by Laura Ruby
Finn followed Sean into the kitchen. “I’ll help you look for the chicken.”
“It’s getting late,” said Sean. “Why don’t you feed and water that horse? And check on Calamity Jane while you’re at it. She’s almost ready to have those kittens.”
Finn didn’t bother mentioning how long he’d been looking for Calamity already. “Okay.”
“Got to work you while I can,” Sean said. He peeled off his thin jacket. “You’ll be going to college soon. Then I’ll have to do everything myself.”
Finn stood there, blinking in surprise. He had more than a year left before college, but Sean was ushering him out the door, like he couldn’t wait for Finn to go. And then what would happen? Would he sell the house and the barn and puny parcel of land? Would he finally go back to school to become a doctor? Would he call Finn once a month, and send ten-dollar checks on his birthday? Would he talk about what a relief it was to be out of Illinois?
Finn opened his mouth to ask, but then Sean wound the jacket around his hand like a boxer protecting his knuckles. “What?”
Finn remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Sean, both of them trying to say the word “table” in Polish. Roza had said, “You have tongue like cow!” and laughed and laughed.
“What?” Sean said again.
He had tongue like cow, he had mind like cow. Dull, wordless.
Finn said, “I’m going for a ride.”
But he didn’t. Not right away. With Sean searching for Charlie’s chicken, Finn took care of dinner: a box of macaroni mixed with a pound of ground beef and some peas. By the time Sean got back to eat, it was cold, but he didn’t complain.
“Did you find Charlie’s chicken?”
“No,” said Sean.
“Charlie needs a coop.”
“Hmmm,” said Sean. He put a forkful of food into his mouth, chewed. Finn tried to think of something else to talk about. Their mother, Didi? No, talking about Didi made Sean seize up like a busted transmission. Their father? No, Sean would mutter something about their father being dead for years, about Finn being too young to remember, and what was the use of bringing it up? But Roza had asked about their parents once, and Sean hadn’t seized up. He’d gone to his room and come back with a photograph, let her look from the photograph to Sean’s face back to the photograph. To Finn, the photo looked like every other photo of every other family: two parents, two little kids, all the people smiling like nothing could ever go wrong. But Roza seemed to see something in the picture. When she offered it back to Sean and he grasped the edge, she didn’t let go—for a moment, both of them holding on.
Finn took a deep breath, banished thoughts of family, thoughts of Roza. Chickens. Back to the chickens.
He said, “I guess a coyote could have gotten her.”
Sean’s fork stopped midway between his plate and his mouth. “Gotten who?”
“The chicken,” Finn said.
Sean put the fork down. “Or maybe she just ran away. Her name was Runaround Sue. Maybe she was living up to it.”
“Then maybe she’ll come back,” said Finn.
Sean got up from the table, scraped the remnants of his dinner into the sink. “If she ran, she’ll keep on running.”
Sean went to bed, which meant that he went to his room so as not to have to look at or talk to Finn anymore, and Finn set up shop at the kitchen table with his books and his tea and his Hippie Queen Honey, too knotted up inside to write essays about his biggest accomplishments, about his worst disappointments, about what his room would say about him if his room could talk.
At ten o’clock, when the jittery sky had finally settled itself into a streaky blue night, Finn checked the yard again. And the barn, and all the rooms of the house.
No Calamity.
He was sorry he’d ever said the word “coyote.” He was sorry that Bone Gap seemed to be cursed somehow, big losses salted with tiny tragedies almost too insulting to bear. Years ago, the police chief’s wife stuck a Post-it on the fridge to tell him she was leaving and that she was taking the dog. After Jonas had one too many ciders, he’d talk about how that dog visited him in dreams and told Jonas that he lived in the desert now, that the sand was hot on his feet, and it was getting harder to remember the smell of the rain.
Here was an essay: You cannot keep chickens, you cannot keep cats, your dog lives in a trailer park in Tucson, Arizona, and has a new name.
