Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  “Christ!” the kid yelled sipping, “that's how the stuff's supposed to taste?”

  Vinnie squinted over the paper.

  “Goddamn. That ain't the way Gram does it.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Christ, is that ham?”

  Vinnie's jaw twitched.

  “Got any Goddamned spuds?”

  “You think you can make a whole sentence without swearing?” Vinnie yelled.

  “Naw,” the kid said, cracking a smile. “Anyway, God and damn are your favorite two words.” That was the first real smile he'd seen on that Goddamned little face since. . .

  “What the hell you mean?” Vinnie said.

  “I mean you got any spuds I can cut and fry up? It's what I used to do back. . .” he squinted for a second then shrugged his shoulder. “That was my job with Gram. I was pretty Goddamned good.”

  “Cripes, kid! For someone's been raised religious, you... You ought to know better'n G-D-this and J-C that.”

  “Shit, yeah, I know! I just like taking the Lord in whatdoyoucallit, vain. If you got spuds, I'll fry us up a mess.”

  Cutting, frying, the kid never shut up. He ran a constant jabber about Esther's pie. . .

  “Never was anything like that Goddamned French Apple shit! What the hell's that? Apples with them little black things and sweet sugar ice on top?”

  . . .about television. . .

  “What the hell? People pretending to be people other than what they are!”

  . . .baseball. . .

  “Waiting around, hitting, running around and back to where you come! What the hell?!”

  School?

  Vern had nothing. He'd never been and didn't want to go, he was certain about that.

  By the time the homefries hit the plates, Vinnie figured the kid had set more words into the air than had been let out since mom left. The fries were great! Except for drowning his in ketchup, Vern did great spuds.

  “Decent,” Vinnie said.

  The kid nodded, shoveling, cheeks packed, chewing.

  Vinnie turned one slice over and over with his fork. Each face gold and perfect. “Pretty good, in fact. I ain't no good with fried,” he speared the nugget, ate it. “Mom was. Dad and me never learned so we got used to burned or raw. Figured fry cooking was something only women did right. Like you need a touch or something.”

  Vern squinted. “Nah. Women can't cook.”

  “Yeah, guess not.” Vinnie said, took another nugget.

  “Gram can't. No one can. I can. Gram says it's my talent that I ought not to toss.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I can't figure what women are for. What's their talent?”

  Vinnie shrugged.

  “Gram's in charge. But, hell, there's nothing to that. She just tells what the Father’s doing for us and to us and wants from us, reads from the Book and tells about the other world and the end of this one. That's about it. Damn.” Vern's eyes brightened. “Oh, yeah. There's that woman! The woman with the dark hair and that streak down the. . .” he showed on his own head where Cristobel Chiaravino's streak of white started above her eye and flowed across her head and down her back when her she tied her hair back, how it fell across her shoulder and chest when she wore it down, untied.

  If Vern Dobbins had chattered about sport and teevee and food, the words he stumbled over on the subject of Cristobel Chiaravino, her hair and body, were sputters and breath.

  If all he knew of women had been Gram, the woman, the mud kids, and Esther, then, for Vern Dobbins, Cristobel, Cristobel Chiaravino, whom he'd seen naked in her place on Slaughterhouse, Cristobel naked, the naked Cristobel was most surely the high holy ground of Vern's life. Seeing her naked, again, would be worth changing his life for.

  Vinnie understood.

  Vern spoke no G-Ds but when he got to her parts and places, a load of J-Cs tumbled into the description. Specifics were near-poetry.

  Vinnie cut him off! “It ain't right, Vern!” Vinnie half growled, half laughed, fixing him with a look.

  “Why?” Vern asked.

  “Just ain't. Miss Chiaravino is...” Vinnie shut up. He blinked. What the hell? Why the hell shouldn't he talk about Cristobel Chiaravino's...parts...like that? Why not? He would have, the kid's age! Why the hell? What the...?

  “Miss Chiaravino is a lady,” is what he said.

  “Oh,” the kid said quietly.

  Vinnie damn near had to cuff Vern to get him in the back of the prowler.

  “I'm staying,” he yelled, kicking.

