Joe shrugged. “You sure about that? All I can say is, good luck to the dumb bitch if she tries.” He snorted at the thought. “But that’s her lookout, no point in getting worked up about it. Or about some weak little ’maldie shitheads stumbling into our turf—that’s probably what we’re smelling anyway, all that wood alcohol and crap they shoot into their skin. Hell, maybe we should both go after them, huh? Ask ’em to take that Renee off our hands?”
He smiled at me, the issue settled. I twitched, feeling beetles creeping over my skin, but it was just nerves. Joe was such an ant farm you felt itchy just looking at him.
“You’re wrong, Joe,” I said. “I don’t know what all this is about yet or what those things are or what the hell Teresa’s really up to, but you’re wrong.”
Joe slammed his fist against a rock. It cracked down the middle like spring ice. “Okay, so what’s your brilliant theory?
Huh? You’re so full of superior wisdom, except you crap yourself when a couple of arm-flapping retards come wanting to play—”
I spat at him, sticky black like a tobacco plug gone rotten. “You’re talking brain damage? That’s just rich. I know what I saw and you know I’m right, you just can’t stand that I could figure anything out or even find my own ass without your help—”
“You can?” He struggled to his feet, yanking me upright with him and then letting my hand slide out of his like it was something diseased. “So if you can take such good care of yourself, what am I doing ‘saving’ you from something a kiddie could kick to dust?”
“What do you want from me? I didn’t even see them until—”
“Yeah! Exactly!”
“Well, if you think I’m that worthless, just don’t fucking bother!” I aimed a hard kick at his leg. “But if that’s how it’s gonna be, don’t try to hide behind me or push me into challenging Teresa because your time’s running shorter and you’re scared and you think you can’t fight like you used to, or maybe you’re just too damned lazy to get off your ass and do it yoursel—”
He pushed me so hard I went flying backward, stumbled over an exposed tree root, fell on my side sliding against rough bark and a cluster of pebbles so the skin from shoulder to hip scraped clean away. I lay there, clench-toothed and dizzy, and when the ground stopped tilting long enough to let me sit up again I saw Joe looming over me, arm held out, the old look in his eyes of genuine remorse mingled with the stubborn certainty that he’d been right all along, that he really was sorry for what he’d done but mostly very sorry I’d ever provoked him into doing it. I hated that look. I hated that I could never even see the sorry part of it anymore, the part that really mattered, all I could see was how it was still always me that was wrong and him that was right. Always. No matter what.
I turned my back on his outstretched hand, getting up again without his help; I stood there clutching a piece of broken rock, my knuckles slowly pulverizing it to powder.
“Just go back to the dance,” I said, and walked away.
I went slowly, giving him a chance to follow, say he really was sorry—for all of it—but when he didn’t I turned and tracked a bend in the old nature trail, seeking out the little wooden observation deck built over a bit of riverbank. You could look without being easily seen out across the river toward the gristmill and the cottonwoods, as far as the footbridge leading to the gazebo. I could still pick up the strains of music, merry and supremely indifferent, feel my legs moving in unconscious time but I was damned if I’d go scuttling back. Maybe some of my new friends would, dozens of them I hoped, so Joe could find out firsthand how frightening it was to have something neither living nor dead nor properly in-between pressing in on you, filling your nostrils and mouth with a stink of skin scrubbed like a floor, shocking strength in its sterile unrotted muscles but only dust and hollowness behind its eyes—
Something was crossing the footbridge from the gazebo side, so thin and tottering that even from this distance I recognized it as Florian. Dust and hollowness. He took a few steps and stopped, clutching the railing like a living old man gasping for breath, and as I stood up in alarm he seemed to gather himself, moving with renewed speed into the open field past benches lost in swaths of grass. He picked his way toward the rise of a little hill right near the old sugaring shack. It took him so long. The dance had drained him dry.
As he came closer, pushing himself to move just a few more feet and then a few more, I felt the ache in my own arms and legs, a little clay ball surrounding a hard painful stone. Finally he curled up on the hillside, wedging himself beneath another rusted bench, and almost instantly fell asleep, alone and unmissed. He trembled in his sleep. He got tremors a lot now, he said it was just old age, but from where I sat he looked like a twist of dried-out paper folded into human shape, hiding and shaking with fright at the prospect of sharp scissors, a lit match, a good gust of wind.
