Bone Gap

by Laura Ruby

  Sean’s face went red, and his chest heaved. Finn would have had no trouble picking Sean out of a crowd. Even Finn couldn’t miss someone that big and that red and that angry, someone whose fists clenched and unclenched and clenched again.

  “You want to hit me,” Finn said.

  “I’m not going to hit you.”

  “But you want to.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Sean laughed, an ugly laugh. “The two of us? What do you know about it, Spaceman? What could you possibly know? What have you ever had to give up for anyone else?”

  “Yeah, you gave up. And you keep doing it. You tell yourself it’s for other people, but it’s not.”

  “Like you would have survived on your own.”

  “That was years ago. What about now? What about Roza?”

  Sean crossed his arms. “What about her?”

  “Jesus, are you really that stupid?”

  Sean said nothing. Finn ground his palms into his forehead, trying to rub away the dull ache there. Talking about Roza made him think of Petey. He saw Petey. But she didn’t see him. It was almost funny, except it made him feel like throwing up.

  Finn scooped the photos from the floor and the articles from the table and stuffed them in the trash. He opened the back door.

  Sean’s voice was honed to a cutting edge when he said, “Going to see your girlfriend?”

  Finn gripped the handle so tightly he could imagine crushing it. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “That’s not what everyone says.”

  “Everyone is an idiot.”

  “You want to know what else they’re saying?”

  “No,” said Finn.

  “That you’re using her. She’s desperate, she’s angry, she’s homely, she’s—”

  Finn flew across the kitchen, punched his brother in the face. Sean didn’t go down—he was too big and too solid for that, too ready for anything—but he rocked on his feet. When Sean caught his balance, a tiny flower of blood bloomed at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t look so big anymore. He didn’t look so strong.

  “You know why she’s gone, you chickenshit,” said Finn. “You know.”

  Sean wiped the blood from his lip. “Because she wants to be.”

  “If that’s what you think, you’re more blind than I am,” Finn said. And he then took his newly mangled hand and recently mangled leg and limped stiffly from the kitchen, expecting to be followed, expecting to be seized, expecting to be tackled to the dirt, expecting to be beaten within an inch of his life, wanting all of that. But neither he nor Sean would get what they wanted. Sean didn’t believe in Finn, either; Sean let him go.

  And so Finn went. Not to the stable or to the police chief or even to the beeyard to find Petey. He went to where he’d last seen the man who twitched like a cornstalk in the wind. Because by punching his brother he’d knocked some sense into himself.

  Finn had a few more questions for Charlie Valentine.

  Charlie

  THE BALLAD OF CHARLIE VALENTINE

  CHARLIE SAT IN HIS FAVORITE CHAIR—HIS ONLY CHAIR—A chicken on his lap, waiting for the knock on the door. He knew who was coming, but he couldn’t be certain what he, Charlie, could possibly say, other than “I’m sorry” and “Go home.”

  Charlie himself had had many homes, going so far back that he only had the vaguest, haziest memories of them. A man, even a man like Charlie Valentine, had limited room for memories, and the new ones kept kicking the old ones out, the way slang replaces the proper names for this or for that, cheapening the nouns and the verbs until they were barely recognizable. For example, he knew his name wasn’t Charlie Valentine, but his real name? Who could recall such a thing? There had been a wife once, long, long ago, beautiful and wretched. Charlie had no idea what had happened to her, either. Nothing good. Or maybe everything good. He wasn’t in charge.

  The chicken clucked low in her throat. She didn’t like storms. Charlie Valentine loved his chickens. He knew everyone in Bone Gap mocked him for it. No self-respecting farmer got attached to his animals, treated them like pets, let them live in the house. How could you work them the way they needed to be worked? How could you butcher them when their time was up, salt and batter them, fry them up for Sunday dinner?

  Charlie couldn’t.

  Charlie was soft.

