Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  Maggie pulled the letter from her pocket. He looked at it and nodded. “We need to eat, do our recovery regimen, then we’ll figure it out. I have an idea.” He took the papers from her and went to his room.

  What about the call? Something else she knew not to say aloud. Not to her brother and never to her father before he’d left. Maggie was convinced that he’d left as much to get away from the calls as to carry salvation to the mountains.

  She didn’t need to say it aloud, anyway, because she knew what the response would be.

  Our mother is dead! Or Your mother is gone! depending on which of them she’d asked, when she still asked. The river took her twenty years ago, and the dead do not make telephone calls!

  Maggie looked up at the photographs again.

  “They especially don’t make calls from Tennessee,” she said, and went to her own room.

  Michael’s idea was to call in a favor. “An inherited favor,” he said.

  “We’re not supposed to go to the lake,” said Maggie. She was stretched out on top of the long table in the kitchen, massaging her calves while Michael scoured the cast-iron pot she’d cooked their rice in.

  Michael dropped the pot into the sink. Sudsy water—rainwater from the roof barrels—sloshed onto the tiled floor. He rocked back and forth on his heels and puffed his cheeks out, swallowing a little storm.

  “If we’re going to get to Paducah for this race . . . Maggie if we’re going to participate in this race, then we’ll be breaking his rules left and right. Those rules were for when we were little kids, anyway.”

  Maggie dipped her finger into the little tin of salve beside her, rubbed it between her palms to warm it, and went to work on the arch of her left foot. Eat, drink, rest, massage. All of it over and over again. “I know that,” she said. “You’re right.”

  Michael closed his mouth. He’d been marshaling an argument and was startled to have it cut off by capitulation.

  “Well,” he said, but didn’t say anything else.

  “I just think,” she said, “that we should keep them in mind. Daddy didn’t find out all those rules and teach them to us because we were kids. He told them to anybody he could get to listen to him, every woken person around here has heard them. And we follow them because we want to stay awake and ourselves. And you may think we’re strong enough and clever enough”—she raised a finger when he started to interrupt, shushing him—“and I know you think we’re fast enough to play them loose. But however we manage this, we’ve got to be careful. We have to be mindful.”

  “I’ll start packing our gear!” he said, and was gone as soon as she’d finished.

  An inherited favor. Maggie hopped off of the table and went over to the sink. The soles of her bare feet were oily, and the tiles were slick from Michael’s overly enthusiastic washing of the crockery. But she was careful, she didn’t slip even when she stood tiptoe to stare out the north-facing window.

  Herbs grew in terra-cotta pots on the sill. Outside, banty hens stutter-stepped around the yard. And away north, a few ridges over, she could see the houseboats of the Buckeye Navy, lashed beneath the balloons that kept their hulls high and dry above the lakebed.

  Sunset light caught the mooring lines even from this distance. The mooring lines and the television cables.

  The twins stood in the garage considering the huge mounds of equipment Michael had assembled in the hours since dinner. The overhead door was pulled closed against the nighttime chill. The kerosene lamps didn’t give off enough heat for Maggie to remove her hands from her warmup jacket’s pockets, but they gave more than enough light for her to see their problem.

  “We have too many bicycles,” she said. The words sounded all wrong, even corrupt somehow, so she amended quickly. “We can’t take all of these bicycles.”

  There were eight bicycles nested into racks on the far wall, a pair each of mountain bikes, cyclocross bikes, the training bikes they’d ridden earlier, and their sleek, twitchy racing bikes. Michael stood with his hand on the saddle of his mountain bike, lips pursed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, what do we need to do? Two things, right? We need to get to the race and we need to . . .” The enormity of the opportunity robbed the next word from him.

  “Compete,” said Maggie. “We need to compete in the race.”

  “That’s right.” Michael loped over to the racing bikes. “So we take these sweet ones—here, start breaking them down, the team will have a shop tent with everything we need to reassemble and dial in.”

