I dreamed one continuous dream that night. I was aware of the fact that I was dreaming, and in some strange way I was trying to interpret what was happening as one scene fed into another. But I couldn’t understand. The only thing I was certain of was that I was flying, not as a child flies when he fears falling and tries to catch something to hold onto.
No, I was looking through the eyes of something . . . a creature that I’d joined with. We flew through the clouds, the trees, swooping down to the silver ripples of a stream that cut through the rocks and disappeared for long stretches before reappearing. There was an urgency about my actions, a fear that sliced through me. I had to hurry, else I’d be too late.
And then my alter self cut sharply around and headed back toward the cabin. It, no, we flew inside and I slid to the floor with a thud. The same raucous cry sliced through the stillness of the night. Suddenly I was awake. For a moment I thought I had dreamed the cry, too. I heard the shriek again and I knew this was no vision; this was real.
I turned on the small lamp on my desk, punched up the fire and considered what had just happened. It was real. I was wearing my usual tee shirt and boxers, which were damp and cold now, and my feet were bare. The squawk came again, accompanied by a rustle of wings as the cabin door opened and the creature flew into the house, perching once more in the rafters.
It was huge, spreading its wings and turning around angrily. Even in the shadows I could see its eyes, a golden glare of light that seemed to be frowning. Suddenly, it came back to me. I’d had this dream in Oklahoma, when I’d been on my vision quest. As if I’d walked fifty miles and my feet were bare. I’d thought when I woke the next morning that I’d failed, that I’d fallen asleep. That’s when I packed my knapsack and headed home, disappointed in what I’d done and in my inability to keep awake.
I heated a container of water and a hand warmer in the microwave and dressed quickly, finding a pair of thick socks and waterproof boots. I packed my knapsack with dry clothes and a blanket and finally, I added powdered coffee to the hot water. At the last minute, I pushed a small flask of medicinal vodka into my supplies and pulled the pack over my shoulders.
A pair of fur-lined gloves and a wool hat with ear flaps and I was ready. Finally, I reached for the staff I always carried when I climbed and headed out, trusting that my feathered creature would show me the way.
The woods were silent, giving me no clue as to which direction to take. Which way? I heard nothing, nor did I see any signs of someone having run through the brush. The bird and the boy were connected. Find one and I’d find the other. I called out, “Hello? Hello? Nikolai?”
No answer. As I stood at the foot of a path I normally took up the mountain, an icy fog wafted down to the ground, completely covering the mountain, leaving only me in the center of a circle of silver gray.
Then it came toward me, the bird I’d called a boomerang with feathers. It swooped down, circled me and headed off toward the mountain top. I couldn’t see it, but I knew where it was. And I followed. The higher I climbed, the colder it got and the stronger the wind surged.
I seemed to walk for hours when I suddenly stepped out of the mist into a clearing. The sound of water rushed passed me and disappeared as if it had never carved a downward slice from the earth. As I stood, watching the waterfall, the mountain went silent.
“Hello? Is there anyone here?
No answer.
Why had the bird led me to this place? Was the boy here? Could he be hurt? Carefully, I made my way upwards. The bird flew back over and up, landing above a point where the water exited the other side of the ridge and plunged into a small pool below. I pointed a flashlight. That’s when I saw him, the boy crumpled beneath an overhanging rock. He’d made a clumsy attempt to cover himself with leaves but when I finally touched him, he felt like ice. A few feet away were the remains of a fire. On the wall behind him was a shadowy drawing that seemed to wave in the mist. Gusts of wind blew leaves and sticks against the wall behind the boy.
I covered him with an insulated blanket while I set about building a fire. If my Cherokee forefathers had sheltered beneath this rock, so would the boy and I. Snow began to flurry; it would be melted and of no consequence by morning, but it made the night feel much colder.
