“I see what it is about you now,” the woman says. “You jump to conclusions and once you have, it becomes carved in stone. Immutable truth. Or at least in your worldview.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She just ignores me. “Whatever ills you might have done are between you and whomever you might have wronged. I came here not to judge you, but for conversation.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t much for small talk.”
“Neither am I. I gave you a gift, one that you have mostly ignored. When you didn’t, you used it unwisely.”
“You mean the dreams?”
“I mean the light in you,” she says. “The dreams came from that light, though not what they were or what you would do in them.”
“Well, maybe you should’ve took the time to include an instruction manual.”
“That isn’t how it works.”
“Course it ain’t.” I shake my head. “You’re all the same. Don’t matter if you’re some big-shot spirit—that’d be you, right?—or some big-shot moneyman from my world. Everything’s got to go your way. And everything can go your way ’cause you’re holding all the damn aces. The little guy ain’t got a ghost of a chance where you’re concerned. We can’t play by your rules, ’cause we ain’t got your grease, but if we try to change the rules so that we can at least get in the game, you just shut us down.”
“You are hardly one of the downtrodden,” she says. “You made the choices to be who you are.”
“You think I wanted to be my sick freak brother’s sex toy?”
“No. But what of the choices you made after that?”
“Fuck you. Ain’t my fault I got dealt a lousy hand. But at least I played it out.”
“Since you wish to use card games as an analogy, did you ever consider folding and playing a new hand?”
“It don’t work that way,” I tell her. “Not when you’re at the bottom a the food chain like me and Pinky was.”
“Your sister’s origins were no different.”
“Yeah, well, whoopie-do. Look where it got her.”
“Yes, do,” the woman says. “She has friends. She’s lived a good life. She’s helped people. She took the gift of my light and created art that served as doorways to open the imaginations of others.”
“But she still ended up a cripple in a bed who can’t even feed her own damn self. So now what the hell good are her arty little friends or how she’s lived? You don’t think them friends of hers are going to get tired of looking after her and do the slow fade out of her life?”
“Do you think her present condition was premeditated?” the woman asks. “Do you truly believe that by living as she did, she earned the fate she has now?”
“You tell me.”
“It was bad luck. No more, no less. It can happen to any of us.”
“’Cept it don’t happen much to your kind, does it? You get to breeze through life and let the rest of us make do wallowing in your crap.”
Those thundercloud eyes’ve been back for a while now, but I don’t muchly care. What’s she going to do to me? Kill me? I been there. Hell, I been through the worst this world’s got for me. Ain’t no threat she can make’ll scare me.
So we stand there and glare at each other. And maybe I see something like sadness for me, sitting in there behind the mad, but it don’t stop her from doing what the people up top always do to nobodies like me that’re scratching out a life down below.
“I cannot take back the gift of my light,” she says, “but Animandeg is not the only one who can close doors,” she tells me.
“Who?”
She steps up and before I can back off, she’s making like she’s at some heavy metal concert, holding her middle and ring fingers with her thumb, the other two fingers sticking straight out. Sign of the devil or whatever. But when she touches my brow with the two fingers that stick out, I feel a little jolt in my head, like a static charge. I push her hand away with one of my own, fill the other with my switchblade. I thumb the button and the blade snaps out.
“Touch me again,” I say, “and you’re going to lose that hand.”
She doesn’t move, just fixes me with those dark eyes.
“When next you leave the dreamlands,” she says, “there will be no return for you.”
“Maybe I just won’t leave.”
“Perhaps,” she agrees. “But if you remain, it would do well for you to make peace with those you have wronged.”
“Anybody has a beef with me, they’re already dead.”
Though I guess death’s not the same here as it is back in the world where I come from. Hell, I’m standing here, ain’t I? Except:
“Yes,” she says. “They are. But they have kin. And they have friends—you know, the sort of people you mock your sister for having.”
“Hey, I understand friends, lady.”
But she only shakes her head and then she’s gone. She does this sidestep and she disappears I can’t tell where. I walk all around where she was standing, looking for the edges, but there’s nothing there. No way to track her. No way to get outa here my own self.
“Fuck you!” I yell, don’t matter she probably can’t hear me.
I stand alone under those damn monster trees and I just keep yelling until I realize I’m lying on my back again, my eyes closed. I’m still saying “Fuck you,” but the words are no more than a whisper.
I open my eyes and I know where I am now. Back in that little holler where I left my sister. Where Pinky got herself killed.
I sit up slowly and see my sister with some little dorky-looking guy, like a cross between a computer geek and one a them faggy boys hangs out at the Renaissance Faires. The pair of them were building themselves a pile of stones, I guess, but they’re stopped now, both of them looking in my direction. The dork seems curious. My sister’s somewhere between happy and scared and I reckon both feelings got to do with me.
“Raylene,” she says softly.
I get up. I figure I should be feeling shaky or something, ’cept that ain’t the case. I’m feeling no different than I ever done, ’cept for having died and come back and for Pinky still being dead her own self.
