Bone Gap (10 page)

He'd said he wouldn't touch her, and she had believed him. Now his fingers dragged across her flesh, and his icy eyes burned with a strange fire. Soon, she would be sitting on the throne next to him, that stupid crown on her head, stuffing her face
with turkey legs, in the sad hope he wouldn't hurt her, as if he hadn't already.

The gown lay against her skin like a dress made of lead, pinning her to her seat. Her voice was barely a whisper when she said, “You told me you wouldn't touch me.”

The fingers curved around her neck, strumming the delicate cords there. “Until you want it.”

“I don't want it.”

He released her neck, slid his hand down to spread his palm over her heart, pressing into the soft flesh. “You do.”

She fought the bile that begged to choke her, begged to end this before it went any further. “Where is the beast?”

His hand stopped its downward slide. “Excuse me?”

“The beast. The one in the yard. The one at the other house. The hideous one that almost ripped out my throat.”

“He was just doing his job. But I'm sure you don't want to see him again.”

“Bring him to me. If you want to please me, that would please me.”

“And why would that please you?”

“Because,” she said. She leaned back in the chair as far as she could go, leaving his hand frozen in the empty space.
Because he's just as pretty as I feel.

SEAN STOOD IN FRONT OF THE OPEN BARN DOOR, HIS
large form casting a long shadow. “Since when do we have a horse?”

“Since four nights ago. Which you would know if you'd been home.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sean. “And how do you expect to feed her?”

“There are ten bales against the wall.”

“And how do you expect to feed her after those are gone?”

“I'll figure something out.”

“Right,” said Sean. “And what's that?”

“This? This is a goat.”

“A goat.”

“Yes, for the horse. The Hasses gave him to me for twenty bucks because he won't stop eating the pants off the line.”

“Great,” said Sean. “I'll start saving up for new pants. Dinner in fifteen.” He turned on his heel, stalked toward the kitchen door, then disappeared into the house.

Finn led the goat into the barn. “Goat, this is Horse. Horse, this is Goat. I'm still working on your names, but that's all I got for now.”

“Meh!” said the goat, peering up at the horse. Suddenly, the goat leaped straight up till he was eye level with the horse. He did this three times. The horse's whinny sounded like a laugh.

“I can see you guys are going to be friends.” Finn took a carrot out of his pocket, giving half to the horse and half to the goat. Then he searched for the cat. Calamity Jane wasn't in the yard. She wasn't in the hayloft, or under the bushes, or perched in the crook of her favorite tree. Her food, sitting in a bowl by the kitchen door, was untouched. It wasn't like her, and a nail of anxiety pierced his gut.

The nail turned into a screw when Charlie Valentine charged across the street toward Finn's yard. Charlie's long gray hair was rattier than usual, and he had forgotten to put in his teeth. He marched right by Finn and pounded on the back door till Sean came out again.

“Runaround Sue got out,” Charlie said.

Sean said, “Maybe it's time for a coop, Charlie.”

“The chickens don't like the coop.”

“They don't seem to like the living room either.”

“Are you going to help me find her or not?” said Charlie.

“Get your great-grandchildren to help you,” said Sean. “There's a lot more of them. You'll cover more ground.”

“Is that your idea of a joke?” Charlie said.

“I don't joke,” said Sean.

“You used to,” Charlie said. “When Roza was around. You used to joke and smile and play games. Now you're just a boring old pain in the ass. You need a new—”

Sean gestured to his uniform. “Let me get out of this first.”

“I'll be in my yard,” said Charlie. “Sometimes she likes to roost in the marigolds.”

“Charlie!” Finn called after him.

“What?”

“How long do you need me to keep the horse?”

Charlie sucked his lips into his face. “What horse?”

“You gave us a horse.”

“Now why would I do a stupid thing like that?” said Charlie, stomping across the grass toward his house.

Finn followed Sean into the kitchen. “I'll help you look for the chicken.”

“It's getting late,” said Sean. “Why don't you feed and water that horse? And check on Calamity Jane while you're at it. She's almost ready to have those kittens.”

