My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller

My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller Gabriel Tallent A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A METRO BOOK OF THE YEAR‘The year’s must read novel’ The Times‘One of the most important books you’ll pick up this decade’ Harper’s Bazaar‘An outstanding book that could be this year’s A Little Life’ Guardian‘You think you’re invincible. You think you won’t ever miss. We need to put the fear on you. You need to surrender yourself to death before you ever begin, and accept your life as a state of grace, and then and only then will you be good enough.’At 14, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall;That chaos is coming and only the strong will survive it;That her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world.And he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him.She doesn’t know why she feels so different from the other girls at school;Why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see;Why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever doneAnd what her daddy will do when he finds out …Sometimes strength is not the same as courage.Sometimes leaving is not the only way to escape.Sometimes surviving isn't enough.‘This book has challenged me like no other. It’s a masterpiece. A work of art on a page. I guarantee this book will take your breath away’ Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep‘Brutal yet beautiful, My Absolute Darling has floored me. Dear Turtle, a heroine amidst the horror. Exceptional, unflinching storytelling’ Ali Land?, author of Good Me Bad Me‘An incandescent novel with an extraordinary, unforgettable heroine, both deeply contemplative and utterly thrilling’ Observer – Thriller of the month‘There are echoes of Ma’s bravery in Emma Donoghue’s Room, or the resilience of Cormac McCarthy’s protagonists as they struggle to stay alive. Tallent’s world is shocking in the truest sense of the word’ Irish Times‘An utterly fantastic read. Every page is brimming with energy. And Turtle Alveston is as enthralling a character as I’ve encountered in a good long while’ Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds Copyright (#ulink_da445269-89fa-5f99-8a0b-f576e01d74f7) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk) This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Gabriel Tallent Cover design by Jo Walker; Cover photographs © Sharon Pruitt / EyeEm Gabriel Tallent asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008185213 Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008185237 Version: 2018-07-05 Dedication (#u052d3501-e8a0-5ac5-ab97-9f13d9c21198) for Gloria and Elizabeth Contents Cover (#u3a69753a-600b-5ad2-a11b-2f4b57257ad1) Title Page (#uf660656c-bfb5-542b-9bf6-cd6003080274) Copyright (#u17f28c35-221f-5bc5-9f17-8d944b7e2f5c) Dedication Chapter One (#u26a2fd35-b4cc-540b-b351-deb5c71a31f0) Chapter Two (#uf81b747b-fc8d-5305-b112-315f467d7804) Chapter Three (#u243f7a37-2003-5512-8bb1-14b1224b7602) Chapter Four (#u2c584a5d-add6-5763-884e-91cf29dac8f0) Chapter Five (#u024bcbc9-5056-59bf-97b1-87e9393f2fdf) Chapter Six (#ue72165ec-5c4a-51d0-895e-5513fe5656af) Chapter Seven (#u04a91708-18d3-5129-b55f-6980947187b4) Chapter Eight (#ub4f984ca-4d82-5aa3-b04e-2b4f541f3917) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) One (#ulink_e957f19e-617c-566b-ac85-38e4eefa604c) THE OLD HOUSE HUNKERS ON ITS HILL, ALL PEELING WHITE paint, bay windows, and spindled wooden railings overgrown with climbing roses and poison oak. Rose runners have prized off clapboards that now hang snarled in the canes. The gravel drive is littered with spent casings caked in verdigris. Martin Alveston gets out of the truck and does not look back at Turtle sitting in the cab but walks up the porch, his jungle boots sounding hollowly on the boards, a big man in flannel and Levi’s opening the sliding glass doors. Turtle waits, listening to the engine’s ticking, and then she follows him. In the living room, one window is boarded over, sheet metal and half-inch plywood bolted to the frame and covered in rifle targets. The bullet clustering is so tight it looks like someone put a ten-gauge right up to them and blew the centers out; the slugs glint in their ragged pits like water at the bottom of wells. Her daddy opens a can of Bush’s beans on the old stove and strikes a match on his thumb to light the burner, which gutters and comes slowly to life, burning orange against the dark redwood walls, the unvarnished cabinets, the grease-stained rat traps. The back door off the kitchen has no lock, only holes for the knob and deadlock, and Martin kicks it open and steps out onto the unfinished back deck, the unboarded joists alive with fence lizards and twined with blackberries through which rise horsetails and pig mint, soft with its strange peach fuzz and sour reek. Standing wide-legged on the joists, Martin takes the skillet from where he hung it on the sprung clapboards for the raccoons to lick clean. He cranks the spigot open with a rusted crescent wrench and blasts the cast iron with water, ripping up handfuls of horsetail to scrub at problem places. Then he comes in and sets it on the burner and the water hisses and spits. He opens the lightless olive-green refrigerator and takes out two steaks wrapped in brown butcher paper and draws his Daniel Winkler belt knife and wipes it across the thigh of his Levi’s and sticks each steak with the point and flips them one by one onto the skillet. Turtle hops onto the kitchen counter—grainy redwood boards, nails encircled by old hammer prints. She picks up a Sig Sauer from among the discarded cans and slivers back the slide to see the brass seated in the chamber. She levels the gun and turns around to see how he takes this, and he stands leaning one big hand against the cabinets and smiles in a tired way without looking up. When she was six, he had her put on a life jacket for cushion, told her not to touch the hot ejected casings, and started her on a bolt-action Ruger .22, sitting at the kitchen table and bracing the gun on a rolled-up towel. Grandpa must’ve heard the shots on his way back from the liquor store because he came in wearing jeans and a terry-cloth bathrobe and leather slippers with little leather tassels, and he stood in the doorway and said, “Goddamn it, Marty.” Daddy was sitting in a chair beside Turtle reading Hume’s AnEnquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and he turned the book upside down on his thigh to keep his place and said, “Go to your room, kibble,” and Turtle walked creakingly up the stairs, unrailed and without risers, plank treads cut from a redwood burl, old-growth stringers cracked and torqued with their poor curing, their twisting drawing the nails from the treads, exposed and strained almost to shearing, the men silent below her, Grandpa watching her, Martin touching the gilt lettering on the spine of his book with the pad of his forefinger. But even upstairs, lying on her plywood bed with the army surplus bag pulled over herself, she could hear them, Grandpa saying, “Goddamn it, Martin, this is no way to raise a little girl,” and Daddy not saying anything for a long time and then saying, “This is my house, remember that, Daniel.” They eat the steaks in near silence, the tall glasses of water silting layers of sand to their bottoms. A deck of cards sits on the table between them and the box shows a jester. One side of his face is twisted into a manic grin, the other sags away in a frown. When she is done, she pushes her plate forward and her father watches her. She is tall for fourteen, coltishly built, with long legs and arms, wide but slender hips and shoulders, her neck long and corded. Her eyes are her most striking feature, blue, almond-shaped in a face that is too lean, with wide, sharp cheekbones, and her crooked, toothy mouth—an ugly face, she knows, and an unusual one. Her hair is thick and blond, bleached in streaks by the sun. Her skin is constellated with copper-brown freckles. Her palms, the undersides of her forearms, the insides of her thighs show tangles of blue veins. Martin says, “Go get your vocabulary list, kibble.” She retrieves her blue notebook from her backpack and opens the page to this week’s vocabulary exercises, carefully copied from the blackboard. He places his hand on the notebook, draws it across the table toward himself. He begins to read through the list. “‘Conspicuous,’” he says, and looks at her. “‘Castigate.’” In this way he goes down the list. Then he says, “Here it is. Number one. ‘The blank enjoyed working with children.’” He turns the book around and slides it across the table toward her. She reads: 1. The ______ enjoyed working with children. She reads through the list, cracking the knuckles of her toes against the floorboards. Daddy looks at her, but she doesn’t know the answer. She says, “‘Suspect,’ maybe it’s ‘suspect.’” Daddy raises his eyebrows and she pencils in 1. The suspect enjoyed working with children. He drags the book across the table and looks at it. “Well, now,” he says, “look here at number two.” He slides the book back to her. She looks at number two. 2. I ______ we will arrive late to the party. She listens to him breathing through his broken nose, his every breath unbearable to her because she loves him. She attends to his face, its every detail, thinking, you bitch, you can do this, you bitch. “Look,” he says, “look,” and he takes her pencil and with two deft strokes strikes out suspect and writes in pediatrician. Then he slides the book over to her and he says, “Kibble, what’s number two? We just went over this. It’s right there.” She looks at the page, which is the thing of absolute least importance in that room, her mind filled with his impatience. He breaks the pencil in two, sets both pieces in front of the notebook. She stoops over the page, thinking, stupid, stupid, stupid, and shitty at everything. He rakes his fingernails across his stubble. “Okay.” Stooped in exhaustion and drawing a finger through the scum of blood on his plate. “Okay, all right,” he says, and throws the notebook backhanded across the living room. “Okay, all right, that’s enough for tonight, that’s enough—what’s wrong with you?” Then, shaking his head: “No, that’s all right, no, that’s enough.” Turtle sits silently, her hair straggled around her face, and he cocks his jaw open and off to the left like he’s testing the joint. He reaches out and places the Sig Sauer in front of her. Then he draws the deck of cards across the table, drops it into his other hand. He walks to the blocked window, stands in front of the bullet-riddled targets, shucks off the deck’s case, draws the jack of spades, and holds it beside his eye, showing her the front, the back, the card in profile. Turtle sits with her hands flat on the table looking at the gun. He says, “Don’t be a little bitch, kibble.” He stands perfectly still. “You’re being a little bitch. Are you trying to be a little bitch, kibble?” Turtle rises, squares her stance, levels the front sight with her right eye. She knows the sight is level when the edge appears as thin as a razor—if the gun tips up, she gets a telltale sheen off the sight’s top surface. She revises that edge into a thin, bare line, thinking, careful, careful, girl. In profile, the card makes a target as thick as a thumbnail. She eases the play out of the 4.4-pound trigger, inhales, exhales to the natural slackening of her breath, and rolls on those 4.4 pounds. She fires. The top half of the card flutters down in a maple-seed spiral. Turtle stands unmoving except for quivers that chase themselves down her arms. He shakes his head, smiling a little and trying to hide it, touching his lips dryly with his thumb. Then he draws another card and holds it up for her. “Don’t be a little bitch, kibble,” he says, and waits. When she doesn’t move, he says, “Goddamn it, kibble.” She checks the hammer with her thumb. There is a way it feels to hold the gun right and Turtle dredges through that feeling for any wrongness, the edge of her notch sight covering his face, the sight’s glowing green tritium bead of a size with his eye. For a suspended moment, her aim following her attention, his blue eye crests the thin, flat horizon of the front sight. Her guts lurch and drop like a hooked fish going to weeds and she does not move, all the slack out of the trigger, thinking, shit, shit, thinking, do not look at him, do not look at him. If he sees her across those sights, he makes no expression. Deliberately, she matches the sights to the quaking, unfocused card. She exhales to the natural slackening of her breath and fires. The card doesn’t move. She’s missed. She can see the mark on the target board, a handsbreath from him. She decocks the hammer and lowers the gun. Sweat is lacy and bright in her eyelashes. “Try aiming,” he says. She stands perfectly still. “Are you going to try again or what is this?” Turtle locks back the hammer and brings the gun from hip to dominant eye, the sights level, coequal slots of light between the front sight and the notch, the tip so steady you could balance a coin upright on the front post. The card in contrast moves ever so slightly up and down. A bare tremor answers to his heartbeat. She thinks, do not look at him, do not look at his face. Look at your front sight, look at the top edge of your front sight. In the silence after the gunshot, Turtle relaxes the trigger until it clicks. Martin turns the unharmed card over in his hand and makes a show of inspecting it. He says, “That’s just exactly what I thought,” and tosses the card to the floorboards, walks back to the table, sits down opposite her, picks up a book he’d set open and facedown on the table, and leans over it. On the boarded-up window behind him, the bullet holes make a cluster you could cover with a quarter. She stands watching him for three heartbeats. She pops the magazine, ejects the round from the chamber, and catches it in her hand, locks the slide back, and sets the gun, magazine, and shell on the table beside her dirty plate. The shell rolls a broad arc with a marbly sound. He wets a finger and turns the page. She stands waiting for him to look up at her, but he does not look up, and she thinks, is this all? She goes upstairs to her room, dark with unvarnished wood paneling, the creepers of poison oak reaching through the sashes and the frame of the western window. That night Turtle waits on her plywood platform, under the green military sleeping bag and wool blankets, listening to the rats gnawing on the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Sometimes she can hear the clack clack clack of a rat squatting on a stack of plates and scratching its neck. She can hear Martin pace from room to room. On wall pegs, her Lewis Machine & Tool AR-10, her Noveske AR-15, and her Remington 870 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Each answers a different philosophy of use. Her clothes are folded carefully on her shelves, her socks stowed in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. Once, she left a blanket unfolded and he burned it in the yard, saying, “Only animals ruin their homes, kibble, only animals ruin their fucking homes.” IN THE MORNING, Martin comes out of his room belting on his Levi’s, and Turtle opens the fridge and takes out a carton of eggs and a beer. She throws him the beer. He seats the cap on the counter’s edge, bangs it off, stands drinking. His flannel hangs open around his chest. His abdominal muscles move with his drinking. Turtle knocks the eggs against the countertop, and holding them aloft in her fist, purses open the crack and drops the contents into her mouth, discarding shells into the five-gallon compost bucket. “You don’t have to walk me,” she says, cuffing at her mouth. “I know it,” he says. “You don’t have to,” she says. “I know I don’t have to,” he says. He walks her down to the bus, father and daughter following ruts beside the rattlesnake-grass median. On either side, the thorny, unblooming rosettes of bull thistles. Martin holds the beer to his chest, buttoning his flannel with his other hand. They wait together at the gravel pullout lined with devil’s pokers and the dormant bulbs of naked lady lilies. California poppies nest in the gravel. Turtle can smell the rotting seaweed on the beach below them and the fertile stink of the estuary twenty yards away. In Buckhorn Bay, the water is pale green with white scrims around the sea stacks. The ocean shades to pale blue farther out, and the color matches the sky exactly, no horizon line and no clouds. “Look at that, kibble,” Martin says. “You don’t have to wait,” she says. “Looking at something like that, good for your soul. You look and you think, goddamn. To study it is to approach truth. You’re living at the edge of the world and you think that teaches you something about life, to