The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (84 page)

“Even when we die,” she goes on. “Whichever one of us goes first will be waiting for the other.”

“I don’t like talking about stuff like that.”

“What? Romance?”

“No, dying.”

She give me a gentle nudge with her elbow.

“It’s just another journey,” she says. “Don’t the Kikimi believe that?”

“Yeah, It’s just . . . I don’t know.”

I can feel her smile when she cuddles up to me, face pressed against my neck.

“You’re not sure you do,” she says.

Her breath is warm on my skin.

“I don’t know.”

“Well,
I
believe,” she says.

I think about that as I sit in the intensive care unit, holding her hand, praying to whoever might be listening that she not be taken away.

God. The ancestors. The faerie spirits.

They don’t help.

No one can.

Nothing does.

I don’t know how I get through the funeral. I can’t go to the wake. I sit outside the hall the Hills rented, off to one side on a bench under some trees, not seeing anything.

At one point Uncle Herbert sits with me for a while. He puts his hand on my shoulder but he doesn’t say anything. Tía Luba called last night but I couldn’t talk to her, either.

Whoever goes first will be waiting for the other.

I want to hit something. Or someone. Instead I go to a bar down the street. I order a double whiskey. I stare at the amber liquid for a long time before I put some money on the bar and leave the whiskey behind, untouched.

Sometime later the Hills find me sitting in another park not far from the hall, staring at the ground. I have no idea what time it is, just that it’s dark. I don’t know how they found me. They sit on either side of me. For a long time we don’t speak.

“I knew her life would be short,” Alana finally says. “I didn’t know how or why, but I knew. It’s the curse of this gift of mine. Sometimes you don’t want to see things, but you do all the same. And some things you can’t change. But if Juliana’s life was going to be short, I wanted what time she had to at least be happy. You made her happy, Joey.”

I get a picture in my head of the first time she and Tía Luba met. Tía Luba saw it, too.

“Why did no one tell me?” I say.

“To what purpose?” Alana asks. “Could you have loved her any more than you did? Could you have treated her any better?”

I shake my head. “But now she’s gone. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

I said it in the ICU but she was no longer there.

Tom nods. “But she’s waiting for us in the Summer Country. That’s what I believe.”

“The Summer Country,” I say. “That’s part of Faerieland, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s beyond Faerieland.”

“So how do you get there?”

“It’s not a place the living can visit,” Alana says.

Our voices—this conversation—seems to unfold in some faraway place.

“I don’t feel like I’m living anymore,” I tell them.

“You won’t feel like that forever,” Alana says.

She doesn’t understand. None of them do. Without Juliana the world’s gone gray. Without her, there’s just no point to anything.

I let them comfort me. I let them take me back to the hall. It’s almost empty now. The only ones left are the Hills’ closest friends.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Talk to them. I’ll be okay.”

I stand at the back of the hall. I’m thinking of leaving again, but then I see Seamus and I remember the campfire on the morning after Juliana and I were married. The stories. What he’d said.

He looks up, the gleam in those bright blue eyes of his dimmed by the loss we all share. I sit beside him.

“I’m an old man,” he says. “It doesn’t seem right that I’m still here and she’s gone.”

I nod. “I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat.”

“I know,” he says. “I felt the same way when my Emma passed on.”

“Don’t tell me it’s going to get better.”

He shakes his head. “I won’t. Because it doesn’t. The loss is always there. The hole in the world where once she was. Mine and now yours.”

We fall silent. I look across the hall where the remaining people are gathered in small groups, speaking softly.

“I have to go to her,” I tell Seamus. “I have to find her. Like in the old stories where the guy goes down into the underworld and brings his true love back.”

“And if she doesn’t want to come back?” he asks. “Your people speak of the wheel of life, how it turns as it must, not how we’d will it. What if she has accepted the turning of her wheel?”

“Then I’d stay with her.”

Seamus nods. “I don’t think it a worthwhile endeavor, but I understand how you feel the need of it.”

“Is it possible?”

“They say anything is possible—somewhere.”

