The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  25

  They spent the night in Hunt, sleeping on the ground by the wagon, and arrived in Mystic Township on the second afternoon. The town was a threadbare outpost: a small main street with just a few houses, a general store, and a government building that acted as everything from the post office to the jail. They passed through and followed the river road west through a tunnel of thickening foliage. Pim had never been to the townships before; everything she saw seemed to fascinate her. Look at the trees, she signed to the baby. Look at the river. Look at the world.

  The day had begun to fade when they reached the homestead. The house stood on a rise looking down toward the Guadalupe, with a paddock for the horses, fields of black soil between, and a privy in the rear. Caleb stepped down from the buckboard and reached up for Theo, who was sleeping in a basket.

  “What do you think?”

  Since Theo’s birth, Caleb had made it his habit to speak and sign simultaneously whenever the boy was present. With nobody else around, he would grow up thinking that talking and signing were really no different from each other.

  You did all this?

  “Well, I had help.”

  Show me the rest.

  He led her inside. There were two rooms on the main floor, with real glass windows and a kitchen with a stove and a pump, and a flight of stairs that led to a loft where the three of them would sleep. The floor, of sawn oak planks, felt solid underfoot.

  “It’ll be too hot to sleep inside in the summer, but I can build a sleeping porch out back.”

  Pim was smiling; she looked as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. When will you have time for that?

  “I’ll do it, don’t worry.”

  They unloaded a night’s worth of gear. In a few days, Caleb would have to return to town, an eight-mile ride, to begin the process of securing stock: a milk cow, a goat or two, chickens. His seeds were ready to plant; the soil had been turned. They would be growing corn and beans in alternating rows, with a kitchen garden out back. The first year would be a race against time. After that, he hoped, things would settle into a more predictable rhythm, though life would never be easy, by any means.

  They ate a simple dinner and lay down on the mattress he had moved inside from the wagon to the floor of the main room. He’d wondered if Pim would be afraid or at least anxious, being out here, just the three of them. She’d never spent a night beyond the city walls. But the opposite seemed true; she appeared completely at ease, eager to see how their situation unfolded. Of course, there was a reason. The things that had happened to her when she was a young girl had become for her a source of strength.

  Pim had crept upon his life slowly. At the beginning, when Sara had brought her home from the orphanage, she had hardly seemed like a person to him. Her blunt gestures and guttural groans unnerved him. Extending even the simplest kindness was met with incomprehension, even anger. The situation had started to change when Sara taught Pim sign language. They moved through this improvisationally, beginning by spelling out every word, then advancing to whole phrases and ideas that could be captured with a single swoop of the hand. A book from the library had been involved, but later, when Kate gave it to Caleb to study, he realized that many of the gestures Pim used were made up: a bubble of private language that only she and her mother—and, to a degree, Kate and her father—shared. Caleb was, by this point, fourteen or fifteen. He was a clever boy, unused to problems he could not solve. Also, Pim had begun to seem interesting to him. What sort of person was she? The fact that he could not communicate with her as he could with everybody else was both frustrating and attractive. He made a point of carefully observing Pim’s interactions with members of her family to encode these gestures into memory. Alone in his room, he practiced in front of a mirror for hours, signing both sides of dialogues on arbitrary topics. How are you today? I am very well, thank you. What do you think of the weather? I enjoy the rain but am looking forward to warmer days.

  It became important that he delay the unveiling of his new abilities until he had acquired the confidence to engage her on a range of subjects. The opportunity presented itself on an afternoon outing their families had taken together to the spillway. While everyone else was enjoying their picnic by the water, he had climbed to the top of the dam. There he saw Pim, sitting on the concrete, writing in her journal. She was always writing; Caleb had wondered about this. She glanced up as he made his approach, her dark eyes narrowing on him in their intense way, then looked away dismissively. Her brown hair, long and glossy and tucked behind her ears, flared with captured sunshine. He stood for a moment, observing her. She was three years older than he was, basically an adult in his eyes. She had also become very pretty, though in a no-nonsense way that came across as condescending, even a little icy.

  His presence was obviously unwelcome, but it was too late to back out. Caleb walked up to her. She regarded him with her head slightly cocked to the side, wearing an expression of bored mirth.

  Hello, he signed.

  She closed her book around her pencil. You want to kiss me, don’t you?

  The question was so unexpectedly direct that he actually startled. Did he? Was that what this was all about? Now she really was laughing at him—laughing with her eyes.

  I know you know what I’m saying, she signed.

  He found the answer with his hands: I learned.

  For me or for yourself?

  He felt caught. Both.

  Have you kissed anyone before?

  He hadn’t. It was something he had been meaning to get around to. He knew he was blushing.

  A few times.

  No, you haven’t. Hands don’t lie.

  He recognized the truth of this. All his study and practice, yet he’d failed to notice the obvious fact, which Pim had laid bare to him in mere seconds: signing was a language of complete forthrightness. Within its compact rhetoric, little space remained for evasion, for the self-protecting half-truths that were most of what people said to one another.

  Do you want to?