I rubbed the boy’s hands and his face with the hand warmer but he didn’t respond. I fished the vodka from my bag and forced some of it down his throat. Moments later he coughed and sputtered, then spewed out a few words in Russian.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, gazing at me wildly. I moved back a few steps and sat down cross-legged beside the fire. Slowly he calmed down. He drew the blanket tightly around him, scowled, sighed, then sat down across the fire from me, rubbing his hands and arms. He suddenly reached out and grabbed the thermos of coffee I’d set nearby. He drank it down without stopping for breath. His eyes drooped. He slept.
I built up the fire and covered him with the second blanket, wondering where the bird had gone, wondering if it was the stolen parrot or a figment of my imagination. Sleep wouldn’t come. I felt as if I was in a silent world, alien to me, yet protecting me with its seclusion. Finally, I inched my way over to the wall so that I could shine a flashlight on the drawing I’d seen earlier.
The etching depicted a campfire much like ours with three men sitting around it. The curved wall around them had vein-line lines with irregular patterns along the bottom. Obviously, the picture was not one of the exact place we were camped. There were no boulders, no waterfall. But the place was familiar. There was no suggestion of fear or flight.
I huddled beside the fire again, watching the boy sleep. Finally, I slept, too.
WMOS Radio
“The Voice of the Creek”
Here’s old Bert again to tell you it looks like all our visitors survived Friday night, despite some escapades reported from Miss Eula Mae’s front yard and rumors that Sagan Salter has found the runaway Russian boy. Some of the Cirque d’Europa performers have offered to put on a little show tonight at the new high school gym. It’s free and everybody in town is welcome to drop by. Just remember to dress warm, since the gym’s not quite finished and the heat’s not on, yet. Yep. It’s February in the mountains.
Chapter 3
Saturday
More Fun Under the Big Top
Ida
LIKE I NEEDED another attractive man in my life. The kind of man who makes women jump through hoops while juggling her heart at the same time. On top of all that, he was charmingly French.
Americans who sneer at the French have never read a history book. France is no bigger than one of our largest states, yet its brave people have survived centuries of bloody attacks from their neighbors plus two devastating world wars (World War I wiped out an entire generation of young French men.) Not to mention giving us Quiche Lorraine and Yves Montand.
Speaking of strong, handsome Frenchmen . . .
“Pardon moi,” Philippe Chu said in a deep voice as he stepped into my kitchen at Hamilton Farm that Saturday morning wearing a snug pullover and tight, faded jeans. His French-Vietnamese heritage made for a tall, lithe, honey-skinned slice of cake de beef. He was in his mid-forties by my guess. Silver wings dramatized his shoulder-length ponytail of jet-black hair. His Anglo Asian features included deep, green, almond-shaped eyes. I pirouetted from the kitchen sink and found him smiling at me the way a tiger smiles at a gazelle. “I’m up a little early for my morning training routine,” he went on. “May I join you for coffee, first?”
“Absolutely. That would be wonderful.” My gazelle body, clad in slender charcoal slacks and a form-fitting white sweater with tiny onyx buttons, zinged with pleasure. Ah, the harmless thrill of being chased. I set fragrant cups of dark roast Columbian on a heavy oak table, followed by a platter of extra-crispy raisin bagels glopped with overdoses of pineapple cream cheese, which my young housekeeper, June McEvers
, had left under a clean dish towel on her rush out a side door.
She’d arrived two hours before her normal eight a.m. schedule, zoomed through a few cursory chores, then bounded outdoors into the frosty backyard. Where, by no small coincidence, Philippe’s gorgeous twenty-two-year old son, Jean, had promised to teach her some juggling techniques.
Funny, I’d always thought June was more the Scottish poetry-and-museum type. Now she was outdoors tossing large silver hoops among my freeze-dried winter azaleas.
“Tell me more about your juggling act,” I said as Philippe and I sipped coffee. “Besides flinging glittery Hula hoops, what is your family’s specialty?”
Philippe smiled. “Imagine my twin sons—Jean and Maurice—atop a platform suspended fifty feet above the stage. Imagine Maurice’s delicate little wife, Lien, balanced upon a tall pedestal barely wider than her feet. Imagine my reckless teenager, Camille, perched very carefully upon my shoulders. Imagine all five of us madly whirling dozens of flickering hoops back and forth.” He paused. “Blindfolded.”
