—Do you know what food is? People eat food. It’s not like paper or plastic or cardboard. It’s the soft stuff that rots.—
—Food,—mumbled the trash can.—Don’t know. Don’t know how to look inside my own stomach.—
—Oh, okay. Never mind. Sorry I bothered you.—
—Well, wait.—Things inside it shuffled around. As she watched, something rose to the top.—What about this?—
It was a half-full bag of potato chips.
—Wow, that’s great! Can I have it?—
—You want to take something out of me? You’re not the stomach pumpers.—
—Stomach pumpers?—
—When I get too full? They take away my stomach and give me a new one. I love that. Are you one of those?
—Garbage guys, thought Matt.—Nope.—
—Other people don’t take things out. They feed me.
—Would you mind if I took something out?—
It thought for a little while, then said no. Matt grabbed the bag of potato chips and stuffed it into a pocket.—Hey, thanks. Nice talking to you.—
—Okay,—it said, subsiding into a sleepy mumble.
She glanced along the sidewalk, searching for other trash cans. The smart, big, rich ones were probably behind the buildings.
She had left her tools for taking care of found food in the car, buried deep in the bottom of her trash-bag luggage: Ziploc bags for messy or perishable things, nice thick plastic that could be washed and reused. She had her penknife in her pocket, even though it was another thing she hadn’t used in a while. Useful for carving off bad parts of partially spoiled things, or the chewed ends of leftovers, if she was feeling fastidious.
“Matt?” Edmund touched her shoulder.
For a really good forage, she usually waited until dark and then checked all the trash cans behind restaurants, usually after the dinner hour when lots of leftovers got tossed. She hadn’t talked to garbage cans in a while, but she could almost always find friendly ones. She glanced up and down the street. There were some likely looking places—
“Matt.” He touched her arm. “Let’s go.”
She looked up at him. She blinked a few times. “I forgot. It’s been a while since I took care of myself. I got used to just having you guys do it. That’s so weird. I should’ve been helping more. I can’t believe I don’t even think about this stuff.” She had lived in communal situations before. For it to work best, everybody contributed. How could she have forgotten? The house took care of her. Edmund and Suki took care of her. She just lived with them, and let them take care of her.
What had happened to her finely honed sense of independence?
Well. It was the first time in her memory when she had been with people she trusted absolutely. No wonder she had turned back into a baby.
“It’s okay,” Edmund said. “It’s fine. What I have is yours.”
“But I didn’t bring anything.”
He laughed and hugged her. “Matt! Of course you did! You brought courage and strength and communication between us all, sense, vision, caring, bridges and coming together. You brought—” He kissed her.
She kissed him back. Maybe she had brought something. She’d have to think about this.
He broke the kiss, bumped foreheads with her, then straightened. “We’re okay right now. We just ate, and we still have doughnuts and fruit and carrots in the car. We don’t have to worry for a while yet. And anyway, spirit will provide.”
“Or I will. I could find a lot of food in this town.”
“But we’re not staying here. We’re going on to Artemisia.”
“Okay,” she said. She had seen the dot Artemisia made on the map. It was much smaller than Sisters. The smaller the town, the fewer opportunities it offered for food or temporary jobs. “Maybe we can come back.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“I wonder if Suki got that job.”
“We can check, if you really want to know. But let’s find Dee first.”
The passenger door of Edmund’s rust-spotted Volvo station wagon unlocked itself when she touched the handle, and popped open. “Thanks, car,” she said, sliding in. “What if she doesn’t want to see us?”
“We’ll find out when we find her.”
They drove east from Sisters, and the land changed around them. Some of it was cultivated or tamed, fenced in, with beef and dairy cattle, longhorns, llamas, sheep browsing pasturelands, and hills of rocks showing where people had cleared land. Twisty, many-shaped juniper trees dotted the wilder lands, and sagebrush spread over the high desert floor.
