Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

Don't make yourself crazy, she told herself.

  As she started the car, she remembered that she hadn't had a chance to get to the bank after her trip to Tucson and didn't have a penny on her in case of an emergency. Since her bank was on the way to Jack's bus, she stopped in, actually finding a parking space right out front. Maybe things were finally starting to look up for her.

  There was only a small line inside and soon she was standing at a teller's window, asking to see a balance for her account. When she looked at the amount, she pushed her bankbook back toward the teller.

  "There must be some mistake," she said. "I never deposited ten thousand dollars this morning."

  The teller turned the book around so that he could look at it. He pointed to a line of code in front of the amount.

  "It was an electronic transfer from another bank," he said.

  Lily shook her head. "I don't understand. What other bank?"

  "Just a moment," the teller told her, "and I'll see what I can find out."

  This was too weird, Lily thought as she waited for him to get back. She watched him conferring with a dark-haired woman sitting at a desk, and then the two of them came back to the wicket.

  "I have the transfer record here," the woman said. She smoothed it out on the counter between them. "It was sent to us from the Williamson Street branch of the Unity Trust."

  Lily looked at the transfer record. The name under "Client" was the Newford Investment Group, Inc.

  "This doesn't make any sense," she said. "I've never heard of these people before."

  The woman smiled. "Well, they certainly appear to have heard of you."

  Lily remembered a friend who'd once had a large amount of money simply show up in her account one day. Instead of questioning it, she'd spent the money and then had to pay it all back when it was found to be the result of a computer error. She wasn't about to repeat that mistake.

  "It's so much money," she said.

  The woman nodded. "I'd be happy to discuss some excellent investment opportunities that we can offer."

  Lily shook her head. "Urn, maybe another time. I can't deal with this right now."

  "Of course. Let me give you my card."

  It was easier to take the card than argue.

  "I'd like to withdraw fifty dollars," Lily told the teller when the woman returned to her desk.

  "If you could just fill out this withdrawal slip …"

  Lily returned to her car in somewhat of a daze. This was crazy. Not the same crazy that was filling the rest of her life, but definitely weird all the same. But as she'd told the woman in the bank, it wasn't something she could deal with at the moment. Not when there was that chalice to think of. And that curious figure lying in the bottom of it.

  But ten thousand dollars. How many financial worries wouldn't that solve?

  Focus, she told herself.

  First she had to talk to Jack, then she could worry about large amounts of money mysteriously appearing in her bank account.

  She dropped her bankbook into the shopping bag that held her camera equipment and started the car. Pulling out into the traffic, she headed north toward the Tombs and Jack's school bus.

  18.

  Linear space was as much a human invention as linear time, and like most corbae Margaret had no idea what purpose either served. It certainly couldn't be because they were faster or more convenient. The direct line between two points ignored the folds in the fabric that made up the world, the nooks and crannies that might not only provide a shortcut from one place to another, but were also the hidden resting ground of things that strayed too far out of the world to return. They were washed up like tidal hoards in these secret havens: Lost objects. Forgotten places. The tired, the unwanted, the lonely. Sad places, some, but there were happy ones, too.

  They were a corbae's dream, magpie treasure nests in which you might stumble across anything. A shiny bauble. A gold ring. A missing friend. Why anyone would develop a logic that wouldn't admit to their existence had never made any sense to her at all. But human logic often confounded her. She was very much like the crow girls in that regard, always more interested in what lay behind the obvious, the hidden lane as opposed to the well-used thoroughfare, the secret room-like space in an old elm tree instead of the expected rooms in a house.

  Tuesday afternoon found her poking about in the secret places around Jack Daw's school bus, looking for the tall storyteller. She finally found him in a curious room behind a stop sign that was rusted and almost bent in two. It had worn wooden floors, white plaster walls, and two windows. Through one window you could see the afternoon sun as it fell upon the Tombs. Through the other you were looking into a night sky, freckled with stars. The discrepancy between the two didn't seem at all remarkable to Margaret, but she was used to such places.

  Jack sat on the floor, long legs splayed out in front of him. The tails of his coat pooled on either side of his figure like limp black wings.

  "You look terrible," Margaret said, slouching down against the wall beside him. "Like you're all dried up."

  "I lost her, Maggie."

  "Lost who?"

  "My girl. Katy. She's faded back into wherever it is that she first came from."

  Margaret shook her head. "That's hard. You want some," she added, offering him a stick of chewing gum.

  "No, thanks."

  She unwrapped a piece and stuck it in her mouth, returning the rest of the package to her pocket.

  "You ever tell her you're her father?" she asked.

  Jack shook his head. "No. She liked me. I didn't want to screw that up."

  "If you think a kid wouldn't want to meet her father, you're really out of touch."

  "Even one who abandoned her the way I did? One who went along with everything people were saying about how she didn't exist, so there was no point in looking for her?"

  "You just got some bad advice," Margaret said. "None of us knew."

  "Nettie never gave up."

  "And look where it got her."

  "That had nothing to do with her chasing after Katy."

  "I guess."

