The Rambling

by Jimmy Cajoleas

  “But you’re free,” he said, stammering, his voice gone high and mealy. “The hex is broken. I ain’t got any magic anymore.”

  “That ain’t gonna keep me from ripping you into little Bobby Felix pieces,” said Sinclair. “It ain’t gonna keep me from making sure your bones stick in this mud for good.”

  Bobby Felix hit the ground, and covered himself with his arms. He was terrified, he was, quaking away, like nothing you ever seen before.

  “Come on now, Sinclair,” said Pop. “That ain’t any way to treat our old buddy.”

  “Do you know the agony he put me through?” said Sinclair. “Do you know what kind of hell I’ve had to endure?”

  “We all been hexed,” said Pop. “And we deserved it. Well, everybody did except Marina here. It was our fault, Sinclair. It was our fault we all wound up hexed and cursed and low-down. We didn’t act right, and we got to own up to it.”

  “But I lost everything,” said Sinclair. “The stuff he made me do . . . I ain’t ever gonna be what I was. I’ll never be that again.”

  “You’re cured,” said Bobby Felix. “The hex is gone. What part of that don’t you understand? Leave me be. Just leave me be.”

  “Cured? Is that what you say? Well, I reject that cure,” said Sinclair. “I keep this hex, and I hold on to it for dear life. I’m going down to the depths, Bobby Felix, and you’re coming with me.”

  “But Sinclair . . . ,” said Pop.

  Sinclair cast a mean eye on Pop, shutting him right up. “Davey Boy, you better thank your dear stars that I don’t drag you under neither, seeing as how this is your fault too.”

  Sinclair grabbed Bobby Felix by the ankle and yanked him into the water. He fought and struggled and splashed, but there was nothing he could do against Sinclair, against the monster that he had become. Bobby Felix’s last shouts were choked out by the water, and a few bubbles gurgled to the surface. We watched and waited, but neither of them came back up.

  “Sinclair won’t kill him, will he, Pop?” I said.

  “I doubt it,” said Pop. “Sick as he was, Sinclair ain’t no killer. Never has been. He’ll probably just complain at him for a few months. Maybe make him live off bugs for a while.”

  “Hope you’re right,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Pop. “Me too.”

  Up above us a handful of stars fell in long glittering streaks across the sky. Pop bent down and faced me eye to eye.

  “I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I put you and your mom through. I’m sorry for my arrogance.”

  “I forgive you, Pop,” I said, and hugged him.

  And in that moment I felt all the hope of love that I’d always had for my pop, the warmth and closeness from him that I’d dreamed of, that I’d wanted for my whole life.

  18

  BACK IN MARINA’S PLACE, THE chef and the pianist had come back, and a few of the Baudelaire Quatro refugees were coming out of hiding. I hoped they found the poor man’s head, wherever it was. I hoped maybe he could get his floating Parsnit house back. I saw Tally milling around not too far from Marina, like she wanted to ask her about something. I figured it was about getting cured of her hex, and I didn’t want to interfere. But I still had a question or two for ol’ Tally, so I thought I’d go ahead and ask her.

  “Hey Tally,” I said. “Whatcha got in your pocket?”

  She grinned at me, her spider fangs clacking together. In her hand she held Boss Authority’s Red Bride card.

  “Snatched it in the middle of his story,” she said. “Can’t believe he didn’t notice it, nor Drusilla Fey either. Marina must have been working some powerful magic on them.”

  “Or you’re just the best pickpocket in the whole durn swamp,” I said.

  “That too,” said Tally, smiling. “I guess this just about makes it official, don’t it?” She held the card up, the bright and hideous Red Bride bent on eternal revenge. “I ought to frame this, I should. Hang it up somewhere nice.”

  “You could keep it here, if you want,” said Marina. “It’ll be the only Parsnit card I allow in this place.”

  “Fine with me,” said Tally, all bashful-like. “Miss Marina, can I ask you for a favor?”

  “Maybe,” said Marina. “Depends on what you’re asking.”

