Mobile Library (16 page)

“This was a stupid idea,” Bobby said, pointing at the clouds swilled with inky darkness.

“Means there will be less people around,” Joe said. “Means we will leave less tracks. Trust me. If the army taught me one thing it is how to disappear. Rain should always be welcomed by outcasts like you and I.”

“I'm not an outcast.”

“Whatever you say.”

Joe removed a small set of bolt cutters from inside his jacket and snipped through a barbed wire fence. Bobby skulked nervously behind him, keeping his fists balled so that Joe didn't see his fingers quaking. They stalked the back lot of a farm, hiding between plastic water barrels when the farmhouse curtains twitched. The rain wouldn't let the cowpats settle so the air was thick with the smell of shit. They ran behind the hay bales that blocked the back entrance to the stables, then dipped down low to reach the chicken coop beneath the farmer's kitchen window. Joe reached inside and picked up six white eggs in one enormous hand. He carefully lowered them into Bobby's pockets.

“Close your eyes,” Joe said. Bobby didn't trust him completely, but when he saw Joe wrap his hand around the neck of a chicken he shut them tight. He heard what he guessed was the cracking of a tiny bone, then the gossipy jabber of a final cluck, and he nervously braced himself for blood to splatter his face. It didn't come.

“You can open them now.” Joe lifted the chicken's body, inviting Bobby to prod its downy bloat. “See,” he said, “it's okay.” It was so warm to the touch that Bobby felt jealous when Joe put it in his jacket. He fantasized that he too could take a chicken's life with such virtuoso control of brute strength, and reveled in a mischief that reminded him, happily, of Sunny Clay.

They hiked down a waterlogged rambler's path to the outskirts of the village. At the back of a bakery was a small tower of boxes containing unsold stock. Joe hid behind a fence and watched the baker take a cigarette break. When he'd finished, Joe reached over and took a box from the top of the stack. They went back out into the fields to survey their bounty.

“If we get caught stealing we'll be in big trouble,” Bobby said. He bit into a doughnut. Custard oozed from the end.

“You never read
Robin Hood
?” Joe said. “Surely they have that in your mobile library.”

“Yeah, I read it.”

“I'm sure the merry men stole from time to time.”

“They didn't steal almond croissants.”

“Hungry's hungry. And hungry is what we're all gonna be very soon unless you and I act like men and do something about it, merry or otherwise.”

Joe had eaten five doughnuts to Bobby's one when the clouds cleared and a rainbow watermarked the sky. Their clothes dried quickly in the sun and were soon stiff and uncomfortable, Bobby's T-shirt chafing the tender flesh on his tummy. As they walked Joe plucked the chicken and flung feather darts at the horizon. Bobby snapped a pink rose from a bush and put it in his pocket for pressing later.

“You're a florist now?”

“It's for my mother. I'm going to put it in my files.”

Joe had observed Bobby working on his files. He recognized the boy's longing. With hard-skinned palms impervious to thorns, Joe tore out another handful of roses and put them in his coat with the chicken.

“Then you might as well have a whole bunch.”

From the meadow they could see the rows of gardens at the rear of the village. An old lady hung the washing while her husband dutifully carried the basket.

“Bingo,” Joe said, “disguises.”

“Disguises?”

“We're thieves now. On the run.” Bobby thought of George and Lennie, traipsing across the outskirts of a California plantation like brothers, watching each other's backs. When the couple had gone, Bobby kept lookout while Joe took every last item from the line, underwear included, and carried the heavy wet stack out into the barley fields. Bulky and worn, the jacket fitted him neatly. Bobby wore the old man's flat clap and a threadbare cotton shirt so big his hands barely made it past the elbows. Joe held a turquoise patterned dress up to his body and swished it around like a tango partner.

“What do you think?” he said.

“Not your color.”

“Not for me, smart ass. For Val. A gift.”

Until now it hadn't occurred to Bobby that Joe might have some romantic affinity with Val. The thought brought him out in prickly heat. “She hates turquoise. Reminds her of the Caribbean Sea.”

“What's wrong with being reminded of the Caribbean Sea?”

“She nearly drowned in it,” he lied.