look out at it. And years go by, with you thinking that. You know what I mean?” “Yes, Daddy.” “Years go by, with you thinking that it’s a kind of important existential work you’re doing, to hold back the darkness in the act of beholding. Then one day, you realize that you don’t know what the hell you’re looking at. It’s irreducibly strange and it is unlike anything except itself and all that brooding was nothing but vanity, every thought you ever had missed the inexplicableness of the thing, its vastness and its uncaring. You’ve been looking at the ocean for years and you thought it meant something, but it meant nothing.” “You don’t have to come down here, Daddy.” “God, I love that dyke,” Martin says. “She likes me, too. You can see it in her eyes. Watch. Real affection.” The bus gasps as it rounds the foot of Buckhorn Hill. Martin smiles roguishly and raises his beer in salute to the bus driver, enormous in her Carhartt overalls and logger boots. She stares back at him unamused. Turtle climbs onto the bus and turns down the aisle. The bus driver looks at Martin and he stands beaming in the driveway, a beer held over his heart, shaking his head, and he says, “You’re a hell of a woman, Margery. Hell of a woman.” Margery closes the rubber-skirted doors and the bus lurches to a start. Looking through the window, Turtle can see Martin raise his hand in farewell. She drops into an open seat. Elise turns around and puts her chin on the seat back and says, “Your dad is, like—so cool.” Turtle looks out the window. In second period, Anna paces back and forth in front of the class with her black hair gathered into a wet ponytail. A wetsuit hangs behind her desk, dripping into a plastic bin. They are correcting spelling tests and Turtle hunches over her paper, clicking her pen open and closed with her index finger, practicing a trigger pull with no rightward or leftward pressure at all. The girls have thin, weak voices, and when she can, Turtle turns around in her chair to lip-read them. “Julia,” Anna says to Turtle, “can you please spell and define ‘synecdoche’ for the class? Then please read us your sentence?” Even though they are correcting the tests, and even though she has another girl’s test right in front of her, a girl Turtle admires in a sideways-looking and finger-chewing way, even though the word synecdoche is spelled out in the other girl’s neat script and glittery gel-ink pen, Turtle can’t do it. She begins, “S-I-N …” and then pauses, unable to find her way through this maze. She repeats, “S-I-N …” Anna says gently, “Well, Julia—that’s a hard one, it’s synecdoche, S-Y-N-E-C-D-O-C-H-E, synecdoche. Would anyone like to tell us what it means?” Rilke, this other, far prettier girl, raises her hand, forming an excited O with her pink lips. “Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which the part is made to represent the whole; ‘the crown is displeased.’” She and Turtle have traded tests, so Rilke recites this from memory, without looking at Turtle’s page, because Turtle’s page is blank except for the first line: 1. Suspect. Believe. I suspect we will arrive late to the party. Turtle does not know what it means, when the part is made to represent the whole. That doesn’t make any sense to her, nor does she know what it means, the crown is displeased. “Very good,” Anna says. “Another one of our Greek roots, the same as—” “Oh!” And Rilke’s hand shoots up. “‘Sympathetic.’” Turtle sits on the blue plastic chair, chewing on her knuckles, stinking of the silt from Slaughterhouse Creek, wearing a ragged T-shirt and Levi’s rolled up to show her calves, pale and swatched with dry skin. Under one fingernail, a rusty grime of synthetic motor oil. Her fingers have its prehistoric smell. She likes to massage the lubricant into the steel with her bare hands. Rilke is applying her lip gloss, having already gone down Turtle’s test with a neat little x beside each empty line, and Turtle thinks, look at this slut. Just look at this slut. Outside, the windswept field is spotted with puddles, the flooded ditch cut from the ash-colored clay, and beyond that, the forest’s edge. Turtle could walk into those woods and never be found. She has promised Martin that she will never, not again. “Julia,” Anna says. “Julia?” Turtle turns slowly around to look at her and waits, listening. Anna, very gently, says, “Julia, if you could pay attention, please.” Turtle nods. “Thank you,” Anna says. When the bell rings for lunch, all of the students stand up at once and Anna walks down the aisle and puts two fingers on Turtle’s desk and, smiling, holds up one finger to indicate that she needs a moment. Turtle watches the other students leave. “So,” Anna says. She sits down on a desk and Turtle, quiet and watchful, attentive to faces, can read almost everything in her; Anna is looking Turtle up and down and thinking, I like this girl, and weighing how to make this work. It is unreasoningly strange to Turtle, who hates Anna, has never given Anna any reason to like her, does not like herself. Turtle thinks, you whore. “So,” Anna says again, “how did you feel about that one?” Her face becomes gently questioning—biting her lip, allowing her eyebrows to climb up, wet strands of hair escaping her pony tail. She says, “Julia?” To Turtle’s north-coast ears, Anna has an accent, cool and affected. Turtle has never been south of the Navarro River, and never north of the Mattole. “Yeah?” Turtle says. She has allowed the silence to go on too long. “How did you feel about that one?” “Not that good,” Turtle says. Anna says, “Well, did you get any of the definitions?” Turtle does not know what Anna wants from her. No, she hadn’t, and Anna must know that she hadn’t. There is only one answer to any of Anna’s questions, which is that Turtle is useless. “No,” Turtle says, “I didn’t get any of the definitions. Or, I got the first. ‘I suspect we will arrive late to the party.’” “Why do you think that is?” Anna says. Turtle shakes her head—it’s beyond saying and she won’t be bullied into saying something else. “What if,” Anna says, “you stayed in, some lunchtime, and we made flash cards together?” “I do study,” Turtle says. “I don’t know if that would help.” “Is there something you think would help?” Anna does this, asking questions, pretending to make a safe space, but there is no safe space. “I’m not sure,” Turtle says. “I go over all the words with my daddy—” And here, Turtle sees Anna hesitate and she knows that she has made a mistake, because other Mendocino girls don’t use the word daddy. Mostly, they call their parents by their first name, or else Dad. Turtle goes on. “We go over them, and I think what I need is just to go over them myself a little more.” “So just, put a little more time into it, is what you’re saying?” “Yes,” Turtle says. “So how do you study with your dad?” Anna says. Turtle hesitates. She cannot sidestep the question, but she thinks, careful, careful. “Well, we go over the words together,” Turtle says. “For how long?” Anna says. Turtle works at one finger with her hand, cracks the knuckle, looks up, frowning, and says, “I don’t know—an hour?” Turtle is lying. It’s there in Anna’s face, the recognition. “Is that true?” Anna says. “You’re studying an hour every night?” “Well,” Turtle says. Anna watches her. “Most nights,” Turtle says. She has to protect the way she cleans the guns in front of the fire while Martin waits reading by the fireplace with the firelight escaping onto their faces and escaping out into the room and then being dragged hard back across the floor to the coals. Anna says, “We’re going to need to talk it over with Martin.” Turtle says, “Wait. I can spell ‘synecdoche.’” “Julia, we need to talk to your dad,” Anna says. Turtle says, “S-I-N,” and then stops, knowing that it’s wrong, that she is wrong, and she cannot for the life of her remember what comes after that. Anna is looking at her very coolly, interrogatively, and Turtle looks back, thinking, you bitch. She knows that if she protests more, if she says anything more, she will give something away. “Okay,” Turtle says, “okay.” After school, Turtle goes to the office and sits on a bench. The bench faces the front desk, and beyond the front desk, the administrative assistant’s desk and a short hallway to the green-painted door of the principal’s office. Behind that door, Anna is saying, “God love her, Dave, but that girl needs help, real and substantive help, more help than I can give her. I have thirty students in that class, for crying out loud.” Turtle sits cracking her knuckles, the receptionist giving her quick, uncomfortable glances over her computer. Turtle is hard of hearing, but Anna is talking in a flustered, raised voice, saying, “You think I want to talk to that man? Listen, listen—misogyny, isolation, watchfulness. Those are three big red flags. I’d like her to see a counselor, Dave. She’s a pariah, and if she goes on to high school without us addressing that, she will fall further behind. We can chase down that gap now—yes, I know we’ve been trying—but we’ve got to keep trying. And if there is something wrong—” Turtle’s guts clench. Christ, she thinks. The receptionist racks a stack of papers sharply on the desk and walks down the hall to the door, Principal Green saying something and Anna flustered, “No one wants that? Why does no one want that? There are options is all I’m saying— Well. No. Nothing. All I’m—” And the receptionist stands at the door and knocks and slips her head into the room, saying, “Julia is here. Waiting for her dad.” There is a hush. The receptionist walks back to her desk. Martin pushes the door open, looks once at Turtle, and walks to the counter. The receptionist gives him a hard look. “You can just …” she says, motioning with the papers that he can go right in. Turtle rises and goes after him, past the desk and down the hall, and he knocks once and pushes the door open. “Come in, come in,” Principal Green says. He is an enormous man, pink-faced, with large, soft pink hands. His fat hangs down and fills up his pleated khaki trousers. Martin closes the door and stands in front of it, as tall as the door itself, almost as broad. His loose flannel shirt is partly unbuttoned and shows his clavicles. His thick, long brown hair is in a ponytail. His keys have begun to cut their way out of his pocket, leaving patches of white threads. If Turtle hadn’t known, she could have told that Martin had the gun just from the way he wore his flannel, just from the way he took his seat, but neither Principal Green nor Anna thinks of it; they do not even know such things are possible, and Turtle wonders if there are things that she is blind to that other people can see, and what those things might be. Principal Green picks up a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses and holds it first to Martin, who shows his palm to decline, and then to Turtle, who doesn’t move. “So, how has your day been so far?” he asks, setting the bowl back on his desk. “Oh,” Martin says, “I’ve been better.” Turtle thinks, that is wrong, that is the wrong way, but how could you know better, you’re just a bitch. “And, Julia, how have you been?” “I’m good,” Turtle says. “Ah yes, well, I bet this is a little stressful,” Principal Green says. “So?” Martin says, gesturing him on. “Let’s talk about it, shall we?” Principal Green says. The new teachers go by their first names, but Principal Green is a generation older, maybe two. “Since we last spoke, Julia has continued to struggle in her classes and we’re concerned about her. Part of the problem is her grades. Her reading comprehension is not where it could be. She struggles on tests. But for us, the problem—more than any question of her aptitude—is her sense of, well, perhaps her sense that the school may not be welcoming, and we do believe that she needs a certain level of comfort, a certain level of belonging before she can begin to thrive in school. This is the problem as we see it.” Anna says, “I have been working with Julia quite a bit, and I think that—” Martin interrupts her, leans forward in his seat, clasps his hands. He says, “She will make the work up.” Turtle stifles her surprise, looking over at Martin, thinking, what are you doing? What she wants is for Martin to look right at Anna, and she knows he can do it—look right at her, and make her feel good about this whole thing. Anna says, “Julia seems to have particular trouble with girls. We were thinking—perhaps she might be willing to see Maya, our counselor. A lot of our students find talking to someone very grounding. We believe Julia might gain from having a friendly face here at the school, somebody she can confide in—” Martin says, “You can’t make Julia’s graduation contingent on her seeing a counselor. So what can we do to make sure she graduates?” He looks at Principal Green. A kind of rising horror is on Turtle, and she quells it, because perhaps she doesn’t understand, and perhaps Martin does. She thinks, what are you doing, Daddy? Anna says, “Martin, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Julia will not be held back. Since we no longer have the budget for summer school, and since any continuation school is very limited, all students are promoted into high school. But if she leaves middle school without robust friendships and with her current study skills and level of reading, poor grades will affect her high school curriculum and subsequently her college opportunities. Which is why it is important to continue addressing these questions now, in April, while there is still time left in the school year. It is strictly an issue of Julia’s welfare, and we think that a weekly meeting with somebody she can talk to should be a part of any solution.” Martin leans forward and his chair creaks. He makes eye contact with Principal Green, presents his hands as if asking, if there are no consequences, what the hell are we doing here? Principal Green looks at Anna. Martin looks at her as if wondering why she is being looked at. Then he looks quickly away, engaging Principal Green’s attention. Martin thinks Principal Green is in charge and that Principal Green is the nut he can crack. To Martin, Anna seems both too bothersome and too powerless. Turtle doesn’t know why he thinks this. In all of these conversations, she’s never known Principal Green to be anything but unimpressed with Martin. She can see it, how solid he is. He has, Turtle knows, a squinty-eyed son with Down syndrome and he has been principal here for well over twenty years, and Martin is not talking his language. Nothing Martin can say will convince Principal Green of anything. This meeting is all about being polite and showing that Turtle is engaged, showing that Martin is also engaged with Turtle’s teachers, and Martin isn’t doing it right, isn’t saying the right things, is trying to bully Principal Green like he’s tried to bully Principal Green before. “Martin,” Anna says, “I am very committed to working with Julia and doing whatever is necessary to prepare her for high school, but there are limits to what I can do when Julia is disengaged here at school, unfocused.” “Mr. Green,” Martin says, as if going argument and counterargument with Anna. Principal Green frowns deeply, swinging a little side to side in his chair, hands clasped over his enormous belly. “Julia’s success is not contingent upon special attention or upon therapeutic intervention. It’s not so complicated. Her schoolwork is boring. We live in exciting and terrible times. The world is at war in the Middle East. Atmospheric carbon approaches four hundred ppm. We are in the middle of the sixth great extinction. In the next decade, we will be over Hubbert’s Peak. We may be over it even now, or we may continue with the present course of fracking, which represents a different but no less serious risk to the water table. And for all your efforts, our children might as well believe their tap water arrives by magic. They do not know that there is an aquifer beneath their town, or that it is dangerously depleted, or that we have no plan for how to supply the town with water after its depletion. Most of them do not know that five of the last six years have been the hottest on record. I imagine that your students might be interested in that. I imagine they might be interested in their future. Instead, my child is taking spelling tests. In eighth grade. Are you puzzled that her mind is elsewhere?” Turtle is looking at him and trying to see him as Principal Green and Anna see him, and she hates what she sees. Principal Green looks as if he has heard this objection before, put more forcefully, from others. He says, “Well, Marty. That’s not quite true. Our students have their last spelling test in fifth grade. Eighth graders learn vocabulary words with Greek and Latin etymology, all of which are useful in preparing students to understand and articulate the phenomena you