Anarchy (39 page)

“How did you follow me?”

Goose picked up the paddle and corrected the boat's drift, nudging back toward the beach. “You know,” she said, “it might be easier to talk on board. While we head back.”

“I'm not finished here.”

“Oh. Well. How much longer do you need?”

“It's not your business.”

She dipped the paddle again, keeping the bow straight. “See, the thing is, Jennifer, I've got your boat.”

The girl didn't answer.

“Mr. Hall's boat. Or let's call it yours, doesn't matter, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I took this one without asking too, now that I think of it.”

“You better bring it back, then.”

“Oh, I'm planning to. Oh, wait. You mean the kayak.” It sat awkwardly along the gunwale, stern tipped up, a big yellow plastic prize catch. “I'll be straight with you, Jennifer. This is kind of why I took it, eh? I mean, I could have come ashore and done the whole heavy cop thing, but, you know. No one wants that. So you finish what you need to do, and I'll wait right here with the kayak, and whenever you're ready you come on aboard and off we go. How's that sound?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Goose tapped the kayak beside her. “I guess you don't, really. Sorry.”

The girl turned her head abruptly, as if she'd heard something unexpected. “You here on your own?”

Goose spread her arms. “Looks like it.” Her heart was going faster than it should have been. There'd been no sound; she was sure she'd have heard anything nearby.

“How'd you find this place? You shouldn't be here.”

Goose concentrated on holding an unthreatening smile. “You know what? We both have a lot of questions. There's a ton of stuff I'd like you to tell me about. Like the last time we met, for starters. I spent quite a while running around looking for you after you walked out of the station, you know? So. If you're ready, I'll paddle over, you can hop on in, and we'll talk. I have to say, it's great that you're talking to me like this. I've got to think that's a good sign, eh? It's going to make things much easier.”

The stare was wavering. Jennifer stepped back from the water a pace. She pushed back her hood and glanced around the bay again.

“I hate to say it, but you probably shouldn't take too long deciding. I'd kind of like to get started back. You know. Breakfast.”

The girl's hands popped out of their sleeves. She lifted the chain of her necklace and tucked it down inside her sweatshirt.

“If I have to,” Goose said, “I'll come and get you. But I'd prefer not to.”

“You'd dare touch me?” It wasn't the usual empty bravado of pumped-up teenagers squaring up to the cops; Goose would have recognized that. Jennifer seemed genuinely incredulous. “You gonna lay a finger on me? You heard about the other cop yet?”

Goose gripped the wheel to hold herself steady. “Fitzgerald?”

“You put your dirty white hands on me, they'll start stinking so bad you'll want to cut them off.”

“Jennifer.” Goose's smile disappeared. “Give it a rest. I'm not the bad guy here. I just want . . .” What? “Come back. Talk to people. I'll help. I understand why you wouldn't say anything before. But look, you're talking to me now, right? I'm listening. I'm not going to let anyone lock you up or make you go back to your mom. Nothing like that. I know you didn't push your brother down the stairs. Whatever you've done, I know you've done it for a reason. Everyone treated you wrong, I know that. But you're talking to me, right? So you know I'm okay. I've . . .” For an instant she saw what Jennifer's silence was like from the inside. There were certain things you couldn't say: she felt the unsayability on her tongue. “I've seen some things,” she finished, lamely.

“Talking with you's like talking with nobody,” the girl said, matter-of-factly.

“Jeez. Thanks.”

“Who'd you bring with you?” Jennifer edged toward the water again, distracted. She shouted something Goose didn't understand, in another language perhaps. From high in the upper air the call of the ravens answered, another language again.

“No one,” Goose said. “Just me.”

“Bring the boat.”

“You're coming? Great!”

“All right. Come on.” Jennifer's stare had gone the way of Goose's professional smile. She looked her age again, a girl on a beach, worried she was going to be left behind. She craned back to look at the ravens, who were still circling one another, rising, already impossibly high.

