Something Of A Kind (11 page)

As she put the black top behind her, she wondered if he’d
forgotten his way to the tunnels. Noah moved with purpose, eyes
locked on each destination. Still, it seemed erratic to her, as though
the shortcut was more of a meandering. It became a game – guessing
where his next twist in the maze was. Rather than taking the sandy
path behind the building’s dumpsters, they moved through the trees.
She shadowed as he followed a stream of runoff and scattered
boulders, over a rundown train bridge, rounding walls of rock,
cutting across unmarked hiking trails.

Every
once
in a
while
Noah pointed out a
seemingly
characterless object and identified it as a personal landmark or a
destination for local teens, reciting stories that roused laughter and
quirking smiles. His childhood soaked the ground. Every leaf had
seen his journey. Noah was home. She found herself hushed, for a
moment wishing it were hers, too.

When he fell silent, she imagined herself as a child
– scrawny,
pale, and precocious, with dark ringlets braided down her back,
uncovering his adventures on the tracks, owning the small town
friendships like a birthright.

What she had with the kids back home was flimsy, shifting year
to year. She had never had the relationship that didn’t dissipate when
the pain was too great to share, not outside of the family she was
raised with. The odd-couple bonds between Noah and his friends
were tangible, strong. Still quiet, Aly focused on his breathing,
listening for the howls from the night on the ATVs.

Something made those boys run for the hills.

 

“So,” he said finally, “how’d you score your dad’s keys?”

“He’s out of town for work.” Her fingers shifted to prod her back
pocket for reassurance. She added, “I met the living room for the
first time this morning over coffee. Apparently, we have Syfy in
common.”

A burst of laughter erupted from his chest. “Who would’ve
thought?”

 

She smiled, pleased with herself. “It’s really that ironic?”

“If you knew my dad and his obsession with your dad and his
obsession, then yes.” He joked. “Unless you meant it the sense of
cliché.”

She
blinked, trying
not to be
impressed.
Recovering, she
dramatically swept a hand across her forehead, joking, “So Doctor
Freak drives someone else insane too? Phew! I thought I was the
only one.”

He smirked. “There is nothing that does not irritate or
disappoint my dad, including yours. No offense.”

 

“Except for you?”

“Especially me.” Noah sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “I
probably won't live up to expectation. And I certainly won't grow
my hair that long. Did you notice? It’s ridiculous."

She
laughed through a
sad smile, knowing the ache
of
shortcoming. “If it’s any consolation, I get that. My father acts like I
carry the Tvirus. I still have no idea what he does.”
“But hey, it’s definitely not bigfoot right?”

“I wouldn’t know. You probably know more than I do. I don’t
think my mom knew him, either.What’s to know?” She shrugged.
“What I mean, though, is I understand. I don’t see much of a point in
trying to please the unappeasable. Life’s too short.”

“Jerks are too jerky,” he agreed, amused. The line dropped it like
an old lyric, the repetition of familiar advice. As they converged
with another footpath, he nudged the piece of metal hammered to
the ground. “We’re almost there.”

Someone’s been here a while.

Everything had fallen against the elements, destroyed and mudsoaked. She made out
discarded cigarettes, greeting cards, old
clothes, and cardboard signs – the only intelligible ones holding
something along the lines of, ‘wish you were here’ or ‘anything
helps, God bless’. Even a few washcloth hand puppets were
integrated with the rubble. She couldn’t decide whether to call it a
landfill or a graveyard, inevitably electing for the latter.

The more she stared, the more organic the scene felt. It was
beautiful in a crumbling way. Her gaze traveled ahead of her, far
along the tracks as they stretched on only to curl into the wooded
mountains.

“They’re been some really hard times out here,” she observed.

Noah nodded. “Yeah. It’s always been hard for locals. The town
hasn’t been… well, flourishing, since World War II, back when
everyone worked in this big factory that mass-produced and handpacked cans filled with protein. Mostly fish, I guess. Ashland’s
pretty new compared to most of the area. Or in general.”

