Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 31
Plus going out with Derrick upset Colin, who fancied himself a dangerously masculine man of the world, but who was actually, (though still handsome-faced in the way that had conquered a dozen nerdy freshman virgins) a soft doughy guy who lived on junk food, wrote software, and watched a lot of movies. Derrick's being a real live masculine cop made Colin get pissy in a way that reminded her of the way Dad had gotten whenever anyone mentioned Tolkien.
A cop's girlfriend, lover, or wife should have a sturdy brown burlap soul, or perhaps a pure white linen one, and hers-well, it wasn't the iridescent raw silk she had thought, now was it? She looked down, again, at the square of unbleached muslin hanging limply from her hand. Little gray dust bunnies drifted down from it onto the floor and the toes of her Bean Snow Sneakers.
She lifted her soul to eye level, grasping a corner with each hand, and shook it out gently, tumbling the remaining dust onto her feet and into her cuffs. That outline in blue chalk was obviously-
Amy's father had a shrub of gray hair on top of his head, desert-sky eyes, and a basketball-belly on his otherwise scrawny frame. You noticed him, visually. But when Amy thought of him, most of all she remembered his clatter: the bang of the manual typewriter as she played around his feet, which had given way to the squirr-whuck- chik! of the electric welcoming her home, along with the Oreos and milk and the silly poems on the kitchen table.
Later, there had been the house-shaking daisy-wheel printer covering the sound of her running downstairs to get into a car with primer on the fender, a sullen boy in the front seat, a case of beer in the trunk, and disappointment in the offing because the boy was never quite how she thought boys should be.
Finally, during her college breaks, after he had the money for a quiet laser printer, she had awakened early every morning in Feather Mountain to the thunder of his clumsy stiff fingers pounding against the uncooperating keys, all precision aged out of his aching hands as they walloped a final three books into the word processor, as if he were regressing back onto the manual typewriter.
The window-shape of late-winter sunlight jumped sideways on the living room floor.
Amy had been in a reverie. Her soul still dangled from her upraised hands. Her arms were sore. Had she really stood here staring into that cloth for half an hour?
She switched on the bright lights over her drawing table and spread the soft cloth on it.
The outline of a heart-not a valentine heart, either. Most people would see only a blob, but Amy recognized a real human heart, lying on its atria, drawn from directly above. The chalk line showed no skips, no sketch marks, no hesitations-her soul must have been pinned tight to the table, not to have wrinkled at all as this was drawn. The unbroken chalk line had the assurance of a hard edge in an overdeveloped photograph. Yet it was just the right width and color to be Baudie's…
The drawing on the other side was of a human heart, at the same scale, lying on its right ventricle.
She spread her soul out on the light table. Sure enough. The blue lines on one side matched those on the other, as if the Baudie's Dressmaker's Chalk Stylus-had somehow gone right through the fabric.
Could she make her friends understand how strange this was? Now and then, for some complex patterns, if you're sewing or cutting out, it can be handy to have a mark on both sides, she would say. They would all look bored. To the guys, sewing was girl stuff. To the girls, it was something authentic for authentic Third World peasant women to do in their authentic culture so that authentic woman entrepreneurs could bring it up here and sell it in little stores that just dripped of authenticity.
Or maybe the real reason they would all look bored was just that a brilliantly drawn chalk line for sewing was the sort of thing that plain old goddam Amy would talk about. But they'd let her talk, so long as she didn't go on too long about it. See, she would say, already afraid she was boring them, it's pretty rare that you mark both sides and, if you do it at all, normally you only make a few marks on one side where it's going to be hard to see what you're doing after you've pinned something.
For a cut-out line like this, you'd never mark the whole way round. And most certainly of certainlies-that had been a favorite phrase of Dad's in his books about Little Amy at the The Cabin, so it might suppress their impatience while she finished explaining that nobody could possibly trace all the way around in a medium like chalk on muslin, with no bunching or shaking or anything. I've been doing med illo for years and I couldn't do that. Leo-fucking-nar do couldn't do that on a good day.
They would all nod solemnly, Colin would say something sarcastic, and the clique would go back to quoting television at each other.
Maybe finding your soul made you cynical too.
The rectangles of light from the sunny window distorted further into rhombi, and jumped across the floor again.
Another reverie. Forty-five minutes this time, though she'd had fewer thoughts, at least fewer she could recall.
She wadded up her too-small, colorless, strangely-marked soul and tossed it into the duffel bag with her too-large, colorless, perfectly-self-maintained elven sweaters.
