The Traveler

29

“All of my early memories are about riding in our car or pickup truck. We were always packing our bags and leaving. I guess that’s why Michael and I were obsessed with having a home.

“If we lived in one place for more than a few weeks, we’d pretend we were going to be there forever. Then a car would drive by our motel more than twice or a gas station attendant would ask Father an unusual question. Our parents would start whispering to each other and they’d wake us up at midnight and we’d have to get dressed in the darkness. Before the sun came up, we’d be back on the road, driving to nowhere.”

“Did your parents ever give you an explanation?” Maya asked.

“Not really. And that’s what made it so scary. They’d just say ‘It’s dangerous here’ or ‘Bad men are looking for us.’ And then we’d pack and leave.”

“And you never complained about this?”

“Not in front of my father. He always wore shabby clothes and work boots, but there was something about him-a look in his eyes-that made him seem very powerful and wise. Strangers were always telling secrets to my father as if he could help them.”

“What was your mother like?”

Gabriel was silent for minute. “I keep thinking about the last time I saw her before she died. It’s hard to get that out of my mind. When we were little she was always so positive about everything. If our truck broke down on a country road, she’d take us out into the fields and we’d start looking for wildflowers or a lucky four-leaf clover.”

“And how did you behave?” Maya asked. “Were you a good child or mischievous?”

“I was pretty quiet, always keeping things to myself.”

“What about Michael?”

“He was the confident older brother. If we needed a storage locker or extra towels from the hotel manager, my parents sent Michael to deal with it.

“Being on the road was okay, sometimes. We seemed to have enough money even though Father didn’t work. My mother hated television, so she was always telling us stories or reading books out loud. She liked Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, and I remember how excited we were when she read us The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. My father taught us how to tune a car engine, how to read a map, and how not to get lost in a strange city. Instead of studying school textbooks, we stopped at every historical marker on the highway.

“When I was eight and Michael was twelve, our parents sat us down and told us they were going to buy a farm. We’d stop in little towns, read the newspaper, and drive out to farms that had ‘for sale’ signs on the lawn. Every place seemed okay to me, but Father always came back to the truck shaking his head and telling Mom that ‘The terms weren’t right.’ After a few weeks of this, I started to think that ‘the terms’ were a group of mean old women who liked to say ‘no.’

“We drove up to Minnesota, and then turned west toward South Dakota. At Sioux Falls, Father learned about a farm for sale in a town called Unityville. It was a nice area with rolling hills and lakes and fields of alfalfa. The farm was half a mile from the road, concealed by a grove of spruce trees. There was a big red barn, a few toolsheds, and a rickety two-story house.

“After a lot of haggling, Father bought the property from a man who wanted cash and we moved in two weeks later. Everything seemed normal until the end of the month, when the electric power went off. At first, Michael and I thought that something was broken, but our parents called us into the kitchen and told us that electric power and a telephone connected us to the rest of the world.”

“Your father knew you were being hunted,” Maya said. “He wanted to live apart from the Vast Machine.”

“Father never mentioned that. He just said that we were going to call ourselves ‘Miller’ and everyone was going to pick a new first name. Michael wanted to call himself Robin, the Boy Wonder, but Father didn’t like that idea. After a lot of talk, Michael decided to be David and I picked the name Jim, after Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island.

“That was the same night Father brought out all the weapons and showed us where each one was going to be stored. The jade sword was in our parents’ bedroom and we weren’t allowed to touch it without permission.”

Maya smiled to herself, thinking about the valuable sword hidden in a closet. She wondered if it had been propped up in a corner, next to some old shoes.

“An assault rifle was behind the couch in the front parlor and the shotgun was stored in the kitchen. Father kept his.38 in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket when he was working. This wasn’t a big issue when Michael and I were growing up. The guns were just another fact that we accepted. You said that my father was a Traveler. Well, I never saw him float away or disappear or anything like that.”

“A person’s body stays in this world,” Maya said. “It’s the Light within you that crosses the barriers.”

“Twice a year, Father would get in the pickup truck and go away for a few weeks. He always told us that he was fishing, but he never came back with any fish. When he was home, he would make furniture or weed the garden. Usually he’d stop working around four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d take Michael and me into the barn and teach us judo and karate and kendo with bamboo swords. Michael hated practicing. He thought it was a waste of time.”

“Did he ever say that to your father?”

“We didn’t dare challenge him. Sometimes my father would just look at you and know exactly what you were thinking. Michael and I believed that he could read our minds.”

“What did your neighbors think of him?”

“We didn’t know a lot of people. The Stevenson family lived on a farm that was farther up the hill, but they weren’t very friendly. An older couple named Don and Irene Tedford lived on the other side of the stream and they came over one afternoon with two apple pies. They were surprised that we didn’t have electricity, but it didn’t seem to bother them. I remember Don saying that television was a big waste of time.

“Michael and I started going to the Tedfords every afternoon to eat homemade doughnuts. My father always stayed home, but sometimes Mother would take a load of laundry over to their place and wash it in their machine. The Tedfords had a son named Jerry who had died in a war and his picture was all over the house. They talked about him like he was still alive.

