Malus Domestica (10 page)

“You’re staying over in the hippie-village next to Miguel’s, right?”

“Yep.”

A silk sheet of silence settled over the truck as the town tapered away, the buildings rolling into darkness until they coursed along a narrow corridor of trees.

Robin became more and more at ease as they rode. Kenway had a calming, languid, ursine presence that reminded her of Baloo the Bear from that old
Jungle Book
cartoon movie. He seemed to operate on a different wavelength; everything he did was slow and lazy, as if he had all the time in the world. The night vacuumed his smoke away as he drove, his elbow out the window.

The trees fell away as well, the blue Chevy bursting into the open, the night sky unfurling above them in a dome of stars. Shreds of gray cloud sailed west under a nickel moon. Hills around them narrowed, enclosing the road in washboard crags of granite, then widened again.

B
LACKFIELD
C
ITY
L
IMITS
, said a lonesome green sign. A bit beyond that was a turn-off leading east into the treeline. Kenway flicked the turn signal and the ancient truck slowed.

“What are….” Robin began to ask.

He looked over at her. “Shortcut? I
always
go this way when I go to Miguel’s.”

“Oh.” The truck angled onto Underwood Road. “Do you like to hike?”

She knew from experience that the mountains around Miguel’s were honeycombed with hiking trails, paths that trickled through the forest toward Rocktown. Rocktown was a clifftop strewn with huge limestone boulders, the local hotspot for college kids, rock-climbers from afar, and anybody looking for an out-of-the-way place to burn a bag of weed with their friends. If there’s anywhere safe from the prying eyes of Joe Law, it’s at the top of a fifty-foot vertical rock face.

“I like to climb.” He smiled. His eyes were the same tired blue as his truck. “Yes, in fact, I
can
climb with this foot, in case you were wondering.”

Underwood Road.

She’d hoped Kenway would keep going. She wanted him to keep on driving to the far end of the four-lane where the freeway overpass arced above their heads, where the Subway restaurant, the bait shop, the Texaco, and the road to Lake Craddock clustered around a secluded rest stop in the wilderness.

She didn’t really want to come out here yet. Not yet. She wasn’t totally ready. She needed a few days to pump herself up.

Now the forest surrounded the truck in a claustrophobic collar of pines and elms, the tree-trunks shuttling past in a picket-fence flicker of columns and shadows. She stared out the window at them, the late-summer wind buffeting her face.

“I used to live on this road when I was a kid.”

Kenway took one last draw on the cigarette and ashed it in the dash tray, then flicked it outside. “Yeah?”

The trees kept barreling toward them, counting down, becoming more and more familiar. She kept expecting the houses and the trailers with every turn, the memories leaking in like water under a door. There was the N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign, shot full of .22 holes. Just there, a faint patch of grungy Heathcliff-orange, the armchair someone had dumped in the woods when she was twelve.

Then, there it was: the forest opened up again and there was the trailer park on her left, all lit up with its sickly white security lights, trailer windows haunted by the honey-red glow of lamps and the epileptic blue stutter of TV shows. A large aluminum sign out front declared C
HEVALIER
V
ILLAGE
, or at least that’s what it seemed to say, under a coating of graffiti.

On top of the angular Olde English gibberish was a tiny spraypainted crown.

Suddenly she was sixteen again, she was thirteen, she was nine. Robin sighed, sitting up against her best judgement, and tried to see if there was anything—or anybody—she could recognize. But the night was too dark, and the cars were all too modern, and the yards were strewn with toys, and everybody was inside and had battened their hatches against the dark.

On her right, a double-wide by itself, with a hand-built porch and naked wooden trellis, chintzy aluminum birds with their pinwheel wings, a deteriorating V
OTE
R
OMNEY
sign by the culvert. A wooden-slatted swing dangled by one chain from a rusty frame, the end jammed into the dirt.

Next door, looming on the other side of a stretch of grass, was the monolithic 1168.

“Slow down,” Robin blurted.

The Chevy downshifted and the neighborhood lingered around them. The engine protested. Materializing from the deep night like the hull of some sunken ship was the gingerbread Victorian farmhouse she’d grown up in, her childhood home.

