“‘There’ what?”
“I just got rid of them. No more smoking.”
“Goddammit—”
“It’s bad for you, Pete.”
“Bullshit. You keep me healthy and you know it.”
“That doesn’t mean I should work overtime at it. It’s neither my responsibility nor my duty. I’m not your doctor. And I don’t want to be around it, either.”
“I’m going to have to quit all over again!” Shit—bitten nails, piano-wire nerves, constant craving.
“Too bad. I’m not taking the blame for your addictions, either.”
“Oh, for—” I stopped. What was the use?
We walked through the city. George stayed ahead of us, head inclined toward the road. I think he’d stopped crying.
“Ariel, what are we going to do about him?”
“Leave him alone. He’ll be okay.”
“If you say so.” I scratched my cheek. Sweat had begun to pour from me in the morning’s growing heat and lessening humidity, and it stung where the arrow had brushed past. My shirt—about which Ariel had said nothing—was soaked in the back, damp as a washrag on my shoulders where the pack straps pressed. I shrugged out of them and turned the pack so the H-frame was braced against my stomach, leaning back and walking with knees bent to offset the weight. Holding it with one hand, I untied the flap and flipped it open. The arrow had dented my small first-aid kit and stopped against a hunting knife. I pulled the diamond-shaped head and broken shaft out and threw it onto the road. There was a nylon patch kit in the top left pocket of my pack; I’d fix the hole later.
The cigarette carton wasn’t in the pack.
I reached in and tossed out the peppermint candies one at a time. “Fair’s fair,” I said.
Ariel snorted but said nothing, though she glanced at the candy on the road behind us.
*
George was walking with us again. He seemed all right but wouldn’t talk, other than to give perfunctory answers. My feet throbbed and I was unhappy with our progress. Malachi was probably two days ahead of us by now. Maybe three. Shit.
We were out of Charlotte by noon. At the north end of town we came upon a young woman reading a hardcover book on a bus bench in the bright sunlight. She squinted up at us as we drew near.
I’d dug out Don Quixote and was reading it to Ariel. The woman gave a quiet little gasp and folded her book, marking her place with a finger. I followed suit. She looked at Ariel, looked briefly at me, and back to Ariel. She rose from the bench and stood before us, book dangling at her side. The clear plastic over the cover showed it to be a library book. She opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head as if fully expecting us not to be there when she looked again. Her shoulder-length brown hair fanned out as her head turned from left to right. She watched, mouth open, as we passed. I turned and nodded politely to her, but I don’t think she even saw me. She was staring, of course, at Ariel. Gawkers, everywhere, gawkers. We walked on.
A few minutes later Ariel said, without looking back, “She’s following us.”
“Who? That girl on the bench?”
She nodded. I glanced back. She was a quarter mile behind us, walking with the book held absently in her hand. She still stared at Ariel. “Wonder what she wants?”
“Taken with my awe-inspiring magnificence, no doubt.” She dragged a hoof on the asphalt. Sparks scattered.
“Hmph.” I glanced back again. “Maybe if we ignore her she’ll go away.”
We tried it. I read from Don Quixote for an hour before looking back again. She was still there. “That’s it,” I announced, putting the book away. “I’m not being shadowed all the way to New York. Let’s wait and find out what she wants.”
“Sure. But I can tell you what it is.” Her expression was smug. “It’s me.”
“Why, of course. What else could it be?” I coughed into my hand. We waited as the young woman caught up to us. She looked faintly embarrassed but said nothing, just stood before us.
“Is there something we can do for you?” I asked.
She flushed. “I’d like—I’d like to come with you.” She smiled. Bright silver points glittered in her brown eyes.
I raised an eyebrow. “To come with us?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve waited a long time for something like this to come my way.” She looked longingly at Ariel. “You’re a unicorn.”
“Heavens,” Ariel said dryly. “How astute.”
“And you talk.”
