Just North of Nowhere Read online

  The sun caught a plume of smoke from the chimney at the dinner, turned the gray stuff golden, red, deep blue and shades between.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m here.”

  She pulled information from her laptop; the balding woman at the library suggested a book. She dug through the book, found some promise there, dug more and found another Sending with equal or greater surety. She matched one thought to another as she pored over pharmacopoeia, juggled cantations, mixed, matched, pasted and assembled a draft, a sketch of something, something that might just work.

  First, she thought she'd have to order from Minneapolis maybe, maybe Chicago, farther perhaps.

  Then she put her foot down. “No!” she said. She was alone at least, in her kitchen. “This is a new place.” She would remake it! All of it! Recast the herbals to this life. Her magics, here, would arise from local product. She was gifted, the place had power—she'd seen that, felt it the first night on that rainy bridge where that person, Bunch, had touched her car to life. No, this would all be from her, through her, “from where I live! After all,” she said to the spread of books, mixtures, dried veggies and filtered poultices, notes and printouts, “I am the town Strega!”

  She walked more; scoured the hills and bluffs for warts, molds, and mosses. Some herbs she bought at Karl's Wurst Haus: Towne Butchery and Buttery Shoppe, others she got at the Amish Co-op. Things she couldn't buy or find in Bluffton she got at Krogers in Cruxton – close enough to local, she thought.

  Some substitutions she was proud of, others? Well, the less said the better.

  In a week and a half everything – full moon included – was ready. Nearly everything. Needed for improvement? Cristobel had to improve, well, her nudity. She knew she looked damn good naked, no reason not to be, well, nude, in front of – well, in front of anyone – but, there it was: She couldn't.

  She thought about it. Alone in her bedroom at home, she thought: there I am, she thought, my body, exposed! All I have! Available to the air and elements! She gave a little yelp, shivered and rolled up in the sheets. And she’d been fully dressed! Knowing she looked good, naked, made it worse.

  Bundled in her sheets, she reasoned with herself: nudity in the Craft, these days? Scarcely more than a cultural atavism, an optional convention. It played little. . . No, no! . . .played no part in the efficacy of a casting.

  Ah, she counter-reasoned, that may be! But I favor it, embrace it, so to speak. Unable as she was to bring herself to stand naked alone, or even to think about standing naked, she loved the notion of standing naked, loved the idea that the deep world should. . . no, no! . . .must touch her body in all its places at the height of her Gathering: night, sun, heat, cold, dust and mist were central principles of the Art. Loving that notion, she knew that to aim the miracles of the Craft, she must stand utterly, completely, totally, undefended from the elements and be, therefore, their governess.

  Yet she couldn’t! The old man’s blindness, the man Bunch’s questions about where she belonged aside, this was a quandary! This was madness. This is Madness!

  It happened like/that! In full daylight. The sun poured in her kitchen windows, the world was out and about. People passed by, walking, driving the streets of the town when, thinking madness, she suddenly ripped off her shirt without thinking, unspun her skirt, not knowing she would do so. She kicked out of her panties and, incidentally, her sneakers, and there she was: complete to the world! Stark and sweated, she ran shrieking from her clothes, ran from one end of the house to the other streaming wordless vowels as she did. She ran up the stairs and upstairs again to the attic. She danced in front of her mirrors, each and every one. She ran downstairs cheering. She raced herself one end of the place to the other, front to back, tagging each wall, shouting, “IT!” to the stinging slap, then dashing the opposite way. She sang glamours at volume, shouted songs from childhood and jingles from the radio, she twirled until she was dizzy. She yodeled the long-gone husband’s name and paused before each window, up, down, front back, curtained or wide, and gave herself to the outside! Daring anyone to see her naked!

  She didn’t think anyone had but, “there,” she panted, “I don’t care if they did!” Finally, to the bathroom mirror, she said “how was that?!” She was a breathless, dripping mess, hair everywhere, goosebumped skin and the Lightning’s Kiss spread and plastered to her face. She shook, she laughed, she was unlocked!

  That inadequacy? Gone! she shouted silently to her soul.

