Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Wanting to change the subject, I said, “What is there to like about fishing?”

  “Quiet. Peaceful. Lets you get your thoughts together.”

  It seemed to me that his life was already peaceful and quiet, seeing as he didn’t use a cell phone or the Internet. Maybe being a mailman was more stressful than I envisioned. “I packed you some carrots and celery sticks.” At home, I had poked through the bag of food he was taking along and felt like I had no choice but to contribute something healthy. Inside were potato chips, marshmallows, candy, hot dogs, hot dog buns, doughnuts, and beer.

  “See if the fish like them,” Grandpa Jack said.

  “Vegetables are good for you,” I emphasized. This was fixing up to be a major battle between us, and I was determined to win it.

  “I can’t see that my forebears beat their way out of the caves and built civilization just so I could go back to eating roots and leaves.” Grandpa Jack looked at me ruefully as we pulled over into a rest area for someone who wanted to go sixty miles an hour around this awful road. The person zoomed past us. “I ate one of those spinach chips by mistake. That’s enough green for the month.”

  Soon we dipped down the scary slope into the Gap. He turned right on a road before the campgrounds. Past a block of houses in shambles, he went left to a commercial area. The stores on Jacobo were nothing grand, but these were downright seedy. Bail bonds, bars, pawnshops, a trashy motel in lurid pink, a strip joint and adult toy store, it looked like the kind of place where one might get knifed in an alley. We waited at the light and pulled onto the next block, which had more of the same. Grandpa Jack nodded to a store. “That’s Botanic Wonderments, the Coopers’ store.”

  It was a darling shop in this sea of sleaze. Pinched between a pizza place and an empty business with graffiti on the wall, Botanic Wonderments had pretty white curtains framing windows stacked with candles and greenery. Wind chimes hung around the entryway and made sweet tinkles in the breeze. Too early to be open, it was dark inside. “I’ll have to go in there sometime,” I said.

  “I like their store. They get a lot of business. Oriel brought in the baby last week while I was dropping off the mail and she’s just another Cooper, smiles and dark hair and happy.”

  I thought of what Adriel had said, that there was no Jaden and that had been Zakia who helped me home as a little girl. It was preposterous, even if I had made the mistake at Hubbard’s of mixing them up. They did look the same, but still, one had a mole and one did not! And the hair was different shades. “Who is Oriel?”

  “Oriel Cooper, she’s married to Nateso. They had Liliana last year.”

  “Have you ever seen Zakia and all of his brothers in the same place? They really don’t ever come home here to the Gap?”

  “No, not ever. So the family just takes vacations to them. Good thing I don’t see them all at once, I wouldn’t know one from the other.” He turned right, which led back into residential. The road curved along this way and that, the houses few and far between. The mail truck slowed at a driveway on the left, where he turned in at five mailboxes stacked one on top of the other.

  “Which one is theirs?” I asked.

  “The bottom four are Coopers and the top one is Kreeling.” He gestured out the window to a white house with two stories. Trees drooped over the roof. “That one is the Kreeling house: one part of the family in the basement, another part on the second. Quiet people, real serious. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a Kreeling crack a smile, not even the girl. She’s about sixteen, seventeen.”

  “Maybe she’d have a better sense of humor if she was around people her own age at school,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Grandpa Jack said. “Or maybe she’d be just the same, since that’s who she is. Nothing wrong with being serious. Now this next house,” he said as we came upon a smaller one through a thick line of trees, “is Barney’s. He lives there with his great-nephew or second cousin or God knows how they’re related. I can’t remember. The kid is named Alex and he’s fifteen or so. I bet he’ll split come eighteen. This place doesn’t make him happy.”

  “Aren’t we pulling in?” I asked when we rumbled past the driveway.

