Out Where the Sun Always Shines
Page 4
The Frenchman found a pay phone and called the office. It was after hours, but it was a weekday, and sometimes the doctor stayed late.
It seemed to ring forever. He hung up.
To hell with the League.The Frenchman smoked before bed. I shall go in tomorrowand see her there. Even if I am penalized, it will put my mind at ease.
* * *
The attack that had ruined Cat’s city was still in evidence. Some gaudy neon signs had been built—or perhaps rebuilt, he wasn’t sure—but there were just as many mountains of rubble where the steel skeletons of buildings splayed and twisted in the air. The remaining residential areas were ghost towns, save for where the construction workers lived.
Nowhere did he see anything vibrant, green, or beautiful; nothing worth the song she had sung. He wiped sweat from his brow. The heat here was pitiless.
Any glamour the city retained was not visible during the day, and the Frenchman’s stomach turned at the thought of staying here one more night. He returned to the train station and bought another ticket.
* * *
He smoked half the night away. He spent the other half in fitful dreams where he sought the Australian in a Venice filled with endless, unfamiliar alleys, and he could feel time running out…
When morning came, he found he had come to his senses. A simple phone call duringoffice hours would clear things up.
“You are going to feel very silly about this,” he said to himself. “She will have moved in with family—”
Or the doctor
“—and you are going to feel very stupid for worrying.”
He dialed the phone.
“Guten Tag, Kohlstrasse Consulting, Hartl speaking. How can I help you?”
Not Cat. Coffee roiled in his empty stomach. The Frenchman asked for the doctor and was connected.
“Doctor Riedermann speaking.”
“Doctor, it’s me.”
A pause.
“You’re back. That’s good.” Another pause. “Why are you calling?”
“Doctor.” The Frenchman wet his lips. After some time to think, he settled on the simplest question.
“Where is Cat?”
Silence. The Frenchman spoke again. “Our Sekretärin?”
“I know who you mean, it’s—”
“Do you or do you not know how to get into contact with her?” This was it, this is where the doctor would say she had moved in with him, and she didn’t need to work anym—
The doctor said something he couldn’t make out.
“What’s that? Say it again, say it again.”
Another pause.
“She’s dead.”
The receiver shook in the Frenchman’s hand.
“If this is some…sick…joke…”
“No. No joke.” The doctor could barely be heard over the line.
“I don’t believe you.” The Frenchman grabbed the receiver with his other hand, trying to steady it.
“Listen…” said the doctor. “Come in the back way tonight at nine. Check the alley before you enter it. Don’t be seen.&rdquo.
Click.
* * *
The Frenchman kept pulling his hand out of his pocket. His habit was to open and close the knife, but this train station was busier than the last one. Families with children surged by in infrequent herds, most going on to California to visit relatives, from the overloud chatter of their mothers.
He hated this dry, ugly place. He cursed the song that had brought him here. It was too hot to even think of smoking, so he stood there, sweating, feeling the knife in his pocket and the weight of his pack.
* * *
At the appointed time, the doctor let him in the back door. They moved in darkness, save for the doctor’s small torch. Only one lamp was on in their office.
“What is this nonsense you speak of?” he said. “About Cat—you must be mistaken. The League—”
“She was here late, finishing a report for headquarters.” The Doctor rubbed his forehead, looking older than ever. “She went out back to empty the wastebasket, I think, before she went home. I was…” he lifted his hand, dropped it, “holed up in Operating, cleaning. I didn’t hear anything.”
The Frenchman watched the doctor’s throat bob as he swallowed. “I went out the back way and I almost stepped on her.&rdquo.
The doctor looked at him. “They did it,” he said. “I can’t prove it, but I know they did it.”
“Did what? Come to the point already!”
“They shot her, Renaud.”
* * *
The Frenchman stepped onto the train, face drawn and grim. He found another seat alone and apart from the families. He remembered returning home that awful night, and thinking to himself, I stepped over her bloodstains.
* * *
“She was so quiet at first, I thought she’d gone into shock. But when I checked her vitals, she spoke.
“She told me they took the garbage bag. All papers from the shredder—worthless! She was killed for secrets she didn’t have!&rdquo.
The doctor buried his face in his hands for a long while. The Frenchman lit a cigarette. It was a kretek and right now it tasted foul.
“Sorry,” the doctor said, head still not raised. “If I think about it too much…it’s like I lost—I lost…”
The Frenchman just stared at him. “What happened next?” His voice sounded distant and dull to him. The doctor raised his head.
