Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  “Oh, come on. I bet she’s worried.”

  “She can be both.”

  They sat quietly against the tree for a while. Livy grew restless. “Let’s walk,” she said. She got to her feet and tugged on Nelson’s hands.

  They picked their way down the hill and walked back and forth, up and down Prospect, from the store to the overpass just before Somersburg Road, Livy carrying her shoes. They decided to find some pot. Their nerves were jangled, although neither of them said so. Livy was beginning to feel odd pains in her body, in her shoulders and thighs, as if she had been holding an unnatural position for a long time. They went down to Brian Carroll’s house, where the motorbike was still disassembled in the yard, and persuaded him to sell them a joint from his personal supply. He haggled with them over it, holding it between two fingers and peering at it as if appraising a piece of jewelry. He named a price and Livy and Nelson exploded with incredulity.

  “Maybe half that,” Livy said.

  “I’ve smoked your weed before,” Nelson said. “It’s not that good.”

  “I got the market cornered right now,” Brian said. “Where are you going to go?”

  Livy rolled her eyes and dug some money out of her pocket.

  “Profiteer,” Nelson said.

  From the Carroll backyard, Livy and Nelson picked their way along the creek bank to the bridge and smoked the joint in the deep shade of the high arch, looking out at the shallow water and the hill rising above it. “This tastes weird,” Livy said.

  “His stuff is terrible.” Nelson stretched his legs out and leaned back against the stones of the bridge. They sat for a few minutes without talking. A siren started up, an ordinary ambulance in the distance, and just then Livy began to feel an invisible shift. It was all around her, like a vapor, in the shadowed space under the bridge and the sunny space over the water beyond it. She held very still. The air seemed to have darkened subtly.

  “I’m feeling anxious,” she said. She had always been good at identifying her emotions by their names, even when in the grip of them. She thought this was probably a talent, though not a great one. She looked up at the stone arch above their heads. “This bridge must weigh hundreds of tons. Thousands of tons.”

  “Hundreds, I think,” Nelson said.

  “I don’t want to sit under it.”

  They crossed the creek and sat in a stand of sycamores on the opposite side. Nelson patted her arm and her hair. “You’re all right,” he said.

  “I’m all right.” She ran her fingers across the underside of his upper arm where the skin was soft and cool over the muscle. “You don’t mind if I do this, do you?”

  “It’s nice,” he said. He was looking up at the bright clouds as he said it, and keeping his arm very still; keeping all of himself very still. It was nice. There was a cool buzz in the tips of her fingers.

  She stared across the creek at the backyards of the houses between the bridge and the Lomath Sportsmen’s Club which were separated from each other with chain-link fences but open to the water. “I love that gazing ball,” she said. There was a violet glass sphere the size of a bowling ball on a white pedestal in Lena Spellar’s backyard. “I hate it when I get like this,” she added, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth coming down.

  “It happens to everybody.”

  “Not you,” she said. He squinted at her sideways. She tipped her head back so the sun shone full on her face, which seemed to help. “You’re like a stone,” she said. He looked away. “A stoned stone. You are.”

  He laughed. She let her head drop back, felt its weight.

  “Let’s go up on the road,” she said. “It’s sunnier.”

  This was a mistake. When they came up over the embankment there was an argument going on at the end of the bridge. Lena and Dominic were talking to two policemen. Lena looked smaller to Livy than she ever had. Her blonde hair shone greenish in the sun, and she seemed to come no higher than the policemen’s shoulders. Her hands waved in the air; she held something white in one small fist.

  “It’s empty,” Lena said. The white object was an inhaler.

  “We see it,” said one of the policemen. “This area has still not been cleared.”

  “It’s empty and I am out of refills.”

  Noreen was sitting up in her folding chair at the top of the steps, watching.

  “There is a federal investigation going on here and nobody is passing through this perimeter at this time.”

  “I’ll show you my prescription. I’ll show you my inhalers.” Lena’s face was red and her eyes were wide with frustration.

  Ron Cash was pacing at the edge of the conversation. “People need things,” he said.

  “I would suggest you all be a little more cooperative,” the other officer said suddenly. “Maybe this would go quicker. Have you thought about that?”

  “Who’s not being cooperative?” Ron shouted.

  “Be quiet, Ron, why do you have to be in this?” said Lena.

  “You’ve been going through everything we have,” Ron said. “We let you walk into our homes. Who’s not being cooperative?”

  “I can get my doctor on the phone for you,” Lena said. “I have asthma attacks from allergies, from stress. I could have one any time. These are empty.”

  “I have medications myself,” Noreen called. “Quite a few.”

  “You all have a choice about how long this takes,” the second cop said.

  “Are you trying to kill us?” Lena said.

  “Put your hands down,” said the first cop. “Get your hands under control. And your tone.”