  “The hell you are,” Vinnie said. What would Sheriff Daddy say, come home and find a juvenile offender camped on the teevee sofa? “The hell you are!” he said a second time, damn near yelling.

  “I ain't staying with no old woman!”

  “Till we straighten this out with the state, you are!” Vinnie shouted and covered the kid's head as he doubled him into the prowler’s back seat. He was thinking, what the hell would I do with a kid, thinking stuff like that about Miss Chiaravino? “The hell you're not staying with Esther!”

  “Hell he is, Vinnie! I ain't tending the bastard!”

  Esther was flour to the elbows. She hated disturbances at pie time in the a.m. The street around the Eats smelled like mother-warm heaven. Smoke pillared from the restaurant's chimney and the back door was a bright hole in chilly morning.

  She flopped a runny hunk of hot pie onto a plate and skidded it under the kid's nose. “I done my time. He's a bad one, and that's all.”

  The kid gave a yelp as he ran his finger through the steamy goo that oozed from the deflating cherry wedge. “Serves you right,” Esther muttered. “So, how long you gonna be, Vinnie? Cripes!”

  Except for the still-falling meteors, it was dark when Vinnie pulled into the clearing. The place was empty. Of course it was: the shack, gone, the earth below where the detritus and debris had been, grub-white and powder dry. Vinnie breathed deep. They'd even taken most of the stink. What was left was the old horse, the rope ladder dangling from the sky, and the wind-sighs in the high branches.

  The wagon was gone.

  “And they left the horse. How’d she do that?” Vinnie stood by the prowler.

  He wasn't surprised, but the extent of their leaving knocked him stupid. He walked the clearing, every inch, carefully scanning the grid, like Daddy had taught. Even the mud had gone hard, as though they'd taken the damp along for the ride.

  The horse farted when Vinnie patted its neck.

  Dawn light cut through the branches and all but the brightest fixed and falling stars faded. Red and dark-shadowed, the empty clearing seemed bigger than when it had been filled with Gram and the others, the kids, the mister and missus, all the world's junk and stink.

  Vinnie reached up, snatched the low rung of the ladder. It gave enough to let him get a foot on it. Didn’t know what he was doing but, what the hell, he climbed, peering upward, keeping his head up and eyes on the branches over the light-streaked sky. For sure as hell he did not want to, but sure as hell he had to go up there. He didn't want to, not by himself, nope. He was no fool and should have a buddy to spot him, but buddy or none, he was going up there. Anyway, he didn't have a buddy. Nope.

  He put one foot above the other and swung free of earth. His legs shoved forward, head and torso tipped back. With each step his hands got wetter, more slippery, the rope ladder twisted more and more as he gripped it tighter. He kept his eyes up; did not look down, hanging backward into the climb.

  When the canopy closed around him and the ground vanished it brought the illusion of being held close by the tree. He felt better.

  He continued hand over sweaty hand. Dry leaves brushed his arms, body and face. Breathing hard, he focused on the each rung and the rough chaff of the hemp splinters from the tight rope. Sweat poured from him. The world was a brush-filled room, a web of leaves and slender branches.

  Then his head was through and in the clear. A long tapering bough reached above him with a tight puff of leaves and
branches gathered at its top. Around him, he was in the clear. His body dangled just below heaven, the world rolled away, a green ocean of trees. Beyond, the town lay in the deep distance, here and there the river flashed where it caught the rising sun. Life smelled like morning.

  He rested a quivering foot on a board-wide limb-spanning platform. The board sagged, threatened, but Vinnie held the rope, kept one foot on a rung.

  What a heavenly light was there. The sun climbed above the horizon into the darkness. To the west, the still-black sky showed ghostly bright trails of silent shooting stars.

  A breeze fluttered the leaves below him. The wind picked up and across the valley of the Rolling River, the tree-tops rolled like ocean waves. Vinnie felt the rope and his perch sway, felt the world incline a few feet one way, then rebound the other.

  At his foot, there was a rustle of paper. When he figured he had hold of the dizziness, he ventured a look down. He'd nearly stepped on it setting foot on the plank. A book. A busted old thing, muddy, torn. A note flickered from its leaves.