Finn went to the barn and climbed up on the horse, and though the goat was unhappy to be left behind so soon after making his new friend, Finn and the horse took off, charging past houses and fields, through streams and down roads. He’d ridden every night, but he hadn’t been to Petey’s for a week, not since she’d tried to tell him what he felt about Roza. Maybe he’d been wrong to argue, to insist that his own reasons were the things that mattered most. Maybe it didn’t matter how he was crazy, only the fact that he was, the fact that he wanted someone to be crazy with him.
The horse allowed herself to be led behind the Corderos’ farmhouse, and then into Petey Willis’s beeyard. There was no fire by the hives; the yard was dark. Finn and the mare stood in the circle of hives, listening to the deep hum of the bees, feeling that hum in their skin. Instead of moving past the house, beyond the house, instead of charging around Illinois by way of South Dakota, the mare walked toward the house, toward the gray windows like closed lids. The horse sniffed and snorted, lingering by one of the windows. She tossed her head, mane shimmering in the moonlight.
“This one?” whispered Finn.
The horse snorted again. Finn leaned over and rapped on the window. When there was no answer, he did it again.
Thin hands shoved the curtains aside, and Petey’s wide, angry eyes were framed in the window. She reached down and yanked up the sash. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
He didn’t know what he was going to say until he said it.
“I can’t find my cat.”
She was wearing only a thin T-shirt and the kind of cutoffs that melted his brain, but she pulled on some boots and climbed out of the window as if she’d been doing this sort of thing for years, and maybe she had. He’d heard about the things that Petey did. And maybe, if he was honest with himself, it was one of the reasons he was here. But it wasn’t the most important one. He was too happy to see her. Too interested in what she might say, no matter how much it stung.
She scrunched up her face, her fingers idly stroking the horse’s nose. Then her face relaxed.
“Okay,” she said, looking up at him. “Where to?”
“I thought maybe we’d go for a ride,” Finn said, something else he hadn’t known he was going to say.
“Does the horse know where the cat is?”
“She seems to know a lot of other things.”
Petey gathered her hair and tied it into a knot at the nape of her neck. “You still don’t have a saddle. How am I supposed to get up there?”
He glanced around the yard, spied a large rock at the corner of the house. He pointed to it. She nodded and took a few quick strides and a leap to land on top of it, smooth and graceful. He walked the horse alongside the rock, holding the reins in one hand. Petey looked at the space behind Finn and the space in front of him. Then she turned her face away, focusing on some star in the distance, as if looking at him directly was a little too hard.
She blew out her breath just like the mare. “Listen. I’m sorry about the other day. Sometimes I’m . . . I should . . .”
The words tumbled out. “You should wear those shorts more often?”
Startled, she glanced down at herself. At first he thought it had been the wrong thing to say, the kind of thing one of the Rude boys would have said right before they told her she had a rockin’ body but a butterface, but then Petey looked up and smiled with half her mouth.
She smiled with both sides when he said, “Here’s a college essay idea: Describe the shorts that changed your life in the form of a poem.”
“I like it.” She put her hands
on her hips. “So?”
“So, what?”
“Where’s my poem?”
“Maybe someday I’ll write you one.”
She grabbed ahold of the horse’s mane and swung one leg over the horse’s neck, faltering only for a moment till Finn steadied her with a hand on her hip. She settled against him, her back to his chest. She didn’t say anything more as he put one arm on each side of her and urged the horse forward.
The mare walked quietly from the yard, as if she was trying very hard to be sneaky, and began a gentle trot as they passed the Corderos’ farmhouse. Each step of the mare brought Petey closer, until she was fitted to Finn like a puzzle piece, her head under his chin. He hadn’t realized how much of her height was in her legs, smooth bare legs that glowed gold in the moonlight.
