Dreams Underfoot

  We fell in to our usual Thursday night ritual once we’d finished supper. After hauling down tomorrow’s water from the tank I’d set up on the roof to catch rainwater, I lit the oil lamp, then Tommy and I sat down at the table and went through his new magazines and ads. Every time he’d point out something that he liked in a picture, I’d cut it out for him. I do a pretty tidy job, if I say so myself. Getting to be an old hand at it. By the time we finished, he had a big stack of new cutout people and stuff for his games that he just had to go try out right away. I went and got the book I’d started this morning and brought it back to the table, but I couldn’t read.

  I could hear Tommy talking to his new little friends. The dogs shifting and moving about the way they do. Down the street a Harley kicked over and I listened to it go through the Tombs until it faded in the distance. Then there was only the sound of the wind outside the window.

  I’d been able to keep that stupid envelope with its message out of my head just by staying busy, but now it was all I could think about. I looked out the window. It was barely eight, but it was dark already. The real long days of summer were still to come.

  So is Franklin out there? I asked myself. Is he watching the building, scoping things out, getting ready to make his move? Maybe dressed up in some black robe, him and a bunch of his pals?

  I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t know him, but like Angel had said, it didn’t seem like him and I believed her. He might bug me, being all friendly and wanting to play Pygmalion to my Eliza Doolittle, but I didn’t think he had a mean streak in him.

  So where did the damn message come from? What was it supposed to mean? And, here was the scary part: if it wasn’t a joke, and if Franklin wasn’t responsible for it, then who was?

  I kept turning that around and around in my mind until my head felt like it was spinning. Everybody started picking up on my mood. The dogs became all anxious and when I walked near them got to whining and shrinking away like I was going to hit them. Tommy got the shakes and his little people started tearing and then he was crying and the dogs started in howling and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  But I didn’t. It took me a couple of hours to calm Tommy down and finally get him to fall asleep. I told him the story he likes the best, the one where this count from some place far away shows up and tells us that we’re really his kids and he takes us away, dogs and all, to our real home where we all live happily ever after. Sometimes I use his little cutouts to tell the story, but I didn’t do that tonight. I didn’t want to remind him of how a bunch’d gotten torn.

  By the time Tommy was sleeping, the dogs had calmed down again and were sleeping too. I couldn’t. I sat up all night worrying about that damned message, about what would happen to Tommy and the dogs if I did get killed, about all kinds of crap that I usually don’t let myself think about.

  Come the morning, I felt like I’d crawled up out of a sewer. You know what it’s like when you pull an all-nighter? Your eyes have this burning behind them, you’d kill for a shower and everything seems a little on edge? I saw about getting breakfast for everyone, let the dogs out for a run, then I told Tommy I had to go back downtown.

  “You don’t go out today,” I told him. “You understand? You don’t go out and you don’t let anybody in. You and the dogs play inside today, okay? Can you do that for Maisie?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said, like I was the one with bricks for brains. “No problem, Maisie.”

  God I love him.

  I gave him a big hug and a kiss, patted each of the dogs, then headed back down to Grasso Street with Rexy. I was about half a block from Angel’s office when the headlines of a newspaper outside a drugstore caught my eye. I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared at it. The words swam in my sight, headlines blurring with the subheadings. I picked up the paper and unfolded it so that I could see the whole front page, then I started reading from the top.

  GRIERSON SLAIN BY SATANISTS.

  DIRECTOR OF THE CITY’S NEW AIDS CLINIC FOUND DEAD IN FERRYSIDE GRAVEYARD AMID OCCULT PARAPHERNALIA.

  POLICE BAFFLED.

  MAYOR SAYS, ‘THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.’

  “Hey, this isn’t a library, kid.”

  Rexy growled and I looked up to find the drugstore owner standing over me. I dug in my pocket until it coughed up a quarter, then handed it over to him. I took the paper over to the curb and sat down.

  It was the picture that got to me. It looked like one of the buildings in the Tombs where kids had been playing at ritual magic a few years ago. All the same kinds of candles and inverted pentacles and weird graffiti. Nobody squatted in that building anymore, though the kids hadn’t been back for over a year. There was still something wrong about the place, like the miasma of whatever the hell it was that they’d been doing was still there, hanging on.

  It was a place to give you the creeps. But this picture had something worse. It had a body, covered up by a blanket, right in the middle of it. The tombstones around it were all scorched and in pieces, like someone had set off a bomb. The police couldn’t explain what had happened, except they did say it hadn’t been a bomb, because no one nearby had heard a thing.

  Pinpricks of dread went crawling up my spine as I reread the first paragraph. The victim, Grierson. Her first name was Margaret.

  I folded the paper and got up, heading for the post office. Franklin was alone behind the counter when I got inside.

  “The woman who died last night,” I said before he had a chance to even say hello. “Margaret Grierson. The Director of the AIDS Clinic. Did she have a box here?”

  Franklin nodded. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? One of my friends says the whole clinic’s going to fall apart without her there to run it. God, I hope it doesn’t change anything. I know a half-dozen people that are going to it.”

