by Rebecca Ore
“Are we leaving right now?”
“Why stay around here and wait for them to shoot me?” Six hours in, six hours back. “I’ll have been on the road all day.”
“We can’t stay here. Maybe you’d like to stop at a motel after we’re sure we’re not followed?”
Maude wondered whether he was so justified to kill. “Let’s get on the way then.”
She helped him load the footlocker onto the truck bed, then carried out his boxed clothes and a few pieces of furniture. “What are you doing with the rest of the furniture?”
“I’ve arranged for it to go into storage. I’ve sent the computers on ahead. They’ll show up at your house tomorrow.”
“My house?”
“So we have some advance warning if the boy’s family is looking for me.”
Maude wanted to leave John on the street and drive away, leave Terry’s truck off the road somewhere and hitch to a place she’d never been before. “Don’t you have a car here?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ll drive it. I’ll drive the truck.”
Maude was grateful she wouldn’t have to share a car with him. She’d seen enough of his type of crazy in Berkeley. Generally, they stayed away from the clinics, but bored you with theories. But then, he had shot a boy who was breaking into his house.
John handed her the keys and a cap, smiled at her, and said, “Can you tuck your hair under this cap? Good luck.” He probably had a disguise in his luggage, a wig, a woman’s coat.
“The boy’s family will forget after a while,” Maude said. “According to psych researchers, people only stay angry for about ten years.”
“I’d called in sick. That’s why I was home. I’m quitting my job. All I really need is the computers.”
You did lure the kid in. “Well, let’s go then,” she said. She put the key in the ignition of his car and noticed that he seemed relieved when it started and didn’t blow up. She wondered if the kid he’d shot had been one of his street buddies, the black thieves he knew.
Maude pulled away from the house and found the road across the James that would take her home through the country, with possible variations if she did feel she was followed. She opened the glove compartment to see what maps he might have. A 9-mm Beretta fell out. When Maude pushed it under the seat, she felt another holstered gun there. She was ferrying his handguns. Immediately, she slowed down to 55 and debated whether she should stop and lock the guns in the trunk or leave them where they were and hope she wasn’t stopped for anything.
If she pulled over, someone passing might see her with the guns and call the police wondering what was going on. Guns could make me paranoid. She decided to simply drive through the rest of the hours, go straight home, call Terry to come pick up this rolling arsenal, and drive away in her MiniCooper.
At Amelia Courthouse, she stopped at a gas station and bought three caffeinated sodas. Amelia Courthouse was far enough away from Richmond to be more like the country than northern Virginia. Historical markers told her about the Confederate Cabinet’s retreat, about mines. A couple million years earlier, it was a lake with extinct fish, Newark series Triassic rocks.
The continuum punctuated. Maude knew the sodas would make her need to urinate, but she needed the stimulation. As she threw away the bottle she’d drunk by the car, she looked around to see if anyone with a Richmond sticker had followed her here, then told herself not to buy his paranoia.
The next bottle she finished on the ridge road between Halifax and Danville. She dropped the bottle in the back and found a gas station where she refueled the car and used the bathroom. If the guns get stolen while I’m in here, I don’t care, she said to her mirrored face over the sink.
But no, the guns were still in the car when she drove on to Danville. She tried to turn on the radio and got a PBS station at the end of the dial, faintly playing Gregorian chants. No problems, over the Danville extinct series of lakes and onto the volcanic side of the Bracken allochthon.
Factories replaced the volcanoes. Most of the people were misshaped by potatoes and cornbread; a few dressed better on an average day than any millionaire New Yorker, since money here came harder, so its owners displayed it more aggressively. In a mirror factory, a man went mad and threw blank glass across the floor, then fled weeping. He did this once a year, was fired, then rehired, a cycle in his own particular hell.
Dead, gassy volcanoes ripped from their roots. Whatever the rest of the allochthon was, this side was most evil. Maude felt almost comforted by the guns.
