For Patricia Fairbanks
1
Livy went outside when the clanging in the valley finally became unbearable. It was a hollow, high-pitched noise, as if someone were striking a bell with a hammer. Livy was babysitting, and the baby was asleep just then by some miracle, and if he woke up because of this idiot noise she thought she might lose her mind. It was too hot, and she did not particularly like the baby: he was thirteen months, just old enough to hit people when he was unhappy.
She stood on the front porch and squinted into the bright morning. The porch was wide and neat, lined with Astroturf. The corner store sat just below the house, and across the road the Church of God in Christ raised its white bell tower against the green and gray mass of the hill. Collier Road, climbing past the front steps of the house and disappearing in the trees beyond the playground, lay stunned in the August heat. There was no one out anywhere. The clanging noise began again, and then slackened and died away. Livy hopped down the steps and into the road, barefoot, scanning the quiet houses up and down the valley.
Collier Road was steepest where she stood, and she could see down into the backyards of the houses along the loop of the Lomath Creek. They were built anxiously close to White Horse Road, clinging to the hip of the hill while the land dropped away to the floodplain behind them. The damp backyards were full of bicycles, disassembled cars, and half-built projects of various kinds, some of them clearly aspiring to locomotion: go-karts, rafts, plywood, and stray wheels. She could see the glitter of arc welding in Brian Carroll’s backyard. She rose up on her toes and shouted his name.
There was no way he could hear her. She glanced back over her shoulder at the house, at the floral-printed bedsheets tacked up in the windows to keep out the heat, the air conditioners dripping and straining, and decided she could slip away for two minutes. The baby wasn’t big enough to escape from his crib. She padded down the curving slope toward Brian’s house. He was eighteen, two years older than she was but only one grade ahead, and she had once overheard him telling a navy recruiter during a Career Day presentation that his goal in life was either to become a stock car mechanic or die young. Livy reached the edge of his front yard just as the banging sound started up again.
“Brian!” she called. They were not friends. He, like many other boys she knew, projected a mild disdain for girls. She hesitated at the edge of the road, trying to remember if Brian’s parents were the type that exploded with rage if anyone stepped over their property lines, and then resolutely put one foot on the grass. There was no car in the driveway. She pushed past a massive azalea bush and into the backyard, nearly tripping over a kiddie pool half filled with silt and rainwater.
Twin black ovals turned toward her as she came around the corner. She glanced from one boy to the other. They were both wearing welding masks. A gutted motorbike lay on its side in the grass. “Brian?” she said to the shorter boy.
He flipped up his mask. “Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
He gestured at an amputated gas tank lying in a metal pan at his feet, like a swollen kidney. “Working.”
“Could you do it later? I’m babysitting Mallory’s kid and he’s asleep.” She folded her arms.
“It’s the middle of the day,” Brian said. “People can do what they want.”
“The power just went out anyway,” said the bigger boy, lifting his mask. It was Brian’s cousin Dominic Spellar, who lived two doors down. He nudged the extension cord in the grass with one foot.
Brian looked deflated. “I guess you win,” he said, pulling the mask off.
“Thank you,” Livy said, although they hadn’t done anything for her. She turned and disappeared around the side of the house.
The baby was wailing when she got back, and she whispered a few curses into the close, dusty air of the curtained living room. The television and the air conditioner had been murmuring when she stepped outside, but they were both silent now, and the room was stifling already. She climbed the stairs and rescued the baby from his crib. He was red and sweaty, showing his few teeth in outrage, and she tried shushing and patting him as she came back down the stairs. Babysitting was all right, but there were easier ways to make money. She had another job waiting tables at the restaurant in the Lomath Sportsmen’s Club, the shooting range complex that sat at the junction of the Black Rock and Lomath Creeks. She preferred waitressing to babysitting, because it paid more and she didn’t feel bad taking her money at the end of the day. Mallory, the baby’s mother, always wrote her a check and then asked her to wait to cash it, and then spent too much time apologizing.
Livy carried the baby out to the porch, and to her relief he quieted in the breeze coming down the hill. She persuaded him to nap in his car seat on the porch swing and sat beside him, pushing off gently with her feet, reading a book on dream interpretation she’d found in the bathroom.
The baby’s mother came home at two and was surprised by the blackout. She worked at a hotel half an hour away and there’d been no problem there. She said it was typical, hinting at neglect. Lomath was the kind of place where problems like this appeared to fit into a grand pattern of municipal slights. Potholes multiplied in the roads; telephone poles tipped over in heavy rain and were left dangling for hours before utility trucks came.
Livy walked home, and then couldn’t think what to do with the rest of her day. The quiet of her house, denuded of its electrical buzzing, made her restless. She was making a pot of coffee on the stove when her friend Nelson knocked perfunctorily on the door and edged into the kitchen.
“Are you working today?” Livy said. “I was thinking of going to St. Stanis.”
Nelson poured himself a cup of coffee. He was tall and thin, half Irish and half Filipino, and had a faintly evasive manner with most people, although not with Livy. “Maybe. I thought you were going to be at the restaurant today.”