  Vinnie hooked an arm around the rope, and reached. He worked the book free from where Gram had wedged it into the crotch of the branch.

  Vinnie tucked the book into his Sam Browne belt and unfolded the note. Wind flicked the paper as he gripped it in his free hand. The writing was Palmer Method perfect, easy to read even in morning light. “Mr. Officer,” it said, “Take the boy. Care for him till the NEW JUDGMENT come. It can not be long off as anyone can PLAIN SEE though the Father works in HIS Good Time.”

  Vinnie looked across the valley at the still falling stars.

  He continued reading. “You asked: are we from the OUTER SPACE? THIS WORLD IS the outer space, nor are we FROM it, we are just ON IT, all of us.

  “MY Old Earth was destroyed, the Lord's Year, 1932, like it DESERVED to be like it say in THE BOOK. I leave the BOOK for you to hold and read. We will make us a NEW BOOK at the place where the Father takes us. A BOOK Judging of YOUR Earth and its ways and sins. So take and read until your LAST DAYS which I do not know when they will be because only He knows for sure but they will be SOON.

  “We have been persecuted for BELIEF but that is to be EXPECT because all are damned except! So soon NO MORE. WE are righteous and it is all in the Book and Books do NO LIE. People lie and hurt. BOOKS are true and bring comfort.

  “So care for the boy until DAMNATION comes. His end is HIS CHOOSING and none of our'n. In YOUR Care of HIM you may SAVE YOURSELF.

  “We endure. The race will survive. ELSE.”

  The letter stopped.

  Vinnie pulled the book from his belt. He turned it over in his hands. The pages flapped in the wind, some tore away. Much of it was already gone, Vinnie reckoned, destroyed by time, use and lousy binding. It was muddy, water soaked, and brittle and he barely made out the title in the dawn. It was, Lest We Forget Thee, O Earth.

  Vinnie read aloud, “’A tale of tomorrow's Noah and his Ark through space…’”

  “Goddamn,” Vinnie said. “One of them science fiction books...” Even hanging in the sky and the sky falling around him, he couldn't help laughing.

  Black and white line pictures every couple dozen pages told the story: a planet comes from deep space. Earth is destroyed. A band of men and women escape in a space ark. They travel to another world. They are saved.

  The story was told like a newer testament to the Bible.

  On the title page, someone had written, “GOOD BOOK—Carrie Kingsolver” A child's handwriting. Neat penmanship. Palmer method.

  “'A good book,'“ he read aloud to the waving branches, the falling stars. “Lest We Forget Thee, O Earth... Copyright 1932” Below it, another hand. Crude. Unlettered. Not Palmer Method. “Daddy loves you forever.”

  “Goddamn,” Vinnie said.

  The wind freshened and waves rippled across the treetops. Pages of the book flapped, tore free. He swung for a moment as he reached for them, then gave up, swinging, hanging on to the rope. In a moment, he had steadied his perch and held an empty binding. The dark leaves of the book flew in the morning light, migrating across the Rolling valley and into the distance, fluttering higher and spreading wider.

  More meteors fell... Still falling, he thought, sky, stars. “This where she come to get the Word?” Vinnie said to the star trails. “This where Gram talked to You?”

  A chill breath blew from the north. The year was getting cold.

  “Bastard's gone,” Esther said, sniffing phlegm. “And good riddance.” She filled Vinnie's cup, then Bunch's and cleared the counter next to them. The lunch crowd was drifting in. “Stole fifty bucks and busted my back window.” She piled dishes across her arm and waddled to the kitchen.

  “You might spare another chop,” Bunch yelled, “Fixing up after that Goddamn kid's a three-chop job,” he said more to Vinnie than Esther.

  “Right,” Vinnie said.

  Esther was back. “Yeah,” she said and slapped another sizzling chop on Vinnie's plate leaving Bunch looking two ways once.

  Slouching in the prowler on the curve by the drive-in, all Vinnie wanted in all the world was to catch Karl Dorbler doing a little bit, just a mile, over the limit was all! Goddamn, Vinnie wanted to boot that son a bitch off the Goddamned road.

  “Language, language...” Vinnie said to the car, “all the time cussing.”