  By bright midnight at the leading edge of the nearest hour of the fullest of the full moon, therefore, Cristobel was prepared. She took herself and her mixtures, mirror, wand and knife, bowl and candles, a bottle of good domestic wine and went forth to her yard. She went all the way to the far back, to where the oak tree and shed shielded her from the general view and from where she could see the upper floors of Old Ken's rooming house.

  On a bare spot of ground, she drew her figures, placed her candles, cleared herself. Then she waited for the moment, the moment of opening herself to the night, the air, the world; the moment she would lead light to the blind.

  She wondered what Bunch was doing.

  Two doors away, Leslie B. Fritz, aged 12, on the verge and pissed at everything, stared at the Goddamned moon. Crap. She hated it. Crummy stars? Phooey. They just hung there, didn’t fight back! The rotten town? It stunk. Dad? Clueless. Mom? Dead. Course she is! Just when you need a mom! And what was going on in her stupid body? And there was stuff going on! Friends? Duh! Who cared? She was the only person like herself in all the lousy world. Now here she was: treading water at the edge of when stuff was supposed to happen. And nothing IS! And nothing will. Nothing ever will happen! Not here. Not to me! Except in here. She hugged her bony crummy self! Gaak. And nowhere to go!

  She dropped and gave herself twenty-five!

  The only thing she had was the best damn morel patch in the whole damn county. Big shitty deal! By her twenty-second pushup, she had decided to shave the left half of her head in the morning. At twenty-five she gave herself another set and for the twelfth time that one full-mooned evening she ran her list of hatreds of all there was about her stupid little life.

  When she rose from the floor, wet and stinky, a flicker of something outside her window and up the way, caught her. In the dark, something moved near the light. When she shoved her glasses over her slippery nose, the glimmering blob became a ring of candles by the rotted shed at the Italian Lady’s place.

  She squinted for an hour. A minute, anyway. A good half-minute! Then she got her binoculars and yipes. The Italian Lady! Stripped to the fur and wiggling in the moon. Oh, holy shit!

  Leslie B. Fritz? Outta there like a shot!

  Ken hadn't heard. Cristobel hadn't asked. She had figured he’d want to be not blind. Who wouldn’t? In any event, she wanted to see how it would come out before she mentioned it to him. Wouldn’t want to disappoint an old blind man.

  Wouldn't have mattered. The last 40 years Ken's hearing wasn't what it had been. Sounds still moved in his world, it was just that Ken didn’t necessarily hear what other folks did.

  Here's for instance: Everyday, the shift whistle at the sawmill told Ken: time to roust yourself from the Restrant and git down to the Wagon Wheel—“The Parker” as he knew it – time for the daily beer to show.

  The sawmill whistle marked noon like clockwork. While the mill had been gone 40 years and longer, Ken heard its noon call, daily. The whistle stirred him, midday’s, forth. Any and all who heard the screech of the American House screen door and saw Ken heading up Commonwealth could – and did – set their watches by that internal sawmill whistle, long gone or not.

  No, Cristobel Chiaravino had not told Ken of her plan but at 3:20 that morning, she let slip her robe and felt air catch her, her skin a sail, her body a vessel.

  As the elements moved her—maybe a little too quickly—she joined her senses and her deep being to the ley lines of Earthpower. The forces moved between her toes, burrowed into the damp
dirt of the clear-circle. The power rose through her in the moonlight. She spoke the words, nervously poured the fluids of being into the ground. She lit her mixtures with a trembling hand and moved 'round the candle flames as prefigured. She felt the power penetrate her and tried not to think about her body (bare and out of doors as it was) and in a few minutes the night air and the stillness had calmed her. She felt only a little silly, now and was focused wholly on the modality of vision. She flooded Old Ken's distant room with the concentration the earth was giving. It felt good. It felt right. It felt weird. The old man would see! Even if Creature (poor old tufted red and fluffy white Creature) had not returned to her or life, Ken would see again! Her nipples were hard and not just from chilly night!

  Then she was finished. She didn’t know quite what to do. Some ending there should be, something maybe not useful but a thing to cap the ceremony.

  I will work on that, she thought as she stooped to snuff her candles. Cristobel shrieked! She saw a flicker in the mirror she had leaned against the garage, it was less than a white blink, reflected, but that blink was a small face among the chokecherry branches behind, at her naked back.

  Cristobel skittered around and flopped onto her bare butt.