The guns seemed to stretch under the magic, iron swirling around the barrels, reorienting the magnetic direction of each piece. She remembered the smoking muzzle of her own gun.
At her house, she saw the old Essex alongside Terry and John’s truck and her MiniCooper and thought about driving off into the night. But what was there to go to? She pulled in beside the Essex and went inside.
“Were you followed?” John asked. Terry, Lula, and John sat with Betty and Luke on the formal living room chairs, an interrupted discussion visible in their postures.
“No.”
“We can go home now,” John said.
Betty asked, “Luke, what do you feel?”
“They didn’t follow me,” Maude said again. “I was alone on some of the road coming down to Danville.”
“Luke?” Betty asked.
Luke said, “She’s right. Nobody followed her. Nobody is at the house now. It’s our county. He’s safe now.”
Maude went to the rear bedroom to see Partridge. Her grandmother lay in the center of the bed with her eyes closed. Maude smoothed back Partridge’s hair and returned to the living room, where everyone except Lula was standing up, the interrupted conversation completed. “Thank you, Maude, for driving John’s guns,” Betty said as though thanking a servant, isolating Maude from the group.
“Anything for kin,” she replied.
“Almost anything,” Betty said. Luke helped Betty with her coat. She smoothed her beige gloves and straightened her hat while Luke got into his own coat. John looked at Luke and helped Terry with her coat.
“Gonna be a hard winter,” Lula said. Maude noticed she also stood with the others.
“Partridge won’t live through it unless she’s extraordinarily lucky,” Luke said.
Terry said, “I suppose not.”
“Partridge won’t leave much of an estate,” Betty said. “Maude will have to find work.”
“She won’t die tonight,” Luke said, pulling out the Essex’s keys. The four of them murmured good-byes and left Maude and Lula standing in the room.
Maude knew some people sat nights with their sick kin to keep away excessively old people like Aunt Betty and Uncle Luke. The sitters never explained why they drove away wrinkled old people who’d never been, in living memory, young, but the feeling was that those old people sucked souls. Lula muttered and went to Partridge’s room, Maude following. Lula, like a spoiled dog, climbed into the bed with Partridge.
“You have your own bed,” Maude said.
Lula said, “What are you going to do, drag me out?”
“If you hurt her, I will.”
Partridge said, “Oh, please don’t fuss. Country people are used to sleeping together.”
Maude wondered. She felt a hatred for Lula that scared her. It seemed to have a personality of its own. “Don’t hurt her arm, Lula.” Could she learn magic from Betty and turn it against Betty’s creature? The hate stirred around her spine.
Maude closed her eyes. She tried to pity the homeless woman who went from dying cousins to childbearing nieces to sick distant kin, always locked in a mind that had to numb itself or recognize how wretched her life was. In America an old woman could rot alone, her flesh putrefying, joining her shit while she was still alive. Tending the old was difficult, but a challenge to character rather than intellect.
The hate found a reason in Maude’s attempt to kill it. Maude knew why Lula wanted to get rid of her—-job competition.
On Saturday, Maude drove to Terry’s house and saw the jack-o’-lantern grinning from the porch. In the yard, Terry wore whipcord pants, a pouch on a belt, and a heavy linen shirt. She held Belle, the redtail, on her gauntlet. John came out, dressed in camouflage, with an assault rifle and backpack over his shoulder.
Belle looked indifferent, moving slightly on the glove. Maude saw the long cord with the small swivel at one end in Terry’s other hand. Terry said, “We’re going to work her on the line.”
“You’re going to scare the hawk if you shoot that gun,” Maude said to John.
“She needs to get accustomed to gunfire,” Terry said.
Maude didn’t say anything, but followed them through the field on Wart Mountain’s shoulder. The hawk spread her wings slightly and crouched to keep her balance. John went ahead of them and set up a target at the end of the field. Maude saw that he’d at least put it against a hill.
He fired the gun in two bursts. The hawk flew up against the leash, then fluttered down, wings spread like a chicken about to be killed.