  The people of Bone Gap thought his adopted name was funny, because they were certain he hated everyone and everything, except for all the women he claimed to date. But they were wrong, as they were wrong about many things. He imagined that there was a time he hadn’t been soft, a time he had been hard and strong and merciless—which would explain the beautiful, wretched wife—battling for the women and for the world with other merciless men. But perhaps those were just stories. The clearest memories he had were of his time spent on a horse farm. He told everyone who would listen that his grandfather kept Belgians, huge working horses, and boarded horses for others. But that old man wasn’t his grandfather. And Charlie wasn’t there because of him anyway. Charlie loved the horses, every one of them. He couldn’t remember his own name, but he remembered theirs: Blackbird. Babe. A retired Chicago police horse, Gladiola. A foal with a parrot mouth called Sweetheart. A gelding named Pippin. Horses were like dogs, sometimes calm, sometimes playful, sometimes mean as snakes. Sometimes the horses would try to rear back their heads and smash their riders with the tops of their massive skulls. When the horses did this, Charlie was supposed to take a bottle filled with water and crack them between their ears as hard as he could. The water would run down. The horses would think they were bleeding, and they would never rear back again. But no matter how mean they were or how much they reared, Charlie refused to hit the horses. Refused to even fill the bottles. And the old man who was not his grandfather would shake his head in disgust. “Tchórz. Królik,” he would mutter. Coward. Rabbit.

  As soft as Charlie was, however, it was his job to exercise the animals. A long trail snaked through the property, marked with different-colored mile markers. A blue marker. A white marker. Green, yellow, orange, red. Every day, that old man would tell him, “Take Gladiola out and run her to the blue marker.” Or “Take Pippin out and run him to the white marker.” The old man wanted Charlie’s favorite new horse, a thoroughbred named Thunder, run out to the green marker. So that was what Charlie did. Every day, he took Thunder out and rode him to the green marker and back. But instead of staying fast and strong, the horse grew thinner and thinner and thinner. No matter how much Charlie fed and watered him, no matter how much Charlie whispered in his ear, Thunder’s ribs showed pitifully. The doctors thought that Thunder had some kind of terrible blood disease. One bright morning, they came and took him away. Charlie never knew where. He would spend nights in the stables, crying over Thunder. Years later, doctors would tell him that he was color-blind. Red-green color-blind, specifically. He’d been running Thunder to the wrong marker for months, running him so hard and so long that Thunder had just wasted away to nothing.

  That was how Charlie learned that he couldn’t protect the things he loved. Not even from himself.

  In despair, he left that farm and came to Bone Gap when it was a huge expanse of empty fields, drawn here by the grass and the bees and the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were a little looser here, double-jointed, twisting back on themselves, leaving spaces one could slip into and hide. He had the place to himself for years, but he wasn’t so stupid as to keep horses. He kept goats. And when he loved the goats too much, he gave them up for sheep. And when he loved the lambs too much, he gave them up for chickens.

  Then the people came. A woman named Sally came. She was neither beautiful nor wretched. She laughed a lot. She laughed so much it cracked him open, swapping his insides for his outsides, as if he were wearing his own nerves for a coat. He couldn’t give her up. He married her. They had a child, they had thirty-six years together
. For most, that would have been quite a long time. For him, it was a few minutes.

  He couldn’t protect the things he loved.

  He still had his daughter, everyone reminded him. And four grandkids. And great-grandkids. They terrified him, especially the littlest ones. Each of them so young and so easily ripped away. He had no idea how to protect them, how to keep them safe. It made him furious. He yelled at them all the time, waving his broom, stamping his feet, trying to make them understand. The wounded expression in the children’s eyes broke what was left of Charlie’s heart. Better not to see them at all. Better to hunker down in his house with his chickens and forget.

