The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  That suited Tom, for the most part. He had come to Arcadia to get away from Portland and the people who were interested in him. After the peculiar press coverage of the suicide attempt he had foiled, and the thirty-fourth “make me fly like an angel” joke, he had walked away from his janitor job without picking up his last paycheck. The ease with which he gave his spider plant to his next-door neighbor, said goodbye to his apartment, and packed his duffel bag made him realize he still hadn’t found the place he was looking for: home.

  Something about Arcadia, a hundred and fifteen miles inland from Portland along the river, had whispered “stop here” to him. A ride had dropped him on the off-ramp. He had walked down into town, wandered into the Dew-Drop Inn, thumped his duffel down beside a table, and ordered a glass of milk. The first person he had met was Bert, who offered him a job without asking any questions except whether he could drive and memorize maps.

  “Fella I had before you didn’t last very long,” said Bert. “It’s not such a complicated town, but there are ways and ways of getting lost. You gotta be careful here, Tommy.”

  Tom memorized maps, then applied for and received a chauffeur’s license. He hadn’t changed his name since his brief notoriety in Portland, but few people in Arcadia took the Oregonian, and of those who did, no one appeared to connect him with the weird but accurate press story.

  Tom spent some of his nondriving time in the bar, where Fred, the owner/bartender, let him run a tab. Bert had a half-time dispatcher, Trixie Delarue, who would phone Tom at the bar if anybody wanted a cab. On slow days or when Bert was on duty, Tom worked in exchange for things he needed. He chopped wood, washed dishes, cleaned buildings, repaired fences, weeded gardens.

  He hadn’t seen any ghosts since arriving in town, and he missed them. The people were kind but impenetrable; ghosts at least would have given him some kind of information. He had made one friend, Eddie, who pumped gas and changed oil at Pops’s Garage, but Eddie was a short-termer like Tom, and he disappeared three months after Tom arrived in town.

  Once when Tom was unloading produce at the grocery store, Cleo, the grocer, watched him with such a sad look on her face, he had asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said. Then she shook her head. “You’re a good worker, Tom, and you seem like a nice fella. We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

  “But I don’t plan to leave.”

  “People usually don’t,” she had said, and shrugged.

  The Dew-Drop Inn was warm and much more comfortable than his room. It smelled of beer and smoke and sawdust. It hosted a collection of strange taxidermied creatures—a two-headed lamb, a goat with a single horn, an albino raccoon—on shelves above eye level. Taxidermy was a hobby of Fred’s son’s, Fred had explained. Tom had learned to ignore the creatures and watch people while waiting for fares. During the quiet months of almost-isolation he’d spent in Arcadia, Tom had noticed that the starch in his shoulders was washing away. He was learning to relax again. It made him wonder what he had really been feeling in Portland, and Reno, and Los Angeles before that…

  The pre-game action and ads ended, and the game began, sparking discussion among the regulars at the other end of the bar. Tom heard the big door squeak on its hinges, and turned to see a woman standing there, holding the door open, autumn light behind her. Sun shone through the edges of her cloudy light hair and defined her shape, tall and slender. Tom finished chewing a mouthful of beer nuts, washed them down with ginger ale, and waited, wondering if conversation would be called for. The murmur from the other end of the bar stilled. Fred stopped wiping glassware with the towel over his apron.

  The woman stepped inside, letting the door close behind her, and suddenly she had a face, pale and firm, a high, domed forehead, slanting eyes and eyebrows, high cheekbones, a slender nose, full lips, and a strong jawline. She wore a black knit dress with a pattern of hand-sized white stars on it. It clung to her from neck and wrists to midthigh. She wore black tights and flat black slippers. Tom felt something warm and strange stir inside him.

  “Miss Laura,” said Fred. His tone surprised Tom. He sounded scared.

  “Hello, Mr. Forester. Could you tell me who drives the cab outside?” She sounded scared too.

  “I do,” said Tom.

  “I need a ride—a long ride,” she said. “Can you take me out to Chapel Hollow?”