  “Well, can you get rid of the spider-folk in me?” said Tally. “Or at least maybe shut it down a little bit? This other witch lady said she could put it in a box and hide it deep down in my brain where it wouldn’t bother me anymore.”

  “Did she, now?” said Marina. “Well, you want my opinion on the matter? Spider-folk is who you are. It’s a gift, a rare and beautiful one at that. I certainly can quiet it down in you, but I’m not sure I like the idea of it.”

  “You haven’t had to grow up like I did,” said Tally. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “That’s true,” said Marina. “Can’t much argue with that. Still . . .”

  Marina sat there a minute, deep in thought, and if you’ve ever seen a witch mulling something over, you know you can’t help but watch and wonder what’s coming next.

  “How about this?” said Marina, after a minute or so. “How about you hang around here awhile, maybe learn a thing or two from me. You got magic in that spider-blood of yours, and that’s a fact. Maybe if you learned more about your gift and how to control it, being spider-folk wouldn’t be such a bother to you. You’d have to earn your keep, of course, and I’d work you pretty hard. But you’d have a roof over your head and three meals a day, and the swamp would be as good as your own. We got a lot of work to do down here in the coming months, and I’d be grateful for the help. After a couple months, you still want your fangs clipped, so to speak—I’ll do what I can.”

  “That sounds okay to me,” said Tally.

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Fine, fine,” said Tally. “Sounds pretty great, if you want me to be honest about it.”

  I stood there, watching Tally, the best and only friend I ever had, master pickpocket, genius pal, genuine lifesaver, maybe my favorite person I ever met in my whole life. She seemed happy, she did. For the first time since I’d met her, she seemed like a person who was looking forward to what came next, spider fangs and all.

  Well, that made me happier than anything I’d heard in a long, long time.

  19

  ME AND POP HIT THE road not too long after. I wanted to stay in the swamp, hang around with Tally and Marina, maybe visit the tiny cabin I grew up in, but Pop wouldn’t have it. He said I had to get back to Mom, and fast. That meant we were going inland, that we were taking an actual dirt road up, hitching rides on wagons, even slogging it miles on foot.

  That was fine, I didn’t mind one bit. I was with my daddy.

  And while we rode, and while we walked, we talked.

  We talked about everything. I mean it, I got every last one of my questions answered. Pop told me all about the last five years, how at first he’d fled the swamp in terror after Mom begged Bobby Felix to let us free, how he was convinced there were assassins after him, how he was scared even to stay in an inn, lest some no-account murderer sneak in and strangle him in his sleep. Pop slept outside, he slept in haylofts, he slept with the horses out in the pastures. A lot of rambling, he did, covering all the Riverlands, even into the Hinterlands and beyond. Until one day he figured out wasn’t anybody chasing him, wasn’t anybody asking after him at the taverns he stopped in, at the inns where he stayed.

  Eventually Pop found himself in Gentlesburg, closer to the Swamplands than he’d dared to go in a year. There was talk of a Boss Authority ruling downriver, but nobody seemed to pay him much mind. That surprised Pop, it did, but what surprised him even more were the Parsnit duels popping up in secret corridors and attic rooms and downstairs basements all over the city, and not just in the Skinny Yellow Dog either. Parsnit had followed Pop out of the swamp, and he dove back into the game with all his heart. See, Pop had missed Parsnit, even when he was out roaming, even when
he was fleeing for his life. The cards are like that, he said, they whisper to you while you’re sleeping, they call out to you in the night. So Pop got busy playing, only winning sometimes, only winning when it finally counted. Pop was hustling, he was, and all the while he was gathering information.

  “I was talking to witches, see?” said Pop. “I was learning all about hexes and how they work, the power of a witch’s bond, whether or not it was possible to have one broken. I was doing favors for folks, bad stuff, sordid business, whatever I could to break our witch’s bond, to set you and me and my friends free. I wound up in some pretty hairy situations, mind you, stuff I don’t dare tell you about. That’s just the fact of the matter. But every ounce of my time and energy and heart were spent figuring a way out of this jackpot I’d gotten us in.”