  And that was the way it stayed until Roza. She was Polish, Charlie could hear it in the curve of her voice, but she was also so familiar, like a painting on a wall by an artist whose name he had forgotten. Charlie was rusty, but he could still speak her language. The first time he’d said dzień dobry, hello, she seemed scared and relieved at the same time. He visited her, offering some stories about his home on the horse farm, about Gladiola and Sweetheart and, later, Thunder. He asked her about her home in Poland. She told him of the green rolling hills, the cries of new lambs in the spring, the smell of her babcia’s homemade soup. Sometimes they’d talk for an hour before Roza realized how much time had passed, and she ran back to the O’Sullivan house to perform whatever chore demanded her attention. The scent of her, the bright sun scent of her, lingered in the air long after she left, making him feel cleaner somehow, new and brave, a green shoot pushing through the earth, ready to greet the morning and whatever came after. She seemed to have that effect on many in Bone Gap, the people opening up like seeds after a rain. But Charlie never asked her what had happened to bring her there. He thought it was safer, considering.

  She had seemed safe with Sean and Finn O’Sullivan. Charlie Valentine would watch them sometimes from his yard. Roza tending her garden, Finn digging along beside her, Sean O’Sullivan trying so hard to keep his heart from leaping like a trout out of his throat. Some people seemed to show up just when you needed them, and Charlie had no idea who needed whom more—Roza, those boys, those boys, Roza. It all felt fated somehow. But Charlie had never been comfortable with the idea of fate. He didn’t like knowing that something else, someone else, held all the cards.

  Then Roza had disappeared. Sean O’Sullivan had locked up tighter than a nut. Finn drifted around, rootless and aimless as dandelion fluff in the wind. And the horse, that magnificent horse! Just showing up here as if she wanted to remind him of every stupid mistake he’d ever made, all the ways he’d been disloyal and blind. Fate again, Charlie supposed. And here he was, alone with his chickens, waiting for a knock on the door, thinking that you can’t protect the ones you love, you have to hope they’re smart enough to save themselves. And hope, well. Who had any of that to spare?

  The door flew open. Finn O’Sullivan limped straight through the living room to the kitchen and back again, tracking water and mud everywhere.

  Well, that was a surprise. Charlie was sure it would be—

  “Where is he?” Finn said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. The man who moves like a cornstalk in the wind.”

  Charlie thrust out his dentures, sucked them in again. “I don’t know where he is.”

  Finn’s breathing got harder and deeper, as if his very breath was angry and was attempting to launch an attack from the depths of his lungs. “You know this guy, you know he took Roza, you knew I wasn’t lying about what I saw, and you didn’t do anything? You didn’t say anything? You let people think I was crazy! And Roza! What about Roza?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “What’s complicated about it?” Finn yelled. “Who is that man? Where did he take her?”

  “Not a place where you or anyone else can go. And even if you could make it, who knows if you could find your way back?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought maybe the horse would cheer you up.”

  “The horse? You thought you could swap a girl for a horse and that we’d just forget about her?”

  Charlie would have kept the horse. He wanted to so badly. But he couldn’t do it. He had the feeling that he had tried to hold on to things that weren’t his before, or helped other men do that, and maybe this was why he was holed up in a broken-down old house with nothing but chickens to keep him company. “You can’t swap what you don’t own. She’s her own horse,” Charlie said. “She does what she wants to do.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Finn shouted. “What the hell is going on?”

  The chicken flapped in Charlie’s arms. “All right, all right, just calm down and I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “You’ll tell me everything.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “You’ll tell me what I need to know to find Roza.”

  “Valentine’s not my real name.”

  Finn began to pace—step-drag, step-drag. “Who cares about your name?”

  “Are you going to let me talk or not?”

  Finn clamped his mouth shut and jerked his head, motioning for Charlie to go on. And Charlie did. He talked about the horses, about Gladiola and Pippin and Thunder, ignoring the way Finn rolled his eyes and sighed and muttered under his breath. Charlie talked about Bone Gap before the people came. He talked about Sally. How much she laughed. How it cracked him open. “And she was smart, too,” Charlie told Finn. “Sally said it seemed dumb to name a place ‘Gap’ when there weren’t any gaps anywhere. No ravines or cliffs or stuff like that.”