  “No, we’re meeting up at the end of their road. So this third house, the big one there, that’s where Nateso, Oriel, and Liliana live. Well, they’ve got the second floor. Nateso grew up in Spooner and wouldn’t dream of leaving. The first floor is a bunch of other relatives. I can’t keep them straight except for Neala. She’s a relative from back East, came here about three years ago. Pretty woman. She keeps the younguns who help in the store in line. Nateso and Oriel do the shop four days a week and Neala does the rest.” We passed the driveway and went through more trees. On the right side was a fourth house.

  “And even more Coopers,” I said. There were bicycles spilled all over the lawn, which hadn’t been mowed recently. The houses looked old and somewhat humble, even the biggest ones.

  “Even more Coopers. Nateso’s sister lives there with her brood. The husband took off a few years ago, always a flighty guy, and left her with six of their kids under the age of ten and the two he’d had from some other relationship. But here she gets all the support she needs and she’s got a cousin from Montana who gets paid to help out with the younger ones-”

  “She had six kids in less than ten years?” I asked. “Didn’t she think it might be a good idea to stop sooner than that if the guy was flighty?”

  “Well, she didn’t mean to have that many. Three sets of twins. Oh, did she want a girl! That last set finally had one, little Nescha. She’s five now. Boys coming out of Vanya’s ears and the joke is on her, she says. Nescha lives up trees and in mud puddles, and her twin Cavary, he’s the one who prefers stuffed animals and staying clean. Now some of the older boys I can tell apart. Mostly. The first set is identical down to the last freckle, I don’t have a clue which one is which, but the second set isn’t, and the two half-siblings look a little different so I don’t struggle quite so much. So that’s the first and second floor of that house, and the basement has some other Coopers that rotate too frequently to keep track.”

  The last house was only one story. “So this is where Hoopie lives. That’s Lotus and Zakia’s father. Their mom has gone to help in Montana with another branch of the family for a time.”

  Appalled, I said, “But Lotus is so young!” It was one thing for my mother to leave me for nine months when I was almost eighteen; it was quite another to leave a twelve-year-old.

  “Oh, soon enough Lotus will probably go there, too. She’s not hurting for relatives and she’s a solitary sort anyway. Loves to say hello to me and then loves to go off to her own thoughts.” The mail truck pulled up outside that house and stopped. “The basement of that place is converted into a little schoolhouse for them. Or maybe I’m mixing it up with one of the other houses. And out there, where you can just barely see it, that’s where Zakia has his own place.”

  I squinted at what was practically a shed in a cluster of dark trees. “You can’t be serious. That’s the size of a postage stamp!”

  Grandpa Jack pulled out his bags as I slid from the mail truck. Nodding to the shed, he said, “When I was his age, I would have loved it. Some privacy. It’s wired up for electricity. He has to come back to the house to shower and wash his clothes, but he’s got a little bathroom attached to it, too. Lotus now, she was just telling me that she might like a shed of her own.” Once his bags were sorted about his shoulders, he started off in the direction of the shed. I came along with the bag of food, thinking this was bordering on child abuse.

  A man about Grandpa Jack’s age was sitting on a lawn chair at a trailhead just beyond the shed. His hair in a gray horseshoe about his head, I figured this was Barney. His hands rested on his big belly as he looked up to the trees. At the sound of our footsteps, he turned and called out to us. Grandpa Jack introduced me and Barney shook my hand. But it felt genuine, when all of the handshaking at school just felt like a covert attempt at behavioral
modification. He got up with a grunt and collapsed his lawn chair to carry it along. The door to the shed rattled open and Zakia put his head out. “Hi! You going fishing?”

  “No, I’m just dropping off Grandpa Jack,” I said. “Are you going?”

  He stepped outside and brushed a hand through his curly hair. I preferred shorter hair on guys, but the slightly shaggier look worked for Zakia. If he ever got a crew cut, it would be a shame. We must have woken him, as he looked a little bleary-eyed. All he had on were a pair of sweatpants and thick gray socks. “I’m helping in the store this morning. They need some muscle.”

