Asimov's SF, February 2010 (10 page)

We waited. Keith looked ready to blow, so we were looking at him as much as we were my father.

"Find a place that's safe for shooting. Make sure there's a hill or cliff behind it so your arrows stop there. Make a line—a line you'll all shoot from—and no shooting if anyone's over that line, if anyone's between you and the targets. You've got paper targets, right? No one shoots if anyone's walking toward the targets, checking them, changing them. And no shooting at anything other than the targets—I don't care how tempting a tree or a shack or a wagon looks. Got it?"

We all nodded, even Keith, even Marco, who hadn't understood a word."Got it,” I said.

Outside, Keith said, “Yeah, right. Your dad's as candy-assed ‘strack’ as mine is. How do you stand him?"

I didn't answer. I knew we weren't going to do everything my dad had said—some of the rules were silly—but I liked my dad, even if I wasn't going to say so.

On the path to the cove, I tried to translate for Marco what my father had said. Marco's eyes rolled at one point when he realized how many rules there were, but he listened, helped me with some of the words, and nodded in that quiet way of his.

It took us no time at all to get there because it was downhill most of the way. About halfway—among the
villettas
where Keith and his brother had rung the doorbells so much they barely worked anymore—Keith's brother caught up with us, panting, bow and arrows in his hand, too. I'd never really seen him up this close. He had better things to do usually than hang out with us. He was tall, like his father, and thin and quiet, not at all as loud as Keith, and calmer, more confident—his eyes calculating, aware of everything around him. He had a small scar over his left eye, and a long scar on the back of his hand. Had he gotten them in fights, by rough-housing with Keith, or—at least the one over his eye—from a bad .22 aim?

Why he wanted to hang out with us that day, I had no idea, but he obviously wasn't embarrassed that he had a kid's bow in his hand. His was bigger than ours and the feathers on the arrows weren't so colorful, but it was still a kid's.

He was squinting down the path toward the cove, trying to see something, and we let him lead. Keith tried to stay alongside him, but before long was walking with us.

When we reached the bottom of the hill, where the cove started, the houses disappeared and the cobblestone path became dirt. Bobby was craning his neck looking for something not in the cove, but up between the hills. He said, “There's an old hospital up there. I want to see it."

None of us answered. Not even Keith.

I'd seen that hospital, I realized—at a distance anyway—but had forgotten it was in that cove. My father—as we'd driven to La Creccia one Saturday for a tennis party for the officers’ families—had turned off the coast road and onto a gravel one that led up between the hills—"Just out of curiosity,” he'd said. He loved taking side roads, and my mother never minded. We had time.

The gravel road had stopped at a little garden with a marble statue of a woman, and from there forked in two directions—one north to what looked like a big villa in the hills and the other south to a large building of some kind, much closer and down on the flat. You could see the building from where we sat in the car, and it looked old and abandoned.

"Who does this land belong to?” my mother asked. She'd probably ask the
Contessa
Carnevale, too, the next time they had tea at the Villa Carnevale in Romito; but maybe my dad knew.

"Don't know,” he said. “That building is an old German hospital. Who owns it, I have no idea."

We turned the car around, and, as we left, I glanced back at the statue. It was a naked woman—a beautiful woman, too—so of course I was interested. She didn't look Greek or Roman; she looked more modern, “Romantic,” as our teacher would say. Her hips weren't as big as classic statues made women's hips, and her thighs were thinner, her arms long and beautiful. This was all very exciting, of course—I was fourteen and statues like her were exciting—but the look on her face killed it. It was sad and wistful, not very exciting at all. Was she from a legend or myth, or was she someone who'd actually lived, someone long dead now? And why was she sad? Why would you want a sad woman greeting everyone on the road to your nice villa?

There wasn't really any way to cut directly from the dirt path through the olive groves to the hospital. There were old walls—some as old as the Etruscans, people said—littering the orchards, and it was a pain in the ass climbing over them. So, after a couple of minutes of trying, we returned to the dirt path and just walked until we found the gravel road, took it, and finally reached the little garden and the statue.