  “Holy crap,” the face said, rising, “you're a witch or something!”

  Cristobel scrambled to cover herself.

  “Cripes. It's okay! I mean, holy shit, okay, man! Thank God! A witch. In town! Here! All right! Shake stuff up, man. Oh! Didn't mean to say that. 'God,' I mean. Jesus Christ, you probably you don't do the 'God' thing, do you? Oh, shit, again! Jeeze. That is tres cool!”

  Sitting in the mud Cristobel thought, the child's words will not stop, for breath, thought, response, for nothing!

  The child, didn’t stop. Not until Cristobel had gotten to her feet, gathered her robe around herself and held up a hand did Leslie shut up. “You! Come forth. Be seen.” Cristobel beckoned, “and do it now!” She’d never spoken that way before. It felt good.

  The child stepped out. She was stopped, but her whole body chugged, like a tractor-trailer idling.

  A skinny child. A girl. A girl in a long tee-shirt, Megadeath jagged across the chest in electric letters. The colors were uncertain by moonlight. Bare legs stuck out the bottom of the tee. Sneakers, no socks. An unattractive child, popped into Cristobel’s head. Her red hair was self-chopped and tufted. Scabs, picked and bleeding, dotted her shins and arms. She had a squinty face, an unfinished body. Cristobel also noted that the child was not frightened.

  In a heartbeat, Cristobel was also not frightened. She was not frightened about being caught beneath the full moon’d sky, about the spell or whether it had worked or not worked. Neither was she frightened about having been seen naked, abroad, and seen to be doing the work of the Craft! This red-topped creature stared in her squinty way – so familiar – yes, in that way her old red cat had had about her. Yes!

  “I dislike spies!” Cristobel said. To the point: she hated empty curiosity, those who wandered after dark sins, imagined. She hated what prying people thought of her, of the Craft, she hated the assumptions, always made!

  Well, no harm: the shape of the spell was formed, cast and abroad, working. Nothing that happened here would halt or harm it now.

  “First, who are you?”

  “Leslie,” the girl said, “B. Fritz,” she added, “Leslie B. Fritz.”

  “Why are you here, Leslie?”

  “Saw your lights, saw you dancing, saw you naked,” Leslie winked and waited again. “From there,” She pointed. “Number 6 Slobberhouse. Slaughterhouse. My window’s there. Stupid window.”

  Cristobel looked at the back end of a dark house, a house like her own. “I am pleased to meet you. I’m Cristobel Chiaravino. You will help me with these few things.”

  Leslie B. Fritz? On top of it like that! She scampered around the circle on hands and knees whiffing out the candles. She made another circle gathering, then depositing them – gently, respectfully, no wax dripped – in the empty bowl. She took up the mirror – careful, careful, sniffed the nearly empty bottle of wine. She’s economical, like a cat. Helpful, when silent, Cristobel thought.

  “So,” the Strega said, not realizing she was going to and considering that the child was not quite so ugly now, laden with burdens, “you want lessons in the Craft, do you?” They walked toward Cristobel's kitchen.

  Leslie squinted, picked up the pace. Duh! she said.

  Old Ken woke, wrestling smelly sheets in his flop. Something touched his face through the torn shade, touched like warm morning. Different, but like. Huh! He jolted upright. “Morning?” He pried his eyes open as he did every day, put his face toward the source of the sensation. “Yep. Still blind. . .” he began, but, “Whup. No, I ain't,” he ended.

  He could see. He saw something. The feeling on his lids wasn't sun warmth rousing, it was by-God light. Light of the moon! Moonlight on thin old eyelids. Huh! He could see. Cripes, about time, he thought.

  He looked.

  The room was dim, faint, it wiggled in and out of view, but there it was: view. Crimminies, where is this? he wondered. He splashed himself with water from his sink, and remembered half way down the hall, to go put on some clothes.

  When he’d dressed, he eased down the steps one by one.

  The street was quiet, empty. “As any fool can see!” he said.

  A breeze came off the bluff and crossed the river. As it ran up the town, it picked up, yep, the smell of horse. Daddy's livery stable! Yep. There t’was, down where it always had been. Ken could find it by smell alone! “I ain't gonna have to!” he called to the empty street, “I can see where ‘tis.”

