About a Girl (18 page)

“Halcyon,” she said, in answer to my unasked question. “A kind of kingfisher. Alcyone lost her lover Ceyx at sea, and threw herself into the ocean after him; the gods changed them both into birds out of pity. The halcyon is a lucky bird, if you see her when you’re sailing.”

“You like sailing,” I said, though I couldn’t remember how I knew this, or if it was fully true—something about her out on the water, a beach with white sand, hot merciless sun—

“I used to sail.”

“Out here?”

“No. It was a long time ago.”

“You met Jack. In California?”

“I’ve never been to California.” A strange flash of d
é
j
à
vu stuttered through me and was gone again. She yawned and stretched—tangle of dark hair, bright eyes, black tattoos. Overcome, I bit her shoulder, and she laughed and pushed me away. “You like boats?”

“I’ve only been in Jack’s boat. But I liked it.”

“Get dressed, then. I’ll show you something. Coffee?”

I did not want to get dressed, and I did not want coffee, and the only thing I wanted to be shown was the miracle of her, over and over for the rest of my life. I should have been happy to starve to death in her bed, redolent of sex and sweat and even still after all our labors the sweet smell of her skin, so long as she was there with me; but she was aloof again, pulling on her clothes with her back to me, ripple of muscle and ink disappearing under her billowy black shirt. I tried to keep my disappointment off my face, but it didn’t much matter; she wasn’t looking at me, anyway, was already halfway down the ladder to her kitchen. I could hear her filling the kettle, lighting the stove. I sighed heavily into her pillow and got up myself.

Fog had rolled in late the night before. Outside was a grey world through which mist swirled so thick I could barely see thirty feet in any direction. Even Qantaqa clambered into the truck in a subdued manner. I pulled on one of Maddy’s sweaters and took the steaming mug of coffee she handed me, and she drove us down through town to the spit of beach that reached out from the fort. A low mournful noise echoed across the water—“Foghorn,” she said, when I asked—as she parked up by the bluffs, where several people stood looking down at the beach. I followed her as she joined them.

The cool dreamy light leached away the closeness of the night before, and I was too shy again to touch her or even stand too close; in her black clothes, in the real world, she was as inscrutable and inapproachable as the day I’d met her. She hadn’t put on a coat, despite the chill; the crows on her arms flickered in the mist that beaded on her skin. A rough caw from the trees behind us and a swoop of black: my own fat crow landed in the grass and hopped toward us, its head cocked. “Hi,” I said. It eyed me thoughtfully, cawed a few more times in a distinctly imperious manner, and flapped back up into the trees again. I bit my thumb and chewed miserably at my knuckles, pretending not to notice Maddy refusing to notice me. I could not imagine how she got her eyeliner so perfect; I hadn’t seen a mirror anywhere in her house.

On the sandy beach below us, six or seven canoes lay parallel, with a scatter of people surrounding each one. A line of more canoes stretched out across the water and disappeared into the mist, each of them big enough to hold ten or fifteen people paddling in unison.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“It’s the annual canoe journey. The Northwest Coast tribes started organizing it in the eighties, to revitalize the tradition, and now they paddle all the way into Canada, and down almost to Oregon. That’s the Klallam, down there.” She pointed to where a tent was set up, with people milling around under it. “This is their tribal land. Each tribe along the coast hosts the travelers as they make their journey.”

“I got two kids in one of those canoes,” said the woman next to us. Her clear grey eyes were startling against her brown skin, and she wore a red sweatshirt with a canoe logo. Her features were drawn with worry but still striking in their harmony, and her heavy dark hair fell sleek and glossy past her shoulders. “It’s so foggy out there, I’m a basket case. My youngest is twelve; she was so excited last night she was talking in her sleep.”

“Did you paddle?” I asked her.

“Not today,” she said. “Twenty-four miles yesterday. And tomorrow, even farther, when we paddle to Quinault. That’s where I’m from. The fog was nothing like this yesterday. I heard you can’t even see the front end of the canoe from the back out there. That’s a nice dog you got there.” She bent down to pat Qantaqa, who gazed up at her happily, pleased someone had realized she deserved to be the center of attention.

