Bone Dance

9.0: The new day begins in darkness

It was not unlike being invalided all over again. The effect wasn’t widespread; the number of people who knew about my emotional collapse was limited. But for several days Sherrea, Theo, Frances, and Josh all behaved as if I was likely to either erupt or evaporate without cause. I expect I needed it.

I needed forbearance from myself, too. It hadn’t been a perfect catharsis; my instincts were still in place, and I had to struggle against a passionate desire to slip back into silence. And my memory was still good. Now that I had a nice, scraped place on my soul to scour them across, the cruder things I’d said or done to protect my privacy came back to me.

The worst was that same night, in the kitchen. Mags was replacing the gasket in the faucet, and I was sharing the lamp oil, reading A Tale of Two Cities at the kitchen table.

“Why are you called Sparrow?” Mags asked suddenly. “Did you name yourself? Is it symbolic? Is it a reference to something?”

I could tell her about waking up on the side of a levee in a tangle of brush, sweating already in the morning sun, and seeing a buff-gray breast and a round black eye bobbing on a twig above me. The word had appeared in my head. That was when I recognized language, that I had it; and that I had no past, that I recalled, to have learned it in. It was my first moment of self-knowledge. How was I supposed to know that Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil?

Cassidy had told me that.

“No,” I said suddenly, “it’s just a name.”

“It doesn’t fit you, you know.”

Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil. Shortly after he’d said that, he’d made me a gift of something and I’d felt trapped by it. Beer. I’d finished his beer. And because of that violation of my principles, my valuable principles, I’d made him believe that I didn’t care about him.

“I mean, sparrows are little and round and brown.”

The last conscious thing Cassidy had done in his life was to try to make me a gift of mine. “They work for the Devil,” I said, my voice breaking up like a clod of earth in water. “Excuse me.” I bolted out the back door.

By some miracle, there was no one in the town circle. I stood leaning against the big central tree, my forehead on my clenched hands, and wept again. This time the storm was silent, and angry. And this time I had to do it alone. However well I told it, no one else would understand the size of my wrongdoing or my grief. There had been a person who’d felt entitled, for the value of a swallow of beer, to deny a friend. It didn’t seem possible to share a life with that person.

The night continued to move around me, the tree continued to hold me up, the earth didn’t open under my feet. Instant oblivion wasn’t offered to me. I would just have to go on.

But I noticed, eventually, that there was an uncommon lot of verbal tiptoeing happening around me. It was Frances who was the first to be polite and self-effacing one time too many. I can’t remember her exact words; I remember that the sentence was even more ornamented and less linear than usual. I said, “I tell you what: I’ll lock myself in my room, and you can slip notes under the door. That way you can think about what you want to say for days before you say it.”

Frances’s eyes opened wide. “Hullo,” she said, grinning, “you’re back!”

Theo slid gradually into quoting from movies again, because he couldn’t help it. I understood how that worked. After all, I’d avoided seeing Theo for weeks because I couldn’t look at him and not think of VU meters and mixing boards. Sherrea simply forgot and cussed me out one day. After that, without comment, we picked up the rhythms of genuine conversation again, genuine argument, and silences that weren’t loaded with anything.

So there was no discomfort, when I went out to the stables looking for a pitchfork, in finding Sherrea propped against the fence of a nearby paddock. There was a certain amount of strangeness, however. She was feeding handfuls of clover to a camel. A two-humped, dark brown, disreputable-looking camel.

“How in the name of… everything did that get here?” I said, in lieu of the sentence I’d been planning to say.

“Isn’t she hot stuff? There’s not a thing we can do with her, but the camels keep hanging on, and they’re so weird we can’t bring ourselves to trade ’em off to somebody who needs ’em.”

“There’s more than one?”

“Oh, yeah. A male, two she-camels, and a calf just this spring.”

“But where from?” I asked again, holding out my hand.

“Put some grass in it, or she’ll just bite you. The land we’re on used to be the zoo. Whenever you’re up for a serious hike, you can see the old buildings — they’re over that ridge a ways. They’re ruined, though. It’s kind of a sad place. When the Engineers set up camp, the tropical animals had already died, and some other species, too. The last tiger died two years ago, and everybody was miserable, even though we all knew it was gonna happen eventually.”