  She stood and faced him. Okay.

  So they did. He closed his eyes, thinking this was something he should do, tilted his head slightly, and leaned forward. Their noses bumped, then passed each other, their lips meeting in a soft collision. It was over before he knew it.

  Did you like it?

  He barely believed this was actually happening. He spelled out his answer: Lots.

  Open your mouth this time.

  That was even better. A soft pressure entered his mouth that he realized was her tongue. He followed her lead; now they were kissing for real. He had always imagined the act to be a simple grazing of surfaces, lips upon lips, but kissing was, he now understood, far more complex. It was more a mingling than a touching. They did this for a while, exploring one another’s mouths, then she backed away in a manner that indicated that the kissing was over. Caleb wished it weren’t; he could have done it for a long while more. Then he understood the nature of the interruption. Sara was calling to them from the bottom of the dam.

  Pim smiled at him. You’re a good kisser.

  And that was all, at least for a time. In due course, they had kissed again, and done different things as well, but it hadn’t amounted to much, and other girls had come along. Yet always those slender minutes on the dam remained in his mind as a singular point in his life. When he joined the Army, at eighteen, his CO said he should find someone back home to write to. He chose Pim. His letters were all cheerful nonsense, complaints about the food and lighthearted stories of his friends, but hers were unlike anything he’d ever read, richly observant and full of life. At times they read like poetry. A single phrase, even describing something trivial—how the sun looked on leaves, a passing remark by an acquaintance, the smell of cooking food—would catch his mind and linger for days. Unlike sign language, with its unequivocal compactness, Pim’s words on the page seemed to overflow with feeling—a richer kind of truth, closer to the heart of her. He wrote to Pim as often as he coul
d, hungering for more of her. It was her voice he was hearing—hearing at last—and it wasn’t long before he began to fall in love with her. When he told her, not in a letter but in person when he returned to Kerrville on a three-day pass, she laughed with her eyes, then signed, When did you finally figure it out?

  To these memories, Caleb drifted into sleep. Sometime later he awoke to find her gone. He didn’t worry; Pim was something of a night owl. Theo was still asleep. Caleb slid into his trousers, lit the lantern, got his rifle from its place by the door, and stepped outside. Pim was sitting with her back against the stump he used for splitting.

  Everything okay?

  Douse the light, she signed. Come sit.

  She was wearing only her nightgown, though it was actually quite chilly; her feet were bare. He took his place beside her and extinguished the lantern. In the dark, they had a system. She took his hand and in his palm signed in miniature: Look.

  At what?.

  Everything.

  He understood what she was saying, between the lines. This is ours.

  I like it here.

  I’m glad.

  Caleb detected movement in the brush. The sound came again, a grassy rustling to their left. Not a raccoon or possum—something larger.

  Pim sensed his sudden alertness. What?

  Wait.

  He relit the lantern, casting a pool of light on the ground. The rustling was coming from several places now, though generally in the same direction. He positioned the rifle under his arm and clenched it to his side with his elbow. Holding the lantern in one hand, the rifle in the other, he crept forward, toward the heart of the sounds.

  The light caught something: a flash of eyes.

  It was a young deer. It froze in the light, staring at him. He saw the others, six in all. For a moment nothing moved, man and deer regarding one another with mutual astonishment. Then, as if guided by a common mind, the herd turned as one and burst away.

  What could he do? What else could Caleb Jaxon do but laugh?

  26

  “Okay, Rand, try it now.”

  Michael was lying on his back, wedged into the slender gap between the floor and the base of the compressor. He heard the valve opening; gas began to move through the line.

  “What’s it say?”

  “Looks like it’s holding.”

  Don’t you dare leak, Michael thought. I’ve given you half my morning.

  “Nope. Pressure’s dropping.”

  “Goddamnit.” He’d checked every seal he could think of. Where the hell was the gas coming from? “The hell with it. Shut it off.”

  Michael wriggled free. They were on the lower engineering level. From the catwalk above came the sounds of metal striking metal, the crackling hiss of arc welders, men calling to one another, all of it amplified by the acoustics of the engine compartment. Michael hadn’t seen sunshine for forty-eight hours.

  “Any ideas?” he asked Rand.

  The man was standing with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. There was something equine about him. He had small eyes, delicate-seeming in his strong face, and black hair wavy that, despite his age—somewhere north of forty-five—failed to show more than scattered threads of gray. Calm, reliable Rand. He had never spoken of a wife or girlfriend; he never visited Dunk’s whores. Michael had never pressed, the matter being one of supreme unimportance.

  “It could be someplace in the charger,” Rand suggested. “Tight fit, though.”

  Michael looked up at the catwalk and yelled, to whomever might hear him, “Where’s Patch?”