There’s just the two of them and me here.
“Where is she?” I ask them. “What’ve you done with Pinky?”
“We … we’re raising a cairn for her,” my sister says.
“A cairn …?”
But then I get it. Them rocks they been piling up—Pinky’s under ’em. I fight the wave of pure misery that comes flooding over me, push it back, hold steady. Like I done when Hector died, or when I was doing my time in county. You never let ’em see a weakness in you.
But goddamn.
“We … were doing it to honor her,” my sister says, looking not too sure of herself anymore. “So that nothing would disturb her body.”
That flood of red rage I usually feel for her goes through me like a lightning bolt, but it don’t hold. It just drains away, leaving me feeling a little dizzy. Whatever else is fucked up in my life, I know I can’t lay the blame on her. Guess I always knew it. I just didn’t want to deal with it.
“’Ppreciate your doing that,” I tell them.
I wish I had something to do with my hands. I end up shoving ’em in my pockets.
Jillian May turns to the little dork standing beside her and says something I don’t quite catch. But I figure it out when he gives her a nod, me another look of pure curiosity, then takes off into the woods. I guess she wants to finish the conversation the shotgun blast ended, just the two of us, nobody else sitting in.
I look at that old pile a stones that are covering Pinky.
The two of us and Pinky’s ghost.
Okay. I can do that. Anything to stop thinking about how maybe I got to admit it’s my own damn fault how things turned out for me. I got me a head full of hurts right now, but for the first time I can remember, there ain’t some finger in my brain, pointing at someone else.
; I walk over to where she’s waiting and look her over. Like me, she’s carrying the years well. Hell, she don’t look much more’n twenty, tops.
I take me a seat on a big old stone that gives me a view of the holler, the way it goes winding down between the hills in a mess of rock and cedar and pines, but keep my back to that pile of stones that are covering my poor dead Pinky. Jillian May hesitates a moment, then comes over and sits near me.
“You’re looking pretty damn plucky for someone who’s supposed to be crippled,” I tell her.
“This is just my dreaming self,” she says. “Joe took my body back to the rehab.”
“Joe’d be one of them dog-faced boys?”
She nods.
A big piece of quiet falls down between us. I guess we don’t the neither of us know where to begin. I start in easy, coming up on what I want to talk about from the side.
“So how come you never painted any of them boys?”
She gives me a surprised look, then shrugs. “I don’t know. I just never thought to do it, I guess.”
“They’re a big piece of something strange, though.”
“They’re old spirits,” she says, “except for Joe. He’s younger than the others I’ve met, but still a lot older than you or me. Most of them have been around since the very beginning, when Raven made the world in the long ago.”
“You buy that?”
“What?”
“That someone just made the world. God. Raven. Whatever you want to call him.” I think about that New Age earth mama with the moon face and the dark eyes who just walked out on me. “Or her.”
Jillian May gives me another shrug. “The world’s a long complicated story,” she says, “but it had to start somewhere.”
“I suppose.” I take me a breath. “I guess I’m sorry ’bout them paintings of yours.”
She doesn’t say nothing for a long pair of heartbeats, then finally asks, “Why did you do it?”
Then it’s my turn to have to look for the right words.
“I guess I hated you something bad,” I tell her, “and them paintings was just standing in for everything I didn’t want to remember ’bout you. You know, back when we was kids and getting along and all. Before you went and took off. I saw them paintings and it went and brought the whole damn mess of it all back.”
I see her swallow hard.
“Do you still hate me?” she asks.
“I can’t rightly say,” I tell her, being honest for a change. “I don’t know much of anything these days.”
“I know that feeling,” she says.
Which surprises me. I know she’s had it hard, what with being crippled by that car accident and all, but I always reckoned she was just one of them people always knows who she is, how she fits into the world, what she’s going to be doing with her life.
“Tell me how it was for you,” I find myself saying. “After you took off that last time and I didn’t see you no more.”
So she does, though she looks at the ground or up into the trees while she’s talking ’stead of looking at me.
I hear about this little girl, running away from home, getting shunted between foster homes and juvie, always trying to get away, just taking off whenever she can, until this one time she run off, she don’t get caught and brought back. But that don’t turn out a whole lot better. Now instead of getting molested in the foster homes or beat up by the other kids in juvie, she’s living on the street and eating out of garbage cans. Then when she finally hooks up with some guy, he starts in a-pimping her soon as the money and dope runs out.
Her voice, the way she talks, none of it’s looking for me to feel sorry for her. She’s just doing like I asked, giving me the story and it ain’t pretty. Between being a junkie and a hooker, she was so messed up in them days that I come to understand how she didn’t have her the wherewithal to be worrying, or even thinking, ’bout this little kid sister she left behind.
I say something about how this guy Rob would’ve been looking at a knife in the gut, he tried any of that shit on me. My sister just shakes her head.
“That’s because you’re brave,” she says. “You were probably born that way. I had to learn to be brave.”
“Naw, that’s something Pinky taught me.”