As each canoe drew close to shore someone would leap out and run up toward the tent pavilion and, panting for breath, ask permission to land on behalf of their tribe. They’d pass the mike over to a rotating member of the Klallam, who welcomed them in a language I didn’t know—“Klallam,” the woman said—and English, crying, “Come ashore! Come ashore! Come ashore!” The paddlers steered their canoes to an open spot on the beach before jumping out, hoisting the canoe to their shoulders, and carrying it carefully ashore. “That fifth one in is cedar,” the Quinault woman said, pointing at the biggest of the canoes; it was beautifully painted, with red and black figures winging across its bow. “The ocean dugouts weigh sixteen hundred pounds, some of them—Oh, thank the Creator, that’s them out there with the flag,” she said. “I better get down to the beach.” Some white tourists were playing volleyball next to the nearest of the canoes, oblivious; a girl in hot-pink short shorts lobbed the ball at one of the kids climbing out of the canoes and shrieked a falsetto, giggling apology. A few of the paddlers were wearing flat, circular hats and beautiful black coats sewn with vivid patterns of birds and fish outlined in white disks—“Buttons,” Maddy said—but most of them were wearing sweatshirts and athletic shorts. All of them looked happy.

We stood for a long time as the canoes materialized out of the mist, one by one, and glided toward the shore, the people on the beach calling to each in turn:
Welcome, welcome,
and then the echo in older, richer languages, unfamiliar in their music and pattern. The heavy fog lent the whole beach the weighty, hazy quality of a dream. Grey beach, black boats, silver water. We watched in silence until the last of the canoes was drawn ashore, the last of the paddlers greeted and folded into the circle of family and friends, and then Maddy turned away and, after a beat, I followed. She was careful to keep her face hidden from me but still I caught the snail-traced glint of tears tracking their way down her cheeks.

*   *   *

When the fog cleared Maddy drove us to the farmer’s market downtown, and we bought raspberries in a pint box and cider, salmon out of a cooler full of ice and a lettuce as big as my head, because the lettuces in Maddy’s garden were done for the year. I picked up a bunch of deep velvety purple-green kale as big as a baby. The vegetables here did not look anything like the vegetables at the farmer’s market in Prospect Park, which seemed shabby cousins in comparison. Maddy laughed at my big eyes.

“We don’t have vegetables like this where I’m from.” She looked at me as though she was on the verge of asking me something, and I would have given anything to know what it was—since I’d blurted out my whole history to her, that first evening at her house, she’d asked me nothing about myself or what I was doing here or what I planned to do next, as though to do so would be to violate some unbreakable, unspoken rule, commit some trespass against me, or against herself. If she was not curious about me, I thought, it was because she did not wish to evoke any answering curiosity about herself.

“There are a few perks to living in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

“Maddy? Why did you move out here? To forget what?”

But she was walking too fast, and I had to half-run to catch up with her—“Oh look,” she said, “we should get some of this pesto, too.” We bought the pesto, and coffee, and I did not ask her any more questions.

“That’s my landlady,” Maddy whispered with a jerk of her chin toward a stall full of brown glass bottles and baskets of herbs. The woman behind the table didn’t look much like a witch; she was short and stout, with long, curly dark hair and a sour expression that looked to be more or less permanent. I knew, from living with Aunt Beast and Raoul, that the bottles were tinctures; Aunt Beast had gone through a dreadful phase of making her own herbal salves, which involved a lot of melting things and burning pots and stinking up the kitchen. The witch landlady gave us a basilisk glare, and I collapsed into giggles. Maddy grabbed my hand. “She’ll hex you!” she hissed, laughing, and pulled me away.

*   *   *

I did not much feel like going back to Jack’s, and Maddy did not suggest it. Time had lost all meaning, and I had no idea if I had been at her house for days or for weeks; nor did I care. At Maddy’s house my dreams were even worse than they’d been at Jack’s. Over and over, the dark-haired girl, the bone forest, the dog. And uglier things, now, too: a ship full of men with hard mean eyes; a one-eyed monster the size of a house; a child, eyes wide in terror, screaming wetly even as a crimson fountain poured forth from its cut throat. All my dreams ended in blood: hot red rivers of blood, blood poured over me, blood washing across a white-sand beach; I’d wake up screaming, Maddy’s hands knotted in my hair, her mouth at my ear, hushing me in a language I did not know. When I was too afraid to go to sleep she’d keep me up, telling me stories about old gods while she drank whisky out of the bottle and smoked cigarette after cigarette, or in other ways: her fingers inside me and her mouth on my skin, the salt taste of her body its own ocean mapped in scars, until my nightmares were forgotten and I could not think of anything other than her lavender-scented skin, her raspy voice, her bitten-nailed fingers, cigarette hanging loosely between her knuckles.