  I gave him a considering look. A half-dozen friends? He had this real sad look in his eyes, like… Jesus, I thought. Was Franklin gay? Had he really been just making nice and not trying to jump my bones?

  I reached across the counter and put my hand on his arm.

  “They won’t let this screw it up,” I told him. “The clinic’s too important.”

  The look of surprise in his face had me backing out the door fast. What the hell was I doing?

  “Maisie!” he cried.

  I guess I felt like a bit of a shit for having misjudged him, but all the same, I couldn’t stick around. I followed my usual rule of thumb when things get heavy or weird: I fled.

  I just started wandering aimlessly, thinking about what I’d learned. That message hadn’t been for me, it had been for Grierson. Margaret, yeah, but Margaret Grierson, not Flood. Not me. Somehow it had gotten in the wrong box. I don’t know who put it there, or how he knew what was going to happen last night before it happened, but whoever he was, he’d screwed up royally.

  Better it had been me, I thought. Better a loser from the Tombs than someone like Grierson who was really doing something worthwhile.

  When I thought that, I realized something that I guess I’d always known, but I just didn’t ever let myself think about. You get called a loser often enough and you start to believe it. I know I did. But it didn’t have to be true.

  I guess I had what they call an epiphany in some of the older books I’ve read. Everything came together and made sense—except for what I was doing with myself.

  I unfolded the paper again. There was a picture of Grierson near the bottom—one of those shots they keep on file for important people and run whenever they haven’t got anything else. It was cropped down from one that had been taken when she cut the ribbon at the new clinic a few months back. I remembered seeing it when they ran coverage of the ceremony.

  “This isn’t going to mean a whole lot to you,” I told her picture, “but I’m sorry about what happened to you. Maybe it should’ve been me, but it wasn’t. There’s not much I can do about that. But I can do something about the rest of my life.”

  I left the paper on a bench
near a bus stop and walked back to Grasso Street to Angel’s office. I sat down in the chair across from her desk, holding Rexy on my lap to give me courage, and I told her about Tommy and the dogs, about how they needed me and that was why I’d never wanted to take her up on her offers to help.

  She shook her head sadly when I was done. She was looking a little weepy again—like she had when I told her that story before— but I was feeling a little weepy myself this time.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess I thought you’d take them away from me.”

  I surprised myself. I hadn’t lied or made a joke. Instead I’d told her the truth. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  “Oh, Maisie,” she said. “We can work something out.”

  She came around the desk and I let her hold me. It’s funny. I didn’t mean to cry, but I did. And so did she. It felt good, having someone else be strong for a change. I haven’t had someone be there for me since my grandma died in 1971, the year I turned eight. I hung in for a long time, all things considered, but the day that Mr. Hammond asked me to come see him after school was the day I finally gave up my nice little regulated slot as a citizen of the day and became a part of the night world instead.

  I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, trying to fit into the day world—I’d probably never fit in completely, and I don’t think I’d want to. I also knew that I was going to have a lot of crap to go through and to put up with in the days to come, and maybe I’d regret the decision I’d made today, but right now it felt good to be back.

  16

  Bridges

  She watched the taillights dwindle until, far down the dirt road, the car went around a curve. The two red dots winked out and then she was alone.

  Stones crunched underfoot as she shifted from one foot to another, looking around herself. Trees, mostly cedar and pine, crowded the narrow verge on either side. Above her, the sky held too many stars, but for all their number, they shed too little light. She was used to city streets and pavement, to neon and streetlights. Even in the ’burbs there was always some manmade light.

  The darkness and silence, the loneliness of the night as it crouched in the trees, spooked her. It chipped at the veneer of her street-smart toughness. She was twenty miles out of the city, up in the hills that backed on to the Kickaha Reserve. Attitude counted for nothing out here.

  She didn’t bother cursing Eddie. She conserved her breath for the long walk back to the city, just hoping she wouldn’t run into some pickup truck full of redneck hillbillies who might not be quite as ready to just cut her loose as Eddie had when he realized he wasn’t going to get his way. For too many men, no meant yes. And she’d heard stories about some of the good old boys who lived in these hills.

  She didn’t even hate Eddie, for all that he was eminently hateful. She saved that hatred for herself, for being so trusting when she knew—when she knew—how it always turned out.

  “Stupid bloody cow,” she muttered as she began to walk.

  High school was where it had started.

  She’d liked to party, she’d liked to have a good time, she hadn’t seen anything wrong with making out because it was fun. Once you got a guy to slow down, sex was the best thing around.

  She went with a lot of guys, but it took her a long time to realize just how many and that they only wanted one thing from her. She was slow on the uptake because she didn’t see a problem until that night with Dave. Before that, she’d just seen herself as popular. She always had a date; someone was always ready to take her out and have some fun. The guy she’d gone out with on the weekend might ignore her the next Monday at school, but there was always someone else there, leaning up against her locker, asking her what was she doing tonight, so that she never really had time to think it through.