“I told her it was okay, it wasn’t her fault. I could see she wasn’t going to make it, it was…there was a lot of blood loss.” He went quiet. The Frenchman’s cigarette burned. The doctor began again.
“I think…she knew, when I didn’t bring her up here, that she was…she knew what was going to happen.”
The doctor looked into the Frenchman’s eyes. It was a look of weariness the Frenchman had never seen before, nor since.
“She cried and said she wanted to go home. Over and over again. I think I said something stupid about her flat, and she said, ‘No, to my home-home!’ To her Zuhause.” The doctor stared at the floor, seeing nothing. “Of all the men here I was the best one to save her, and I couldn’t even do that. All I could do was hold her while she cried.”
They sat for a long time after that, in the dark. The cigarette burned to ash on the Frenchman’s lips.
* * *
The train clacked along. More desert.
Did Mercury ever weary of shuttling the dead to their destinations.
* * *
From that moment on, he felt senseless, slow, like the walking dead.
“Where is she buried?” The Frenchman finally asked.
“She’s not,” said the doctor. The Frenchman groaned. Burned up, his beautiful Cat.
“She’s in Operating, in one of the cold drawers.” The doctor gave him a look, until the Frenchman comprehended.
“Now? When was this? When did she…?”
“A week ago? Less? Mnh,” the doctor shook his head, “probably less. It feels like forever. The League wants it kept quiet. They sold off her apartment and told me to…dispose of her.”
“When?…Will you?”
The doctor nodded. “I bought a plot in Hallstatt some time ago, in case—ha!—in case the League ever needed a quiet burial. There’s a Beinhausthere, one more or one less skull in a year won’t be noticed.” Images of the ossuary flitted through the Frenchman’s mind, but he pushed them away. Too much, right now.
“I was hoping you would be back soon,” said the doctor. “I wanted your help. I know you’ve had some experience with…night burials.”
They sat in silence again, for a longer time.
The doctor spoke.
“Would you like to see her?”
…Would he?The Frenchman wasn’t sure what he wanted right now.
“I think she was looking forward to your return. At least, she was asking after you recently.&rdquo.
The Frenchman bowed his head. After a time, the doctor pushed himself out of the chai
r. “Come, if you want.” The doctor went down the stairwell and did not wait for him.
* * *
The sun outside was so bright, it bleached the remaining color from the desert, from the sky even. Children squalled. The train drove on. All he could do was wait.
* * *
Under the too-bright lights of Operating, the doctor rolled open the drawer.
The white sheet made her slight frame seem even smaller in death. The doctor reached for the corners of the sheet. The Frenchman grabbed his wrist.
“Is it…bad, Heinrich? I don’t…&rdquo.
“The injury was in her chest. A colleague of mine did the embalming.”
The Frenchman debated. Then nodded.
It was a terrible blow. She was real again now, but her face held no smile.
He looked upon her and imagined possibilities, mourned them. Walking her through the sphinx park, sharing his favorite poets with her, giving her a velvet-lined box…All memories that could never be; a future that would only exist in his imagination.
“She would have been the last woman I ever loved,” he said.
The doctor said nothing.
The Frenchman bent over and lightly touched his lips to hers.
* * *
The scenery outside was changing again. The sharp rock and scrub were giving way to softer-looking grasses and purple-red mountains.
Almost there.
* * *
Two nights later, they smuggled her body out and buried it in snowy Hallstatt under a faint moon.
“She would have liked it here, I think,” said the doctor, the next day. They were walking alone on an empty road that wound tightly against the side of the mountain. The doctor’s breath steamed in the cold air. “In September the mountains are green, and there is fog on the lake. A good place for a budding writer, oder?”
The Frenchman said nothing. He wanted to go home and get drunk.
They walked a while before the doctor spoke again. “She was alone in the city—she told us while you were gone,” he said. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel. “I wish we could have taken her home, instead of here.” The doctor nodded at the mountain. “The village is beautiful, but it isn’t her Zuhause.”
The Frenchman tapped ash off his cigarette. “She didn’t tell me,” he said. He looked out over the dark lake.
I thought I had more time.
* * *
The train stopped and let him out in the more-beautiful country. She had died in a city where the sky was only seen in narrow strips between old white buildings, but her home was big sky country.
The Frenchman set off to find the best view.
* * *
He waded through time like it was mud. After some months, the numbness eased into a sort of daze. Some days he questioned if she had been real, but then the boy would say, “Hey Doc, you remember the time when Cat…?”, or there would be a bunch of grapes, or a woman who resembled her, and Cat would come back into sharp focus.