  Maggie made tight fists, then whipped her wrists forward and splayed her fingers all at once, cracking her knuckles in the same gesture she’d use to flick tainted water from her hands. She lifted a leather apron, slick with oil and heavy with tools, from where it hung on a sixteen-penny nail driven into a supporting beam. “Extra sets of wheels,” she said, speaking and working at the same time, lifting her brother’s racing bike onto her repair stand. “Some tubes, some tape, some lube. We have to assume the team will provide most stuff.”

  Michael was hauling their tagalong trailers down from the rafters. They were sturdy, clever machines with single all-terrain wheels at one end and quick-release attachments designed to be fitted into the rear spindles of a bike at the other. Between wheel and attachment the tagalongs curved around their capacious cargo holds in an elegant cello shape. More machined gifts from one of their father’s earlier journeys.

  “Yeah, yeah. Depending on who the national organization has hired as director sportif there might even be a chef!” Michael’s experience with international racing was the same as Maggie’s and consisted of reading books and articles in old magazines their mother had kept in a rosewood trunk.

  “Food for the trip there,” said Maggie. She started at the front of Michael’s bike, loosening and removing the brake hoods and indexed shifters from the handlebars. She detached the fine, sharp cables and coiled them into a battered plastic bowl she’d found that had a sealable lid and was exactly the right size.

  “Clothes, some stuff to trade with—what do we have that’s lightweight that foreign people might want? Our paperwork. Water bottles! I can’t decide whether to try to take everything or as little as possible!” Michael was working himself up, channeling his doubt into enthusiasm.

  Maggie spoke around the tiny screwdriver she was holding in her mouth, nodded at the tagalongs. “Frame stamps on those things say they’re rated for eighty pounds. And I’d rather not haul half that if we can get away with it.”

  Michael didn’t acknowledge her comment. He’d stopped, standing in the middle of the garage. “Mountain or cyclocross?” he shouted. “What are we going to haul the trailers with?”

  In terms of raw minutes (but not miles), the twins probably spent more times on their mountain bikes than even their training cycles. The roads between Pellyton and Knifley (where they bought the food they didn’t grow themselves) were rough, and sometimes flash floods required a traveler to take to the ridges. If their racing and training cycles were their thoroughbreds, then the mountain bikes—heavy tubed, fitted with shock absorbers in the forks and seat posts—were their draft horses.

  “The last time we went to the lake,” said Maggie, considering, “the pavement was pretty good. But that was a long time ago.” Fifteen years ago, at least, she didn’t say aloud. While perched on the back of a cart pulled by flesh and blood horses. Their father had been taking bales of airy cloth to his friend Japheth, and the lake had still been a lake.

  “The mountain bikes we can take anywhere,” Michael said, “just not very fast.”

  “Fast is important,” agreed Maggie.

  To a casual glance, the cyclocross bikes were very similar to the road cycles. But neither of them had ever looked at a bicycle casually, and Maggie reflexively ticked off the differences: studded tires, lower gearing, sturdier welds in the frame, and a fork of heavier gauge material. Cyclocross bikes weren’t as effective off-road as the comparatively huge mountain bikes, but they were
effective. And to boot, they were lighter, had more aerodynamic lines. The twins used them for winter training when there was snow on their usual routes.

  “I’ve got skewers that’ll work to attach the tagalongs to the ’cross bikes,” she said, pulling open one of the wide, shallow drawers of her wooden toolbox. “Somewhere.”

  “Little Miss Organized,” said Michael, teasing her. It was usually the reverse, as the frantic clutter of his “packing” that took up most of the floor space attested. “Lucky for us when we’re on the race we’ll have mechanics to keep track of our parts.”

  Maggie laughed, delighted. “And soiegneurs to pack our mussettes and wash our water bottles.”

  “And give us massages!”

  “Ooooh, yeah.”

  “And a director to tell us when to attack and when to mark time,” Michael continued. “Not that we’ll listen.”

