Strawgirl (27 page)

The man who destroyed Samantha Franer had violated that necessity. The man who raped a three-year-old child was removed from the human community and all its future. But he wasn't the only one. Thousands of others like him, perhaps millions, walked on the earth, self-absorbed and forever alone. A terrible power lay in their ability to damage the very foundation on which human happiness must be built. A power to poison the little people, and thereby tear apart the web of life. Most of them, Eva thought as cream-colored spume bubbled and then vanished in the sand at her feet, had no awareness of the cruel distortion they threw into the future. But this one, the one who eviscerated Samantha Franer with the weapon of his own body, had somehow glimpsed it. And embraced it. He knew what he was now. And his rage at the knowledge would propel him to kill and kill until something stopped him.

Hannah seized a broken shell from the littoral and held it up for Eva to see. A penknife clam shell, purplish and similar in color to the quahog beads pinned on the child's shirt. The clams were related, their shared history documented under ancient seas. Like the two people on this Pacific beach, Eva smiled, with their shared history of stories. "Let's go sit up there," she gestured to a small amphitheater in the worn cliffs where a sandstone layer had collapsed in piles of rubble beneath a stripe of white quartz.

Hannah scrambled ahead, her golden hair streaming in the odd light. "Up there, up there," she sang into the whipping wind, ozone-scented and laden with salty chill. "Let's go sit up there."

It was a mark of the child's strong spirit, Eva conceded, that she'd been able to speak again so quickly after the horrors that locked her in silence. But her speech wasn't self-generated, not spontaneous. Not yet. Since early in the afternoon she'd repeated phrases Eva said to her in a peculiar singsong voice, as if words were audible toys to be played with, not symbols that could define Hannah Franer and her experience to the world outside her head. That experience was too terrible to define, Eva knew. But the experience also was Hannah Franer. If the child could not be brought to define it, that fierce, boundaried core of being called self would never wholly return.

Purple-gray clouds fringed in shifting yellow glare jostled over the windswept water as Eva gathered her skirts and climbed into the small amphitheater beside Hannah. Cupped in the western edge of the North American continent, a dim silence seeped from the curved stone walls. Eva Broussard listened to the silence and heard the pulse of ten thousand stories, told so that people might know what they were.

Hannah sat cross-legged in jeans wet to the knee, and drew lines in the sand with her broken clam shell. The jeans, Eva noted as if from a great distance, were already snug, a little too short. The child's body was growing. Could her mind be brought in step? Far at sea filaments of lightning threaded toward an invisible horizon. In the flickering surge of light Eva saw a woman's face beneath the child's. A face like Bonnie Franer's, but also different. A firmer set to the wide jaw. A smoothness over the sandy eyebrows that in the mother had seemed a landscape of crimped cloth. The face of the woman Hannah Franer might become, if she were given tools with which to survive.

"Look how your California clam shell is purple," Eva began in the storyteller's voice she had heard in childhood, "just like your clam shell grieving beads from New York are purple. The California clam shells are like the New York clam shells."

"Like New York," Hannah sang in the quiet shelter, watching Eva from the sides of wide-set eyes.

"And I'm going to tell you a special story," Eva went on, almost chanting. "It is the story of Otadenon, whose name means 'The Last One Left.' "

"Last, last," Hannah sang, rocking slightly to the sound of Eva's voice.

"Otadenon was the last one left of his family," Eva continued softly. "His family had been taken away forever by something
otgon
t, something very bad."

"Bad," Hannah repeated in a quavering falsetto. Her left hand reached for the grieving beads over her heart.

Eva let herself rock beside the child as she told the story, of how Otadenon, to save the life of the man who cared for him, traversed a trail guarded by two snakes, two bears, and two panthers on the way to the terrible chestnut grove where the flayed skin of a woman hung in the trees, singing a warning if anyone came near.

"Skin Woman," Hannah repeated, but did not sing. "
Otgont
."

"Yes," Eva replied, taking no apparent notice of the emerging conceptual connection. "And Otadenon was very, very afraid. But he tricked Skin Woman by giving her a worthless wampum belt, and got plenty of chestnuts to feed everyone, and went home. Otadenon was very afraid, but he didn't give Skin Woman his life. Otadenon was the Last One Left, and he went on being Otadenon, Hannah. He won. Can you guess who Otadenon, the Last One Left, is like?"

