by Drury, Tom
The goat came soft-footed down the grass. The reds and whites of her coat had faded to shades of silver. She surveyed the visitors and then stared at Micah, as if to say, Oh, wait a minute. You’re leaving? That’s what this is all about?
Micah fell to his knees and roughed up the goat’s long and matted coat. You could see him trying not to cry, but he did anyway. The goat stared with slotted eyes at the road that went by the house.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” said Micah.
Tiny and his mother stood in the yard, watching Joan’s car go around the bend. A bank of blue and gray clouds moved in, hiding the sun. Colette took out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco and proceeded to smoke.
“And then there was one,” she said.
“Looking that way,” said Tiny softly.
“You think he’s doing the right thing?”
“He might be.”
She walked off to her truck, and Tiny went into the house, closed the door, and walked up the stairs with his shoulders bumping the walls. Micah’s bed was made with a blanket of red and black plaid and a light blue pillow centered beneath the headboard. A hockey stick leaned in the corner, blade wrapped in frayed electrical tape, near an old poster from a movie about heroic dogs.
The bedsprings wheezed like an accordion as Tiny sat down at the foot of the bed. A car went by, the road became quiet, and light rain began to fall against the window.
He sat with his forearms on his knees and his hands folded, remembering when the goat was young, how she and Micah would dance around the yard.
CHAPTER TWO
SINCE DECLINING to run for a sixth term as sheriff, Dan Norman worked for a private detective agency on the sixth floor of the Orange Building in Stone City.
The agency was called Lord Norman Associates, after its founder, Lynn Lord, but Dan and his assistant, Donna, did most of the work.
Lynn Lord had more or less retired to the basement of his house, where he designed and built clandestine audio and video devices, some of which had been patented. Lynn was said to be one of the best darts players in the county, not that the county was teeming with darts players.
One day a middle-aged couple came in to see Dan. Their case would turn out to be important, though not in a way that anyone could have predicted.
“Do you have children?” said the man.
“No,” said Dan.
“Well, then you don’t know.”
They explained in halting fashion, correcting and annotating each other’s remarks. Couples rarely speak smoothly to a private investigator. Anyway, their daughter, Wendy, had fallen in with a man from out of town. Jack Snow was his name, and he ran a mail-order trade in Celtic artifacts from a warehouse by the railyards. He’d moved in with Wendy, and she kept the books for his business. Before that, she had made beaded moccasins of her own design.
“Now, when you say artifacts,” said Dan.
“We haven’t seen them,” said the woman. “Haven’t been allowed to. But we think they’re worthless.”
“Why?”
“Certain things she said.”
“‘They’re not what they seem,’” said the father.
“Meaning what?”
“She wouldn’t elaborate,” said the mother. “She said we were down on her boyfriend, and our concerns were trite.”
“Aren’t all antiques overpriced?” said Dan.
“What if they’re not antiques,” said the mother.
“He’s raking in the money,” said the father. “They’re riding around town in a Shelby Mustang. One weekend they up and flew to Reno to play blackjack. It doesn’t feel right.”
“We don’t want Wendy mixed up in anything.”
“Maybe we’re crazy,” said the father.
“We hope we are.”
As they spoke, Dan took notes on a legal pad:
daughter
Wendy
boyfriend
Jack Snow
artifacts
warehouse
not what they seem
Shelby
Reno
crazy
Louise drove a bleached-blue IH Scout II with a three-speed manual on the column. It was a rough ride but that was okay because she liked feeling the road. The door seals were dry and cracked. The smells of springtime drifted in: new grass, pollen, bird wings.
She had inherited the three-story Kleeborg Building in Stone City and ran a thrift store on the ground floor and rented out the rest as apartments.
Louise and the man who left her the building, Perry Kleeborg, had been in the photography business together, and after he died, in his nineties, she didn’t want to keep it going without him.
Over time the thrift store filled up with the things left by the emptying of the old farmhouses. Small chairs of coarse fabric, barometers and birdcages, hunting jackets lined with flannel, books bound in dark green and red, pottery from the old studios.
Louise would buy things from the forties, fifties, and sixties, but nothing from the seventies and after, for that was when the quality fell off. The hours she kept were noon to nine.
That morning, before opening, she sat out front with coffee and a smoke. She wore a man’s pinstriped jacket and watched the traffic along the street. The sun was out, and she felt good and warm with the wind blowing her hair.
A crow spiraled down between the blocks as a white and blue transit bus came from the east. The crown of the bus clipped the crow and left it flapping on the pavement.
Louise ran into the street, took off her jacket, and used it to gather up the crow. She carried it into the store and put it in a cardboard box. The bird had black eyes ringed with gold and bobbed its head in disbelief, to be one moment flying and the next in a box.
The lining of the jacket was streaked with crow liquid of some kind, and Louise took the jacket out behind the shop and put it in the dumpster.