She snorted. “Good trick, huh? You’d never guess it took two people to operate this thing.” She turned sideways. “Look—no seams.
“I’ve never seen anything like you. I mean, I’ve seen magical animals before, but never a unicorn, never anything so … so …”
“Beautiful? Noble, pure, that sort of thing?”
The young woman nodded.
“Okay,” I broke in. “So you’re both members of the Unicorn Admiration Society. I don’t want to seem rude, and I’m glad you’ve finally seen a unicorn, but we’re in a hurry.”
“Fine. I don’t need anything but what I have with me.”
“I don’t think you understand. We’re traveling together. The three of us.”
“Oh, no. I’m not letting an opportunity like this get away. I won’t get another chance like this again. I know.”
“We’re going to New York,” I said.
“Fine.”
“It’s dangerous. You’d slow us down.”
“I can take care of myself.”
George followed the conversation like an observer at a ping-pong match. I was getting angry. Who the hell was she to come out of the clear blue sky and demand to go with us? “Look,” I said. “I’m not even going to argue about it. You can’t come with us.”
Ariel stepped forward slowly. The sun was just past overhead and her hooves spearpointed the light with polished chrome newness. “Child,” she said—the young woman looked surprised at the word; she was at least my age—“you can follow us, but you’ll never have me.”
Her expression showed she didn’t know what Ariel was talking about.
“Try to touch me,” said Ariel. “And you’ll understand.”
She reached toward Ariel’s muzzle, a child reaching for the shiny, golden ornament on a high branch of a Christmas tree. Her hand stopped five inches from the side of Ariel’s face. She frowned and pushed her elbow, but the hand only trembled and went no farther.
“You can’t have your dreams,” said Ariel. “You’d only be wishful and frustrated if you came along.”
“I don’t understand,” George said. “I can touch her no problem.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “So can I.”
“But why …?” Her round-faced features drew in puzzlement.
“You have to be pure to touch a unicorn,” Ariel whispered. She looked intently at the frowning young woman. “I see what you need,” she said, “and because of all you desire, I am for the first time in my life sorry this is so.” Something seemed to pass between them; Ariel seemed to understand this total stranger as if she’d been inside her head. I didn’t follow it too well. But the woman made a cutting motion in the air with her library book and said, “Okay, rules are rules and I can’t touch you. But I’ve waited ever since I can remember for magic—real magic, not this spell stuff or bone throwing by candlelight—and I can’t let it walk by without me, not after it’s passed right next to me in the middle of the afternoon. I just can’t.” She jerked her head to me. “Look, I’m sorry if I’m coming on too strong. But you try reading fantasy books all your life—have a Bradbury dream walk by your bus bench on a hot day, with everything you’ve ever wanted tied up in a neat bundle—and see if you wouldn’t do almost anything to have it.”
“Ariel is my friend,” I said. Something about her tone bothered me; it had that religious-fanatic tinge. “Nobody ‘has’ her, dreams or not.”
Ariel enunciated each wo
rd clearly. “I won’t be worshiped. Not by anybody, ever.”
George’s face looked as if he were squinting at a bright light. “How come I can touch her and you can touch her, but she can’t? I still don’t get it.”
“Aah—” I raised a hand, and dropped it quickly. “Because you’ve never been fucked, and I’ve never been fucked, and she has.”
She flushed deep red. “I’m not ashamed of it. And my name is Shaughnessy, if you’d like to know.”
“I wouldn’t like to know. Look, this is crazy. We have to go.” George still stared at me, open-mouthed.
“I’ll follow you,” she warned. “You can’t keep me from doing that.”
I thought about it. Short of violent means, I guess I couldn’t. I sighed. Why did I always get the nuts? If we kept collecting people, Malachi would have a caravan strung out behind him from New York to Atlanta.
I frowned at her. “Let’s go,” I told Ariel and George. George looked uncertain but came along, Ariel cast me a baleful glance. I stared back until she looked away.