describe.” Martin stares at Principal Green. Principal Green says, “Though, it is true that they are required to spell the words correctly.” Martin leans forward and the Colt 1911 prints against his flannel at the small of his back, and despite how cool his face is, the movement expresses his physical power and menace. It is clear, watching Principal Green and Martin across from each other, that they may even be of a weight, but where Principal Green is spilling hugely off his chair, Martin is solid as a wall. Turtle knows that this meeting is about showing a willingness to address their concerns. Martin doesn’t seem to know it. “I think,” Martin says, “that we should allow Julia to navigate her own relationships with her peers, and her own relationship to her schoolwork, in whatever way is best for her. You cannot dictate that a girl be an extrovert. You cannot dictate that she see a therapist, and you cannot pathologize her boredom and disenfranchisement with a tedious curriculum. In her place, you or I would be bored and disenfranchised. So I will not tell her—nor will I permit anyone to tell her—that she needs special attention. I hear your concerns about the rigors of high school, but I cannot help but think that such rigors can only be a profitable contrast from this mind-numbing gauntlet of spelling tests and plotless children’s books. She will rise to whatever challenges the coming year brings. However, I am cognizant of your concerns and I can commit right now to finding more time to help Julia study and to teaching her the study skills you believe she may lack. I can find more time for that, every night and on weekends.” Principal Green turns to Turtle and says, “Julia, what do you think of all this? Would you like to meet with Maya?” Turtle sits frozen, one hand grasped by the other, right on the cusp of cracking a knuckle, mouth open, and she looks from her daddy to Anna. She wants to put Anna at her ease, but can’t contradict Martin. Everybody watches her. She says, “Anna is really helpful, and I don’t think I do a good job of letting her help.” Everyone in the room seems surprised. “I think,” Turtle says, “that I need to work a little harder, and let Anna help a little more, listen to her more, maybe. But I don’t want to see anybody.” When they are done, her daddy rises and opens the door for Turtle and they walk to the truck together and get in and sit in silence on the bench seat. Martin puts his hand on the ignition and seems to think about something, looking to the side window. Then he says, “Is this the sum of your ambition? To be an illiterate little slit?” He starts the truck and they pull away, out of the parking lot, Turtle repeating the words illiterate little slit. His meaning comes to her all at once like something lodged up in a can glopping free. She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself. He shifts gears with quiet, forceful anger. She hates herself, hates that unfinished and unchinked gap. They go up the gravel drive and he parks in front of the porch and shuts the truck off. They climb the porch steps together and Daddy walks to the kitchen and takes a beer from the fridge and knocks it open on the counter’s edge. He sits down at the table and chisels at a stain with his thumbnail. Turtle gets down on her knees and puts her hands on the faded indigo of his Levi’s and says, “I’m sorry, Daddy.” She slips two fingers through the white distressed threads, laying the side of her face against the inside of his thigh. He sits looking away from her, holding his beer encircled by thumb and forefinger, and she thinks desperately about what she can do, a slitted little girl, slitted and illiterate. He says, “I don’t even know what to say. I don’t know what to tell you. Humanity is killing itself—slowly, ruinously, collectively shitting in its bathwater, shitting on the world just because they cannot conceive that the world exists. That fat man and that bitch, they don’t understand. They make up hoops for you to jump through and they want you to think that that’s the world; that the world is made up of hoops. But the world isn’t, and you must never, ever think it is. The world is Buckhorn Bay and Slaughterhouse Gulch. That is the world, and that school is just—shadows, distractions. Never forget that. But you have to pay attention. If you stumble, they will take you away from me. So what do I tell you …? That school is nothing, and still, you have to play along?” He looks at her, gauging her intelligence. Then he reaches out, takes hold of her by the jaw, and says, “What goes on in that little head of yours?” He turns her head this way and that, looking into her intently. Finally, he says, “Do you know this, kibble? Do you know what you mean to me? You save my life every morning that you get up and out of bed. I hear your little footsteps padding down your stairwell and I think, that’s my girl, that’s what I’m living for.” He is silent for a moment. She shakes her head, her heart creaking with anger. That night, she waits silently, listening, touching the cold blade of her pocketknife to her face. She opens and closes it silently, tripping the liner lock with her thumb and lowering the lock into place to keep it from clicking. She can hear him pace from room to room. Turtle pares crescents from her fingernails. When he stops, she stops. He is silent down in the living room. Slowly, quietly, she folds the knife closed. She cracks the knuckles of her toes with the heel of her other foot. He comes up the stairs and lifts her up and she drapes her hands around his neck and he carries her down the stairs and through the darkened living room to his bedroom, where the moon-cast shadows of the alder leaves come in and out of focus on the drywall, the leaves themselves the darkest waxen green against the window glass, the rust-black floorboards with cracks like hatchet wounds, the unfinished commissure of the redwood and the drywall a black seam opening into the unplumbed foundation where the great old-growth beams exhale their scent like black tea, like creek stones and tobacco. He lays her down, fingertips dimpling her thighs, her ribs opening and closing, each swale shadowed, each ridge immaculate white. She thinks, do it, I want you to do it. She lies expecting it at any moment, looking out the window at the small, green, new-forming alder cones and thinking, this is me, her thoughts gelled and bloody marrow within the piping of her hollow thighbones and the coupled, gently curving bones of her forearms. He crouches over her and in husky tones of awe, he says, “Goddamn, kibble, goddamn.” He puts his hands on the shallow horns of her hip bones, on her stomach, on her face. She stares unblinking. He says, “Goddamn,” and runs his scarred fingertips through the tangle of her hair, and then he turns her over and she lies facedown and waits for him, and in the waiting she by turns wants and does not want. His touch brings her skin to life, and she holds it all within the private theater of her mind, where anything is permitted, their two shadows cast across the sheet and knit together. He runs his hand up her leg and cups her butt in his hand and he says, “Goddamn, goddamn,” and he walks his lips up the knobs of her spine, kissing each, waiting on each, his breathing choked with emotion, saying, “Goddamn,” her legs parted to show a gap admitting to the black of her guts and he takes this for her truth, she knows. He lifts her hair in handfuls and lays it over the pillow to expose the nape of her neck and he says, “Goddamn,” his voice a rasp, teasing the small stray hairs with his fingers. Her throat lies against the pillow, filled with papery wet leaves, like she is a cold seep in autumn, the wintry water sieving through them, peppery and pine-tasting, oak leaves and the green taste of field grass. He believes her body to be something that he understands, and, treacherously, it is. When he is asleep, she rises and walks through the house alone, holding her engorged pussy to catch the unspooling warmth. She crouches in the bathtub, looking at the copper fixtures, ladling the cold water onto herself, the coarse spiderweb texture of his spunk among her fingers clinging even under the running water and seeming only to thicken. She stands at the porcelain sink, washing her hands, and they are her father’s eyes in the mirror. She finishes washing, cranks the copper finial, looks into that chinked, white-threaded blue, the black pupil dilating and contracting of its own. Two (#ulink_97e04261-6bfa-59a9-b54f-ff5d832c7630) WHEN THE FOG LIFTS FROM GRASS STILL SMOKING WITH dew, Turtle takes the Remington 870 down from its wall pegs, trips the release, and slivers back the slide to show the green buckshot hull. She jacks the shotgun closed and tilts it over her shoulder and goes down the stairs and out the back door. It is beginning to rain. The drops patter down from the pines and stand trembling on the nettle leaves and sword fronds. She scrambles along the joists of the back deck and clambers down the hillside alive with rotting logs and rough-skinned newts and California slender salamanders, her heels breaking through the gooey crust of myrtle leaves and churning up the black earth. She comes cautious and switchbacking down to the wellspring of Slaughterhouse Creek, where the maidenhair ferns are black-stemmed with leaves like green teardrops, the nasturtiums hanging in tangles with their crisp, wet, nasturtium scent, the rocks scrolled with liverwort. The spring here pours from a mossy nook in the hillside, and where it falls, it has carved a basin out of the living stone, a well of cold, clear, iron-tasting water, big as a room, thatched with logs worn feathery by age. Turtle sits on the logs, taking off all of her clothes and laying the shotgun among them and slipping feetfirst into the stone pool—because here she seeks her own peculiar solace, and here she feels it to be the solace of cold places, of a thing that is clear and cold and alive. She holds her breath and sinks to the bottom and, drawing her knees to her shoulders with her hair rising around her like weeds, she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily. They are bent and distorted, hazed the way things are under water, and the cold is good for her, it brings her back to herself. She breaks the surface and heaves out onto the logs and feels the warmth return and watches the forest around her. She rises and climbs carefully back up the hillside and walks heel to toe across the joists of the back deck in the gathering rain and then into the kitchen, where the black-tailed weasel startles and looks up, one paw raised above a plate covered in old steak bones. She sets the shotgun on the counter and goes to the fridge and opens it and stands wet, her hair slicked to her back and straggled around her face, racking the eggs on the counter’s edge and breaking them into her mouth and discarding them into the compost bucket. She hears Martin walk out of his bedroom and down the hallway. He comes into the kitchen and looks past her through the open kitchen door to the rain. She says nothing. She lowers her hands to the counter and lets them rest there. Water is beaded on the shotgun. It clings to the corrugated green hulls in the shotgun’s sidesaddle. “Well, kibble,” he says, looking past her. “Well, kibble.” She puts the carton of eggs away. She takes out a beer and tosses it to him and he catches it. “Time to take you down to the bus?” “You don’t have to come.” “I know.” “You don’t have to, Daddy.” “I know that, kibble.” She doesn’t say anything. She stands at the counter. They walk down the road together in the gathering rain. The drive runs with water, laddering the ruts with pine needles. They stand at the bottom of their driveway. Along the tarmac’s crumbling edge, sweet vernal grass and wild oats nod in the downpour, bindweed twining up the stalks. They can hear Slaughterhouse Creek echoing in the culvert beneath the Shoreline Highway. On the nickel-gray ocean, whitecaps ship cream against the black sea stacks. “Look at that motherfucker,” Martin says, and she looks, not knowing what he means—the cove, the ocean, the sea stacks, it isn’t clear. She hears the old bus shifting as it comes around the bend. “Take care of yourself, kibble,” Martin says darkly. The bus creaks to a stop, and with an exhausted gasp and the thwacking of rubber skirts, throws open its doors. Martin salutes the bus driver, holding the beer over his heart, somber in the face of her derision. Turtle climbs the stairs and walks down the corrugated rubber runner lit by panel lights in the floor, the corrugations now filled with rainwater, the other faces dim white smudges disordered in their dark green vinyl pews. The bus heaves, and with it, Turtle jars sideways and drops into her empty seat. Each time the bus slows, the water drains forward beneath the seats and through the rubber corrugations of the walkway and the students pull their feet up, disgusted. Turtle sits watching the water pass beneath her, carrying with it a hull of pink nail polish, which has come off all of a piece and lies upturned on the tide. Rilke is across the aisle from her, knees pressed against the seat back, bent over her book, running a hank of hair between thumb and forefinger until she has only the fan of ends, her red London Fog coat still beading with water. Turtle wonders if Rilke wore it to school thinking, okay, but I have to take good care of this coat. The rain is unseasonable, but she’s heard no one say so. Turtle doesn’t think anyone else but her daddy worries about that. She wonders what Rilke would think if she could see Turtle up at night, sitting under the naked bulb in her redwood-paneled room with its bay window looking out on Buckhorn Hill, stooped over the disassembled gun, handling each piece with care, and she wonders, if Rilke could see that, would Rilke understand? She thinks, no, of course not. Of course she wouldn’t. No one understands anyone else. Turtle is wearing old Levi’s over black Icebreaker wool tights, her T-shirt clinging to her stomach with damp, a flannel, an olive drab army coat much too big for her, and a mesh-back cap. She thinks, I would give anything in the world to be you. I would give anything. But it is not true, and Turtle knows that it is not true. Rilke says, “I really like your coat.” Turtle looks away. Rilke says quickly, “No, like—I really do. I have nothing like that, you know? Like—cool and old?” “Thanks,” Turtle says, pulling the coat up around her shoulders, drawing her hands back into its sleeves. “It’s this whole, like, army surplus, Kurt Cobain chic you have.” Turtle says, “Thanks.” Rilke says, “So, Anna is, like—killing you on those vocab tests.” “Fucking Anna, fucking whore,” Turtle says. The coat sits huge about her shoulders. Her hands, white-knuckled, wet with rain, are clenched between her thighs. Rilke barks out a startled laugh, looking forward down the aisle and then in the other direction, to the back of the bus, her neck very long, her hair falling about her in straight, black, glossy strands. Turtle does not know how it is so glossy, so straight, how it has that sheen, and then Rilke looks back to Turtle, eyes alight, putting a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god,” Rilke says, “oh my god.” Turtle watches her. “Oh my god,” Rilke says again, leaning in conspiratorially. “Don’t say that!” “Why?” Turtle says. “Anna’s really very nice, you know,” Rilke says, still leaning in. “She’s a cunt,” Turtle says. Rilke says, “So you want to hang out sometime?” “No,” Turtle says. “Well,” Rilke says, after a pause, “good talk,” and returns to her book. Turtle looks away from Rilke, at the seat ahead of her, and then out at the window, sheeted with water. A pair of girls tamp a bowl into a blown-glass pipe. The bus shudders and jars. I would just as soon, Turtle thinks, slit you from your asshole to your little slut throat as be your friend. She has a Kershaw Zero Tolerance knife with the pocket clip removed that she carries deep in her pocket. She thinks, you bitch, sitting there with your nail polish, running your hands through your hair. She does not even know why Rilke does this; why does she examine the ends of her hair; what is there to see? I hate everything about you, Turtle thinks. I hate the way you talk. I hate your little bitch voice. I can barely hear you, that high-pitched squeak. I hate you, and I hate that slick little clam lodged up between your legs. Turtle, watching Rilke, thinks, goddamn, but she is really looking at her hair as if there is something for her to see about the ends. When the bell rings for lunch, Turtle walks down the hill to the field, her boots squelching. She wades out toward the soccer goal, hands in her pockets, and the rain sweeps across the flooded field in drifts. The field is enclosed by a forest black with rain, the