Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 32
No hurt, no foul, as Dad said whenever he fucked up without totally fucking up, which was pretty much the average for Dad.
She gassed up, paid, peed, and then decided to move the car over to the main parking slots and sit down to eat at the counter. Derrick was right. If she was going to be driving within a few hours of finding her soul, she really ought to take some care of herself, for the sake of other drivers if nothing else. Might as well make sure she was comfortable, well-rested, and prepared, since the trip up Maggie's Creek Canyon Road in the dark was going to be stressy.
How had she let it get so late? Then she remembered that she had spent about an hour and a half in reverie. Aimee and Ami and mye had all said that you forgot things a lot when you first got your soul back, though it seemed to Amy that she had been remembering things rather than forgetting them. Except that whatever she had been remembering, she'd been forgetting again.
Really, it was confusing and disorienting. She must've been driving a bit spaced out, but probably awake enough and therefore safe enough. She hoped.
Her usual double-burger-with-nothing had cooled to about room temperature, and the long hand on the clock had jumped halfway round. She wolfed the burger before it could get colder, gulped her slightly warmer chili, and left her lukewarm coffee on the counter, begging a refill with fresh hot stuff for her thermos. Forty minutes for a burger at a counter; life was slipping away just like that.
The last time she had come through here had been with her friends, with Colin sitting in the passenger seat of the red Miata she'd had then, grabbing the doorframe as she went up Maggie's Creek Canyon at a perfectly reasonable pace. It had been for Dad's funeral. Behind her there had been two more carloads of her friends, supposedly all there to support her through Dad's funeral, and actually along to be able to say that yes, they had known Little Amy in college, and been to The Cabin, and even been at Burton Goldsbane's funeral. It was the ultimate privilege-or payment-for having consented to be friends with plain old goddam Amy.
Extra privileges, such as actually riding shotgun in Poga's Miata, knowing the real story behind that Poga nickname, and being able to tell people that Little Amy drove like a lunatic, came for agreeing to sleep with her or at least to crash on her couch.
At the funeral she had almost heard her father whispering in her ear what he said often when he was drunk; Amy, Poga, Amy-Amy-Poga, I deal in lies all the time, little Poga, and the first thing to keep in mind is that to lie well you can't lose what the truth is. Disappear into the jaws of your own lie and it will digest you and leave you as a little pile of mendacious poop by the road. So lie all you want, Poga, but don't let the goddam lie eat you.
She had kind of enjoyed the shocked look on her friends' faces when they saw Feather Mountain and The Cabin and the waterfall pond the way they were…
Which had been what?
No time to think about that now. She was into the canyon. In daylight this place was gorgeous, at night a scary challenge, though a familiar one. She didn't need to see anything more than what was in her headlights-she felt, or just knew, where things were and where she was. The rock walls, brief pullouts, and steep drop-offs were where they belonged, held in place by her memory, and marked by the sudden flashes of the bright mad dance of stars between the peaks, spires, and canyon lips.
She knew and watched for the game trails across the road. In icy late winter, in the last hour of light and the first hour of darkness, there were often deer and coyote, even elk or bear, heading down for a drink from fast-flowing Maggie's Creek, which never froze all the way over. Or you could see a Ute ghost, or even an elf flying low to follow the road, and be startled just as you came onto black ice, and be into the canyon before you knew it-though as long as some of the drops were, you'd know it for much too long.
A mountain road at night is busy, if you intend to make time and still get there alive. Amy had learned to drive on this road but it still required her full attention. She could never remember every place where shadow lay on the road all day long so that runoff dribbling across the road turned into black ice, suddenly under the tires, quick, thin, slick, invisible, and hard as death itself. Traffic coming the other way compelled her to constantly pop brights on and off, and she was always braking behind locals who saw no reason to hurry, or pulling into turnoffs to let other locals pass, blinking from the bright headlights in the rearview mirror, peering ahead for the not-pulled-over enough car with naked, semi-drunk kids in it that could be in any pull-off.
She wondered idly how many of these turnoffs she'd gotten laid in, during high school. Maybe the Burton Goldsbane Foundation would like to put up some small monuments: "Little Amy Was Slept With Here." And by her bedroom window, a statue of Burton Goldsbane himself, rampant with a puzzled expression-
Why by her window?