The mare splashed through the stream, peppering her riders with droplets of cool water, then headed for the cemetery, which was clouded over with a strange silvery mist. Older than Bone Gap itself, the cemetery had a couple of stones dating back to the early 1800s. Once, Miguel had surveyed the rows and rows of stones and said, “Everyone looks the same when they’re dead.” But Finn didn’t think that was true. Each stone was different. Some of the older ones canted crazily, like crooked teeth, the names and dates eroded from decades of sun, wind, and snow. The more recent stones were polished granite in various colors. Dark gray, black, and, in the case of Mrs. Philander “Muffin” Gould (1903–1982), Pepto-Bismol pink.
But now the silvery mist muted all the colors of the grave markers, the uneven ground dancing with strange shadows. The mare stopped, letting them survey the stones, the willow tree dangling its fingers over the rooftops of the two small mausoleums, the dusky grove of poplars beyond.
“Spooky,” murmured Petey.
“Hmmm,” said Finn, who had discovered that if he turned his face a little bit, his lips would brush her hair.
“Look!” breathed Petey, and he glanced up and saw one of the shadows flickering, gathering scraps of moonlight and cloud to assemble itself into a vague shape that drifted over the tops of the stones.
“Are you seeing this?” Petey said.
“Yes.”
They watched the shape glide through the still air, passing so closely that Petey shivered. The shape slipped out of the cemetery and into the darkness beyond.
“Was that a ghost?” said Petey.
“A cloud, probably. Fog,” said Finn.
“I think it was a ghost.”
“Maybe it’s going to Miguel’s house. Maybe it’s hungry.”
And maybe it was a ghost, maybe it was hungry, but if it was, the mare wasn’t troubled. She ambled past the cemetery to the unclaimed land beyond. The field should have had rich green grass springing up around the horse’s knees, it should have been wild with bluebells and violets and larkspur, bayberry and lily and clover, but the field burned gold in the thin light of the moon, and Finn wondered why the grass and the flowers seemed to be dying. Surely that was a trick of the eye or the mind or the fact that Petey Willis was warm against him and smelled like a million things you’d want to eat and this was jumbling his thoughts, confusing him, making it hard to pay attention to anything but her.
The mare trotted across the golden field and into a deep still forest, a forest that Finn didn’t remember. Crickets whirred and owls hooted and the ground crunched under the horse’s feet. They seemed to be at the mouth of a very long path through the dark wood, a path through a wood that he had never seen before.
“What is this place?” Petey said.
“I don’t know.”
And he didn’t. But the mare seemed to know, as she seemed to know so, so many things, too many things for a horse to know, and she moved from a walk to a trot, a trot to a gallop. Finn drew his forearms in tighter so that they brushed against Petey’s waist. If she thought he was getting too close, she didn’t say. She didn’t say anything about his lips in her hair, or the fact that his breathing had gone ever so slightly ragged.
And then the trees blurred as the mare ran faster and faster. At first Finn tried to keep an eye on the path in front of him, but it was too dark and the horse was running too fast. He tried to keep his eyes on the moon, but it blazed too hot and too whitely bright, and it etched its image across his vision. He looked around, but what he saw made no sense—trees bleeding into clouds, and the clouds parting for winged lions carved from stone, and the stone lions charging down a staircase made of glass, and the glass shattering into fire.
The mare ran all the way through the forest and out the other side, and suddenly the sounds of the forest were replaced by the crashing of horseshoes on rock. The mare thundered across a flat gray plain that Finn saw too late, too late, was the edge of a mountain, and then the mare was leaping into the air, and they were falling over the cliff, until they felt the wind catch them, carry them in its soft, dark hand as if the horse and two riders were nothing but a feather that wended its way down the mountainside.
And since none of this could be real, Finn closed his eyes and held on to Petey and wondered if she could feel his heart beating against her back, if she noticed his arms wrapped around her waist, if the moon had etched itself upon her otherworldly eyes, if the moon could ever be full enough to fill them.
Hours later, days or weeks or months later, the mare’s hooves again found the ground, and they were no longer falling off a mountain or flying through the forest, they were trotting back across the golden field, through the now pitch-black cemetery, past the Corderos’ dozing stone house, and into the beeyard, the only sounds the sounds of Finn’s breathing, Petey’s breathing, the mare breathing.
