She examined it and came toward Bruce again. She caught his wrist before he thought to run and yanked him close. She smelled sharp as he collided with her. He felt his tears well up as she dragged him away from the others and into an empty store jammed with bare metal shelves and broken glass. She whirled him around and released him so that he staggered backward into a wall and sat down.
“Tell me where you got this,” she said, holding up the insert.
“The doctor’s office.”
“Which doctor?”
“Widistal.”
Erica snorted. “That asshole. What did you do, lift it? Yeah, I guess you had to; he wouldn’t have just handed it out.” She frowned. “Or would he?”
“I found it in his drawer.” Bruce tried to straighten up without standing.
Erica tossed it back into his lap. “It’s a little late. I’m too old for a PAL.”
“It wanted me to find you so it could come back. It misses you.”
Another snort. “Yeah, sure. Tell it thanks but it wasn’t around when I needed it. Sitting in a drawer, useless. I haven’t had it for—” She stopped, a distant gaze softening her face, and Bruce got the impression that it had not been so long ago that she had lost her friend.
“Did they give you a new one?”
She nodded. “Wasn’t the same.” She stared out the broken window of the shop for a time and shook her head.
“Listen, a piece of advice. If you know what’s good for you, don’t depend on those things. All they do is try to program you to be a good citizen.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing if that’s what you want to be.”
“I don’t know what I want to be.”
“Exactly. Maybe you should find out before you let something else make you over. Gotta be somebody first before you become somebody else.” She glanced at him again. “My mom remarried. The new man didn’t like where I was heading and decided I needed some revision. I don’t know what he told Widistal, but it ended up with me losing my original PAL and getting one that, I don’t know, fit my stepdad’s idea what I should be.” She shook her head. “He never asked me. Mom I guess, being alone was too much of a risk for her to challenge him. Been close to a year now. Anyway, I chose to do without.”
“Did it work?”
She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
Bruce pulled out the matrix from his backpack and held it up. “This is yours.”
“Keep it. I don’t need it anymore. Don’t want it.”
Bruce put it back into his pack. “Okay.”
“Listen, you came here all by yourself? I’ll walk you back. Not the greatest place to be for someone—I’ll just walk you back.”
She took him to the transit stop near the school. “I appreciate what you tried to do,” she said.
He looked at her. “I made a promise, that’s all.” As she began to turn away, he said, “Can I talk to you again sometime?”
“Why would you want to?”
He shrugged.
“Do you have any friends? Your own age, I mean.”
“Sure, at school—”
“I don’t mean playmates. I mean friends, people you share secrets with—and trust.”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, then you don’t. Do yourself a favor and make one. Do you more good than a PAL.”
“Do you have a friend?”
“No.”
“Do you want one?”
She opened her mouth and Bruce saw the rejection forming in her face, but she held it back and frowned, thinking. “What’s your name?”
“Bruce.”
“Well, Bruce—maybe.” She took a slip of paper from a pocket and a pen from another and scribbled something. “This is my loco. Three days from now, call me. I’ll let you know. Okay?”
Bruce took the paper and watched her walk away. Things shifted in his head, a quick surge of anticipation, then it faded. He put the slip in his pocket and went home. In the solitude of his room, he reinserted Erica’s matrix.
Where’s Erica?
“She didn’t want you back.” He described the encounter to the PAL.
That is sad. I could be good for her now. It sounds like she isn’t using a friend at all—
That sounded wrong to Bruce. Somehow he had the impression that you did not use friends. You had them, they had you. He was unsure how that differed from what the PAL meant.
“I’m not going to try to return you again.”
I understand. What will you do with me?
Without answering, he removed the matrix from the PAL and dropped it into his desk drawer. He took out the one his mother had intended him to have. Ryan’s. She wanted Ryan. Wanted him to be Ryan. He knew that, but it did not matter, not the way he thought it should. She had no idea who he was, that was all. Maybe if she did, she might stop missing someone who could no longer be here.
He wrote a note for his mother, by hand, which was his way of letting people know it was important.
I’m not Ryan. I’m me. I won’t tell Dad.
He tapped the end of the stylus against his chin, studying the note. Good enough, he decided, and wrapped the Ryan matrix in it and taped it closed. He set it aside until he could find a time to give it to his mother without his dad noticing.
He took out the slip of paper with Erica’s contact loco and placed it on the desk. Three days, she said. Bruce wondered what it would be like to have a friend. He wanted to know what that was like. Perhaps it was like finding yourself?
The King’s Arrows
Sean Petty clamped the padlock in place and kicked back the straw in front of the door. He sneezed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve wondering how much longer his cold would last. He turned to leave, but the sight of his brother Alan leaning against the ladder to the loft stopped him in his tracks.
“I said never to go in there.” Alan’s voice was a deep, quiet rumble.
“My chores are done,” Sean said. “I was just looking. I didn’t touch anything.”
Alan stepped away from the ladder. “Go on. Supper’s ready.”