“Everything was okay until Sheriff Randolph came up the driveway in his squad car. He was a big man in a uniform and he was carrying a gun. I was scared when he arrived. I thought that he was from the Grid and that Father would have to kill him-”

Maya interrupted. “Once I was in a car with a Harlequin named Libra and we were stopped for speeding. I thought that Libra was going to cut the constable’s throat.”

“That’s how it felt,” Gabriel. “Michael and I didn’t know what was going to happen. My mother made iced tea for Sheriff Randolph and all of us sat on the front porch. At first Randolph just said a lot of nice things about the way we had fixed up the place, and then he began talking about the local property tax. Because we weren’t connected to the power line, he thought we might refuse to pay the tax for political reasons.

“Father didn’t say anything at first, but he kept staring at Randolph, really concentrating on him. All of a sudden, he announced that he’d be glad to pay the tax and everyone relaxed. The only person who didn’t look happy was Michael. He went over to the sheriff and said he wanted to go to school with all the other kids.

“When the sheriff drove away, Father brought us into the kitchen for a family discussion. He told Michael that school was dangerous because it was part of the Grid. Michael said that we needed to learn things like math and science and history. He said that we couldn’t defend ourselves from our enemies if we weren’t educated.”

“So what happened?” Maya asked.

“We didn’t talk about it for the rest of the summer. Then Father said okay, we could go to school-but we had to be careful. We couldn’t tell people our real name and we couldn’t mention the weapons.

“I was nervous about meeting other kids, but Michael was happy. On the first day of school, he woke up two hours early to pick out the clothes he was going to wear. He told me that all the boys in town wore blue jeans and flannel shirts. And we had to dress that way, too. So we’d look just like everyone else.

“Mother drove us into Unityville and we got registered at the school under our fake names. Michael and I spent two hours in the office being tested by the assistant principal, Mrs. Batenor. We were both advanced readers, but I wasn’t so good at math. When she took me into a classroom, the other students stared at me. It was the first time I really understood how different our family was and how other people saw us. All the kids started whispering until the teacher told them to be quiet.

“At recess, I found Michael on the playground and we stood around watching the other boys play football. Just like he’d said, they were all wearing jeans. Four older boys left the football game and came over to talk to us. I can still remember the look on my brother’s face. He was so excited. So happy. He thought the boys were going to ask us to join the football game and then we’d become their friends.

“One of the boys, the tallest one, said, ‘You’re the Millers. Your parents bought Hale Robinson’s farm.’ Michael tried to shake his hand, but the boy said, ‘Your parents are crazy.’

“My brother kept smiling for a few seconds as if he couldn’t believe that the boy had said that. He had spent all those years on the road creating this fantasy about school and friends and a normal life. He told me to stay back and then he punched the tallest boy in the mouth. Everybody jumped him, but they didn’t have a chance. Michael was using spinning back-kicks and karate punches on farm boys. He beat them to the ground and would have kept on punching them if I hadn’t pulled him off.”

“So you never made any friends?”

“Not really. The teachers liked Michael because he knew how to talk to adults. We spent all of our free time at the farm. That was okay. We always had some project going, like building a tree house or training Minerva.”

“Who was Minerva? Your dog?”

“She was our owl security system.” Gabriel smiled at the memory. “A few months after we started going to school, I found a baby owl near the stream that ran through Mr. Tedford’s property. I couldn’t see a nest anywhere, so I wrapped her in my T-shirt and took her back to the house.

“When she was little we kept her in a cardboard box and fed her cat food. I decided to name her Minerva because I had read this book that said the goddess kept an owl as a helper. When Minerva got bigger, Father cut a hole in the kitchen wall, then built a platform on both sides with a little trapdoor. We taught Minerva how to push through the door and enter the kitchen.

“Father placed Minerva’s cage in a thicket of spruce trees at the bottom of the driveway. The cage had a trigger weight that would open the cage door, and the weight was attached to some fishing line that was stretched across our driveway. If a car turned off the road, they would hit the fishing line and open the cage. Minerva was supposed to fly up to the house and tell us that we had visitors.”

“That was a clever idea.”

“Maybe it was, but I didn’t think so at the time. When we were living in motels, I had seen spy movies on television and I remembered all the high-tech devices. If bad people were searching for us, then I thought we should have better protection than an owl.

“Anyway, I pulled the fishing line, the cage door opened and Minerva flew up the hill. When Father and I reached the kitchen, the owl had come through the trapdoor and was eating her cat food. We carried Minerva down the driveway, tested the cage a second time, and she flew back to the house.

“That was when I asked my father why people wanted to kill us. He said he’d explain everything when we got a little older. I asked him why we couldn’t go to the North Pole or some other distant location where they could never find us.

“My father just looked tired and sad. ‘I could go to a place like that,’ he told me. ‘But you and Michael and your mother couldn’t come along. I won’t run away and leave you alone.’”