When she returned, she had a customer—tall and thin and pale, perhaps in her twenties, dressed in black, with shining white hair and inch-long bangs.
“My name is Sandra Zulma,” she said. “I’m looking for a rock.” She pressed her fists together to indicate the size.
“We have a geode,” said Louise. “You can see the crystals inside. On the table with the coin banks of the presidents.”
“No. It’s a . . . particular rock.”
“Is it special?”
The woman looked at Louise with clear blue eyes. “Some say it’s a piece of the Lia Fáil. Or it might be the stone thrown by Cúchulainn to keep Conall’s chariot from following him to Loch Echtra. Or a cairn stone left by the raiders of the Inn at Leinster.”
“Gee,” said Louise. “I doubt we’d get anything like that here.”
Then they heard the sound of scratching.
“What’s that?” said the customer.
“It’s a crow that got hit by a bus.”
“Can I see?”
Louise opened the box, and Sandra Zulma knelt and reached inside, setting the crow upright. When she withdrew her hands it lay down again.
“The raven, the blood, and the snow,” she said.
“Mmm,” said Louise. “I hope you find your rock.”
“I’m at the Continental Hotel if it turns up.”
After she left, Louise locked the store and took the crow across town to twin veterinarians she knew. They examined the bird on a high table of stainless steel, spreading one wing and then the other. They seemed happy to have a bird to work on instead of dogs, cats, and livestock all the time.
Business turned profitable later in the day. Louise sold an ominous cabinet that had been in the shop forever, a set of cocktail glasses decorated with pinup girls, a bait-casting reel, and a sun-faded series of
Zane Grey novels, including an autographed copy of Wanderer of the Wasteland.
Louise could tell that the book buyer hoped she wouldn’t know the value of the set, but she held fast and got a good price.
Lyris and Albert lived in an apartment on the top floor of the Kleeborg Building, and one evening Lyris stopped into the shop after work. She was a clerk for the gravestone salesman Don Gary, who had an office by the cemetery on the east side of Stone City.
Lyris was an uncertain shopper who crept through the aisles, as if every hat rack, wringer washer, and abandoned golf club required intense consideration.
And so Louise showed her one of the better things in the shop, a large oil painting of men and horses stopping at a mountain pass in Tibet. The men smoked a long-stemmed pipe, and the horses stood nearby wearing sashes of yellow and green.
Lyris said it was the most beautiful painting she had ever seen and asked the price.
“It’s free,” said Louise. “A present for your new apartment.”
Then Louise and Lyris settled into a paisley sofa with funhouse springs and they drank glasses of wine and rested their feet on crates that had long ago held California tangerines.
“Dan and I think the world of Albert,” said Louise.
“How long have you known him?”
“Well, how long have we? Since he was in high school anyway.”
“What was he like?”
“Like he is now, maybe a little funnier. He played guitar in a band.”
“His job takes it out of him,” said Lyris.
Albert wrote for the Stone City newspaper, known for being shorthanded and for having dropped the cartoon strip Blondie, to much disapproval.
“Have you met his family?”
“Some of them. There’s so many.”
The Robeshaws were among the more prosperous farming families in the county. They owned five places, raising corn and beans and hogs, some cattle, and a horse or two, and Albert was the youngest of the six children.
“They’re very competitive,” said Louise. “One night I got to see them play Scrabble. Not something I would care to watch again.”
Louise refilled their glasses, thinking that she must sound like her own mother, who in the old days would instruct her on the ways and faults of the community. But Louise was not Lyris’s mother, though she might have been, given the difference in their ages.
A pair of white leather gloves were on an end table by the sofa, and Lyris put them on and spread her fingers wide.
“You work for the tombstone guy,” said Louise.
“Yeah.”
“How is that?”
“He’s hyperactive. Puts on Aqua Velva at work.”
“He does not.”
Lyris raised her chin, patting cheeks and neck with her gloved hands.
“Like this. It makes a cloud in the air. I guess it takes people’s minds off their grief maybe. And sometimes, when he’s walking around a corner, he moves his hands like he’s turning a steering wheel.”
Louise laughed with surprise in her heart and put her arm around Lyris’s shoulders.
Then, thinking she’d been too familiar, she drew her arm back until it rested awkwardly in the deep space between the cushion and the back of the sofa. What the fuck is wrong with this couch? she wondered.
“I’m glad Albert found you,” she said. “He needed someone. You’ll be good for each other.”
Lyris took the gloves off and laid them on the table, pressing them flat with the edge of her hand. “I don’t know.”
“Well, you don’t. That’s all right.”
“I get afraid sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, that I will be left, or that it’s the end of the world.”
“Yeah,” said Louise. “Yeah.”
“It happens at night. I wake up and I don’t know where I am. I cry out.”
Louise freed her arm from the sofa. “You’re in a new place, with a new boyfriend.”
