Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  Better.

  Then she missed the pain.

  Hurt told when something was wrong. That was why it was.

  She was still mostly twig and stick, leaf-filled and mud-covered, bound in rope and rag. An empty hornet nest, harness traces, and a few metal bits that had tumbled downriver and gone to moldering rust in the dirt, all that became her, too. She was still becoming. She didn’t know what any of it was for before or now.

  Her teeth were small shells from an ocean she'd never imagine. For years the shells had sat on a table by a window in a shack upstream, deep in the Driftless; they were mementoes of a day more than a century gone. A flood had taken cabin, table, shells, people, and recollections, left them on the Kiddorf banks. Now they were teeth and that was that of time and memory.

  She was part grass too, pretty grass, grown in a narrow sunny place between trees in a flat spot near the river. It flourished, grew beyond the ability of the blades to remain vertical and the sward had lain down flowing green. A flood disengaged the whole island of turf and it rolled with the river until it landed on the Banks. Now, it flowed rich brown across her shoulders, brown, except for a streak of sun white. Her hair cascaded across her forehead and spilled down her back.

  Her forehead! What it would be, if she’d been a person and her head hadn’t been an empty hornet’s nest and if she’d been the person in the snoring man’s thoughts.

  She was nearly a person now. Now, she had the heart of the man who had come to undo her to nothing. The heart of the man had been given freely and he died. He loved her. That, at least: She had been loved and now she had the killer's heart wrapped in the leaves of her chest.

  Sitting on the bank of the river from which she’d been combed, she remembered how the killer had reached out to her. She reached out now to the man who slept under the bridge. Her arm stretched into the red and rising light. She listened as the birds drew morning up the sky and as cold water whispered past her. She listened to that wonder of breath, wet night air entering the hot moist places of the man, flowing through, mixing with his blood. Air and night gave its substance to become him. They were part of that body, smells and tastes, the hardness and softness of him.

  Her mud rag skin smoothed at the thought of him, the grasses of her hair softened, darkened, curled, then straightened, grew finer writhing past her cheek and shoulders. The nuts and birds egg shells of her eyes grew fluid and the hard old leathers that bound the soft and fragrant mosses, toadstools and big-head mushrooms of her chest grew tight, tighter. Then it all softened and they tingled when she touched them, her breasts. What they were, were breasts. She continued to touch them. As she did, the sprigs of her fingers paled and grew supple in pearly light, and her chest, her chest filled. Ah, she felt it fill not with air, but pain. Yes, pain. Love. Love. The warning.

  The man across the little river dreamed in sleep. He dreamed of her. Of the witch woman, of course, the one she was becoming. Soon. She looked down at herself. Soon there would be little difference. Only inside would be difference. Inside, where the heart of the killer who had loved her still beat. And he would not; the man would not love, not her. Maybe he’d not love the Other, the witch woman, either. But her killer’s heart beat. It beat and hurt. Called warning. What would the man whose heart she carried have done?

  The river was cold. Not like it had been. Winter was nearly done and another spring was draining snow from the deep high Driftless above the town. Cold when it joined the river, the water had warmed in the slow quiet above the dam. Feather Proud had no need for shoes. He forgot his shoes and they were gone. His skin yearned to feel the air. He forgot his clothes and his clothes were gone. He ran naked in the cool spring, splashing the warming icemelt stream as the last of night's stars drained into the old mouth of morning.

  He passed under the bridge, ran by the smoking camp of the man, Bunch. He swept past the woman seated on the other side of the river. When she looked at him she raised bone-thin hands to her eyes.

  She heard with spiderweb ears. Feet splashed as he dissolved into being. She saw his arrival through the mists and gently drifting smoke of the man’s fire. The runner arrived streaming.

  He is no man. She knew that much. He was naked and his flesh streamed steam like the river. He was no more alive than she, yet she saw him, he is mist made whole, she thought. Oh! she realized, he’s as alive as I am and not one bit more.

