The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Part One: The Space Capsule

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part Two: The Bowhunter

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The boy sat tight up against the passenger door. There was something breathing on the backseat. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d climbed in out of the rain. He’d been too thankful, in too much of a hurry. But the shape of it had grown on his senses. From the corner of his eye he could see a pile of blankets. There — it moved! Something or someone.

  “What’s your name again?” said the driver.

  Had he told him his name? He didn’t think so.

  “You got a name or what?”

  Donovan. Dono.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dono,” said the boy.

  “You don’t know your own name?” The driver burst out laughing, his belly jiggling against the steering wheel.

  Under the laughter, Dono heard a low moan from whatever was buried in those blankets. He grasped the door handle. He had to reach Bee somehow. She’d be worried sick. Bee . . . Yes . . . Beatrice. She didn’t call him Dono. Who was he to her? Turn. That’s what she called him. Turn.

  “Sorry, kid. Nobody’s turning.”

  “What?” He hadn’t said it out loud, had he?

  “Too late for that.”

  Dono held his breath and stared straight into the darkness beyond the twin cones of light.

  Are you.

  “What’s that?”

  The boy shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. Why were his thoughts leaking out of him like this?

  There was something he needed to remember. It was the start of a question — as much as he could recall. Behind it was a whole world of questions.

  “You’re a quiet one,” said the driver. “Strong, silent type, eh?”

  Donovan shook his head. He couldn’t think — mustn’t even try, not here.

  “You don’t look like a ball player.”

  Had they talked about baseball?

  “I mean with the long hair and all. What — you tie it back like a girl with a piece of string?” The man waited for a response. Got none. “You listening?” he said. Then he wobbled the steering wheel a bit — a power trip — just to show who was boss in this speeding car on this lonely stretch of highway on this moonless night. “Hey, a little company’d be nice. What do ya say, Dono or Dunno or whatever it is you call yourself?”

  “Thanks,” said the boy. “I’m just —”

  “Boring as paint,” said the man. He burst out laughing again. “Hey, just joshin’ with you, kid,” he said, and punched Donovan in the arm.

  “Ow!”

  “Whoa! Just a love tap, slugger.”

  Donovan reached up to rub his shoulder. He ached all over.

  “Something wrong with you, kid?”

  Yes. That much he knew. Something was very wrong.

  “Just . . .”

  “Just what? You on something?”

  A good question.

  “Gotta say, though, you got one helluva pair of shoulders on you! How’s a guy supposed to know you’re a wimp?”

  “I’m not —”

  “A sissy-boy?”

  “I’m not myself, okay? Do you get that?”

  “Well, forgive me,” said the man. “Forgive me for picking up your sorry ass in the rain. Forgive me for having a warm car and a big heart.” He patted Donovan’s knee and chuckled. He left his hand there, one hundredth of a second too long.

  Dono slithered away from the man’s touch and began to weigh his chances. He’d had some tae kwan do. The guy was large but out of shape. He imagined he could take him if things got bad. Then again, he’d missed the class where you learned how to defend yourself in a speeding car.

  Behind him, the blankets shuddered again. Just a drunk, he told himself. Sleeping it off. A drunk . . .

  Then there was a low popping noise and a smell wafted forward from the backseat. Jesus! Dono pressed his face against the window as if trying to suck air from the darkness on the other side of the rain-splattered glass.

  The driver chuckled. “God, I hate this job,” he said. He shook his fat head. Donovan stared out the corner of his eye at him, his face red in the dashboard lights. Red? He looked at the dashboard. What kind of car had red dashboard lights? The flesh of the man’s neck pressed against his collar, sagging over the frayed edge of it like dough left too long to rise. He turned his head Donovan’s way and smiled wearily.

  There was a tatty green pine tree hanging from the rearview mirror doing nothing to quell the stench. The little paper conifer wobbled dangerously, as if the car’s wheels were straddling some fault line in the earth and the Malibu was about to fly apart into a million shards of steel and glass and hapless humanity.

  See. That was part of it. Something he wanted Bee to see?

  “See what?” said the driver. “You see anything out there?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Man, you are one weird customer,” said the driver.

  Donovan closed his eyes. He couldn’t take much more of this. He was so tired. Too tired to keep his guard up. Words were seeping from him in a slow drip. What was he doing? How did he get here? He searched the empty highway ahead. He was running from something. That had to be it. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw only darkness out the rear window, and below it the darkness of something under wraps, something still breathing but smelling as if it had stopped.

  Donovan faced the front and gripped the door handle more tightly. Dared to close his eyes.

  “Here’s the deal, Dono, my man. I got a job to do, okay? I don’t choose the work. I just do my job. Wouldn’t hurt to liven things up a bit. Tell me a bit about yourself. Your plans for the future.” That made the man laugh again — laugh himself into a coughing fit. “What do you say, boy?”