“I thought . . . if I could get to Bordertown, then I’d be close to the Faerie Realms. And the Summer Country . . . it lies past them, doesn’t it?”

Seamus is quiet for a long moment.

“In the old days,” he finally says, “you would have been a perfect candidate for entry into Bordertown. It always welcomed those who had nothing left for them here in the fields we know. But there’s no way back to Bordertown—not that I’ve been able to find in thirteen years.”

“But if could get there . . . ”

“You would get no further. They are very strict about who can cross and who can’t. It’s not like it was when I was a boy and strayed beyond the fields we know. There was no Bordertown then—at least none that I knew. There was only a music, late at night as I came from a hoolie with my pipes in a bag hanging from my back. I followed that music into the Perilous Realms—not once, but many times. I followed it until I heard it no more and that was when I found my way to Bordertown. But I never crossed over from Bordertown. It wasn’t possible.”

“I have to try.”

“I know you do. And I wouldn’t hold you from going. But something is blocking the way. Or maybe the city just doesn’t exist anymore. It isn’t mine to say. I only know that anyone I’ve met who was here in the fields we know when things changed, has been stranded here. And I’ve talked to many of them, if not all.”

“I don’t understand. How can a city be destroyed and it not be on the news?”

“I didn’t say it was destroyed. It’s . . . sometimes I think it’s more an idea than a place—though it was certainly real for me at one time. It’s where magic works—sometimes. It’s where technology works—sometimes. But mostly it requires some curious amalgamation of the two.

“Bordertown has always been a paradox. You can get there if you really need to be there—or you can’t. You can stumble into it by chance—or you don’t. It could be right there—” He points at a mirror on the side of the hall. “Just past our reflection—or it isn’t. At one time there was even a
Rough Guide to Bordertown
available, but the truth is the city’s always followed its own rules and they can change with a shift in the wind. Or they don’t.”

“So what do I do?”

He gives me a long serious study.

“Here’s what I think,” he says. “The old wisdom tells us that ancient power spots and sacred sites are gateways. And maybe that is true, or once was true. But I believe that the true openings lie inside us. In our own hearts, minds, and lives.

“It’s occurred to me on more than one occasion that perhaps the reason we can no longer enter Bordertown is because we, as a people, have no longer allowed for the possibility for it. We simply don’t believe anymore—even those of us who have crossed over once and twice and more times still.

“If that is true, perhaps all you need to do is set out on a journey in search of it, believing that when the journey ends you will be there. Not perhaps. Not maybe. Leave no room for doubt. Go with the understanding that the path you take will bring you there. And if it feels like you need a ritual, then make one up. But don’t make it easy. Easy doesn’t earn you anything.”

“Just like that.”

Seamus gives me a sad smile. “It’s never ‘just like that,’ Joey. Even you know that much.”

When I was a kid, home life was a horror show. Dad left, Mom died and we kids were on our way into foster care until the aunts came and brought us back to the rez, but it was probably too late.

My older brother was heavy into drugs and living on the rez didn’t stop his intake. He OD’d when I was eleven.

My sister ran with a gang and six months later got caught in the crossfire of a drive-by.

Like them, I abandoned the idea of family pretty quickly, too, and you saw where that got me.

Tía Luba and Uncle Herbert gave me a chance, but I didn’t really understand the idea of family until I met Juliana and her parents.

But now I’m abandoning them, too.

After my conversation with Seamus, I don’t talk to anyone about it. I go back to Baltimore with the Hills and Uncle Herbert. I go back to the rambling house, to the room I shared with my wife. Just before dawn, I pack a knapsack and leave a note on the kitchen table:

I’m sorry. I have to do this. Don’t look for me to come back because I don’t know if I will.

—Joey

I’m waiting outside the bank when it opens. I close my account, stash the money in a bag under my shirt, and then I set off.

4.

Where do you go when you’ve got a destination in mind but no idea how to get to it?

I do what I did when I was a kid. I ride the rails. It was tough enough when I was a kid because things had already changed from the old days when hobos crossed the country on the old freights. It’s changed even more now, but it’s not impossible. And there’s no better way to travel unnoticed. Hitchhikers get noticed. Take a bus, a train, even if you pay with cash, someone notices.

