Shadow Season (7 page)

“God no, you want to die?”

“What?”

“Don’t call no one.”

He frowns and feels the ice crystals trapped in the furrows of his forehead. “Tell me why.”

“We got to settle accounts.”

“Who does?”

A grunt rumbles in her chest. It’s the sound of a very old and bitter woman. “Don’t everybody?”

“Listen—”

“You listen to me, man.”

The dread and determination are distinct in her voice. He’s heard resolve like this before, and knows the truth of it immediately.

“Explain what you mean,” he says.

“I mean you need to listen so no big wrongs come this way. That might not mean much to you but it’s of considerable stake to me.” It hurts her to speak, the words softening as she tries to concentrate beyond the pain. “They say you blind folk got good ears. You hearing me good, blind man?”

“Yes. Can you walk?”

“If you put me on my feet and lend me a shoulder, I’ll see about it.”

He eases her down carefully. “What’s your name?”

“Harley Moon.”

“Moon?”

She clucks her tongue. “I said it.”

“Like on the tombstones?”

“That graveyard is full of my people. Most holes around here are.”

Sometimes when he’s sitting on the back porch of his cottage and the breeze is right, he can hear someone walking there among the wrecked gravestones. He’s called out before but never gets a response. “You visit them much?”

“This is what you want to talk about, man?”

“Just asking.”

“They got no real need of me, nor me of them. What
are you doing prowling around back there with my late kin?”

“I live nearby.”

“I know that. But it doesn’t answer the question.”

He hears the wind chimes clatter on the porch of his cottage. They’re bamboo with Asian symbols carved into them. They strike together with a dull clacking. Not particularly musical but they’re distinct from the ringing metal chimes hanging near the front doors of the three academy buildings. Roz hung them all in place shortly after she and Finn arrived at St. Val’s. It was a good idea, but Finn can’t help feeling a mild resentment toward Roz for it. Anytime anyone does something helpful it pisses him off.

“You listening to me, blind man?”

“What?”

“I said—”

“Can you make it to the school?”

“No, not there.”

“Why not?”

“Not there, please.”

There’s a hint of fear in her voice. Somebody thumped her. There are worse things than a little snow. She should be looked after. He thinks Roz might be back by now. “We have a nurse. She can help you.”

“Can’t go there to the Hotel, I said.”

He’s heard the holler folk still referring to the academy as the Hotel. It hasn’t been a hotel in forty years, but small-town memories are long and stubborn. “Tell me why.”

“It’s not safe. They’ll be coming sooner or later.”

“Who?”

“You ask a lot of simpleton questions.”

“I’m starting to get that feeling.”

There’s a slight popping sound as she snaps her mouth shut. He sees the Tennessee beauty queen with her lips smoothed, grinning at him, flirting the way she did but always dancing away. He’d ask her what a Blueberry Day Parade was all about, and she’d answer, Blueberries, a’course.

The wooden chimes are louder. The trail leads to the walkway in front of his cottage, already cleared once by Murphy. Finn stumbles a bit as his feet touch cement.

Harley grabs hold of his arm and tries to steady him. “This your place?”

“Yes.”

“Right here within view of every hotel window? Don’t you worry that they stare at you at night?”

“Who?”

A shrug of thin shoulders inside an oversized jacket. “Anybody.”

“Come inside. Let me call someone.”

She follows Finn inside. Considering the situation with Vi, he should be more careful. Here he is inviting another underage girl inside his place, but what the hell else is he supposed to do? He goes for the phone but Harley grips his wrist. Her hand is extremely rough for such a small girl, and she sort of slaps him across the knuckles. It’s an assertive and humiliating gesture.

Instead, he gets a towel, bandages, and hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom. She snaps the towel from him and wipes down his face before she does her own. She dries her hair with quick, violent motions. He holds
the bandages and peroxide out but she ignores him and eventually he puts them down on the kitchen table.

“This is a lonely place, what you got here,” she says.

“Why do you say that?”

“There aren’t no pictures on the walls. Should have some, for visitors at least.”

He’s never thought of it before. She’s right. He imagines how empty a house without pictures on the walls looks. Roz has never said anything about it. He thinks of Ray’s apartment in the city. Long wood floors, lots of nice furniture, the best stereo and home-theater equipment available, but no photos, paintings, or prints. The burning white walls leading up to a vaulted ceiling like a glacier.

This little girl makes him wonder.

“What do you do there, at the Hotel?” she asks.

Like he might say elevator operator or bellhop. “I’m a teacher.”

“What do you teach?”

“Literature.”

“What they call modern? Or what they say is classical?”

“Both.”

“So that’s why you got so many books around,” Harley says. “Dad likes Westerns. Someone reads these ones to you?”

“They’re mine, from when I could see.”

“Yeah, I can see the scar on your head now, since your hair’s wet. How do you teach somebody words when you can’t read them yourself?”

“I have an assistant who helps me. She reads me my students’ essays so I can grade them.”

“So what happened to you?”

It’s a question almost terrifying in its simplicity. It’s the one that gets all the wheels turning forward and backward. It makes him wag his head. That’s his only possible response.

She steps to the fridge and he can hear her uncorking the half-full bottle of Zinfandel and swigging directly from it.

Wonderful. A drunk underage girl covered with bruises in his place. He might as well hold his wrists out and just wait here for the snap of the cuffs.

She burps without covering her mouth, with no embarrassment. “You got a girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“She the nurse?”

It’s not exactly a secret that he and Roz are an item, but there’s something about the way Harley Moon says it that makes him think that someone told her this in confidence. “How do you know that?”

“So she’s not just your partner.”