All the lights were off, but the security lamp on a nearby power pole threw a pallid greenish cast across the front so that the black windows were more like eyes in a dead face.

“This was my house,” she said, as if in a dream.

Familiarity wreathed the window-frames and eaves of the house in mistlike echoes as she studied it from afar. Her memories were stale, and far from her groping mental hands. The house was a different color (she knew it as green, the pale green of dinner mints, with John Deere trim), but it was her house. She could feel the splintery porch railing in her hands, the words her mother had carved deep in the windowsills and that her father had painted over.

“Nice place,” said Kenway. “Looks like somebody else lives there now. Or they’re about to move out.” A U-Haul truck and a blue car sat in the driveway, the car tinted black by the watery light. She didn’t recognize them.
 

Something drew Robin’s eyes back to the trailer park across the street, and she traced the long gravel drive snaking along the east hip of the park to the old mission-style manor lurking on top of the hill. The Lazenbury House cut a tombstone silhouette against the Milky Way. All of the lights were off except for one window on the topmost floor. She’d never been up there, but she knew the rest of the house. She knew the blood-red walls, the piano, the Japanese-style front garden with its fish-pond. The sprawling, Eden-like garden out back. She knew the dirt-floored cellar, with its fire-blackened casks of wine and cramped dumbwaiter-style elevator.

She’d practically grown up in that house. She remembered stories her mother had told her when she was a teenager, losing sight of little two-year-old Robin and searching the house for her, only to discover that she’d wandered over to Granny Mariloo’s house for cookies and apple juice. A few times, she’d cried for hours, banging on the door of an empty house. Robin had vague memories of her mother Annie marching resolutely up that long gravel drive barefoot, the wind pulling at her dress, to come fetch her daughter.

Those were the days when her father had been his worst, and her parents had fought with each other the hardest. Disturbed by the shouting, Baby Robin would creep out and seek solace with sweet, maternal Marilyn.

But she’d never been allowed on the top floor. Did the Lazenbury have an attic? She wasn’t sure.

A shadow moved behind the window’s lacy curtain.

“Okay,” she said, startled out of her reverie, and Kenway took that as an indication to keep on trucking.

The forest swallowed them up again, and they followed their headlights down a long, winding two-lane under oppressive branches. Whenever there was a break in the trees, farmhouses sailed past in the cool twilight, surrounded by empty gray pastures tied to the earth with barbed wire and driftwood stakes.

Underwood came out at a lonely T-junction watched by a grove of birches, where a single cabin peered through the trees with one yellow eye. Kenway pulled left without his turn signal and the Chevy roared north. A few minutes later, the headlights scraped across the belly of the interstate overpass and a little beyond, in the crook of a long, shallow curve, was Miguel’s Pizzeria, a single security lamp standing vigil by the shower building.

Kenway pulled up onto the gravel drive, weeble-wobbling across the jagged ground. The bicycle in the back thumped in time with the truck’s creaking suspension.

“That’s me.” Robin pointed at the plumber van.

Kenway erupted into laughter. “Aha ha ha, Joel wasn’t kidding. That is truly sketch.” He must have seen the look on her face, because he immediately stopped grinning. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I mean…shit. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”

She waved him off. Cool indignity rested in her belly like a stone. “It’s okay. I know how it looks.”

“If…if you don’t mind me asking, why are you living in an old panel van?”

Opening the door, she started to get out but something seemed to press her back into the cab of the truck. Reluctance? Robin slid to the edge of the bench-seat, the fabric of her jeans buzzing across the tweed upholstery, but she just sat there.
To hell with it,
she thought, her eyes fixed on the sign out in front, a picture of a cartoon Italian chef perched on a cliff face. I’
D
CLIMB
A
MOUNTAIN
FOR
M
IGUEL
’
S
PIZZA
!
Might as well go ahead and drop the bomb. It’s going to happen eventually, might as well wreck this before it really gets going.

Instead of meeting his eyes when she turned to him, she fixed on his giant hand, wrapped around the steering wheel. “I bought it with the money that was in my mom’s bank account when I was released from Blackfield Psychiatric a few years ago.”

Kenway nodded, slowly. “Ahh.”