On top of her soul she put her meager toiletry bag: toothpaste, shampoo, aspirin, and hairbrush. No makeup. What would be the point? There wasn't going to be anyone at The Cabin except her, and she could never get things to come out anyway no matter how long she stood at the mirror.
Or had she invited someone to The Cabin?
She closed up the duffel, shouldered it, and went down to the convertible that she'd inherited, along with too much else, from Dad.
When she turned a different way, the old LeSabre seemed to perk up and sing, as if it didn't have to do something it hated, this one time; whether it was getting away from The Lowered Bar, or from Greeley, or it was all just her imagination, the car sounded happy.
Going east to west across the Front Range, you point the car's nose down the straight-as-a-bullet two-lane road, stand on the accelerator, and go into that mental groove where you can run down a country road flat-out and wide-eyed, alert and quick enough not to rear-end a frontloader, T-bone a hay truck, or put an antelope through your windshield. You chew up road as the mountains loom, and make sure you stay alert.
The phone rang. She pulled the headset from her neck up onto her ears and said "Hello?"
"Hey, there, this is Sergeant Derrick de Zoos of the Colorado Bureau of Cute Chick Control-"
"Oh, my dear sweet god, how long did you spend making that one up?"
"Hours and hours," his voice said, a warm smiling baritone in her ears. His voice, she thought, was even better than the eyes and the muscles. Now if he could just stop being a cop and lose that sense of humor.
She reminded herself to focus on the road. "Well, ma
ybe it just needed a few more drafts."
"Everyone's a critic. I bet your dad always said that."
"Almost as often as he said 'Goddam Tolkien.'"
"What did he have against Tolkien?"
"Several million book sales and a vast repeat business. So what are you actually after, here, Detective? Am I charged with anything cool?"
"You're charged with being cool, how's that? Here I am, a detective, all set for major crimes, and no major criminals have turned up, so of course I thought of you."
She saw brake lights far ahead and took her foot off the gas, letting the LeSabre slow down. "Aren't you worried about someone taping your calls to me?"
"They're nothing compared to the calls I make to other girls."
Amy couldn't help smiling; she liked Derrick whether she wanted to or not. "So let me guess. You're soaking up taxpayer time and money on the phone to me because you're finally getting a weekend off?"
"A three- day weekend," he said, in a tone approaching religious awe. "So, first question, does it take three days to wash your hair?"
"Day and a half, tops."
The brake lights had been a big old F250 turning off into a dirt road; she put her foot down again and the LeSabre pressed pleasantly against her back.
"Old boyfriends coming to town? Dental appointments?"
"They're rotating a paratroop regiment home from Avalon, and I should see a brain surgeon, but no." She liked bantering with the detective; Derrick got banter in a way that none of her crowd did, understanding it was a mutual game and not a public performance.
Belatedly, she realized she had just put herself into a corner, when Derrick asked, "So what lame excuse are you going to give me for not seeing me?"
"Oh, god, I should have seen that coming. There's two reasons it will be tough, but tough is not impossible. One, I'm driving up to The Cabin-right now, actually on the road-to spend a week."
"Your dad's old place?"
"You remember everything I say."
"I heard the capitals, so I recognized the place right away. But I thought that your dad's foundation was putting artists-in-residence into it."
"Right now it's in-between. Samantha just left, and Piet isn't due for another six weeks, and I get to use it during in-betweens. So you might have to be willing to drive up to Feather Mountain on one of your days off."
"Deal!"
Doh! Why had she done that? Was she trying to keep Derrick pursuing her? And if so, why? And wouldn't it be awkward with three of them there?
That was, two.
The road lurched a little sideways and her breath caught before she brought the car back into her lane. Thank all the gods for dry pavement and good tires. She must have been off in like a two-second reverie.
"Amy? Are you still there?"
"Still here," she said, thinking good question, Detective.
"Did I get too pushy?"
"Not at all," she said. "Just had to think and drive and didn't have any brain cells to spare for talking. But yes, come on up to The Cabin this weekend. I want you to. The question is whether you want to, because the other thing is, just this afternoon, I found my soul, so if you come to see me, I might be pretty weird, you know."
"And you're driving? "
You weren't supposed to do that, Amy remembered, belatedly. "Derrick, I feel fine."
"It's not a law or anything," he said, "but you are going to be kind of out of it and accident prone, so be a little careful, okay? And you're making me wonder about that long pause on the phone."
She was about to make something up, tell him there was a tractor on the shoulder and cars coming the other way, but the words stuck in her throat, like they always did.
"Or is that sounding too protective?" he asked.
