Someplace to Be Flying (40 page)

“But you can’t. What’s done is done.”

“I can try, Ray. I’ve got to try.”

How many times had they been through this before?

“You know what happens,” Ray said. “It just gets worse. You can’t fix what’s broken. Hell, for all we know, this is the way things are supposed to be.”

“You really believe that?”

Ray was quiet for a long moment, before he finally turned to look at Cody.

“No,” he said. “I guess I don’t.”

“Don’t worry,” Cody told him. “I’m not trying to win you back to the cause or anything. If you want out, you’re out.” He smiled and touched the bridge of his nose. “No hard feelings.”

“I appreciate that.” Ray hesitated, then added, “And the same goes for Kerry, right?”

Cody sighed. “Sure. No problem.”

Ray knew he was lying, but there was no point in pushing it. Better to let Cody think he was taking everything at face value and just be careful. That wouldn’t be too hard. It never hurt to be careful around Cody.

“So what’s going on here?” he asked.

“Hard to say. There’s maybe a couple of dozen corbæ having themselves a powwow somewhere over there”—Cody made a casual motion with his hand in the direction of an abandoned tenement farther down the street—“but I haven’t been able to get any closer because there’s too many of their little cousins around. Every time I try to get a little closer, they start dive-bombing me.”

“You see Jack go in there?”

“I don’t know
who’s
in there.” Cody gave him a sharp look. “What do you want with Jack, anyway? Since when did the two of you get so tight?”

Ray shrugged. “Maybe since we realized we’re kin.”

“So we’re back to the girl.”

“Kind of hard to avoid her,” Ray said, “seeing how everybody’s so interested in her.”

“Did you care so much for her grandmother?” Cody wanted to know. “Hell, do you even remember her?”

“That’s not really the point.”

“Then what would be the point? Either you’ve got a reason to be so concerned about the girl or you’re just blowing air my way. Which is it, Ray?”

“Blood,” Ray said. “It’s that simple. We’re kin.”

“I don’t remember that ever meaning so much to you before.”

Ray smiled humorlessly. “I guess that’s no big surprise seeing how we’ve already figured out you never really knew me.”

He could tell Cody wanted to push it, but something held him back. That made Ray nervous. There had to be a pretty good reason for Cody’s playing nice and that could only mean the trouble was more serious than he’d thought.

“Screw it,” Cody said. “I’m not here to argue with you.”

“Suits me.”

“But let me tell you one thing,” Cody added. “While you’re getting so cozy with your new crow friends, think about this: Just because your granddaughter’s got some crow blood in her doesn’t mean they’ll be welcoming you into the fold with open arms.”

“I’m not expecting them to. I just want her out of this. I don’t want anybody using her—not you, not them.”

“Yeah, well, don’t turn your back on them,” Cody said.

Ray never saw him leave. One moment he was standing there on the street, the next he’d twisted the shadows around him, wrapped them around his tall body like a winding sheet, and he was gone. Ray stood for a time, the skin prickling at the nape of his neck and up his spine, waiting for he wasn’t sure what. A gunshot, maybe. A knife in the back. Some kind of payback for breaking Cody’s nose and walking out on him the way he had.

What he got was a pair of crow girls dropping silently out of the sky. They landed giggling on the street in front of him and immediately found places to lounge—one sitting cross-legged on the roof of the junked car, the other on its hood, legs dangling, heels kicking against the fender, which woke little clouds of rust.

“This is a much better look,” Maida told him, looking him up and down. “Black is so veryvery you.”

Zia nodded. “Mmm. I could eat you all night long.”

“Nice to see the two of you again,” Ray said, not quite sure how to take their welcome.

The last time he’d seen them, they’d been ready to cut him. Now they were greeting him like a long-lost friend. Crow girls. Who could figure them?

“So are you in disguise?” Maida wanted to know.

“Who are you disguised for?” Zia added.

“Because we knew you ever so right away.”

“If not even quickerly-er.”

Ray shrugged. “I’m just trying to fit in. You know, this being the City of Crows and all.”

“You’ve been talking to Jolene. She always says that.”

“How is Jolene? Is she big or small?”

Ray had to smile. “Been a few years since I saw her last, but she was small then.”