  He definitely had that to offer, I thought. Grandpa Jack and Barney sorted through their things, mumbling about which split of the trail to take to get to the lake faster. Multi-colored light was glowing within the shed around Zakia’s head. Wanting this tiny place to be nice, I said, “May I see your room?”

  “Sure,” Zakia said through a yawn.

  The glows of color were coming from holiday lights strung high on the walls and looped three times around the shed. I relaxed a little to see that this was a cute room, if small. A twin bed was pushed to the wall, the blankets askew upon it. A bookshelf was packed with novels and comics. There was a miniature refrigerator, a space heater blowing gustily, and a television set on a little table. The table was bracing open the door to the bathroom permanently, but I guessed that didn’t matter when he lived alone.

  The room was filled with his good earth scent. Breathing it in, I gestured up to the lights. “Are you a Christmas hound?”

  “Actually, no. I just like how they look,” Zakia said. He picked up some dirty clothes in the corner and dropped them into a hamper.

  I liked the lights as well. It gave the place a cheery, friendly glow. This wasn’t as bad as I’d thought from the outside. He even had a window, which overlooked a shadowy place among the trees. Leaning against the doorway, Zakia said, “There really isn’t much to see, I guess.”

  “You’d rather live here than in your house?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Zakia said at once. “I can play music as loudly as I want and it won’t bug anybody. Never have to wait for the bathroom and I don’t have to share the remote. This place is all me.”

  “Doesn’t it get lonely?”

  He laughed. “Hang out on this street much and you’ll be wanting a spell of peace soon enough. Coopers can make quite a ruckus.”

  Barely holding up two tipping lines of books on the shelf was a picture of Zakia and Lotus. I picked it up and spread my fingers to brace the books while I looked more closely at the shot. Behind the two of them was the reservoir, or perhaps it was the lake that Grandpa Jack was going to in order to fish. Dressed in swimwear, both looked happy. This was a recent shot, Lotus looking no younger than the age she was now. I put it back on the shelf and said, “Don’t you have a picture of all of you?”

  “No,” Zakia said. “There’s probably one in the house somewhere. We aren’t big on picture taking in our family.”

  “Think it steals the soul?”

  “Just can’t everyone to stand still long enough. Like herding cats.”

  Wondering how this handsome, friendly guy couldn’t have a soul, I asked, “What are all of your brothers’ names?”

  He spied a sock on the floor and whisked it up to the hamper with his foot. “The oldest is Jeremiah, and then there’s Brecken and Eliseo, Jaden and yours truly. They’re closer in age, those four, than they are to me. The girls are Willow, Laurel, Ivy, Sage, and Lotus. Any reason you’re interested?”

  “You just have such a huge family,” I said, floundering to find a way to ask what I really wanted to know. I picked through the books and saw nothing unusual or telling. “When are you going to vacation to see them all?”

  “Next summer. I might stay in Montana for a while, send a few cousins back in my place to work the shop. They all want to see California.”

  “Do you want to see Montana?”

  He grinned lazily. “Nah. But we’ve got family all over the country, so I can pick and choose where I want to go. It just depends on my mood.” Outside, the men called to us. We walked over to say goodbye and I reminded Grandpa Jack about his carrots. He made a face and the two headed out on the trail. I watched them go.

  When I turned around to go back to the mail truck, Zakia had changed to jeans and a T-shirt. He closed the door to his shed and said, “I’m off to work.”

  “Do you want a ride?” I offered. “I’m going back that way. Or I’m going to try. My sense of direction is three degrees above miserable and two left of clueless.”

  He brightened. “That would be great! You should come in and see the shop. Maybe you’ll find something that you like.”

  As we walked back to the road, I realized what had been missing from his room. “If you’re homeschooled, where are your textbooks? I didn’t see anything academic in there.”

  “Did you look under the bed?”

  “No.”

  “There you go then,” Zakia said, and he laughed. I laughed along, even though I was embarrassed at my prodding. It just made no sense to me how the Graystones didn’t like one of the nicest guys I’d ever met. We climbed into the mail truck and I made a U-turn on the road to go back. It was still early, but people were waking up in the houses. Lights were on and a door of one house opened to release a tumble of dark-haired children. They raced around the side to the backyard, although I slowed in case any sprinted for the road.