Joe tossed the dress to the floor and Bobby made a mental note of its exact whereabouts—twenty-eight paces from the tree, perpendicular to the electricity pylon—so that he could collect it come nightfall.

Joe put on a pair of the old man's gray pinstripe trousers, tying the waist with string, then smoothed his hair to the side. “What do you think,” he asked Bobby, “disguised?”

“Kind of.”

Joe rummaged through his pockets.

“Then maybe I've got a better idea.” He was holding a switchblade inches from Bobby's face, close enough that he could feel the metal's coldness reflected on his skin. “How about you give me a trim?” Joe handed Bobby the knife and squatted down beside him. The pump of an artery throbbed in Joe's neck, tender, slit-able. Shaking, Bobby wound the mane around his hand and shaped it into a ponytail.

“Get a move on, will you? I don't want a perm,” Joe said, “slice it off. We can tidy it up back at the ranch.” The blade hit the column of hair with force enough, but the angle was skewed, so Bobby sawed through it with the corrugated edge. Eventually the golden rope of hair came free in his hand, and the knife felt more like a sword.

“Good boy,” Joe said, tidier, the two buds of his ears now visible and making him instantly more human. Bobby instinctively stuffed the hair into his pocket.

They walked back the long way, over fields and out toward the bypass, where factories, warehouses and a homeware depot formed a small, depressing-looking business park. Reject piles of broken furniture and dented paint cans littered the yard. They made their way back to the mobile library, declaring their booty enough.

•  •  •

Joe stripped and gutted the chicken, tossing the liver and heart to Bert. They cooked it over the fire, slathered in what was left of the barbecue sauce, and ate it with doughnuts for dessert. The night froze their words in mist, so they put on as many of the stolen clothes as they could and took it in turns to read stories to each other. Rosa rocked in the warmth of the flame.

Bobby picked up
Of Mice and Men
and read the last few pages. Though he was sad that George had shot Lennie, he knew that it had been for the greater good, so that Lennie didn't suffer. He wondered if he could kill Joe should he need to, and tried to remember into which of his pockets Joe had put the knife.

“It's your turn, Joe Joe,” Rosa said.

Joe's tongue curled a mouthful of smoke into an S-bend. “I'm not one for stories,” he said.

“Come on,” Val said. “Rosa will pick one for you.” He shook his head. Bobby envied the authority he mustered.

“I told you,” he said, “not for me.”

“Then tell us what's in Scotland.”

“Huh?”

“Scotland. When we found you, that's where you said you were headed.” Joe flicked the cigarette's clubfoot into the embers.

“A house.”

“A house?”

“
The
house. More of a mansion, if I'm honest.”

Bobby wolf-whistled. Unable to copy him, Rosa said “Switzswoo” in a pitch that sent Bert scuttling around the camp.

“Saw it when I was a child,” Joe said. “Never forgot it. Right beside a dam, and the clearest blue loch you'll ever see, I swear. Damn thing's a mirror made of water.”

“Who lives there?” Rosa asked.

Joe lit another smoke. “That's the thing. I doubt nobody lives there anymore. Whole place is empty, I reckon. Some decrepit country pile, falling down to nothing. Needs a lot of love. Whole tanker full of paint, ten thousand nails and all the time in the world, but I could fix it up all right. Then it'd be total privacy. No one goes that far into the wilds for a crumbling old wreck of a house like that.”

“What do you mean you saw it?”

“Moved around a lot as a boy. Different homes, different families. Went hiking in the mountains one time. Just came across the place, standing up in the fog like a castle or something. Always promised myself I'd make it back there one day.” Rosa smiled. “Want to know the best bit? Whoever lived there had their own private zoo on the grounds. I swear, on a still day when the wind wasn't screaming havoc in the hills, you used to be able to hear the lions roaring, and the parrots squawking and the . . .”

“Bears growling?” Rosa said.

“Exactly. Grrrr. Heard them all from the other side of the wall. Always wanted to find out for myself where all those animals lived.”

Val blushed. It had been a long time since she'd seen another adult talk to Rosa in a way that made her respond in kind, or even really talk to her like a fellow human being, but there she was, rolling around at the feet of the man from the woods, dressed in stolen clothes. What did it matter if Joe was spinning a yarn? They had come this far. To hell with the truth. Lit by only the flicker of a fire, everything is the same, more or less.

