can clean up my messes anytime.”
“Pah,” Gregor said. “We did none of it for you. But you are right. We have made this into something very acceptable with our work.”
“Acceptable, my left wing,” Ms. Vukovitch said. “It is a palace.”
“Let’s go outside,” I said.
It was hard to believe, but the old place was nearly ready for its new life.
The sun was down. A chilly wind was coming up from the river. Crossfield looked as dark and lost as al
ways. But the lights glowing behind our windows fell on the barren ground in every direction. The crisscross patterns of the windows looked like the narrow stone paths that held down the past all around us. But these were not part of the past. These were the future, if we could make it happen.
“How’s this, Mercy?” I wondered aloud. “Is this good enough? Anyway, we’re almost ready.”
It was a palace. A palace of light.
20
The next day, Turk and I visited the school library. Ms. Shadwell showed us a plastic-covered notebook that had the names and addresses of all the community organizations in it. There were the Society for the Preservation of Oak Trees, the Friends of the Gomorrah River, the Association of King Charles Spaniel Fanciers, the John Keats Chapter of the Federation of Romantic Poets, Post 147 of the Massachusetts Colonial Historical Association—it went on for two hundred pages. But only a few were arts groups.
Turk and I made a list of all the ones that sounded even remotely right, and started calling their presidents. Every one of them, from the New Sodom Light Opera Guild to the Daughters of Terpsichore Classical Dance Circle, turned us down.
“How very kind of you to think of us in this way,” the president of the Thalian Confederation for Oral Recitation told me. “We do wish you the best of luck with your project. But it isn’t quite right for us.”
“What a lovely idea,” said the president of the Aeolian Society for the Propagation of Sixteenth-Century Wind Music. “But I doubt that the acoustics of an old mill would favor our efforts.”
And the president of the Friends of Folkloric Musical Performance told Turk, “We couldn’t possibly appear in a venue that was originally a site of labor exploitation.”
The first week of October ticked by. The second. Nobody wanted to be part of the opening.
Turk got busy with her show. She spent all her afternoons out at the mill hanging her work.
“Hell, who cares if they don’t show?” she said. “I’m going to have my art up. That’s what matters.”
I was pretty sure Turk was self-involved enough not to care if anybody else used the center or not. She was probably enjoying the picture of herself as someone too special for New Sodom. I could imagine her standing alone in the gallery on the main floor, just her and her art and her inflatable Scream.
But I did care. In between missing Justin and wishing I were with Ileana, I worried about an opening night where nobody came. I wanted a night where people were falling out the windows because it was so crowded inside, with everybody saying, “How come no one ever did this before?” At the very least, I wanted it to be important enough that Justin and Ileana would know that I had been right.
If I was right.
I kept thinking about an old joke Dad told me he used to see on signs plastered around his college campus: TOMORROW HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST. It looked like we might be on our way to being that joke.
Then I got a clue as to just how very interested some people were.
It was Columbus Day. In Massachusetts, that’s a day off from school. Turk and I were celebrating by trying to catch up on our homework. I read English while she worked through her math, science, and history.
Meanwhile, it was a beautiful day outside. All the leaves were beginning to turn, and some of the trees were like crowns of red and gold already. The air was warm, and bright with that special light that says, “Enjoy this. It won’t last long” and makes everything stand out sharp and clear.
By four o’clock, the shadows were getting thick under the trees in the backyard, and the last hour of daylight was starting to slide toward evening. I had spent hours slogging through a sludge of nineteenth-century poetry, most of it written to girls with names like Annabelle and Maude, poems that seemed as thick on the page as the shadows outside, and not anywhere near as beautiful. And they made me think about Ileana more, which was not the best thing to have happen.
So when Turk stuck her head in my bedroom door and said, “Let’s blow up this place and get out of here,” I was ready, even though I had about a hundred more pages of Annabelles to go.
We got into her car and drove down to the Screaming Bean.
The Screaming Bean was a downtown coffee joint. There was a life-sized version of The Scream, just like Turk’s, on the front door, and across the bottom, in words cut from old magazines, it said, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO COFFEE?!?!?!?!”
“Hey, look. Your friend’s here,” I said.
“The Scream is everywhere,” Turk sighed. “It’s become a cliché. You don’t see inflatable Rothkos, do you?”
Whatever that meant.
Anyway, I pushed open the door and in we went.