“We like her better small,” Maida told him.

“We like it when even/body’s our size.”

Maida nodded. “That’s why we like you now.”

“I appreciate that,” Ray said, which made them both giggle. “So what’s going on over there?” he added, nodding toward the tenement.

“Oh, you know,” Zia said, obviously bored by with the question. “Talk? talktalk. They never stop.”

“What’re you all talking about?” he asked.

Maida shrugged. “Who knows? Nothing fun.”

“Completely without fun.”

Ray studied the pair of them for a moment, unsure as always if they were only being disingenuous, or if they really didn’t know. Looking at them sitting there on the car, acting goofy, it was easy to forget how hard they could be, how quickly the switchblades could slip down out of their sleeves and appear in their hands. But having seen it firsthand earlier in the day, he had no trouble believing Jack’s stories about them now.

“You’ve gone and lost Raven’s pot, haven’t you?” he said.

Maida shook her head. “Oh, no. Whatever made you think that?”

“We’ve just forgotten what it looks like,” Zia said. “That’s all.” Then she added a “Whoops” and put her hand across her mouth.

“I kind of already figured that part out,” Ray told them. “Thing I’m wondering about is, where does Kerry fit in?”

There was no immediate response. The crow girls exchanged a look Ray couldn’t read. Zia glanced back at the tenement, before returning her attention to her companion. Maida merely shrugged and began to bounce a small rubber ball on the pavement.

“People are kind of upset,” Zia said. The playfulness had left her voice and she seemed years older than she had moments ago. “Jack’s always warning everybody about Cody, but no one pays attention. ‘Either keep that pot safe, or break it,’ he says, ‘or there’s always going to be trouble.’ “

“Only no one wants to break it,” Maida put in, her voice changed now, too. She caught the ball and rolled it back and forth between her palms. “It’s so long ago. Oldold.”

Zia nodded. “Older than Raven.”

“Older than us, maybe.”

“So people are mad,” Zia went on, “because Raven’s gone away and he’s let the pot get lost again, but it’s not just his to take care of, you know. It’s everybody’s, really.”

“Only nobody want’s the responsibility, so why get mad at Raven?”

“Except we’re not mad at him.”

“We’re never mad at him,” Maida agreed.

“So now Cody’s back and he’s brought the cuckoos with him and everything’s gone dark and dangerous again—like it did when Jack went killing crazy.”

“Nobody likes that most of all.”

Ray wasn’t surprised. You’d have to be crazy yourself to want to see those times come back again.

“Is Jack in there with the rest of them?” he asked.

“Nobody knows where Jack’s gone,” Maida said.

“Jack’s gone away. Not like Raven, but gonegone away all the same. Looking for Katy.”

Ray was getting confused. “Who’s Katy?”

Zia shrugged. “Just some girl.”

“Some old friend.”

“Nobody important.”

“Except to Jack.”

This was getting way off the topic so far as Ray was concerned.

“Look,” he said. “I just want to know what Kerry’s got to do with it. You’re planning to use her to find it, aren’t your That’s why you brought her here.”

Maida shook her head. “Who told you that?”

“I just figured it out.”

“Nobody brought her here,” Zia said. “She just called Chloë and Chloë invited her to stay at the house to be nice.”

Ray smiled. “Uh-huh.”

“Chloë can be very kind,” Maida assured him.

“So why are you all so protective of? her? Why wouldn’t you let her come with me?”

“Because she didn’t want to go,” Zia said.

Maida nodded. “Duh.”

Their answers were as pat as Cody’s but he didn’t think they were lying to him.

“So you’re not using her to find the pot?” he said.

“No,” Zia replied. “But that’s a veryvery good idea.”

“Veryvery,” Maida agreed. She began to bounce her ball again. “Maybe she can see things that everybody else is too tired and old to see.”

Zia looked over her shoulder to the tenement. “We should tell them and then maybe they’ll stop all their talktalktalking.”

“And we could have some fun again.”

“Don’t,” Ray said.

They both looked at him.

“I’m not telling you,” he said. “I’m asking. She could get hurt.”

“We like her,” Maida said. “She’s so funny.”

“We’d never want to see her get hurt.”

