The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  I see Jack catch himself from asking Bo more about this curse and get back on track to the business at hand.

  “How well do you know Tyson?” he asks me.

  “Haven’t done more than pass through it a few times,” I tell him.

  “I’m the same with Newford, so I’ll take it, you take Tyson.”

  It’s good planning. When you know a place too well, you tend to miss things a stranger doesn’t, like, there’s no sense in checking out this alley, those blocks, that part of town because you think she’d never go there. But all too often, that’s exactly where she’d be.

  “All we’re doing is observing,” I say, looking from one to the other. “No cowboying. One of us finds her, we get the others before we make a move.”

  “Unless she takes a swipe at us,” Jack says.

  I nod. “That goes without saying.”

  Whiskey Jack and I leave Bo at the fire and go our separate ways. I spend most of the day making a slow pass through the town, from downtown Tyson, over to the Ramble and Stokesville. I even take a turn through all those new suburbs that are spreading like weeds on the south side of town. I make good time, slipping in and out of the middleworld when I need to get from one part of town to the other quickly. The middleworld’s a handy place for that sort of thing—not to mention, just plain everyday spying. You can see out fine, but most people can’t see in. Don’t even know you’re there.

  I catch hints of canid presence, but whenever I track one down it turns out to be somebody with the blood, yeah, but so thin they can’t even see me peering out at them from the middleworld. Twice I come across a pureblood—or as pure as you’re going to get outside of manidò-akì —but they’re minding their own business and don’t have any connection that I can see to Jilly’s sister. They’re not hiding their scent, and I don’t recognize either of them.

  I can’t ask people, but I talk to a lot of dogs, especially in Stokesville and on the edges of the Ramble where there’s more of them and they run free. They’re not exactly articulate, but a couple of old yellow hounds point me in the direction of the Ramble so I go back there. I don’t find Jilly’s sister or her friend, but I do run across a backyard with about a dozen pit bulls staked out on short chains. It doesn’t take a lot to realize that someone’s breeding them to fight.

  Their heads lift when I come into the yard, but they’re smart enough to see I’m out of range of their chains and they’ve probably been trained with beatings not to start in on barking every time something unusual happens to show its face. I look at the back door of the clapboard house, waiting for someone to come out. No one shows and I have to admit I’m disappointed. I’d like to discuss how I feel about this kind of thing with whoever’s set it up. I force down the urge to hunt him down and do a little drumming on his face and turn back to the dogs.

  “You want out of here?” I ask them.

  They regard me with flat, hard gazes until one honey blonde gives a slow nod of her head.

  Anyone watching would think I was crazy to just walk up to her the way I do. I’m not worried. I can tell the canid blood runs strong in her. She knows I’m here to help.

  I can’t break the chain that’s keeping her staked in place, but I don’t have to. I just kneel down and undo her collar. She bumps her head against my arm by way of thanks. I don’t make the mistake of trying to give her a pat. These aren’t pets. And besides, they’re cousins. Do you go around patting your cousins on the head?

  The next one starts to snarl at my approach. The honey blonde pushes by me and gives a quick short bark that shuts him right up. He trembles—with anger, not fear—as I reach for his collar, but doesn’t snap at me, doesn’t move except to back away once his collar’s lying in the dirt.

  I free the rest of them, the honey blonde following me from stake to stake until I’m done.

  “You’re going to have a hard time of it,” I tell them.

  They just look back at me with expressions that don’t give away anything.

  I think about leaving them here to fend for themselves. How long are they going to last with no one to look out for them? Even in this part of town no one’s going to stand for a pack of dogs running wild. Not to mention mistreated the way they’ve been, they might take it into their heads to get a little bit of their own back, just on general principles.

  So I show them a way into the dreamlands, take them to a stretch of alleyway I noticed a few streets back where the layers of the middleworld are thin enough to push through, if you know enough to recognize the way. The honey blonde ushers the pack through. When it’s her turn, she hesitates for a moment, then comes over and bumps her head against my leg, the way you might punch a friend on the arm. I lift a finger to my brow and I swear she grins before she bounds off after the others.

  Then they’re gone and I go back to looking again.

  Late in the afternoon, I catch up with Jack. I find him north of Newford, up by where old Highway 14 passes the Sleep Comfort Motel. He’s sitting right on the border of the middleworld and what Jilly likes to call the World As It Is, looking out at the parking lot of the motel.

  “Any luck?” Jack asks when I settle down beside him.

  “Nothing useful.”

  I offer him my tobacco pouch, but he shakes his head. I wonder if he’s feeling sick until he offers me a ready-made smoke from his own pack. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s had his own smokes and I take one for the sheer novelty of it coming from him.

  “How about you?” I ask after he lights me up.

  “I don’t know what I’ve got,” Jack says. “You smell it?”

  I shift to my dog face and lift my head, take in the air. For a moment there’s nothing. Then the wind turns and I smell what’s got him holed up here, watching that motel.

  “You had a closer look?” I ask.