  Finn stopped pacing. “I’ve seen a cliff.”

  “Did you?” said Charlie. “Can you say that for sure?”

  “I—”

  “Because we don’t have your typical gaps around here. Not gaps made of rocks or mountains. We have gaps in the world. In the space of things. So many places to lose yourself, if you believe that they’re there. You can slip into the gap and never find your way out. Or maybe you don’t want to find your way out.”

  “Roza didn’t slip anywhere. She was taken.”

  “But maybe she wants to stay now. Maybe he convinced her. I know stories like that.”

  “Who is he?”

  Charlie tried to remember, he tried, but all he had was fog and haze and a parade of loss that numbed and shamed. “I know him, but I can’t name him. I think of him as the Scare Crow. Seems as good a name as any.”

  Finn said, “Fine, just tell me where he is.”

  For a moment, there was only the sound of the two of them breathing, the chickens worrying their feathers, clucking nervously. “You’re not the one I expected,” said Charlie.

  “Yeah, but I’m the one who’s here.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . . ,” Finn began. His lips worked, his hands worked, struggling for the answers. Charlie had asked the question, but the answers were obvious. Finn was here because he was the one who had seen the earth swallow Roza. He was here because he had done nothing to stop it. Because he had fallen in love, and it had made him brave and stupid and desperate. He was here because Roza was his friend. Because his name was Finn and he didn’t want to be called anything else.

  But—another surprise—the boy, the young man, said none of these things. What he said: “When I lost Roza, I lost Sean, too. I’m here because he can’t be.”

  Charlie Valentine, whose name wasn’t Charlie Valentine, who hadn’t been called anything else for as long as he could recall, who had lost more than even he could remember, said, “The chickens have been plucking out their feathers. They haven’t been laying, but when they do, the eggs are small and gray as stones. They talk to each other. It sounds like fox, fox, fox. It’s their word for nightmare. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I know it’s dangerous. How do I get there?”

  “You know how. You’re the one who’s here.”

  “I don’t know what that means!”
/>   “It means you can find her if you can find the gap.”

  “What?” Finn said. He started pacing again. “Maybe the horse can—”

  “The horse can’t take you there,” said Charlie. “You have to go alone.” Not the horse. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice the horse.

  Finn drew himself up to his full height. He was getting so tall and broad, more like his brother every day. Stern. Determined. “So, you won’t help me?”

  “I just did.”

  Finn half laughed, half swore. “Fine.” He limped to the front door, opened it, slicing the room with a beam of moonlight, blasting through the fog of Charlie’s memory, of his many pasts.

  “Wait!” said Charlie. “I can tell you one more thing!”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The Scare Crow is a betting man.”

  Finn

  THE FIELDS

  THE RAIN STOPPED, LEAVING THE AIR THICKER THAN it had been before it started, both soupy and charged. The light had retreated at the insistence of the darkness—a scrap of cloud lidding the blank eye of the moon—and Bone Gap was still. No cars traveled the roads, no creatures howled or sniffed or chuffed, and the wind, a constant in the cornfields of Illinois, pulled in on itself and snoozed like a cat. Finn’s leg itched under the bandages, and his hand throbbed; he should have known his brother’s jaw was made of iron.

  He had no idea where to go.

  Never had Bone Gap seemed so large, so full of hidden spaces. If what Charlie Valentine said was true, Roza was here and there, everywhere and nowhere. And if Finn hadn’t ridden the Night Mare, hadn’t glimpsed the gaps for himself, he would have thought Charlie was crazy.

  But he wasn’t riding the mare, and he had no one else to trust. He almost screamed at the unfairness, at the injustice—the blind in charge of finding the hidden, sure, that made so much sense. Still, he walked from Charlie Valentine’s house to the main road, racking his brains for some way into another world. The mare had taken him past the Corderos’ and into the graveyard, and he had seen the mists rising and pooling, coalescing into vaguely human shapes. Ghosts? Maybe that was where the skin of the world thinned, and he could slip through.