  Margaret looked out through the window from which the sunlight came in. She didn't recognize the view, but then she didn't really know the Tombs all that well, never really liked the place. It was too used up. Sometimes you looked on a ruined structure and you could still appreciate the splendor it had lost, but that never happened to her in the Tombs.

  "What about the other one?" she asked.

  "Kerry."

  "Are you going to tell her?"

  "I think I let her life get messed up enough as it is without me bringing more trouble into it."

  Margaret sighed. "I'd say you should let her make up her own mind on that, but I guess I'd be wasting my breath."

  Jack didn't reply for a long time. Finally he put a hand on her knee.

  "I appreciate your sitting with me," he said.

  Margaret covered his hand with her own.

  "Sometimes I understand Cody's wanting to change things," Jack told her then. "You know, going back and trying to make right what you screwed up the first time around."

  "It never works."

  "I know that. I'm just saying I understand the impulse."

  "You've got too much sympathy for that mangy old dog," Margaret said. "Sometimes it seems to me that everything that ever went bad came out of something he did."

  "He didn't send Nettie to the cuckoos."

  "And neither did we. I'm not saying we can't make our own mistakes. I'm just saying we don't need Cody adding to them."

  Jack shrugged. It was an old argument.

  Margaret changed tack. "The crow girls had me looking out for a friend of yours down Tucson way."

  "Who's that?"

  "Lily Carson—a photographer."

  Jack nodded. "Oh, sure. I know her. She's a good listener." He gave Margaret a curious look. "What's she got to do with the crow girls?"

  "I thought maybe you could tell me. Lily's got the cuc
koos chasing after her, though I don't think she knows it."

  "The crow girls've got a thing about the cuckoos."

  "And you don't?"

  "I'm done killing them," Jack said.

  "Maybe. That who you're hiding from, Jack?"

  At first she thought he wasn't going to answer.

  "Meanness comes naturally to them," he said finally. "Trouble is, they call that meanness up in us, too. Take a look at the crow girls. Sweetest kids you'd ever want to meet until you put a cuckoo in front of them and then they're all knives and hardness."

  "The crow girls aren't kids," Margaret said. "They're older than any of us, except maybe Raven."

  "You know what I mean."

  "I guess."

  "I don't like who I become when those cuckoos are around," Jack said. "That's what it boils down to. I don't want to know that person. I don't want to be that person."

  Margaret waited him out.

  Jack sighed. "You weren't there, Margaret. You heard about it, but you didn't see what they did to her."

  He was talking about Nettie again.

  "That was bad," Margaret agreed. "Maybe as bad as it gets. But what if it happens again—to someone else we care about? It'd be worse this time. If they get their hands on Raven's pot …"

  "That damn pot. Why does it have to be our responsibility?"

  "Someone's got to do it."

  "Yeah, and we're doing such a great job of it, too."

  Margaret had no argument with that. But she didn't know if it was entirely their fault. There was something about that pot that made it easy to misplace, to forget. Then you'd hold it in your hands and you couldn't imagine ever letting a piece of magic like that slip out of your mind.

  "We're going to need everybody's help on this," she said.

  Jack gave her a slow nod and got to his feet. He offered her a hand up, then looked out the window—not the one that offered a view of the Tombs, but the one that opened out onto some night, somewhere.

  "That's a peaceful dark," he said. "There's not an ounce of loneliness in it."

  "I remember."

  "It belonged to us once. That's what Cody's looking to bring back."

  "I've got friends to ease that loneliness," Margaret told him. "And that's what Cody's looking to take away."

  "I said the same thing to Ray."

  "Maybe they don't live long," Margaret said. "Not like us. But I figure they're worth fighting for."

  Jack nodded, still looking out at the dark.

  "You know what scares me?" he said.

  Margaret shook her head.

  He turned to her with haunted eyes. "If the killing starts again, this time I don't think I'll be able to stop."

  Margaret didn't have an answer to that.

  THE LONESOME DEATH OF NETTIE BEAN

  What we want most is a secret that no one can tell us.

  —Anonymous

  1.

  Hazard, Late summer, 1983

  There's those that say that Nettie has another breakdown when Lilah and her husband took Kerry away from Hazard. You can understand people's point, if you take the time to look at it from their perspective. Best they can make out is Nettie's just gone feral. She takes to the woods again, but not to collect stories. She's not sketching or keeping a journal—working up something to be published or hung in a gallery, which they think is strange enough. It's like when she was that fox child I first met all those years ago, doesn't matter she's a woman grown. She's running wild, plain and simple. Has a purpose, but it makes no more sense to the locals than when she was looking for some lost daughter that was never born.

  She's looking for magic.

  She's looking to fly.

  She reaches for it the way the crow girls travel, gives herself time to stop and look at everything. Goes tumbling through the wooded hills like an acorn bouncing down the branches of its oak, following the wind, chasing fancies real and imagined, reading portents in the way moss flakes on a stone, mushrooms grow from a stump, a snag points its long length between the trees still standing.