trees withered and gnarled with their poor soil, thin as poles. A garter snake skates across the water, gloriously side to side, head up and forward, black with long green and copper runners, a thin yellow jaw, a black face, bright black eyes. It crosses the flooded ditch and is gone. She wants to go, to bolt. She wants to cover ground. To leave, to take to the woods, is to throw open the cylinder of her life and spin it and close it. She has promised Martin, promised, and promised, and promised. He cannot risk losing her, but, Turtle thinks, he will not. She doesn’t know everything about these woods, but she knows enough. She stands enclosed in the open field, looking out into the forest, and she thinks, the hell, the hell. The bell rings. Turtle turns and looks back to the school above her on the hill. Low buildings, covered walkways, throng of raincoated middle schoolers, clogged downspouts sheeting water. Three (#ulink_d4ca357f-794c-5b6e-8ea3-738c96c93a4b) IT IS MID-APRIL, ALMOST TWO WEEKS SINCE THE MEETING with Anna. Blackberries have clambered into the old apple trees and are knitted into a wildly blooming canopy. Quail mince in nervous coteries, topknots bobbing, while sparrows and finches go wheeling and banking among the trunks. She comes out of the orchard and through the staked raspberry field to Grandpa’s trailer. Streaks of mold have run down the panels. The aluminum coping around the windows is caulked with moss. Pockets of leaf litter grow cypress shoots. She hears Rosy, Grandpa’s old dachshund/beagle mutt, heave herself up and come to the door, shaking herself and setting her collar to tinkling. Then the door is thrown open, and Grandpa stands in the doorway and says, “Hey there, sweetpea.” She climbs up the steps and leans the AR-10 against the doorjamb. It is her gun, a Lewis Machine & Tool rifle with a U.S. Optics 5-25x44 scope. She loves it, but it’s too damn heavy. Rosy hops up and down, flopping her ears. “Who’s a good dog?” Turtle asks Rosy. Rosy shakes herself excitedly, wagging her tail. Grandpa settles at the foldout table, pours himself two fingers of Jack. Turtle sits down opposite him, takes her Sig Sauer from a concealment holster in her jeans, drops the magazine, and leaves the gun on the table, locked open, because Grandpa says that when a man plays cribbage with his granddaughter, the two of them should be unarmed. He says, “Have you come to play some cribbage with your grandpa?” “Yeah,” she says. “You know why you like cribbage, sweetpea?” “Why, Grandpa?” “Because cribbage, sweetpea, is a game of low animal cunning.” She looks up at him, smiling a little, because she does not at all know what he means. “Ah, sweetpea,” he says, “I’m joking with you.” “Oh,” she says, and allows her smile to overtake her whole face, turning a little away from him, touching her thumb to her teeth shyly. It feels so good to have Grandpa teasing with her, even if she doesn’t understand. He is looking at her Sig Sauer. He reaches across the table, sets a hand on it, lifts it up. The slide is locked back, the barrel is exposed, and he inspects it for fouling and touches it with a finger pad for grease, turning it this way and that way in the light. “Your daddy takes care of this gun for you?” he says. She shakes her head. “You take care of this gun for yourself?” he says. “Yeah.” He swings the takedown lever and drops the slide catch. Carefully he removes the slide from the frame, sits inspecting the rails. “But you never fire this thing,” he says. Turtle picks up a deck of cards, shucks it out of the case, splits the deck, shuffles and bridges them. The cards slither with satin-finish friction. She racks the deck sharply against the tabletop. “You do fire it,” he says. “Why is it a game of low animal cunning?” she says, breaking the deck and examining the halves in either hand. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “That’s just what they say.” Every night she disassembles the gun and cleans it with a brass-bristled brush and with cotton patches. Grandpa sits looking into the clean, well-worn rails, and then he returns the slide to the frame. His fingers shake, holding the slide in place against the recoil spring. He seems to have forgotten how to engage the takedown lever, sits looking at the catches and levers as if hesitating, as if for a moment he has lost his bearings on the gun. Turtle does not know what to do. She sits with the halves of the deck still in her hands. Then he finds the takedown lever and tries it twice before he manages to get the tight-fit steel tab to rotate, and then he pushes it into place, his hands shaking, and lets the slide relax forward. He sets the gun aside and looks at her. Turtle shuffles, bridges, slaps the deck down in front of him. “Well,” he says. “You’re not your old man, that’s for sure.” “What?” Turtle says, curious. “Oh,” Grandpa says, “never mind, never mind.” He extends a shaking hand and cuts the deck. Turtle picks it back up and deals them each six cards. Grandpa fans the cards before him, and sighs, making slight adjustments with thumb and forefinger. Turtle discards her crib. Grandpa sighs again and encircles his whiskey in one big hand and sits, turning it slowly in the ring of its condensation, the soapstones sounding softly against the glass. He tosses back the drink, sucks air through his teeth, pours himself another. Turtle waits, silent. He tosses this back, and pours himself a third. He sits rotating it slowly. Finally, he picks two cards and tosses them into the crib. Then he cuts the deck and Turtle draws off the start card, the queen of hearts, and lays it faceup. He seems about to remark on how the start card has determined the fate of his hand, as if—on the verge of this observation—he is struck mute by the complexity of it. “The rails on that gun,” he says after a minute, “look pretty good.” “Yeah,” Turtle says. “Well, they look pretty good,” Grandpa says again, doubtfully. “I keep them oiled,” she says. Grandpa looks around the trailer, suddenly, wonderingly. His eyes run across the ceiling, across the ersatz wood paneling peeling away in places, over the dingy little kitchen. There is laundry on the floor in the hallway and Grandpa frowns severely, looking at it all. “It’s your play,” Turtle says. Grandpa teases one card from the others, throws it down. “Ten,” he says. Turtle throws down a five, pegs two for fifteen. “Grandpa?” she says. “Twenty,” he says, pegging two for the pair. “Thirty,” Turtle says, throwing down a jack. “Go.” Turtle pegs one for the go, throws a queen. Grandpa lays down a seven in seeming exhaustion. Turtle throws a three, for twenty. Grandpa throws a six, says, “Here, sweetpea,” and unbuckles his belt and draws off it the old bowie knife. The belt leather is worn shiny black from the sheath, and he holds it out to her in his open hand, hefting it. “I don’t use it anymore,” he says. Turtle says, “Put that down, Grandpa. We still need to score the hand.” “Sweetpea,” Grandpa says, holding out the knife. “Let’s see what’s in your hand,” Turtle says. Grandpa puts the knife down on the table in front of her. The leather handle is old and black with grease, the steel pummel dark gray. Turtle reaches across the table, collects Grandpa’s hand, and pulls it forward to her. She gathers the four cards together and looks at them: the five of spades, the six of spades, seven of spades, ten of spades, and the start card, the queen of diamonds. “Well,” Turtle says, “well.” Grandpa doesn’t look at his cards, he just looks at her. Turtle’s mouth moves with her counting. “Fifteen for two, fifteen for four, the run for seven, and the flush for eleven points. Did I miss anything?” She pegs him eleven points. Grandpa says, “Pick that up, sweetpea.” She says, “I don’t understand, Grandpa.” He says, “You’re entitled to a thing or two of mine.” She cracks one knuckle, then another. He says, “You’ll take good care of it. It’s a good one. You ever stick a son of a bitch with this, he’ll sit up and take notice. This knife comes from me to you.” She draws it from the sheath. The steel is smoky black with age. Oxidized in the way of very old carbon steel. She turns the blade to face her and it shows a single unbroken, unglinting line without nicks or flaws, a shining, polished edge. She passes the blade gently up her arm and golden hairs accumulate in a tide line. He says, “Go get the whetstones, too, sweetpea.” She goes to the kitchen and opens a drawer and pulls out the old leather bundle with the three whetstones and carries it back to the table. He says, “You take good care of that.” She sits looking at the blade, mute. She loves taking care of things. Rosy, sitting on the floor between them, perks up, her collar tinkling. She looks toward the door, and then there is a loud knocking. Turtle flinches. “That’ll be your father,” Grandpa says. Martin swings the door open and steps inside. The floor complains beneath him. He stands spanning the hallway. “Oh Christ, Dad,” Martin says, “I wish you wouldn’t drink in front of her.” “She doesn’t mind me taking a drink,” Grandpa says. “Do you, sweetpea?” “Christ, Daniel,” Martin says. “Of course she doesn’t mind. She’s fourteen. It’s not her job to mind, it’s mine; it’s my job to mind, and I do. It should be your job, too, but you don’t make it your job, I guess.” “Well, I don’t see the harm.” “I don’t mind it,” Martin says, “if you have a beer. I don’t mind that. I don’t mind it if you’re gonna pour yourself a finger or two of Jack. But I don’t like it when you’ve had more than a few. That’s not all right.” “I’m fine,” Grandpa says with a wave of his hand. “All right,” Martin says thinly, “all right. Come on back home, kibble.” Turtle picks up the pistol, drops the slide, slaps in the magazine, holsters it. Then she rises, holding the knife and the bundle of whetstones, and walks toward the door, where Martin puts an arm around her shoulder. She slings the AR-10 and turns to look back at Grandpa. Martin hesitates there in the doorway, holding Turtle. He says, “You all right, Dad?” Grandpa says, “I’m fine.” Martin says, “I don’t guess you’d want to come over for dinner?” “Oh,” he says, “I have a pizza in the freezer.” “You’re welcome to dinner. We’d like to have you over, Dad. Wouldn’t we, kibble?” Turtle is silent, she does not want to be in this, does not want Grandpa to come over. Martin says, “Well, have it your way. If you change your mind, you just call, and I’ll drive the truck up here and pick you up.” “Oh, I’m all right,” Grandpa says. “And, Dad,” Martin says, “take it easy. This girl deserves a grandfather. All right?” “All right,” Grandpa says, frowning. Martin continues to hesitate in the doorway. Grandpa watches him, his head trembling a little bit, and Martin stands as if expecting Grandpa to say something, but Grandpa doesn’t and Martin tightens his grip on Turtle’s shoulder and they walk down together, following the old gravel road through the orchard. He is a big, silent presence beside her. They go through the evening woods, past where Grandpa parks his truck. Blackberry runners have knit over the median. Wild chamomile sprawls in the gravel. “Don’t take this the wrong way, kibble,” Martin says, “but your grandpa is a real son of a bitch.” Father and daughter climb the porch steps together and go in through the living room. Turtle vaults onto the counter and sets the knife down beside her. Martin strikes a match on his Levi’s to light the burner, takes down a frying pan, and begins to prepare dinner. Turtle sits at the counter’s edge. She unholsters the gun, racks the slide, and sinks four shots into a single mark. Martin looks up from cutting a squash and watches her empty the magazine. The slide locks back, smoking, and he returns his attention to the butcher block, smiling tiredly and lopsidedly, smiling so that she can see it. “Is that your grandfather’s knife?” He dusts off his hands, holds one out. Turtle hesitates. “What?” he says, and she picks up the knife and hands it to him. He draws it from the sheath and walks around the counter to stand beside her, turning it to the light. He says, “When I was a kid, I can remember your grandfather sitting in his chair—he’d get in a mood and he’d drink bourbon and throw this knife at the door. Then he’d stand up and get it and sit down again, and he’d look at the door and then he’d throw the knife. It’d stick in the door and he’d walk over and get it. For hours, he’d do that.” Turtle looks at Martin. “Watch this,” he says. “No,” she says, “wait.” “It’s fine,” he says. He walks to the hallway door beside the fireplace and closes it. He walks back and squares against the door. He says, “Watch this.” She says, “It’s not a throwing knife.” “The hell it isn’t,” he says. She grabs on to his shirt. “Wait,” she says. “Watch this,” he says, seeming to gauge the distance. He tosses the knife in the air and catches it by the spine. Turtle watches silently, putting her fingers in her mouth. Martin winds up and throws the knife and it ricochets off the door and strikes the hearthstones. Turtle lurches after it, but Martin is faster, shoving her aside and picking it off the river stone hearth and bending over it, putting his back between Turtle and the knife, saying, “Nah, it’s fine.” “Give it back,” Turtle says. Martin turns away from her, bent over the knife, saying, “It’s fine, kibble, it’s fine.” “Give it back,” Turtle says. “Just a moment,” he says. Turtle, hearing some dangerous note in his voice, steps back. “Just hold on just one goddamn moment,” he says, holding the knife to the light while Turtle waits, her jaw flexing in annoyance. “Well, fuck,” he says at last. “What?” “It’s this fucking carbon steel, kibble, it’s like glass.” “Give it back to me,” she says, and he hands it back. The blade is chipped. “It doesn’t matter,” Martin says. “Fuck!” Turtle says. “That high-carbon steel is worthless,” Martin says. “Like I told you, it’s like glass. That’s why they make knives out of stainless steel. That carbon steel, you just can’t trust it. Holds an edge like a motherfucker, but it shatters and it rusts. I don’t know how the man kept it like that, all through the war. Grease, I guess.” “Fuck,” Turtle says, flushed with anger. “Well, here, I’ll make it good.” “Forget it,” Turtle says, “it doesn’t matter.” “It does matter. You’re mad about it, my love. I’ll make it good.” “No, I don’t care,” she says. “Kibble,” he says, “give me the knife, I’m not going to have you pissed at me because that knife is as fragile as a fucking toy. I made a mistake, and I can set that knife up just like you want it, good as new.” Turtle says, “It’s something you have to care for.” “Well, that’s fucked, because,” Martin says, laughing at her anger, “I thought a knife was supposed to take care of you. I thought that was the point.” Turtle stands, looking down at the floorboards, feeling that she has flushed red to the roots of her hair. “Give me the knife, kibble. A pass on the sharpener and that mark won’t even be there.” “No,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.” “I can see on your face that it does matter, so give it to me, and let me make it right.” Turtle gives him the knife and Martin opens the door and goes down the hall, past the bathroom, the foyer, and into the pantry, where there is a long wooden workbench along one wall, with clamps and vises and above that a wall of pegboard covered with mounted tools. The opposite walls are lined with gun safes, stainless-steel cabinets of reloading materials, stacked thousand-round boxes of 5.56 and .308. A spiral stairwell leads into a cellar, which is a room of damp, moldy earth filled with five-gallon buckets of dehydrated food. They have enough food stored down there to keep three people alive for three years. Martin goes to a grinder bolted to the workbench and turns it on. “No, wait,” Turtle says over the roar of the grinder. Martin stands gauging the angle of the bevel by eye. “Fine,” he says, “it will be fine.” He passes the blade across the grindstone. It screams. He plunges it, hissing, into a coffee can of mineral oil, returns it to the wheel, holds it steady, his whole face intent, runs it across the grindstone, throwing a brilliant rooster tail of orange and white sparks, the edge feathering white, heat markings spreading across the steel. He lifts the blade away, plunges it again into oil, turns it over in his hand, and returns it to the grinder. He inspects it again, and stands testing it against his thumb, nodding and smiling to himself. He turns off the grinder and the grindstone begins to coast, some hitch in the mechanism so that the sound of the slowing grindstone has a faint irregularity, a whump-whump, whump-whump. He passes her the knife. The mirror polish of the razor edge is gone, the cutting edge scored and uneven. Turtle turns the knife to the light and the blade throws a thousand glinting sparks from chips and