Under the Empyrean Sky (11 page)

He comes out, sputtering and wheezing, and instantly runs to Cael and begins to lick his hand.

Then he growls at Rigo and Lane.

“The dog hates us but likes you,” Rigo says, stepping back. “It’s almost like you’re—”

“Shut it.”

“Family.”

“Wanda and I aren’t—”

Wanda is suddenly in the doorway, face lit up like a
sparkler, and she’s throwing her long arms around Cael’s neck. For a moment he thinks,
How many elbows does this girl have?
Because it seems as if she’s got an extra couple joints in those gangly grabbers.

“You came to make sure I got home okay,” she says.

“Uh-huh” is all Cael can muster. It occurs to him suddenly: if she were just a year younger, she would make a great bride for Rodrigo.

“Come on, Hazelnut,” Wanda says, grabbing the lumpy mutt by the collar to usher him inside. “Leave Cael and his friends alone. Shoo! Shoo, now, shoo.”

The dog gurgles assent and waddles through the doorway.

It just gives Wanda more room to hug Cael.

“Hello, my husband-to-be,” she says, and he almost wonders if she’s going to cry.

“Uh. Hey.”

“Hi, guys!” she chirps over Cael’s shoulder.

Rigo, still as bloated as a boiled blood sausage, waves. Lane just stands there looking guilty.

“Hurry inside,” she says. “Gosh, it’s
so
nice of you to think of me and my family here during the storm.”

She grabs his hands and pulls Cael inside.

Lane gives him a look. “Hear that, Cael? How
nice
we are?”

“Shut it,” Cael hisses.

Dogs sometimes look like their owners, and Hazelnut shares a look with the Mecklin patriarch, Artie. Artie’s got the same long, thin limbs, the same fat-barreled body. Minimal neck. Lots of head.

Big smile, too. Because he loves Cael. Couldn’t be happier that his daughter is Obligated to Cael. (Cael thinks sourly that he’s probably just happy Wanda’s betrothed at all.)

Artie hugs Cael as hard as Wanda did, and as he’s being hugged, Cael looks over Artie’s shoulder to the the photos hanging on the wall beneath the stairs. Most of the photos are crooked, but one of them isn’t. It’s a snapshot of Cael from just hours before, Wanda’s arm around him. In the photo, Cael looks as if he’s trying not to stand too close to a musky goat.

Artie beams. “Congratulations, my boy. Welcome to the family.”

“Not yet,” Cael says. “Uh, soon, though.”
Not if I can help it.

“Don’t be silly. Obligated is Obligated. Family’s family.” The man sizes him up. “You came all this way. In a pollen drift.”

“I did. We did. It’s late, I know, and I’m sorry—”

“Late? It’s early for us. You boys need some breakfast.”

“What? No, I—”

Artie claps Cael on the shoulder. “Shush, now. We have—What do we have, Wanda?”

From behind Wanda comes a little girl’s voice. “Mommy’s got some day-old biscuits. And some shotgun gravy.”

Rigo’s eyes light up. “I love shotgun gravy.”

“Rigo!” Cael whispers.

Wanda turns, and Cael sees it’s her little sister, Zelda. She’s got big hands, ears, and feet, but is skinny and small otherwise. Cael thinks she’s eight, maybe nine years old.

Wanda shoos her. “Go on back to bed, little peach.”

“Bye-bye,” says the little girl. Then she totters upstairs.

Artie turns back to the boys. “Don’t feel like you’re imposing. You boys come in. Take a load off. Rodrigo, we can fix you some tea, get those histamines down.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Rigo says, “but okay!”

Cael shoots him a look. But now they’re in it, like boots stuck in mud.

Shotgun gravy. Cael’s not sure why it earned the name. Maybe because it’s such a mess, like something you’d blast with a shotgun. (Not that he’s seen a shotgun—Empyrean law does not permit Heartlanders firearms.) It’s like a gut-shot of everything but the kitchen sink: roast some bones, brown some old meat, make a flour roux with water,
hope for the best. If Cael’s nose is right, the meat today is… goat? Got that rich, gamy smell.

