Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  Michael had made his way a few yards off the road to where a line of pin oak saplings marked where a fence line used to be. He paused in his fumbling with the safety line. “If we ever need unexpected aid,” he said.

  “Unexpected aid from an unexpected quarter,” said Mr. Sapp.

  “That’s it!” said Maggie, brightening. “That’s it exactly. He said it wasn’t for when we were sick or hungry or even if there was worse trouble, because we had neighbors for that.” She hesitated again. “I don’t think he meant to say that we’re not neighbors—it’s not really far at all from our house to your . . . to where you live.”

  “Your father uses the word ‘neighbor’ to mean a very particular thing,” said Mr. Sapp. His face was a day or two away from its last shave, and the callouses on his fingers made raspy noises when he rubbed his chin. “Doubt that comes as any surprise to y’all.”

  “He’s particular about words,” agreed Michael, rejoining them. “About everything.”

  “Peculiar about everything, too,” said Mr. Sapp. He had a look on his face as if remembering old arguments. Not a hard look, and even it softened when he said. “And the three of us aren’t the only ones owe our lives to him being the odd bird he is. Is.” He weighted down the last word exactly the way Maggie did when she talked about their father. Michael didn’t seem to notice, and Maggie chose not to ask why Mr. Sapp had said it in just that way.

  “Unexpected aid,” said Maggie.

  Mr. Sapp shook off the reverie he’d been in. “Yes. Let’s talk about that. But let’s do it someplace more comfortable.”

  He pointed down the road. “Half a mile, maybe, there’s a gravel track coming down off the hill. It’s not washed out too bad and you should be able to get your machines up it. There’s an old church at the top—you can see where the number-six lines moor down there. Wait for me there.”

  He made a twirling motion with his finger and Michael jumped back across the ditch to unwind the line. He was already back behind the wheel and rising when Michael threw it up into the boat.

  “You’ll wait for us if you make it there first, right?” called Maggie.

  “Oh, I don’t imagine there’s any danger of me beating y’all anywhere,” came the reply. “I knew your mama, too.”

  Japheth Sapp’s home and workplace was a sort of collage of found objects and impermanent architecture. A camper set on cinderblocks was joined to an old curing shed by a run of timber frames walled with tarpaper and roofed in rusting tin. Poultry houses sat in a picked-over yard penned in by chicken wire, that fence being the only structure in sight that could be said to be in good repair.

  The twins rode up slowly, Maggie leaning hard into the pedals against the weight of the trailer. They dismounted and leaned their bikes against an old grape arbor that had the dried ghosts of vines twisted round its crossbeams. There was no sign of Mr. Sapp, even in the sky.

  Michael walked out into the center of the lot, where a humming noise came from a metal-sided hut measuring about ten feet on each side. Huge cables twined down from above, merging into a single strand thick as an oak tree that penetrated the flat roof of the hut. The individual strands split and split again as they branched upward, becoming hawsers that led, a quarter-mile distant, to a flotilla of houseboats hanging beneath spherical, dun-colored balloons.

  Like many of the houses in the drainage of the Green River, in the drainages of all the rivers of Kentucky, really, the houseboats hosted Viewers at Home, the attenuated, drip-fed people who made up a sizeable portion of the population of the Commonwealth and many other places. Largely unchurched, they existed to consume media, and existed in a mediated state. The race the twins were bound to ride would be taken in by some statistically significant percentage of the people in those houseboats.

  “Looking at the Viewership?” called Japheth Sapp, his little boat tracking in low over the smoking shed. “Some of them are looking back, probably. I’ve got local-access videostats orbiting the fleet for those among them who miss walking the world the most.”

  This time he didn’t need any help landing his little craft, because he had worked some technical maneuver that let the gas escape from the balloon that held the boat aloft. There was a whine of electric motors as the lines attaching boat to balloon were drawn in around drums fore and aft, and the old man swiftly folded the deflated sack of canvas and unceremoniously let it lay over the boat itself.