He made it through spring, summer, and fall. When winter came, he thought memories of her would choke him dead, but somehow he made it to the other side.
* * *
In the distance, the sunset reflected off the lake. Birds sang and twittered afar off, almost on the edge of his hearing. Cloud edges caught the gold of the sun, bent the light into orchid reds and magentas.
Perfect, the Frenchman thought. He reached into his bag and unfolded the little shovel.
He began to dig.
* * *
During that first year, the Australian sent mail the Frenchman did not reply to. Not at first. But after the first winter, normalcy began to restore itself. He missed her, but it was comprehensible now.
“Sometimes I wish that I had a picture of her,” said the doctor once. They sat in a quiet corner of a nearby pub. “For my desk.” The doctor lifted his glass as if to drink, then set it back down. “I never had a family. But when I was with her, it was like…it was like I had found the daughter I was meant to have.”
The Frenchman just nodded.
* * *
He paused later, to rest. When he had heard the song after her death, it had felt like some kind of miracle—for he wasn’t just in the right place at the right time to hear it, but also, he thought, in the right state of mind.
* * *
It was the second summer after her death. Along Kärtnerstrasse, the Frenchman leaned against a tree, apart from a large group of assembled families and tourists. They faced a makeshift stage where some American children’s choir was performing. He blocked out the music and tried to enjoy his cigarette.
His next mission began tomorrow. The manila envelope had come with an eight-month assignment, deep cover documents, and a note from his administrator indicating that anything less than a stellar performance would be grounds for dismissal. She had included a dozen surveillance photos of him taken unawares.
The singing died down, and there was applause. He took a long drag.
Then the choir began to sing her song.
The Frenchman forgot to exhale. It couldn’t be.But by the time they reached the chorus, he knew. He staggered into the crowd. At the foot of the stage, he listened to the words. He thought they would bring him solace, but what the Frenchman heard left him thunderstruck.
When the song was over, he left. The Frenchman chewed on his lip the entire subway ride home. He had held a key to the puzzle for a long time, but had never even known there was a puzzle—until now.
* * *
The Frenchman resumed digging.
After a time, he stepped back. Finally, it was right.
* * *
He went to Hallstatt and found her grave by sunset. While the town slept, he took what he needed, burned his manila envelope, and was on a flight to America the next morning.
* * *
The Frenchman knelt next to the hole and took out the parcel. He unwrapped it.
The paint hadn’t smeared during travel. He was grateful for that.
He had done the art and lettering himself, hand steady after a year and a half of mourning.
* * *
Before he left Hallstatt this second time, he visited the Beinhausin order to study. Inside the ossuary, the skulls of the townspeople, collected for hundreds of years, were carefully arranged. Some were decorated, their names painted in script across the smooth brow of the skull; others had crowns of flowers painted on, or crosses added.
To make her beautiful again—this was the least he could do for her.
* * *
Cat’s skull wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hallstatt. On her right temple, he had painted a red rose; on her left, a round sparrow in winter plumage. Between these images, he had written her name in the best calligraphy he could manage. He thought she would have liked it. Perhaps someday—he hoped, someday— she would tell him so herself.
“You’re home, chérie.“
He kissed her brow and laid her to rest.
‡‡‡
The sun had gone down behind the mountains. He walked back to the train station, the sky glowing behind him.
Home means Nevada
Home means the hills
Home means the sage and the pines
Out by the Truckee’s silvery rills
Out where the sun always shines
There is a land that I love the best
Fairer than all I can see
Right in the heart of the golden west
Home means Nevada to me
FIN
28.Nov.2010
With thanks to Valve
Also by Danielle Williams
WONDER Out Where the Sun Always Shines
HORROR The Bureaucrat
What the Cat Brought Back
HUMOR The Purrfect Christmas
FORTHCOMING Steel City, Veiled Kingdom
A Gingersnap Cat Christmas
Magic Fashion Frenchies #2: Salute a Pooch!
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About the Author
Danielle Williams once lived abroad in Vienna, Austria for school where she ate far more Döner Kebab than was healthy. She regrets nothing.
She believes her outrageous imagination can be attributed to a healthy childhood diet of computer games, Bruce Coville books, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Martin H. Greenberg horror anthologies, and Ranger Rick magazines.
She graduated from Brigham Young University in the 2000’s and currently resides in the Wild West with her patient husband and threenager cat.
Hints of fantasy and science fiction always sneak into whatever she’s writing.
A Note from Danielle
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Your humble writer,
Danielle Williams
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