  “Because the time to attack is always now!” said Maggie, plucking the skewer she’d been hunting for from the drawer and brandishing it like a short sword.

  This was an old game. Michael looked around quickly, then snatched a stick of kindling from the dry-wood rick along the south wall. “Sword,” he said.

  “Slow and heavy like yourself, Monsieur Porthos,” said Maggie. She whipped the skewer up and down in a chevron pattern, drawing an invisible, sharp-pointed M in the air before her.

  “Aha, but look here!” Michael picked up one of the round leather cases that held their spare racing wheels. The handle was at the top, but he looped his fingers through it and held it up, his arm hidden from her. “This is my mighty shield, Foebreaker! Don’t really hit it because one of your disc wheels for the time trial is in here.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Maggie. “Guard your life, villain!”

  Chapter Three

  Maggie could barely remember when there was still a lake in the lakebed. Like most of her earliest, dimmest memories, it was tangled up with their mother’s face and laughter. There was a muddy beach and Michael crying because of something to do with a fishing pole. Their father was there, standing underneath a picnic shelter, talking to some other men.

  She remembered better when the lakebed still looked like that. A broad, twisting, muddy swath of land cutting between the green hills to either side. They’d already learned to fear the river when her father started taking supplies to his friends at the campgrounds, but they didn’t know why just yet. At least she and Michael didn’t. Her father, generous with his counsel to others, kept his own about that.

  Now, cresting the hill above Plum Point, the lakebed didn’t really look any different than any of the other Pennyroyal valleys carved by creek and river. Flatter, perhaps, but just as choked with the trees and brush of young forests as all the other abandoned land in this part of the Commonwealth.

  The Green made its way from the twins’ left to their right. Casey Creek flowed into the river a quarter mile up the road. Even if it weren’t an old forbidden thing from their father’s lists, the twins would have avoided cycling his road—the creek made frequent attempts at flooding and undermining the road.

  Maggie wasn’t looking at Casey Creek, though. She was as close as she’d ever been to the Buckeye Navy and both she and Michael were shaking their heads at the colors and designs that decorated the hundreds of balloons that floated above the valley.

  Older people, like Mr. Pelly, still called the Buckeyes “summer people,” even though it had been decades since any of them had been out of the valley, much less gone back to their home north of the Ohio. Much less been down from their houseboats.

  When the rivers broke the dirt collars that slacked their flow into the necklace of lakes across the south of the Commonwealth—Lake Cumberland, Dale Hollow Lake, Green River Lake, Barren River Lake, and away west Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake—thousands of houseboats had been left wallowing in the mud flats or smashed up against cliffs and trees. The people who lived in them were wealthy vagrants from the north, rumored to have their own homes but more content floating on Kentucky water than standing firm on their own soil. Strange people.

  The ones that had lived on the Green soon found that there were no safe routes north. The trade tunnels were years away from being dug, and they weren’t the kind of wealthy that could buy a place on a government aerostat. So they decided to stay, but to stay safe from the corrupted rivers, wellspring of Athena’s technology, seeping out from Tennessee into the rest of the world.

  And so the miles of mooring line and thousands of bales of silk. So the clever still that their father’s friends had built to pull the lightest gases out of the air. The man they were going to see, Japheth Sapp, had taken the Buckeyes’ money and his own wit and set their homes to float again, this time in the air. When the cable company came, they simply wrapped their lines around Japheth’s mooring cables like honeysuckle around older, woodier vines.

  Michael and Maggie stood astride their cyclocross bikes, chests heaving. World-class athletes that they were, hauling an extra eighty pounds of equipment inside trailers that weighed another fifteen up a long climb was hard work. For Maggie it was as if there were a whole other cyclist clinging to the bike—and not an ultra-light climbing bike like the one disassembled and carefully packed in her trailer.

  They looked over the valley, and at the floating town. No sound drifted from all those homes except the creaking of mooring lines and the soft whistle of wind over the silken curves of the great balloons.