  He wondered where on earth the kid was, what he was doing. Three a.m. and Vinnie wasn't too far from wondering just what was the point of it all.

  For the best, he reckoned. What the hey would he do with a kid? Take care, clothe, educate the son of a gun? Teach right and wrong and football and shit?

  He and daddy were sufficient! The kid – THAT kid – would be okay! But cripes, what about the law? Law says kids had to be tended to and cared for until they're able to tend themselves and “Goddamn it,” Vinnie said aloud, “that makes sense.”

  The black air above the trees was only every now and then streaky bright with meteors. The last of the shower, maybe? Still pretty. A couple of the things split with what he reckoned was far off thunder, sprayed like a spread of white buckshot over the ridge before fading. His cop-eye clocked the dying star doing a flat-out billion.

  He stepped from the prowler; stood in cop mode, eyes on the sky; looking mean and helpless. What're you doing, he asked himself? Gonna pull one over, make it I.D. its damn self or what? Big doofus hick country bonehead cop.

  He thought about the book. He thought about Gram. About that ninth kid. He tried to remember what he knew about meteors from high school. Meteors. He kept thinking, but, no, it was just a memory of a memory. Vinnie had never been much in school. Oh, yeah, he remembered! It was a big one of them that killed the dinosaurs. End of the world for them, those huge dinosaurs. Just a meteor or something.

  In a few minutes he was stiff at the knees and neck and then was bawling like a Goddamn baby, thinking about his mom, long gone from dad and him, and now dead, he'd heard. Dead somewhere.

  Vinnie blushed thinking it, but there it was: these shooting stars were maybe something like tears, her tears for what a waste and disappointment he'd been all the years, since.

  The long straight light trails went wiggly and thick with his damn snuffles, the exploding ones became fans of wrinkling brightness through his wet eyes. The earth smelled of damp forest, of earth fumes, and gunpowder and he wondered if that's what those last great dinosaurs had smelled the last day of their world.

  Next day, he was over it. Christ, blubbering like a damn sissy!

  Chapter 12

  GOD SCREAMED AND SCREAMED, THEN I ATE HIM

  Bunch woke up. He was at his place, under the bridge, down where Papoose Crick fed the Rolling River. Snow was falling.

  Okay.

  He sat up and yesterday oozed into his head.

  Oh Cripes! He was pretty sure the Eelmans, the fat lady, that stuff – whatever it was – from last night – whenever it had been – hadn't been a dream.

  Bunch sniffed. Okay. The air didn't
stink anymore. He sniffed himself. He didn't stink anymore. The mud under the bridge where he lived had frozen. Yesterday, it was soft beneath the crust. Today it took his weight. The river dribbled by like always, early winter. Morning air was pearly, color of the streak in Cristobel Chiaravino's hair when she combed it just right.

  The ashy bole, the one had come blasting off the tree across the Rolling last night, lay snow dusted at the foot of his sack.

  Nope. No dream. The cold white ash of the pinewood bole, showed that, all right. Damned thing had come right for him, shot from the tree across the river. Damn tree had always been there, now it was gone; tree had stood forever across the Rolling from where Bunch lived, and there it was: gone, and the bole, laying there at his feet! Putting a couple things together to make another one he was pretty sure the dry thunderstorm part of yesterday hadn't been a dream. Nope.

  Darkness had started rumbling early, before he'd put his head down. By and by, a full-out dry thunderstorm was coming through the valley, a real son-of-a-bitch.

  Bunch was used to odd. This time of year, lightning was a little odd. Thunder without rain was odd, anytime. A full-blown all-out bang down rip-roar flash-crash and explode-a-tree kind of storm – dry as a bone, no rain, no snow AND this time of year – that was Goddamned peculiar! Anytime. Time to time it happened. It must, or it wouldn't have happened last night. And last night it happened – there was the bole!

  In bluff country, thunders mostly stayed in the flatlands, above, like people say. Night before, though, the storm must have gotten itself stuck down in the valley of the Rolling. Goddamned thing had come bouncing like a dam-busted creek along the rocky walls of the valley, a flood-front of thunder rushing, gathering, rising like a wave until it flat-out rammed him stupid with noise and light.

  Without thinking, Bunch had sat bolt upright.