  Lena took a step back, tears running down her face, and murmured something to Dominic, who was standing very still just behind her. Livy had once seen Dominic in a fight at school that had achieved iconic status afterward, with students who hadn’t been there claiming that they had. It was just after the last bell, when people were milling in the front hallways and pushing for their buses, and Livy had stepped out onto the sidewalk and seen Dominic standing coatless under a cold January sky, with a friend attempting to hold him back, a shrimpish lackey of the type that seemed to swarm symbiotically around his large body. The other half of the fight was a tall, thin boy with a painfully acne-scarred face and long hair, the kind of kid who seemed to belong to no grade and no class, a phantasmic entity who might turn up anywhere at any time and who constantly projected a desire to be provoked into violence. He was screaming curses and threats, and they were collapsing the longer he went on and the more excited he got, so that “I’m going to fuck you up, motherfucker,” finally became only “I’m going to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” until Dominic stepped forward and hit him once in the jaw, knocking him down. Dominic didn’t look angry, or even annoyed, at any moment during the incident. While the kid sat on the sidewalk, holding his face, Dominic turned and picked up his coat from where he’d dropped it and walked away to find his bus. Livy scanned Dominic now, knowing that his lack of expression did not mean that he wasn’t about to do something violent. She wondered if the police could sense this also; she glanced at them and saw that they could.

  “This is kidnapping,” Lena said. “You can’t do this to us, this is against the law, you can’t just do whatever you want.”

  “She needs half an hour to go to the pharmacy,” Noreen said.

  Livy was gripping Nelson’s arm. It seemed out of the question to turn and walk away; it would make them conspicuous.

  “We’ll get somebody down here soon,” said the policeman in front, who was bald and looked tired. “We’ll get some supplies to you. But we can’t let people out.”

  “When? When will you get somebody down here?” Lena said. “There are diabetics. People have jobs, I have a job, people depend on me, I can’t even use a telephone!”

  She stepped toward him as she said this, her hands making arcs in the air, and for a moment the wild way she was moving made Livy think she might hit him. The policeman blanched and pushed her. It was a quick, practi
ced shove against her chest with his forearm, and she stumbled back into her son. Before she could straighten up or Dominic could begin to move, the younger policeman jumped forward and pressed a club against Dominic’s chest.

  “Don’t,” said the younger policeman. “You don’t want to move.”

  Dominic’s face was still blank, free of expression.

  “Get back,” the younger policeman said. His face was red. He stepped back, pushing Dominic at the same time so they fell away from each other like the halves of a split log. “Get back!” he said, and they did, Lena and Dominic and Livy and Nelson too, retreating back across the bridge while the police watched them.

  Lena stopped as soon as they were out of sight and pressed both palms flat against her face. Dominic stood staring at her. “Fuck,” he said. His mother bent her knees slightly, hid her face. “Fuck, stop crying, you’re going to have an attack,” he said. “Stop, Mom, please, come on.”

  Lena’s face was mottled yellow and red. She turned away from them, waving her hands, and walked down the short slope to her own gate. Her hair was falling out of its elastic. She negotiated her front door and disappeared inside. Livy was shaken. She stared at Dominic, and he stared back.

  “We’ll get her refills,” Dominic said.

  “How?” Nelson said.

  “Walk the fuck out and get them,” Dominic said. He pointed toward the bridge.

  Livy wondered how that could be done, what route to take. Her mind was racing. The part of her that had been surprised at the altercation was crumbling already, and she was moving something new into the gap it left. It didn’t occur to her until much later that Dominic had said we and she had accepted it, just like that.

  It had been another difficult day for Revaz. He had put the battery back in the cell phone for a few minutes that morning, hoping for a message from the cousin. There was nothing. A slow-burn panic set in, which made him do stupid things like wave the phone through the air in search of a better signal, as if the nonexistent message were a butterfly he was trying to catch with a net. He was abandoned—the hustler cousin had taken his money and disappeared—or the phone signals were being interrupted, a thought that struck him as paranoid despite how appropriate paranoia was in his life now. Or the message he sent had somehow not gone through, or he had the wrong number. He approached the rendezvous point again, but again could not get close. He filled the water bottle in the creek. He crept back to the deer blind. He had no idea what to do, except wait and repeat the whole thing the next morning.

  Revaz wanted a bottle of vodka, though it occurred to him that if he had one he would almost certainly drink all of it, and that it would probably kill him. This made him waver about wanting a bottle of vodka, though it was still very tempting. Anger animated him briefly as he went over a well-worn track of curses and deprecations aimed at a few unspeakable bastards who had done him serious wrong. He had trusted them. He had trusted them insofar as anybody trusts anybody professionally. But also, he had tried to make a little money. This track always ended in self-loathing.

  He ruminated on the mysteries of biology for a while in the tree. He had not gone this long without a drink, he reflected, since childhood. How strange it was to be despairing because his life might be snatched from him, and also despairing because the life he stood to lose was so paltry. His will to live—was it the same as hunger?—was insistent.

  He couldn’t stay in the deer blind any longer. If he didn’t eat soon he would be too weak to get away when the time came. Once it was dark he climbed down in search of food, walking almost blindly through the woods with his hands up, trying to keep stray branches from hitting him in the face. His knee hurt terribly from lying on his back all day; it needed regular movement or it seized up. He had few ideas for finding something to eat. He would have to go down across the creek and try the garden in the yard of the white house.