Finn didn't bother mentioning how long he'd been looking for Calamity already. “Okay.”

“Got to work you while I can,” Sean said. He peeled off his thin jacket. “You'll be going to college soon. Then I'll have to do everything myself.”

Finn stood there, blinking in surprise. He had more than a year left before college, but Sean was ushering him out the door, like he couldn't wait for Finn to go. And then what would happen? Would he sell the house and the barn and puny parcel of land? Would he finally go back to school to become a doctor? Would he call Finn once a month, and send ten-dollar checks on his birthday? Would he talk about what a relief it was to be out of Illinois?

Finn opened his mouth to ask, but then Sean wound the jacket around his hand like a boxer protecting his knuckles. “What?”

Finn remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Sean, both of them trying to say the word “table” in Polish. Roza had said, “You have tongue like cow!” and laughed and laughed.

“What?” Sean said again.

He had tongue like cow, he had mind like cow. Dull, wordless.

Finn said, “I'm going for a ride.”

But he didn't. Not right away. With Sean searching for Charlie's chicken, Finn took care of dinner: a box of macaroni mixed
with a pound of ground beef and some peas. By the time Sean got back to eat, it was cold, but he didn't complain.

“Did you find Charlie's chicken?”

“No,” said Sean.

“Charlie needs a coop.”

“Hmmm,” said Sean. He put a forkful of food into his mouth, chewed. Finn tried to think of something else to talk about. Their mother, Didi? No, talking about Didi made Sean seize up like a busted transmission. Their father? No, Sean would mutter something about their father being dead for years, about Finn being too young to remember, and what was the use of bringing it up? But Roza had asked about their parents once, and Sean hadn't seized up. He'd gone to his room and come back with a photograph, let her look from the photograph to Sean's face back to the photograph. To Finn, the photo looked like every other photo of every other family: two parents, two little kids, all the people smiling like nothing could ever go wrong. But Roza seemed to see something in the picture. When she offered it back to Sean and he grasped the edge, she didn't let go—for a moment, both of them holding on.

Finn took a deep breath, banished thoughts of family, thoughts of Roza. Chickens. Back to the chickens.

He said, “I guess a coyote could have gotten her.”

Sean's fork stopped midway between his plate and his mouth. “Gotten who?”

“The chicken,” Finn said.

Sean put the fork down. “Or maybe she just ran away. Her name was Runaround Sue. Maybe she was living up to it.”

“Then maybe she'll come back,” said Finn.

Sean got up from the table, scraped the remnants of his dinner into the sink. “If she ran, she'll keep on running.”

Sean went to bed, which meant that he went to his room so as not to have to look at or talk to Finn anymore, and Finn set up shop at the kitchen table with his books and his tea and his Hippie Queen Honey, too knotted up inside to write essays about his biggest accomplishments, about his worst disappointments, about what his room would say about him if his room could talk.

At ten o'clock, when the jittery sky had finally settled itself into a streaky blue night, Finn checked the yard again. And the barn, and all the rooms of the house.

No Calamity.

He was sorry he'd ever said the word “coyote.” He was sorry that Bone Gap seemed to be cursed somehow, big losses salted with tiny tragedies almost too insulting to bear. Years ago, the police chief's wife stuck a Post-it on the fridge to tell him she was leaving and that she was taking the dog. After Jonas had one too many ciders, he'd talk about how that dog visited him in dreams and told Jonas that he lived in the desert now, that the sand was hot on his feet, and it was getting harder to remember the smell of the rain.

Here was an essay:
You cannot keep chickens, you cannot keep cats,
your dog lives in a trailer park in Tucson, Arizona, and has a new name.

Finn went to the barn and climbed up on the horse, and though the goat was unhappy to be left behind so soon after making his new friend, Finn and the horse took off, charging past houses and fields, through streams and down roads. He'd ridden every night, but he hadn't been to Petey's for a week, not since she'd tried to tell him what he felt about Roza. Maybe he'd been wrong to argue, to insist that his own reasons were the things that mattered most. Maybe it didn't matter
how
he was crazy, only the fact that he was, the fact that he wanted someone to be crazy with him.