“I scream, actually. I just say ‘cry out’ because it sounds prettier. ‘She cried out, in her sleep.’”
“But Albert’s there.”
“Yes. But I think he’ll get tired of it, don’t you? This terrified thing in his bed.”
Lyris had green eyes that looked in slightly different directions, as if watching for trouble that might come from anywhere. They glassed over as she stared at the goods in the shop.
“It’s all right to cry if you need to,” said Louise.
The girl nodded, looking miserable. “Ah yeah, I think I do.”
And so she cried, with rapid breaths and big round tears rolling from the corners of her eyes.
Louise held her, petting her hair. “Rough old world,” she said. “I know it.”
After a while Lyris sat back and dried her face with her hands. She laughed a little, as one does after an unexpected cry.
“I think I got your shirt wet,” she said.
“It’s only a thing,” said Louise.
She and Lyris carried the painting of the men and horses in the mountain pass up the linoleum stairs. The apartment was a decent place. Everything was old but it all worked. Louise looked around at the boxes and the tall windows and the dark wood floors, and she thought of other things that would go well in this place.
The phone rang as Louise was turning off the lights in the shop. The twin veterinarians got on the speakerphone to give her the bad news: the crow had died of internal injuries.
“Oh, really?” she said unsteadily. “He was doing so good, I thought. I was really counting on him getting better for some reason. . . . Yeah. . . . No. . . . I understand. Goodbye.”
Louise was sadder than the death of a crow would otherwise make her. She’d begun a story about saving the bird, the story had come to a different ending, and she could not change it.
CHAPTER THREE
COMING INTO Los Angeles, where jet airplanes crossed the mountains and drifted down over rivers of cars and trucks, Micah could not imagine people and things enough to fill the buildings he saw. It was the world’s largest place.
Joan had a silver Audi with a straight stick and the roundness and precision of a toy. She wore big, dark sunglasses and drove with a thoughtless confidence Micah did not remember. She knew the way without thinking, turning down a curving, single-lane highway high in the sky.
Micah saw a giant woman dressed in an emerald gown and holding a violin on the side of a parking garage, and he saw the shining towers above the highways, and he thought maybe he’d made a mistake, which made everything more interesting.
Joan lived in a village north of Los Angeles with her husband and her husband’s son. The husband’s name was Rob Hammerhill, and he produced animal shows on television and managed a library of wildlife footage. His business took him often to Russia.
The house was a cluster of reddish boxes hidden from the road by vines, orange trees, and evergreens. No one was home. Joan led Micah to a room on the second floor in the back. Everything was new: bed and desk, wicker laundry hamper, big chair of blue and white stripe, bedside table with a black box on it. The smell of fresh paint made him miss the grounding smells of home—tobacco, motor oil, gravel dust, things like that.
Joan raised the window shade, and they looked out at a slate terrace, deep green yard, and, beyond that, stone steps climbing a hillside rife with trees and bushes and ivy.
“This is your room,” said Joan. “I hope you like it, though you might not at first. That’s okay. I want you to feel free to tell me what you think.”
“It’s nice.”
“Those are redwood trees,” said Joan. “Thank you for letting me be your mom again.”
When Joan left the room, Micah opened his suitcase and dug out a framed photogr
aph of Tiny and Lyris. They were washing the goat in a wading pool, and the goat looked into the camera, wondering if it could be eaten.
Micah set the picture on the desk, lowered the shade, and lay on the bed. He looked at the black box and pressed the top of it, and it made the sound of rain. Then he pressed it again: the singing of birds. He cycled through wind, crickets, ocean waves, rain again, and he fell asleep.
Someone said it was morning time, and Micah opened his eyes.
“I lied,” said a boy in the room. He was older than Micah, small and thin with a dark goatee. “It’s evening time.”
Micah sat up and looked around for his shoes, before realizing they were on his feet.
“I’m Eamon,” said the boy. “We’re the sons of the people in the house, so we have to get along, no matter if we hate each other or what.”
“What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.”
Micah yawned. “I’m Micah. Nice to meet you.”
“Are you a loner?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good. Let’s go for a drive.”
Soon they were on another freeway. The green banks of the hills came down to the road and rose again on the other side. They listened to a band Eamon liked called the Libation Bearers.
The hilltops looked close in the evening light and Micah thought you could climb them and look around, though it would probably take longer than it appeared.
“How was the flight?” said Eamon.
“I got patted down in Minneapolis.”
“You look dangerous.”
“I’m sure.”
“One time they dusted my backpack. I was seven years old. It’s an honor, really.”
They drove for half an hour and got off the highway, headed south on a two-lane road that wound through tunnels and canyons. Micah rolled down the window, feeling the cool wind on his face.
It was forested country, and they arrived at last on a soft dirt lane, beneath the interwoven branches of trees, with horse farms on either side, or perhaps it was the same farm.