Aly felt her jaw slack and closed it, nibbling her lip as though it
would lock in place. “What do you mean?”

“These tracks are older than this town. A lot of the land here is
blown out of rock, so there’s not much history for this area. There
are a lot of natives that migrated from other little tribes, but that was
a few generations ago. Therearen’t any pure groups, not ancient or
anything. We’re not even considered a reservation, though some
people call it that anyway. The families are old, but we don’t do
powwows or potlatches or anything like that. Some people do, but
because of where they’re from genetically. It’s why it’s so hard to
narrow down the legends, because most of them were adopted and
distorted from other people.” His voice trailed off, racing past her
distant stare, melting
into the horizon. As he
spoke, he
went
somewhere else – wherever his stories came from. Realizing he
returned from the silence to wait for a response, she nodded dumbly.

Where do the words go?

“I mean, Ashland is pretty westernized, but it’s not like we have
no tradition at all. We
still
have
elders, even though they’re
practically self-appointed. We have music, dance troupes, art. And of
course, legends.”

“Like the bigfoot thing?”

“Yeah. There’s plenty about that –
most call him Hairy Man
because of some old newspaper article. There are tribes that call it
Omah or Gigit. You’d say bigfoot or sasquatch.”

“Actually, we’ve got other words for it too. There are myths
where I come from, too. Kingsley is a city, but it’s a city in the
middle of nowhere. The Adirondacks are infamous
for it. My
grandfather used to say they lived in abandoned watch towers.”

“It seems like the Hairy Man is stalking you, then.” He grinned,
squinting to the sky. “They say the stars do too.”

“I get that. It’s like when you’re a child, and you expect your car
to pass the sun, but it’s a tease, the size of your thumb, just dipping
behind trees.”

“I did that too,” Noah laughed, raising his hand and closing one
eye to cover the beam in the sky. “Have you heard of the sun
thieves?”

She shook her head.

“It’s one theory, I suppose. The sto
ry of where the stars come
from. There was once a man who was terribly wise. Going into his
village, he spoke about the worth of all people. He said, ‘the Sun is
made of gold and the Moon of silver’, because equality by nature is
meant to unchallenged, never influenced by men. A group of thieves
fled to the woods, where they climbed the highest tree on the
mountain, and ran along the rays of light through the sky, to the
Sun.”

“That’s one way to go about it,” she noted, filling the lapse in his
words.

“When the Sun saw them,” he continued, “she grabbed the
thieves, crushing them in her hand. She kissed the earth, and
scattered them across the sky with a breath of light. She warmed the
earth in the center, creating the stars. Supposedly, when people die,
theSun makes more stars.”

He spoke quickly to conclude as they rounded another wall of
rock, slowing to a stop as the tunnel came into view. She had
expected a sort of overpass, but the hole was narrow, carved out of
the mountain. He paused, stretching an arm to prevent her from
going forward. Whistling inside, he listened for a response. Hearing
only an echo, he ducked in to press against the walls, nudging
wooden beams. Sighing, he warned, “We should be careful. It’s
pretty old.”

Some sections had crumbled away, erosion taking the stone
where rot had taken wood platforms. She assumed Noah’s hesitation
to go further inside was related to the structural instability. From the
fallen rocks scattered across the ground, it was a rational concern.

Every visible inch of the original wall was covered, some pieces
extending far beyond what the sunlight illuminated. The uneven
surface of the stone hadn’t inhibited the artists and vandals. Paint
filled the nooks and crannies in the same way
the Japanese
aggrandize cracks with gold. In the fresher pieces, it bubbled like
only leaving a spray-can focused on a single section too long could.

The majority of the mural was a forest of trees. They were
inverted, not unlike the cedars in Alaska’s Glacier Gardens
advertised in every gas station from Juneau to Ashland. Roots
sprayed from the top like weeping branches, disheveled. The top
was cropped to one side, as though half the trunk gave way before
the other. Several bears lay in submission at their feet while whales
were tossed across the tops. It wasn’t clear whether they were
victims to the bird with a frowning star wedged in its beak or the
brown mass in the center, its looming features like monkey fused
with a man. Arms stretched to the sky while knees curled to its
chest, its head coned, its lips round in a howl.