Hannah drew a tightening spiral in the sand with the penknife clam shell, rocking hard. "Clams like ... New York," she pronounced, gasping. "Otadenon is like ... me. Because I'm the Last One Left."

"Yes, Hannah," Eva whispered as the wind gusted a shower of sand up from the beach and the child's face broke in sobs. "Otadenon's story is your story, too." From deep in her heart Eva Blindhawk sent a prayer of thanks to the chain of Iroquois storytellers who had preserved through time a story that would teach Hannah Franer who she was.

After Hannah wept for a long time within the circle of Eva's arms, she looked up through matted eyelashes, her head cocked to one side. "Can there be two Last One Lefts?" she asked.

Eva was puzzled. "What do you mean, Hannah?"

"There's two Last One Lefts. Like Otadenon. I'm one, and there's another one." She smoothed her windblown hair with both hands in a businesslike gesture that made Eva smile. "I think you're not really the Last One Left when there's two. And Bo's the Last One Left, too. She said so. So me and Bo, we're the last two left. Kind of like sisters. See?"

In the keening of the sea wind Eva imagined she heard an ancient wooden flute, its music sent from the midwinter fire of a vanished Iroquois longhouse. Sent into the future through the mind of a child on a California beach. The gamble had succeeded; the story had given coherence to mere fragments of pain. When Hannah plumbed its depths and molded it to fit her own need, the story became a bridge to a future unimagined when the tale was first told.

"I do see, Hannah," Eva answered. "And you're very, very smart to have figured out how you and Bo are both like Otadenon, how you and Bo are both the Last One Left. You have a good mind like a Hageota, a storyteller. I am proud to be your grandmother."

The child's eyes glowed as a smile lit her wide, freckled face.

"I'm hungry," she mentioned, standing and stretching her arms toward the sea. "Can we get a hamburger? Can we call Bo? I want to tell her about Otadenon. Skin Woman won't get us!"

In a flurry of sand and pebbles Hannah scrambled from the little enclosure and dashed across the gray-lit beach, her face exultant. Eva followed, smiling. The story of Otadenon, created in a time when sickness and cold might leave anyone the sole survivor of a family, had leaped three thousand miles and probably as many years.

"
Nyah-weh
," Eva pronounced into the wind. "Thank you."

Mildred, bored with her long day alone in the apartment, had overturned Bo's kitchen wastebasket and strewed pizza crusts, cigarette ashes, coffee grounds, and half a microwave tray of moldering macaroni-and-cheese onto the dining area carpet. The little dog's breath bore a telltale hint of Italian spices.

"I see you didn't eat the crusts again." Bo sighed. She'd forgotten to put the wastebasket on the counter, a necessary precaution when going out for extended lengths of time. "And I've got to take you out now, before the rain starts."

Mildred wagged her stubby tail in anticipation as Bo grabbed the red leather collar and leash from an easel in the dining area. Beyond her second-story deck the Pacific Ocean pounded the empty beach and gray cliffs with tons of murky saltwater. Bo could almost see the Flying Dutchman, crewed by skeletons in ragged pantaloons, floundering in the storm-driven surf. St. Elmo's fire flashing from the tattered riggings. The mainmast groaning and then breaking with a sound like blasted rock.

"Yark!" Mildred said at the door. A reminder to curb the enjoyable rush of imagination. Stay with the program. Take the dog out.

"Hurry up," Bo told the dog as they hurried toward a grassy area abutting the seawall. Beneath the Ocean Beach pier, walls of water surged upward and split in white flumes of spray against the pier's underside. Ahead, palm trees dropped fronds on the balconies of a pink motel facing south from Newport Street. The motel seemed deserted, its sets of glass doors dark. Except there was someone on one of the balconies. A man. Short and nondescript in a black T-shirt and jeans, he appeared to be watching the storm. But Bo thought she could feel his attention shift to her and Mildred when they stopped beside a trash can on the grass. Mildred sniffed the receptacle with scholarly ardor as Bo tried not to look upward again. Had the man in the Hawaiian shirt on the beach been short? She couldn't remember. The man on the beach had been sitting on the seawall. Hard to tell if a seated figure is short. When she glanced at the balcony again, he'd gone inside. She could see the drape move slightly behind the sliding glass door, but no light. Why would he be sitting around in the dark? A lamp in the motel's street-level office indicated the presence of electricity in the building. Maybe he was watching them, unseen. Maybe he was the one who carved a hole in a canyon and painted it pink. Maybe he was the one who preserved hotel carpeting by exsanguinating people in bathtubs.