  “Miss Laura,” said Fred, upset, as Tom grabbed his cap. Tom had seen Chapel Hollow on the map. It was about eighteen miles away.

  “Mr. Forester, I need a cab. My car broke down on the highway, and the only way I could get even this far was on the bus. Michael’s getting married tomorrow. I have to get home. Right away.”

  “Miss Laura,” said Fred, and sighed. Then he said, “Tommy, could you come here and settle your tab?”

  Tom turned and looked at the bartender. He had just paid up two days before, and Fred usually let him go a week between payments. Tom took out his wallet and walked down the bar to where Fred was standing.

  “Don’t take that Bolte girl all the way out to Chapel Hollow,” Fred murmured. “Nothing but trouble out there.”

  Fred was the closest thing to a friend Tom had in the bar. Tom looked at Fred, who wore an expression midway between pleading and scolding. He glanced in his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to Fred. “Thanks,” Tom said, and headed to the door. As he looked at the woman, he listened to the first whisper directed his way he had heard since arriving in Arcadia.

  —Come with me. Though the voice was a whisper, it was compelling and promising.

  —Come on home, it said.

  Awake, afraid, hopeful, Tom followed the woman outside.

  The air had a nip in it—night frost had started the leaves turning the week before—but even in her city clothes the woman didn’t look cold. She was tall, must be around five ten; Tom didn’t have to look down very far to meet her eyes. Her hair was the color of dried grass: brown, with streaks of bone and beige. Her eyes were the color of shallow water over sandstone. Her mouth did not smile, but her lips looked soft. She cast a glance at him, then walked down the sidewalk toward a soft-sided silver-gray suitcase with a camel-colored coat and a moss-green beret sitting on top. She stooped to lift the bag by a gray shoulder strap, but he beat her to it. She took her coat and hat, gave him a glimmering of smile, and climbed into the backseat of his cab. He put her suitcase in the trunk, then slipped in behind the steering wheel.

  Like everything about Bessie, Cab Number Two, the radio took a moment to warm up. Tom pressed the transmit button and said, “Trixie, are you there? I’ve got a fare.” He waited, but no answer came. Trixie only worked about half the time—when she knew planes were going to land at the tiny municipal airport, and most late afternoons and early evenings. The taxi company phone rang at her house, for those times when someone needed a taxi unexpectedly. Then she would phone, or come down and get Tom out of bed or out of the bar and send him out. She knew he always checked the westbound bus in the morning and the eastbound bus in the afternoon; still, she was usually in the office in the afternoon. He tried reaching her once more, with no luck, then shrugged and clicked the flag on the meter.

  Bessie growled at him when he started her. She seemed to want to hibernate; the previous winter, he had had to coax her carefully for each start, and now she was getting sleepy with cold. Tom wallowed the car around and headed south out of town on Highway 21, up away from the river and the green it gave to the south shore and the town. Phone lines and barbed-wire fences kept pace with the taxi along the gray asphalt road. Magpies flew across the sky. Tom wondered what they found to eat in the desert scrub, the low lichen-looking green-gray bushes and the scatterings of black pumice rock, dead grass lending a warm brown tone to the country. Brown and black cattle drifted away over the rises.

  The old cab ran quietly once she started. Tom watched the woman in the rearview mirror. Just being in a small enclosed place with her set something simmering inside him. The air carried a faint scent of
cedar and sagebrush: was it hers? Light lay like milk on the curve of her cheek, the column of her throat, as she stared out toward human-shaped metal hieroglyphs a hundred feet high that carried power lines along the horizon.

  —Come with me, something whispered, even though the woman was looking away from him.

  With, the whisper had said. It had been so long since he had done anything with someone on any level below the surface.

  When he turned left on Rivenrock Road, she met his eyes in the mirror. “I don’t think I remember you from school,” she said. “Not unless you’re the Meyers kid and your acne finally cleared up.”

  There was a Scott Meyers about her age—looked like mid-twenties—who was a cook at the Ring-Necked Pheasant Grill. No acne. Tom said, “No, I’m new.”

  “Why would anybody move to Arcadia? I couldn’t wait to get away.”