When they reached Petey’s window, Finn released the reins and slid from the horse’s back, knees loose and watery, hands trembling. Petey put her own hands on Finn’s shoulders as he helped her down. They stood there in the hushed dark of the yard, struggling for words.
Finally, Petey said, “I’m sorry we didn’t find your cat.”
Finn decided not to press his luck, not to do anything but say Thank you, say Good night, say Maybe tomorrow, say Did you see the fire? say Did that just happen? but when her fingertips traced down his arms to his wrists, when she turned her face up to his, lips parted, breath sweet, there didn’t seem to be anything to say, anything to do, but kiss her.
And so he did.
Somehow, Finn got home, stabled and watered the mare, patted the goat, stumbled into the house. Instead of sitting vigil at the kitchen table, as he had done sixty-whatever gray and troubled nights, he dropped into his bed and careened into sleep, his feet jerking as if he were still riding with Petey through a forest that existed only in dreams. But only a few hours later, thin cries woke him.
Finn threw back the sheets, disoriented. He lurched toward the open window, not sure whose name to call out.
Another sharp cry.
Finn glanced around. Then he dropped to his knees and peeked under the bed.
Calamity.
And six tiny kittens, not much bigger than the mice Calamity was such a calamity at catching.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to the squeaking, squirming pile of them, nosing their mother’s belly. “I’ll look after her, she’ll look after you. You’ll see.”
He crawled back into bed. You’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see.
Roza
JUST LIKE THE REST OF US
THE BEAST THAT HAD PREVENTED ROZA FROM ESCAPING the yard of that horrible suburban house was the largest, ugliest, most miserable dog that Roza had ever seen. His teeth were long and yellow, his tail a spiked lash, his eyes the color of tombs. He growled every time she moved, erupted into furious snarls if she dared walk from one end of the room to the other, barked till he was hoarse if she lingered too long by the doors or windows.
The castle maids and guards kept their distance from Roza and her ferocious new companion. But that night, when the cook asked if she would like some eel pie for dinner, Roza said, “Yes. Thank you very much.”<
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The cook was so delighted to have someone to cook for, she prepared two eel pies. Roza took the dog and the pies to her chambers in the tower, broke the pies into pieces, and offered them to the dog. The dog turned his bloodshot eyes up at her, confused by the offer, by the kindness.
“It’s okay,” she said.
He took one bite, gulped, looked up at her again.
“Go on. It’s all for you.”
He ate one pie, then the other, and belched contentedly. She sat in a chair by the fire, and the animal laid his head across her ankles and drooled on her bare feet. The darkness came, and he sprawled out at the foot of the huge bed, taking up more than half of it with his mangy, flea-bitten form. And though she might have to have these sheets burned in the morning, and possibly have to bathe in lye herself, it was nice to have a friend.
Because of his matted, reddish coat, Roza decided to call him Rus.
She didn’t mind talking to Rus, as the dog didn’t gaze upon her with that horrible, indulgent smile, the dog didn’t touch her with cold fingers, the dog didn’t trace the lace on the bodice of her gown and chuckle when she shivered and jerked away, the dog didn’t the dog didn’t the dog didn’t the dog didn’t.
Roza had the cook make eel pies every night. After the dog had devoured them and put his great shaggy head across her ankles or in her lap, she would tell him a story. She would say, “I grew up in a village so small that it didn’t have a name.” Or, “Before the day I boarded the flight to America, I had never been on a plane. Never been so far from home. Never been so close to the sun.”
On the plane, there were other students in the program giggling and turning around in their seats in the rows in front of her, but Roza’s eardrums felt like overblown balloons, her heart hammered in her chest, and her tongue was heavy as stone in her mouth. Was she sick? Was she scared? If someone had asked, she wouldn’t have been able to answer. All around the plane, the vast blue sky shimmered in the sunlight. Far below, the gray ocean defined the word “forever.” Everything felt both huge and small, as if the plane were hanging from a string held by the hands of gods.