I smiled. “That sounds truly magical. How did you learn that? How many hoops have ended up around the necks of audience members?”
He laughed, a deep, musical sound. “Quite a few, actually. But they’re light and harmless. We’ve found that people love the risk of our act. Danger and surprise have a powerful allure.” His eyes shifted slightly, taking all of me in with one glance. Care to duel with rose-tipped swords? “Don’t you agree?”
“I prefer to be the tosser, not the tossee. Don’t fling any hoops my way. I’m not fond of being on the receiving end of unexpected complications.”
“Mon Dieu!” He feigned shock. “Such timidity behind your glorious joie de vivre!”
“Do I look timid?” I tilted my head just so. Flirting is second nature to some men and women, me among them. The art of it has little to do with tawdry come-on’s. Great flirting was born in the ancient ages of gallantry, a substitute for forbidden sex, a graceful parlor game. Men love a woman who makes them feel, hmmm, effective. She doesn’t have to be beautiful or young, slender or firm. It’s about the tilt of her head, her smile, her attentive gaze. What’s the harm in that?
“You, timid?” Philippe said, leaning toward me. “Never! Afraid to take risks? Impossible! Such a shame. I can’t fathom it!”
Beneath the teasing he seemed genuinely amazed. I sank back in the silk-padded security of my kitchen chair. “You don’t ever feel any pressure to . . . act your age?”
He stared at me. “Do you? Act your age?”
“Maybe I should. I’m fifty-one.”
“Such a vibrant woman, talking as if a mere number can define the passion and promise of life. Tell me it isn’t true.”
“You tell me something, first, Philippe. Last night, over dinner, one of your children mentioned that their mother died a few years ago and you’ve been alone ever since. I understand grieving for a lost spouse, believe me, but I assume you have plenty of gorgeous young women from which to choose. At least to have, shall we say, companionship.”
He looked at me wryly. “Ah, ‘companionship.’”
“All right, Frenchman. You know what I mean. Sex.”
“I have had companions. I adore them. But I don’t need or want a replacement for my wife.”
I waggled a finger at him. “A bit stuck in your ways, eh? What happened to the ‘passion and the promise’? Maybe you’re older than you think.”
“Mais non, my darling hostess.” His smile grew wistful. “I am whatever age my birth certificate claims, but my heart sees nothing but love. My wife was far younger than me. More than twenty years younger. I’m sixty-one years old, Ida.”
I was seriously flabbergasted. When I recovered, I said, “Mais non, my handsome, unwrinkled guest!”
He gave a soft chuckle but his eyes took on a sad, distant gaze. “Life was difficult for me, growing up in Vietnam as a half-white child. So my wealthy French father sent me to a Catholic boarding school in Paris. I didn’t return to Vietnam until I was nearly forty years old. I was an acclaimed gymnast by then, a performer with the most elegant juggling troupes—and I had won a bronze medal in gymnastics at the Olympics, as a very young man. I was a celebrity.
“Important Vietnamese families, their fortunes ruined by decades of war, were anxious to curry favor with me. To offer me their daughters in marriage—their pureblooded Vietnamese daughters, offered to me, a mongrel. Imagine. In my pride, I chose a beautiful, well-educated girl the way traders choose a prize cow. She was barely eighteen. I never intended to love her, and I told myself I didn’t care whether or not she ever loved me. I owned her, this . . . beautiful, innocent, barely grown child. I had earned her. Nothing else mattered.”
I sat there, hypnotized, my coffee mug cooling in my hands. “There’s a nice surprise ending to this story, I’m guessing.”
He nodded. “Yes. We fell in love. We had the most soulful marriage two people could ever wish for. Despite our differences, we became best friends.”
I set my coffee down. “I see. You’re telling me it’s easy to find a new companion. But not to find another soul mate and best friend. Those cannot be predicted or planned.”
“Indeed. You understand.”