“A tiger?”

“Yeah. He was beautiful. But we just couldn’t find out enough about taking care of tigers, and what we could find out, we couldn’t always use. But the moose and the wild horses did okay on their own, so we let ’em go feral. And you’ll see snow monkeys in the woods, if you watch. The musk oxen were our big success, though.”

The camel looked adoringly at me from under vast, sand-colored lashes, and tried to tear a piece from my sleeve. I pulled another hank of grass and offered that instead. “They’re still here?”

“No, it’s too hot for ’em here now. We were losing too many to disease. But we found out about some people north of Winnipeg who’re doing kind of what the Engineers are doing here, and they said they’d take ’em. So we had a musk oxen drive up to the border. It was great, except people started singing ‘Git Along Little Musk Ox’ when we’d stop for the night. Now we hear the herd’s increasing again. I figure that’s one for the good guys.”

“Who are—?”

The camel bit me.

“She’s really sweet,” Sher said as I rubbed my forearm. “You just don’t want to ignore her.”

“You’re darn right.”

The camel pulled her lips back blissfully once more.

Josh’s brand of tiptoeing wasn’t verbal. It wasn’t even tiptoeing, really; it was a different kind of caution, another sort of concern for my mental state, and it manifested itself in watching me. I’d known he was doing it, but I hadn’t known how thoroughly he was doing it until he stopped. I brought it up one evening, in his surgery, where he’d had an emergency call. Large Bob Beher had broken his left wrist; I assisted at the cast-making. (Josh’s principles of doctor-patient formality were, based on this example, a little slippery; Large Bob referred to the doctor as “Josh, you sonofabitch,” and Josh addressed the patient as “Mr. Beher, you horse’s ass.”)

We were alone, and I was gathering up the last ends of plaster gauze and the pan of chalky water when I said, “Did you think I was going to kill myself?”

Josh looked up from his dishpan full of scary stainless-steel implements. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know you before, you see. But I knew while I was sealing up the outside of you, that something inside was broken. Then, when you… ”

“When I did my imitation of a garden hose all over the carrot patch,” I said.

“Whatever. I couldn’t tell if that helped or hurt. Acceptance of despair sometimes looks like that, too. That’s why people often say of suicides that they seemed so much better the day before.”

“I couldn’t have done it. Frances would have been furious, after I kept… ” I took a moment to decide if I was really going to do what I thought I was. “Josh, do you have any beer?”

He looked affronted. “I have an icebox, don’t I?”

“I’ll tell you the whole story if you want to hear it. But I don’t think I can do it yet without drinking some beer.”

“These things take practice,” he agreed. “How ’bout the porch?”

So we sat outside in the dark, reeking of pennyroyal to keep the mosquitoes off, with three bottles of home-brewed beer apiece, and I told him what I was and how I’d managed to end up blood-boltered in his front yard. Josh whistled and invoked gods in all the appropriate places. When I was done, he took a long, meditative swallow of beer and said, “What are you going to do now?”

I hadn’t expected that. “I don’t know,” I answered after some thought. “Do I have to do anything?”

“Maybe not. Probably not. But in the larger scheme of things, we’re close to the City. We do a lot of trading there. This seems like the kind of business any sane person would leave unfinished, but you may find that it won’t leave you.”

I finished my third bottle. “Maybe I ought to go.”

“Where?”

“South again? Or I could try Mick’s idea, and head for the border.”

“Not the border,” Josh said. “You wouldn’t get across openly, anyway.”

“Have they closed it?”

“No. But they’d ask for your health card. And when you couldn’t show them one, they’d give you a physical. Then they’d take you out back and shoot you.”

“Oh. Not fond of unusual foreigners up north, huh?”

He finished his third beer. “Besides, you might not have to go anywhere at all. Then what’ll you do?”

“Prune the raspberries?”