I don’t want to be noticed.

I feel it’s important to just disappear, like it’s the first part of a ritual I have to make up. I don’t see the other pieces yet, but this first one feels right.

I eat off the land—fishing, setting snares before I go to sleep—or from fast food outlets. I clean up in public restrooms. I take a few bad spills coming off the trains. Sprain my arm once. My ankle another time, which has me hobbling for a couple of days, unable to catch another train. Dislocate my shoulder. That was a bitch to reset, pushing myself up against a pole until the damn thing finally popped back into place.

I manage to avoid the security guards in the freight yards. I’m not always so lucky with the other guys on the road. But I grew up fighting and it’s not something you forget. After awhile word gets around and the would-be toughs stay out of the way of the crazy Indian.

Most people I meet on the rails don’t want to fight. Most of them don’t even want to talk. That’s fine with me, too, because I’ve got nothing to say.

The loss is always there,
Seamus said.
The hole in the world where once she was.

That doesn’t begin to describe the emptiness I feel.

I ride the rails.

I start carving acorns out of found pieces of wood. When one is done, I toss it from whatever train I’m on.

Seven months go by.

I’m on another train, sitting cross-legged in front of the empty boxcar’s door, watching the landscape. It’s desert country again. Badlands. New Mexico, maybe. It doesn’t matter. It’s just one more place where I am and she’s not.

I finish the acorn I’ve been carving. I hold it up to my eye for a long moment, studying the smoothness of the nut, the tough texture of the cap with its little stem. I toss the carving out the open door, snap my jackknife closed and stow it back in my pocket.

“Didn’t like that one?” a voice says from behind me.

I turn and look for who spoke. I find him sitting in the shadows, an old man with a bedroll under his butt. He’s got a battered tweed cap on his head and he’s bundled up in a greatcoat. I can see how you might want something like that when the sun goes down, but right now it’s got to be in the high eighties. He has to be melting in that thing.

“I didn’t see you there,” I tell him.

The old man smiles. “I get that a lot. Maybe I should change my name to Surprise.”

“It’s as good as any other, I suppose.”

“Think I’ll stick with Rudy. What’s yours?”

You don’t meet many talkers on the old hobo trails and I’m not used to having conversations anymore. But we’ve got a ways to go before the train will slow down enough to jump off and I’ve already carved my acorn for this ride.

“I’m Joey,” I tell him.

“Nice to meet you, Joey. So you like to whittle?”

I shrug. “It passes the time.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. Another might be that it’s a piece of a ritual.”

“What?”

“Did you know that when you work magic it shows? It puts a charge in the air. How strong the charge is depends on how close you are to finishing what you started.”

“Who
are
you?”

“I already told you. My name’s Rudy. I’m like you. Just a guy riding the rails. And like you—like every one of us living this life—there’s more to me than the homeless guy you see when you look my way. Come on. This can’t be anything new for you. You know none of us were born doing this. We came to it because we’ve got nothing else left. Or in your case, because it’s something you need to do to make something else happen.”

I glance out the open door but we’re still going too fast for me to survive a jump.

“I don’t know what you think you see,” I begin, but he waves a hand to cut me off.

“And I don’t know,” he says, “what’s happened to you that makes you treat everybody as an enemy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve got knowledge. I’ve got skills. Maybe I can help you.”

“Why would you?”

He smiles and throws my words back at me.

“It passes the time. And really, what have you got to lose?”

Nothing, I realize. So I tell him. Not what brought me here. Not about the hole in my life that can’t ever be filled.

“I’m trying to find a place called Bordertown,” I say.

“Bordertown? Yeah, now there’s a place. It can fill up your spirit and it can break your heart—sometimes both at the same time. Being in Bordertown is like mainlining a drug. Go there once you don’t ever want to stray because all you’ll ever want to do is get back. Problem is, sometimes it’s just not there anymore—or at least it isn’t for you.”