“I’ve been alone since my husband died, twenty years ago. Despite an ample supply of male companions since then, no other man has ever . . .” I stopped. A needling sensation on my skin told me I was about to tell a lie. What lie? You know what lie, the angel of my conscience hissed. And you know who it’s about, too. Who that special man is. The one who could stand side by side to equal Jeb’s place in your life.
I fumbled with a bagel mounded with cream cheese. “No other man,” I repeated grimly, and aimed the bagel for my lips. When cornered, hide behind food.
Philippe stopped my hand. His fingers were long, supple and callused. They closed gently around my wrist. “I am hearing what you’re not saying,” he accused. “Ahah. There is such an amazing man in your life. So, tell me, what stops you from pursuing him? From accepting this incredible second chance at happiness? Is he married?”
“No.”
“Disinterested?”
“No.”
“Horribly humpbacked? Covered in festering leprosy sores?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “No.”
“Then what could possibly be the problem?”
“He’s only thirty-six. I’m fifty-one.”
Philippe frowned. His fingers splayed on the tender underside of my wrist, as if searching. “And?”
“That’s fifteen years’ difference. He’s a man. I’m his older woman. And no, it’s not the same as an older man and a younger woman. Not like you and your wife. You know that. I keep trying to explain the biological reality to him.”
Philippe clucked his tongue at me. “So you’re telling me this reckless boy of thirty-six surely cannot know what he wants? Why, of course. He’s barely old enough to shave. You cradle robber.”
“Be serious.”
“I cannot be serious when faced with such absurd reasoning.” He removed the bagel from my hand then cupped my hand in both of his. Leaning toward me intently, Philippe said in a low, graveled voice, “Never turn your back on passion. We will all surely grow old and die some day, but our love, our passion for life, makes us young at heart forever. Love is eternal. Love is not about age, my beautiful new friend. It is about lust and friendship, courage and faith and hope.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it.
I sat there with tears in my eyes.
He kissed my hand again.
We heard footsteps on the hall rug only a few seconds before Del stepped into my kitchen doorway. Philippe, being a Frenchman, calmly refused to release my hand. And me, being a Southern woman not given to panicking, looked up at Dell’s grim face and said, “This is my hou
seguest from Cirque d’Europa. Philippe Chu. He’s a palm reader.”
“Does he read palms with his mouth?” Del growled.
“He’s near-sighted. Philippe, this is Del Jackson. Lieutenant Colonel, retired, United States Army. Who is glad to meet you, regardless of his scowl.”
Philippe released my hand, stood, and bowed slightly. “My pleasure, monsieur.”
“All yours, I’m sure,” Del said coolly. My heart sank. The Del I knew had never been inhospitable, sarcastic or given to cheap retorts. His churlish mood was my fault.
I stood. “Let me fix you a cup of coffee.”
“No. I’ve got errands. I just dropped by to talk about tonight.” We had plans for a pre-Valentine’s dinner at Win Allen’s restaurant. “I’ll be waiting in your office.” Del pivoted with the crisp authority of a recruit on the drill ground and walked out.
My shoulders slumped. I felt Philippe watching me, and I faced him. “Yes?”
“I take it,” Philippe said gently, “he knows he’s not the man you love.”
I could only nod.
Sandy
I HAD READ MYSELF to sleep Friday night, listening for a call from Mutt at the jail, telling me Sergei and Mariska had chopped each other up with some plastic knives from the break room. Even though no call came I woke up Saturday morning tired. I wasn’t much of a reader until I met Jess, and he introduced me to fantasy novels. Now I love to read about magical creatures and mystical places, like unicorns, fairies, wizards and elfin kings and queens performing heroic deeds. I dreamed of a feisty little girl with blond ringlets and fireflies in her hair. Me in Camelot or some such place.
After I fortified myself with coffee, I did some house work until mid-day. I used to clean houses for a living before Amos hired me to be his dispatcher. I always liked to keep things tidy, but lately I’d been on a serious cleaning binge. I thought about how much I missed Jess and wondered how he was enjoying his camping trip. His solo camping trip. I hoped he was as lonesome as I was. Really, really lonesome.
At Home in Mossy Creek Page 12