“Cody wants to use her,” Ray told them. “And maybe those cuckoos he’s brought into this. I’m not sure how much they know. Maybe they’re just using all of this as an excuse to settle some old scores… .”

Ray’s voice trailed off?. He never saw the switchblade appear in Maida’s hand, never heard the
snick
as it opened. But suddenly it was there and the small plastic ball was impaled on the point of its blade.

“We don’t much like cuckoos,” Zia said.

Her dark eyes flickered with dangerous light and the tense promise of violence hung in the air around them.

“Nobody does,” Ray said.

The crow girls remained silent, their attention gone inward, or off someplace Ray couldn’t see. On the ledges of the buildings, along the rooflines, the little cousins began to stir. Ray found himself remembering something Jack had told him once, how the crow girls dealt with living forever by moving through the days in an ever-present now. Zen time. They didn’t worry about tomorrow, didn’t think about the past. He also said that they didn’t directly involve themselves in events. Ray didn’t think either observation was true—not by what he was getting from them now.

“You remember everything, don’t you?” he said. “You only pretend to forget.”

Maida blinked. She stuck the ball in her mouth and pulled the point of her knife out of it, then spit the ball into her hand. The switchblade disappeared back up her sleeve.

“When we don’t remember, we really don’t,” she said.

Ray didn’t recognize her voice at all now. It held neither a giddy good humor nor a hardness, but was as matter-of-fact as Chloë‘s—or Raven’s before he went away.

“But that doesn’t mean it goes away,” she added.

Zia tapped a finger against her temple and nodded. “Everything goes on living somewhere in here. Mostly we choose not to think about it.”

“Because if we did,” Maida explained, “we might start thinking like Cody and try to change the world.”

“Maybe that’d be a good thing,” Ray found himself saying. “Maybe you wouldn’t screw it up.”

They both shook their heads sadly.

“That’s where Cody’s got it wrong,” Zia said. “You don’t change the world by stirring up something in Raven’s pot.”

“Then how do you change it?”

“By being strong and true.”

“See,” Maida added. “That’s what makes the cuckoos so bad. You can only gentle them by killing them and every death diminishes us.”

Zia nodded. “We should know.”

“Or ask Jack if you don’t believe us.”

“I believe you,” Ray said. “I just never thought of it that way.”

“The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That’s the only way a person can be changed.”

“By looking inside yourself,” Zia said. “Even if you have to look into a mirror that’s outside yourself? to do it.”

“And you know,” Maida added. “That mirror can be a story you hear, or just somebody else’s eyes. Anything that reflects back so that you can see your? self in it.”

“We can’t do that with the cuckoos?” Ray asked.

Maida shook her head. “You can’t do it with people who never look outside themselves.”

Was that what had happened to him? Ray wondered. All those years of going along with Cody until Jack held up one of his stories, bright as any mirror, and all of a sudden Ray had found himself thinking about somebody else for a change.

“So do you think Jack’s right?” he had to ask. “Should we be trying to smash Raven’s pot?”

Maida shrugged. “First you’d have to find it.”

“And then,” Zia said, “you’d have to understand it.”

“And then you’d be able to decide what to do.”

Zia made a helpless gesture with her hands. “So you see the problem.”

Ray shook his head.

“Duh,” Maida said, playfulness returning to her voice.

She tossed her ball to him and he caught it without thinking.

Zia took pity on him. “That pot’s deepdeep mystery, Ray. Nobody can understand it.”

“So… ?”

“Not even Raven,” Zia said, “and he’s had it forever.”

“Is that where he’s gone?” Ray asked. “Looking for the mystery?”

Zia shrugged. “Who knows? But if he did, he’s looking in the wrong place.”

“Why’s that?”

She knocked a knuckle against the rusted metal of the car she was sitting on. “Because this is where the mystery lives. Out here. In the world. The only thing we carry around inside us is a reflection of it.”

She jumped down to the ground, landing lightly on her feet. Maida pushed off from the hood of the car to join her.

“We should go,” Zia said.

Maida nodded. “They like it when we listen to them talktalktalk.”

“You won’t mention Kerry?”

They shook their heads.

“But maybe we’ll take a turn looking for that pot.”

“If we could only remember what it looks like,” Maida said.

“Try remembering how it smells,” Ray told them.