  He looked. She was not alive. Not a woman, no more than he was a man. But she was as alive as he was. She looked like the woman who lived in the old wooden house up by the river. The one with the lightening down her hair. There it was on this one: the lightening ran through her hair, down her cheek and neck, down her shoulders, across her back. She had hair of fine, fine strand.

  She stood. She was naked to the morning. Her hand covered her breast. Her other hand covered the mother part between her legs.

  She was beautiful.

  To her, he was as beautiful as life.

  He stopped to speak, but waited. Birds called. Morning was full of sound, the river, things alive, and things sleeping for the season or the things that were coming back to life. She rose, standing on feet of brambles, the fat brown grubs that were her toes felt the mud under her give, ooze, with her weight. She felt. She felt the warmer air of morning's light.

  I am for the darkness, she thought. I'm of night and it's morning and I must find deep forest.

  She didn't move. She felt warning. He warned her heart. She felt the warmth of the warning, the love, the sameness of him.

  Feather Proud waited. Her tongue was a fish tail grown old. It served, grew more competent with each word. She said.

  “I have the heart of a killer,” is what she said.

  “Oh,” Feather Proud said. He breathed her. She smelled like the world, like a long winter flood, smelled like the forest. He wondered if he smelled, too. “I'm not here,” he said, “You don't have to speak to me.”

  She stared at him even though he wasn't there. Even though morning mist rose around him and drifted up the pillars of his legs, his hard golden legs. Even though he ran with sweat and smelled like...

  She sniffed the air. It hurt to do so, but she did it, she did it so she could smell this man who wasn't there. She enjoyed the pain because he smelled like sweat and smoke. He smelled like the man who slept under the bridge, dreaming.

  Oh. Oh. She was forgetting the man who slept. And the heart of the killer inside her beat stronger. The twigs and knots of her fingers quivered as when a breeze stirred the trees. She no longer wanted to cover herself.

  And she didn't.

  “But I wish you would speak to me,” he said as she dropped her arms to her sides, “even if I’m not here.” The world smiled. The sun, through the trees, fell into his eyes and hurt, it hurt him. He didn't mind the pain. Sometimes pain brought beauty. Like running.

  “I have the heart...” he said – not wanting to say to her from where his heart had come. He knew he had to say it. He started again, “I have the heart of a small bird.”

  She stared.

  “I'm a warrior without people. I left them. I ran for help. I died running. I was killed by a rock to the back of my head.” He stopped talking. He looked at her. He looked at the deep blue sky, then, “No!” he said, looking back at her. “Not for help. It is in my heart to tell you I ran not for help but for myself. I ran for my life. I left my people and ran from battle. And yet I was killed.”

  “I never lived,” she said.

  “I think,” he said, “I never did, either.” He thought about it. About the seasons of running, about all the days he'd spent looking. About coffee and grunts. About pie and the empty road ahead, wondering where was the help, where was the place that would give rest. Not among the living was there any such place. “No. I didn't, either. I never lived,” he decided, “I haven’t even the heart of the smallest bird.”

  “But I have the heart of a killer in me,” she said. “I could share that.” She stepped into the wa
ter. She felt the cold stream over the mud of her legs, through the severing branches of her calves. She felt.

  Feather Proud watched her step through the stream. She was beautiful. Her skin was nut brown. She looked soft. Her hair looked as though it would be a tent for their faces, her eyes would be the night sky. He hoped they could touch.

  They touched. She slipped into his arms, his arms slipped about her. He drew her rich-scented flesh toward his.

  She wondered at the touch of his arms, felt the ripple of muscles as he gathered her to him. She was in wonder, too, at the hard and soft thing between his legs the which now rose against her lower grasses and slithered the dews that had formed there.

  His chest pressed her breast. He felt the heart of her beating against him, in him. She drew sharp breath and they flowed together in the sun.

  When he looked at her again, when she looked at him again, they were dying. They knew it. The woman who had never lived and the man who was not alive were dying.