  He told me about doing a run up north, dashing into a forest seeking bald-headed mushrooms so a witch could curse some governor somewhere. She was scared to go into the woods on account of this nasty hex that made spiders sprout up from the ground every time her feet touched soil. Problem was, the hex extended to folks out there on her behalf. Pop showed me all the scars he had on his legs, all the tiny poisonous bites covering himself.

  “I barely got out of that one alive, I did,” he said. “And turns out that witch wasn’t helpful at all. All she did was say a bunch of witchy things and knock me out with a sleeper spell.”

  “I got spider bit too,” I said. I showed Pop the half-healed wound on my arm, where Tally’s granddad had bit me.

  “Good night!” he said. “You tangled with that old spider-folk and lived to tell the tale? That’s my boy.”

  He seemed so proud of me then I could have cried. It was everything I ever wanted, having Pop back, traveling with him. It was everything I ever dreamed of.

  “I got another question for you, Pop,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “When I first found you, you were sitting by the river, just thinking all sad-like. What were you doing? Why hadn’t you run away?”

  “Well, Buddy boy,” said Pop, “I don’t rightly know how to tell you this, seeing as how it don’t sound too heroic, but by that time I’d given up.”

  “You’d given up?”

  “Yep,” he said. “I ain’t much proud of it, but that’s a fact. I’d traveled the whole Hinterlands, the Riverlands, the Swamplands, all searching for a way to break this witch’s bond. It simply could not be done. Best case, you could replace it with a new one, but how likely was that? Not very, I tell you. So I quit. I was going to cook myself a big crawfish dinner and eat it and smoke my pipe and wait for the durn reaper to come calling, metaphorically speaking. Then you showed up, and I figured, heck, maybe it ain’t all over yet. And I snuck out that very night to get us passage on this new ship they got, runs on steam. It don’t care which way the river flows. It could take us anywhere we wanted to go.” He shook his head. “Turns out I was a day too late.”

  “Or right on time,” I said. “It seems like everything worked out okay, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, Buddy,” he said. “I surely do. Even if it was Drusilla Fey’s magic that called you to me, all that one-eyed stuff. That’s just how magic works, I suppose. No matter who casts the spell, it’s got a mind and a purpose of its own, and it wills whatever it wants.”

  That night we slept under the stars, right out in the middle of somebody’s field. A couple of cows mooed and swished their tails. Pop snored hard and loud, same as he always had, same as I remembered from when I was a kid. I lay there and thought about everything, all I had gone through, all the folks I’d met and seen and fought against. I missed Tally, I did. I missed her a lot. I hoped I’d get to see her again. I hoped she would find her cure, or else be happy with who she was. I hoped nothing but good things for her, and that those good things came on her own terms.

  I looked over at Pop, his mouth hanging open, that gold tooth catching the starlight. Even though the night was lovely and the moon was high and bright and clear and the stars were like burning angels smiling down, something was bothering me, some sad ugly splinter working its way out of my heart.

  I guess I might as well be honest about it.

  Even though I told Pop I’d forgiven him, I realized it wasn’t so easy as that. You can’t just forgive somebody completely in a moment’s notice and never feel sad about anything they’ve done to you again. That’s just not how things work. The truth was, I was still mad as all heck about the hex he put on me, how Pop didn’t even bother to tell me about why my life was so rotten. I was mad about my blood being gambled away so carelessly, how me and him would both be dead if Mom hadn’t pleaded for our lives. I was mad about every durn bit of it. And I guess I’d stay mad, just a little bit, for a long, long time. I was glad I had my pop back, surely I was, but things had changed, and they had changed for good. Pop was never gonna be my hero again. Instead, he was just my daddy—flawed, arrogant, maybe even a scoundrel. I still loved him though, and I would try my hardest to forgive him. I would keep trying, too, no matter how long it took.

  That was just the way of it, wasn’t it? That’s how the world works, how love works. It changes, it grows tougher, it tries to forgive. I don’t know how to do it any better than that.