Aly pointed, afraid to touch the dirty paint, as though it would
streak away. “This is the sasquatch?”

 

He nodded, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Head of the food
chain – or so I’m told.”

 

“Really,” she murmured, head cocked to the side. “It seems like
whoever made this was pretty freaked.”

 

“Wouldn’t you be? They’re supposed to be big enough to rip
trees out of the ground and flip them straight upside down.”

 

“Bigfoot did this?” Aly gasped, fingers hovering over the swirls
that textured the bark.

 

“I think the artist did,” he teased.

 

Forcing a smile, she met his eyes before turning back to the wall.
She hadn’t expected to see concern.

 

“Unless Hairy Man’s artistically inclined,” she ribbed, hoping
he’d loosen up. “Do you think there’s anything to it?”

His brow furrowed. “Honestly? No. I don’t think you should
look into it so much, either. The people around here… they get
caught up in themselves, especially stories. If you ask me, they take
it way too seriously.”

“I didn’t mean to be disrespectful,” she said suddenly. The locals
clearly spent laborious amount of time on the belief– even the
younger generation was up to date.

I’m an idiot. It didn’t even occur to me that I’m being offensive.

 

“Aly, that is so not what I meant. At all.”

 

Aly winced.
Great. Now asking if I was being ignorant made me ignorant.
Can this topic just disappear?

 

“I just meant that you shouldn’t let anyone scare you,” he
continued. “You don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

She raise
d her brow, surprised. “I’m not afraid,” Aly admitted,
staring at her shoes. Sliding her gaze to meet his, she whispered, “I
feel very safe with you.”

Noah smiled. “Good, because I’d protect you.”

 

CHAPTER 8 | NOAH

Noah had elected to take the long way back to town. Under the
assumption the tunnels would take longer, he hadn’t factored in the
light debris dropping from the ceiling when his foot caught in a
pothole. His arm still throbbed from slamming into a shifty beam. It
was a relief to leave– the place had felt eerie since Charlie Reeves
nearly lost his hand to a bear that had been scoping out the manmade cave.

He and Rona Carr were running around drunk in the dark, but
still.

The end of the road led out into the main row of houses, which
connected with his street in a fork. Uncharacteristically barren of
patrons, they were permitted inside to purchase coffee from the bar.
It was hooked in the corner of the street, trees filling in the area
around it. The rest of the road was blank – its buildings shifted with
the seasons, built up or down with tarps and tents in the rainy
seasons, the portables dragged to the edge of the curb in the winter.

When Noah was young, they would clear it in the early summer
for a flea market. He couldn’t put a date on when it stopped, but like
everything else, the lack of money circulating crushed it. People
working in shacks moved throughout the
lawns, struggling to
support meager income. Locals went into a frenzy right before July,
the concept of travelers feeding a starving income – and often
families – too much to bear.

Upon seeing Noah and Aly, a few people made a point of staring,
others wedging behind their makeshift displays.

“Boy!” Nathaniel hollered, the old man a long time partner with
the Locklear businesses, Lee
particularly. The
two bickered
incessantly despite being nearly a decade apart in age. The senior
produce a lot of the foods for the town, working directly with the
fisheries and what remained of novelty shops. He often
filled
Yazzie’s
To-Go freezer, which had become a surprising flood of
revenue for his parents. Noah couldn’t tell if there was a debt to be
settled or a complaint to pass on to the elder.

Aly nodded as Noah glanced at her. He assumed it meant she
wouldn’t be offended if he mingled.

Recalling the last time he had spoken with the man, Noah
shuddered. Though aloof
but friendly, Nathaniel was clearly
suffering from dementia. His memory was quick as a whip most
days, but the guy got nasty fast. Noah had greeted the man, “Hey,
Nate! What’s up?” It launched lectures skewing from the
inappropriateness of nicknames to bad parenting to people’s fading
respect for each other.