"Maybe a little."
"Well, it's pure self-interest. I want you around to reject me for years to come. How do you feel right now?"
"Weird but not bad and not out of it. I did have a couple of reveries right after I found it. But as far as I can tell, I'm alert now."
"Well, I know this is hovering and I know you hate it, but call me when you get to The Cabin, okay? Just so I know you got there. And then we can figure out whether you really invited me or I just trapped you into it."
"Derrick, sometimes you are too smart for both of our good."
"Whatever. Anyway, call me from The Cabin? Then maybe we'll make plans or not, but I'll know. Call the cell-I don't get off till three a.m., but I don't expect I'll be doing much of anything, unless Greeley gets a lot tougher than it's ever been up till now. Can't even really hope for a good stabbing."
"The tough act isn't working, either," she said, smiling into the phone and hoping he heard it as teasing. "All right, I'll call you."
"You will?"
"Actually, yes. I promise. I just realized I probably did worry you some, and besides, I kind of want to have someone looking for me if I don't make it there. But as far as I can tell, I'm fine now, really."
"Okay. 'Preciate it, Amy."
"No problem, Derrick. Have a quiet night."
She crossed 25 into a series of dips and rises, where in dinosaur times the Pacific Plate finished skidding under North America like a piece of cardboard under a tablecloth. Wrinkles and folds in the Earth rise and steepen and cram together to become the Rocky Mountain Front, an area of astonishing beauty populated by elves and fairies illegally squatting below the Wyoming line, Buddhists and anarchists and old tommyknockers who can tolerate the elves, and, south toward Raton, bordersnakes, demons, and Apache ghosts.
Other ghosts are everywhere, silent, unspeaking, forever watching the invaders. Dad had taken her out to watch them gather and dance beside the borrow pit in the moonlight, countless times.
Not the borrow pit!
The lovely dark pool at the foot of the pine-covered slope from The Cabin with a twenty-foot waterfall falling into its north end. The pool that tumbled down the steep bouldery slope to Maggie's Creek in its southeast corner. She remembered vividly. The ghosts, Utes mostly, had come to dance on the flat rock, as broad as a tennis court, by the waterfall, in the moonlight, and she and her father had sat watching them till the sunrise swept them away.
Cops had found Dad floating on his back in the open water around the waterfall, nude, dead of exposure, one bright sunny February day. Pike and ravens had been feeding on him for a few days, and his blue eyes, typing-strong fingers, and sardonic lips were already gone; they had had to identify him by his teeth.
The sheriff's office had been mystified by the $400 cash on the front table but Amy hadn't. She'd had to tell them that that was $300 standard, $50 premium for getting the exact physical type (young, pale, black haired, size four or smaller, ski-jump nose, fox-faced), plus $50 for driving up from Boulder or Fort Collins. They found a bunch of escort-service phone n
umbers on his computer and that ended the mystery; they'd even located the girl who had driven all that way to a door that didn't open and lost a night's earnings by it. The time of his call to the service established the last time he'd definitely been alive, six days before he was found.
Amy had always wished she could find a way to apologize to the girl for that. But then she had always wished she could apologize to all the vampire-brunette pixies. Dad liked to say that he drank cheap and hated Tolkien for free, so girls who were born to play the lead in Peter Pan were his one expensive vice. He had been saying that ever since Amy was old enough to understand why she was supposed to find somewhere else to be, or stay very quietly in her room, about once a month.
Later on, in her personal finance course, she had sat down and figured out that he had dropped a bit over five k a year on his "one vice." Run that through compound interest by twenty years, think about what they could have had during those years, and the figure had made her eyes water. In her journal she had written I am changing my major from business to art and biology so I won't have to look at things that are quite so upsetting.
How far had she come over the rising wrinkles in the continent? It seemed like only five minutes in the groove, with the seat pushing against her back and the motor tached up past 4, but no, it had been almost an hour by the clock. The sun was most of the way down now, the towns farther apart, the mountains close, their shadows already stretching far out behind her so that it was night here and day in the sky. She was almost to Van Buren, at the foot of Maggie's Creek Canyon.
She topped the last rise before Van Buren, and the truck stop's neon island in a sodium-glare pond welcomed her into the dark below. She put her blinker on-she had skipped lunch, her bladder was about to burst, and the needle was near E. She glanced up and had to brake hard to make the last parking lot ramp into the truck stop. Her car fishtailed on the gravel but the passenger side door didn't quite kiss the BP stanchion (after a nervous split-second). Then her front tires grabbed pavement and she crunched over the gravel and up to the pump.