  Donovan squeezed his eyes more tightly shut. Saw lightning. Tried to shake it away, which only made his head hurt. Are you? There it was again: the question.

  “Am I what?” said the driver, irritated now. Donovan clammed up. His mouth was closed; his eyes were closed. He resisted covering his ears, but the desire was there to make himself inaccessible. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

  “Well, if that’s the way you want it,�
�� said the driver. “Have it your way.” And then the car started to slow down.

  Dono’s eyes popped open. There was nothing but forest on either side of the road. “There’s this little rest stop up ahead,” the man said. “Don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to relieving myself.” He scratched at the wattles that hung from his neck as the speedometer needle drifted to the left. “Maybe you could give me a hand, eh?” he said, and then threw back his head and laughed.

  “Oh!” said Donovan.

  “That all you got to say? ‘Oh’?”

  It was the other thing he needed to tell Bee, just as soon as he could.

  “I asked you a question, son.”

  “Shut up,” said Donovan.

  “What’s that?”

  Something trembled back to life inside Donovan, some struggling true piece of himself. “Forget about it,” he said.

  “I’m not hearing this.”

  “Yeah, sorry, you are.”

  “I did not hear anyone in this vehicle say for-get-a-bout-it.”

  There was a silence ripe with anger and resentment — the car shook with it. Any minute now it will all end, thought Donovan. The earth will open up and swallow us.

  The man was breathing hard. “Ohhhh-kay,” he said, drawing out the syllables, “you asked for it.”

  Suddenly the car swerved onto the shoulder and shuddered to a stop.

  “How’s this? Close enough to nowhere for you?”

  Donovan nodded slowly. “Nowhere’s good,” he said.

  And then before he could even loosen his seat belt, the guy was shoving at him with thick fingers and meaty arms, shouting at him, swearing at him. “The great outdoors, asshole,” he said. “It’s all yours.” Finally the door shot open and Donovan fell out onto the gravel shoulder. The man threw the car into gear and started to pull away, howling with anger and frustration.

  “Hey!”

  Donovan twisted his foot free from the car and rolled out of its path as the back tires slewed in an arc toward him. The Chevy squealed to a stop, making the passenger-side door slam shut — thunk! Then the car swerved, churning up gravel, and shimmied back onto the rain-slick pavement.

  Donovan sat in a heap on the cold shoulder, his foot aching, sprained or worse. The Chevy fishtailed down the highway, the horn blaring triumphantly, as if the driver had just won the world championship of fat losers. He was perhaps the saddest primate on the planet at that moment, with the exception of the boy he had left sitting in the dirt.

  The car’s engine roared, then the Chevy suddenly squealed to a stop. Donovan looked up. The back left passenger door of the car opened — right in the middle of the highway — and out of it shambled the thing that had been on the back seat. It rose on two legs under its shabby greatcoat of blankets, backlit in red. A thick and seemingly headless figure, stumbling, hobbling, and lurching toward the other side of the highway. The back door of the car slammed shut, and again the driver took off. Dono watched the faltering figure reach the edge of the embankment, sway momentarily, and then seem to fall down the slope out of sight, lost in darkness.

  The Chevy’s engine feebled itself into the distance, until it was a sound smaller than the slow wind shivering the trees and the din of the amphibious life all along the ditch, peeping their little hearts out. Donovan listened. How shrill it was. How urgent. A fog rolled in until there was nothing left of sound but frogs and the wet-lipped wind.

  The boy lay tight up against the side rail of the gurney. Surely they had not placed him there like that, pressed so hard against the railing? His face was contorted, as it must have been at the moment of impact. What had he seen in that blinding instant? Bee shook the image from her head, rested her hand on her heart, which was beating out of control. Calm down, she told herself. Don’t try to imagine. Don’t go there.

  Be here.

  She stepped closer to the bed. She reached out tentatively and rested her hand lightly over Donovan’s chest, let it glide down like a feather until it hovered over his heart. It was there, beating, a survivor in an earthquake buried under the rubble of his broken rib cage.

  “I’m here, Turn,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  Monitors beeped, the room buzzed, ticked, clicked. There was a screen with green calligraphy that said the same thing over and over: you are alive, you are alive, you are alive. The intensivist had been less certain than the machine. Donovan was only barely alive. Unstable. Which meant she was allowed to be there, one of those good news/bad news things. The good news was she could stay as long as she wanted; the bad news was that might not be very long.

  She sobbed involuntarily. Sniffed. Wiped her nose. Get a grip, girl.

  “Turner, it’s Bee.”