  There: bright in the moonlight, livery, horses, carts and carriages. All the way down there—where the Rexall had been since 1951. Yet, there it was: Daddy's stable in the moonlight! No snakes nailed to wooden battens, but what the hell! It'd been a while.

  There, where it had been before Ken’s birth, was the sawmill's smoker stack, just past the White House Restrant.

  Sawyers up and cutting! he thought, or soon they will. Soon the stack will smoke.

  The stack smoked, puffing hard in late moonlight!

  The boiler, soon, will make steam, he reckoned.

  In the distance, brass hissed, cylinders cracked.

  . . .leather belts'll turn and flap!

  In the distance: flapping flutters of wide, wide leather. . .

  . . .them big blades! Spin!

  Buzz saws moaned alive, grew to howls. . .

  . . .trees scream!

  ripped trees, shrieked. . .

  . . .sliced thin or cut wide for beams. . .

  . . .dust filled the night.

  Yeah, he sighed. It was all there, just as it always was, before.

  Before the place was torn down, the wreckage hauled off, 1962, after the Big Fire of ‘60.

  Ken never knew. Or, if he did, he'd disremembered. It never mattered, that old mill coming down. Not to Ken. Not then, 1962. ’62 was blind black! And now, particularly, it mattered not a bit since there it was – it flickered, steamed, flapped, whirred, buzzed, and screamed, in that night’s moon.

  Not a soul stirred. Ken heard the river, the gentle lowing and farting of the cows in the pens up the way, waiting for the hammer to the head. He listened for the horses’ whicker and saw it all, mist-thin in moonlight, but there it was. As always it had been, turn of the old Century, turn of the old life.

  He breathed night air. Fresh, clear.

  Oh, God, he thought, snakes. Them hissin’ shakers will be coming out by moon. But, shit. . . He relaxed. They'd wait for him. They'd waited. . . Why hell! Most of a century? Was it that long we all waited, me and them? A century? Oh, sweet night.

  He looked to the moon, the light on the bluffs, listened to the distance, he heard the horses down by Daddy’s. A damn tear flowed and another damn one! “Oh, love!” he said to the world, shaking them off, “what a night for snake!”

  Chapter 3

 
; DROOPY GUY

  A hound at noonday, soft, fleshy, melting, that was Herb. His ears, long, wide, and thick started the look. They weighed down each side of his head, leaving his pate looking stretched as though the tight thin skin was about to split to the bone. The illusion followed that the extra flesh from the top of him had flowed downward. His eyes bagged in opulent half-moons, his cheeks sagged to dewlaps, his lips drooped to a quiet pout – sad, like he'd just flopped the summer's only vanilla cone into the dirt.

  His necktie seemed to stop the face meat from further slippage. He always wore a tie. Past the collar, his shoulders sloped so steeply they left an unclear distinction between where neck ended and arms began. His chest was nothing much. What flesh there seemed sagged to his gut-line adding to what already hung over his belt.

  From there, he tapered, then disappeared, into two tiny shoes.

  When it came right to it, Herb wasn't fat; loose-skinned was all – gravity's doing. What came of it was he looked like a hound dog drooping over the inevitability of another scorcher.

  Herb wasn't old but didn’t look very young either. Nobody had ever seen him young: not in Chicago, or, if anyone ever asked, nobody from the little town back east, where he said he'd been before Chicago, would have known a young Herb either.

  He didn’t stay long enough to be familiar, see? Herb was a quiet, droopy guy who traveled alone.

  Every chance, Herb slipped into a car – he loved cars – and he’d drive to some small place he'd never been, never thought about or heard of, a place where nobody knew him and where he didn't know anyone. This world was full of these places and he loved them almost as much as he loved cars.

  Bluffton was one such town. Driving, he saw the sign and off the road he went.

  He motored slowly along Slaughterhouse Way – and what a name was that – past the stock pens. Thus, the name, he calculated. The sound, the scent, the narrow glint from the wide round eyes that stared from the dark sheds made him shudder. He shuddered aloud to the inside of the car and drove a little faster before pausing at Slaughterhouse and Commonwealth. He made a slow, wide left, checking ahead, to the side, to the rear – the way he'd been taught years and years ago – and when the turn was complete, he cruised the wide main street of the pretty little town. Two turns and he’d seen it.