  Maggie saw that Michael had drawn out the letter, which he had insisted on carrying in the back pocket of his jersey, and was nervously folding and unfolding it. But he didn’t approach Mr. Sapp while he worked, leaving Maggie to proffer a hand in aid, which was gently rebuffed with a grunt and a shake of the man’s grizzled head.

  “Now,” he finally said. “What aid can I offer the children of my oldest friends?”

  Maggie cleared her throat and nodded. “We need—that is, we’d greatly appreciate, um, transport.”

  Mr. Sapp looked over at their bicycles. “I remember a time when there wasn’t much of the wide world one couldn’t go to on their own, if they had machines as fine as those. Now, well, now—” And he suddenly sang in a nasally tenor:

  “Everywhere we look there’s water, water . . .”

  Maggie recognized the snatch of song, of course. It was from one of their father’s Psalms for Warning. She was about to explain that she and her brother knew how to manage the crossing of creeks and rivers as safely as anyone else might, or more so with their father’s methods, when Michael gave in to his impatience. He walked over to Mr. Sapp and handed over the letter.

  The old man drew a pair of round, steel-rimmed glasses from a pocket inside his vest and held the papers at arm’s length. He carefully read the explanatory letter, but then paged through the packet of information in the following pages quickly until he came to the map of the race route.

  “I didn’t think they even ran this race, anymore,” he said, more to himself than to the twins. “All the river crossings. I saw your mother win it once, you know. Before you were born.”

  Michael held out his hand. Maggie supposed he was asking for the papers back, but it looked like supplication. Mr. Sapp didn’t return the pages in any case, but instead walked toward the trailer, indicating that they should follow him.

  “I wish you had come to me earlier than this,” he told them. “We’ll barely make it to Paducah on time.”

  When Maggie woke in the middle of the night, it was to the uncanny sensation that she was sleeping on air. And then she remembered that, in a way, she was. The low sounds of the houseboat Mr. Sapp had commandeered from the flats at Holmes Bend cutting through the wind sounded around her.

  Maggie had always been able to wake herself at any appointed time, even without the sun’s rays streaming into her attic room or one of the mechanical windup clocks that her father and his friends so cherished jangling away. Unlike Michael, who slept the sleep of the dead and whose soft, steady breathing she could hear across the cabin.

  Sleep of the dead, she thought to herself, remembering why she had chosen to wake in the middle of the night.

  She padded through the interior of the houseboat on bare feet to the sliding door beside the captain’s wheel that had steered the boat when it was a watercraft. She went out onto the front deck, then climbed the ladder to the roof, weaving her way through the hemp hawsers that attached to the balloon overhead. Japheth Sapp sat quietly at the control apparatus he was using to operate the houseboat, watching her approach and chewing the stem of an unlit pipe.

  “I’d have thought you wanted to sleep as much as you could before tomorrow,” he said.

  Maggie hugged herself against the high, chill air. “I’d have thought it was tomorrow already,” she replied.

  Mr. Sapp made a study of the stars along the eastern horizon, behind them. “It’s today yet. Just.”

  She nodded and watched him make a minute adjustment to a lever. There was a hissing sound in the balloon above and a fan motor churne
d briefly.

  “You know a lot about machines,” said Maggie. “Flying these boats. Acting as caretaker for the Buckeye Navy. Being . . .” She trailed off.

  “Being as old as I am,” he laughed. “Yes, Maggie, I know a lot about machines. Some machines, anyway. Machines built and maintained by human hands.”

  Not machines from Tennessee, he meant. Maggie hesitated at that, but then asked her question. “Have you ever heard of a machine that could carry messages for the dead?”

  The course of the balloon, barely perceptible to Maggie, must have shifted just then, because the light of the three-quarters moon suddenly spilled across the roof of the houseboat. She could clearly see Mr. Sapp narrowing his eyes as he stared at her, then beginning to nod.