  “It’s quiet here.”

  “You can’t have been here long if you think that,” she said. “The town runs on talk. They talk about seven generations ago, bring you up to the present, and predict that everything will stay the same in the future. That’s why I left. I didn’t want to get stuck on the same track as my ancestors and relatives.”

  “It’s quiet here for me,” said Tom. “I’ve only been here ten months. Hardly anybody talks to me yet.”

  “They probably talk about you, though.”

  “Not where I can hear. The ones who do talk to me seem to think I’m going to leave at any minute. It’s like they don’t want to get involved with me because I’m only temporary, I wonder if they’ll feel that way after I’ve been here ten years.”

  “Do you want to stay?” she asked, amazed.

  —Almost home, the whisper said underneath.

  Tom blinked at the woman’s reflection, wondering which voice to speak to. At last he said, “I want to be here now. I feel as if something’s about to happen.” Hearing his own words, he realized that yes, that was the feeling he had had since he walked down the off-ramp from the highway. A feeling that slept, until she opened the door to the bar and stood there framed in light.

  “Something is about to happen,” she said. “My brother Michael is getting married.” She hugged herself.

  He could only think of soap opera reasons why she should be upset about her brother’s getting married. He shifted subjects. “Your family lives out in Chapel Hollow?”

  “Yes, for ages and ages.”

  A creek wandered around a low hill and passed under the road via a culvert. Its passage across the country was marked by a meandering line of willows, silver-gray and dusty after the summer’s dry.

  He said, “What do they do out there? Ranch? Farm?”

  “Not really,” she said. In the mirror he watched a slow smile surface. Her eyes caught and contained golden light. “No, that’s not true. They do both; not commercially, just to supply the family.”

  “What do they do? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “You definitely shouldn’t ask.” But she was still smiling. Suddenly she leaned forward, grasping the back of the front seat. “No one from outside is allowed to ask! I am so tired of rules.”

  —I am so tired of rules, said the whisper.

  “Does that mean you want to talk about it?” Tom asked.

  She leaned over the back of the seat and looked at him, smiling, her head very close to his. “I’m glad you didn’t grow up around here. If you had you would never talk to me this way. You would never have taken me as a fare, if I gave you a choice about it. What did Mr. Forester say about me?”

  Sage and cedar and muted amber; the scent was coming from her. He felt hungry for her. “He said your last name was Bolte.”

  “So it is. Laura Bolte.” She held out a hand to him.

  “Tom Renfield,” he said. He couldn’t shake hands without twisting around and maybe losing control of Bessie, who tended to veer to the right given an ounce of opportunity. He touched Laura’s fingers.

  “Pleased—you don’t know how pleased—to meet you, Mr. Tom Renfield. Oh, I love Outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I get to create myself from scratch. If you had gone to school with me…if you had grown up in this town…if your parents knew my parents and your grandparents knew my grandparents, you would have so many ideas about me there wouldn’t be room for the real me. In fact, that’s been my biggest challenge—rooting out what everybody’s told me about who I am and how I should act, and trying to find out who I really am.”

  “I came to Arcadia to ditch an identity,” said Tom.

  “You’re—a Russian spy. An ex-con? A mysterious shy comic-strip writer escaping a rabid public? Naw. A country-western singer.”

  “None of those,” he said. He realized he was easing up on the gas pedal to prolong the time he spent with her. He glanced at her, those tan, lucent eyes so close to his, and saw a dimple in her cheek. So she felt stamped by history and heredity; he wondered if all of her family had her attractiveness. Being near her made him feel as if stars were melting in his chest. “You’re the only fare I’ve taken to this wedding. Are any of the rest of your family coming?”

  “Very few of us ever leave,” she said, and there was a chill in her voice.

  “Who’s going to perform the ceremony?”

  “My great-uncle Jezra. They’re flying him in.”

  “Your folks have an airstrip?” There was a crop-dusting airstrip a couple miles from town, but he hadn’t heard of another aside from the Arcadia Airport.

  “You might say that,” she said.