“Did he tell you he was a Traveler?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “Nothing like that. We went through a couple of winters and everything seemed all right. Michael stopped having fights at school, but other kids thought he was a big liar. He’d tell them about the jade sword and Father’s assault rifle, but he also said we had a swimming pool in the basement and a tiger in the barn. He told so many stories nobody realized that some of them were true.

“One afternoon when we were waiting for the school bus to take us home, another boy mentioned a concrete bridge that ran over the interstate highway. A water pipe ran underneath the bridge and a couple years back some kid named Andy used the pipe to cross the road.

“‘That’s easy,’ Michael told them. ‘My little brother could do that in his sleep.’ Twenty minutes later I was on the embankment beneath the bridge. I jumped up and grabbed onto the pipe and started to cross the interstate while Michael and the other boys watched. I still think I could have done it, but when I was halfway across the pipe broke and I fell onto the highway. I hit my head and broke my left leg in two places. I remember raising my head, looking down the interstate, and seeing a tractor-trailer truck coming directly toward me. I passed out and, when I woke up, I was in a hospital emergency room with a cast on my leg. I’m pretty sure I heard Michael telling the nurse that my name was Gabriel Corrigan. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe he thought I’d die if he didn’t give the right name.”

“And that’s how the Tabula found you,” Maya said.

“Maybe, but who knows? A few more years went by and nothing happened to us. When I was twelve and Michael was sixteen, we were sitting in the kitchen doing our homework after dinner. It was January and real cold outside. Then Minerva came through the trapdoor and sat there hooting and blinking at the light.

“This had happened a couple of times before when the Stevensons’ dog hit the trip line. I got on my boots and went outside to find the dog. I came around the corner of the house, looked down the hill, and saw four men come out of the spruce trees. All of them wore dark clothes and carried rifles. They talked to each other, split apart, and began walking up the hill.”

“Tabula mercenaries,” Maya said.

“I didn’t know who they were. For a few seconds I couldn’t move, then I ran into the house and told my family. Father went upstairs to the bedroom and came down with a duffel bag and the jade sword. He gave the sword to me and the duffel bag to my mother. Then he handed the shotgun to Michael and told us to go out the back door and hide in the root cellar.

“‘What about you?’ we asked.

“‘Just go to the cellar and stay there,’ he told us. ‘Don’t come out until you hear my voice.’

“Father grabbed the rifle and we went out the back door. He told us to walk by the fence so we wouldn’t leave footprints in the snow. I wanted to stay and help him, but Mother said we had to go. When we reached the garden, I heard a gunshot and a man shouting. It wasn’t my father’s voice. I’m sure about that.

“The root cellar was just a dumping place for old tools. Michael pulled the door open and we climbed down the staircase to the cellar. The door was so rusty that Michael couldn’t shut it all the way. The three of us sat there in the darkness, on a concrete ledge. For a while we heard gunfire and then it was quiet. When I woke up, sunlight was coming through the crack around the door.

“Michael pushed the door open and we followed him out. The house and barn had burned down. Minerva was flying above us as if she was searching for something. Four dead men lay in different places-twenty or thirty yards away from each other-and their blood had melted the snow around them.

“My mother sat down, wrapped her arms around her legs, and began crying. Michael and I checked what was left of the house, but we didn’t find any trace of our father. I told Michael that the men didn’t kill him. He ran away.

“Michael said, ‘Forget that. We better get out of here. You’ve got to help me with Mom. We’ll go over to the Tedfords and borrow their station wagon.’

“He went back into the root cellar and returned with the jade sword and the duffel bag. We looked inside the duffel and saw that it was filled with packets of one-hundred-dollar bills. Mother was still sitting in the snow, crying and whispering to herself like a crazy woman. Carrying the weapons and the bag, we took her across the fields to the Tedfords’ farm. When Michael pounded on the front door, Don and Irene woke up and came downstairs in their bathrobes.

“I’d heard Michael lie hundreds of times at school, but no one ever believed his stories. This time, he sounded like he believed what he was saying. He told the Tedfords that our father had been a soldier and he had run away from the army. Last night, government agents had burned down our house and killed him. The whole thing sounded crazy to me, but then I remembered that the Tedfords’ son had been killed in the war.”

“A skillful lie,” Maya said.

“You’re right. It worked. Don Tedford loaned us his station wagon. Michael had already been driving for a couple of years on the farm. We loaded up the weapons and the duffel bag, then headed down the road. Mother lay on the backseat. I covered her with a blanket and she went to sleep. When I looked out the side window, I saw Minerva flying through the smoke up in the sky…”

Gabriel stopped talking and Maya stared at the ceiling. A truck came down the highway and its headlights cut through the window blinds. Darkness again. Silence. The shadows that surrounded them seemed to gain substance and weight. Maya felt like they were lying together at the bottom of a deep pool.

“And what happened after that?” she asked.

“We spent a few years driving around the country, and then we got fake birth certificates and lived in Austin, Texas. When I was seventeen, Michael decided that we should move to Los Angeles and start a new life.”

“Then the Tabula found you and now you’re here.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said softly. “Now I’m here.”