Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  Chapter 31

  JUNQUE, the sign said. STUFF. I-GLASSES. The permit number was painted over the door. Nadia ducked in, wet and freezing. She had to get out of the cold and the rain even if only for short while. A bell rang as she stepped in.

  A white-haired man sat behind a counter with a tiny screwdriver in his hand, taking apart a bird toy. Maybe it was a stuffed bird. It was yellow and black and feathers were dropping from it.

  May I help you?

  Yes, said Nadia. She tried to quiet herself and act normal. She took a long breath through her nose. I was wondering if you had a compass somewhere.

  A compass.

  Yes.

  Why? Where are you going?

  Nadia tucked her hands in her sleeves. She was shaking very slightly with the cold and with nerves and she could see a lock of hair in front of her eyes trembling. She pushed it back under Jeanne Uphusband’s hat and looked around at the displays of old framed pictures, vise grips, boxes of nails and screws, old wood-cased TV monitors, tin cans full of kids’ school awards badges, cracked chairs and scrap paper, birdcages, and broken lamps. Hats that she knew must be cowboy hats and old spurs and branding irons, painted dishes. A box full of I-glasses of all sizes and strengths. There was a door in the back.

  Nowhere. Nadia peered at the stuffed bird. What’s that? She bent over the counter, wet and shivering.

  A clock.

  A bird clock?

  Yes. It tells the time. “I am time, grown old to destroy the world, embarked on a course of world annihilation!” He threw the stuffed bird onto the counter. Why do you want a compass?

  I am going down to the creek valley, that’s why. To the riverbed.

  What for? I have a right to be a busybody. He laughed and performed a little writhe and his white hair tossed like silk.

  I was told to go north up the old riverbed. Nadia smiled at him and then looked down at all the heaped cheap jewelry under the glass counter.

  Told by whom? By a sadist. It would take you through the scrap yards, an entire universe of junk being recycled by gnomes, by dwarves. Swarming over the heaps like unhygienic humanoids seeking . . . what? Things.

  I know.

  Why?

  I am looking for my father’s bones. In the river. And so I need a compass.

  Child! he cried. He dropped both wrinkled hands to his sides and stared at her.

  Nadia shifted her tote bag. Yes. He was murdered north of here and they never found his body. I should shut up now, now.

  The man opened a drawer and took out a handful of buttons and let them slide through his fingers, slowly. The buttons clattered. And what is your name?

  Sonia Hernandez.

  A common name, Hernandez. Why don’t you have a coat?

  I haven’t bought my winter one yet, she said. You’re nosy. I just want a compass.

  When was he murdered, O son of Hernan?

  Ten years and seven months ago.

  Child! He leaned with one elbow on the countertop and stared at her with narrowed eyes. His worn suit coat rode up on his shoulders. You wish to distract me with this story. You have been sent. You would have been quite young. How do they know he was murdered?

  Nadia said, The man confessed. She smiled, a fatherless but brave girl, a daughter of tragedy. It might take me to the end of the city altogether. She walked down the counter and pulled out a drawer. Buttons, old playing cards, nozzles, and faucet handles.

  The end of the city! You must not! It is not allowed. The things! The alien tribes! What will you eat? There is nothing to eat but roots and bark and alien tribal people lurking in rocky declivities and so on! You would be stooping over the miry, unclean riverbed in search of your father’s bones. “Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made, those are the pearls that were his eyes” and so on. Epic. That would be the land of faerie, beautiful and dangerous where bones are turned into sea limestone. Come. I will see what I have. You are really escaping to the Great Northwest, are you not? Where the ancient hippies live as true believers still, and fishes with gold coins in their mouths leap into maidens’ laps.

  Do they? She looked up at him.

  Who knows. He stalked to the back of the shop and began to root through a canvas sack. I saw a beautiful young woman shot dead on live TV, anything is at present possible. A communal grief inhabits us. And now for myself.

  Yourself? I just thought you might have an old compass.

  You have told me about yourself. I will tell you about me.