I watched him for a long time, ignoring the fading notes of the calliope, and when my chest grew tight from sadness I lay down on the deck, my back to him, and fell asleep.
BOOK TWO
DANSE MACABRE
7
Florian died three days later.
Once he found that little hillside spot, the night of the dance, he never left it; he just lay curled on the grass, sleeping, rocking back and forth, singing softly to himself. “Go along, pets, go ahead. I’m tired,” he’d whisper, every time we went to hunt. We brought him back fresh deer meat that he nibbled like candy and never finished. His brain radio was soft and fading, you had to strain to hear it, but it was still there: banjo, a merry strum when he was in his prime but now slow plucks of weak, tired fingers on strings he’d forgotten how to play.
A slow banjo is the loneliest sound in the world.
The sun was just coming up and we were wandering back from a hunt, drunk on blood and heavy with meat. We went past the gristmill and sugaring shack and up to the little hill and as we got closer we saw no movement in the winter-browned grass, felt only silence. My stomach lurched.
Teresa stood there for a moment, then walked away. Considering everything that happened later I should be fair and say it was our way, we left each other alone and in peace when it was time to die again, and Billy and Ben and the rest all followed her but I couldn’t do it, Florian I couldn’t leave like a dead raccoon on the road shoulder. I pushed my way through the grass and found him huddled knees to chin in a nest of tree roots, his jaw clicking in slow mute taps. He stretched suddenly, rolling flat on his back, and clutched at the grass stems like he might float away.
This wasn’t right. He had to wake up, eat, tell one of his convoluted stories about ghosts and talking animals and spaceships heavy with radiation and always, no matter what, us triumphant against the frighteningly or comically stupid hoos; he had hundreds of stories, some decades old, invented to while away the long tedious hours of watch duty or hunting or travel or insomnia. His prophecies, he called them. All true in some time or place. He wasn’t allowed to be a dry, wordless thing curled up in the dirt. I knelt by him, murmuring, “Florian.”
I heard footsteps behind me but stayed turned toward Florian, stroking his skull; poor little skull, the bone flaky and almost soft beneath my fingers. “Florian?”
“
M’eech
.”
He moaned, his failed strength gathering like a fist in a single painful sound. He spasmed, gasping, and Renee and Linc were suddenly beside me slipping arms around his shoulders, holding him steady, and I kept rubbing his head as he kept repeating
m’eech, m’eech
, nonsensical but full of an urgency that sapped him.
“Tell me,” I said, touching his face. “Slower.”
His hands, all bone, clutched my shoulders hard as he yanked himself up for a single, agonized second and then fell back into our arms. “My beach,” he murmured, calmer now. Like he knew what was coming. Like he couldn’t wait. “Get—my beach—my lake—stones—”
His lake stones. Those ridiculous mementos. He didn’t have the pouch slung around his waist, the one he always kept them in. I hadn’t even noticed. What had he done with it? Where had it gone?
“Where?” Linc said quietly. “I’ll get them.” He would never make it back with them in time. None of us would. “Florian? Where—”
“M’lake.” He grabbed at my arm and then his fingers seemed not to uncurl but collapse, reduced to random bits of bone held together at the knuckles by strings: a plastic hooskeleton, curled up back in its box after Halloween. “Lake—stones—m’beach—I’ll live—”
Tremors rushed through his body, the dust of his flesh and bits of bone coming off in sooty patches like plaster from a ceiling. His skull opened, parting as easy as a split seed pod, and his brain pulsated, ready to burst open too; it shrank and withered with every new beat, the rhythm slower by the second. A wrinkled, grayish-white little cantaloupe. A dust-caked plum. A peach pit. His eyes rolled backward, and then just melted from their sockets. He’d always had kind eyes, Florian did, steady and gentle and when he looked at you, it was like he saw nothing else. Now they were just streams of thin jelly that trickled out over his cheekbones like tears, dropping one by one into the grass.
Gently, we laid him back against the roots.