  “Did a walk around, but I couldn’t pinpoint the den.”

  I let my dog face fade and we step out of the middleworld, taking an easy turn around the motel, walking slow and casual, like we have every right in the world to be here. No one pays us any attention.

  The canid smell is strong, but I see what Jack means. I can’t zero in on the source either. It’s just this wolf smell, hanging in the air around the motel.

  “You know how we say we can smell the rain?” Jack says.

  I nod, seeing where he’s going with that. It’s not the rain you smell, but the reaction of vegetation, or the land itself, to the precipitation.

  “That’s what we’ve got here,” Jack goes on. “We’re not smelling those dream wolves. We’re smelling the reaction of their presence on their surroundings.”

  “But they’re denning here,” I say.

  “No question. Or they have been until very recently.”

  I have another look around the parking lot.

  “I don’t see the pink Caddy Sophie was talking about,” I say.

  Jack waves a hand at all the box stores and fast-food joints that line this part of the highway. Time was, I remember, when the Sleep Comfort Inn was outside of town. Now it’s pretty much right in the thick of it.

  “She could be playing it smart,” he says, “and just parked it someplace nearby.”

  “You want to have a look?”

  He shakes his head. “I think it’s time we fetched Bo and have another meeting about where we go from here.”

  “We can’t go rousting everybody in that motel,” I say.

  “Let’s just get Bo. We can talk it out with him.”

  We cross the highway and come to the big sign advertising the muffler shop that’s sitting across the road from the motel. At least that’s what it looks like in this world. In the middleworld, it’s still all bush around here. I give a look around, but no one’s paying us any attention, so we cross back over.

  “Think one of us should stay and keep watch?” I ask.

  Jack shrugs. “Why bother? We’ve both marked that scent now and we can find it
again. And if it moves, we can track it.”

  I give a last look at the motel, then we head back for Cody’s mesa in those red rock canyons where the three of us got together last night. I think of Cassie as we go, but I figure we won’t be gone long this time. I can see her tonight when we get back. If she was trying to get hold of me like I felt this morning, it was probably only to pass along the same message that Sophie did.

  But I do miss her.

  Raylene

  NEWFORD, MAY

  I Spend most of the day fine-tuning this new synchronization program I’ve been putting together—just to keep my mind off of all of this crap with my sister. I always find the best way to come at a problem is to just settle in on some other damn thing that’s got itself no connection to what’s really on my mind. I guess it lets the back of my head come up with a fix-up that the front of my head can’t see. Pretty much anything’ll do the job, but programming’s the best thing I ever found me to just take everything and slow it down till any problem I got’s just one more thing in the world, not the whole damn world itself.

  Lately I’ve been working with Linux. I like the fact that the operating codes are all open source. Linux programmers give you the sense that we’re all one big happy community and I like that, ’cept I know everybody’s still looking for a way to make a buck and I ain’t no exception.

  Pinky’s idea of doing something constructive is to sit around in her bra and panties, watching TV and chain-smoking. Come eleven, she pops her first beer.

  “What exactly are you doin’ with that machine of yours?” she asks during a commercial.

  “Thinking,” I tell her.

  She laughs. “It’s gettin’ pretty bad when you need somethin’ like that to help you with your thinkin’.”

  I don’t bother to explain. I just smile back at her and keep at it.

  This program’s starting to seriously annoy me. Them little handheld Palm computers are popular these days, but not everybody wants to synchronize their data through Windows programs on their desktop. So I’m trying to set up something that’ll work with other programs, like Eudora for the people who don’t use Outlook. I’ve been at it for a while and I can’t even get me a decent beta version. I’ve checked the code a thousand times and everything reads just fine on the screen, but every time I try to run it through my Palm simulator program, I still get clean facts coming in one end and strings a gibberish spewing out the other once the sync is done.

  I sigh.

  I been at it all morning and I’m not getting any closer to either fixing it or figuring out what to do with that sister a mine. Finally I shut down the computer and close the lid.

  “You done workin’?” Pinky asks.

  “I’m going out,” I tell her. “You want to come?”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  She glances at the TV screen, where some actor I don’t know is shilling his new movie to an interested-looking woman I don’t recognize neither. I think it’s some local show. I remember when all I could do was stare at the TV, day in, day out, but I don’t guess Pinky’s depressed like I was. Or if she is, she’s not showing it in any way I can see ’cept for suckling at the TV and drinking her beer, and she’s done that pretty much forever.

  “Naw,” she says. “I’m just gonna watch this awhiles.”

  So I leave her at it.

  I decide to go driving with no direction in mind, but I guess I shoulda knowed there’s no such thing as an aimless action. Some part of us always knows what we’re doing, even if it can’t explain why. That being the case, I guess I shouldn’ta been surprised to find myself up past Tyson on the Indiana Road, sitting in the car on the side of the road and looking at my brother’s single-wide. Unfinished business is something the back of your head’s always working on.