Matt found her mind going over and over their resources. She climbed in back and checked the cooler. Edmund had loaded it before they left the house. Carrots, apples, cheese, bottles of water, a stick of butter in a plastic bag, a jar of mayonnaise, a head of lettuce rolled in a wet towel. There was a grocery bag with a loaf of sourdough bread, a box of Triscuits, a box of granola bars, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of grape jelly, a bag of barbecue potato chips, some loose potatoes, bananas, oranges. A white, waxed-paper bag of assorted doughnuts from the bakery in Guthrie. Plenty of food. What was she worried about?
She added the sugar packets and the half bag of potato chips to their store of food, then returned to the front seat and buckled her seat belt. She stared out unseeing at the landscape.
She had never been much of a long-range planner. Spirit provided for Edmund from one place to the next, and Matt’s own version of spirit provided for her, too, she guessed. People threw away all kinds of things which, while not always appetizing, were still edible; sometimes people gave her things outright; sometimes she worked small jobs for money or food; and more often than not, Matt could find shelter in someplace human-formed and out of the weather. Her needs were minimal. Most of what she needed didn’t cost anything: just to see new places, new people, new things, talk to people and things about their lives, learn more. Maybe help, if the opportunity arose.
Now she had friends with two cars. Now she had a friend who was a house. She would never need to ask anything else for shelter if she didn’t mind sticking with these friends.
Now she had Edmund.
She didn’t know what that meant yet, but she was sure it was good.
She glanced at him. He smiled at her, raised his eyebrows. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“Not yet. Still working it out, maybe.”
“Okay.”
They drove in silence for a while. They headed north, past small spiky hills and small rises and falls of land. They drove over Crooked River Gorge, then left the main highway and took a small side road.
Westward, the sun slipped slowly behind the Cascades. Beyond the dark foreground of juniper and sagebrush, the mountains floated pale purple in the distance, except where sunlight glowed on the baby glaciers on the peaks.
Edmund and Matt drove through Artemisia before they realized they had reached it.
Edmund pulled over to the shoulder of the road, glanced at the town behind them, then looked at Matt. She stared back too. That scatter of buildings? She guessed she’d seen smaller towns once in a while. This wasn’t a place she’d come to and stay in. No way you could hide from anybody in a place this small.
They turned around and drove slowly across six cross streets: Second through Seventh Avenues. There was a trailer park at the north end of town, and a scattering of small one-and two-story businesses: Desert Bar-B-Q, It’s Larrupin’ Good!; Sagebrush Tavern: Darts, Pool Tables, Coldest Beer in Central Oregon; Rico’s Market—ATM; The Old Artemisia Hotel, a two-story brick building with a covered wraparound porch—inside the building were a gift shop (Thundereggs!), a bed-and-breakfast, an ice-cream parlor, a paperback swap shop, and a small museum; a burger joint, an espresso drive-thru, a small quarried-sandstone-faced building that contained City Hall and the fire station; a gas station; Mac’s Launderland; Sam’s Auto Parts and Repairs; Ruby’s Tortilleria.
“Wow, Dee,” Edmund murmured, “what are
you doing here?”
They cruised all the way through town again. Edmund turned west onto Seventh Avenue, where they found a residential district of double-and single-wide ex-mobile homes. He parked by a row of mailboxes and reached into his pocket, took out the lead weight he used for dowsing.
“Maybe she isn’t here,” Matt muttered.
He kissed the weight, spoke to it, stroked it, and hung it from the rearview mirror. “Deirdre, Deirdre,” he said.
The weight swung forward.
They drove two blocks and came to the end of Seventh Avenue. A white cinder-block building stood there: Artemisia Veterinary Clinic. They could see a darkened waiting room through the front window. The parking lot was empty. The clinic was closed for the night.
The weight pulled toward it.
Edmund drove into the lot and parked the car.
The weight pulled toward the building. He unhooked it from the mirror, thanked it, and returned it to his pocket.
Matt climbed out of the car. She felt strange, a little drifty. Suki had run away from them, and when they found her again, she had slammed a door in their faces. What kind of reception would they get from Deirdre?