  “Mr. Sapp will be down the valley a ways, won’t he?” asked Michael. “At the Holmes Bend dock?”

  Maggie traced the cables down a pointing finger to the rocky summits of the imprisoning hills. “Maybe he lives at the mooring points, though? He’s supposed to be the caretaker for all those Viewers at Home up there, right? So he’d need a way up and down.”

  A shadow fell across them and the road, as if a cloud had blocked the sun on this cloudless day. A voice floated from above them.

  “That’s assuming I ever come down, miss.”

  Maggie looked up and her eyes went wide while an open-mouthed grin grew across her face. Michael leapt from his bike and scrambled at the roadside, coming up with a ridiculously short, rotting stick that he brandished at the sky.

  A fiberglass bass boat hung a dozen yards above their heads, suspended from an oblong, finned balloon. Propulsive fans were set all about it, pointing in every direction, cabled to an industrial-sized battery set where the outboard had once been.

  Balloon, boat, and pilot were alike in their decoration, pinwheel collages of feathers in every color and size to be found from any bird in these hills. Shells and stones, too, were set among the feathers on the boat itself, spelling out what Maggie guessed to be its name. In books, boats have names. The Undeniable Crow, read the legend, and she guessed those were black crow feathers that constituted most of the decorations on the pilot’s long leather coat, his wide-brimmed hat, and even flourished at his temples on the leather bands of his goggles.

  “I know you know me,” said Japheth Sapp—it could only be their father’s old friend and debtor. “And I’m guessing I know you. Ted Hammersmith’s twins, ain’t you? Miguel y Margarita?”

  Michael, guessing there was no threat or maybe recognizing the futility of their position if the strange man in his strange craft was a danger to them, dropped the stick. “Yes, sir,” he said, “We use the anglo style, though, usually.”

  “Would do, among all the Amish over your way,” said Mr. Sapp. He’d been standing casually, a booted foot on a side rail, but a slight rise in the wind caused him to reach down and twist a dial. One of the fans kicked in with a slight whine, and the boat turned a bit, maintaining its position. “Michael, then,” he said, then, looking at Maggie, “and . . . Margaret?”

  “Margaret’s okay,” she said. “Or Maggie, really.”

  “Maggie Really. That’s a good name.” He turned a few more dials and the boat began to drop closer to the road. “Brother Theodore wouldn’t care much for you two
pedaling right down here next to the old Green, I know.”

  “Our father doesn’t live with us anymore,” said Michael.

  Maggie turned to look at him. This was true in a technical kind of way, but the twins weren’t raised to be technical people.

  She didn’t correct him, exactly. “Daddy’s away. He’s on a long mission trip. Hasn’t made it back yet.”

  The boat landed on the pavement and made a loud scraping noise as it drifted a foot or so before coming to a halt. Mr. Sapp tossed Michael a line. “Tie that around something heavy, boy,” he said.

  “Um . . .” Michael held the hemp line and looked around.

  “A tree, son,” said Mr. Sapp, stepping out of the boat. He kept his hands carefully on the railing, though, and didn’t step away but instead sat perched on the side of his odd craft.

  “I guess you could say trees are heavy,” said Michael.

  “Could and would and have,” said Mr. Sapp. “Trees are the only thing that hold these hills down sometimes. And as to that other thing, young señorita, I know Ted’s off. I probably seen him since y’all have.”

  “You have? When?” Maggie asked.

  Michael hardly ever did much except pick at the memory of their father these days like a scab. But he even asked, “Why would he come see you but not us?”

  “Never mind that,” Mr. Sapp said, in a way that made it clear he would say no more.

  Maggie realized that she was still standing astride her bicycle, that her brother was unexpectedly doing an errand for this tall, half-remembered man from their childhood, and that they’d not even broached the subject of why they were on this forbidden, creek-haunted stretch of road. But talk of their father gave her an opening.

  “Before he left, our father told us if we needed . . .” She faltered. “He said it a specific way.”