  Here was the medical rationale: because there was no guarantee he’d pull through, the benefits of having someone there with him — someone close — outweighed the distraction. And she was the only someone they could find so far. The cops were trying to track down Trish and Scott in the wilds of Algonquin Park. No, Scott isn’t his father, Bee had explained. So they were trying to track down his father, as well, who wasn’t answering his phone. Not a huge surprise. Until they found one parent or another, there was just Bee.

  Bee and Turn.

  Trish was his emergency contact number. The cop who had spoken to Bee had been scrolling through Donovan’s phone looking for someone with the same last name as Donovan. There were no Turners other than Trish in his contacts. So she’d explained how Donovan had dropped his father’s name, McGeary.

  The cop scrolled to M. “Allen I. McGeary?” Bee had nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t pick up,” she’d said before she could stop herself.

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  The cops had found Bee because of her text message to him, sent at 10:46, sitting in its little white balloon on Donovan’s cracked cell phone.

  Where are you?

  She looked at him, felt for him ever so gingerly through the thin cloth of the blanket. “Where are you?” she said.

  The duty nurse’s name was Geraldine Ocampo. “Just Gerry is fine.” And then Just Gerry smiled. “He was calling for you, honey.”

  “What?”

  The night clerk had helped Bee out of her coat. She was out of breath and suddenly someone who had forgotten how to take off a coat. Then the clerk had handed Bee over to Just Gerry.

  “Bee, right?” said Gerry. “It’s one of the things he keeps saying.”

  “He can talk?”

  Gerry wagged her head from side to side, not wanting to give the wrong impression. “Only sort of. Sounds. They come out of his mouth, and one of those sounds is you.”

  Bee covered her face.

  “You sure you want to do this, honey? It isn’t pretty.”

  Bee recovered. Nodded. “Yes.”

  Gerry smiled. “Reach out to him, okay? Just good stuff. Encourage him.” Then she guided Bee into the semidarkness of the ICU and left her there with a pat on the shoulder.

  So Bee sat on a hard chair, by a bed that looked like it was designed by NASA, and although it wasn’t that cold, she found herself shivering and wished that the night clerk hadn’t taken her coat after all.

  “Ahhh . . . Ahhh . . . Urrr . . .”

  His cracked lips moved and sounds came out. Bee gently squeezed his hand — the right one, which was scratched but apparently not broken. The left was in a cast. So were his legs. He was so broken. She bent closer. The chair scraped the linoleum, letting out a squeal. She flinched. His face did not seem to register the intrusive noise.

  “I’m here, Turn. It’s me.”

  Nothing. The slightest twist of his face, which quickly became a rictus of pain.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  Nothing.

  A web of tubes carried liquids to Donovan’s battered body, carried liquids away. There was so much of him that was liquid now. He was a wineskin. His stro
ng bones broken; his muscled arms and legs flaccid. She imagined what was left whole of him as a tiny figure on a raft, rising and falling on a dark and swollen sea in the cavern of his body.

  She looked around the dim, small room — too small — with all its machinery and blinking lights. It felt like a space capsule. A floating world not of the earth anymore but suspended above it, held in the planet’s gravitational pull. She wondered that there weren’t straps to hold him tethered to the bed lest he float away.

  “Hu . . . Huuuuuu . . . Huuuun . . .”

  She jerked in her chair. She had slipped away. She stroked his nearby hand.

  Just Gerry had said to talk to him. Soothe. Comfort. Just Gerry was an optimist. She wore a little gold cross on a chain. A believer. Lucky her.

  “Can you hear me, Donovan?”

  His face contorted in a sudden paroxysm.

  “It’s all right, Turn. You’re in good hands.”

  Right.

  The ventilator was not hooked up. No intubation, which is why he could make any kind of sound at all. They hadn’t shoved a tube down his throat through his vocal cords. “The doc who’s on tonight isn’t big on unnecessary extras,” Gerry had said. “The RT will be monitoring him.”

  “RT?”

  “The respiratory guy.”

  So Turn was breathing all by himself, which was something. An important something. He might not walk again, but he could breathe. She tried to imagine Donovan content just to breathe. Donovan, who lived to move fast, to hurl himself at things: fly balls and flung Frisbees. Her family had once had a long-legged mutt; Donovan was like that. Just walking with him was a workout.

  “Ah . . . Are . . . Are . . .”

  His mouth curled in. His tongue appeared, attempting to lick his lips. On the bedside table there was a cup with water in it, and Q-tips. Bee took one and dipped it into the water, then gently brushed the wet Q-tip along his lips. It was something she’d done when Nana D’Amato was in the hospital. His whole face seemed to move toward the moisture with the blind sense of a plant. Was it just her imagination? She dipped the Q-tip again and brought it to his lips.

  “Are . . . you . . .”

  She stopped, drew back the Q-tip.

  “Am I what?”

  “Are . . . you . . .”

  “It’s me, Turn. What do you want to say?”