spurs in the edge. “You’ve ruined it,” she says. “Ruined it?” he says, hurt. “No, that’s just because— No, kibble, this is a hell of a lot better than whatever edge Grandpa put on there. That grindstone, it’ll put a perfect edge on that blade, a hundred microscopic serrations, that’s what really gives the blade a cutting edge. The razor edge you had on that before, that’s just the vanity of patient men—that’s no good for the real activity of cutting, kibble, which is to saw through things. A mirror polish like that—that’s only good for a push cut, you know what that is, kibble?” Turtle knows what a push cut is, but Martin can’t resist. He says, “A push cut, kibble, is the simplest kind of cut, when you lay the knife down on a steak and press without drawing the blade across it. But, kibble, you don’t just push the knife into a steak, you draw the knife across it. That, what you had before, was a glorified straight razor. In life, you drag a blade across something. That’s the business of cutting, kibble, a rough edge. That mirror polish is meant to distract from the knife’s purpose with its beauty. Do you see— Do you see—? That razor edge, it is a beautiful thing, but a knife is not meant to be a beautiful thing. This knife is for slitting throats, and for that you want the microscopic serrations you get from a rough grindstone. You’ll see. With that cutting edge on there, that thing will open flesh like it was butter. Are you sad that I took your illusion away? That edge was a shadow on the wall, kibble. You have to stop being distracted by the shadows.” Turtle tests the edge against her thumb, looking at her father. “That’s a goddamn lesson in life, right there,” he says. She turns the knife in her hands, uncertain. He says, “You just don’t trust me, do you?” “I trust you,” she says, and she thinks, you are hard on me, but you are good for me, too, and I need that hardness in you. I need you to be hard on me, because I am no good for myself, and you make me do what I want to do but cannot do for myself; but still, but still—you are sometimes not careful; there is something in you, something less than careful, something almost— I don’t know, I am not sure, but I know it’s there. “Here,” he says, taking the knife from her and shoving her down the hallway, leading her to the living room. They go back through the door and he points to a chair. “Step up on that,” he says. Turtle looks at him, steps onto the chair. Martin points to the table, and she steps up onto it, stands among the beer bottles and old plates and steak bones. “That rafter,” he says. She looks up at the rafter. “I want to show you something,” he says. “What?” she says. “Jump up to the rafter, kibble.” “What are you going to show me?” “Goddamn it,” he says. “I don’t understand,” she says. “Goddamn it,” he says. “I know the knife is sharp,” she says. “You don’t seem to know that.” “No,” she says, “I trust you, I do. The knife is sharp.” “God fucking damn it, kibble.” “No, Daddy, it’s just that it was Grandpa’s knife, and he’ll be disappointed.” “It isn’t his anymore, is it? Now grab on to that rafter.” “I wanted to try taking care of that mirror polish,” she says, “just try and take care of it, that’s all.” “It doesn’t matter. That steel, it’s gonna rust away into pits by the end of the year.” “No,” she says, “no it won’t.” “You haven’t had to take care of a thing like that yet, you’ll see. Now jump up on the rafter.” “Why?” “God fucking damn it, kibble. God fucking damn it.” She jumps and captures the rafter. Martin overturns the table from beneath her, spilling the deck of cards, the plates, candles, beer bottles. He puts his shoulder against it and shoves it out from beneath her, carrying all of its detritus along like a bulldozer, leaving Turtle hanging from the rafter above the floor. She racks and reracks her fingers so they lie comfortably against the grain. Martin watches her from below with a grimace gathering almost to anger. He walks to her and stands between her feet, turning the knife this way and that. “Can I come down?” she says. He stands looking up at her, his face growing stiffer, his mouth setting. Turtle, looking down at him, can almost believe that looking at her like this makes him angry. “Don’t say it like that,” he says. Then he raises the knife and lays the blade up between her legs, stands scowling up at her. He says, “Just hang in there.” Turtle is silent and unamused, looking down at him. He presses up with the knife and says, “Upsy-daisy.” Turtle does a pull-up, places her chin on the splintery beam and hangs while Martin stands below her, his face stripped of all warmth and kindness, seeming fixed in some reverie of hatred. The knife bites into the blue denim of her jeans and Turtle feels the cold steel through her panties. She looks across to the next rafter, and the one after that, all the way to the far wall, each rafter felted with dust and showing wandering rat tracks. Her legs quiver. She begins to lower herself, but Martin says, “Uh—” abruptly and warningly, the knife resting against her crotch. She trembles, not able to fully raise herself back to the rafter and so puts her face against its splintery side, holding her cheek there. She strains, thinking, please, please, please. Then he lowers the blade and she comes down with it, unable to do otherwise, trembling and shaking with the effort of lowering herself as slowly as he lowers the knife. She hangs at the full extension of her arms and says, “Daddy?” He says, “See, this is what I’m goddamn talking about.” Then he begins to raise the blade again, clucking his tongue warningly. She goes up into a full pull-up and hooks her chin on the rafter and hangs there, quivering. She starts to lower herself and Martin says, “Uh—” to stop her, grimacing as if it’s sad the way things are, and he would even change it if he could, but can’t. Turtle thinks to herself, you bastard, you fucking bastard. “That’s two,” he says. He lowers the blade and she lowers herself with it, and then he raises it, saying, “With a little incentive, you can really rack up those pull-ups, huh?” He makes her lower herself with agonizing slowness. She does first twelve, and then thirteen. She hangs trembling from her exhausted arms, and Martin, raising the blade with a slow and menacing pressure, says, “You all done? Tapped out? Dig deep, kibble. You better find something. Let’s go for fifteen.” Her fingers ache, the grain cuts into her flesh. Her forearms feel numb. She doesn’t know if she can do another. “Come on,” he says. “Two more.” “I can’t,” she says, almost crying with fear. “You think the knife’s sharp now, don’t you?” he says. “You believe it now, don’t you?” He saws the blade forward and she hears the denim whisper apart. She digs deep for any last ounce of strength, trying desperately to hold on, and Martin says, “You might want to hold on, kibble. You might not want to let go, little girl,” and then her fingertips peel off the rafter and she comes down onto the blade. Martin jerks the knife out from under her at the last possible moment and it saws through her thigh and buttock. She lands on her heels and stands there splay-legged and astonished, looking down at her crotch, where there is no sign except a cut in the denim. Martin holds the bowie knife bloodless and unmarked, his eyebrows going up in astonishment, his mouth opening into a grin. Turtle sits on her butt and Martin begins to laugh. She stoops forward to look through the parted cloth and says, “You cut me, you cut me,” though she cannot feel or see any cut. “You should’ve,” Martin says and stops and bends double with laughter. He waves the bowie knife through the air to try and get her to stop so he can get his breath. “You should’ve—” he gasps. She lies back and unbuttons her jeans. Martin sets the bowie knife on the counter and grabs the bottoms and upends her out of them. She spills across the floor, recovers herself, and then stoops over her thighs, trying to see the cut. “You should’ve—” he says. “You should’ve—” And his eyes clench with laughter. Turtle finds the cut and a whisker of blood. Martin says, “You should have seen—your face.” He screws his own face up in a mimicry of adolescent betrayal, opening his eyes wide in astonishment, and then, waving one hand through the air as if to brush all teasing aside, he says, “You’ll be okay, kiddo, you’ll be fine. Just, next time—don’t let go!” At this, he begins to laugh again, shaking his head, his eyes slitting closed and leaking tears, and he inquires of the room, “Jesus! Am I right? Am I right? Jesus! Don’t let go! Isn’t that right? Fuck!” He kneels down and takes her naked thigh in his hands and, seeming to see her distress for the first time, he says, “I don’t know why you’re so afraid, baby, you’re hardly even nicked. See, I wasn’t going to cut you. I took it out from under you, didn’t I? And if you’re so afraid, goddamn, next time, don’t let go.” “It’s not that easy,” she says from behind her hands. “It is, you just—don’t let go,” he says. Turtle lies flat on the floor. She wants to smash to pieces. He rises and walks down the hall and into the bathroom. He returns with a first aid kit and kneels between her legs. He tears open a green disposable wound sponge and begins to dab at the cut. He says, “This? You’re worried about this? There, I’ll take care of it, there.” He unscrews the cap on the Neosporin and begins to dab it into the wound. His every touch sends ripples of sensation through her body. He opens a Band-Aid and lays it flush against her skin and smooths it to ensure the contact is good. “All better, kibble, look at that, it’s all right.” She raises her head and ropes of muscle stand out from her mons pubis to her sternum like a bread loaf. She watches him and then she lays her head back down and she closes her eyes and she feels her soul to be a stalk of pig mint growing in the dark foundation, slithering toward a keyhole of light between the floorboards, greedy and sun-starved. Four (#ulink_cfe69514-40bb-5b09-b44b-e089461ed2ee) IT IS FRIDAY AND THEY HAVE A FRIDAY RITUAL. TURTLE WALKS up from the bus stop to the two fifty-gallon drums where they burn their trash, flooded with rainwater the way any bucket, any barrel or pot left in their yard fills with water, and will keep filling until June, though the weather has been unpredictable. She takes the fire poker laid crosswise over the barrel mouth and plunges it deep into the ashen water and draws out an ammo can on a looped steel runner. She pops it open and takes out a 9mm Sig Sauer and a spare magazine. She is supposed to take the precaution of clearing the house slowly and carefully, from the front door and into every room, discovering every target. But Turtle has grown bored of the process, and so she goes up the porch steps and throws open the sliding glass door, gun up, and there are three training targets by the kitchen table, plywood and sheet-metal stands with printed silhouettes stapled to them, and Turtle takes them one at a time, sidestepping out of the doorway with tight double taps, one after another, six shots in a little less than a second, and in all three targets the shots are between and slightly below the eyes, so close together that the holes touch. She walks casually to the hallway door, stands off to the side of it, on the hearthstones, and soft-tosses it open and moves in a swift arc across the doorway, three steps back and then sidestepping so that the hallway comes into view by degrees, and she takes each of three plywood and sheet-metal targets as they appear around the jamb, tight double taps into the nasal cavity, then she steps through the door and quickly out of the fatal funnel. Gunman’s shuffle down the side of the hallway, into the bathroom, clear—into the foyer, one bad guy, two shots, clear—into the pantry, clear. She ejects the magazine and replaces it with her spare and moves to Martin’s bedroom door at the end of the hall. There is not enough room to pan across the threshold, so she tosses open the door and takes three swift, retreating steps back down the hallway, firing as she goes—six shots, two seconds, and when her field of fire is clear, she advances on the door again and finds three more targets, taking each in turn. Then there is silence except for the hot brass rolling around the bedroom and the hallway. She walks back to the kitchen and sets the Sig Sauer on the counter. She can hear Martin coming up the drive. He parks outside and throws open the sliding glass doors and walks right through the living room and sits down heavily on the overstuffed couch. Turtle opens the fridge and takes out a Red Seal Ale and pitches it underhand to him and he catches it and fits the bottle cap between his molars and pops the bottle open. He begins to drink, taking long satisfied gasps, and then he looks back to her and says, “So, kibble, how was school?” and she walks around the counter, sits down on the arm of the couch, both of them looking at the ashy fireplace as if there were a fire there to absorb their attention, and she says, “School was school, Daddy.” He rakes a thumbnail across his stubble. “Tired, Daddy?” “Nah.” They sit and eat dinner together. Martin keeps looking at the table, furrowing his brow. They continue to eat in silence. “How did you do, clearing the house?” “Well.” “But not perfect?” he says. She shrugs. He sets his fork down and considers her, his forearms resting on the table. His left eye squints. His right eye is bright and open. The two compose an affect of complete and nuanced absorption, but when she looks at them carefully it is upsetting and strange to her, and the more genuine her attention to his expression, the more alien it seems, as if his face were not a single face at all, and as if it were trying to stake out two contrary expressions on the world. He says, “Did you check the upstairs?” “Yes,” she says. “Kibble, did you check the upstairs?” “No, Daddy.” “It’s a game to you.” “No, it’s not.” “You don’t take it seriously. You come in here and you saunter around, placing your shots right into the ocular cavity. But you know, in a real firefight, you can’t always count on hitting the cavity exactly, you might have to fire for the hip—break a man’s hip, Turtle, and he goes down and he does not get up—but you don’t like that shot and you don’t practice it because you do not see the necessity. You think you’re invincible. You think you won’t ever miss—you go in there just cool and relaxed, because you’re overconfident. We need to put the fear on you. You need to learn how to shoot when you’re shitting yourself in fear. You need to surrender yourself to death before you ever begin, and accept your life as a state of grace, and then and only then will you be good enough. That is what the drill is for.” “I do all right when I’m afraid. You know how I do.” “You go to shit, girl.” “Even if my spread goes to shit, Daddy, it’s still two inches at twenty yards.” “It’s not your spread, and it’s not how strong you are, and it’s not how fast you are, because you have all those things, and you think that means something. That means nothing. It’s something else, kibble, it’s your heart. When you are afraid, you clutch at your life like a scared little girl, and you can’t do that, you will die, and you will die afraid with the shit running down your legs. You need to be so much more than that. Because the time will come, kibble, when just being fast and accurate won’t be enough. The time will come when your soul must be absolute with your conviction, and whatever your spread, and howsoever fast you are, you will only succeed if you fight like a fucking angel, fallen to fucking earth, with a heart absolute and full of conviction, without hesitation, doubt, or fear, no part of yourself divided against the other; in the end, that’s what life will ask of you. Not technical mastery, but ruthlessness, courage, and singularity of purpose. You watch. So it’s fine that you saunter around, but that’s not what the exercise is for, kibble. It’s not for your spread. It’s not for your aim. It’s for your soul. “You are supposed to come to the door and believe that hell awaits just on the other side, believe that this house is full of nightmares; every personal demon you have, every worst fear. That’s what you stalk through this house. That’s what waits for you down the hallway. Your worst fucking nightmare. Not a cardboard cutout. Practice conviction, kibble, strip yourself of hesitation and doubt, train yourself to an absolute singularity of purpose, and if you ever have to step through a door into your own personal hell, you will have a shot, a shot at survival.” Turtle has stopped eating. She watches him. “Do you like your cassoulet?” he says. “It’s fine,” she says. “You want something else?” “I said, it’s fine.” “Christ,” he says. She goes back to eating. “Look at you,” he says, “my daughter. My little girl.” He