Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  That would be a good way to live, Kerry thought. To be brave and true. To stand up for yourself and for anybody else not strong enough to be able to do it for themselves. It seemed to come so naturally to Annie. Did she ever have doubts? And if she did, how did she overcome them? Was it something you could learn?

  Probably not. You probably had to be born brave.

  Kerry didn't think she'd ever been brave. She could endure, but that wasn't the same thing at all.

  She sighed and set about cleaning up the mess she'd made. The paint peels and chips into the garbage, newspapers refolded so that they could go into the recycling bin, scraper and unused steel wool returned to the bag they'd come in so that she could give them back to Rory in the morning. Tomorrow she'd ask him if he had any linseed oil she could borrow, but for now she placed the bookcase against the wall.

  The tape machine was set at such a low volume that when she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of herbal tea, she could no longer make out the words. But she didn't want to turn it up any louder in case it bothered somebody. She finished making her tea and returned to the living room, stopping the tape and rewinding it so that she could listen to it properly tomorrow. Turning off the lights, she sat in her chair and looked out the window, sipping her tea.

  She was so tired she thought she might be able to get to sleep without having to take a pill. Unless her night visitor returned. That was what was really keeping her up. Just thinking about it made her chest go tight. But by ten o'clock, she'd finished her tea and the ghosts had left her alone.

  Leaving her cup on the window seat, she went into the bedroom and undressed in the dark. She loved the firmness of the futon, the way you could turn over on it without making a bedspring creak, because there was no box spring underneath, only the floor.

  "Thank you for a perfect day," she said.

  If she'd been asked whom she was addressing, she wouldn't have been able to say. Perhaps she was only speaking to the night.

  She fell asleep more quickly than usual. Sometime later, drifting deep in the shoals of early morning with the dawn not even a promise on the horizon, she stirred at the light touch of a hand on her arm.

  "You're grinding your teeth again," a voice said.

  Not at all alarmed, she burrowed her face deeper into her pillow.

  "You're not real," she mumbled. "You were never … real …"

  As she fell back asleep, she thought she heard someone weeping softly. In the morning, she remembered it only vaguely, like a dream.

  15.

  Closing in on three that same morning, Ray was in the lane that ran behind the Rookery—a tall, red-haired figure, standing so still he was almost invisible unless one knew to look for him. His gaze was fixed on what he could see of the dark bulk of the house through the boughs of the elm, a small frown furrowing the V between his red eyebrows. He didn't hear the other man approach. He wouldn't have seen him, either, the newcomer's black duster and flat-brimmed hat letting him meld with the shadows, but Ray knew he was there all the same.

  "Hey, Jack," he said without turning. "Long time no see."

  "A little out of your usual territory," Jack said, stepping closer.

  Ray shrugged. "You know how we are. I like the high country, but the whole world's our territory."

  Jack made a noncommittal sound low in his throat.

  "You don't seem too happy to see me," Ray said.

  "You're scouting for Cody and Cody means trouble, so why would I be happy to see you?"

  Ray shrugged. "Cody keeps things interesting."

  "Chinese think 'interesting' is a curse," Jack said.

  "Yeah, but I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times."

  Finally Jack smiled. "Got an answer for everything, don't you? Some things never change."

  Ray turned to look at him. "You've changed," he said finally. "You're fat with stories."

  Ray knew that would make Jack smile again, as if that tall fence post of a figure could ever be considered overweight. He caught the flash of white teeth under the brim of Jack's hat, then went back to studying the Rookery. Jack did his whisper-walk and stepped up right beside him. They stood quietly together then, watching the house, aware of the night around them and everything in it, but distanced at the same time, as if they were one step outside the world, just beyond peripheral vision.

  "Cody's not here to cause trouble," Ray said after a time.

  "I know that. But trouble happens all the same whenever he's around."

  Ray shook his head. "That's the way it used to be, Jack. But I've talked to Cody and he's really thought it through this time."

  "You believe that," Jack said, "and I've got a bridge to sell you."

  Ray didn't blame him. He'd been just as skeptical when Cody first approached him a few weeks ago.

  "Look," he said. "Every time it's gone wrong was because Cody was trying to fine-tune that first mistake. This time he's going back and changing everything to the way it was before. He's going to clean the slate of all of this"—Ray lifted a hand, indicating the city around them—"and take us right back into the long ago, like nothing was ever changed."

  Jack was so long in replying that Ray had to turn to make sure that the presence he still sensed was actually there. He found Jack's dark gaze studying him from under the brim of his hat.

  "That what you want?" Jack asked finally.

  "You don't?"

  Jack shook his head. "Oh, I'll admit the idea has some immediate appeal when I think about all the ways they've found to screw things up, but I've made too many friends to be able to turn my back on them just like that." He snapped his fingers. "Now I know some of them are no better than cuckoos, mean for the sake of meanness, but the thing is, most of them're more like Cody than maybe he'd like to admit. You know what I mean? They mean well, even while they're making things worse."

  "I suppose."

  "And besides," Jack added, "I'd think you'd be the last one to want to turn back the clock like that."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You think I don't know who that is, moved into the crow house?"