I turned my back to Shaughnessy’s look and started walking. After a hundred yards I glanced back. She was just behind us, library book in hand. I turned back before she saw me looking and opened the Don Quixote to where I’d left off. I began reading.
“I don’t want to hear it right now, Pete,” said Ariel. There was something in her tone I couldn’t quite read, a flavor between sullenness and melancholy. “Maybe later.”
I handed the book to George and he put it in its pocket. After ten minutes I remembered to ask George what he’d got away with from the mall.
He turned away from where he’d been looking back toward Shaughnessy. “Huh?”
I snuck a glance. She was treading along about five hundred feet behind us, book open, eating an apple. I wondered if she’d had it with her, or what? “I said, what did you end up bringing back from the mall?”
“Oh.” He grinned, sending large quantities of freckles closer to his forehead. “I got away with some pretty neat stuff. Here—” He opened Ariel’s pack, excusing himself to her. An arm went in up to the elbow and came out with a package. “New boot laces,” he said. “But you got new boots.”
“That’s okay. I can always use them when the others wear out. They will before too long, I’m sure.” I was conscious of what’s-her-name behind us.
George tossed them back into the pack and pulled out a Frisbee. “I thought it’d give us something to do when we got bored,” he explained to my heaven-cast gaze.
In went the Frisbee. Out came a wind-up Timex. “I want to put it on but I don’t know what time to set it for,” he said.
“It’s two o’clock,” said Ariel.
He brightened and pulled the button with his teeth, then set the dial at two and wound the watch. It made a noise like a lone cricket.
“Didn’t you get yourself clothes other than the ones you have on?” I asked while he rummaged again.
“Nope.” He had to reach up on tiptoe and pull down on the pocket to get into Ariel’s pack. She complained that the straps cut into her side. I made her stop and bend down so George could reach in for more things. She grumbled to herself but complied. George pulled things out and we resumed walking, Ariel dragging a trail of sparks behind front left and back right hooves. I wondered if Shaughnessy saw that. Was Shaughnessy a first name or a last?
George tossed me a brown paper bag. Things inside clinked when I caught it. The paper crackled comfortably. “I looked at your blowgun darts and saw how you made them,” he said. “Maybe you can use that stuff.”
I looked into the bag. About a dozen pieces of foot-long steel wire. A pair of wirecutters (I already had a pair in the pack, but George didn’t know that). A half-dozen strands of heavy plastic-beaded necklaces, the kind that are supposed to look like pearls and don’t. “Hey, great stuff. Thanks, George!”
He nodded, pleased I was pleased. “I wasn’t sure how big the beads should be, so I got different sizes. I got the wire from an umbrella.”
“Good thinking.” That had never occurred to me; until then I had used either coathangers or piano wire.
The final item was George’s crowning glory: fishing arrows. They were the kind with four thin metal lengths that sweep back from the sharp head. Once embedded they couldn’t be pulled loose without leaving a hole the size of a baseball. Nasty things, but efficient. The only bow I had was the Barnett, and the arrows would have been totally useless to me had George not been lucky enough—or wise enough; I didn’t ask—to find arrows with screw-on heads. I could remove the heads, throw away the long arrow shafts, and put them on my threaded crossbow-bolt shafts.
I thanked George again, put the bag of blowgun-dart materials in the lower compartment of my pack, and began unscrewing crossbow-bolt heads. Soon I was finished and Ariel asked me to read from Don Quixote.
Shaughnessy followed us all day.
*
I read to Ariel until sunset. We traveled a little over an hour into the night, then made camp. George pulled another rabbit from a hat: foil packets of freeze-dried camping foods he’d grabbed from some sporting-goods department. I started a fire and heated water, and George and I ate chili-macaroni, washing it down with the last bit of instant lemonade I’d managed to hoard.
Ariel and George got into another conversation about dragons. Saying I was going to the bathroom in the bushes, I slipped away with the last of the chili mac. I shielded it from view with my body.