Blinded, Florian trembled, his jaw opening and closing
click-bang-click
like he was trying to shout in pain; even knowing he wasn’t feeling a thing, brain shriveled up like that, I gripped Linc’s outstretched hand tight as I could. Florian’s arms were bare rattling bones now, his teeth going to dust as his jaw clicked harder and faster. His arms went to powder at the finger joints, wrists, elbows; his legs disintegrated, his lower jaw broke off with a clatter, a chunk of his skull and the peach pit of his brain fell into musty bits of nothingness. Then there was just the top part of his skull, empty staring sockets, and the long length of his spine half-buried in soft tan ash. I kept listening for the last faded, failing banjo notes, one lingering echo of him in my head, but when I wasn’t paying attention it had all just gone.
Renee turned to me and Linc, stricken. “What do we do now?” she whispered.
Nothing, Renee, nothing but wait for the rain to come wash away this ash. Wasn’t that a line in some movie? A guy wishing the rain would come through the city and wash him away? Some movie my dad liked. I couldn’t remember. What did Renee care? He was kind to her, the handful of days she’d known him, but she couldn’t miss him like I did. I didn’t know why she was even there.
“What are we going to do?” she repeated, querulous. She just wanted to show off how human she still was, sniffling over someone she’d barely known and hadn’t loved. Fresh out of gold stars, sorry. Linc took my hand again and after one last look, we turned and walked away.
“Don’t we at least bury him or something?” Renee shouted. “Don’t we do anything?”
We kept on walking. She had to work to catch up.
8
Linc and I were on watch that next morning, a relief as he never expected me to talk. I told him I���d take the Sullen Trail to the underpass, not explaining I meant to check on our dead girl; he could beat bounds the opposite way. I moved slowly, letting my thoughts drift as the riverbank disappeared behind me, the trees became denser and the flat ground gave way to slow-rising hills matted with last fall’s leaves. Everything was quiet, all the sounds and smells what they should have been, and then I saw something that made me pause: a single young, slender ash, standing in a handkerchief-sized clearing, its trunk encircled with flat, colorful stones laid out in neat spiraling rows. Sitting near it, weighted down with ordinary forest stones, the old leather pouch Florian had always worn round his waist, looking bulky and bumpy like there was still something inside.
I picked up one of the stones, a smooth slate gray, put it down, pulled the pouch free and took it in my hand. Heavy. I couldn’t remember seeing him wear it, I realized, since that day in the woods; it must’ve been too burdensome on his old bones, those final days. His stone collection, the water-polished bits of Lake Michigan he had carried with him over miles and decades without, he once told me proudly, ever losing a single one. Precious bits of junk. He’d never say where he buried them but he’d take them out and count them sometimes in secret, like miser’s gold. I’d never realized he had so many.
He must have stuck them here meaning to organize or bury them or just look at them one last time, but never got the chance.
Get my beach. My lake.
That’s all he wanted, to look at his souvenirs one last time and think of the beach, the lake, the place he’d been really happy. But I didn’t get them. I couldn’t even be bothered to try.
I sat down on the ground and made the sounds that had to pass for crying now, not touching any more stones lest they turn to dust too. I heard footsteps behind me and Linc was next to me then, holding something in his hands, and when I saw what it was I couldn’t get angry at him for following me. He sat next to me with the bit of skull cradled in his palms, that and a strip of dirt-stiff cloth torn from his own shirt, knotted into a makeshift bag around a handful of gray ash.
“I had to go back to get it,” he said. “The rest disintegrated when I picked it up. The backbone. But this part looks pretty solid. Please don’t cry.”
“Renee did.” I wiped my eyes. “She barely knew him, so why shouldn’t I? I didn’t want him to die. He wasn’t so old—”
“Over three hundred? Not so old?” His voice was gentle, not yelling at me about hoo sentimentality like Joe would have. Like he already had. Yelling louder when I just walked away. “Almost a century as a hoo and two as one of us, that’s a lot of life.” Linc put the cloth bundle down near the stones. “A whole lot of life.”
His shoulders sagged, chin dipping down toward his chest. A big black beetle emerged from the tangle of his black hair, crawling slowly down his shoulder; Linc was getting more of those lately, making the slow transition from bloater to feeder. I took the skull from him, its eye sockets softening and flaking away but most of the cranium still solid: our old man, all that was left of him.
I been everywhere.
Nothing left now but the pieces.