Approaching the blind curve that often had elk on the road just beyond it, she felt the reverie reaching up for her as if it were big, strong hands with unnaturally long fingers trying to cover her eyes, touch her body, stroke her- Never mind! She was driving the goddam canyon and the reverie would just have to leave her alone. The reverie vanished like the blur does when you focus a telescope.
With the very small part of her mind that had time to think, she was glad, almost smug. No reverie was going to shove her around. When she emerged at the head of the canyon, driving across the long truss bridge that leaped the raggy head of the canyon, and up into Feather Mountain Park, she glanced at the clock. As always, it had taken only about half an hour but she felt as if she had been driving all night.
Feather Mountain Park is not terribly impressive, as parks go. When she had gone off to college and met people from other parts of the country for the first time, Amy had forever been explaining that she had not grown up in a national park, that a park is a wide flat space between the mountains with too much wind and not enough rain for trees or crops, but perfect for horses and cattle. "Aryan Masculine Paradise," she used to explain. "Room for many cattle for the Tamer of Horses, and also lots of room for playing with guns and driving drunk real fast. Lots of long views you can snipe at federal agents from. Roadhouses with six country songs, none changed since 1970, on a thousand year old jukebox. When the Lord of the Park wants babies, there are local girls, dumb as rocks, blonde and well-knockered, drinking under-age at every roadhouse, drunk as shit and desperate to move out of their parents' house. And lots of room for a man to build his cabin-or park his doublewide. With all that going for it, what's a few months of below-zero, a wind that never stops whistling, and a little isolation and insanity?"
For some reason that had made people uncomfortable, though redneck jokes were common currency at UNC, especially among people who were afraid that they might not have s
craped all the redneck off yet. After a while she made the connection and stopped telling those jokes; the problem wasn't what life in Feather Mountain Park was like, or that people felt bad about laughing at it. The problem was that the kids who had devoured all of Burton Goldsbane's Little Amy books did not want to picture sweet, dreamy Little Amy out on the backroads with older boys. Colin found it a little too interesting. Maybe that was why she stuck with him, though she never talked about life in Aryan Masculine Paradise any more around him.
What everyone had wanted, Amy thought, was to claim friendship with Little Amy from the books, with shy bookish good looks and a dreamy artsy iridescent valentine-centered soul; it didn't matter whether they wanted to worship her or win her heart or debauch her, they wanted Little Amy, and while she might have been perfectly happy to be worshipped or loved or debauched-better yet, all three-she just didn't have that iridescent soul.
And that brought her back to the thought of what was in her duffel bag. She had had such a clear picture in her head of her magnificent soul, and here she had a gray rag with a brilliantly drawn technical illustration: a real heart and not a valentine. Why had she ever gone looking for it in the first place, if it was going to turn out like this?
She topped the rise and looked down on the town of Feather Mountain. She'd also tried to make a joke out of the observation that there was a name shortage out here, that towns very often were named after prominent local features and so was everything else within reach, Feather Mountain standing above Feather Mountain Park where the town of Feather Mountain lay at the crossing of Feather Mountain Road and Maggie's Creek Canyon Road; she said when she was little she didn't know that anywhere could be named anything except Feather Mountain and Maggie's Creek. But nobody else thought that was weird, so she gave up on that joke too.
In the night with the miles of blinding-silver snow all around it, Feather Mountain was at least interesting, visually, and maybe even attractive. The sky was spattered with stars; you could see so many up here, down to very dim ones, and the moon had not yet risen.
She crossed the last stretch of Feather Mountain Park on the swooping miles-wide arcs of blacktop as the town popped in and out of view, until finally she came over the last low ridge just above the town and the wild spill of stars vanished in the glare on her windshield.
Two blocks of faade-style buildings with steep pitched roofs behind the faade, the real old-timey places from when this had been a tank town on the narrow gauge. Maybe twenty frame houses, Sears railroad bungalows that the real estate people now called Victorians, clustered around those two blocks, and then around that was the usual sprawl of aluminum sided fake frame houses, prefabs, and mobile homes on gravel streets. Out on the edge of that disorderly cluster, linked to the downtown by the other well-lighted street, lay a huge sodium-glaring parking lot surrounded by Wal-Mart, McDonald's, KFC, and Gibson's; the glare illuminated the irregular sprawl of mobile homes uphill from the parking lot.
Amy's LeSabre shot by the faade row of Main Street. No light on at Mrs. Puttanesca's-but what would you expect at nine o'clock on a Friday night?
She would have to make some time for a visit. She hadn't talked with Mrs. P since the funeral.