He laughed. “Be careful what you ask for.” Then he set his bottle down on the porch and leaned forward in his chair, looking out at the village circle. “Has anyone explained to you about hoodoo?”

“I know about hoodoo,” I said, a little sharply.

“Really? Well. Ask Sherrea,” said Josh in an odd, pleasant voice, “about this town.”

The tone put my back up. It occurred to me that Josh could have meant it to; he might not have been all-knowing, but he had a respectable average with me. “She said it used to be the zoo.”

“That probably had something to do with it, but that’s not what I mean.”

“Will she know what you mean?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do I have to ask her tonight?”

Josh opened his eyes wide. “You don’t have to ask her at all.”

Frances would probably have had an elegant and corrosive response to that. I only sighed and took six empty bottles back to the kitchen.

The next day the weather was beautiful, in a way it rarely was so close to midsummer: warm, but full of fresh wind and high, white clouds. Theo and I spent almost the whole of it in a shed-turned-machine-shop, overhauling a generator. We came out, sweaty and filthy, and discovered the tail end of what we’d missed just as the sun touched, blinding, on the treetops. Theo scrambled to the top rail of the fence and sat with his face to the dazzle, his eyes closed. I didn’t have the energy to climb; I just leaned.

“This is okay,” Theo said. “You know, for the boondocks.”

“Philistine,” I said contentedly.

He twisted on his rail and looked down at me. “You like it, don’t you? Here, I mean.”

“I don’t… know. That is, yeah, of course I like it. But if you’re saying, am I going to stay here, then I don’t know.”

“There’s not enough tape here,” he said to the field before us.

“No. But I don’t know what to think about that anymore, either.”

“What’s to think about it?”

“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want to suck my living out of the past like a leech, Theo. I’m afraid of it. I’m still afraid of all the stuff I woke up knowing. It was put there to be useful over sixty years ago, so why should it be any good to anyone now?”

“It’s been useful,” he said, ruffled, “and it is useful. So who cares why?”

I sighed. “I do. Because I’ve been useful, Theo, and I am useful, I think. But I popped to the surface fifteen years ago wide awake and full of trivia, and now I want to know why.”

“Zeus and Damballah?” said Theo in a determinedly neutral tone, as if he thought someone ought to bring it up.

“Oh, sure. Or how about — was it the Blue Fairy? Who zapped Pinocchio? No strings on me.” I stopped, because that way lay self-pity, and I was trying to kick the habit.

“I always thought you were more like the Scarecrow,” said Theo. “You know — ‘If I only had a brain.’ ”

“This from the man who watched Guns II six times. What do you want to do?”

He knew I wasn’t talking about the next ten minutes. “Get everything at the Underbridge to work at once.”

“Then I guess you’re not an atheist.”

“Hell, to do that, I’d have to be God. I’d like to record those drummers who played the other night. Man, if I’d had a DAT recorder… ” He sat quiet for a moment; then he peeled all his brown hair back from his face with both hands. “I want to go back, Sparrow. And I can’t. And I hate it.” He did, too. It was in his suddenly harrowed voice, the desperate closing of his fingers. Those things sealed my mouth and robbed my mind of comforting phrases.

“Well, hey,” he said suddenly, slipping down off the fence. “We’re young, we’re strong, and we know how to wire a quarter-inch phone plug. Something’ll come along.”

“Any minute,” I said. I looked up at the sky, held out my hands, and added loudly, “Preferably in Hi-8 format, with a copy of Casablanca loaded.” I turned back to him. He was smiling, a little. “You’ve got grease all over your nose, from pushing your glasses up.”

Theo was staying in LeRoy’s house across the circle from Josh’s, a two-and-a-half-story log building so new it still had the heated smell of cut wood. When we reached it, Theo led the way around to the back porch. There was a pump beside the steps, and a big jar of soft soap on the porch railing. Theo pulled his shirt over his head, which, I found, made me uncomfortable. I sat on the top step and pretended to be absorbed in brushing dirt off my jungle boots.

