Just North of Nowhere Read online

  She dreamed. Dreaming was wonderful. Things walked in her dreams. In her dreams she saw preparations, watched herself grind ingredients to bits, work the bits to powders. She made pastes and poultices in her dreams, burned herbs and breathed their vapors.

  Her dreams became more vivid: grinding, powdering, coating beeswax with dust and lighting fragrant oils. Nights, she watched and the stars breathed vaporous sendings to her. Dreams.

  Looking back, the husband wasn't important. Looking back, he was important only insofar as he had anaesthetized her to the world. Through him, she stopped needing to feel. She stopped tasting food, air, stopped hearing spring and the sweep of snow on the panes. She’d stopped smelling the lightning. Well, that was it: she’d simply stopped. It hadn't hurt, that was the point, she hadn’t needed the warnings that pain brought, nor the direction the senses gave. She had him. He warned. He pointed. Her husband was the News at Eleven whenever she needed it.

  When he said they had to talk, she laughed. “You’re leaving?” she laughed.

  His right eye squinted.

  “That’s what women say when we’re on the move, Sweet!” She feigned a serious face, “'We have to talk.'“ She said it again, feigning deep emotion: a woman opening a monologic discussion with a to-be-left lover. She laughed again: So silly that he would say such a woman’s thing. Him! And him such a man. Too much a man to use “we have to talk” faintness.

  He didn't laugh. He was on the move. They talked – he talked. At the end of the words, he left. It was a windy day.

  She cried. Of course. The tears felt okay and she cried for a long time. She cut her hair. With her hair boy-short, the white streak that he'd had her dye-away stood out. In a few days its roots showed just above her right eye, white against mahogany richness. When she’d had a pre-Raphaelite cascade, her hair tumbled below her shoulder blades, her Lightning Kiss, as Nonna called it, had poured over her back. She liked it.

  He’d said he did, too. It was the very first thing he’d ever said to her. His opening move: he loved her hair, that streak!

  He’d hated it. Eventually, he said it was, well maybe a little too dramatic, could she, like, maybe, do something?

  Of course! She did.

  That was then.

  Now, scalp-short but growing, damn if that white tuft didn't remind her – damn – of the tufted coat of that old red cat in its final days, how that white fluff was all that remained of its fur by the time Creature lay – in her imagination – cold, dead, and un-resurrected by her Craft.

  She had failed with the cat, and that made her mad. Chris went to the boxes in the basement. This was a month – maybe a bit more than a month – after the husband’s ‘talk’! Excepting her dreams, she’d not practiced the Craft for a dozen years. The articles from that time had sat those years, among other useless bits – brought instinctively – from her old life: bundles of herbs tied with brown string, her pestles, mortars, and crystals still feathered with greasy dust, phials of oils and tinctures, her stilettos, rods, and wands, tubes and leaf-wrapped pouches, ointments and powders, charts, tables, registers of ingredients, the directions this way and that, the ways, means to make, enhance, augment the philters, her old notes, stained, soaked, crossed out, spattered-upon, over written.

  Her damn life was there. Here I am. THIS phase of me, she thought.

  Opened, the boxes exhaled reeking nebulae of dust. Cris had a large, opulent nose—men learned, grudgingly and after a time, to like that nose. Her wide nostrils bespoke passion, hinted at an urge toward the dark, toward the bed. Without being crude, it suggested, that opulent nose did, that wonders might lie ahead.

  Now, in the basement of her recently happy home, those arched nostrils took in the swimming bits of ground bone and pestled powders of a dozen years past. Odor, memory, anger, pain forced a gag from Cris—on top of which she sneezed. Then she threw up. Into the boxes, over the powders, crystals, jars, and tinctures, over the rotted fruits, herbs, and spices, the crumbling weeds and molds, the lean daggers and sheathed blades, she heaved breakfast and last night's cheap wine.

  When she finished retching, she breathed again. The scents had opened, cleared her. She was Cristobel.

  Later, she packed a few things and drove away. Her car was a twelve-year-old Saab sedan that hadn’t been any damn good since he’d bought it for her. No matter. It was what she had, so she thought no more of it. She drove. The car hummed. Miles slid by.