  That’s okay. I shouldn’t have told you all about myself. Nadia turned and surveyed the shop. She was looking at the back door, an escape route. She was still shaking and couldn’t seem to stop, even in the comparative warmth of the Curiosity Shop.

  He opened up an ancient microwave and looked inside and drew out a box with small devices in it. He said, I am probably the last person alive to have seen The Barber of Seville performed. Probably the last. My name is Roman Durban Gallegos.

  Happy to meet you.

  Nadia heard crowd noises outside, street kids yelling. They always did that when a pair of Forensics agents came along.

  The elderly man hitched up his pants and pulled at his tie. He said, It was at the Midnight Cowboy Theater, which had a proscenium, and in the opera season they rolled up the film screen and the Sector Zero Opera Company performed. Yes. They were awful. Awful.

  Where was the Midnight Cowboy Theater? Nadia moved to the bureau and yanked open a drawer. At the first noise of the jangling doorbell, at the first sound of an official voice, she would bolt through the back door.

  I don’t know. It’s confusing. I get confused now after the invasion and the bombing, they insist it be called the Urban Wars, so whatever. Perhaps Omaha, could have been Denver. I was evacuated on a night train. It was different then! Now here! There. He handed her a compass. Are you happy now?

  Nadia reached for the small round object and held it in her upturned palm. Oh, it’s lovely, she said. It shone with brass and delicate lettering; NSEW, it stated in bold capitals. It’s beautiful. How do you work it?

  Work it?

  Then the front doorbell jangled as the rickety old door was pushed open and two Forensics officers walked in. Their breath smoked; they were very large and heavy with all their belt equipment.

  One of them said, Well, Mr. Gallegos. Do you have that tureen for my wife yet? Hey, how about this rain?

  Raindrops stood out on their watch caps and sleeves. They stood with their hands behind their backs, trying to smile and set the small elderly man at ease but one of them was going through tissue engineering and his face was like hard plastic and his eyes glittered with permissible, pointless rage.

  Bing will have it soon, he said. My ceramics scrapper. Soon! And so, did you come to the neighborhood just to ask about the tureen? Mr. Gallegos appeared elaborately surprised. Just to see me? He smiled and backed away one foot, two feet, slowly.

  No, no. Looking for somebody and found her. Hiding a stolen ID in her baby’s diaper. She’s off to jail and the baby to an orphanage. They both nodded together. The tissue engineering did something to their understanding or maybe their perceptions. They became inarticulate, they repeated themselves. She waited, holding her breath.

  Yes, baby to an orphanage. They nodded again and drops flew from their watch caps. Then the near one shot out a hand so fast it seemed a blur as he caught a cuff link that Gallegos had knocked off the counter in his nervous crabwise backing. There was nothing wrong with their reaction times.

  I don’t care, thought Nadia. I don’t, I don’t. It was her or me. She tried to fade into the background, become neutral, mild and gliding. She put two dimes on the counter and then turned away from them to look at a framed print of a little girl in a birch wood, staring up at a bird and then found something interesting near the door.

&
nbsp; Your lives are full of drama, said Mr. Gallegos. Lives of theatrical intensity. He nodded and straightened his tie. I was the last person ever to see a live performance of La Bohème at the Midnight Cowboy Theater; it was the Sector Zero Opera Company, that was drama, that was romantic intensity. De Lara sang “O Soave Fanciulla”; it was an assault on the senses.

  Nadia smiled and nodded to them all and stepped to the door. The stuffed finch on the counter began to sing. Five o’clock! Five o’clock!

  Gray clouds pouring out from the northwest and a fine drizzle. A ruinous neighborhood with broken pavements or biscuit-colored dirt, hard as concrete and now steaming with damp. Great wet boulders of granite sat between buildings or in front of them as if they had come as invaders from down below in the Land of Underpinnings where rock lived. Untidy apartments pressed against one another down steep slopes and made narrow canyons. Blackbirds wheeled overhead and sang songs to one another in the cold, nebulous light of early morning and from every window shone the jewels of television screens on which glaciers broke apart into the arctic seas and a voice said I know, I know. Bowls of grain porridge and hard biscuits with margarine were eaten on doorsteps and smoke from wood fires bannered up from rooftops. Nadia had spent the night under the piers of an ancient bridge structure that spanned a narrow dry wash, listening to other people who had crowded under it, as they shifted and turned and talked among themselves. They were heaps of heavy clothing, breath clouds, the occasional flash of a match. Nadia held her tote bag close and sat awake long into the dark.