Sean ducked his head and moved past Alan. His brother was taller and a lot stronger, but he had never struck Sean. It only seemed sometimes as if he would.
Halfway across the barn, he heard the padlock open, and stopped to stare back at Alan. His heart raced. He should go into the house, do as he had been told, but his resentment won out, and he strode back.
Alan stood in the center of the small room, hands in his pockets, looking all around. A rack of small bows, little better than toys, leaned against one wall, quivers of arrows hung from pegs above them. The opposite wall held a banner, red lettering across white canvass:
King’s Arrows, Buxton Chapter chartered A.D 1926.
A framed photograph hung beside it: two rows of boys grinning at the camera, holding their bows. In the center of the second row, his oldest brother Roy towered over them all and alongside him a much younger Alan. Roy had been older by four years, a closer span than the eight years that separated Alan from Sean. Alan looked less and less like Roy each year, the strain of maintaining the farm wearing at him. The ten-year-old photograph showed Alan with an easier face: a happier boy than the man he now was.
Behind Roy stood a huge, round section of an ancient oak tree. That section hung now on the wall opposite the door. Six inches thick, nearly seven feet across, it had been the meeting table for the Arrows back when they had gathered on the farm. Sometimes, Sean remembered, they had taken it into Buxton for special meetings at the hall Roy used for Arrow business. Other clutter filled the corners of the locker, odds and ends Sean wanted to poke into.
“I told you to get back in the house!” Alan shouted without turning to face the door where Sean stood.
“I want to know about the Arrows!” Sean shouted back. “You keep it all locked in here, and you never tell me about them. It’s not fair.”
“No, it ain’t. But that
’s the way it is. Now, go on.”
Sean’s hands shook with frustration. He did not want to cry in front of Alan, so he kept his mouth tightly shut and hurried out of the barn, back to the house. He ran up the stairs to his room where he stripped out of his coat and boots and sat on his bed working to regain control of himself.
In the last year, since he had turned fourteen, Sean hadn’t been able to ignore the deepening desire to know more about the Arrows. Alan’s attitude made no sense. He knew so much. He knew everything that was left to know. But he refused to explain anything, just like everyone else. Roy was dead, seven years ago in the East, killed in some riot while serving in the army, and all Sean remembered about him were the stories he used to tell about the King’s Arrows he used to lead, that and a big, friendly presence, doing what he could to make up for the deaths of their parents. Sean’s memory of Roy was large and warm, but with too few details.
He washed his hands and face and went downstairs. He heard the tinny sound of the crystal set in the living room. He stopped at the entrance. On the small table by the door lay the daily London Times, December 10, 1936.
Alan sat in the chair next to the radio. He looked up and Sean became frightened at the expression on his face. The last time Alan had looked so grim was the day they had learned of Roy’s death.
“What is it?” Sean asked.
“Hush, now. Listen.”
Sean held his breath. The radio said, “—found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love. Therefore—”
Alan shook his head. “The King’s abdicating.”
“England is without a King?”
“Edward just stepped down.”
The radio droned on. Stunned, Sean went back to his room. He sat by the window and stared out over the dark smudge of forest that bordered the farm, barely visible in the starlight, and thought: England is without a king—what will happen now?
In the morning Alan took the truck into Buxton, leaving Sean with the all the chores. Sean fed the cows and chickens, loaded wood into the racks by all the stoves, and collected eggs. Chores complete, he stole into the barn, pulse racing, and opened the locker.
He stared at the photograph. He had been barely seven when Roy left for service in the army. Their mother had passed away the year before and the pension they had received since Father’s death—an Army stipend, partly compensation for wounds he had received in France during the Great War—had stopped coming. With just the three of them, the farm was harder to hang onto. They needed a steady income so Roy had joined.
But before that he had started the Arrows. When he died, Alan had tried to run them, but less than a year later, when times became even harder and more people lost farms and businesses and jobs, and it looked as if even the Pettys might lose what they had, he had disbanded them. All that remained was here, in this little room. Sean had been too young to remember details, details he now craved.
As he grew older, Sean began to think there had been more to the Arrows than Alan let on. They had disappeared when the troubles began. It did not make sense. Hard times came and a band of men like Robin Hood’s own just faded away? More likely, Sean thought, they were still around—Roy’s mission to the Holy Land, news of his death, crisis in the land—too much coincidence, too little fact.
Maybe Alan’s calling them back together now, he thought. England has no king. It’s necessary.
He locked it all back up and walked towards the house. Up on the road he saw a man standing by the old stone wall. From the distance Sean could not tell who he was, only that he was a thin man wearing a long gray overcoat. The man stared at him for a time, then turned slowly and walked off down the road, head bowed.
It was nearly dark by the time Sean heard Alan drive back into the yard. When Alan came into the house Sean saw a grim look on his face.
“The question is whether the subsidy will continue,” he said, hanging up his coat inside the door. “King George kept us from losing the farm and Edward said he wouldn’t change that. But now—”
“You’ll be calling the Arrows back together, then?”
Alan stared at him. “What?”