  The day? It had been windy. She drove with the wind, though she didn’t think of it at the time.

  Sometimes, she pulled off the road, nights, and slept. A woman, alone, on the highway, nights! Didn’t bother her.

  Some nights, she took a room just for a wash and a place to sit quietly surrounded by cinderblock and paint. Other nights she drove, the speed terrifying her into a chattering half-awake dream-state. “American Zen,” she said to no one.

  She’d been on her walkabout for. . .

  Well, she didn't know for how long! She had been out there for a bit. She had no real idea where she was. She'd seen things along the way, some things, indeed! But now the land was nothing, nowhere, flat, wide and filled with crops, crops of some sort: growth rolled to the lines of the surrounding horizon all day for days. As night settled, the roadway blackened, gradually narrowed to glowing white lines rushing her headlights.

  One evening, distant lightning licked between looming darknesses. For a few jagged seconds the sky showed mountains, brightly shadowed ancient hills and arroyos of cloud. The voice of the thunder thumped her chest long after the jagged light had finished.

  The landscape changed. In a dozen miles, the only light in the land was hers, her Saab's one flickering headlamp and the dashboard glow on her face in the rearview. The road was narrow and the way wound upward. In the lightning's distance, island hills arose from what had been the drab golden forever of the plains. The car climbed, trees closed in.

  She had no idea when she had left the interstate, she had not done it on purpose, a twitch of hand and eye and the old car must have eased onto an exit, and that exit had exited to a road, and that road had given way to others, then to this. She flowed – mercury in lightning, she thought in an image from the Craft – along a channel made for this passage. This hilly land in the northern plains, this place of forest and bluffs led her. . .

  Odd, she thought, this place ought not be here. This sudden place belongs somewhere, elsewhere.

  Nope. Here it was. Rising forested hills narrowed the road and the roadway led her. It wasn’t the land of cloud-mountains seen minutes, hours, before in the lightning. No, this was earth and solid.

  Her hands knew the way. She didn't. Turning now, a narrow corridor between trees, under linking branches, the road became: “County Road H,” the sign said. She heard it. The voice was hers, of course. She didn’t believe in magic. Not any more. To stamp it proof, she said “County Road H” aloud. “There!” she said.

  She could see no more than a hundred yards ahead, fewer behind. The curves and rises, dips and banks through the darkly massed trees embraced, held her close and to the narrow road. Even so, her speed never dipped below too fast. “Too fast for conditions,” her husband would have said.

  Such a husband, the News at Eleven had been.

  A high cedar fence chattered, passing. A gate with a sign, a sign that couldn't be read at speed; a drive-in theater, maybe. Closed perhaps. Then it was gone.

  A river flowed beyond the trees on her right; she knew it had been there for miles, paralleling her way. She hadn't seen it in the dark, no star or moonlight flicked on water, there were no clear places in the trees and bluffs that had replaced the horizon-spanning fields, but even in the too-fast-for-conditions Saab she smelled river mud in the air stream. Huh! There were deer by the roadside, bright eyes on long, sharp faces, impossibly slender legs, angular attention curled in their shining muscles; in her lights for a moment, and they were gone.

  She was closing on something.

&nbs
p; County H lifted for a moment; for a moment she felt the roadway rise under her ass. The moment carried her with such authority. She felt the car bank, so lovely, felt the Saab take the curve at speed so perfect, felt the earth sink, just so, as she swooped, straightened out and closed upon a small iron suspension bridge. The tires hummed as she rolled across.

  Then they stopped. No humming. The car made a jerk of a stop. Something had gathered ahead, an invisible soft something, brought the car to a quick rolling halt. No harm, no injury. But, by the powers, she stopped and the car died.

  Stopping woke her. Silence. Immobility. She figured she’d awakened. She’d been in a roadway fugue-state, driving like that. Suddenly aware, she sat dead in the middle of a black iron bridge in the middle of nowhere in the heart of the night. Then the rain poured.

  “God damn car,” she said, then, “Yipes,” she said. The rain on the roof was hard. In its noise she felt its fall from a great height. The road ahead was clear. The way back?

  She looked.