  I rolled over in the grass and patted down the knapsack that I was using for a pillow one more time. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get to sleep. So I watched the sky lighten and dim, the stars hide themselves behind that bright curtain of blue, and the sunrise spill over the horizon in reds and golds and pinks. It was like the night was a scrap of paper God lit on fire, like the past was this great big book and God was burning it up one page at a time.

  I watched the night burn into the morning burn into the day, and I wondered at it all. Then Pop woke up, smiling his gold-tooth smile, and we set out walking again.

  We rode into Collardsville on the back of a wagon full of furniture fresh from market. I was sitting on a stool and Pop had a rocking chair all to himself. We felt like kings, we did, like war heroes returning in a victory parade, riding high above all the townspeople welcoming us home, the hot sun beating down on us, laughing and singing songs all the way.

  We hopped off when we came to Mom’s street, where the bakery was.

  “You ready to do this?” I said to Pop, and he nodded at me, his face all scruffy, his smile forced. I could tell he was pretty nervous to see Mom again.

  The bakery was still charred on the outside from the fire, though Mom had replaced the front door and the window frame. But something was wrong. There wasn’t the fresh smell of bread wafting through the air, or smoke billowing up from the chimney. There weren’t any tarts baking, any fresh pies piping and hot. The bakery looked shut down, boarded up, empty, like not a soul had set foot there in weeks.

  I walked up to the door and pushed it open, she hadn’t even bothered to lock it.

  The front room was dark, and no pastries were set out, just some week-old bread. Flies buzzed around the room, and the whole place stank, like something was rotten.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Maybe I ought to wait outside,” said Pop, and I nodded at him, because I wasn’t sure quite what to do.

  I walked on through the storefront, to the bakery, where I’d accidentally set the fire, where the ovens sat cold and unsmoking. And there was Mom, on her knees, her head bowed, like she was praying. Her dress was tattered and torn, the floor all dirty and musty, the burned smell still thick in the air from the fire. Around her were magic things, I knew—balls of twine nailed into the walls, chunks of wood with hearts and triangles and eyeballs carved on them, dead and drying flowers hung in gray bouquets upside down in tiny little altars. If I had ever doubted Mom was a witch, now I knew the truth.

  “Mom?” I said again.

  She stood up and whirled around, her eyes wide and bright, staring at me like she couldn’t believe I was actually there, like I might have been some figment of her imagination. She looked wore out, Mom did, bone-th
in and exhausted, her hair a mess of gray tangles, her skin pale and sallow, wrinkles burrowed deep around her eyes. I bet she hadn’t left this spot, not for one second, since I ran off. I bet she’d spent night and day praying right here, casting her spells, not ceasing, not daring to quit. Her hand went to her cheek, and for a second neither of us said a word. We just stood there and looked at each other, both of us changed, both of us never to be the same again.

  “Buddy,” she said, and I burst out crying and I ran to her, and she scooped me up in her arms and held me close, and we cried together, and I knew at last I was home, maybe for the first time ever.

  After a minute Mom went still, and I realized that Pop had followed me in, that he was standing behind me, right there in the doorway. She held me tight and got a fistful of my hair and pulled me so close it hurt, it did, and I was scared she’d yank my hair clean out. But then her hand relaxed, and she let go of me. But I didn’t let go of her, no sir, I held on tight to my mom.

  For a whole minute nobody moved. Then Pop said, “Well, I best be going.”

  He turned in the doorway to leave.

  Mom finally spoke.

  “David,” she said.

  Pop stopped and looked back at her, his face so full of hope and sadness I could hardly bear it.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for bringing Buddy home.”

  Pop smiled a little bit at that. He tipped his hat to her. A spear of sunlight caught his gold tooth and it glistened.

  For a second I thought he’d stay. For a second I thought Pop would come in and pull up a chair and sit himself down, and we’d be a family again.

  But Pop turned and walked out of the bakery, and I heard him start to whistle a little bit, and in my mind I could see the saunter sneaking back in his steps, the deck of Parsnit cards in the knapsack slung over his shoulder, headed far out of town, to where the soil met water and the Wayward River snaked out before him endlessly.

  I hoped he’d come back to visit one day soon.