  As soon as it was light she pulled the big boy’s shirt over her dress and put on the red sneakers. She was still cold, and her shivering was wearing her out, exhausting her. She felt abstract, slow, lethargic.

  Where are you off to?

  A young woman sitting beside a fire of scrap lumber called to her. A frypan sat over the flames on two bricks and bannock rose and browned inside it as if the girl commanded the ministering spirits of baking powder, the toasted odor and crack of vagrant drops of rain that fell on the pan. She cut a triangle of bannock and wrapped it in brown paper. Two pennies!

  No, thank you. The smell made Nadia light-headed. She had so little money left. At a distance she heard a crushing noise as ceramic refuse was ground to powder. The cold clouds poured by heavily in sagging corms.

  They had stopped looking for her as far as she knew. For Sendra Bentley with Nadia Stepan’s face or maybe by now somebody else’s face. Nadia wondered which mattered most, the name on an ID or the face.

  Maybe neither. Underhydrated Legal Forensics employees with minimal typing skills hit Ctrl/Enter instead of Shift, plus some other key and everything disappeared. Or they thought it had disappeared; what they had actually done was brought up a blank page. OMG it’s all gone! Their first objective was to hide this from their section manager by claiming they had received a notice: Case no longer relevant. Then delete everything. She was not important enough to pursue but James was. And James could not take to the streets and disappear as she had; he could not run for his life; he could not hide. She stopped and put one hand to her forehead. Let him escape. With or without me. Let him live.

  A valley, Nadia said. A good view.

  Yes, yes! The young woman turned with her to look out over the valley. We all have good eyes here. From looking a long ways all the time. And there are some live trees! Also special are our boulders. You don’t want this? Just two pennies.

  No, I’m not hungry.

  The young woman wore a worn canvas coat with a flannel lining and a heavy skirt with two pairs of woolen leggings and thick leather shoes. Her hair and eyes were black as carbon. She clasped her knees in the cold dawn. Clouds! she said. Rain! First I ever saw! Where you off to?

  Nadia said, I am looking for the Laundromat. Nadia’s little hat brim jittered in the wet breeze and far away at the edge of sight, in the great valley, were dully glittering mountains of what must be broken dishes rising up out of earth colors of walnut and umber and smoke drifting from the distant foothills textured with the thousands of living units and along the dry wash a few bare trees that seemed to be living yet from some secret source of water far below the surface.

  It’s on down there. The girl pointed. That’s Crow Creek.

  It’s a beautiful view, said Nadia.

  The young woman pushed the ends of scrap lumber farther into the fire. We had a poet laureate here in our neighborhood that made up a song about us, about the Crow Creek Valley, thirty-two verses, he said it over the pirate radio, but he was arrested.

  Angela! An older woman leaned out of a glassless, sashless window up on the third story. What are you going on about?

  She might think Nadia was some kind of inspector or spy, looking for signs of a pirate radio station. Nadia called up, Is Pamela still on crutches?

  Yeah, for a couple of weeks, said the woman. She was somewhat mollified. They’re going to show the wrecked train cars being dragged off. And now, who knows? Killing women live on TV. Maybe real dead bodies, real train wrecks. She pointed a finger at Angela. Look after that fire.

  Angela handed Nadia the wedge of bannock.

  Bye. Take it anyway. Bye.

  It took a few minutes before Nadia was able to understand how the compass worked. She held it as she walked. She expected something to light up, she had hoped for a noise or a voice saying You are headed north now, you don’t have far to go. Turn right, turn left. But it was silent. There were the letters NSEW and numbers on the decorative bevel and a central rosette of beautiful spikes and leaves.