“I’ve rigged it to almost fire auto,” John said, smiling at Maude.
Behind the hill, another gun fired, then further away, yet another gun. Guns talk to guns.
“Why don’t you practice down at Betty’s so your neighbors won’t know you’ve got such guns?” Maude said.
“We want our neighbors to know,” John said.
Maude wanted to say wasn’t that what got a boy killed in Richmond, but didn’t. Terry went to the hawk and wound the leash in her hand. The hawk climbed back on the gauntlet and began smoothing her feathers.
“Do you want to shoot?” John asked. He pulled another clip out of the backpack.
Maude was tempted. As she took the gun, she felt a magic jolt come from him. Whether he believed in magic or not, it was in him. Maude looked at Terry and saw an aura around her that excluded the hawk. Whatever their conscious selves believed, their underselves were deep in magic. Maude turned away from them both and looked at the target. John came up and pulled off the safety, then said, “Fire.”
She shot the gun a bullet at a time, then listened for the people talking gun back at her with their own weapons.
“It’s like dogs barking,” Terry said, soothing the hawk, which had stayed on her glove this time.
“Guns to mark territories,” Maude said. She returned the assault rifle to John. They walked back through the field, following Terry, to a mowed place with a couple of cages containing small domestic rabbits. The hawk looked at the animals while John ran parachute cord through a ring on top of the cage, then down to the bottom of the door. He tied the cord to the door, then picked up the other end and walked backward until the cord tightened.
The redtail bounced on Terry’s glove. John pulled the cage door open and chucked a rock at the rabbit inside. The hawk pounced on the rabbit and squeezed. Terry ran up and covered the rabbit’s body with her glove. The hawk spread its wings and ate the rabbit’s brain, then stepped back on the glove to eat the chicken neck Terry pulled out of her game pouch. The rabbit disappeared.
“So you trick them,” Maude said.
“Hawks aren’t good at object consistency,” Terry answered. The pouch at her waist was swollen, full of rabbit, and she had blood on the linen tunic. Maude wondered why linen, why white.
They walked back to the house. Terry fed Belle another mouse and reattached her to the block while she was distracted. She coiled the leash in her hand. Maude saw that it was made of extremely fine leather cords braided round and oiled to a dark brown.
“Where did you get the hawk gear?”
“Some of it in Japan. They hunt goshawks, not falcons, and I figured redtails were a more predaceous bird than most Eurasian buteos, more like a gos, though really a Cooper’s hawk is even more like a gos, being an accipiter, but Coos are a bit crazy.”
Maude felt outclassed. She’d never traveled beyond a day into Canada. “Oh.”
“I was a kid, then, just buying stuff I didn’t know I’d ever be able to use. We taught English there. Some old samurai lady showed us her household relics. Not all Japanese like high tech and Sony.”
Maude felt money behind her cousin, an upbringing in a place where her mind was nourished. Terry was as predaceous and as innocent as her hawk, taking privileges without questioning them, being a witch without acknowledging magic. Maybe, Maude reminded herself, my envy finds excuses.
Terry served a cassoulet, with real goose and white beans, and they drank red wine until Maude dropped her edginess.
Then she wondered if they felt sorry for her. “I’ve got to get back. Lula won’t use the blender.”
“I expect she didn’t like having you come in and criticize her. After all, she’d been taking care of Partridge for over a year.”
“But she was starving Partridge,” Maude said.
“Do you really know that? Did you take your grandmother to a doctor?”
“They told me when I took her in to have her arm set”
“Oh, Betty didn’t tell me,” Terry said. Maude wondered if Terry believed her. John was cleaning his rifle and seemed oblivious. Women’s talk, not something he’d hear.
“It’s true enough.”
“Betty trusts Lula.”
Maude wondered if she should say she didn’t trust Betty, but then these people, as much as magic enhanced them, didn’t confess to believe in witches, spells, or soul suckers, but instead talked about quaint folklore. “I think Lula sucks up to Betty.”