“My partner?”

“I know some things. I been around. I heard some chatter.”

“Whose chatter?”

“The worst kind. The kind I wasn’t supposed to hear. But I got big ears. It’s the only way to keep my family out of any real bad trouble, as much discomfort as they can keep out of, and them who want to stay out. I look out for my little brothers and sisters, ’cause the bigger ones are touched. But sometimes folks see my ears are twitching, and then I’m in the path of misery myself.”

He thinks, Christ, how this girl talks in romantic tragic terms. This dying town has taught them their own kind of merciless poetry. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes, you do. Things aren’t good for you, blind man. You got an ill will thinking on you.”

“An ill will? What do you mean?”

“Make it right.”

“Make what right?”

He feels very stupid. Has he ever asked this many questions? Even when he woke up in the dark in his hospital bed? He holds his palms up to the girl trying to get her to slow down and make some sense.

“I’m trying to help. I want to do some good. So pay what you owe. Do it fast. Do it now.”

Finn listens to her drink down the rest of the wine and thinks about exactly how many academy rules and criminal laws he’s currently breaking. He hopes the storm’s bad enough that Judith isn’t watching his door. Or Violet. The shit you have to worry about, every second of the day.

He repeats himself. “What do you mean by that? And how do you know about the metal plate in my head?”

Harley Moon doesn’t answer him. She floats around the room for a minute, hitting one spot and then another. Finn gets the distinct feeling she’s just looking at him from different angles. Now here, now here. Checking out his scars, the blank gaze. Her footsteps soften. There’s a willful, strained sound at the back of her throat, as if she’s urging him to make the right choice.

“Harley?”

A breath of cold air sweeps against his throat and then there’s only warmth and silence. The implacable, impenetrable darkness seems to almost thin for an instant. Now here, now here. The girl is gone.

A HALF HOUR LATER, ROZ WALKS
in, stamps snow from her boots, and asks, “What’s happened?”

Only one second inside the room and she’s already aware. Again Finn thinks that he somehow gives off signals, generates a field that alerts the sensitive to his predicaments.

He ventures a lie, never the smartest move when you’re talking to someone who’s already on to you. “Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that, Finn.” There’s no real heat in her voice at all. “Was that Treato kid in here again?”

“No.”

“Thank Christ for that. All the wine’s gone. Who are these bandages for? Are you all right?”

Roz is sniffing the air. For what? Cookies? Spermicide? Unoxidized blood?

She moves in on him too fast, the way he hates. She blitzes forward until she’s only a half inch from his nose, so intense and demanding that he rears his chin back. Fuck. He forgets how quickly she reverts to the woman she used to be, the one working all the action.

“Was it Vi?”

“I told you, it wasn’t Vi.”

“Jesus, another one?”

“Nothing like that. A holler girl. Twelve or thirteen. She was hurt. I found her unconscious in the graveyard.”

“God damn it, Finn—”

“You listening? She was hurt.”

“What were you doing back there? You know you shouldn’t go walking on your own with a storm breaking.”

As they often do, they talk at cross-purposes. Five years they’ve been together, and they’ve never been able to get through a conversation without heading off on some kind of fucked-up tangent. “Forget that, Roz. Her name is Harley Moon.”

“What’s that?” Her breath squeezes from her. “Moon?”

He relates everything that Harley said to him. What she told him and what she implied. He knows he’s not doing a good job of showing how concerned he is because Roz is tsking now. It’s a trait she’s picked up from Judith, and it really crawls up his ass. He’s just not getting his point across.

“What was she doing out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who hit her?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

She tosses the empty wine bottle in the trash. “Well, she couldn’t have been too bad off if she left on her own. Did she make a play for you?”

“Not every teenage girl has a crush on me.”

“That’s a precarious position to take, Finn. Okay, I’ll rephrase the question. Did you touch her?”

“I carried her inside.”

“Did you touch her?”

He knows he deserves this, but Jesus Christ.

“No. This girl was hurt and scared.”

The answer actually seems to calm Roz a bit. “But she didn’t say why.”

“No.”

“Maybe she was running away from some aggressive boy.”

“Maybe.”

“Or she didn’t want to catch a beating from her father. You know how these holler families are.”

“Yeah. But she didn’t want me to call the cops, and she didn’t want to come to the school to get in from out of the blizzard or get her head looked at.”

The tsking again, hard and flat. “They don’t trust the police any more than city street kids do, and they don’t trust outsiders like us, no matter how long we live in their backyard.”

“I know, you’re right,” he says, and closes his lips on any further response. “She calls this place the Hotel.”

“They all do. They always have.”

“They’ve got long memories.”

“Everyone does.”

Maybe she’s talking about him, or herself. Either way it’s true.

“She knew about us,” he says. “That we’re together.”

“So what? We’ve been up here in the sticks for three years. We’re sort of an open secret.”

“Even to the townspeople?”

“Sure, I suppose. Why not? They don’t care enough one way or the other.”

“Not like we move in the same social circles. I’ve never said more than two sentences to any of them.”

“You’ve never said more than two sentences to just about anybody, Finn.”

Roz reaches out and runs a hand through his hair, brushing his curls back, covering his scars again. She rests her palm on the side of his face and rubs, like she’s trying to scour lipstick smears away. She’s telling him something in that touch but he has no idea what. He knows it’ll come to him, later, when he least expects it, in the night or in the middle of class. Something will click and it’ll all come together, and he’ll think, That’s what it meant.

He should let it go, but he can’t. The girl has stirred the cop in him, gotten him buzzing. “Harley said someone’s thinking bad thoughts about us.”