  “I see, I see now. Is it just you or your brother, too?”

  Maggie shook her head, not understanding him.

  “Your father asked me a similar question once, but in his way he already had his own answer. He believed the calls were sent to torment him, took it as evidence that a great awakening’s on the way. Or that there’d better be one before we all wake up not ourselves. I’m sure you’ve heard him say that we can’t afford to just rely on our ability to keep the worst of Tennessee’s influence out. That’s why he’s been gone so long, his mission.” Japheth paused. “I take it you’ve been contacted by something you think might be Maria.”

  For three years, the twins had lived on their own in the house atop the hill. In all that time, she, at least, had never thought that her father had gone anywhere but on an extended mission trip into the mountains—not on a mission to spread his gospel against Athena. She started to tell this to Japheth Sapp, but he raised a hand to silence her.

  “Telephone calls. Letters from south of the border. Dreams.”

  Maggie said, “We haven’t had any letters. And we only answered the first call.”

  “But you’ve dreamed? Both of you?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I have. If Michael has he hasn’t said. And he won’t listen to me tell about mine.”

  Mr. Sapp said, “I will.”

  Maggie took, as the text of her dream, the first verse of the forty-first chapter of Genesis.

  And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.

  Maggie was no Pharaoh, and she knew better than to stand by the river. In waking life, anyway.

  In her dreams, she wore raiment, the raiment of a champion. She wore a shifting jersey that marked her what her mother had been, Champion of Kentucky, of America, of the World. And she dipped the wheels of her bicycle into the water of the Green River.

  But when she went to draw her bicycle away, the river would not let go its hold. The waters clung to the wheels, then flowed up the spokes like snakes, to the seat stay and the fork, then onto where she held the machine by the handlebars and the seat. The green water flowed over her hands and up her arms. It filled her eyes and her mouth. It flowed into her ears so that she could hear it speaking to her.

  “Oh my daughter,” said the river. “Oh, my beautiful daughter.”

  “‘The river would not let go its hold,’” said Mr. Sapp, smiling by moonlight. “You may ride a bicycle like your mother but you tell a story like your father.

  Since she couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, Maggie held out hope that Mr. Sapp couldn’t see the color coming to her cheeks. “The race we’re going to starts and ends at the Ohio River,” she said. “In the old days, they used to dip their tires into it for luck at the start, and then again when they finished. In thanks, I guess.”

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Sapp. “I think you’re overstating how much ceremony went into thanksgiving in those times.”

  Maggie said, “What about machines in those times? Could they contact the dead?”

  Mr. Sapp looked at her sharply. “You know as well as I do that if any machines are echoing your mother, they’re not old. They’re of the same ilk that’s polluted the waterways and caused us to build the Girding Wall along the Tennessee border. Artificial intelligences escaped of their bounds programming matter and sending it out into the wider world.”

  “They say my mother went into one of those waterways.” Maggie gestured down at the strip of river reflecting silver far below them. “Into that one. Into the Green.”

  Mr. Sapp said, “Whoever ‘they’ are, they never said it in hearing of your father, and I’m surprised they’ve said it to you. Your mother disappeared, Maggie, on a thunderous, flood-wracked night. There’s no way to know what kind of . . . accident she met.”

  “If it was an accident at all,” said Maggie.

  Mr. Sapp was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t know for certain if any machines can carry the voices of the dead. I’d think more about imitation and camouflage if I were you. I’d think about bait. And be careful.”

  “Why would thinking machines be trying to fool us into thinking our mother is alive? Why would they want to anger our father, if that’s why he really left?”

  Mr. Sapp could only shrug. “Your father means a lot of things to a lot of people.”

  Maggie knew that was true, but couldn’t stop from wondering if Mr. Sapp meant something else.

  Maggie had decided to sleep in to make up for the hour she lost in talking to Japheth Sapp in the night. But Michael neither knew nor cared about that. He shook her shoulder, practically jumping up and down in the narrow cabin.