“Here. I'll toss this to you.” Goose clambered around the crates to the bow again, coiled the bowline, and threw. “Easy. Whoa there.” The girl had yanked the bow in hard. “Got to spin it side-on. Walk along that way.” Goose leaned over the side with the paddle, fending off against the cracked rock below. “There we go.” She was going to paddle a little closer to the sand but Jennifer didn't wait, didn't even roll her sweatpants up, let alone stop to take her shoes off. She splashed in up to her knees and launched herself at the gunwale, spreading her elbows across it, thrashing the water as she tried to pull herself over. “Easy!” Goose reached over to haul her in by the waist. They ended up in an untidily intimate heap among the crates.

“Okay.” She straightened herself out, leaned over with the paddle again, and pushed away. “That worked. Kinda.” A couple of shoves and a couple of backstrokes and the boat was moving away from danger, spinning slowly as it went. “Welcome aboard.”

Jennifer sat down in the passenger seat, hunching morosely.

Goose pulled in the bowline hand over hand, quietly pleased with herself. Though she was past the stage of knowing what to expect, her plan had gone about as well as she could have imagined. If she'd had any expectations, they certainly wouldn't have included a Jennifer who was not only reasonably cooperative but reasonably communicative as well. There'd been plenty of stuff in the file testifying that she was basically a good kid, but that was before she'd become—

The shaman girl.
The phrase spoke itself in her memory in a horrible dry voice; the
r
in
girl
not sounded, in the English manner, turning the word cold and sinister.

Goose sat in the bow, the safety of the windscreen between her and the girl, while she forced her feet back into her boots. The damp lining was horrible but still better than open air against her skin.

“Jennifer?”

The girl glanced up, plucking hair away from her cheek.

“I just want to make something clear to you.” There was the weight on her tongue again. She tried to think her way around it. “There's a lot of stuff I don't understand, but I know it's . . . different now. Okay? So anything you want to tell me, I'm not going to try and tell you you're wrong, you're crazy, whatever. We were wrong. Weren't we. The rest of us.”

Jennifer looked like she could have been modeling for a statue: Teenage Sullenness.

“So.” Goose shrugged. “That was it, I guess.”

She'd never have expected the girl to answer, but Jennifer surprised her.

“This was a place people lived, once,” she said. “The biggest house was my people's. The orca house. Over on the far side, where the long beach is. Where's your house? Where do you belong? You don't even know.”

Goose looked at her. She couldn't see a shaman girl. All she saw was another stroppy kid.

“That's what all this is about?” she said. “The old you-stole-our-land stuff ? Jeez.” She stowed the coiled bowline, more neatly than Jonas would have bothered to. “That's kinda disappointing.”

“It's nobody's land.” Jennifer clasped her hands over her breasts, a strange gesture, almost religious. “It never belonged to anyone. The Band talk that way 'cause they don't know any better than you. My mom, she don't belong here. Or anywhere. She don't know how to live, don't matter where she goes. Get drunk, watch TV, have babies.” She spat another word Goose didn't know: it sounded like a curse. “Yeah, you were wrong. You and everyone else.” For a moment her voice made flat echoes ring from the wave-smoothed shoreline.

“Were we,” Goose said, moving Jonas's crates back out of the way. “Is that so. And you're going to fix it?”

Jennifer said, “It's gonna fix itself.”

Goose thought of the couple she'd met that foggy morning in Alice, running away down-island because they were afraid of living by themselves with no TV. She thought of the failed bank machine, no longer translating digits in an account into money for the wallet. She wondered what they'd find when they got back to Hardy.

The wind was gusting up a bit. They were still sheltered from it, but Goose could hear it in the trees and see the grey sheet of the Passage beginning to wrinkle into dark lines. A rough crossing would be no fun in a boat this size.

“Well,” she said, squeezing behind the passenger seat to take the helm again. “Let's go back and see, shall we?” She pressed the switch to lower the outboard.

There was no response.

She pressed it again, clicking it back and forth.
“Tabarnac,”
she growled, jiggling the key in the ignition. The battery gauge caught her eye. Its needle showed zero charge. Less than zero: the needle was slumped against the edge of the dial as if it had broken. The fuel gauge was the same. It had been showing three-quarters of a tank maybe half an hour ago. Now it showed nothing.

“Crap.” The boat was spinning unhurriedly, drifting closer to one of the small islands. She jabbed at light switches. None of them worked. The key clicked back and forth without provoking the smallest response from the motor or any of the electrics.