The horse allowed herself to be led behind the Corderos' farmhouse, and then into Petey Willis's beeyard. There was no fire by the hives; the yard was dark. Finn and the mare stood in the circle of hives, listening to the deep hum of the bees, feeling that hum in their skin. Instead of moving past the house, beyond the house, instead of charging around Illinois by way of South Dakota, the mare walked toward the house, toward the gray windows like closed lids. The horse sniffed and snorted, lingering by one of the windows. She tossed her head, mane shimmering in the moonlight.

“This one?” whispered Finn.

The horse snorted again. Finn leaned over and rapped on the window. When there was no answer, he did it again.

Thin hands shoved the curtains aside, and Petey's wide, angry eyes were framed in the window. She reached down and
yanked up the sash. “What's going on? What are you doing?”

He didn't know what he was going to say until he said it.

“I can't find my cat.”

She was wearing only a thin T-shirt and the kind of cutoffs that melted his brain, but she pulled on some boots and climbed out of the window as if she'd been doing this sort of thing for years, and maybe she had. He'd heard about the things that Petey did. And maybe, if he was honest with himself, it was one of the reasons he was here. But it wasn't the most important one. He was too happy to see her. Too interested in what she might say, no matter how much it stung.

She scrunched up her face, her fingers idly stroking the horse's nose. Then her face relaxed.

“Okay,” she said, looking up at him. “Where to?”

“I thought maybe we'd go for a ride,” Finn said, something else he hadn't known he was going to say.

“Does the horse know where the cat is?”

“She seems to know a lot of other things.”

Petey gathered her hair and tied it into a knot at the nape of her neck. “You still don't have a saddle. How am I supposed to get up there?”

He glanced around the yard, spied a large rock at the corner of the house. He pointed to it. She nodded and took a few quick strides and a leap to land on top of it, smooth and graceful. He walked the horse alongside the rock, holding the reins in one
hand. Petey looked at the space behind Finn and the space in front of him. Then she turned her face away, focusing on some star in the distance, as if looking at him directly was a little too hard.

She blew out her breath just like the mare. “Listen. I'm sorry about the other day. Sometimes I'm . . . I should . . .”

The words tumbled out. “You should wear those shorts more often?”

Startled, she glanced down at herself. At first he thought it had been the wrong thing to say, the kind of thing one of the Rude boys would have said right before they told her she had a rockin' body but a butterface, but then Petey looked up and smiled with half her mouth.

She smiled with both sides when he said, “Here's a college essay idea: Describe the shorts that changed your life in the form of a poem.”

“I like it.” She put her hands on her hips. “So?”

“So, what?”

“Where's my poem?”

“Maybe someday I'll write you one.”

She grabbed ahold of the horse's mane and swung one leg over the horse's neck, faltering only for a moment till Finn steadied her with a hand on her hip. She settled against him, her back to his chest. She didn't say anything more as he put one arm on each side of her and urged the horse forward.

The mare walked quietly from the yard, as if she was trying
very hard to be sneaky, and began a gentle trot as they passed the Corderos' farmhouse. Each step of the mare brought Petey closer, until she was fitted to Finn like a puzzle piece, her head under his chin. He hadn't realized how much of her height was in her legs, smooth bare legs that glowed gold in the moonlight.

The mare splashed through the stream, peppering her riders with droplets of cool water, then headed for the cemetery, which was clouded over with a strange silvery mist. Older than Bone Gap itself, the cemetery had a couple of stones dating back to the early 1800s. Once, Miguel had surveyed the rows and rows of stones and said, “Everyone looks the same when they're dead.” But Finn didn't think that was true. Each stone was different. Some of the older ones canted crazily, like crooked teeth, the names and dates eroded from decades of sun, wind, and snow. The more recent stones were polished granite in various colors. Dark gray, black, and, in the case of Mrs. Philander “Muffin” Gould (1903–1982), Pepto-Bismol pink.