“Pitch me the soap?” he said. I had to look at him after all. He’d been going without his shirt intermittently, it seemed; he was lightly browned, and freckled across the shoulders. It still made me uncomfortable, I decided. I threw him the soap jar, and he traded me his glasses for it. He cranked up the pump, stuck his head under the water, and let out a reverberating, gurgling shriek.

“I think,” said Frances, strolling around the corner of the house, “the water’s cold.”

“You wonder why he’d do a thing like that,” I said.

“No, you don’t. If he’s in the same condition you are, there’s no mystery at all. What were you doing, building an oil tanker?”

“He was worse, actually. We were wrestling a Honda generator.”

“It won?”

“Probably a moral victory. But it runs now.”

She sat on the step below mine. “So,” she said, watching Theo douse his head again, “what are we going to do next?”

I stared at her, keeping my mouth closed with an effort. Then I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I’ve had this conversation twice already in the last twenty-four hours. You people ought to coordinate better.”

“Did they mean the same thing I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know you’ve had this conversation? I mean,” she added, before I had time to object, “that I want to know how you think my future ought to influence yours, and vice versa. I like it here, but eventually, being in striking distance of the City would rot my mind. I’d have to take another shot at him, and there’s no point. As you pointed out, shortening the running time on my life story would be ungrateful. So I’ll leave, sooner or later, and sooner is probably not a bad idea.

“Given all that, are you staying, or going?” She pulled her own knees up to her chest and looked at me.

“If I go, do I have to go with you?”

“Christ, no, but you’re welcome to. This is my Byzantine way of telling you so.”

It was one solution. It was a good one, in fact: guaranteed to remove me both from Tom’s reach, and from the thorn-hedge maze of reminders of my past mistakes. It didn’t help Theo, but maybe I could come up with a way to do that, too. “Can I think about it for a while?” I asked.

“No,” said Frances, “I expect you to fling yourself onto the back of my horse without so much as a clean handkerchief. Of course you may. Please do.”

“Oh, shit!” Theo wailed. “No towel!”

“No, no towel,” I agreed.

Frances shook her head at me. “You’re not a very nice person. I’ll get you a towel, Theo. In the meantime, pretend you’re a drip irrigation system.”

Theo pushed the streaming hair back from his face as Frances went in the back door. Wet-headed, without his glasses, he looked like a stranger. “She’s doing better, I think,” he said.

“Frances? Better at what?”

“That’s right, you were busy not noticing everything. She’d rattle off the speeches, but they were all bitter. And she wouldn’t fight back.”

“Wouldn’t fight back?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. I think she felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

I frowned.

“Well,” said Theo, “I know you can be stupid without anybody else’s help, but maybe she didn’t. Anyway, you were pretty much wired in series. You got better, she got better.”

I didn’t say anything, and it was just as well, because Frances came out with a towel and sailed it at Theo.

“LeRoy wants to know if you’d mind having corn fritters again,” she said to him.

Theo looked at Frances in disbelief. “Mind? I mean, do you?”

“That’s what I told him. But he wanted me to ask. Saints and angels, if there’s one thing people around here seem to know about, it’s food. The place must have been founded by an exiled cooking school.”

“You’re staying here, too?” I asked, surprised. “At LeRoy’s?”

“Attic. Why,” Frances said, aggrieved, “does everyone put me on the top floor, as if I were likely to have a nasty accident with a chemistry set?”

“Maybe they’re hoping the stair-climbing will cut into your natural vivacity.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been listening to me for too long?”

“Sparrow, is that you?” LeRoy’s voice preceded him to the screen door. He opened it and poked his long amber-brown face out. There was a streak of flour in the cropped black fleece of his hair. “Mags asked me if I’d dig out some old schoolbooks of mine for Paulo. If I can find ’em, will you take ’em back with you?”

“If you don’t mind them a little seasoned with machine lube.”

“Nah. Someone threw the physics book in a vat of Coca-Cola once, from the looks of it. Frances, is it okay if I look around in the attic?”

“It’s your attic. Can we help look?”

“I don’t know,” LeRoy said, a little desperately.

When we’d all tramped up to the attic, I could see why. Frances occupied one end of the floor space: a camp cot, a crate with a few books ranked neatly inside and a candle lamp on top, another crate used an open-fronted dresser and filled with folded clothes. It was spare and obsessively neat.