Rigo is salivating. So’s the dog, who has his jowly, slobbery, one-eyed head lying on Cael’s knee, a whiny noise like the sound of a bad motorvator fan belt coming from the back of the beast’s throat.

Janine, who looks like an older facsimile of her daughter except with black hair done up in a ponytail, slides two platters in front of the boys. The biscuits look like clods of clay, but Cael is thankful to have them. The gravy softens them up a little, even if it does taste a hair past its prime. He about chokes on a wad of food, though, as Wanda’s hand finds his thigh under the table.

Artie hands him a ragged cloth napkin. “You okay, son?”

Son
. That word about makes him choke again; but he nods, swallows, and offers a strained smile. “Just fine. Sir.” If this man thinks Cael’s going to call him Daddy, he’s baked his noodle.

“Is it Wanda?” The man winks. “She tickling you under the table?”

Rigo’s eyes go as wide as moons, his cheeks bulging, midchew. Cael can only imagine what his own face reveals. Lane doesn’t even bother hiding it: he snorts and almost chokes on his food.

Wanda giggles, too.

“What? Wait. No. No!” Cael cries. “It’s fine. It’s
fine
. It’s not that. I’m just; it’s—”

He’s trying to find something to say, but his mouth is so dry. He could really use a glass of milk, but the Mecklins aren’t lucky enough to have their own goat like Pop does. And then Artie laughs a big belly laugh, which makes it all the creepier.

“Son,” Artie says, “Janine and I had Wanda when we were your age. It’s okay to be…
sexually
expressive. This town could use a little romance. Ain’t that right, Janine?”

Another giggle, this time from Wanda’s mother. Cael’s half expecting them to drag him up to Wanda’s room and throw him down on her bed.
Have at ’er, boy.

Artie leans across the table, clutching his chest as though he’s having a perfectly happy heart attack. “Son, I
want
you two to be a little closer. That warms my soul.”

Wanda’s hand tightens on Cael’s thigh. Moves northward. Cael can’t contain himself.

“We want your boat!” he blurts. Voice too loud, too forceful. Everyone seems to retreat a few inches. Wanda’s hand loosens, slides down to his knee.

“Our boat,” Artie says. “Our
boat
? The pinnace? Why the heck would you need the pinnace?”

Cael knows that not everyone is fortunate enough to have
a hover-boat. They don’t come cheap, and they’re hard to maintain. A few folks have motorized carts and four-wheelers that need corn-diesel to run, but that’s expensive, too.

The Mecklins have a pretty nice boat. It’s not new, but a pinnace has two hover-rails beneath it. It moves faster than most, and the lean, pointed tip cuts through the wind and reduces resistance. It’s a holdover from the days when the orchard was crazy productive, supercharged with high octane fertilizers and bug-juice. The days of Mecklin prosperity are long gone, but the boat remains.

Cael knows they’re not going to lend him the boat. They’d be idiots to do that.

“What you need her for?” Artie asks again.

“Ah. Well.” Cael’s mouth is dry from the biscuit, and he can’t think of a good lie. He can’t tell the Mecklins he wants to harvest a secret garden in the hopes of striking it rich and changing his whole life. All before someone else, like that thick-skulled mayor’s son, finds it.

Lane handles it. “Nancy the goat got out. Cael’s family needs that goat, and with his father’s hip… It’s a tragedy to lose their one good animal. Delicious milk, that animal. I’m sure any family of Cael’s could happily partake in said milk—”

“And the boat,” Cael says, filling in the blanks, “ah, will
help us get a better vantage point above the corn. Let us move faster, too. Our boat got wrecked on a scavenge yesterday. We could use a boat in the interim until we get her fixed up and…” His voice trails off. This isn’t going to go over well.

“That’s awful,” Artie says, clucking his tongue. It’s clear to Cael, though, that this is a statement easily followed by the word
but
. As in
That’s awful, but I can’t just let you take our one and only land-boat, boy.
Except Artie says, “Heckadang, sure thing, Cael.
Doris
is all yours.”

Cael blinks. “Wait. Seriously? Are you nuts?”

Rigo elbows him.

“I just mean—”

Artie cuts him off. “I know what you mean, son. But as of tonight you’re the closest thing to family. We trust you to take good care of her. Of course we heard you busted up your cat-maran yesterday. It true you had that thing loaded for bear with some off-the-books hover-pads?”