  He edged down through the woods to the road, crossed it in a few long strides, and slid down the bank into the creek. He got soaked to the knees in the crossing. On the far bank he walked straight through a patch of nettles in the dark, which brought tears to his eyes from pain and surprise. He thought at first he was having some kind of neurological event, the way his skin turned cold and then began to burn, but then he caught the smell of crushed vegetation and understood.

  At the top of the bank he crouched for several minutes, panting, in a clump of weeds, gathering his nerve. Here the moon threw enough light that he could see. The garden was surrounded by a fence, but it was only chest-high. He trotted to the corner where the tomatoes were staked and pulled three fat ones loose, then dropped to his knees and ate them in under a minute. He hadn’t intended to do this, prolonging his exposure in the yard, but he couldn’t help it. Seeds and pulp were all over his face and shirt, and juice dripped down his wrists and into his filthy unbuttoned cuffs. He took two more tomatoes, then walked around through the gate and wrested loose a whole cabbage. He nearly fell in his hurry to get back across the creek.

  Back in the deer blind, peeling the cabbage leaves loose and shaking the worms off, he felt a surge of joy. A little raw cabbage in his belly after several days without. This time he paused to smell the tomatoes for an instant before he ate them.

  2

  Livy was always the last person awake in the house. Her parents had been out most of the afternoon, sitting around Clarence Green’s radio, and had gone to bed early. Livy sat in the kitchen, over the remains of a dinner of potatoes and beans, reading an adventure novel for children by the light of a citronella candle. It was a book she’d read many times when she was little, and it had a pleasant anesthetic effect on her brain. She had told her parents about Lena and the policemen on the bridge; they had told her to stay away from the roadblocks. She was becoming more and more tense as she waited for the boys to come collect her for the trip to the pharmacy. She hoped they might change their minds. She was afraid to go but couldn’t say so without losing face. When Nelson tapped on the door she jumped and gasped so hard the candle almost went out. “Come in,” she said.

  Brian Carroll appeared behind him in the doorway, followed by Dominic, who pulled the door very quietly shut. “How are you doing?” Brian said. He was being polite. He was like that sometimes when he was planning or hiding something, lowering his head when he talked, retreating slightly into his oversized clothes. She’d once come across him nodding and apologizing manically to a school security guard who was scolding him for standing in a flower bed by one of the back entrances, a lit cigarette smoldering unnoticed at his feet.

  “I’m okay,” she said. The three of them came as far as the stove and then stopped and looked at her. They seemed apprehensive, bunching together in the middle of the room as if they had been wandering in the desert and she was their reintroduction to civilization. “You can sit down,” she said. She moved the smoking candle to the middle of the table. They were out of tapers. Nelson was not a natural companion for Brian and Dominic; he was too quiet, and they were too tough. But they offered each other a kind of mutual amnesty based partly on being neighbors and partly on their shared interest in marijuana. Livy guessed she’d be regarded the same way if she were a boy, but being a girl she was naturally considered more suspect, more domesticated.

  Dominic settled his bulk in a kitchen chair, which squeaked faintly. “We’re going to walk down the creek,” he said. “Nelson said you got past the cops on Somersburg doing that.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll be harder going that direction,” Livy said. “There are more police on Prospect than on Somersburg.” Maybe she could pretend to have a stomachache and stay behind? But no, they wouldn’t believe her, they would know she was afraid. And if they were going to be heroic, if they were going to go on a righteous mission to buy inhaler refills and rescue Lena Spellar, she would not want to miss it. Opportunities for heroism were rare in her life.

  “Yeah, but the creek is farther from the road there, too,” Dominic said.

  “The cops
did say they would send something,” Livy murmured.

  “Bullshit,” Dominic said.

  Livy thought he might elaborate, but he did not. “So, the Quick Drug,” she said.

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  The Quick Drug was open twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t far, less than a mile from the bridge, just past the point where Route 72 became First Avenue in Maronne. She looked at them from the doorway. The cat cried at her feet. “What if there are cops in the woods too?” Livy said.

  “The whole Maronne PD is like fifteen people,” Brian said. “They’re not going to be everywhere.”

  “But they have the FBI too,” Livy said.

  “You think some FBI guy is sitting on his ass in the woods, waiting for us?” Brian said.

  “I’m going to smoke a cigarette,” Dominic said. He was tense. His stillness, when he paused by the door to let her step out of the way, appeared to be the product of huge, perfectly opposed forces. He closed the door behind him and then they heard the scrape of his lighter around the side of the house.

  “I’m going to use your bathroom,” Brian said, and withdrew.

  Livy looked at Nelson. “What if the cops do stop us?” she said. Her stomach was starting to knot up. “Can they arrest us? Or do they just send us home?”

  “I don’t know,” Nelson said. He paused, carefully unfolding and refolding a piece of tinfoil he’d found on the table. “Dominic said they wouldn’t have a charge.”

  “He has a lot of experience with this?”

  Nelson laughed. “He gives that impression.” He looked at her. “I don’t think you should come.”