  "Some cousin," Ray said with a shrug, pretending an unconcern he couldn't quite pull off.

  Jack nodded. "Family of yours … and family of mine, too."

  So that was how Cody got her into the roost, Ray thought. She was carrying blood from both sides of the argument. No wonder Cody was using her.

  "So?" he said, keeping his voice casual.

  Jack studied him. "You really don't know, do you?"

  Ray sighed. He hated riddles.

  "Know what?" he asked.

  Jack stepped up to him. "Come on," he said, taking Ray by the arm and pulling him down the lane. "Take a walk with me."

  "What for?"

  "I want to tell you a story," Jack told him. "But it's a long one. I figured maybe we could find ourselves a diner and you could buy me a coffee—just to keep my whistle wet."

  Ray hesitated a moment. He looked back at the Rookery and thought maybe there was someone looking out at them from the one second-story window that had a clear sight line through a hole in the elm's boughs. He didn't see so much as sense a flash of red hair. There was something about the person it belonged to that was both familiar and not.

  "Everybody knows how you like to ramble the woods around Hazard," Jack was saying. "How you're kind enough to help some of those hill girls ease their loneliness."

  Now the window was empty. Ray turned and let Jack lead him away, down the lane to where the shadows pooled thick. Hazard, he thought, and his thoughts went sliding back to the old mining town.

  "What're you getting at?" he said.

  "Well," Jack said, "her name was Edna Bean, a widow living by herself in a yellow farmhouse outside of town. Had herself a little girl she named Annette, but most folks called her Nettie, and she was more than a cousin to either of us."

  Ray stopped walking. He started to pull away, but Jack's grip was stronger than he
expected and he couldn't shake it.

  "If what you're telling me is that Nettie's my—"

  "Listen to the story," Jack said. "Maybe you'll learn something you didn't know."

  "Look, Jack. I don't need to hear some story—they always turn out the same. The humans die and we carry on. If you've got something to tell me—"

  Jack cut him off. "They all turn out the same, do they? I didn't know this one had all played out yet."

  Ray didn't have the patience for this.

  "Just tell me straight," he said. "That girl living in the crow house … what's her connection to me? How close are we related?"

  Jack gave him a mild look. "How close. That's going to make that big of a difference to you? I didn't know family was a thing you could measure like that."

  Ray had to pull in a steadying breath. It was worse than he'd thought. Damn Cody with that handsome lying smile of his. This time he'd gone too far.

  "I've got to go," he told Jack.

  What he needed right now was to have Cody standing here in front of him, not Jack. He needed to be taking what was owed to him out of coyote skin.

  "Maybe you should hear me out first," Jack said.

  Ray shook his head. "I appreciate what you're saying, but I've got a previous appointment I didn't know I had, so I'll just be saying—"

  "I've been carrying this story for you for a long time," Jack told him, cutting him off again, voice firm. "The least you can do is have the courtesy to take it from me."

  "Maybe some other time. Right now I need to—"

  "Besides, I really could use that coffee. How about you?"

  Ray met Jack's gaze and knew he had to let it go for now. Jack had a gift that could take the air out of anything—even this. Even Cody playing games with him, games that ran too deep.

  "Okay," he said. "We'll have that coffee. I'll listen to your story. I'll do that much. But then—"

  "Then maybe you'll think about what you've learned and who knows what you'll find yourself wanting to do?"

  Ray had to smile. "Maybe," he said.

  This time when Jack gave his arm another tug, he went along.

  16.

  It was Anita who found Katy curled up in the backseat of the junked canary-yellow Volvo that she had to pass on her way to the VW bus she was summering in herself. She returned to where Moth was sitting out with the dogs and brought him back to see, picking her way easily through the rows of rusting vehicles and other metal trash that were stacked fifteen feet high in places. Moth followed at a slower pace, Ranger and Judith ambling along on either side of him. He didn't know these back rows as well as Anita or the dogs—not at night.

  "So that's where she's been squatting,” he said when they reached the Volvo.

  He'd often wondered what kind of person would've bought a car so flashy and bright when it was new, but he wasn't surprised to find Katy claiming it. When the mood was on her, the girl could live on color, the flashier the better.

  Anita shook her head. "I'd have known if she was staying here on a regular basis."

  That was true, Moth thought. Hell, he'd have known, too. But he still didn't see what the big deal was. So she was crashing in one of his old cars. Better here, where she was safe, than out in the jungle of the Tombs.

  "I don't have a problem with this," he said. He turned away from the small figure to look at Anita. "Why the concern?"

  "You don't get it, do you?"

  Moth took the time to light a smoke. "What am I not getting?"

  "Look at her," Anita said. "She's got the look of an old cat that's crawled off to die."

  Or turning invisible for real, Moth thought, having a closer look. She wasn't a real distinct shape, lying there on the backseat, and it had nothing to do with stillness or the bad light. It was more like she was slipping away, withdrawing from the world to someplace they couldn't follow.

  "You've got to talk to her," Anita said.

  "Me?"

  Anita smiled. "Kids like you, Moth, damned if I know why. Maybe it's because you never grew up."