The rest of the attic contained what looked like the pasts of the last three generations of every family in town, in boxes, in overflowing trunks, in storage cabinets made from the crawl space under the rafters, and a two-door closet built into the end wall. “I thought this was a new building,” I said, rather faintly.

“I moved it all from the old one,” said LeRoy. “There wasn’t time to sort it.”

“Yes, there was,” Sherrea said as her head appeared on the landing. “If you hadn’t put it off until the day before we needed to tear the old place down. Santos, what are you all doing, up here?”

“Looking for a needle,” Frances said.

“Huh. I was going to invite myself to dinner.”

“Great!” said LeRoy. “As soon as we find these books.”

“We’ll starve,” Theo sighed.

The possibility seemed to send Sherrea into action. She pointed each of us at a box or cupboard, and took one for herself. I got the two-door closet.

The floor was stacked with magazines, and if they were sorted, it was into an organization that I didn’t understand. Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, Wigwag, The Utne Reader, Air and Space, Convolution Quarterly, something called Dirty Linen…

I felt as if I’d fallen, with a bad toothache, headfirst into a candy box. The urge to sit and read was unbearable.

Not that the magazines were the only things there. I pulled out a smelly wool quilt, three fluorescent tubes, an electric fan with a blade missing, a fat-bellied painted reed basket, a stack of stamped-tin ashtrays bearing the legend “Reynolds Radiator: A Good Place to Take a Leak,” and an enormous framed brown photograph of a beaming blond woman, from around the mid-19408. I sneezed and raised my eyes, daunted, to the closet shelf.

There were some books there, the bindings disguised by a barely arrested cascade of newspapers and an inverted pyramid of cardboard boxes that, if anything in that closet had seemed to be arranged by intent, I would have called a booby trap. I recognized that. I pointed it out to myself, almost in so many words, in mingled amusement and dismay. And still my hands went out to ruffle under the heap of newspapers, to try to draw the books from the very bottom of the stack.

Newsprint slid, one fold, then two. The boxes trembled and rocked. At last, inexorably, in the same style as avalanches filmed for documentaries, the boxes tipped forward and poured their contents and themselves over my head and shoulders. I think I yelled.

I stood finally at the end of a long drift of mixed paper, sneezing. The mess eddied gently around Frances’s knees, where she sat cross-legged in front of an open box. “Just think,” she said mildly. “It could have been paint… What’s that?”

Lying between us, face up, was a bent and battered postcard of a city by night. The buildings were illuminated and rich against a blue-black sky, lovely and unimaginable in their use of power. Once people had lit the outsides of skyscrapers, and turned them into sculpture and monuments when their insides were empty.

Then I recognized the pillar of glass in the middle, reflecting its sisters and the cool night sky on its flanks, crowned with a halo ring of little white lights. I was looking at my City.

No, I realized, after a glimpse of Frances’s face — I was looking at hers. The City as she’d left it, whenever she’d left it to do her nation’s bidding and ride the bodies of strangers. The city, maybe, that she’d been innocent in, blank tape herself.

“But what’s the big gold one?” I asked aloud.

“Pardon?” she said, looking up blindly.

“The one with the top lit to a fare-thee-well. That’s almost as big as—”

I realized it as I said it, but Theo answered me anyway. “Cripes. It’s the Gilded West.”

Frances laughed, just a little. “The second-tallest building in town by popular fiat; did you know? My mother always claimed, when it was lighted, that it looked like an electric shaver.”

“No,” Sherrea said, peering over Frances’s shoulder. “It looks like a skull. See? From this side, anyway. Those shadows are the eyes—”

Theo had crouched in the multicolored reef of papers and was stirring through them. “Here’s another one — and another one. Look at this! The Tent Farm with the roof still on. Cool. And that building’s not there now.”

“The Multifoods Building. And City Center,” Frances told him, her voice steady. “Both desperately ugly. They will not be mourned.” But I could see her face. I wandered over, as if to look at the postcards, and touched my fingers lightly to her shoulder.