  Patch’s real name was Byron Szumanski. The nickname came from the anomalous square of white in his otherwise coal-black stubble. Like many of Michael’s men, he had been raised in the orphanage; he’d done a stint in the military, learning a thing or two about engines along the way, then worked for the civilian authority as a mechanic. He had no relatives, had never married and professed no desire to do so, possessed no bad habits Michael knew of, didn’t mind the isolation, wasn’t a talker, took orders without complaint, and liked to work—perfect, in other words, for Michael’s purposes. A wiry five foot three, he spent whole days in pockets of the ship so cramped that another man wouldn’t have been able to draw a breath. Michael paid him accordingly, though nobody could complain about the wages. Every cent Michael made from the stills went straight to the Bergensfjord.

  A face appeared above: Weir’s. He drew his welder’s mask up to his forehead. “I think he’s on the bridge.”

  “Send somebody to get him.”

  As Michael bent for his tool bag, Rand rapped him on the arm. “We’ve got company.”

  Michael looked up; Dunk was coming down the stairs. Michael needed the man, just as Dunk needed him, but their relationship was not an easy one. Needless to say, the man knew nothing of Michael’s true purpose. Dunk regarded the Bergensfjord as an eccentric distraction, an elaborate pastime on which Michael wasted his time—time better spent putting more money in Dunk’s pockets. That the man had never bothered to wonder just why Michael needed to refloat a six-hundred-foot freighter was just more evidence of the man’s limited intelligence.

  “Great,” Michael said.

  “You want me to get some guys together? He looks pissed.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Rand moved away. At the base of the stairs Dunk halted, propped his hands on his hips, and surveyed the room with an expression of weary irritation. The tattoos on the man’s face ended abruptly at his former hairline. A lifetime of hard living had done him few favors in the aging department, but he was still built like a tank. For entertainment, he liked to lift a truck by its bumper.

  “What can I do for you, Dunk?”

  He had a way of smiling that made Michael think of a cork in a bottle. “I really should get down here more often. I don’t know what half this stuff is. Take those things over there.” He wagged a meaty finger, thick as a sausage.

  “Water jacket pumps.”

  “What do they do?”

  The day was getting away without much to show for it; now he had to deal with this. “It’s kind of technical. Not really your thing.”

  “Why am I here, Michael?”

  Guessing games, as if they were five years old. “A sudden interest in marine repair?”

  Dunk’s eyes hardened on Michael’s face. “I’m here, Michael, because you’re not meeting your obligation to me. Mystic’s open for settlement. That means demand. I need the new boiler up and running. Not later. Today.”

  Michael aimed his voice at the catwalk. “Has anybody found Patch yet?”

  “We’re looking!”

  He turned toward Dunk again. What an ox the man was. He should’ve been strapped to a plow. “I’m kind of busy at the moment.”

  “Allow me to remind you of the terms. You do your magic with the stills, I give you ten percent of the profits. It’s not hard to remember.”

  Michael yelled up to the catwalk again. “Sometime today would be nice!”

  The next thing Michael knew, he was rammed up against the bulkhead, Dunk’s forearm pressing against his throat.

  “Do I have your attention now?”

  The man’s broad, pitted nose was inches from Michael’s; his breath was sour as old wine.

  “Easy, amigo. We don’t have to do this in front of the kids.”

  “You work for me, goddamnit.”

  “If I could point something out. Breaking my neck might feel good in the moment, but it won’t get you any more lick.”

  “Everything okay, Michael?”

  Rand was standing behind Dunk with two others, Fastau and Weir. Rand was clutching a long wrench; the other two had lengths of pipe. They were holding these implements in an offhand manner, as if they’d merely picked them up in the course of a day’s work.

  “Just a little misunderstanding,” Michael replied. “How about it, Dunk? We don’t need to have a problem here. You’ve got my attention, I promise.”

  Dunk’s a
rm pressed tighter against his throat. “Fuck you.”

  Michael glanced over Dunk’s shoulder at Weir and Fastau. “You two, go check on the stills, see what the situation is, then report back to me. Got it?” He returned his attention to Dunk. “Got this covered. I’m hearing you loud and clear.”

  “Twenty years. I’ve had it with your bullshit. This … hobby of yours.”

  “Totally understand your feelings. I spoke out of turn. New boilers up and running, no problem.”

  Dunk kept glowering at him. It was hard to say how things were going to go. Finally, giving Michael a last hard shove against the bunker, Dunk backed away. He turned toward Michael’s men and nailed them with a hard look.

  “You three should be more careful.”

  Michael withheld his coughing until Dunk was out of sight.

  “Jesus, Michael.” Rand was staring at him.

  “Oh, he’s just having a bad day. He’ll cool off. You two, back to work. Rand, you’re with me.”

  Weir frowned. “You don’t want us to go to the stills?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ll look in on them later.”

  They walked away.

  “You shouldn’t goad him like that,” Rand said.

  Michael paused to cough again. He felt a little foolish, though on the other hand, the whole thing had been strangely gratifying. It was nice when people were themselves. “Have you seen Greer anywhere?”

  “He took a launch up the channel this morning.”

  So, feeding day. Michael always worried—Amy still tried to kill Greer every time—but the man took it in stride. Except for Rand, who’d been with them from the beginning, none of Michael’s men knew about that part of things: Amy, Carter, the Chevron Mariner, the jugs of blood that Greer dutifully delivered every sixty days.