Girl in Landscape (17 page)

He put his glass on the floor between his feet. “Why’d you come here, Pella Marsh?”

“Stop using my whole name.”

It was actually the least of her objections. She hoped he’d withdraw the dangerous, unnecessary question.

“Why’d you come here … 
Pella
.”

“To your house?”

He shook his head, and waved his hand like the suggestion was exasperating. “Planet of the Archbuilders.”

“Family, stupid.” She thought of Clement sitting with Diana Eastling, her leg over his. Family.

“You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”

She nearly corrected him, then decided she liked the sound of it. She put her glass to her lips to have something to do with her mouth other than speak. She drank, then held the side of the glass to her burning cheek.

“I guess you do what Clement tells you,” said Efram, half-contemptuously, half as though he’d realized her connection to Clement for the first time.

I’m here because of Caitlin, Pella thought. But she didn’t want to tell him that, either. She didn’t want to talk to him about her parents. It made her too much the pilot fish beside the whale.

She felt drowsy and crazed at once. Efram was drinking the whiskey—if that’s what he was drinking—but she was the one getting drunk. Drunk on the Archbuilder walls, drunk on Efram’s big, disastrous body so close to her. Drunk on the way he moved his arms.

She lifted her leg, entranced, and draped it over Efram’s knee.

He didn’t push it away. She couldn’t bring herself to look to see his expression. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the couch, and said, “Explain to me about the Archbuilders.”

It seemed like a thousand years before he spoke.

“Which Archbuilders?” His voice was neutral. Her leg felt like a twig across his giant thigh. It twitched, pulsed. She felt sure he could feel the blood beat in it the way she could. Like her whole leg was a single vein.

“The ones you hate,” she said, eyes still shut.

It was a while again before he said anything. His leg was perfectly still, and it—or more precisely, the place
where her leg met his—was the only thing in her universe, until his voice floated down to join it. “Hiding Kneel and Truth Renowned, those types aren’t what I call Archbuilders,” he said. “They’re what the Archbuilders left behind.”

His words came to her like she was underwater. But she understood. “You mean the ones that went into space.”

“That’s right. They were something a little different than the sorry batch we’ve got lurking around here. They remade their planet, built a civilization, and then they figured out a way to do the greatest thing anyone’s ever done—explore the stars. The rabble around here are just the lazy, stupid ones that didn’t want to go.”

Pella tried to imagine this exodus, the great world that had been here, then flown away. Somehow she couldn’t picture the arches any way other than destroyed, couldn’t imagine the Archbuilders any different from how they were now. What she pictured instead were
people
living here, building starships. People like Efram, exactly. Maybe that’s what he pictured too.

She said, dreamily, “Someone had to stay.”

“Could be that’s what they told themselves at the start of it, Pella.”

Pella, her eyes closed, head back on the couch, felt that she and his tremendous leg and the couch were in one place together, while his voice was piped down from some impossibly distant other place. Perhaps from space, from aboard an Archbuilder starship.

“But look what it’s done to them,” he went on. “They passed up the chance to find new frontiers, became
a bunch of good-for-nothing navel-gazers instead. They made this planet into a hell of luxury—the weather control, the free food. And it made them into hothouse creatures picking through their own memories of greatness. They’re not a civilization anymore.”

Was Efram really using words like
navel-gazers
and
hothouse?
He sounded like an Archbuilder. Like Hiding Kneel. Or was she beginning to fall asleep and dream elaborations on his talk? Was he really talking at all?

“The Archbuilders who left built this place as a challenge to us, Pella. Why else do you think we can breathe the air, drink the water? They invited us up to get a look around here, give us a taste of getting off Earth, to face us with a choice. We could try to follow them to the stars, to the real frontier, or we could bog down here with these idiots, get lulled by the weather and the free food and the atmosphere of complacent degenerate buffoonery.”

It felt as though her leg and his were floating upward, that the immense weight of them together had been released and that they were now moving toward the ceiling. The words—some of them had to be his, she could never have invented
complacent degenerate buffoonery
, didn’t feel at all responsible for
bog
or
lulled
—swam in her consciousness.