  “Come and see!” he said.

  Oh. There was her twin, expressing delight. Her heart lifted.

  She made her way out onto the forward deck. In the hours she had slept, the landscape had changed. The hills of the Pennyroyal had given way to the flatlands of the western Commonwealth. But it was not the unusual sight of riparian plains that had so excited Michael.

  “It’s the Start Village!” he said.

  Below, sprawling over a vast acreage of untilled land, was a temporary town made up of colorful tents, temporary garages, and canvas shelters. But more than those constructions, it was the vast number and variety of conveyances that drew Maggie’s eye here and there.

  Automobiles of every description crowded the field: cars, trucks, motor carriages, even great lumbering buses, which Maggie had only seen in old photographs. Where can they get the fuel for them all? she wondered, and then wondered the same about the fleet of motorcycles that were parked in disorderly rows along one side of the encampment.

  A buzzing noise drew the attention of both twins then, and they saw a tiny aerostat marked with the logo of the national cycling union keeping pace with the flying houseboat. Mr. Sapp called from his perch on the roof, “They’re guiding us to land on the east side of the village,” he said. “Be ready to throw down ropes.”

  Below, the twins saw people waving their hands, directing the boat to land on a muddy flat. They tossed lines down to waiting hands, and Maggie felt the boat lurch to the left at the last minute before settling to the ground.

  A powerfully built woman with a long braid of graying black hair hanging in front of one shoulder stood off to the side, watching the work of the landing. She wore a light blue jacket imprinted with a red and white striped insignia portraying a spinning pair of wheels. Maggie thought she looked vaguely familiar, and Michael must have as well.

  “Where do we know her from?” he whispered.

  It suddenly came to Maggie. “Pictures. Pictures from our old magazines. Pictures of mother. Think of her younger, standing on a podium and wearing a silver medal.”

  The woman was walking toward them, and must have had unusually sharp hearing. “I won a few golds as well, though there’d be no reason you’d find pictures of those among your mother’s remembrances. You are the Hammersmiths. I am Lydia Treekiller, your director sportif.”

  Their team manager. Their mother’s greatest rival.

  Chapter Four

  “She’ll drive us into the ground,” Michael said, pacing back and forth in the tent they’d been assigned. “This
is some sort of revenge play.”

  Maggie sat on her cot, calmly drinking from a water bottle she’d pulled from the insulated cooler full of such that had been provided with the tent. “She was only one member of the team selection committee,” she said. “And besides, if she had some kind of axe to grind with our family, wouldn’t she have worked to keep us off the national team?”

  If Michael planned to answer, Maggie would never know, because someone outside the tent flap cleared their throat just then. “Hello, Hammersmiths?” came a muffled voice.

  Michael stalked over to the entrance and swept aside the curtain closure, revealing a stout young woman about the twins’ age and about Maggie’s height. She wore a jacket similar to that they’d seen on Lydia Treekiller, khaki shorts, and rugged hiking boots. “Hello, there,” she said in an accent Maggie didn’t recognize. “I’m Tammy Salisbury, one of the Team America soigneurs. Lydia sent me to bring you to the team meeting.”

  Maggie returned the woman’s smile, but Michael simply walked out of the tent, brushing past her with suspicion writ clear on his face. Maggie shook her head and, catching Tammy’s attention, rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Sprinter,” she whispered.

  Tammy giggled, then seemed embarrassed that she had done so, because she covered her smile with one hand and turned away. “We’re meeting on the team bus, which is parked on the far side of the village. You’ll recognize it,” she said, indicating the logo on her jacket.

  “You’re not coming?” asked Maggie.

  “Athletes and directors only,” said Tammy. “Director Treekiller has a very specific way she likes things done. You’ll see. Anyway, I have to go into Shady Grove to see if I can find some dried pasta anywhere. The national federation was supposed to send everything we’d need for the race, but the foodstuffs leave a little to be desired.”