I stood staring at her. Her head was gone.

"You like tits, Brad? She's got nice ones.” It was Keith, of course. “Hey, someone took her head!” He laughed and his brother laughed too. Then they looked at each other, and I knew they'd been here before.

Someone had indeed taken her head away. It wasn't lying around anywhere that we could see. Why anyone would want the sad-faced head of a statue, I didn't know.

Bobby was walking up the fork toward the hospital, so we followed. I looked up once at the villa on the hill, but it was so far away—as if the hospital and it couldn't possibly be related—that I didn't really worry about anyone watching us. Without binoculars they wouldn't be able to see us.

When we reached it, the building was even bigger than it looked from the garden. It was wood and corrugated metal, big and tall, with lots of windows around the top of it to let light in, so that the light would fall on what was inside. It didn't look like a hospital. Why build one this way—just one floor, all those windows? Maybe it hadn't been a hospital originally. Buildings got appropriated during war. I knew that.

It was big and quiet and no one else was there. Birds whistled in the groves on either side of it. The sounds of the cars on the coastal road didn't reach this far. It was peaceful.

Bobby was already at the front door, which was unlocked, a big chain dangling from it, the lock that once held it in place long gone.

"I can't believe no one's ever been here,” Keith announced. He meant kids—kids like us, or him and his brother. No one had used spray paint on the outside walls. No one had broken the high windows with rocks.

Bobby didn't answer. As if on a mission, he'd pulled the chain aside, opened the door, and stepped inside. We followed.

What I saw inside made no sense for a moment, and then it did. I'd been right. There was only one floor. The high windows let the light in, and it fell on a dusty, littered pavement. It had been a factory of some kind, but the machinery had been removed during the war. Cots must have covered the floor when it was a hospital, hundreds of them, with partitions that were no longer there, and tables for medical supplies and equipment, whatever hospitals had back then. Other than medicine and gauze and splints and surgery, what could you give wounded soldiers that might help them heal? You could give them sunlight—and the windows did that. Had it been a cold building, though? It had to have been, all that glass and the high ceiling; and you'd need blankets, lots of them.

Bobby was kicking at something, a piece of wood. There were no signs that anyone—beggars, gypsies from the south—had been here in recent times, lighting fires on the floor to stay warm or cook with.

The light from the high windows reached most of the floor, but in the four corners there were shadows.

Something made a noise, a tiny noise, in the corner nearest us, and we turned, waiting to hear it again.

"Rat?” I said.

"Who cares?” Keith said—as if this, like everything, were a test of his courage.

The sound came again, but not from the same corner. A creaking this time. The floor was cement. Only the building itself was wood. Why wouldn't an old wood building creak?

"More than one,” Bobby said, snorting.

Keith went to the corner nearest us, kicked the litter around to show off, jumped when the creak came again—this time from the great beams near the ceiling—and walked back looking as nonchalant as he could.

"Scared now?” Bobby said to him.

"Fuck you,” Keith answered.

"Fuck you too, dipshit.” Bobby was laughing. Nothing scared him; that was obvious.

"Isn't that a table?” I asked. I could see a table in the shadows of the corner where Keith had kicked at things—the corner where the first sound had come from.

"Who gives a shit?” Keith said. “This is boring. Let's go back and knock that statue over."

"Can't,” his brother said, looking up at the windows now. “It's bolted down."

So they'd tried. Were they the ones who'd taken the head?

This embarrassed Keith, and when Keith felt embarrassed, he got angry.

"What are you looking at?” he said to Marco, who was looking at both of them. Keith's friend was looking at them, too, but Marco was the annoyance—the one who shouldn't be along because I, not Keith, had asked him.

Marco didn't need to understand Keith's words. He knew the tone. He knew it better than I did. He simply shrugged.

"Nothing in here.” Bobby was heading for the door. Keith followed, and in a moment, relieved, so did the rest of us.

We found Bobby standing on the side of a little hill beside the building, still looking up at the windows. “They're perfect,” he said, and they were. Not one of them was broken—on this side of the hospital anyway. But that's not what he meant.