  The needle floated free and it was up to her to turn her body so that the needle slid around to the N. And then she was facing north. She stood with it in her hand and by the long shafts of sunlight stabbing through the cloud cover she saw that the sun was settling in the late-afternoon at west-northwest. The four directions were standing at the corners of the sky, the maharajas of the world. She and the inhabitants of this open valley of debris were tramping along some latitude and some longitude that crossed each other like a gunsight, looking for sanity and peace.

  She came to a scrap-metal reduction yard with the repeated, fierce light of a reducing furnace and a little building with vending machines. The guard allowed her to go in. The bannock had barely touched her hunger.

  Looks like you could use a bath, he said. Hey? Just go and stand out in the rain. He threw back his head and laughed.

  She came away with a bottle of water, wasabi peas, and a pita wrap with some unnamed filling and the knowledge that she had sent a message to James as to where she was, if he were not arrested, if he could still access a computer.

  She walked on toward the Northwest. Up and down the coast behind Lighthouse Island would be settlements of Primary workers or unofficial villages, savage hippies. A man named the Uncanny with some kind of talking egg and a man with a top hat and a demented bald man with an empty book made of wallpaper, a religious colony that sacrificed goats to the mountain gods. Her kind of universe, her kind of world. She ate as she plodded on, running down like some malfunctioning film clip.

  Mountains of clothing and bedding, a cornucopia of discarded textiles. Scrappers packed up clothes and cheap quilts, stained sheets, tablecloths, pants, socks, and underwear in bales and strapped them tightly. Then heaps of broken furniture that people were binding up to sell for kindling. In the topmost twigs of the bare trees black-and-white birds teetered back and forth in the drizzle, occasionally lifting their wings to balance themselves and they called to her, Nadia, Nadia, stop and rest.

  I can’t, she said. There is no rest for the wicked.

  Chapter 32

  Nadia slept curled in the seat of a front-end loader among the mountains of scrap. The machine was abandoned, rusty; waiting for repairs, for a part. The rain had its own voice and spoke all night long in running streams, in a light tapping on the windshield, drips from the rusty arms. The bucket was filling
with water like a rough chalice offered up. The next morning Nadia changed into the boy’s pants in the biting, damp cold and filled her water bottles out of the bucket. She could not let James see her like this. How to talk her way into a Laundromat?

  She asked a man picking through a heap of paper bales where the Laundromat was.

  The man straightened up in his wet rags with a stack of cardboard in his hands; thin, addicted, larcenous. He gave Nadia a long considering stare from under a drooping rubberized hat brim. She was soaked through and a thin layer of sleet had rimed her hat brim and her shoulders and she was shaking, her lips blue.

  Washateria right up there by the paper mill. They use the last rinse of the pulp. Good water.

  She stood in line with about ten other women, shuffling forward over the sticky clay of the wet earth, pushing their baskets ahead of them. Above them on the hillside the great paper mill poured out steam and mechanical noises. Nadia’s red shoes made sucking noises in the mud and she was shaking so much she could hardly hold on to her tote bag.

  The girl attendants in their candy-striped uniforms kept their eyes on Nadia, the crazed homeless person with no ID who had forgotten her pills. Your pills! Your pills! One of the girls had said in a loud voice. Your medication!

  You mean the blue ones? said Nadia, with large empty eyes.

  Whatever!

  A woman in a bright headscarf who stood behind her in the line said, Oh let her in, let her in. Come on, just do it. Two young women laughed at Nadia and elbowed each other.

  The girl paused over her form and everyone in the line sighed and kicked their baskets. They were standing out in the rain and were dripping and cold. The girl said, Yes, but what gerrymander are you from?

  Dogtown Towers, said Nadia, and put a knuckle to her mouth. I think. I forget where I am.

  That’s Gerrymander Eleven, said the woman. Just let her in.

  And so they had allowed her in and marked down on the form that she was indigent. Nadia walked into the main room where a TV shouted out an exercise program and several women were doing dance moves, and felt the hot air in her face, and fainted.