pushes aside his plate and sits there looking at her. After a while, he nods to her backpack. She walks to it, opens it, brings out her notebook. She sits down opposite him, notebook open. She says, “Number one. ‘Erinys.’” She stops, looks up at him. He puts one large, scarred hand across the open book, draws it across the table. Looks down at it. “Well, now,” he says. “Look at that. ‘Erinys.’” “What is that?” she says. “What does that mean, ‘Erinys’?” He looks up from the book, his attention is fixed on her, and it is enormous with his affection and with something private. “Your grandfather,” he says, careful, wetting his lips with his tongue, “your grandfather was a hard man, kibble, he still is: a hard man. And do you know that your grandfather— Well, fuck, there is a lot your grandfather never said or did. There is something broken in that man, profoundly broken, and his brokenness is in everything he’s done, his whole life. He never could see past it. And I want to say, well, kibble, how much you mean to me. I love you. I do things wrong, I know I do, and I have failed you, and I will again, and the world I am raising you into—it is not the world I would want. It is not the world I would choose for my daughter. I do not know what the future holds, not for you and me. But I am afraid, I will say that much. Whatever you lacked, whatever I haven’t been able to give you, you have always been loved, deeply, kibble, absolutely. And I wanted to say, you will do more than I have. You will be better and more than I am. Never forget that. Now, here it is. Number one. ‘Erinys.’” Turtle wakes in the predawn dark thinking about that. Thinking about what he’d said. She cannot get back to sleep. She sits at the bay window and looks out at the ocean, the rose thorns itching at the panes. What had he meant, there is something broken in that man? Outside, it is clear. She thinks, you will be better and more than I am, reproducing his expression in her mind, trying to get at what he meant. She can see the stars out above the ocean, though when she looks north, she can see the lights of Mendocino reflected in the clouds. She turns, feet on the floor, elbows on her knees, and looks at her room. The beam-and-cinder-block shelves, her clothes neatly stowed. Her plywood platform bolted to the wall, with its sleeping bag and folded wool blankets. The door, the brass doorknob, the copper lock plate, the old-fashioned keyhole. She pulls on her jeans and she belts on Grandpa’s knife and adds a concealment holster, telling herself, just in case, just in case, walking to her bed and reaching under it and pulling her Sig Sauer from the brackets there. She shrugs into a thick wool sweater, and over that a flannel, and walks barefoot through the hall, holstering the pistol. She climbs down the stairs, but stands on the lowest step, hesitating, soaking up the loneliness of the house in some way, as if it had something it could tell her, the generations of Alvestons who have lived here, and all of them, she thinks, unhappy, all of them bringing their children up hard, but all of them having something to them. Just down the hall, Martin is in his huge redwood bed, the moon casting the shadows of the alder leaves onto the drywall, and she imagines him there, solid, one hand resting on that enormous chest. She walks into the kitchen and eases open the back door. The night is clear. The moonlight is bright enough to see by. She walks along the joists and stands looking down into the black ferns. She can smell the creek. She can smell the pines. She can smell their curling, dusty needles. She switchbacks through myrtles and rusty fronds. She comes into the rocky creek and wades up it, her feet numb with cold. The trees rise blackly into the star-glittered vault. She thinks, I will go back now. Back to my room. I have promised and promised and promised and he cannot bear to lose me. To the east, the stream shines glassy from out the riotous dark. She stands breathing, taking in the silence for a very long time. Then she goes. Five (#ulink_d4e4df49-e2a0-5a79-875c-fa8be0f19dad) TURTLE CLIMBS OUT OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE GULCH AND COMES into a forest of bishop pine and huckleberries, deciphering them in the darkness by the wax of the leaves and the brittle mess of their sprawl, the dawn still hours away. At times she breaks from the woods into moonlit open places filled with rhododendron, their flowers pink and ghostly in the dark, their leaves leathery and prehistoric. There is a part of Turtle that she keeps shut up and private, that she attends to with only a diffuse and uncritical attention, and when Martin advances on this part of herself, she plays him a game of tit for tat, retreating wordlessly and almost without regard to consequences; her mind cannot be taken by force, she is a person like him, but she is not him, nor is she just a part of him—and there are silent, lonely moments when this part of her seems to open like some night-blooming flower, drinking in the cold of the air, and she loves this moment, and loving it, she is ashamed, because she loves him, too, and she should not thrill this way, should not thrill to his absence, should not need to be alone, but she takes this time by herself anyway, hating herself and needing it, and it feels so good to follow these trackless ways through the huckleberries and the rhododendrons. She walks for miles, barefoot, eating watercress from ditches. Bishop pine and Douglas fir give way to stunted cypresses, to sedges, pygmy manzanita, to Bolander’s pines stooped and ancient, hundreds of years old and only shoulder-height on her. The ground is hard-packed and ash-colored, puzzled over with tufted, gray-green lichens, the land studded with barren clay ponds. In the dawn, the sun still banked among the hills, she climbs a fence and walks across the tarmac of a small airport, all shut up and quiet, the runway all her own. She’s been walking for just over three hours, groveling through the underbrush. She should’ve taken shoes, but it doesn’t much matter. She is so far accustomed to going barefoot that she could strop a razor on the soles of her feet. She climbs over the fence on the other side and walks out onto some other, larger road. She stands in the middle of it, on the double yellow line. A rabbit breaks from the underbrush, dim gray movement against the black. Turtle draws the pistol, racks it in one smooth movement, and fires. The rabbit pitches over in the salal. She crosses the road, stands with the kicking, delicate creature at her feet, and it is smaller than she thought. She picks it up by the back legs, a bare skim of soft fur over the coupled bones, articulated and sinewy, sawing back and forth in her hand. Turtle comes to an old roadbed lined with Oregon grape, cluttered with fallen leaves. She stands looking down into the Albion River basin. The sun has risen a handsbreadth above the horizon, crowning the eastern hills, sheaves of light slanting through the stunted trees. The road winds out below her, following a ridge with thickly wooded gulches on either side. She eases along, stopping to watch the silk-lined burrows of spiders in the cut bank, raking through grass for the grass-colored mantises, turning over roadside stones. She has an image of Martin in the kitchen, cooking up pancakes for a Saturday morning breakfast, humming to himself, and expecting her to come down any minute. Her heart breaks at this thought. He will be riddling over what to do as her pancakes get cold, and he will stand at the bottom of the stairs and call up, “Kibble? You up?” She thinks that he will go upstairs and open her door, look at her empty room, scraping his stubble with the edge of his thumb, and then he will go back downstairs and look at all the plates and pancakes and warm raspberry jam he’d set out. The morning turns to early afternoon, blue, cottony, flat-bottomed clouds towing shadows across the forested slopes. At a barren clay promontory, the road makes a turn and descends into the easternmost of two gulches, and here a clay pullout overlooks the valley. Long dried ruts. An old VW bus with its tires rotting into the ground, ceanothus growing up against the driver’s-side quarter panel. Turtle lays the rabbit across the dirt and opens the van’s rusted door and finds it stuffed with Oriental rugs. She drags out a rug, unrolls it, and finds nothing but sow bugs and wolf spiders. She walks to the front of the van. She opens the passenger-side door and sits inside, looks carefully around the front of the van. There is a strange, intermittent squeaking. It sounds like a loose spring in the upholstery, but it isn’t that. She opens the glove box and finds decaying maps and something long rotten. She leans down and walks her fingers along the footwell where the moldy upholstery has wrinkled up from the frame. She draws her grandpa’s bowie knife, cuts through the carpet, and pulls it aside. There are three pink newborn mice, the size of her fingertips, laid up along a mounded fold in the carpet, eyes closed, paws folded in small fists, squeaking furiously. Turtle lays the carpet back over the mice. She climbs out of the bus and walks to where the rabbit lays on the dirt. She collars its feet, slits it from anus to throat, pulls its fur off like a bloody sock, and pitches the pelt into the brush. She scoops out the guts and pitches those after the pelt. Then she makes a fire of dry grass and dead wood, skewers the rabbit, and roasts it over the fire, looking by turns at the fire and out at the valley. A mouse comes out from the undercarriage of the VW and she watches it wander about. It clambers awkwardly up a shoot of grass to get at the seeds in their papery chaff, bowing the sprig over. It extends its muzzle, sniffing and finally opening its mouth to show the chisel of its teeth. Its ears are small and round and the sun shows pink through them with just a single, snaky pink vein at the center of each ear, catching the light. Turtle takes the rabbit down from the skewer and the mouse bolts, feinting right and then changing directions in a desperate bid for a nearby rock. But whatever hiding place it expects isn’t there, and it performs a panicked circuit of the rock. In a last-ditch effort, the mouse squashes itself up against the rock and waits, panting. Turtle prizes ribs off the rabbit’s spine and chews the flesh from them, letting the juice run down her scabby fingers. In time, the mouse comes back and wanders the clay promontory, lifting one tiny hand to lean on this or that stalk of grass, flouncing its whiskers when it sniffs. Turtle finishes the carcass and pitches it over the ledge into the trees below. Her fire smolders. She sits, hands folded, watching. She needs to get up and go home. She knows it, but she just doesn’t go. She wants to wait out here, on this clay promontory above the river valley, and wants to watch the day go by. She needs time to sit and go through her thoughts like going through a colander of snow peas. It’s not like Martin does, when he paces thinking and thinking and sometimes gesturing to himself as he tries to think out something difficult. The day warms, turns to late afternoon, and still Turtle does not go, does not move. Then she sees a spider. It is the silvery color of sun-bleached driftwood. It sits sullen at the edge of its hole, eyes hidden behind a mess of hairy legs. The legs unfold and reach carefully out of the cave like ghastly, creeping fingers. She can see no eyes and no face, only the clutch of fingers. It has a speculative creep. The mouse crouches several feet away, hunched over another seedpod, its potbelly pooched up between its legs. When it is done with its seed, it looks down and gives the short hairs on its pink belly a hard look, then riffles through them with its fingers in a sudden, urgent little search, and dives its muzzle into its belly and chews intently for a moment. The spider moves carefully. Stricken, Turtle watches it circle the tuft of grass, drawing closer. She hears then a noise from down the road—someone walking along the roadbed, and she thinks wildly of Martin. It is more than possible that he has managed to follow her. He has done it before. It is even likely. She rises slowly, silently, drawing the pistol from its holster and slivering back the slide to see the bright brass in the chamber, her every movement swift and quiet, but then she stops to watch. The spider emerges behind the mouse and crosses the last six inches and then rears and sinks two black hooks down into the mouse’s shoulder. The mouse jerks spasmodically, one hind leg pedaling through the air. She hears more footsteps, but Turtle is captivated, watching the spider drag the mouse backward to the burrow, where it lodges crosswise against the silky-webbed sides. Knuckles in her mouth, Turtle watches the spider come half out again, fangs buried in the mouse’s back. It turns the mouse with deft legs and then pulls the mouse down into the dark, the pink tail twitching. She chews her fingers in anguish. The footsteps draw closer, and Turtle ducks into the woods, lies down behind a log. A slender, black-haired boy comes down the road, her age or a little older, fifteen or sixteen, not watching his feet, wearing a backpack and board shorts, an old T-shirt with a single candle and a twist of barbwire around it, some word she doesn’t know. He stands, surveying the clay promontory, chewing on the water reservoir’s bite valve. He isn’t much experienced. The board shorts are a bad idea. His trail-running shoes are unscuffed, the backpack new. He doesn’t know what he’s looking at or what he’s looking for. His gaze just wanders. He seems delighted. Another boy comes down the road behind him, this one with an old leather-and-Cordura backpack molding apart, a huge blue tarp rolled up and bungee-corded to the side. This new boy says, “Dude! Dude! Check it out! A van!” He’s holding a spray can of Easy Cheese and piling it onto a Butterfinger. She places her front sight on the can. “Dude, Jacob!” he says to the black-haired boy. “Dude, Jacob! You want to sleep in that sick, righteous-looking van?” He stuffs the Butterfinger into his mouth and chews. His grin is so big that his jaw stands out and shows his chocolate-stained teeth. He’s having trouble eating the bar all at once and it slips partially out of his mouth, so he pushes it back in with a forefinger. Turtle could shoot the can right out of his hand. Jacob smiles and squats down at the coals of Turtle’s fire, raking through it with a stick. She’s seen both boys before, last year when they were eighth graders and she was a seventh grader. The candy-eating boy is Brett. They must be high school freshmen now, and she doesn’t know how they’ve gotten here, but they must be a long ways lost. She wonders what the black-haired one is thinking. He is hurtful to look at, his face beautiful and unguarded. They must be on some kind of weekend adventure. Their parents dropped them off, they were going to spend one night out here and walk out the next day, something like that. Jacob sets his backpack down and eases a map from the mesh access pocket. He smooths it flat and says, “Well.” “This cheese,” Brett says, holding up the cheese can, Turtle placing the front sight perfectly on it, “is sick. I mean, fucking dank, is all.” He props his backpack against one of the VW’s wheels and lies down, pillowing his head against it, jetting Easy Cheese into his open mouth from the can. “I know you don’t believe, but truth, I mean truth.” Jacob, looking by turns at the map and at the valley, says, “Man, we suck at this.” Brett says, “Just because it’s in a can doesn’t mean it’s not ‘real’ cheese, you know?” “We are extremely, I mean extremely—I don’t want to say ‘lost,’ but I am not entirely sure of where we might actually be.” “You’re cheese-prejudiced, is what you are.” Jacob lies back on the rug that Turtle unrolled hours ago. He says, “Our powers of navigation astound.” He opens his backpack and pulls out a wedge of Jarlsberg and a loaf of focaccia still in its Tote F?te bakery bag. He and Brett pass these items back and forth, lying propped up on their packs, stretched at length on the Oriental rug with small powdery gray moths struggling up from the nap. They take bites directly from the wedge of cheese. “Let’s camp here.” “There’s no water.” “I wish there was a girl here,” Brett says wonderingly, looking up at the sky. “We could woo her with our powers of navigation.” “If she were blind and had no sense of direction.” “That’s sick,” Brett says, “sick, deceiving a blind girl like that.” “I’d date a blind girl,” Jacob says. “Though, not just because she was blind. What I mean is—I don’t think it’d matter.” “I’d date her just for being blind,” Brett says. “Really?” “How’s it any different from objectifying her for her intelligence?” “Her intelligence cannot be abstracted from her personality, whereas her blindness is incidental to who she is, and can be abstracted,” Jacob says. “I.e., she’s not a blind chick. She is a chick who is, incidentally, blind.” “But,” Brett says, “but, dude! She is not, like, responsible for her intelligence in any meaningful way. That’s shallow, dude.” “She isn’t responsible for her blindness, either,” Jacob says, disgusted. “Unless she plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage.” “You’d date a girl who plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage?” “You know she’s feisty. You just know it.” “That feels like an understatement.” “Dude, bring it. I’m all about it.” “I bet she has a wicked temper.” “Girls have to start spunky, Jacob, or ninth grade grinds it out of them.” Turtle lies in the brush, the sight laid first on Brett’s forehead then on Jacob’s, and she thinks, what the fuck? What the fuck? They recline on their rug, ripping off strips of focaccia. Brett gestures to the view. “Gods,” he says, “but I wish we had some more Easy Cheese.” When they are done, the boys help each other up and trudge bantering along the jeep track into the redwoods. Turtle rises and stands there for a moment and then slips into the trees after them. The road is hardly better than a streambed. Gangly brown roots stick out from the cut bank. They walk for hours and climb finally into a clearing with a cottage built from scrap lumber. It is unlit and the door stands open. Turtle squats behind a burned-out stump, coal-black, eaten by fire into a helix laddered by mushrooms with flat brown tops and bottoms like frogs’ throats. It is shading into early evening. Everything is painted in deep green and sumptuous purple. She watches the boys walk out into the clearing. The clouds look like candles that have burned down to tiered pools of blue wax. Brett says, “Dude, dude, what if you go in there—and there’s just, like, one deformed blind albino child on a rocking chair with a banjo?” Jacob says, “And he takes us prisoner and makes us read Finnegans Wake to his peyote plants?” Brett says, “You can’t tell anyone that my mom made us do that. You can’t.” Jacob says, “Why Finnegans Wake, do you think? Why not Ulysses? Actually, why not just read TheOdyssey? Or—or The Brothers Karamazov?” “Because, dude—you read fucked-up Russian bullshit to your peyote plants, you’re gonna have a bad time.” “Okay, so: To the Lighthouse. Or—you know what?