“The Arrows. There’s going to be need for them now. Isn’t that where you’ve been? Getting things started to call them back together?”
“And just what would the Arrows have to do with anything?”
“We’ve got no king, Alan. We have to be ready—”
Alan’s face contorted with anger. “Enough. I don’t want to hear another word about the Arrows. They’re gone. They won’t be coming back, not for this, not for anything.”
“But—”
“I said enough! I won’t hear any more about them! You’ve got to get them out of your head!”
He paced the living room. “In the morning I’m burning all that stuff. I shouldn’t have kept it this long.”
Sean jumped up. “No! You can’t!”
“I can and I will. You’ve got your head full of fairytales and nonsense. This is serious business, not some storybook fancy. When it’s gone you can get your head straight about how the world really is.”
“Alan!”
“Enough! No more! Go to bed!”
“You can’t—”
Alan reared back and raised his hand. Sean stopped. Slowly, Alan lowered his arm, but he quivered from the effort.
“Go to bed.”
Sean backed away from him all the way to the stairs.
Sean packed salt pork wrapped in waxed paper with some fruit and three loaves of bread into his duffle, along with extra clothes, matches, a small axe, a couple of knives, and a few books. He estimated he had enough food to get him by until he snared his first rabbits. After that he could forage. The woods, even in the cold of winter, supplied enough provender to keep a careful man alive. He also packed Roy’s handbook on the forest to fill any gaps in his knowledge.
Alan’s snoring filled the house. Sean considered leaving a note, but decided against it. Alan no longer understood. All he talked about these past few years was politics and the economy, just like everyone else. The things that really mattered no longer mattered to Alan. Leaving a note would just make him angrier.
He went to the barn and opened the locker. In the wan light from the lantern he studied everything again. He took the photograph from its nail and tucked it in his duffle. Then he found a bow with a decent string and a quiver of arrows. He rolled them into the banner and tied it with its own cord.
There was no way to take the oak table. If Alan really intended to burn it, Sean could do little to stop him. At least it was in the photograph.
He rummaged through the stack in the corner. Old clothes, a couple of sacks, another banner. Nothing else struck Sean as important as what he already carried. He could not save it all.
He opened a canvas bag and found it stuffed with shirts. He pulled one out. It was grayish and down the back ran a dark, wide arrowhead. He stared at it for a long time. He had never seen or heard about these before.
Sean quickly added one to his supplies, blew out the lantern, and locked the padlock. He pocketed the key and walked out into the cold night air. He entered the forest just as the moon rose, feeling confident and excited. He felt ready, though he could not say what exactly was coming. Roy, he was sure, would be proud of him.
He found the stone shelf late in the afternoon. He dug out enough of the debris that filled the hollow beneath it to build a decent fire and lay out his bedroll by nightfall. The next morning he cleaned out more of the leafy humus to make a livable space and started cutting wood and stacking it around the opening to cover his lair.
He found a stream a short walk away. The water burbled over worn rock, icy cold, beneath a few thin sheets of ice. He set up snares nearby. After laying in a supply of kindling for the fire, he settled down to go through Roy’s book.
The King’s Arrows had studied woo
dcraft, and Roy had written chapters on everything. Reading it, Sean wished he had been older then so he could have joined them. Alan had told him once that the Arrows were sort of like the Boy Scouts that General Baden-Powell had started back before the Great War, but Sean always believed there had been more to it. People talked about the Boy Scouts, but they treated the Arrows differently.
Some of the Arrows still lived around Buxton, but most had moved away. The depression had caused a lot of people to move. Times had improved in the last few years, so there were fewer people losing work, but Sean expected that to change now. Without a king, England would drift, just as it had when Richard was held captive in Austria and his brother sat as regent. There would be need of a band of freemen to keep faith until the king returned.
He woke with a start, coughing. Smoke filled his small dugout under the shelf. His eyes stinging, Sean charged out through the curtain of twigs and branches he had built. He hacked painfully, clearing the smoke from his lungs. The wind had shifted. The breeze no longer ran away from his hideout, but toward it and pushed the smoke back inside.
When he recovered he tore away some of the cover and put the fire out. The smoke slowly dissipated. While he waited, he wondered sullenly where he might find a better place to build a shelter. He leafed through Roy’s handbook but found nothing about changing breezes. Still coughing, he made a new fire outside of the hollow.
In the morning he ate some bread and pork, brushed his teeth, then went to the stream to check his snares.
Two of them were empty, but as he came up to the third he saw someone hunched over it. As he watched, the man—who wore a threadbare army overcoat and shoes the color of dirt—removed a rabbit from the snare.
“Hey!” Sean called and ran toward him. “That’s mine!”
The man turned and stared, wide-eyed. His hair was matted and his face was covered by a tangle of beard. He clutched the rabbit to him as if it were a purse filled with gold. Suddenly, he bent over and rushed forward catching Sean with his shoulder just above the sternum lifting him off the ground.
Gravity Box and Other Spaces Page 16