We both fall quiet at the mention of her name but neither of us turn to look at that heap a stones behind us.
“I’ve never had any luck with men,” my sister says after a moment. “I guess it’s not so surprising, after Rob and Del and all those state-sanctioned pedophiles in the foster homes. I know there must be good foster parents, but I never got to meet them. And then there were all those johns …”
Her voice trails off and she gets this lost look in her eyes like she’s back there again, living in that time. She catches me looking at her and shrugs.
“After all of that,” she says, “I started making my own bad luck, I suppose. Or at least it seems that way. Guys I’d go out with would always turn out to be married or creeps or something. And I could never be intimate with them—not without first shutting myself off inside.”
“You were making the mistake of thinking sex’s got to be meaningful,” I tell her. “It’s just supposed to be fun.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Worked for me,” I say. I hesitate, then have to add, “Or it did until I met Hector.”
I tell her ’bout him. It’s funny. That’s something I never done before, not with no one, not even Pinky. I mean, tell how it really was between Hector and me. Sweet and deep and like nothing I ever knew before and sure as hell ain’t never going to be feeling again.
“That’s so horrible,” she says when I tell her how he got himself shot, how I just shut me down afterward.
She reaches out and lays her hand on my arm. I know she’s been wanting to do something like that right from the start, or better yet do the sister hug thing, but it ain’t in me. I can maybe understand how she come to leave me behind for all of them years, but there ain’t going to be any kind of bonding happening here.
I look her in the eye, then down at her hand. She takes it away, holds her hands on her lap, fingers twisting around each other.
“So how’d you get off of the street?” I ask.
She tells me ’bout this cop and his social worker girlfriend. About going into detox. Finishing high school. Going to university. Making friends. Finding a real life. Making a difference.
She’s matter-of-fact ’bout all of this, too. There’s no bragging ’bout how she done so good. She’s just sharing her story. When she gets to how she and this guy Geordie come back to Tyson to look for me, but all they find is the empty house and the burned-out tree in the field out back, I find myself wondering, what would my life have been like if we’d managed to hook up then?
“Why did you burn down the tree?” she asks. “Was it like with the paintings?”
“I reckon.”
She nods and looks away, past me.
“I ain’t particularly proud of setting out to hurt you,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says. “But there was magic in that tree.”
“Yeah, you had a hundred stories ’bout it.”
She shakes her head. “No, there was real magic. I didn’t know myself until today.”
She tells me about how the little dorky guy brought this wreath of magic flowers and twigs to heal her, how she used it on me instead. But before it worked, she got took to this other place, this deep mysterious forest, where she met her this old spirit. Funny thing is, she’s well into this part of her story afore I pick up on how this must’ve been the same woman I met on my way back to being alive again.
Hell, no wonder that earth mama was so pissed off at me. I went and burned down her special tree.
“I met her,” I tell Jillian May when she’s done. “Just afore I woke up here, I was in that same place with her. But we didn’t get along near so well as the two of you did. She was some disappointed in me, but like I told her. Sh
e wanted things to work out different, she could’ve been a little more forthcoming ’bout it all. I mean, how the hell were we supposed to know what she give us?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s too late anyways,” I say.
Jillian May shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s ever too late.”
Yeah, like I can just turn my life around now after all I done.
“How come you never hooked up with this Geordie guy?” I ask instead, pushing the conversation onto steadier ground. “Sounds like the two of you were particularly tight.”
“We were just friends for the longest time,” she says. “And now … now he’s with someone else.”
“Don’t mean you can’t make a play for him.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
I think about that a moment.
“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be right,” I say.
Considering how she turned her own self around, I’m kinda surprised she ain’t more judgmental ’bout my life and the things I done. But all she seems to want to do is understand me. She’s not even trying to correct the way I talk.
“Did you really … you know, kill all those unicorns?” she asks.
“I guess. But we was wolves. That’s what wolves do. You hunt. You bring down game.”
She nods, but I can tell she don’t like it. I can’t say’s I blame her. I look at what we done, me and the pack, and it don’t seem right to me neither, not no more. Sure wolves hunt. Out there in the wild country, it’s always gonna be survival of the fittest. But we wasn’t hungry. We was hunting them critters for the plain fun of it and then getting us high on their blood. Ain’t a whole lotta dignity in that for ’em and it don’t say much good ’bout me and Pinky and the others, that’s for damn sure.
But it’s nothing I can take back now. I can feel bad about it, and I do, but it don’t change nothing for them that’s dead and gone.
And we got the same problem with my sister here. I feel bad for her, too, but I can’t change what’s been done. I can’t take back all them years of hating her. I can’t fix all them paintings I cut up. I can’t do nothing ’bout that burned down tree. I can’t trade my life for her health.
“You know we ain’t never going to be friends,” I tell her. “We don’t got much in the way of common ground ’cept that one thing and I’m not real eager to sit around and talk about that sorry-ass freak brother of ours for the rest of my life.”
The Onion Girl Page 52