  She's tracking down the wild crow boys, climbing up in their trees and trying to talk to them while they're wearing their black feather skins. She's sitting on the porch with that old juju woman who lives at the head of Copper Creek, the two of them listening to the clink of glass coming from the bottle tree in front of the house, the wind brushing the bottles against each other, Nettie asking questions, the juju woman shaking her head, she doesn't know. She's pestering Alberta and Jolene and Bear, but they can't help her. Crazy Crow comes by and tries to talk some sense into her, and later Annie and Margaret, but she won't listen to anybody.

  She's got this idea that once she gets hold of some piece of magic she can call her own, once she can fly, she'll be able to bring Kerry back from California to live with her. She'll be able to find her other daughter, the one that got lost before she had the chance to get born.

  "It's never going to happen," Crazy Crow tells her, trying one last time.

  He's right, but he's wrong, too. In the regular turn and spin of the world, it isn't going to happen. Doesn't matter how deep the fox blood runs in her, canids don't fly. But he should've remembered that nothing's impossible if you want it bad enough—hell, doesn't the story go that the whole reason the world's here for us to mess up the way we do is because Raven was looking for someplace to fly? He couldn't do it on his own, but you put enough heads together and a thing'll get done.

  Only Crazy Crow forgot that, so he didn't think he could help. The crow girls would have known what to do, but they were off in Tibet at the time. I know, because I ran into them there, on my way back to the Americas from a summer spent on the shores of the Dead Sea.

  "Give it a rest," Crazy Crow says. "Appreciate what you've got."

  "I know what you're doing," Nettie tells him. She's looking wild, hair all knotted and caught up with seeds and twigs, wearing a circle of burrs on the hem of her ragged dress. "You're the voice in the wilderness, come to dissuade me. But I won't be dissuaded in this."

  Crazy Crow gives up on her then. Most folks do. But she doesn't give up. Not on flying. Not on finding her missing daughter. She just keeps digging, deeper and deeper, further afield, until somewhere she hears about the Morgans and that's when it all goes bad.

  In human terms, the Morgans are an old moonshining family that lives back in the hills where no one goes unless they've got legitimate business. If you don't have legitimate business in Freakwater Hollow, you don't come back.

  Inbred, folks'd say, seeing how they all have that same Morgan look—tall and lean, men and women both, handsome, dangerous, clannish. They age well, silver-haired and dark-eyed from their teens on, and they don't seem to have children, least no one sees any Morgan children. Story goes that mean as the Morgans are, their children are worse, so they keep them kenneled up somewhere out beyond where they run their stills, deep, deep in the hills. Keep them there until they're old enough to act civilized, if that's what you can call a Morgan's behavior.

  We know them better. They don't kennel their children. They leave them in other people's nests like faerie changelings, come and collect them when they're grown. "Grown" for a Morgan usually means they've killed off the family that raised them and are ready to spread their wings. Round about then their birth parents come to collect them and bring them back into the hills.

  There's serious bad blood between us. Goes back forever it seems and I've never been able to track down the story of how exactly it all got started. I remember once, before he went away, Raven told me there was no big mystery, we just had to keep them in check because that's the way it was. Someone had to do it and we got elected, same as that pot of his was our responsibility.

  "Comes from being the oldest," he said. "Certain things we've got to do. Everybody's got a role to play—world wouldn't turn without us all doing our part."

  Maybe that's why things are the way they are now. Raven's turned his back on his responsibilities and th
e world's been going downhill ever since. I don't know what part it is the Morgans are supposed to play unless it's to catch and skin corbae, and they're too damned good at that.

  But Nettie doesn't know any of this. No one's ever thought to tell her. So there she is one afternoon, walking barefoot up Plum Hollow Road, what the locals call 'Shine Road on account of the Morgans and their stills and marijuana fields. They're watching her as she follows that old dirt track up into the wooded hills, some of them pacing her through the trees on either side, rifles in hand, others winging it above. She doesn't smell like the law or trouble, so they let her come, curious about this raggedy woman who doesn't have enough good sense to stay away.

  When she finally reaches their place it's nothing like she expected. It doesn't look magic, it just looks run-down. Big old barn up on the hill, wood beams gone the same gray as that silvery Morgan hair, tin sheets rattling on the roof whenever a wind comes up. Junked cars and pickups in the fields. A couple of others that don't look like they're in much better condition parked in the dirt yard that lies between the barn, the clapboard farmhouse, and the outbuildings. There's trash everywhere. Morgans don't keep a clean nest.

  It's so quiet it feels like there's a storm building, but the sky's blue for as far as Nettie can see. She looks around some, wondering if maybe the place is abandoned, until she suddenly notices the woman in a rocking chair on the porch that fronts the house, just sitting there, looking at her, smiling. Something about that smile's not quite right, but Nettie, she's not noticing that sort of thing. She smiles back and crosses the yard until she's standing by the porch.

  "You lost?" the woman asks.

  She's genuinely curious. There's a throaty, hollow-toned ring to her voice, as though the sound of it's coming up from the bottom of a well. Or a crypt. Her name's Idonia and she's the matriarch of this clan, hundreds of years old but she looks the same as any Morgan, late twenties, early thirties, smooth pale skin, silvery hair, dark eyes.

  "No, ma'am," Nettie says. "If this is the Morgan farm, then I'm right where I looked to be."