Just beyond the streetlights, as the stars popped back out of the black sky, Amy took the familiar turnoff up the steep winding road to The Cabin. Over the first hill, down into the little draw among the pines, and the friendly dark closed around her; she seemed to drive into that vivid spill of stars as she made the long climb up the main hill.
There were several houses back here, and she passed them all without seeing any sign of life. When she came to the driveway for The Cabin-actually just a place where the road narrowed and a sign announced that this was now private property rather than a public road-she was relieved to find that Bartie Brown had been up there with his snowplow, since when she'd known him in high school he'd only been reliable about getting beer. But when she'd talked to him to arrange the plowing, he'd rather shyly said that nowadays he had four trucks and was growing into a real business, and had asked permission to put up one of his advertising signs beside her private road.
She laughed when she saw his sign; the name of his company was How Now Brown Plow. Possibly there was more to Bartie than she'd realized ten years ago-maybe not being drunk and high all the time had something to do with it.
At The Cabin she parked in the same spot under the built-on carport where she had always parked her old VW Bug during high school, and her red Miata during college. "Plain old goddam Amy, home again," she said, aloud, but somehow it lacked the bitterness and irony she had intended. The car door opened into the expected blast of cold, and she pulled her duffel from the back seat and shouldered it up.
What was she doing here?
The question was what she had been trying to remember. Her whole reason for going up to Feather Mountain and The Cabin had been to look for her soul (a big expanse of vivid iridescence, in raw silk, with the most glorious embroidered ruby-red Valentine heart at its center), which she was sure was somewhere in one of the elf-crafted cedar chests along one wall of her bedroom.
But she had found her soul. It was right here in her duffel. What was she doing here?
She had reason enough to want to take some time off, but once she'd found her soul, she could have just turned left on 25, headed down to Denver or Santa Fe or even into Mexico, or picked up 70 in Denver and headed to Vegas or L.A.
She still could. If the weather didn't suit her clothes she could just buy clothes on the way; her job was to keep her busy and because she liked saving money of her own, but she could buy a new wardrobe any time she wanted one, she just never did. She could head to somewhere sunny and spend the next week in gauzy bits of fabric that cost more than her first car, in a hotel room that cost, for a week, what her apartment cost for three months, and live on umbrella drinks and desserts if she wanted. And she just might want.
No point in running the canyon again, though. Not in the dark when she was tired. Tomorrow could be another day.
Inside the front door, she found six tied-up garbage bags.
The Foundation had said that they had thoroughly checked Samantha out of the place, and yet they'd left these lying around? She had some bones to pick with the manager-
There was a pile of dishes in the sink, too. Had they not cleaned up at all, or-
She opened the refrigerator.
Fresh milk and fruit, bologna that couldn't have been more than a couple days out of the store.
There was some little sound from upstairs. She reached for her cell phone, thought for a second, and dialed.
"Derrick de Zoos."
"Derrick, it's me, Amy. I'
m at The Cabin, but I want you to stay on the line with me for a little bit, if you have time and you can. I think there's someone else in here, squatting in The Cabin."
" What?! Get the hell out of there-"
"Easy. I think I know who I'm going to find. And it will be fine. I just want you on the line just in case. If something doesn't sound good, call the Larimer County Sheriff and tell them to send a deputy up here, they'll know the place, but I think it's all fine. I just want a back up plan in place in case this isn't who I think it is."
"I don't like you taking chances-"
"And I don't like you being protective, but we'll both have to live with it. My guess is it's Samantha, and trust me, she's harmless. And a friend. I just want you on the line in case a couple Texas-hunter assholes are squatting in here. But I bet it's just Samantha."
Samantha was a waif-thin, tiny, black-haired girl who churned out picture book scripts at a terrifying rate, showing great promise without ever quite selling one.
Amy carried her duffel up to her room as a way of temporizing. Since whoever was in the house didn't seem to have much furniture, and the only bed was in Amy's room, it seemed like the place to look.
"What are you doing now?"
"Climbing the stairs, Derrick. Going to the only room with a bed."
Amy's room, with the furniture her mother had given her before leaving, and Dad's office were the two rooms the Foundation required to be preserved pretty much as they had been, though Amy's room was a bit neater, and Dad's office phenomenally neater, than they had been when anyone lived there. Not to mention that they had taken down all of Amy's Kurt Cobain posters and dug the Care Bears back out of storage.