—people die in subordinate clauses in that book. Maybe D. H. Lawrence? For a passionate, make-love-to-the-gamekeeper kind of high.” “Dude, with your voice you are like, ‘Look at all these books I’ve read,’ but with your eyes you are like, ‘Help me.’” “You know what would be good, actually? Harry Potter.” “Well, I guess we’ll never know what’s beyond that door,” Brett says. “We already know, Brett.” “We do?” “Adventure,” Jacob says. “Behind every door lies adventure.” “Only if by ‘every’ you mean ‘some’ and by ‘adventure’ you mean ‘sodomical hillbillies.’” “Nah.” “Dude. It could be dangerous. Actually and in reality dangerous.” “It’s fine,” Jacob says, and goes up the steps and in through the door. “Physically perilous, Jacob,” Brett calls after him, “in an entirely real, entirely not-hilarious way.” “Come on!” Turtle follows the edge of the forest around the back of the cottage, slipping through the brush. She thinks, stay calm, stay easy. She steps up onto the creaking back deck and stands looking out into the woods. There are big black coils of irrigation hoses and heaped fifty-pound bags of organic fertilizer at the foot of the deck. There are clipped hoses and coupling links lying beside an overturned bucket with a coffee-can ashtray. The deck has an outdoor bathroom with a toilet and shower, the drain cut crudely into the redwood boards with a PVC pipe running to a sump hole. There’s a PBR can beside the toilet and when Turtle picks it up she can hear the ticking of its carbonation. She sets down the beer and opens the door and steps into a bare kitchen. Now she is in the back of the house and the boys are in the front, separated from her by a dividing wall and a closed door. She can hear them. “Dude,” Brett says, “I don’t like this.” “You think someone lives here?” “Dude—obviously someone lives here.” “They’re reading The Wheel of Time.” “Probably to their peyote plants.” “That’s so epic. Just read them, like, all thirteen books, drop a bunch of peyote buttons, and then, like, hold on to your hat.” She walks through a kind of living room. There is a worktable with hand loppers and garden shears and a copy of the collected essays of Thomas Jefferson. Unopened boxes of Hefty garbage bags are stacked beside a six-foot-tall wooden Quan Yin, ornately carved. The ceiling is crisscrossed with white cotton clotheslines. She goes into a bedroom with a large four-poster bed and a dresser with a mason jar of bud, a stack of Robert Jordan novels, and a copy of Overcome Your Childhood Trauma. She returns to the back door and slams it behind her to startle them, and it works. She hears Brett whisper, “Shit! Shit!” and she can hear Jacob laughing. They scramble out of the house. She looks into the forest with the gun in her hand. The road does not continue beyond the cabin and the nervous boys take off south, going cross-country down into the river valley. She listens to the silence of the clearing for a long time. Then she follows them. They walk along a high hedge of thimbleberry in a clearing of velvet grass and sweet vernal grass. Turtle goes quietly among the stumps of old trees. She stops at a large concrete circle in the grass, and beside it, the form of a pump, covered in a tarp. She can hear the boys, but she isn’t listening to them. She thinks, stop and look. She goes in a half crouch, moving swiftly through the high grass, thinking, oh god, for christsakes, you two, stop and look. She sees them ahead, beside a stream at the border of the forest, the stream half overgrown with bracken. She opens her mouth to call to them, but then she sees a man on the far side of the stream, wearing camo pants and a Grateful Dead shirt, a woven-hemp necklace with silver wire twining a large amethyst, a lever-action twenty-gauge shotgun slung on his back. He’s a small man, with a big rotund belly and a bright red face turned to leather with years of sunburn. The tip of his nose is waxy and bulbed, with little red veins standing out of it. He’s got a lemon-echinacea juice bottle in one hand. Turtle swings the Sig Sauer up and at him, placing the front sight over his temple, thinking, only if I need to, only if I need to. “Hello, boys,” he calls out. “How you do’en today?” Brett straightens and looks around to locate the man. Jacob spots him and calls back, “We’re good, a little lost, how about you?” Turtle goes through the weeds, thumbing back the hammer. She thinks, easy does it, easy and slow, you bitch, and don’t fuck this up, just do this, every part of this, exactly fucking right, every moment of this; do exactly and only what is necessary, but you do it well and you do it right, you slut. “Where you boys from?” the man asks. “Well, I’m from Ten Mile and he’s from Comptche,” Jacob says. He walks up to the man, holds out his hand. “I’m Jacob. This is Brett.” They shake, and Jacob says, “A pleasure to meet you, friend.” Turtle kneels behind a stump, places the sights on the man’s temple. “All right, all right,” the man says nodding. He takes out a can of Grizzly chew, thumps it once with the ball of his thumb, pinches up a huge dip, and folds it into his lip. “You chew?” he says. “No,” Brett says. “Only on special occasions,” Jacob says. “Ah,” the man says, “well, don’t start. Myself, I’m trying to quit. They put fiberglass in this stuff. Can you believe that? So, boys, you take it from me, if you’re going to take it up, and it has its perks, I’ll give you that, you pay the extra dollar and go organic. All right?” “Right,” Jacob says, “that’s solid advice.” “Organic, that’s the way,” the man says, “not these chemicals. I believe in organic myself. Better yet, just stick with the marijuana. If it weren’t for nylon, that’s all we’d ever be smoking.” “Speaking of that,” Jacob says, unshouldering his backpack and setting it down. “Is there any chance we can buy some from you?” “Well,” says the man, turning the can of chew over in his hands. He frowns. “It’s no worries,” Jacob says, “we were just looking for something to add to our adventure.” “I can appreciate that,” the man says, nodding. “Sometimes you’re just looking for a little something to take the edge off all the walking, and it helps bring out the details, doesn’t it? You notice things you otherwise just plain wouldn’t.” “That,” Jacob says, “is exactly what I mean. I can tell, sir, that you are both a poet and a scholar.” “Well, I’d hate to leave a friend in need,” the stranger admits. “My man,” Jacob says. “I can help you out,” he says, after a hesitation. What the hell? Turtle thinks. She stands in the grass, gun leveled at the man. Jacob passes the man a twenty-dollar bill, and the man opens a canvas pouch on his belt and takes out a tea canister. He pulls the cap and dispenses several buds into his hand, passes them to Jacob. Then he takes out a pipe made from a deer’s leg bone, with a wooden mouthpiece whittled to the bone flute, a bowl augured out of the jointed end. He begins breaking apart another bud in his fingers and packing it into the end, going on: “This stuff. This stuff, now. Not like tobacco, which is as addictive as anything—as addictive as heroin, and will kill you. Why I ever started smoking tobacco is beyond me. Trying to quit. Hence the chew, you understand. Only problem with the marijuana is that when you grow it out here, the fertilizer isn’t good for the salmon, even the organic fertilizer, and that gets to me. Looking at ways around it. Also, another thing is that we have rodents and things come out of the forest to chew on the stalks of the plants and you have to poison them or put up with them. I put up with them, and that’s why you should buy local. Those Mexican growers, those guys don’t care, this isn’t their home, right? They just lay down rat poison and it’s awful, just awful, kills the ringtails, the raccoons, the weasels, all those critters. That’s why you gotta buy your weed from guys like me. Locals. Supports the economy and it’s better for the environment. Where you headed, by the way?” “We’re just trying to find a place to camp,” Jacob says. The man nods, working his fat lip of tobacco. “You’re all right, boys, you’re all right, well, I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.” He squints off west. “Why fiberglass?” Brett asks suddenly. “Huh?” the man says. “What’s that?” “You said they put fiberglass in the tobacco, but why would they do that?” “Oh, well,” the man says, “the fiberglass now, it cuts your lips so that the tobacco gets absorbed faster, makes it more addictive. It’s the same thing with all of this packaged food they’re selling, don’t ever trust a corporation, boys, and especially don’t trust a corporation to make the food you eat. This is why I don’t have a car, you understand. Can’t conscionably have a car. Not when I’ve been down to South America myself, lived among jungle tribes in the Amazon and seen the damage the petroleum industry is doing down there. We should all eat a lot more local food, smoke a lot more pot, and drive a lot less, as far as I’m concerned. And love one another. I believe that. Community, boys, that’s the way.” He lights the bone pipe and takes a long draw. He puffs, and then hands the pipe to Jacob. They stand nodding and passing the pipe around. “Well,” Brett says, “I admire that, but I have to ride the bus to school. No other way to get there.” “Me too,” Jacob says, “though sometimes I drive. But you’ve given me something to think about.” Turtle doesn’t know what to do. She watches, relaxing her finger on the trigger, but she doesn’t lower the gun. After a silence broken only by the stranger’s sumptuous chewing and by the boys firing the lighter, Brett says, “Do you know where we go next? We’re a little turned around.” Jacob says, “Our path to glory has been swift and clear, but our destination eludes us.” The stranger nods down the gulch. “That way, keeping to the stream,” he says, and then turns and nods back the way they came, “or that way back.” “The stream will take us to a road?” The man nods, either agreeing or seconding the question, it isn’t clear to Turtle. He says, “There’s roads down there.” “All right,” Jacob says, “thanks for the advice, man.” “Yeah, dude, we appreciate it,” Brett says. “Well, off you go,” the man says. Brett and Jacob begin down the slope, following the stream. The man taps out the pipe, puts it away, turns and forges back through the bracken. Turtle tracks him with the Sig until he is gone. Then she looks south, into the gulch. The plan is a bad one. I should go back, she tells herself. Then she thinks, what will Martin do? It will go badly for me, but the hell. I am a girl things go badly for. A light rain begins to fall, and Turtle holds out her hands and looks up at the sky, huge, misshapen towers of clouds, and then the rain begins in earnest, wetting her hair, wetting her shirt, and she thinks, well, we’re in for it now. Six (#ulink_a4a7aa1f-a4fd-5a1b-8074-ba4aedb43b40) TURTLE STANDS ON A FALLEN LOG IN THE POURING RAIN. Fifteen, twenty feet below her the flickering yellow beam of Brett’s flashlight plays across the seamed and shaggy bark of redwoods, sword ferns, thimbleberry, the scaly, fluted trunks of western hemlocks, across the stream swollen high above its banks. She picks her way down to them. Water runnels, tea-colored with tannins, wind down between the knotty fern rhizomes, cutting dollhouse waterfalls, the soil spangled with something golden but not gold, tiny wafery minerals that circle the tiny catch pools, reflecting what light there is. The flooding washes millipedes out from beneath the logs, some trick of the current sorting dozens of them onto muddy washes so they lay stacked together, nearly all curled up, blue and yellow and glossy black. She thinks, these useless boys, useless. She needs to leave, she needs to go, but they are lost and won’t make their way down this hillside without her. Still, finding her way back home is easier said than done. Walking cross-country under a bright moon and a clear predawn sky is something entirely different than finding your way through this cloud-throttled black. It would be hard going. Beside her, Brett says, “I don’t know, dude.” Jacob says, “Yeah. I don’t know either, man.” Turtle boosts herself up onto the log and backpedals quietly into the ferns, going on hands and feet just before Brett sees the log and moves to it, leans against it to take some of the weight off his pack. “Keep going?” Jacob shakes his head, but they can’t stop here, that much is apparent. The ground is a mess. Turtle thinks, say something, say something to them, point the way for them, but she cannot seem to say anything. The only glimmer is the treacherous light of glowworms, nearly the same phosphorescent green as the tritium sights on her Sig Sauer, and she puts her hand on it now, thinking, I am not afraid of these boys, and if I have to make my way in this dark, I will. But she is afraid of them. She knows just from wrapping her hand around the Sig Sauer’s comforting grip, that grip that says, no one will ever hurt you, just from her own willingness to brave this flooded dark alone, she knows that she is afraid of the boys. Jacob hitches his backpack up on his shoulders and they continue down the hillside, following the stream, which has overrun its narrow trough and flooded the nearby banks so that the boys splish-splash through ankle-deep water. She thinks, I will wait and see if we come to a road. And if we do—I don’t need to do anything; they will go one way, and I the other. But if there is no road, then they’re going to need me. They descend into a basin where the stream forms a pond before pouring over the edge, the marshy banks thicketed with cattails. The pond is full of chorus frogs, and when Brett pans the pale yellow beam across the water, Turtle can see their hundreds of eyes, the distinct ridged shapes of their heads breaking the surface. “Let’s strike out that way,” Jacob says, and motions west across the side of the drainage, not down it. “If we follow this stream, it is gonna be too steep.” “Dude,” Brett says, “this stream takes us to the road. That’s what the guy said. We aren’t good at, like, improvising this navigation thing.” “What possible reason have I ever given you to doubt my navigation?” They both laugh, Jacob looking down into the gulch, nodding. “All right, bud, all right, you wanna go right down this stream?” “Yeah,” Brett says, “that’s the way he told us.” “All right, lead—” “Shh!” Brett says, and turns and