“Great. That's freaking great.” Goose thumped the dashboard in frustration. “Must be some kind of battery thing.” A broken connection was the best she could think of. She looked at the scattered boxes and spools and weed-streaked fenders covering most of the boat. “Where the hell's the battery?” There'd have to be some kind of hatch in the hull, she guessed, probably in the stern. She tried the key a few more times. “Come on. Jeez, Jonas. Trust you.” On the coldest winter mornings back home it would sometimes take a while for the car to start. She remembered sitting in the back with Tess, watching their parents stomping around the hood in their snow jackets, getting angrier and angrier, first with the car, then with each other. But on those mornings you could at least hear the ignition trying to turn over. The boat wasn't making any noise at all. It had gone dead as driftwood.
“Tabarnac! ”
She kicked it.

“You shouldn't have come here,” the girl next to her said, not smugly; she sounded tense.

“Why don't you shut up for a bit, okay?”

“Something bad's come with you.”

“Here.” Goose picked up the paddle of the kayak and put it in Jennifer's hands. “Here's something useful you can do. Make sure we don't run aground while I get this fixed.” She began kicking her way through the junk in the stern. The girl got to her feet, too slowly. There were shallows beneath them; they'd drifted out toward the channel between the rocks. The black bulk of a drowned log came into view nearby. “Don't just stand there!” Goose grabbed the paddle, leaned over, and shoved them clear of it. “All right. Sit down. Let me.” The tide was ebbing, slowly enough as far as she could tell; still, she didn't like the idea of losing depth in the channel. Better to get out into open water before seeing what she could do with the electrics, she thought, especially if the kid was just going to be a pain in the ass. She went forward and sat with her legs over the bow. From there she could just about paddle the boat, though it was as unwieldy as trying to row a bathtub. A faint current helped, the tide draining out of the bay. Her back ached as she bent, dug the blade in, pushed. She noticed how hungry she was, and how stiff. The steel blue of dawn had turned into the inevitable grey day.
Shouldn't have come here.

“Oh,” Jennifer said, behind her. “I get it.”

The stern was swinging the wrong way. Goose battled the paddle sideways. The water beneath would have been no more than waist deep if she'd been standing in it. “Shut up.”

“That looks like hard work.”

Goose didn't have the breath to shout. She tried to ignore the girl. They were abreast of the outer island. A cliff-rooted pine jutted out overhead at a ridiculous angle, doomed to end up among the fallen wood, though its losing battle might go on for decades more.

“You're not going to make it the whole way.”

“Shut your freaking mouth, you freaking witch,” Goose said, very quietly, between breaths. The rocky bottom fell away suddenly and the sea became a dark opacity. She clenched her teeth and gave a few more powerful strokes, propelling them away from the bare shoal to starboard, then sat up, putting the paddle aside, feeling her back. The boat yawed abruptly. She looked around. Jennifer had stood up and was trying to lift the kayak.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

“No freaking way.” Goose swung her legs inboard. The kid wasn't strong enough to get the kayak up. Goose got a hand on it before she could move it more than a couple of inches and shoved it back, hard.

Jennifer turned on her. “You can mess around with the motor all you like. It's not gonna help. I get it now, I get what's happening. You people, you always wanna go faster, don't you? Gotta have your cars and your boats and your planes. Gotta be able to get away, get somewhere else. You can't do that around me. You know what happened? I called the killer whale to me.” She reached inside her sweatshirt and pulled out her necklace, the plain brown ring looped on a chain that had gone the dull speckled green of tarnished silver. “From the other side of the world. He didn't get on some plane. He came the way a whale's supposed to come. This is what he brought me.” She clutched the pendant in her fist. “This makes everything the way it's supposed to be. No motor's gonna speed this up. If you wanna take this anywhere you're gonna have to do it yourself, the way a person's supposed to. That's how I came here. That's the way you should have come too. You screwed up. Gonna be a long paddle home.” She pointed across to the distant southern landmass. “Or you can let me go my way, then you can go yours. Quick as you can, A to B. Hurry hurry hurry. Get it over with. And you're wondering why you don't belong anywhere.”