  A door had closed behind her. Not a door visible, but a door had shut, nevertheless and she was on this bridge. It assessed her, the bridge. No back up. “Severe Tire Damage back there,” she said. “News at Eleven!”

  Ahead, the roadway steamed in rain and glare.

  The face that appeared in her headlight above the grasses at the end of the bridge should have given her concern. It did not. It was a man’s face. It needed a shave. It squinted at her light. It was not friendly. It was trying to figure.

  “Huh,” she said.

  The face rose to become a hairy man, a naked man. No, she’d only thought he was, but, now, she saw he was only mostly naked; streaming and muddy as though risen from the river over which this bridge, no doubt, passed.

  She saw clearly now: he wore cut-off jeans. No shirt. No shoes.

  “Whatcha stopping for?” he yelled from the edge of her headlight.

  “I am not stopping,” she called back.

  He walked down the beam toward her. His toes seemed to grip the wet asphalt. “Musta,” he called, “'cause you got here and now you ain't leaving.”

  “The car stopped. I didn’t!”

  He stood by her door. The rain shoved his hair across his face.

  “You are wet,” she yelled through the closed window.

  He shook his head. “It's raining,” he said. “Pop your hood.”

  She blinked, then released the catch.

  The man disappeared into the Saab's mouth. The car clanked and bumped as he. . .as he did what it was men did with engines!

  “Give her a try,” his voice rose above the rain.

  The engine coughed, started, stopped.

  “Don't be shy, cripes, give her some!” he yelled.

  The engine turned, caught, coughed, then raced to full life.

  He slammed the hood shut. His hands were black with oil. He didn't wipe them. He didn't mind. She knew he didn't. She cracked the window. “May I?” she began but didn't know what she was offering.

  “Nup. I’m where I’m at.”

  He was weighing something. She read that. He wasn’t thinking of what he could get for his service. He wasn’t looking at her as a women. No. His eyes were not overtly intelligent, yet they weighed her. He was deciding about some part of her she didn’t know that she possessed.

  “Get off the road and get yourself up to Einar's, there. In the morning!”

  “Einar's?”

  “Place up the other end of town, there.” He pointed at a sign on the roadway, ahead. In a few more seconds, the sign would have been a green and white blur, passing. She couldn't read it from where she sat.

  “Einar's. It used to be the Amoco, now it ain't. It's Formerly. Einar's lousy but he'll have the part you need. Don't let him charge an arm for her.” For the first time, he looked at her like a man would. “Well, he’ll figure he can! What you need is a butterfly spring. Not a whole carb!”

  His eyes held more.

  “May I offer you...” she looked at his greasy hands, the soaked cut-offs. She still had no idea what she was offering.

  “Nope. I got what I need for now.” He jerked his head over his shoulder to show her the bridge, the night. “I'm here. You getcherself to Bluffton, there, and see Einar in the morning. He’s probably still up, but he’s a little goofy, nights.”

  Then he was gone and the bridge released her.

  She rolled into town. Into Bluffton, Pop. 671. Green sign, white letters, potted with buckshot-rust.

  “Thanks,” she said to the night.

  Chapter 2

  THE STREGA CRISTOBEL AND OLD RATTLER KEN

  Maybe the Old Rattler Ken, needed just that little bit of a nudge to start seeing again. Maybe Cristobel could do magic. What the hell, who knows?

  Old Ken had been blind since just after the century's turn. That’s the OLD century, damn near a hundred years, that long. He was that old.

  Blind, maybe, but Ken kept pictures of his life. The pictures were in his head and they moved like a flicker show at the Kiddorf’s Magic Light. Ken had never seen a flicker show, but he'd heard about them. Anyway, the Kiddorf was gone since 1950-something, but the pictures of Old Ken’s life moved like he figured the Magic Lights had done.

  Now, the movie picture he sees in his head every morning of his life is about an hourglass—one of those old things, counts time. His daddy had one. The hourglass in Old Ken’s head-picture hangs in blackness. It shines and doesn't much move. Here's how it works: Every morning the sun rises over the bluff. Day crawls down the town from stock pens to the bend of the river. By and by it gets to Old Ken's flop on upper Slaughterhouse Way. When it reaches his window, sunlight slips into his hotbox room through a rip in the shade – just a squiggle of bright day, about the length of a bloodworm. That warm beam wipes itself on the old guy's sleeping face.