She winced a smile at him in gratitude. “Thank you for the ride home. Oh!” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a scant wad of cash and peeled off two twenties, thrusting them in his direction. “Gas money. As thanks.”

His eyes landed on the money, his eyebrows jumped, and he twitched as if he were going to take it, but he said, “No, that’s—it’s all right, I’m good.”

“No, really. Take it.”

Kenway pointed at the dash dials. “I’m full anyway. I filled up on the way to Movie Night.”

Folding the money into a tube, Robin stuck it in the tape deck so that it looked like the stereo was smoking a cigarette. “There.” She slid the rest of the way out of the truck and shut the door, walking through the glare of his dingy headlights.

On the driver’s side, she stood in the dark hugging herself. “Drive safe,” she said, feeling awkward. “Thank you again for the ride home.”

He didn’t leave. “You’re an odd duck, Robin.”

Ice trickled into her belly. “Thanks.”

“I like odd ducks.”

“Quack quack,” she replied, perhaps a little too coldly.

The two of them had a short staring contest, the girl standing behind her van, Kenway sitting in his idling truck.

She was about to bid him adieu and climb into her party-wagon when he spoke up. “If you’re ashamed about the psychiatric thing, don’t be. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time talking to shrinks that I shouldn’t have any room to talk.” Drumming a bit on the windowsill, he added, “So…yeah. I don’t know what your story is, but you won’t find any judgement here.”

Robin smiled. “Thanks.”

“I don’t know how long you’re going to be in town, but I’ll be around. If you want a real bed to sleep on for a night, you’re welcome to crash at my place.” He crossed his fingers. “No creep stuff, scout’s honor. Just…you know, an offer. I guess. It’s there on the table.”

“Okay.”

She took hold of the rear door handle and started to open the door and climb in, but then had the idea to tell Kenway good night. When she turned to speak, he was already rolling the window up and putting the truck in gear. Robin stood there with one foot on her back bumper and watched the Chevy grumble around the parking area, crunching across the gravel and washing the pizzeria with its headlights. Kenway pulled up to the road, sat still for a moment, then lurched out and disappeared with a roar.

She sighed and climbed into the back of the cold van.

All of a sudden, her mobile candy-van nest didn’t look nearly as inviting as it had before. Robin stripped, kicked her fuzzy legs down into the sleeping bag, and lay down with a huff. “Shit,” she muttered to herself, regretfully wrenching a beanie down over her eyes.

5

“C
ASTLE
O
NE
,
THIS
IS
Castle two. Do you copy?” burped the radio in Delilah’s hands. The little girl crouched in the shadows by the corner of the building and gazed out at the night. The playground lights were a dazzling array of suns; white floodlights on the apartment block eaves made the jungle gym into a rib-cage of black shadow-bones.

The day wasn’t done yet. Blackfield’s sky was a dark, watery indigo, and the sun was a hint of a bruise on the horizon. A giant silver dollar hovered in the dome of blue, the moon a translucent all-seeing face. A huge bunker of darkness loomed in the east, threatening rain.

Delilah put the damp walkie-talkie against her chubby cheek and stage-whispered, “Yes, Castle!”

The girl on the other end of the line sighed in exasperation. “That’s not how you say it, Lilah. That’s totally wrong. You say
roger, Castle two, over.
That’s how they say it in the armies.”

Delilah sniffed. The evening dew on the grass was getting her socks wet. She hated wet socks.

The droning of the cicadas made it hard to hear Ginny without having the radio turned all the way up, and didn’t that defeat the purpose of being ninjas? You weren’t supposed to
hear
ninjas. Though, she supposed, the cicadas made it easy to be sneaky. That monotonous wheeling buzz covered you like a blanket.

“You
didn’t say over,” she said into the walkie. She took a deep breath of that sharp cut-grass smell and coughed. “Are you sure ninjas use walkie-talkies?”

“Yes.
 
. . . Over.”

“Ninjas don’t walk
or
talk. They hide in trees and jump over stuff and throw stars. I
know.
My dad lets me watch ninja movies with him. We have all the best ones.”

“Well,” said Ginny. “The ninjas in this army use walkie-talkies. I got them for my birthday so the ninjas can use them. Over.”