Three hundred yards down the road a small campfire burned. She was nowhere in sight, but her library book rested atop a large rock. I picked it up and held it away from the campfire, reading the title in the dim orange-yellow glow. The Little Prince.
I set the book back and put the plate on top of it.
“What took you so long?” asked Ariel when I returned.
“Serious bowel movement.” I looked at George, who sat cross-legged a respectful distance from the fire. “How’re your feet holding up, George?”
He wriggled his toes. “Okay, I guess. They hurt, but they ain’t nowhere near as bad as yours.”
“Give ‘em time; I’ve been on the road longer. Actually, though, I think mine are getting better. The new hiking boots will definitely help.”
Thumb pinning spoon to aluminum plate, George searched around. “Hey, where’s the rest of the chili?”
“Oh, I threw it out already. I’m sorry. I thought you were finished.”
Ariel threw me a look.
“Don’t worry about it.” George set his plate down. “I was just gonna fill up so I wouldn’t be hungry tomorrow.” He unzipped his sleeping bag. “We getting up earlier tomorrow?”
I nodded. “Five-thirty. You can set your watch by it.”
He glanced at his arm and smiled before crawling into his sleeping bag. “See you tomorrow.”
“Good night.”
“‘Night, Ariel.”
“Good night, George.” She got up and walked around the invisible perimeter of the fire’s heat. I stopped in the midst of unzipping my own sleeping bag and looked up at her.
“Threw it away, huh?” she said.
I shrugged. “I thought she might be hungry. Is there something wrong with that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.”
“What?”
“Feeding a dog is no way to make it go away.”
“Oh, come on. Even if you don’t like her, she’s not a dog. She’s a person.”
“She’s following us like a dog. She wants to be blindly faithful to me like a dog. If you help her out she’ll follow us all the way to New York.”
“I can’t let her go hungry.”
“If she’s lasted this long she isn’t going to starve now. But she will turn back if she gets discouraged enough. Besides, she’s not your responsibility.”
The corners of my mouth tugged. “We seem to have traded places—that doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“I feel sorry for her,” she said,
“but I won’t have somebody worshiping me, making me something I’m not.”
“How do you know it isn’t just that she appreciates what you are?”
“Bullshit. You saw how she acted. She was practically dazed. I don’t need that.”
“Maybe she does.”
“I don’t understand you. Just this afternoon you were raising hell because you didn’t want her to come along, and now you’re defending her.”
I felt tongue-tied as I tried to sort things out. After deliberating a minute I said, slowly, “It’s not her. It’s you. You acted very strange today after she saw you. I think you might be letting what you are turn you into an egomaniac.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’ve been acting like Miss America getting roses. ‘But most of all I’d like to thank myself, because I couldn’t do it without me.’”
“I don’t even know what a Miss America is.”
“That doesn’t matter. The point is that, okay, fine, you’re beautiful. But you’ve begun to take it for granted, and you’re acting like everybody else should casually acknowledge it, too.”
“What else can I do?”
I pointed a finger at her snout. “See what I mean?” I mocked her tone. “‘What else can I do?’ That’s what I mean by egomania. You’re taking what you are right in stride.”
“And I repeat,” she said firmly, “what else can I do? Would you like me to bask in my own glorious radiance and remind myself every day what a wonderful creature I am? Of course I take it in stride; I’ve lived with it all my life.”
“But people like what’s-her-name, like Shaughnessy, haven’t. Ariel, I’ve been with you close to two years now. In that time I’ve seen you grow from the equivalent of a five-year-old human to what you are now. I see what you look like at sunset, at sunrise, and by moonlight—and I’m not used to it. And furthermore, I don’t ever want to be. I can’t imagine the novelty ever wearing off. No, I don’t want her to follow us to New York—she’ll probably get killed if she does—but try to realize that she’s probably never seen anything like you, and understand why she thinks she needs to go with us. I don’t care that you’re against her coming with us. Like I said, so am I. But don’t be insensitive to why she’s doing it.”
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