  "Yeah, I'm a regular Peter Pan. Look at me fly."

  "Just talk to her," Anita said.

  She was gone before he could argue.

  Moth sighed. Ranger trailed after her, but Judith settled down in the dirt by his feet, tongue lolling.

  "You ever get the feeling you're not really in charge anymore?" he asked the dog.

  All she did was give him a steady look in response.

  Well, what were you expecting? he asked himself. That she was going to talk? The world hadn't gotten that weird yet.

  He took a drag from his cigarette, lit another from its butt before he ground it under his heel. Judith lifted her head sharply when he tapped a knuckle on the window of the Volvo.

  "Hey there, sleeping beauty," he said when Katy turned around to look at him.

  Those eyes, Moth thought. You'd swear she had a summer sky stashed away behind them.

  "You mind some company?" he asked.

  She shook her head, so he cracked open the front door and stretched out along the front seat, back resting against the passenger door. The ashtray was gone, so he flicked ashes out the window behind him.

  "Nice place you've got here," he said.

  "I didn't think you'd mind."

  "Help yourself. I told you before—you want something, all you've got to do is ask. We look out for each other."

  "I won't be here long."

  Moth pretended indifference. He leaned his head back and blew smoke out the window behind him.

  "Going on a trip?" he asked.

  She shrugged. "Just going away. Back to wherever it is I came from. I can't stay here anymore."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't belong."

  "Everybody gets to feel like that, one time or another. It's a hard thing to have to live with, but it's fixable."

  She made no reply. Moth gave her the space to talk or not. There was no hurry. That was the thing people forgot in their rush to fix this and set that right, as though problems—especially problems of the heart or spirit—were like cars; you just needed to find the right part to replace. Didn't work that way.

  He finished his cigarette and dropped the butt on the ground outside his window where it would burn out in the dirt.

  "I always thought Jack was just being nice," she said after a while, "but now I know he was telling the truth."

  "About what?"

  "Me not being able to die."

  Moth wanted to take this slow, talk it out, no histrionics, but she didn't give him a chance.

  "I've figured out why I can't die," she told him in a flat, empty voice. "It's because I'm already dead. Or maybe I was never really alive."

  "Bullshit."

  She gave him a wistful look that made his old jaded heart want to weep.

  "I wish it was," she said, then she turned away again, face against the seat, back to him, hands tucked into her armpits, knees pulled up tight.

  Moth started to argue, then thought better of it. He went back to his trailer and chased down a blanket, brought it back and laid it over her. She didn't move, didn't give any indication she knew he'd gone, or come back. When he returned to his trailer again, Anita was sitting on a lawn chair, waiting for him.

  "How'd it go?" she asked.

  Moth stared away into the darkness beyond the junkyard. Judith picked up on his mood and moved in close against his leg, whined. That was the problem with a dog—you couldn't explain a problem to her. You just had to be there for her. Moth went down on one knee and laid a hand on her shoulder, felt it tremble. He looked over to Anita.

  "It didn't go at all," he said.

  "What can we do?"

  "Damned if I know. Maybe Hank'll come up with something."

  Moth showed up at Hank's stretch of concrete in the Tombs when Hank was in the middle of his push-ups. The day had begun overcast, a heavy cloud cover settling in so low it seemed to sit on your shoulders, but it didn't smell like rain.
There was a sense of something else in the air, something Moth couldn't quite put his finger on. An expectation that ran deeper than weather, he decided.

  He sat down, cross-legged, waiting for Hank to finish. Fishing out a cigarette from his battered pack, he lit up, blowing the smoke away from Hank. Across the pavement he could see the big mongrel dog that followed Hank around in the Tombs chowing down on whatever it was Hank had brought him today.

  "That is one seriously ugly dog, kid," he said.

  Hank only grunted in response.

  "It'd probably feed on small children if you weren't providing for it."

  "Or. Old men. Who. Talk. Too much."

  Moth took the hint. He smoked his cigarette and waited until Hank reached his hundred-count before he spoke again.

  "Anita found Katy sleeping in that old Volvo at the back of the yard," he told Hank. "Looking like an old cat that's crawled off to die, is the way she put it."

  Hank sat up and reached for his shirt, wiping his face on it.

  "You talked to Katy," he said, not making a question of it.

  Moth nodded. "Sounds like she's pretty much packing it in all right."

  Hank got that look in his eye, the one he always got when the situation seemed hopeless but he was determined to do something about it all the same.

  "We have to help her," he said.

  "You got the time?" Moth asked.

  He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. Hank was grown up now. He knew what he was doing, how much time he had, if it was stretched too thin or not.

  "You don't think I should've taken on this job with Marty, do you?" Hank said.

  Moth shrugged. "The way I heard it, she popped her old man. Pretty much cut-and-dried."

  "Maybe."

  They hadn't had much of a chance to talk about it over dinner last night, so Hank took the time now to fill him in on the previous day, detailing his interview with Sandy Dunlop, how he'd gone chasing through the tattoo parlors and body-piercing joints—"I would've loved to have seen Bruno's face when you asked him that," Moth couldn't resist saying. He finished up with the talk he'd had with Eddie this morning.