Inside, it was a Turk kind of place. Dark walls with things on them that I guess were art, because they had price tags. There were tables and chairs that looked like they’d been salvaged from the Titanic. The backs of the chairs and the tops of the tables had been covered with photographs and paintings under heavy coats of thick, clear lacquer. All of these things had been clipped from magazines, and all of them showed terrible things happening to the people in them. On every chair and table were the same words: WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO COFFEE?!?!?!?!
The customers were mostly kids and mostly gadje, though there were a few jenti kids in one corner. Whichever they were, they all looked like Turk. I wondered if she’d found her own kind here.
It was pretty cool, actually. There was a little stage in one corner with a sign behind it that said POETRY SLAM 7 PM FRIDAY. Next to it was a handmade poster for the Sixty-Minute Shakespeare Theater Company.
Some kind of techno-pop music was playing over the sound system.
I got us a couple of cups of coffee and a sweet roll.
“I kind of like this place,” Turk said. “Not great, but it tries. And the coffee would strip paint.”
“When do you even find time to come here?” I asked.
“Whenever I want to,” Turk said.
“Is any of this stuff yours?” I asked.
Turk pointed one black fingernail straight up.
Over our heads was a paper snake like the one in Turk’s attic, but gigantic. It looped and coiled all over the ceiling. Huge paper wings stuck out from its sides and drooped down. Its jaw hung open to show a double row of fangs.
It was impressive, but there was something weird about it. It didn’t really look like a snake. The head was wrong. On the other hand, why not? Flying snakes are rare, and their heads might look a little odd. But what was it about the face that bothered me?
Then I realized what it was.
“It’s Gregor,” I said.
Turk grinned.
“Not bad, Cuz,” she said. “Hanging out with me has definitely made you smarter.”
“Does he know?” I asked.
“Like I’m going to tell him,” Turk said. “It’s a private joke.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
Turk shrugged. “You’ve got a point,” she said. “It should have been a pig. Or a jackass.”
“He’s been a lot of help,” I pointed out. “Him and his guys. Without them, we’d be nowhere near ready to open.”
“Give me a break, Cuz. You don’t like him any better than I do,” Turk said.
She reached up under her shades and wiped away an invisible tear.
“Oh, Cody,” she said. “How noble you are. How fair-minded. You shame me.”
“As if anybody could shame you,” I said.
We drank our coffee and took turns eating the sweet roll.
Outside, the golden light was gone. The shadows spread across the window.
I looked at the kids sitting around us. A couple of them were typing away on laptops. A few others were reading or sketching.
“Hey,” I said. “Maybe we ought to try asking these guys.”
“Asking them what?” Turk said.
“If they’d like to be part of the opening,” I said.
“Nooo,” Turk said s
lowly.
“Why not? Especially since we haven’t got anybody else,” I said.
“Because they’re nobodies,” Turk said. “And nobodies can’t help us.”
“You know what, Turk?” I said. “You don’t want any help anyway. Gregor helps, Ms. Vukovitch helps. Somebody with a mess of Dumpsters helps. You sneer at them, or you get all paranoid. Maybe what you really want is a bunch of people who can’t help.”
Turk snorted. “Don’t try to figure me out, Cuz. You’re not smart enough.”
I didn’t want to get into a fight with her, so I looked up at the ceiling. At that big Gregor dragon-snake thing.
And then I proved Turk was wrong. Because I had figured out something about her that she would have killed me for knowing. She had picked where we sat. Our table was right under the snake, where the wings joined the body.
Rest beneath the shadow of my wings.
Gregor and Turk? The idea hit me like a splash of icy water.
Gregor and Turk. And Turk would rather die of lockjaw than ever admit it to anybody.
“What?” Turk said. “Your face is all stupid-looking.”
“Nothing,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
My phone buzzed.
“Mr. Cody Elliot?”
A man’s voice. Kind of old-sounding.
“Yes,” I said.
“I represent the New Sodom Federation for the Arts. We are interested in exhibiting at your venue. I would like to discuss matters of fees, available space, that sort of thing. Might we meet in perhaps an hour?”
“The New Sodom Federation for the Arts?” I said. “Who are you, exactly?” I was sure they hadn’t been in Ms. Shadwell’s binder.
“We include about forty arts and performance groups in the area,” the voice said. “Not all of them are in New Sodom, in spite of the name. I hope that’s not a problem.”
“Uh—no,” I said. “Certainly not. Where would you like to meet?”
The voice gave me an address in Squibnocket.
“I’ll be there,” I said, and snapped the phone shut.
“I’ve got to get to Squibnocket,” I said. “Can you take me?”