“Here’s another one of the Gilded West after dark,” said Theo. “It looks like a toad in this one.”

“It’s the other side,” Sherrea said. “Bullshit. Where’s the toad?”

“Right here. There’s the two front legs, and the body, and the two red lights on top are the eyes.”

“Santos. It does look like a toad.”

Frances tipped her head back and met my eyes. Her expression was an unstable mix of hilarity and distress. “Thank heaven,” she said, “the Norwest board of directors are no longer with us.”

Sher had both postcards, skull and toad, in her hands and was studying them. “They’re both death symbols.”

“Oh, happy bankers,” Frances sighed. “No wonder the building’s standing empty now.”

“Noooo… Theo, hasn’t your family got it? Why’s it empty?” Sher tapped the edges of the cards and fanned them like her tarot pack, her brows drawn together.

“I’m not sure. Something about security, I think. And maybe just that they’re so close in size, and somebody didn’t like the competition. It’s not really empty. It’s got stuff stored in it.”

I sat on my heels next to Frances. “What kind of stuff?”

“Groovy stuff. I’d have gotten it all by now, except you can’t exactly take most of it out in your pockets. Uninterruptible power supplies, the four-hour ones; about three dozen heavy-duty storage batteries; some charge controllers; a whole pile of halogen floods — hey, they must be replacement bulbs for the outdoor lights. Take that look off your face. Just because the place isn’t lived in doesn’t mean it’s not guarded.”

I’d forgotten LeRoy, and was startled when he said, “Y’know, if we’re not going to find the books, we might as well have dinner.”

Sher said, “LeRoy, it’s your house, but don’t you think we oughta put this back in the boxes, at least?” She flourished the postcards. “Hey, can I hang on to these?”

I stood up and worked my way around the pile to the closet again. The books I’d tried to get at on the shelf were still there. I pulled them down. Modern English Grammar, 7th Ed. Windows on Western History. And, binding and page edges irregularly tan, Adventures in Physical Science. I stared at them, and at the pile of paper on the floor, and the postcards in Sher’s hand.

“If you want to send a message,” I said softly, frowning again at the books, “try Western Union.” But no telegrams were forthcoming.

I wound up delivering the textbooks to Paulo and coming back to LeRoy’s for dinner. Theo and Frances had been right about the corn fritters. Conversation was easy around the table during the meal; but as we finished, Frances leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I think I’d like to get embarrassingly drunk, in good company. Would you mind? And Theo and Sher, too, if they can stand it?”

Sher contributed a bottle of Iron Range malt whiskey. We climbed to the warm, barely sloping roof of one of the hay sheds and sprawled there, drinking from the bottle and watching the emerging stars and talking, erratically, about nothing particular. The whiskey was smoky and full on the tongue, and the roof slope faced south, away from the City.

The bottle had gone around a few times when I dropped my gaze from the sky to the roof. Sher, Frances, and Theo were picked out in monochrome by starlight and a half moon, the uneven rickrack lines of heads, shoulders, and knees dusted silver. The moody voice of a clarinet rose behind us, from somewhere in town, asking rhythm-and-blues questions that didn’t need an answer.

Frances held the bottle on her chest and said thoughtfully:

I said, “Who—”

“W. B. Yeats,” Frances sighed. “There’s nothing like the Irish for times like this.”

“Bottle,” said Theo, and Frances passed it.

I looked at them, and thought it was no wonder that I hadn’t subscribed to the concept of friendship. The silliest exercise I could imagine would be to squeeze these three profoundly dissimilar people under the umbrella of the single word “friend.”

But, it seemed, I’d been silly. “Bottle,” I said to Theo.

“But of course, my little chickadee.”

“’Sparrow,’ you asshole. That’s a good Fields, though.” I held the bottle up to the moon. “To us,” I said, very softly, and drank.

The moon was high when we slid, graceless but undamaged, down from the roof. Frances was still collected and fluent, but I thought the whiskey had worked; the wild taint on her words since she’d seen the postcards was gone. It occurred to me, my own feelings rocking more freely than usual on the surface of the liquor, that I’d probably just attended a wake.