  Never wanted to think it through, she’d realized in retrospect.

  Until Dave wanted her to go to the drive-in that Saturday night.

  “I’d rather go to the dance,” she told him.

  It was just a disco with a DJ, but she was in the mood for loud music and stepping out, not a movie. First Dave tried to convince her to go to the drive-in, then he said that if she wanted to go dancing, he knew some good clubs. She didn’t know where the flash of insight came from—it just flared there inside her head, leaving a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a tightness in her chest.

  “You don’t want to be seen with me at the dance,” she said.

  “It’s not that. It’s just…well, all the guys…”

  “Told you what? That I’m a cheap lay?”

  “No, it’s just, well…”

  The knowing looks she got in the hall, the way guys would talk to her before they went out, but avoided her later—it all came together.

  Jesus, how could she have been so stupid?

  She got out of his car, which was still parked in front of her dad’s house. Tears were burning the back of her eyes, but she refused to let them come. She never talked to Dave again. She swore that things were going to change.

  It didn’t matter that she didn’t go out with another guy for her whole senior year; everyone still thought of her as the school tramp. Two months ago, she’d finally finished school. She didn’t even wait to get her grades. With money she’d saved up through the year, she moved from her dad’s place in the ’burbs to her own apartment in Lower Crowsea, got a job as a receptionist in an office on Yoors Street and was determined that things were going to be different. She had no history where she lived or where she worked, no one to snigger at her when she went down a hall.

  It was a new start and it wasn’t easy. She didn’t have any friends, but then she hadn’t really had any before either—she just hadn’t had the time or good sense to realize that. But she was working on it now. She’d gotten to know Sandra who lived down the hall in her building, and they’d hung out together, watching videos or going to one of the bars in the Market—girls night out, men need not apply.

  She liked having a girl for a friend. She hadn’t had one since she’d lost her virginity just a few days before her fifteenth birthday and discovered that boys could make her feel really good in ways that a girl couldn’t.

  Besides Sandra, she was starting to get to know the people at work, too, which was where she met Eddie. He was the building’s mail clerk, dropping off a bundle of mail on her desk every morning, hanging out for a couple of minutes, finally getting the courage up to ask her for a date. Her first in a very long time.

  He seemed like a nice guy, so she said yes. A friend of his was having a party at his cottage, not far from town. There’d be a bonfire on the beach, some people would be bringing their guitars and they’d sing old Buddy Holly and Beatles tunes. They’d barbecue hamburgers and hotdogs. It’d be fun.

  Fifteen minutes ago, Eddie had pulled the car over to the side of the road. Killing the engine, he leaned back against the driver’s door, gaze lingering on how her T-shirt molded to her chest. He gave her a goofy grin.

  “Why are we stopping?” she’d asked, knowing it sounded dumb, knowing what was coming next.

  “I was thinking,” Eddie said. “We could have our private party.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Come on. Chuck said—“

  “Chuck? Chuck who?”

  “Anderson. He used to go to Mawson High with you.”

  A ghost from the past, rising to haunt her. She knew Chuck Anderson.

  “He just moved into my building. We were talking and when I mentioned your name, he told me all about you. He said you liked to party.”

  “Well, he’s full of shit. I think you’d better take me home.”

  “You don’t have to play hard to get,” Eddie said.

  He started to reach for her, but her hand was quicker. It went into her purse and came out with a switchblade. She touched the release button and its blade came out of the handle with a wicked sounding snick. Eddie moved back to his own side of the car.

 
“What the hell are you trying to prove?” he demanded.

  “Just take me home.”

  “Screw you. Either you come across or you walk.”

  She gave him a long hard stare, then nodded. “Then I walk.”

  The car’s wheels spat gravel as soon as she was out, engine gunning as Eddie maneuvered a tight one-eighty. She closed up her knife and dropped it back into her purse as she watched the taillights recede.

  * * *

  Her legs were aching by the time she reached the covered bridge that crossed Stickers Creek just before it ran into the Kickaha River. She’d walked about three miles since Eddie had dumped her; only another seventeen to go.

  Twice she’d hidden in the trees as a vehicle passed her. The first one had looked so innocent that she’d berated herself for not trying to thumb a ride. The second was a pickup with a couple of yahoos in it. One of them had tossed out a beer bottle that just missed hitting her—he hadn’t known she was hiding in the cedars there and she was happy that it had stayed that way. Thankfully, she had let nervous caution overrule the desire to just get the hell out of here and home.

  She sat down on this side of the bridge to rest. She couldn’t see much of the quick-moving creek below her—just white tops that flashed in the starlight—but she could hear it. It was a soothing sound.

  She thought about Eddie.

  She should have been able to see it in him, shouldn’t she? It wasn’t as though she didn’t know what to be looking out for.

  And Chuck Anderson. Jesus.

  What was the point in trying to make a new start when nobody gave you a break?

  She sighed and rose to her feet. There was no sense in railing against it. The world wasn’t fair, and that was that. But God it was lonely. How could you carry on, always by yourself? What was the point?