  “That girl sort of looks like Lotus,” I commented about the last child out the door. “Same hair, similar face.”

  “She’s a Cooper,” Zakia said. “Our genes overpower city folks’ genes every time. Lotus should be back tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Out camping somewhere.”

  “Alone?” I cried.

  “Of course alone. No one else wants to tromp around the way she does, dodging poison oak and clipping plants. She’s having a great time, wherever she is.”

  This family! “But she’s too young to be on her own like that. Don’t you worry about something happening to her?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like kidnapping!”

  “Pity the kidnapper who tries to take on Lotus. She’s a spitfire. He’ll have his butt handed to him in five seconds flat.”

  That was a horrifically naïve attitude. We coasted past the other houses. Outside the Kreeling house at the end was a girl in her mid-teens dressed in jogging clothes. Her hair was white blonde and pulled back in a ponytail. The muscles in her arms made her look like a bodybuilder. She was stretching her calves against the side of the house. Looking over to see who was going by, her dark eyes pierced through the window. Zakia nodded politely to her, and she nodded back.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Silea Kreeling,” Zakia said.

  I had the sense that he did not like her very much. It wasn’t hatred by any means, but there was reserve in his voice where none had been before. Maybe she had turned him down for a date, although I couldn’t see why. “She’s built.”

  “Yeah, she takes her physical training very seriously,” said Zakia.

  “Is she planning to join the Army?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t really chat much. The Kreelings stick to themselves.”

  Still appalled at the thought of a preteen roving around alone in the wilderness, I turned past the mailboxes. These people needed some serious intervention on child rearing. When I checked the rearview mirror, Silea was jogging out the driveway and turning to go in the other direction. She didn’t listen to music as she ran, which surprised me. I thought everyone did that.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I queried. “What do you think about the Graystones?”

  A look of dislike passed over Zakia’s face quickly, but then his features settled back to amiable. “I barely know them. Why?”

  “Adriel is a hard read for me. The other guys . . . live their lives out
loud, I guess I would say. But he’s reserved. Kishi is more outgoing, but I’ve only met her once.” Sighing, for stealth was not my strong suit, I said, “You grimaced when I said their name. What? Is it just conflicting pheromones or something?”

  “Yes. We have conflicting pheromones,” Zakia said with a snort. Unrolling his window, he put his feet out. “Haven’t you ever met someone and just not liked them for no reason? You can’t even say what it is. They just bug you.”

  “Yeah, now and again.”

  “We bug each other. Don’t worry about it. Adriel and I aren’t about to have a fistfight in the hallways of Spooner High. We just maintain some distance and everyone is happy.” Zakia grinned out to the trees and motioned for me to turn. “But if we did fight, I’d win. He’s a scrawny dude.”

  Adriel wasn’t as built as Zakia, but he was far from scrawny. “He’s nice.”

  “Of course he’s nice. To you. Your pheromones are lovely.”

  I laughed. “Thank you. I made them myself.”

  “Don’t go past it!” he exclaimed, and I hit the brakes just in time to make the last spot at the curb by the store. This place was so rundown, all but the Botanic Wonderments store. I locked the doors of the mail truck, even though there wasn’t anything tempting inside to steal. Watching this in bewilderment, Zakia said, “You lock the doors?”

  “I’m from L.A.,” I said.

  “And the significance?”

  “There you lock your doors.”

  “Are you in L.A. right now?”

  I followed him to the door, where he produced a key and pushed it into the lock. “Obviously not.”

  “Then why did you lock them?”

  Now it was my turn to grimace, since he was being a pill. I didn’t want to insult the place he lived with a comment of how dangerous it looked. This was his home. “Force of habit.” Seeing his smile widen, I rolled my eyes. Then I exclaimed, “You didn’t have any breakfast!”