We walked Frances and Theo back to LeRoy’s house. I turned to the town circle, and the sight of the farmhouse and its wide front porch. Then I said, “Sher?”

“Well, don’t shout. I’m right next to you.”

She was, too; I’d thought she’d started toward her place, but she hadn’t moved. As if she’d known I was going to ask.

“Tell me about the town,” I said, feeling the twitch of fear in my stomach that goes with the beginning of any risky enterprise.

I had good night vision, but I longed suddenly for a full moon instead of a half. Something — the moon, a star, a last lit window in a house — reflected for a moment in Sherrea’s right eye and was gone. “Why?” she asked.

“Josh said I should.”

“I wanted to know, back when you were still sick, if you’d taken a vow not to ask questions. Now you ask ’em because you’re told to?”

I felt the same rush of irritation I had with Josh. “When have I ever done what I was told?”

Around us was a fury of crickets, but I thought I heard her draw breath. “Always,” she said. “Because it’s the easy path, and the one you’re least noticed on.”

I had a powerful longing to turn and go. “Tell me about the town, Sher. I want to know.”

“Why do you want to know?”

I thought of the camel, and Josh saying that the character of the town might have a little to do with the zoo. And Frances’s frivolous comment about the cooking school. “Because I like it here. I’d say you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if you didn’t want to, you’d have told me so and gone to bed by now.”

“Sparrow,” she said in an odd, unsupported voice. “Why do you want to know?”

I did turn then, and took three steps toward the circle. The movement shook a thought loose. The postcard lying on the floor in LeRoy’s attic, face up in front of the only person in the community who had seen that view before. And the books we were looking for, stored where they would set off that cascade when moved, just as the cards in a tarot deck, if you believed it worked that way, always came off the stack in the right order.

And Theo being a friend of Sher’s, and me knowing both of them; Sher being friends with China Black; meeting Frances on the bridge; Mick finding my body in the first place. Further back, that I had come to this City, and stayed, and further yet, that I’d been brought to life at all. We, the tarot cards, had come off the deck in order.

I faced Sherrea, queasy with nerves. “Because I think I know half a secret, and I can’t keep it properly until I know the rest. Because whoever’s shuffling is stacking the deck. Why did Josh ask if I knew about hoodoo, then tell me to ask you about the town?”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Then: “Maiden, Mother, and Crone. I didn’t think you were gonna do it.”

“Do what!” I said, my patience frayed.

“Prove you knew enough to understand the answers, dipshit,” she told me happily. “I’m gonna fetch a candle. If I tell you to wait under the big tree, will you trust me to come back and answer you?”

So I stood under the big tree and waited for her. I could see the stars between the heavy branches. The grass of the circle, faintly reflective with dew, was a little lighter than the sky.

I was still queasy. It was as if my stomach knew something my reason didn’t, about what I had asked, what I was about to find out. It was hard not to go straight to the farmhouse and lock the door behind me. I sat down, leaned against the trunk, hugged my knees, and tried to think of nothing.

Then I looked up to find Sher standing over me. “Santos, this isn’t even the hard part,” she said.

“I don’t know what it’s a part of.”

She dropped down on the grass in front of me. In her hand was a little lantern, glass framed in tin with a squat white candle inside. She set it down between us and lit it, and a pleasant piney smell began to spread around us. “I’ll make it easy. Heck, maybe I’ll even make it boring. What do you know about hoodoo?”

“It’s magic. Crowley’s definition, about making changes in conformity with will.”

“Do you believe it works?”

“No,” I said, before I quite thought about it.

“Good. Because it does, and that’s not how.” She let me wrestle with that for a moment, her face impassive and erratically underlit. “We’re living in a closed system. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. That’s true of mental energy, too, and spirit, and emotions — all the stuff that magic and religion are about.