  I remember afore we went to sleep last night, Pinky turned to me where we’re lying in our beds and asked, “How come you want to kill your sister but not your brother? He’s the one was puttin’ it to you when you was a little girl.”

  “She knew better,” I said. “She had to understand what she was doing. Del—well, he’s evil, all right, and dumb as a fencepost. But I reckon he just didn’t know no better.”

  “And that makes it right, what he done?”

  “Course it don’t make it right. It’s just …”

  I don’t know and I can’t explain.

  “Anyway, who says I want to kill my sister?” I asked.

  “I thought you did.”

  I shook my head. “I just want to put her down. I want her to know what she done and to feel my hurting. And I don’t want to be sharing no dreamlands with her.”

  I think about that as I sit here on the edge of the road looking at the trailer park. I guess I still feel that way about my sister. But I can’t explain my feelings about Del. I know I don’t even come close to liking him. I’m maybe even a-scared of him a little—somewhere in back of who I am now where the little girl I used to be is still living. I sure wouldn’t mourn his dying none. But where I want to hurt Jillian May, I can’t even muster up much of anything for Del ’cept maybe a kind of pity.

  I guess it’d be different if I thought he was still playing his old games. If there was some little girl here in the park he was doing it to, like he done it to me. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Just making sure of that. But it don’t feel like it’s why I come. And it’s not likely I’m gonna catch him up to no good just by sitting here watching his trailer. For one thing, this pink Caddy ain’t exactly inconspicuous, parked here the way it is.

  I remember on one of them talk shows I used to watch how they was always going on about forgiveness, how you needed to forgive the one that hurt you so that you can get on with your own living, but that ain’t in my repertoire neither.

  So I don’t know why I’m here, and after a whiles I figure I might as well go back to the motel. But then I look in the rearview mirror and see me a girl walking up the road. I put her at about fourteen, but I could be off a year or two either way. She looks like me and Pinky did when we was her age, wearing too much makeup and looking like a prostitute with that tube top, a denim skirt so short she might as well not be wearing it, and platform sneakers. She gives the Caddy an admiring look as she comes up aside of it.

  “Hey, there,” I say.

  She stops, but she don’t say much of nothing.

  “You live here in the park?” I ask her.

  “This month,” she says. “Mama don’t get the rent together soon we’ll be out on our asses again.”

  “I been there.”

  She admires the Caddy again, gaze lingering on its lines.

  “Don’t look like that from here,” she says.

  “Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”

  “Not ’round here.”

  “I guess not,” I tell her. “You want to go for a ride?”

  She only hesitates for a moment before coming ’round to the passenger’s side of the car. I guess she figures me being a woman, she’s not taking her no chance at getting hurt. I don’t bother to set her straight, but some of the purest evil I run into come in the shape of one of the female persuasion. Take my mama …

  “What’s your name?” I ask as she settles in her seat.

  She runs her hand along the white leather of the seat, enjoying more than the texture. I know what’s going through her head: daydreams of how someday she’ll have her a ride like this and no way anyone’ll catch her ’round these parts again.

  “Lizzie,” she says. “What’s yours?”

  I tell her as I start up the Caddy and we pull away.

  “This your car?” she asks.

  I nod. “Where you want to go?”

  “Anywhere but here. Newford. Chicago. New York. L.A. You name the place and I’m game.”

  I want to laugh, but I know she’s serious—just as serious as me and Pinky woulda been back in the old days, we get offered a ride in something like this.


  “How about someplace a little less ambitious,” I say.

  She grins and leans back into the seat. “Just drive and I’ll be content.”

  So we do that awhiles, not talking, just enjoying the wind in our hair, the wheels humming on the pavement under the Caddy’s wheels.

  “What were you doing there at the park?” she asks after a while.

  “You know that blue and white single-wide with the busted awnings over the windows?”

  She nods.

  “I thought I might know the guy that lives in there.”

  “He a friend of yours?”

  “Not likely.”

  “That’s good. I was thinking maybe you was some old girlfriend of his. Show up with this ride and he’d be as like to sell it under your ass just to get him some liquor.”

  “So he’s dangerous?”

  She laughs. “Are maggots dangerous? He’s just some no-account loser, always crying ’bout the good times he once had and how they all got took away. We call him Bottle on account of you pretty much never see him without one.”

  “He bother you at all?”

  “You mean like wanting a party favor?”

  “Something like that.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “He looks plenty, but we got his number. He try and grab me and I’d just cut off his dick.”

  “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you.”

  “He mighta married into the Morgan clan, but they’re all dead and gone and no one’s gonna put up with any crap from him now, least of all me. I heard he was a hardcase and raised some hell when he was younger, but you take a look at him now and he’s just some fat old drunk who’s got nothing left of them days but memories and some jailhouse tattoos.”

  She turns then to look at me.

  “He hurt you once?” she asks.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She shrugs. “Dunno. You just look like you got some old painful history sitting there in your eyes.”

  I laugh. “And you got you an old woman sitting there in yours. How’d you get to be so smart?”