A jangle, far away, grew nearer.

“Shh . . .” Bobby said. Val and Rosa stopped talking and soon they could hear it too, the familiar sound of the dog collar bell coming up the hill from the village. It got closer this time, moving on the other side of the thick oaks, then without warning the dog burst into the clearing and headed for the chicken carcass.

“Lola!” Her owner was still some distance away, but nearing, and worse, searching. Bert growled. Val wrapped a hand around his muzzle.

Joe baby-stepped toward Lola, hands out by his sides, and tentatively shepherded her back up the track to the trees. At the final moment, defeat in her nose, she swooped beneath his grasp, snatched the chicken and savaged it, showering Joe in splintered bone and flecks of cold meat.

“Lola,” the man said, closer still. Joe kicked out at the dog in panic, missed, and thrown from balance fell over the grassy verge they had been using as a platform from which to piss. Angry and embarrassed, he climbed back up and reached into the pocket where he kept the switchblade. Anger overtook him. With one smooth jab Joe could slit the dog's throat, let the threat bleed silently onto the mulch. He was ready to kill it—but that would give them all away—and Bobby was the only one thinking clearly enough to realize it.

“Lola,” the man said again, now at the cloak of the trees, close enough to hear. The dog walked toward Joe and passed underneath his legs. Joe reached down and grabbed his tail. Bobby launched himself at Joe with all the force he could muster, causing him to topple over the dog, almost crushing it, and land on his back on the grass. With all his strength, Bobby tried to wrestle the knife from his grip. In Joe's hands Bobby's arm was a twig, brittle and small. Joe let go before he broke it. Bobby stood over him, the knife in his hand, the blade exposed. Lola dropped the chicken and its spine shattered on the ground. Bobby lifted the blade above his head. He thought of George and Lennie. He thought of the greater good.

He slashed the knife down through Joe's bootlaces, yanked them from his feet and quickly removed his socks. With one hand, as swiftly as Joe had ever rolled a cigarette, he balled the socks and dangled them in front of Lola's eyes. Enraptured, she licked the salty liquorice-blackness of her lips, as, exalted, Bobby launched the socks high into the sky. They sailed to the top of the tree line and disappeared out of sight, with Lola in rapid pursuit.

“There you are,” the man said, jangling the bell as he clipped her lead to its collar. “Where the hell did you find these dirty old things?” The dog sneezed. “Come on, let's get you home.” The ringing faded until all that was left was their breathing as one.

Bobby ran to where Val and Rosa were standing and they threw their arms around him. Joe flung the tattered remnants of his laces into the woods. As he walked over to join the embrace, his boots slipped free from his feet.

Bobby, finally, felt like a man, or at least, the glue in which others are caught. The two, he decided, were one and the same.

They went into the mobile library together.

“Joe,” Val said, “I think it's time we told you who we are . . .”

The trees were black paper pasted on the sky. Mirror-eyed rabbits bounced back the moonlight. Inside the mobile library, Bobby and Joe lay on the carpet together, the files spread out before them. Bobby had never showed them to anyone before. Neatly arranged like this, they made him tremble with pride.

“And these are parts I cut out of her clothes,” he said, “so that she remembers what dresses she had and can buy the same ones again. If she's still the same size.” What he could rescue of his mother's hair from the pine needles he kept pressed inside an atlas, beside the roses, now flat and crisp. In an envelope were the locks of it congealed with blood that he'd salvaged from the flesh wounds on his stomach. Joe didn't recognize his own blond tresses tangled in the mix. He held the photograph of Bobby's mother, rubbed his thumb over the pregnant hump of her dress and had an idea of sudden and stunning clarity.

“A family!” he said, to Val, who was reading
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
to Rosa, reclining on a bean bag in the corner by Travel.

“What?”

“They're looking for a woman and two children in a stolen mobile library.”

“And a dog,” Rosa said.

“Right, and a dog. But they're not looking for a family. So we become one. The disguise we need is each other.” Joe, just like any other soldier, had been schooled in camouflage when he joined the army. He appreciated it not just as a necessity in combat, but as a discipline that could be twisted into everyday life.