“Calling them idiots is too generous. They’re sexual deviants, most of them. That didn’t matter when it was just me and Ben and a couple of others living up here, but if they touch the children I’ll kill them.”

She was falling into a nerve-racked sleep. It came
over her irresistibly, like a fever. For a moment she thought she might escape into some nearby household deer, and by doing so find clarity, open her eyes. She could sneak around to Efram’s house, find her way inside and watch this encounter from a neutral corner, sort out the confusion of bodies and words.

But this wasn’t that sort of sleep, and besides, there wasn’t a household deer nearby. She was only slipping deeper into herself. Nobody would see what happened in this room unless she opened her eyes, and opening her eyes was impossible.

“I kill them already, actually. I roast them in my kiln in the backyard and eat them. My little joke—Archbuilders eat potatoes, I eat Archbuilders. They both grow wild around here.”

She was dreaming, and in her dream she protested, illogically, Can’t he see that I’m asleep? Why won’t he stop talking? Doesn’t he know that I’ll believe whatever he says?

“If your dad doesn’t leave, I’ll kill him too. This isn’t the place for him to practice his politics. He should go home. Maybe he’ll leave you here, though. I wouldn’t mind that.”

Efram nudged her awake, speaking her name. His voice was gentle now.

She looked up at him foggily.

“We’d better get you home,” he said.

Her leg had slipped, or been lifted, from his. Their
bodies hadn’t touched anywhere but that one place. That one place burned. She didn’t speak, just rubbed her eyes.

She had slept, she was sure now. The words, at least some of them, had been a dream.

She would never know which ones.

Efram got up from the couch and opened the door. The sky was dark now. The colored lights in the room leaked out weakly into the night. Even the edge of the porch was barely visible.

“I’ll walk you back. Come on.”

“My—we’re having dinner at the Kincaids’.”

“Then I’ll walk you to the Kincaids’.”

They left his compound and set off along the dim paths, Efram ahead, his step sure. Pella’s boldness was gone, but so was her fear. Those extremes had been rolled together, blunted by her strange, deep sleep.

Efram walked too fast for her, but she didn’t complain, didn’t speak at all, just broke into short skipping runs to catch up the whole way back. He glanced down at her half-indifferently, like she was a parcel to be delivered now. Their afternoon together was over.

The Kincaids’ house was lit, and Pella could see activity bubbling behind the curtains. Efram stopped outside the penumbra of spilling light, at a rocky bend in the path, and lifted his heavy finger to point at the house. “There you go.”

She went ahead of him to the house, and didn’t turn until she reached the porch. He stood like a monolith in the shadows, watching. She thought she saw him nod at her. She went inside.

The girl walked into the lit room blinking. It was cluttered with life, a chaos of activity, demands. The two families were around the table, her father, her brothers, the Kincaids. Bruce Kincaid, watching her. The meal was nearly over, empty plates smeared—except her father’s. He was helping himself to green potatoes from a huge bowl. Joe Kincaid was pouring him a drink. He’d just come in, she saw. Like her, he’d been out in the valley, living his secret life. Out in the valley, now sealed in darkness. The girl moved to the table still in a kind of trance.

“Your father was worried,” said Ellen Kincaid, taking Pella by the elbow and hurrying her to a seat at a clean table setting.

“Here you go,” said Joe, loading up her plate.

“Are you sick?” said David. “You look sick.”

“I fell asleep,” she said. She started to push the plate of steaming mash away, then realized she was hungry. She took her fork and directed a chunk of the lukewarm flavorless stew into her mouth, chewing intently so she wouldn’t be expected to speak. She didn’t want to look at anyone, didn’t want to answer questions. She knew where they’d all been. Wasn’t that enough?

“Well, eat up,” said Joe Kincaid jauntily. “You’ll keep us waiting for dessert.”

In reply, Pella only chewed. Clement had as much on his plate as she did. If she was keeping them from dessert, so was he. He’d barely started. She must have come near to running into him, on the paths back out of the valley.

Back from their
liaisons
.

“Can we be excused?” said Martha Kincaid.