He notched an arrow—he seemed to know what he was doing—took a breath, and let it fly.

The arrow didn't shatter the window. It didn't bounce off it. It went through it like a bullet, making a hole about the size of your fist. I felt it go through. We all did.
A perfect hole in perfect glass
. This was even better—more exciting—than if the window had just broken. You couldn't do that with a rock. This was precision. We stared, amazed.

"All right!” Keith shouted.

"Beautiful,” his brother whispered.

Then the guilt hit. This was
not
what I thought we were going to do today. It certainly wasn't what my dad thought we were going to do. And it was not what we
should
be doing. Trees or bushes or bottles or a shack or an ox cart—that was one thing, but this ... an old building someone owned, perfect windows, ones we were breaking. I could hear my parents discussing it—trust, betrayal, “he's not the son we thought he was.”
Vandalism—
which meant destroying something you didn't care about but that someone else did.

Not to be bested by his brother, Keith had notched an arrow, too, even as Bobby notched his second, and was letting it fly.

Neither Keith's friend nor Marco nor I were notching arrows. Not yet.

"I don't think...” I started to say. “My dad—"

"Oh, for Christ's sake,” Keith said. “Why did you even come, Brad?"

That was the most shaming thing he could have said, and it worked. It meant: “You'll never have the courage. You'll never be a real man.” Keith was a master at shame.

"I don't think—” I started again.

"No one cares what you think,” he said.

"It's an abandoned hospital,” Bobby was saying, not looking at me, though meaning it for me.

He was right. It was abandoned, and abandonment meant that no one cared—no one cared enough about it to keep it up. How could this be vandalism if no one cared? It wasn't as if we were going to set fire to the place. If Keith or Bobby started to do that, I'd run. I'd shout “No!” I'd take Marco with me and we'd run. I wouldn't be a part of
that
, and because I knew I wouldn't—I swore I wouldn't—

—it was easier to notch the first arrow.

And because I notched mine, Keith's friend and Marco notched theirs.

We all let fly. We were following one of my dad's rules at least. We were standing on a hillside, in a line, and the windows were so high no one could possibly get shot. Wasn't that—safety—more important than the windows?

Keith and Bobby had more arrows than we did, so when we ran out, we just stood there watching them. Most arrows had hit windows, and we'd all tried to make sure—for the
perfection
of it—that each window had only one hole in it.

"Well, go get your arrows,” Keith said smugly.

"Not if you're going to keep shooting."

"We're not going to keep shooting,” he said. “You think we're stupid?"

I wanted to say, “No, but I don't trust you,” but didn't.

"They're your arrows, too,” I said instead. “Why don't you and Bobby come?"

"Because we don't need them yet."

Bobby wasn't saying a thing. He was looking at the windows, as if counting.

"Okay,” I said instead, “but don't shoot."

"Jesus, what a wimp."

Bobby laughed at that, but was still counting. I looked at the windows. There were only two that didn't have holes in them. When we got back to the hillside, Bobby was going to take those two windows himself, I knew. Our shooting was over, and so was Keith's. We could always go to the other side of the building, but on that side we might be seen from the villa. We were done—unless of course Bobby said, “Screw perfection. Let's hit those windows with everything we have,” and the one-hole-per-window rule no longer mattered. But I didn't think he would. He liked the perfection too much.

I started down the hillside to the building's front door, Marco and Keith's friend behind me.

Inside, arrows were scattered everywhere, and we started picking them up. Before we left the house, we'd all marked our arrows so we'd know who they belonged to—so that was no problem—but it was going to take awhile to find them all on a floor this big, littered as it was with wood, corrugated metal and other junk. Keith and Bobby would have to wait. We were the ones doing the work.

Just as Marco—who was standing about twenty feet away from me—picked up an arrow, looked at it, and said, “
Di qui sono le freccie con le croci
?”
Who do the arrows with crosses on them belong to?
—a window above us, one of the two that were still intact, cracked; and the arrow that passed through it arced slowly through the air, down through the sunlight, hitting Marco in the neck, near his shoulder.