“If Partridge wants, she could fire Lula.”
“I don’t think Partridge wants to be cruel. Lula doesn’t have any other sick kin now, except the people who asked her to leave.” Maude remembered living with friends in California, before she got welfare. She wondered if she’d seemed as strident, as defensively opinionated.
“Betty likes her,” Terry said, as though that was enough.
While shopping, Maude saw the Reverend Springer again. He smiled at her and said, “An angel made a face in my pointing finger and told me to paint.”
“You look happy.” Do I think he’s a witch, too?
“I fit here,” he said.
8
* * *
DIFFERENT EYES, DIFFERENT IMPROBABILITIES
Doug broke Maude’s isolation. When his plane landed, she felt as though she’d gained an ally, an engineer like her father. She’d forgotten how much magic enchanted him.
He came out of the gate with a carry-on bag and a light coat. Maude also had forgotten exactly how tall he was. He’d gotten puffy around the waist since she’d seen him last, as though he’d been too busy to run and lift weights. “Hi,” he said, kissing her with a gin-flavored mouth. He spoke more like a Yankee than she’d remembered, too. “I’ve got my car.”
“The MiniCooper? Amazing that you’ve kept it going so long. I’ve brought my backpack and a winter tent.”
“You may have to sleep out in the yard. Lula won’t approve of you being in bed with me.”
“You said you had a couch.”
“Actually, we’ve got a spare bedroom. Lula’s sleeping with my grandmother.” The cast was off, but the arm was still tender. Maude wondered if Partridge would die with a crippled arm.
“You look worried. I could rent a room. You do have motels in your county, don’t you?” He looked around and found the stairs to Baggage Claim. The carousel eventually brought around a large canvas sack. Douglas pulled the sack off the conveyor and unzipped it, checking to see if the backpack had come through without damage.
“You’ve braced between the frame,” Maude said, seeing wood pieces at right angles to the aluminum frame.
“I’d like to get a hardshell shipping box, but…” Doug folded the canvas and tied it on to the backpack, then swung the pack onto his back.
Maude realized a backpacking engineer was going to be weird for Bracken County.
“If you don’t have a campstove, we ought to stop at an outing shop and buy one.�
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Maude almost said she didn’t. Going by Blacksburg would delay getting back to Bracken County. Douglas as theory seemed great. Douglas among the real witches began to seem awkward. “I’ve always had one. Sometimes, when I was in Berkeley, I needed to get away.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting away from Berkeley.”
“You’re very away from Berkeley now.”
“I’ve heard about Floyd County.”
“The counterculture back to the landers, yeah.”
“So, let’s spend a few days with backpacks on. Your sleeping bag zippered into mine, and all that.”
Maude wondered if she’d dare leave Partridge alone with Lula. For a few days, Partridge could live off milk and potato water. “I’ll have to see if I can leave my grandmother.”
“We can hire someone to take care of her.”
“I can’t ask you to do that. Besides, there is a woman helping now, only she’s set in her ways. My grandmother can’t eat solid food, but Lula won’t use the blender.” Maude wondered if she’d sound like a crank if she complained more. Let him meet Lula.
“You could blend the food, freeze it, and have Lula heat it up in a microwave.”
“We don’t have a microwave,” Maude said.
They drove back to Bracken County by the Blue Ridge Parkway. Douglas pointed out all the trail heads and crossings. Maude wondered if he’d feel anything when they crossed into the Blue Ridge magic fringe.
When they crossed it, he said, “I can’t believe I’m here.” Then he was quiet for several miles.
“Do you want to stop at Lover’s Leap?”
“Overlook? Sure.”
“You tired?”
“Some. I’ve always wanted to see the East.”
“Hard to do from here. It’s bigger than California.”
“And older,” he said as they pulled into the overlook. He got out and stared for almost a minute, his legs straddled, both hands on the overlook wall. Maude liked the mountains better in winter when the rocks showed. She wondered if he did also.