  “Everything I am will be what it was,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “It will.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except my heart,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. He had felt it beating.

  “Where will that go?”

  He took her up. She was as light as a feather. She had grown pale.

  “Are you afraid,” he asked.

  “I don't know what that is,” she said. “’Afraid’.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Afraid is nothing.”

  He'd come alive for one more run. He'd take her away from here. He’d carry her upstream to the night, where she could rest in the headland of the Rolling River. He'd be alive that long and so would she. After all the time, it would be enough.

  Eagle Feather Proud ran. He ran like the wind with beauty until he was gone, until they both were.

  Bunch woke. He had one of those dreams. About the Italian lady, about her, Cristobel Chiaravino. She was on him about something he didn't remember what. About making something of himself in this life. Damn, he thought, the woman would not let go.

  Bunch took a long yawn of a breath. Air smelled good, he thought. Something had passed in the night, in the morning. Something had passed and Spring was there. Finally.

  Chapter 26

  AN END

  The Old Rattler Ken considering: a hundred years blind, going and coming, then waking one day, sighted, seeing stuff and folk unseen for a passel of years! With all that in life, cripes, how does a man know much of anything for certain? Maybe it all just naturally gets more wonderful. Maybe old friends just naturally do start dropping by to say hello after a lifetime of not. People he thought dead a half-century, now suddenly show up, passing the time of day. Maybe? Cripes, in a world this wonderful how does someone even know if he's dead?

  When it takes a guy a while to get somewhere—even down to the damn can—a guy’s got time to consider stuff like that. Maybe that’s good, maybe not. Ken didn’t have a damn choice.

  He shuffled down Slaughterhouse Way from his flop. Pretty soon, in the midst of consideration, he looked up to see the day. Coming back from blindness, he did much to consider how he spent his light. He listened to the birds as always. He watched them now, too. Like he almost never did when he was a boy. Watching the morning tweeties, he put a whole mess of other things to the sounds he’d been used to this past century: it was dust he smelled when he heard them flapping by the corner. He couldn’t get enough of the way a worm’s rings glistened in the sun, the way they twisted in their beaks. And damn! How the water sparkled – hell how it exploded! – when one of them slate gray ones with the sharp bills swooped out of the heights and hit the river— swack! Like THAT—then grabbed air, angling back up the bluff.

  Ken felt the old sun crawl above the trees, saw sunlight chase the shadows around and under them, or into the house basements along the way.

  “Git, shadows! Scram, dark! Dive bird!” he called out. “Wriggle worm,” he said.

  Moving wasn’t like being a little shit, not any more, but he got there, eventually.

  The sawmill chugged. A head of steam blew its wet top at the morning. He smelled hot leather belts that slapped the wheels, breathed flying sawdust and tasted the char on the kiln-dried logs as the man-high blades screamed through them. At shift change, the overnight workers trudged into daylight, yellow-dusted and squinting. “Glück auf!” they shouted to the day men coming to work, scrubbed red and wide awake. At the gate, they traded shadows with the night men who dragged them along the trail of snus to their beds and wives, or down the street for breakfast beers at the Dancing Queen.

  “Glück auf!” Ken called to the world.

  The Valley Steam Passenger and Freight Line locomotive chugged along the banks of the Rolling River. It coughed a husky greeting to its brother whistle at the mill.

  “Whoo-HOOO-oooP!” Old Ken called to both. “So-long,” he called to Madam Adam, and Mr. Bedlam, sitting prim and straight and staring straight ahead at one another, “So-long, my darling dear!” he called to Madam and waved to her from tip-toes. He also waved to the Ambidextrian, tied and rocking in his seat, “So long,” he called to the Mummy King leaning from the windows in the salon car, waving, trailing linen ribbons in the wind. Behind them, the menagerie and critter show gondolas. “Whoo-HOOO-oooP!” he called to the car of bright glass cages and its chaos of serpent, its scaled and feathered beasties, hairy behemoths and all the terrors of the world. The critters, writhed, uncurled, flapped leathern wings and gaped toothed mouths at him as Bluffton passed! “So long and see you soon again!” he yelled.