"And maybe my imagination is running at full-tilt boogie," Bo told Mildred. "Let's get to Estrella's."

Back in the apartment Bo regarded the mess on the floor and then picked up the phone.

"Es ... Mildred's dumped the trash on the carpet. I don't want to face this when I get home tomorrow. I'll clean it up and then come right over, okay?"

Estrella mentioned several matters more pressing than tidy carpets, principally storms and blood-filled bathtubs.

"Just as soon as I can ..." Bo promised, and hung up.

The vacuum cleaner was wedged in a broom closet among four outdated editions of The Physicians' Desk Reference, a striped beach umbrella, and a collapsible snow shovel Bo had kept after St. Louis for the simple elegance of its design. The storm broke just as she disentangled the vacuum's cord from a nest of dust-filmed Christmas tree lights on the closet floor. Gusting wind slammed sheets of black rain against the deck doors, making the glass wobble. In the watery design Bo imagined she saw Irish beasts from her grandmother's tales—the Dun Cow, the "slim, spry deer," a Selky seal with woeful eyes who'd once been human for a while—their mouths all wide and warning. Mildred stood growling under an easel, her ears cocked.

"It's just the storm," Bo said, suddenly edgy. Patches of orange cheese sauce had dried, flecked with coffee grounds, to the carpet's nap. Bo scrubbed the offending islands of color with a soapy sponge, rinsed and blotted the area until the carpet was spotless.

"Aye 'n' they found yer Aunt Mary Duffy," Bo's grandmother had reminded Bo's father every summer during her visits from Ireland, "dead as a stone, her rooms like a pigsty they said. 'Twas a crime 'n' a shame, such a thing." The idea had been to induce neatness in the perennially messy library of Michael O'Reilly, whose elder daughter, if now found dead, would at least not be found dead in a pigsty. Bo wondered if her father's Aunt Mary Duffy had possessed a dog with a fondness for trash. And how the negligent housekeeper had died. Outside a tree limb cracked in the wind, and fell to the street with a whoosh.

Bo abandoned the vacuum cleaner where it stood, and hurried to her bedroom closet.

"And what shall I wear to the court, tomorrow?" she sang to an Irish tune, and then finished the song. "You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg. You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg. And you'll have to be put in a bowl to beg. Och, Bradley, I hardly knew ye."

The forest green bijou jacket, she decided. Matching skirt if she could still button the waist, and cream silk blouse with a Mandarin collar. The emerald drop earrings her mother had worn onstage with the Boston Symphony. No rings. Gold watch. Don't forget the damn green shoes. New pantyhose, still in the package. It was important to look conservatively smashing for the event in which she would reveal to a hostile world just how "different" it was possible to be. As the lights flickered and then regained their normal luminosity, Bo considered how she might appear in this outfit, pushing a wire grocery cart through alleys. Pausing to glean handfuls of brown-edged lettuce from dumpsters behind restaurants. Exactly how did one hold the second glove, while grubbing through pre-used food?

But Solon Gentzler had said it couldn't happen. Not after the Disabilities Act. Madge Aldenhoven and all her demonic bureaucracy couldn't touch Bo, he'd said. And it would be a landmark step for those who would come after, like Hannah Franer. Bo remembered the child's trembling hand, the gift of grieving beads. Zolar weeping in the canyon. Her people. A lost family.

Folding the clothes neatly, Bo placed them in a waterproof duffel bag, zipped it shut, and turned off the lights. Something made a thumping noise on the deck. An overturned plant, Bo decided, clipping her car keys to the edge of her skirt pocket. Not worth dealing with in the rain. Mildred was whining near the door, her terrier eyes wolflike from fear.