“Sure,” said Joe Kincaid. Martha and David ran from the table, almost stumbling over each other, and disappeared into the back of the house. Raymond got up too, but somberly, and flopped into a chair.

Bruce moved from his place, but only to sit closer to Pella. “You get the package?” he whispered.

Pella nodded. Then, confused, she looked down at the floor beside her chair. Where was the bag of pills?

On the floor beside Efram’s couch, in his Archbuilder cave of a living room.

Bruce said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“But you got them?”

“Yes. Shhh.” She tried to calculate the meaning of
her mistake, the trajectory of a fall in progress. What would Efram do with the pills? Get Bruce in trouble for stealing them? That was the least of it. Efram would think of something worse, something she couldn’t guess at.

Unless—shouldn’t Efram want her to take the pills? In that he was on her side, wasn’t he?

“You’ll take them, right?” said Bruce.

“Quiet,” she said. “Don’t talk about it here.”

But nobody was listening. Clement babbled blithely to Joe and Ellen Kincaid about Diana Eastling’s field trip, her study of Archbuilder science. Pella wondered if Joe and Ellen knew about Clement and Diana’s affair. Probably. Probably they knew and imagined they were helping
keep it from the children
.

She wanted to get away from the table, out of the house. She picked up her plate. “Come on,” she said to Bruce. “Let’s sit on the porch.”

“You were asleep when I came by,” said Bruce. “You slept all day?”

“I guess.” It was an odd lie, given that she was on the verge of nodding off here, on the edge of the porch, her plate in her lap.

The lights of the house were behind her. She knew Bruce couldn’t read her face. She looked up at the shadowy ridge where Efram had last stood. She could imagine him still there, a little back, veiled in darkness, watching the house.

In her imagination he always stood there, in a place just out of sight, watching.

“Aren’t you scared?” said Bruce.

“No,” she lied. Whatever he meant she should be scared of.

They sat not speaking for a moment, then she asked, “Where’d you get the pills?”

“Wa’s. The delivery guy from Southport came through. Doug Grant was hanging around, and some Archbuilders. I just stole them when everybody was out back, unpacking stuff.”

“Why do you want to hang around with Doug Grant?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t.”

“He’s a jerk,” said Pella, surprising herself with the force of it. “He thinks he’s Efram.”

Bruce didn’t respond. Probably he wanted to be Efram, too.

“While you’re sucking up to Doug Grant, my brother and your sister are Morris Grant’s little slaves,” she said.

“I can’t help it if they want to follow him everywhere. Tell Raymond to watch David.”

“Raymond isn’t bigger than Morris. You are.”

But it was hopeless to expect Bruce to chaperone David and Martha and Morris. The unity of the larger group was an illusion. It had formed because Bruce was following Pella, and so were Pella’s brothers, just as Martha was following her older brother. Then Morris had attached himself to the five of them. When Pella
retired to her turret, her hole in the ground, the group dispersed, each member seeking new alliances.

Like her family, now that Caitlin was gone.

“Okay, okay,” said Joe. “Here, we’ve got something unusual, they were selling it down at Wa’s today. Somebody at Southport concocted a kind of ice cream, Archbuilder ice cream, made from ice potatoes. Bruce, why don’t you help get some bowls?”

Joe dished out the imported dessert, and it was passed around the table.

“This isn’t like ice cream,” said Bruce.

“It’s really
sweet
,” said Martha, making a face.

“I hate it,” said David.

“I don’t know, it’s not bad,” said Clement. “Sweet and gooey and cold—is this vanilla?”

“Remember when you made that pudding from tea potatoes and froze it?” said Bruce to his father. “
That
was more like ice cream.”

“Yeah, but Bruce, that was from tea potatoes,” said Martha.

“So?”

“So this is more like ice cream,” explained Martha patiently. “Because it’s made from ice potatoes. Because of the word ice.”

“I think it’s crappy,” said Bruce. “Did Wa even taste this stuff? He bought about fifty pounds of it off the delivery guy.”

“Bought
from
, not
off
.”

There was a knock on the door. Pella’s throat tightened with fear. Thinking of him on the ridge, she’d somehow summoned him back.