How the hell did he hear that?
Cael thinks.

But it’s as if Wanda’s father can read his mind, or at least his face, because he explains, “Boyland is going around telling everyone. Uh, Junior, not Senior. Not that I expect the mayor to be any kinder, of course.”

Godsdamn Boyland.

Cael manages a strained smile. “It’s true, we broke our boat. Now we need to find our goat.” He’s speaking the words of a children’s rhyme.

“Then she’s all yours.”

These people
, Cael thinks,
are too nice to live in the Heartland.

“I want to go,” Wanda blurts out. “I want to be on your crew.”

Eyes turn to her. Is she serious?

“The piss-blizzard—erm, the pollen storm—is bad, real bad,” Cael says.

“Horrible,” Rigo adds, sipping a tea made from grape seed and butterbur. “Oh, uh, not the tea.” Though by his puckered lips, Cael can tell that it is. “I mean, just look at my face.”

Wanda shakes her head. “I don’t care. I’m not allergic. I want to go. I want to be with my Obligated. Something happens to him, it needs to happen to me, too.”

“Jeezum Crow,” Artie says. “Janine, what do you think?”

Janine’s got tears in her eyes. She takes her daughter’s hands in hers. “I think that’s the sweetest thing I ever did hear, Arthur.”

“So it is. Wanda, you go ahead. Cael, I’ll expect you to
take good care of her.” He wags a fatherly finger, but his stern voice does nothing to hide his cheerful face.

Cael wishes Artie were talking about the boat, but he’s not.

“Fine,” Cael says, jaw tight. “That sounds… fine.”

Wanda kisses him on the cheek. He tries not to wince. He winces anyway.

THE GARDEN TRAIL

AT A DISTANCE,
the pinnace is a real beaut. Her shape calls to mind a lean fillet knife. Across the side is the boat’s name painted up in fancy cursive:
Doris
. (“A goddess of the sea,” Wanda yells over the wind and pollen.)

Up close, though, Cael starts to see some flaws. Dings and scratches. Hull scrapes. A splintering mast. He hopes they’re just cosmetic.

Artie gets them set up with the boat—helps them unmoor it and power up the hover-rails—and off they go. But once they get her out in the storm, Cael starts to see that
Doris
has other problems. Real problems.

First up: the sail. It’s got a big vertical slash down the middle. The wind just howls through the vent, the fabric
fluttering but failing to catch the air. Wanda, who’s in one of her father’s barn jackets, a blanket pulled up over her head like a hood, says she doesn’t know how that happened. Says they use oar-poles to push the boat along.

Second problem: the hover-rails on the bottom are on the fritz. They’re each like a lightbulb in a wobbly socket; they
buzz
and
sizzle
, flickering and sputtering. The boat can barely stay aloft. It keeps dipping sickeningly toward the ground, into the corn.

With the wind howling and the pollen raining down upon them, the boat only goes where the wind shoves it. The boat knocks around as if it’s being struck by invisible hands, and everyone’s sick and miserable and wants to go home. But Cael won’t call it off.
Can’t
call it off. The garden’s out there. If they don’t find it, someone else will. That’s what he tells himself. Someone else will steal the vegetables, or the pollen from the piss-blizzard will ruin them. He invents a hundred other reasons why they need to get to the garden
tonight
, in the middle of the worst pollen drift Boxelder’s seen in years.

But inside is that nagging voice, the one that tells him Gwennie never would have let this foolishness happen—she took risks sometimes, but she was always the brains of the operation, always the one with the
plan
, the one who never let Cael get away with his nonsense. Her job as first mate
was to balance out Cael. And now that balance is gone, leaving him all kinds of off-kilter.
And don’t forget that you’re not gonna get to kiss her anymore, either.

We don’t need her
, Cael thinks.
She held you back. That’s why your crew was always second to Boyland’s. Let her be first mate on his boat. Let her drag
him
down
.

Cael has the others fetch the oar-poles from the side of the boat, holding the poles and thrusting them down against the earth, the four of them walking the boat along and trying like hell to stop the wind from knocking them over into the corn.