“No, I switched with the Saturday girl.”
“It always smells like shit at St. Stanis,” Nelson remarked.
“It’s just the sulfur,” Livy said. “It’ll be nice. I’m sick of being hot.”
It was easy to persuade him. They borrowed his sister’s car for the short drive to St. Stanis, which was a quarry and a broad, noisy creek out in more open country. A few concession stands and T-shirt shops painted in ice-cream colors clustered along the road above the creek. They parked in a gravel lot and walked down the trail, waving away gnats and conjecturing about poison oak.
“Is this it?”
“No, too many leaves, I think.”
“Is this it, then?”
The creek was full of swimmers and sunbathers, and Livy felt a kind of benevolence in the air: old people and babies in swimsuits, a lack of vanity that suggested they were all off the hook for the afternoon. Livy was sixteen and still trying to get used to herself. She had dark hair that failed to distinguish itself, and skin that did not seem to conceal her blood and bones as thoroughly as other people’s did. She was growing uncomfortably fast, so fast that stretch marks had appeared on her knees and lower back, like invisible ink revealed by a fire. She feared this growth would continue indefinitely. As the weather got warmer she’d outgrown her clothes and taken to wearing boys’ T-shirts, the kind that came in packs of three.
Nelson set his glasses on a rock and pulled his shirt off quickly, one hand at the back of his collar, without any show of self-consciousness. He could be casual and fluid, sure that no one was paying any attention to him. Livy envied him for it. He dropped into the water. “Cold,” he said, as if reprimanding it. Livy floated, looking up at the tall, flat-bottomed clouds. There was a low chatter all around them of water running and people talking in their encampments on the rocks. A couple of girls nearby began to giggle and Livy looked up at t
hem sharply. They might have been looking in Nelson’s direction; the sun was in her eyes and she couldn’t tell. She felt proprietary about Nelson. She didn’t like to have other people peer into the comfortable space they shared. The sexual interest of other girls was like a dye in the water, blooming and spreading, coloring everything.
She glanced at him to see if he’d noticed. He was brown-skinned now after two months of summer, long-armed. He had just cut his hair as short as he could; the limit was defined by his mother, who controlled his clipper settings. Mrs. Tela loved his hair, mourned its loss, waited anxiously for its return. It was thick and dark and stiff, and it curled if he let it get long enough.
“I was supposed to get a call about that job today,” he said, frowning. He had applied for a job at a sporting goods store in Beckford, which paid two dollars more per hour than his current job, serving gelato from bins covered with gold foil at the Hareford Plaza Court. He disliked the job because the customers were constantly disappointed by the small portions: four dollars for a dollop of raspberry in a paper cup, with a tiny short-handled spoon jutting pretentiously from the top. All day long he handed the little cups to people and watched their faces fall. “I put my house phone number on the application,” he said. “I should have put my cell.”
“Your house phone’s not working?” Livy said.
“No. Is yours?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t tried to call anybody.” Water burbled in her ears. She pushed her toes into the sand. “Don’t the phones usually still work when the power’s out?” She was trying to remember a cartoon about tornadoes that she’d seen on public TV as a kid. Weren’t there separate circuits, one for the phones and one for the power, coiling and backtracking through a cartoon town?
“I guess so,” he said.
“Do you ever wish you still lived in the city?” she said. Nelson had moved from Philadelphia with his parents and sister when he was thirteen, into a blue house high up on Collier Road, past the playground, in a little niche that had been carved into the hill by earthmovers.
“Why? Because they have working utilities?” he said.
“For one thing.”
He laughed. “Sometimes, I guess.” He looked up into the overhanging trees. “If you’re a kid it’s not that much fun.” On his arrival in Lomath, he had flattered her with his ignorance of plants. She was the one who had shown him how to salve a nettle sting with jewelweed.
“Horsefly,” he said.
She was watching a couple of boys mock-wrestling, showing off in the water for the two girls on the boulder. They were yelling and splashing, darkening the rocks.
“Horsefly,” Nelson said again, but she was slow turning and he was there already, brushing it off her shoulder. When the horseflies came you had to dive. She dove.
Revaz twisted his ankle on a stone in the train station. He was shocked by how much it hurt. It was a bit of gravel from between the railroad ties, kicked up onto the platform where he was the only passenger to disembark, and in the dark he stepped on it in his soft-bottomed tennis shoes—they were nearly worn through at the ball of the foot and offered very little support—and his ankle rolled. The twinge followed him as he limped down the steps and made a cautious turn onto a side street where a row of asphalt-shingled houses faced a rising bank of weeds.
He was unsettled by the quiet of the street. It was only eleven o’clock at night, but no cars passed as he skirted the edge of the town, and he saw few lights in the windows. He stopped in the glare of a gas station to consult his map, and then headed right, under the high arches of a bridge. It was only a mile to the cluster of houses marked Lomath on the map.