“People who work with those kinds of energy, the unmeasurables, have been called hoodoo doctors. Somebody’s got a lousy love life, or is being worked against by somebody else, or wants to find a better job — it’s sort of like going to the medical doctor when you’re sick.” She grinned suddenly at the farmhouse and said, “G’night, Josh. Anyway, they go to the hoodoo doctor, who does the spell and asks the loa to help the customer. What’s really happening is that the hoodoo doctor, who has a lot of energy and can get hold of more, moves it into the system in favor of the customer, and asks some of the major components in the system to keep things stable.”

This all sounded reassuringly like what must have been in the science book I’d delivered today. Too reassuring to be the whole of it. I fastened, in a kind of reverse self-defense, on a lurking inconsistency. “Where are the loa supposed to come into this?”

Sherrea shook her head. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear that yet.”

“Then what you just told me isn’t true?”

“I’m trying to explain it in order so it’ll make sense. Look, hoodoo isn’t sticking pins in an apple. Hoodoo is all the energy and attention you bring to what you do. Everything you do. The work of your hands, done with all your attention, becomes a container full of energy that you can transfer to somebody else. Baking bread is a hoodoo work. So’s putting in a garden. Or fixing an amplifier, or teaching someone else to. If you do it right, with your whole head, and an awareness of where it came from, and where it’s going when it leaves you. The process it’s part of. And you have to be concentrating on moving energy, not money.”

“Then this is a hobby business?”

“There’s a difference,” she said with exaggerated patience, “between getting money for what you do, and doing it for money. If you don’t do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it. If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn’t be done.”

A moth had come to knock against the lantern. There were fireflies in the flowerbeds, and something, an owl maybe, shot out of one of the upper branches and disappeared into the darkness. I thought about the City, about the structure and rules of all its exchanges. I remembered the ones I’d taken part in, right up to the last one. “This sounds really nice. But people don’t live like that. They want what they’ve paid for. They want things evened up. Nothing,” I said, almost against my will, “is free.”

“That’s right — that’s your damn religion, isn’t it? And the rest of the congregation is full of people like Albrecht and Beano.” She was angry. Her expression was hard to read in the unnatural light, but her voice was full of it, and the set of her shoulders, outlined against the sky, was stiff, as if she might lever herself up and go away.

“Don’t,” I said. “Standing by the principle has become a reflex, I guess. Besides, I’ve hurt myself with it. If I give it up now, I’m saying I hurt myself for no good reason.”

“It was a good reason,” she said, very softly. The moth was louder than she was. “You’re both alive and here. You had to pay at his rates, in his currency. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

I dropped my gaze to my crossed ankles and left it there.

“Anyway, as long as you keep the energy, all kinds of energy, moving through the system, everything is free. But as soon as you block some of it off, take it out of circulation — wham. The payback is enormous. You kept your self, your energy, out of every damn thing you did, and you’re still paying for it. Albrecht is stuffing energy in boxes and hiding it in his basement as fast as it comes in, the asshole. And everybody’s paying for it.

“When the whole system is screwed up like that, you need more than a hoodoo doctor. Straightening things out for individuals isn’t enough anymore. So what you need is a gang of people whose job is to keep the energy circulating, to show other people how it’s done, and to make sure both of those go on even when the gang isn’t there.” Sher leaned back, set her hands on her knees, and looked at me.

“Do you think you’re through?” I asked. “I’m waiting for the answer to the first question. What does this have to do with the town?”

“Oh, work a little bit, Sparrow. It’ll do you good.”

I think I knew, really. I just had to line the facts up in my head. A community of people who made food and entertainments for each other, who had no store or even any regulated system of baiter. A town that had given a herd of musk oxen an escort north, and done its best to keep tigers alive. The people who saved my life because, just then, it needed doing. “Oh,” I said, and, “The whole town?”

“That’s right,” said Sherrea. “Welcome to the Hoodoo Engineers.”

That wasn’t the end of it; I had questions, she had clarifications. But not much later, I walked alone back to the farmhouse.

Or not quite alone. For company, I had my sense of something almost seen, something hovering over me, something that would be revealed eventually, whether I liked it or not. I’d thought it would be in Sherrea’s explanation, and I’d been afraid of it. Now I wished it had been. It was spoiling my appreciation of the fireflies.