They went to the clinic’s entrance. ROSENFELD, D.V.M. & EBERHARD, D.V.M. OPEN 8 A.M. TO 5 P.M. AND BY APPOINTMENT, said white letters painted on the glass door. Beyond, they looked into the dark waiting room again.
“Hi, building,” Matt said. She touched the handle of the door. “Anybody home?”
—Hello. We’re closed.— It sounded friendly, maybe even motherly, but firm.
—We know. We’re not here about animals. We’re looking for Deirdre.—
—Dr. Eberhard? —
—Yeah, I guess.—
—She’s around back.—
Matt checked Edmund. Sometimes he could overhear things she said to buildings, and sometimes he couldn’t. Often he couldn’t hear the replies.
He raised his eyebrows in question.
“She’s around back.”
“Ah.”
Matt grabbed his hand, and they headed around the back of the building.
The town ended here: desert ground, covered with rabbitbrush, sagebrush, just-emerging grasses, spread away toward the mountains with wind-warped juniper trees dotted here and there, dark silhouettes against the pale sunset sky above the mountains.
A flat roof jutted out from the back of the building, supported by steel posts at its corners and sheltering a concrete apron and a back door. Below the roof, there was a chair, and on the chair sat a woman. She watched them as they came around the building.
“Something I can do for you?” she asked in a deep, gruff voice, setting a coffee mug on the ground with a clink. She stood. She was tall and slender and wore a white lab coat. Her hair hung in a dark braid down the center of her back. Matt knew her eyes: wide, brown, under fierce dark brows; but her face had changed utterly from that of the stocky, wiry girl Julio had known. The cheekbones stood out now, and her wide mouth seemed in perfect proportion to the rest of her face. She looked beautiful and strange.
“Dee?” Edmund said, with his heart in his voice, all silver and flute.
She took two steps toward them. “Hey,” she said, peering at his face. “Hey, Edmund.” She glanced at Matt, then back at Edmund. “You know, I’ve sort of been expecting you.”
He let go of Matt’s hand and walked to Deirdre. He hugged her, and her arms came around him and hugged back.
“Hey,” she said softly after a minute. She gripped his shoulders and stared up into his face. “Yow! You haven’t changed a bit! What’s with this magic stuff? Eternal youth? Oil of Olay?”
“You look great.”
“Do I?” Her voice didn’t rise on the second word. Almost, it wasn’t a question.
“Really different, but great,” Edmund told her. He touched her check. “How are you?”
She paused for a minute, glanced at Matt, then back up at Edmund. “Hungry. Want to go to supper?”
“Uh—” Edmund said.
“We’re short on cash,” Matt said. “Hi, I’m Matt. Short for Matilda. We’ve got food in the car, but we can’t afford to eat out right now.”
“Wow,” Deirdre said. “Magic people go broke? If I had magic, the first thing I’d figure out would be how to always have enough money. Uh-oh.” She bit her lower lip. She grinned at Edmund for a second, then lost her smile. She stepped around him and held out her hand to Matt, who shook hands with her. “Um, hi, Matt. Nice to meet you. Do you know about Edmund?”
Matt smiled. “Sure.”
“Oh, good. I don’t usually make dumb mistakes like that. Guess I’m still surprised. I could treat you to dinner. You guys like barbecue?”
“I do,” Matt said. “They got tofu barbecue or something like that?”
“Uh—I don’t think so. This isn’t that kind of town.” She cocked her head and studied Edmund. “Vegetarian, huh? Could be a problem. I bet they cook their beans in lard and make their French fries with beef bouillon in the fat.”
“But maybe the coleslaw is okay. I’ll find something,” Edmund said.
Deirdre got her purse (a red knitted-string shoulder sack full of suggestive lumps), checked on the animals, shucked out of the lab coat and replaced it with a brown car coat, and locked up the clinic. They walked through the cool twilight back to Silver Street, which was what the highway was called while it went through Artemisia. Two blocks north, they came to the Desert Bar-B-Q.
“Hey, Doc,” said the hostess, a stout middle-aged woman with short silver-touched brown curls.
“Hey, Arlene,” Deirdre said.