He was tired. He had been too nervous to eat on the train. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, which had been at five o’clock that morning, in a diner in Philadelphia that had exhaled a puff of hot oil when he’d opened the door. He’d had to order by pointing at a plate of eggs and potatoes and sausages being eaten by a man at the next table. He regretted how little English he could remember from his secondary school days. The alphabet had slipped away from him. Some words looked a little familiar, and he could say please and thank you and go, and also I, but otherwise he was helpless. Remembering the food now sharpened his hunger. He pushed his mind out, away from his stomach, into the night air.
It had been only four days since he was at home in his own country, in his own apartment. His own balcony, from which a narrow strip of the green river was visible when the leaves were off the lime trees in the winter. He would probably never see that apartment or that street again. His pulse had not slowed to normal since Wednesday, he thought, and it was Sunday now. He had tried to sleep in the airport and on both turbulent flights but had startled awake over and over, choking for breath, flailing with his right arm, his good arm, upsetting the old woman in the seat next to him. He was too aware of his heart now. His hands went to it whenever he needed to think. He had taken a month’s worth of his blood pressure pills with him and he kept checking for the orange bottle in the outer pocket of the old backpack he had brought.
Lomath announced itself with a green metal sign. Revaz climbed off the road just after the bend and found a dry spot in the lee of a rotting sofa that had been dumped over the guardrail. The ground dropped away steeply below him, but he could see nothing in the darkness. There was an ounce or two of whiskey left in the little bottle he’d bought in Philadelphia; he drank it and fell asleep.
It was a damp night. He woke just as the sky was beginning to lighten and found a trio of slugs on the laces of his tennis shoes. At the bottom of the slope there was a creek that he had only heard in the darkness the night before. He could see the white glint of it now, its busy flow around stands of trees. He pictured himself perched there beside the decaying hulk of the sofa, his thin hair wild, in undignified shoes. A curtain of despair threatened to drop again, but he pushed it away.
Revaz got up stiffly and walked toward the first houses of Lomath, staying back in the woods. He was afraid of dogs more than anything. He could skirt the village easily—it was rarely more than one house and one road deep, and the hills ringed it protectively. He walked and walked along the hills, keeping the houses to his left. His ankle was better than it had been the night before; it wasn’t sprained, then. As the sun was rising he found himself at the top of the ridge on the east side of Lomath, his heart a little lightened by the gold in the air. He sat on a stone and watched the valley below him flood with light. There was a small white house with a vegetable garden far below, tucked into a bend in the creek.
The power went out in Lomath while he slept the day away in a rank-smelling deer blind in a tree just over the top of the ridge. Flies harried him while he slept.
The power was still out at seven thirty the next morning when Livy’s father woke her. She had a dental checkup at nine, and since Greg Marko was re-shingling a house not far from the dental center that day, he planned to drop her off on his way to work. She took too long getting dressed, out of practice in the summer at getting up early, and he had to come back twice and knock on her door. She brushed her teeth with extra care.
They pulled out of the driveway just after eight thirty and drove down Prospect to White Horse Road. When they came around the turn they saw a van and a truck stopped haphazardly in the road, lights flashing.
“Accident?” Livy said.
Her father downshifted steadily, not yet committing to the brakes. “No, those are all police,” he said. Livy hoisted herself up and peered out through the truck’s windshield. He was right; they were marked with the Maronne Police Department logo. Maronne was a steel town a mile away, and Lomath was a small unincorporated outlier of it. An officer got out of the van and walked toward them slowly, holding up one hand.
Livy’s father put the truck in neutral. A couple of sawhorses were set up across the road with chains looped between them. Livy was alert now, her hands spread flat on her lap. Her father had made a long speech to her about the police as soon as
she got her license, with heavy stress on politeness, keeping your hands where they could see them, and describing any movement you were about to make before you made it. He illustrated his points with many anecdotes about traffic stops in his youth, when the cops always said something about his hair, which was long then. They would insinuate that he had drugs, and that if he didn’t have them now he would have them soon, and that he was likely to get stopped again, in any event.
Livy had never been in a traffic stop before. She watched the approaching policeman with interest.
“See some ID?” the cop said.
Livy’s father nodded. “Let me get out my wallet,” he said. He produced his driver’s license, and the officer examined it for a minute and then peered into his face and handed it back.
“We’re looking for somebody,” the officer said. He opened a plastic folder with a friendly, lazy flourish. Inside was a blurry color photo of a middle-aged man. Livy leaned over from her seat to see, but her father gave her a look and she settled back. “Have you seen this person?” said the officer.
Her father shrugged. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure? Maybe he looks different, maybe he hasn’t been shaving?”
Her father leaned closer. “No. Sorry.” He looked up at the cop. “Is he here?”
“We’ve been asked to close the roads. And I would ask you to return to your home, sir.”
“Is he dangerous?” His voice rose a little.
“I couldn’t say, sir,” said the policeman. “This is coming down from a higher level. Like I said, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home.”
Livy’s father put the truck in reverse and executed a tentative three-point turn in the too-narrow road. As soon as they had moved out of range of the policeman, Livy cleared her throat, scanning the undergrowth on the side of the road for signs of impending action. “Do you think somebody broke out of Emeryville?” she said.
“Could be, I guess. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a minimum-security breakout, though.”
Relief Map Page 1