  Ken rounded the corner at Commonwealth, thinking White House breakfast, thinking Mrs. Tim, thinking steaming grits and sizzling eggs, the brewing pot of pretty good coffee always ready, by damn! This morning, Ken was thinking a slab of pie. Pie was his want this damn morning. Pie and coffee. Damn.

  Ken took the first three of the last fifty-two paces toward Mrs. Tim’s Restrant.

  But…

  …at the edge of the town was nothing. No place.

  What the hell?

  He looked, blinked. He rubbed his eyes. Where there had been the restaurant there it wasn’t. There had been. He remembered. The little Swede had scrabbled like a spider, building that whole long summer before the blindness came…

  No. There was no word for it: there was nothing. There was the street, the apothecary, the ironmonger’s then, where the diner ought…was nothing. No restrant, no Mrs. Tim's. Nowhere, no place.

  The long train’s whistle sighed and disappeared, car by car by car into the no place.

  Oh, he could see it not being there, all right. Light was creeping Main Street like a ripple in the Rolling. A spring zephyr stirred, some dust lifted and wove gold in the air. But where breakfast had been almost forever, now was nowhere. A nothing that went on forever.

  The Old Rattler caught a whiff of something old, older than the town, older than him, for cry-eye!

  Damn confusing morning, he thought, hain't been a morning like this since?

  Hell, there hadn't been a morning like it since never.

  Ken spun in the dust. He looked up and down the street.

  That too. The long stretch of the main street ended in the same sort of nothing. Where the field had been, the Carnival, the far bluffs, rising at the end of the Main stem: the same empty that had eaten the White House.

  “Well, okay,” Ken said, “Okay. This is better. A fella can only take just so much wonderful! Thanks,” he said to the nearing nothing, “Least I can see you coming! Cripes…”

  That smell? What the hell, that smell was…? To top it all, from across the river, up the bluff that still remained, there was a sound. A sound that was almost light.

  Wait. Wait! I know what you are!

  For a moment he went dizzy thinking it would vanish, the bright sound, before he pegged it. It was light and youth and green shoots up the burn in his pumping legs and everything there w
as is what it was.

  It’s here and now gone!

  No it wasn’t. A few seconds he heard it again: the rattle of snake, the up-spine chatter of a big one, a big old one off the bluffs. In pretty quick time, the one was answered, one, two, then another, then a fifth.

  From the still shaded bluffs, from the sun side of the river, the snakes called and a guy…?

  Hell, a guy just had to answer that! Old Ken sucked in morning, breathed in sun and dust and the smell of cave and dirt and the high old green acid scent of snake, morning, life, death and love.

  “Damn! Here I am! Still here!”

  END

  YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM?

  Of the things you don’t want to see being made, “sausages” and “laws” are on everyone’s list. Trust me, “stories” should be there too. For example: I wrote “Little Girl Down the Way” in about 1998. It’s a story about a 7 year-old who is tormented and murdered by her mother. Such a thing happened about 40 years earlier in the basement of a house 30 yards down the alley from where I now live in Chicago.

  When a webzine asked me if I had something they could record and podcast I gave the editor a choice: he could have one thing or “Little Girl Down the Way.” He chose “Little Girl...”

  Shortly after the recording was ‘cast, I got an email from a ‘loader. He was complimentary, said the story disturbed him – in that way that horror should – and, as a father, he was impressed and moved by it.

  I thanked him for his kindness and, for his time, gave him a little of mine, a few paragraphs – slightly more information than I offered above – on the story’s fetchings.

  A return note said, in essence: I'm sorry I know that. I thought this came out of your head. He was vexed, I guess, at finding my Little Girl to be a child of the world and not solely of imagination.