  He doesn't see it, no he doesn't, but he feels how hot. When the heat gets him, he remembers what sunlight was; remembers rosy warmth on his cheeks from almost a century back when he was a boy. When that happens, Old Ken's body jerks, remembers a boy's urge to be out, up among the trees, or walking the furrows on the Amish farms. He remembers hunting snake. God! Hunting snake!

  Memory jolts his body. The pain that follows drags him awake, plops him into the smelly bed he's flopped on these last decades, into tar-stinking morning beneath the asphalt roof of the dump he lives in on Slaughterhouse and at that moment. . .

  KERRRR-THUD

  . . .one thick yellow grain of hourglass sand falls from the nearly empty top to the almost full bottom.

  That is the movie picture of Old Ken's life.

  Bedded in his own stink, Old Ken takes the fingers of both hands, pries open his caked-shut lids, turns his face to the heat, already starting to wiggle off to other parts, and confirms: “Ya, still blind!”

  Then he hauls himself up, gets moving.

  When he'd been a young shit, the Rattler's morning picture was something else. Need a sunbeam to wake him? A boy? A boy brings his own sun to each damn day. Mornings were a thumping blaze of hot spit, flapping shirts and snake-taking gear, ready to fly and flail; something else, again! In Ken’s mind's eye, aged eleven and running, life was diamondback and timber snake, their skins nailed, pretty much living, to daddy's parlor walls. In his head, he saw bluff snake, hognose rattlers, snakes seven, eight feet and longer! Sixteen rattles flicking at the end of some, a dry-bone, hailstorm to chatter the dead awake. All them critters, every one, shaking like life, alive and writhing as they'd been one twitch before he’d stripped the meat out of them and tossed it to the hogs.

  That was a moving picture to keep in your head!

  Cold-blood, be damned! In Young Ken the Rattle-Killer's dreams, the hot living skins shook daddy's parlor walls, ceiling to floor. Snake he'd shot, speared, gaffed, fish-hooked, trapped, pinned, stoned, back-snapped, whip-cracked, or just plain stared down to the death shivered the whole damn house. Cold-blood? Ha! In Ken's young dreams, each vengeful head clacked
a white wet jaw at him as he moved between the pissed-wriggling walls of daddy's house. Cold blood, hell!

  Now that was dreams!

  And another darned thing! Each dead critter was a hot new dollar. And that was no dream! No. He loved metal dollars! But dollars were just, what'd you call 'em? Receipts! Markers for the real wages. Life's true measure was snakes themselves, a growing house of dry and lively skins.

  Soon, the skins in the pictures in his head had filled daddy's place, every wall of it. Then they filled the outside walls, every inch. From porch to turret to bellied roof and chimney, the building writhed in spitting angers. Soon, in his dreams, enough rattling, chattering, flickering snake skins there were to cover every wall of every building on the home place, the hayracks and barn, the tack rooms and stables where daddy's precious horses stood waiting, being born, standing, chewing, crapping, snorting, whatever the hell! Oh for crineoutloud, every wall in Bluffton could have been nailed over by the snakes Ken killed in his head and heart!

  That was a picture to keep and he kept it. In Young Ken's dreams, he had stood sweated and breathless on the edge of Morning Bluff by the Amish fields beyond the Picture Man's castle. The town below danced in sun's heat as daylight touched the colored critters nailed everywhere to every wall. The town quaked in their throes and hissing hatreds, scales flashed spud-russet red, sky blue and eyeball yellow, flicking rings of black and diamond orange winkered, set the whole valley unfolding in color mad summer breeze.

  His doing! The wriggling and thumping snake skinned town, below in the rainbow sunrise. He’d done iteHH. Yes sir!

  He couldn’t remember that picture becoming this cold hourglass and its daily fall of a single grain of sand but, bit by bit, through the blind century, it had. Every day, now, that grain dropped – KERRRR-THUD – a cold, still clock.

  For a while, Ken figured if he could cry, tears might could wash away even blindness. Then there'd be the town again, alive and twitching.