Matt sniffed the air. She loved the smells—meat cooking, smoky, spicy, sweet barbecue flavor, and the scent of fresh-baked bread. She looked around. The restaurant was popular. Lots of noisy people sat in red-vinyl-upholstered booths and ate at lots of white-topped tables. Dribbles of barbecue sauce splotched tables and clothing and napkins. The white walls were covered with photographs of barbecue joints across the United Stales.
Arlene said, “Table for three for dinner? Who are your friends?”
“This is Edmund and Matt.”
“Howdy, folks. Welcome to Desert Bar-B-Q.” She shook hands with them and gave them big menus encased in plastic and edged with red. “Got a nice table over here. You can watch the street.”
“Great,” Deirdre said. “Thanks, Arlene.”
“Rita will be right over for your drink orders.” She bustled away, and Deirdre. Edmund, and Matt slid into a booth near the front window.
“Does this menu really say ‘Roadkill Special’?” Edmund asked.
Deirdre checked it. “Yep. I’ve never tried ordering that. Never had the guts. What if it’s real?”
Matt checked the price on the Roadkill Special. It was more expensive than a lot of the other things on the menu. She decided on Texas beef tri-tip instead.
“You guys want drinks?” asked a seventeen-year-old waitress with gum in her mouth and shellacked spikes in her tar black hair. Black eye shadow ringed her eyes. She looked like she had two severe shiners. She wore the regular waitress outfit of the restaurant, a white dress with a red apron over it, but her dress was shorter than the other waitresses’, and her top looked tighter.
“Milk,” said Edmund.
“Water,” Matt said.
Deirdre put down her menu. “Diet Coke. Hey, Rita, how’s Fifi?”
Rita stopped cracking her gum and smiled. “Real good, Doc. Thanks. I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
A menu-studying silence descended over the table, and then all three of them looked up at once.
“Dee—” said Edmund.
“Ed—” said Deirdre.
“You first.”
“Where have you been? What have you been doing? Where’d you go and why did you leave so fast way back when?” The first two questions came out in a conversational tone, but the third one sounded mournful and sad.
Edmund put his menu down and touched h
er hand. Then he pulled his hand back. “I did something so terrible I couldn’t figure out how to live with myself, so I ran away and turned into someone else.”
“Wow,” Deirdre said. Her dark brows pinched together above her nose. “What could you have done that was that bad? You’re not the type.”
“I put a curse on Susan’s father.”
Deirdre sat back against red vinyl. She stared out the window into nightfall and distance, and her hands gripped each other. “You did that?” she said after a moment. She shook her head slowly, still not looking at him. “It was so strange. First Susan’s mom’s funeral, and then … One day we’re all at the house after school like always, and then the next day, Julio and I are there alone with Nathan, and you and Susan never turn up. Julio and I go to Julio’s place and call around. Nobody picks up at Susan’s house, and your mom says you haven’t come home yet. Julio’s mom comes home from work and says it’s all over. Susan’s father had a stroke. Susan’s moving to San Francisco. Juanita never has to work in that miserable house again.”
Slowly, Deirdre turned to Edmund, her eyes dazed. “I was—”
“Hey, guys,” said Rita. She set their drinks down and pulled an order pad from the pocket of her short red apron. “You decided what you want yet?”
Deirdre blinked, shook her head as though coining awake.
“Texas tri-tip,” Matt said.
“You get two sides with that. What would you like, honey?”
Matt checked the menu. “French fries and coleslaw, I guess.”
“Good enough. Doc? Made up your mind?”
“Oh, my usual,” Deirdre said.
“Pulled pork, with a side of salad and barbecue beans. How about you, honey?” Rita flipped her eyelashes at Edmund.
“Cheese quesadilla, rosemary red potatoes, salad.”
“All right! See you soon.” She headed off. Deirdre focused on Edmund. “Susan’s father had a stroke.”
“Yeah. I put a curse on him, and he collapsed.”
“Wow,” whispered Deirdre. “That is so cool.”
Chapter Nine
“what?” Edmund stared at Deirdre.
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