  He slowed to turn right on Lost Kettle Road. The hills rose steeply around them. The road wandered along an old stream bed. Columnar basalt cliffs reared up to the right, their black blocky faces like ancient architecture unburied by earthquakes. “In spring,” said Laura, her voice soft, “a cloud of swallows haunts that cliff. I love those birds.”

  “I lived in a house that had swallows under the eaves once,” Tom said. “I loved them too. I found little blue bits of eggshell on the ground, like pieces of sky.”

  She looked at him, and this look felt different from her earlier ones. Just then the car hit a pothole in the patched asphalt road, and she grabbed his arm to steady herself. The warmth of her hand came through his yellow wind-breaker.

  —Who are you? asked the whisper.

  “Stop the car,” Laura said, low and urgent.

  He pulled over at a wide place in the road, where the weedy verge dipped down to a ditch, then climbed beyond under a scraggled and rusting barbed-wire fence.

  “You can let me out here,” she said, releasing his arm and sitting back. She clutched her coat and hat and climbed out of the car.

  He refused to get out. “We’re miles from anyplace, Miss Bolte,” he said.

  “I’d like my suitcase. If you don’t give it to me, I won’t pay you.”

  “Please get back in the car. I don’t want your suitcase.”

  “Tom, give me my suitcase,” she said, in a concentrated version of her own voice. The whisper double-tracked her, almost speaking aloud.

  He jumped out of the car, marched around to the trunk, opened it, and got out her suitcase. As she took it from him, he woke up and realized what was going on. “Hey!” he said, closing his fingers over the shoulder strap before she relieved him of the suitcase. “What’d you do to me?”

  “Goodbye, Tom Renfield.” She tapped his hand and his fingers opened. Shouldering her suitcase, she strode off down Lost Kettle Road. “Go on back to Arcadia,” she said over her shoulder.

  “I’m not a puppet. And I want my fare.”

  “Go away!” she said in a harsh voice, the whisper expanding it. He started to walk away, then caught himself. Something warm was working inside him, amazed and amused by the fact that Laura could speak a command and he involuntarily responded to it.

  —Funny! said a new whisper. It was a voice he recognized: Hannah, the little girl ghost he had welcomed inside him so long ago and lost.—About time we ran i
nto something like this!

  Puzzled and delighted, Tom went back to the cab. The engine caught on the third try. He drove after Laura, raising a thin pall of dust in his wake.

  “I’ll follow you all the way there. I’ll get you all dusty. You might as well ride,” he said to her profile as she walked. She smiled a little, then looked away.

  “Go back,” she said in a normal voice.

  “No.”

  “No one naysays the Boltes,” she said, and there was the strength of a thousand repetitions in her voice, and a touch of fear.

  “Why won’t you let me drive you?”

  She got her wallet from her coat pocket and pulled out forty dollars. “Here’s your fare. Now leave. I’ll make it home from here okay.”

  “Six more miles, in those thin slippers? What’s really the matter, Laura?”

  She glanced at him as she walked. After a moment, she said, “I don’t want you to get hurt. Everything my family touches gets hurt, and I don’t want that to happen to you, Tom, I like you.”

  He drove beside her, at her walking pace, for another quarter mile. Then he said, “I want to go to this party. Nobody in Arcadia ever seems to celebrate anything.”

  “Go away,” she said, and a tear trickled down her cheek.

  “No.”

  She stopped walking and he braked, letting the engine idle. She stared at him; her lips tightened in a grim line. Then she went around the car and climbed into the front seat, putting her suitcase on the floor. She wiped a tear off her face and stared at him. “You heard me. You understand, most of my family have a stronger command voice than I do. If you take me all the way to the house, where the heart of our power lies, you endanger yourself. People in my family don’t bring home strangers; they bring home slaves. If you come home with me, that’s what you can expect to be, Tom. These are the things I’m not supposed to talk to outsiders about. I have a lot of relatives, and they’ll be at the Hollow, and they’ll be feeling tense—marriage is a very serious business in our family. They’ll probably welcome a chance to torture somebody new. Whatever Mr. Forester told you about us is probably true.”