One afternoon she sent me out to the garden to pick kale, and when I walked in the front door of her cabin I smelled the metallic tang of blood. She was in the kitchen, where I’d left her, her arms red to the elbows, a knife in her hand, a rabbit on the counter in front of her cut open from its throat to its tail. Its guts spilled across the counter, the red kernel of its heart pulsing fast as a hummingbird’s wings. It looked up at me and blinked, its nose twitching in panic. “Come in, sweetheart,” Maddy said. “What’s the matter?” I stumbled back out the door and made it ten feet before I threw up in her garden. I sank to my knees, doubled over, but there was nothing left in my stomach, there’d been barely anything there to begin with, and so I retched spittle onto the rich dark earth, my stomach still heaving long after my mouth was dry. There was nowhere for me to go, so I went back inside. She was in the kitchen still, thumping out dough on the cutting board, her hands white with flour. The counter was clean save a dusting of flour where she kneaded.

“Where is it?” I asked thickly.

“Where’s what?”

“The rabbit,” I whispered.

“What rabbit?” She came toward me and I let her kiss me, her soft mouth tasting of raspberries and salt. She tugged my shirt over my head, and my body came alive under her hands. Everywhere she touched me she left a dusting of flour across my skin. Something stirred inside me, some memory—dark night, blood all over, a child in her arms. What child? Maddy didn’t have a child. I was dreaming again, dreaming while I was awake.

That night we ate lentil soup and fresh-baked bread and went to bed early. She fell asleep before I did, and I watched the bone ladder of her ribs rise and fall as she breathed. She slept like a child, curled in on herself away from me, and if sometimes she seemed a thousand years old, at night, like this, after we had come together and then she had fallen into sleep, she looked even younger than me. “What are you?” I said to her softly, but she did not stir, and even if she had heard me I was not sure I wanted to know the answer. I got out
Metamorphoses
for the first time since the man in the used bookstore had given it to me and opened it at random.

Gods of the dark-leaved forest and gods of night,

Come to my call. When you have entered me,

As if a miracle had drained their banks and courses,

I’ve driven rivers back to springs and fountains.

I shake the seas or calm them at my will;

I whip the clouds or make them rise again;

At my command winds vanish or return,

My very spells have torn the throats of serpents,

Live rocks and oaks are overturned and felled,

The forests tremble and the mountains split,

And deep Earth roars while ghosts walk from their tombs.

I did not much want to read any more after that. I put away the book and blew out the candle and curled myself around Maddy, my face buried in the hollow between her shoulder blades, my belly cleaved to her bony spine, and when I finally fell asleep I was grateful beyond measure that, for once, I did not dream.

I asked her, once, about her tattoos: they moved, I could almost swear it, under my mouth when I kissed her, slipping across her belly—bees buzzing from flower to flower, constellations tracking across the map of her skin, crows’ wings outstretched in flight. The halcyon’s sharp eyes watching me. She only laughed.

“Who did them?” I asked again, insistent, and she shrugged.

“I don’t remember. People all over. I did some of them myself. Do you want one? Is that why you won’t leave me alone?” And that was how I came one night to let her dip a thread-wrapped sewing needle in black ink and pick out a tattoo on the inside of my elbow. It hurt like hell, but I thought it might help me keep her. I was so drunk on her I would have let her do anything to me by then, any number of things; I would have gone anywhere she had asked, if it meant more time in her company. Even in those brief days when all my life was her some part of me understood that I could not possibly live like that forever, in her house in the woods, surrounded by coyotes and crows; but as long as she was willing to make me forget myself over and over again, as long as she did not tire of me, I could pretend that I had dropped whole cloth into a world that consisted solely of her. When she finished with the needle I had a black crow of my own, standing with its head cocked, so lifelike it seemed about to leap off my arm into flight. “It’s beautiful,” I said when she’d wiped away the blood.