swings the flashlight almost onto Turtle. She sits embowered in ferns, grinning. You fuck, she thinks, delighted. You fuck! She thinks, what gave me away? She can feel it in her own face; her pleasure; her eyes slitted with happiness; she thinks, you fuck, did you hear me, did you see me, some movement? She is delighted with herself, and with him, for almost having seen her, thinking, ahh, ahh, Easy Cheese Boy isn’t blind after all. Jacob looks at Brett. Brett says, “Sorry, man, I just had this, like, feeling—I don’t know. I just had this feeling.” “What feeling?” “There’s nothing out there,” Brett says, panning the flashlight across dripping ferns, across the tangle of cattails, almost over her. You bastard, she thinks, delighted with him, you motherfucking bastard. She is full of joy. They go through the pond with their backpacks held above their heads, crushing their way through cattails. They climb to the muddy edge, with the waterfall pouring down beside them, and the two boys look down into the gulch. Turtle cannot see what they see, but Jacob leans out, says, “It looks pretty steep down there, bud.” Brett nods. Jacob says, “All right.” He sheds his backpack and goes down over the lip. Brett passes him the backpacks one at a time, Jacob carefully banking them into the hillside. Then Brett climbs down. They help each other with the bags, and then drop out of her sight. When they have gone, Turtle crawls through the water after them. The muck of the pond bottom is knotted with water lily tubers. They are as thick as her arm, their flesh ridged and scaled, textured almost like pinecones not yet sprung. The drifts of algae feel like thick, sodden spiderwebs. She comes to the pond’s edge and climbs out, shedding water in curtains. Below, the gulch is dark except for the blue glow of Jacob’s headlamp and the lance of Brett’s flashlight. Over the sound of the rain and the torrent of the waterfall, she can hear them calling out to each other. Their heads cut above the ferns like rats through water. Brett pauses and looks back in Turtle’s direction, and Turtle lowers herself into the weeds. Jacob plays his headlamp through the dark. Brett says, “I swear, I just—I had this bad feeling.” She lies perfectly still and looks right back at them. “Like what?” “Something,” Brett says. Jacob wades out toward her, moves the headlamp in meticulous search. “There’s nothing here,” he says. “Just a bad feeling, a spooky feeling.” Jacob stands, turns a slow circle, peering into the dark. He looks back at Brett helplessly. Brett says, “If there’s nothing there, then there’s nothing there.” “I don’t see anything.” “I just hope it’s not that guy.” “It’s not that guy.” “I just hope he’s not, like, following us through the dark.” The gulch narrows and grows steeper, spanned by fallen redwoods, the banks scarred by mudslides. Twenty feet below, it is finally blocked by an impenetrable wall of poison oak. Brett’s flashlight grows pale, dim, and then dies. He slaps the light into the palm of his hand and it glows to life, a sullen filament lit for a moment before it dies again. Turtle waits above, nervous, thinking, just do it, Turtle. She thinks, nothing for it now, but still she cannot. She is going to have to get down on hands and knees and beg Daddy’s forgiveness, beg, and maybe then he will let her off. She hears Brett work the cap and dispense D-cell batteries into his hands. He cups them in his palms and blows on them. Jacob says, “If there’s a road, we’ve got to be right on it.” “Shit,” Brett says, “oh shit.” “There’s no alternative.” “That’s a lot of poison oak we’d have to go through.” “The road’s gotta be right past it.” Brett hunches over the flashlight, whispering to the batteries. “Come on, come on, come on.” In the moment of silence, all they can hear is the rain, soft, padding on leaves, and the crackling of the wet soil, the sound of the river. “He said,” Brett says, sounding betrayed, “that we just go this way, and we’d hit the road.” “We must be right on it,” Jacob says, “we’ve got to be right goddamn there.” He starts precariously down, clutching at ferns and shoots of poison oak, each step sinking into the mud. Turtle can see that he will never make it down the hillside, and before she can stop herself, before she can hesitate, she rises out of the weeds and steps up onto a log above them and says, “Wait.” They both turn and search the dark for her, and then suddenly she is bathed in Jacob’s bright LED light, standing among cow parsnips and nettles, conscious of her ugliness, her lean bitch face and tangles of silt- and copper-smelling hair, half turning away to hide the pale oval of her face. For a moment, no one says anything. Then she says, “Are you lost?” Jacob says, “Not so much lost as unmoored from any knowledge of our location.” Brett says, “We’re lost.” Turtle says, “I don’t think that’s the way.” Jacob looks down the gulch. The light pans over the riot of poison oak, the mud, the water sheeting the ground. He says, “I don’t know what would make you think that.” Brett says, “Are we above a road?” “I don’t know,” she says. Brett says, “Who are you?” “I’m Turtle.” She comes down and stands in front of Jacob, and he reaches out and they shake hands. “Jacob Learner,” he says. “Brett,” Brett says, and they shake. Jacob says, “What are you doing here?” “I live near here,” she says. “So we’re near a road?” “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.” Brett looks wonderingly up at the hillside. “People live near here?” “Sure.” Jacob looks back at her, and she is blinded with the blue light again. “Sorry,” he says, angling the light away. “Can you lead us down to the river?” Turtle looks away into the dark. Brett says, “What happened? Is she still there?” “She’s thinking,” Jacob says. “Did we make her mad?” “She’s speculative.” “She’s still not talking.” “Okay: She’s really speculative.” “This way,” Turtle says, leading them in a muddy traverse along the hillside, looking for a clear place farther out. “Holy shit,” Brett says, “holy shit. Look at her go.” “Hey!” Jacob says. “Wait up.” Turtle leads them across fallen redwoods and then descends to the river among grand firs on a low, sloping ridge, Jacob’s light casting her shadow out ahead of her, the boys crashing behind. The river has flooded its banks and Turtle comes down into a great tangle of alders hip-deep in water, long whips of stinging nettle bent in the current and swinging like seaweed, submerged skunk cabbages nosing out of the torrent, rafts of dead leaves scummed up against every nook and cranny, eddies circling blackly with huge dollops of foam. “Holy shit on a shitty, shitty shingle,” Brett says, and whistles. “There’s no road,” Jacob says. “We’re fine without it,” Turtle says. “Maybe you are,” Brett says. Jacob stands there, sheathed to the waist in mud, and laughs and says, “Man,” drawing it out into a long syllable, his voice giving it somehow a richness of humor and a depth of optimism that she is unused to, running his tongue along muddied lips with pleasure and saying again, “Oh man,” like he can’t believe the incredible good fortune of being so entirely lost beside a river so flooded, and Turtle has never seen anyone confront misfortune this way. Brett says, “Oh man,” and he says it differently, and then he says, “We are fucked.” Turtle looks from one to the other. “We are fucked,” Brett says. “We will never, ever get home. We are fucked.” “Yes,” Jacob says in hushed awe, weighting his words with relish. “Yes.” Brett says, “It’s ironic, because we were fine before, we had the perfect campsite before, but nooooo, we needed water.” “And look,” Jacob says. “Hashtag success! Hashtag winning!” “We need somewhere to hole up,” Brett says, then, to Turtle, “Do you know where we are? Is there somewhere we could sleep? It’s all mud, isn’t it? There’s nowhere not covered in mud.” It is still raining hard, and everyone, including Turtle, is cold, and there is nowhere level here, not with the river flooded, and to find a campsite, they would need to climb the ridge again, and though Turtle could, she doesn’t know about the boys. “I’m so cold,” Brett says, “dude, so incredibly goddamn cold.” “It’s chilly,” Jacob agrees with deep humor, trying to wipe the mud out of his eye sockets. He stands stiffly, in the way of people whose clothes are cold and for whom every movement brings new flesh into contact with gritty wet fabric. He looks at Turtle, and something occurs to him. “How did you find us?” “Just ran into you,” she says. The boys look at each other, shrug, as if to indicate they’ve heard stranger things. “Can you help us?” Brett asks. He hunches shivering under his backpack. Rain sleets around him. Jacob finds a poison oak leaf stuck to his cheek, flings it disgustedly away into the dark. Turtle chews her fingers in consideration. “Jesus,” Brett says, “you don’t feel any urgent need to fill the gaps in conversation, do you?” “What does that mean?” Turtle says. “Nothing,” Brett says. “You seem very patient,” Jacob says. “You move at your own pace,” Brett says. “Speculative,” Jacob says. “Speculative, that’s right, thoughtful,” Brett agrees. “Like, where did you study Zen Buddhism?” “And was your Zen master the ancient, slow-moving reptile on whose shell rests the entire universe, known and unknown, fathomed and unfathomed?” “Is that what your name means?” “Is this a koan? Can you help us? To which the reply is, and can only ever be: silence.” “Dark, dude.” Turtle is surprised that they would go on like this in a cold downpour and then she thinks, they’re waiting on you, Turtle. They’re waiting on you and the talking helps them. “This way,” she says, and leads them back into the forest. In the dark, she circles the largest trees, Jacob shining his light on them. She leaves the boys huddled together and ventures out in every direction, cutting back to them when she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. She is hoping for a burned-out redwood with a hollow chamber, but the best she finds is a stump, crosscut long ago, with axe-cut notches in the sides where the scaffold was pegged to the trunk. She looks up at the stump’s hidden crown and Jacob watches her, shading his eyes from the rain, and then follows her gaze. Lightning strikes on Albion Ridge across the river, and Turtle counts it, two miles before the thunder comes, rolling with the distance. She climbs up the bark, hooks the top with a long reach, and drops into a deep, circular pit where the heartwood has rotted out. The hollow crown is ten feet across and tall enough to sit in without being able to see over the sides. A single huckleberry grows up through the middle in a rough circle of punky wood that drains the water. She wraps her fist around its base and rips it out and pitches it into the dark. She helps Brett and Jacob up, and they begin digging out leaf litter. She opens Brett’s backpack, finds a hundred feet of parachute cord still in its tight store-bought bundle, teases the bundle apart, quarters the line, and passes her knife through the loops to make four twenty-five-foot lengths. They unfold the blue tarp and Turtle bowlines the parachute cord to the corner grommets. Then she drops off the stump, and Jacob after her, while Brett holds the tarp. She pitches Brett a center pole, and he holds it in place. She wraps the first line around a stob, passes the bitter end back to the standing line, and ties a tautline hitch, a slide-and-grip knot that can be cinched up the wet line, though she wonders, even as she is tying it, if a tarbuck knot would be better. She guys out each line in turn. When she comes to the last, she finds that Jacob has already guyed it out and tied the tautline hitch. Water runs down the line, gathers just above the knot, and streams off in a single ribbon. The blue light from the headlamp follows the water on the parachute cord. She runs the knot between thumb and forefinger, finds it tight and well dressed. Jacob stands beside her. She says, “You knew this knot already?” “No,” he says, “just saw you make it.” She plucks the line, and it thrums. She looks at him but doesn’t know what to say, because he’d made the knot well, in the dark, not knowing how to make it, and she thinks he should be told how good that is, how rare, but she doesn’t know how to say such a thing. She undoes Jacob’s knot, then makes the next knot with conspicuous slowness. She ties a slipknot high on the standing line. She takes the bitter end, which passes around a branch, and brings it through the slipknot and bends it back down, making a pulley. She hauls on the line until the cord cuts paling corrugations across her palms. The pulley tightens the whole system; the tarp creaks with strain. She looks at him again. Rain runs down his face, and he wipes his eyes, nodding. She ties the tension off with half hitches, making them with exaggerated slowness. She glances back at him again, and plucks the cord. “Ahh,” he says. “The rain,” she says, “loosens the lines.” He nods again. Here is the difference between me and Martin, she thinks, here is the difference—it is that I know the rain loosens the lines and I care, and Martin knows that the rain loosens the lines and he does not care, and I do not know why, I do not understand how you could not care, because it is important to do things right, and if that isn’t true, I don’t know what is. She circles the stump, testing each guyline, cinching them down and doubling them up with half hitches, thinking, goddamn Martin, and how I will pay for this, how I will get down on my knees and beg not to pay and how I will pay anyway. “It’s like she can see in the dark,” Brett says. “She can,” Jacob says. “You can tell she can.” “No, like she can really see in the dark. And not just a little.” “Yeah,” Jacob says. “That’s what I mean.” “Where do you think she is right now?” “In her head,” Jacob says. “I can hear you,” Turtle says. She climbs up the side of the stump and helps Jacob after her. “She’s so quiet.” “Not all of us,” Jacob says, “go through life in a caffeine-fueled rage, Brett.” “Hey,” Brett says, “it’s good for your stomach. The coffee burns the ulcers right off your stomach lining.” “What are you talking about?” Turtle says. “Coffee,” Jacob says, “and how it mineralizes your bones.” “Is that true?” “No,” Jacob says. Inside, they have made a kind of dark, wet grotto, ten feet across, maybe four feet deep. Brett has laid down a heavy-duty plastic ground cloth, and now he hunches at the far end of the grotto, huddled up in his sleeping bag, his arms wrapped around himself, shivering. Jacob is unpacking his bag. He takes out a siliconized nylon stuff sack and offers it to her. “What?” she says. “Take my sleeping bag.” “No way.” “You’re shivering.” “So are you,” she says. “I’m going to spoon Brett,” he says. Brett says, “What?” “Take the bag,” Jacob says. “No,” she says. “First of all, we owe you,” Jacob says. “We never would’ve found somewhere dry if not for you. Second of all, Marcus Aurelius says—” Brett groans. “If only,” he says, “the emperor’s journal had been burned, as he asked. Should we really follow the instructions of a man whose final instruction was that his former instructions be destroyed?” “Marcus Aurelius says,” Jacob continues, “that ‘joy for humans lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt of the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.’ This—loaning you my bag—satisfies all of those conditions. Please take it.” Turtle is looking at him, incredulous. “What’s happening?” Brett says. “I don’t know,” Jacob says. “Maybe she’s making an expression?” “What?” Turtle says. “Please, let me give you the bag.” “No.” Brett says, “Turtle, take the bag. Seriously. His grasp of reality is tenuous at best, so arguing with him is dangerous. Nobody knows what will shake off that last handhold and send him spiraling into madness. Also, I have a sleeping bag that we can sort of spread out like a blanket.” Turtle looks from one to the other of the boys, and tentatively accepts the sleeping bag and begins pulling it out of its sack. The nylon is of such a high grade that it is soft as silk. It is homemade and has no zipper. She slips into it. The rain drums on the plastic ceiling, filling the chamber with noise. She can feel her breath in moist plumes, and she runs her cold hands together, the fingertips turned to raisins. She can hear the boys in the dark, their ragged exhalations, their movements as they huddle close under the one sleeping bag. Brett says, “Jacob?” “Yeah?” “Jacob, do you think she’s a ninja?” She says, “I’m not a ninja.” Brett says, “She’s a ninja, isn’t she, Jacob?” “I’m not a ninja,” she says. “Hmmm …” Brett hems and haws. “Hmmmm … sort of, yes, actually, sort of a ninja.” “No.” “Where is your ninja school?” Brett asks. “I didn’t go to ninja school,” she says. “She’s bound by covenants of secrecy,” Jacob observes. “Or perhaps,” Brett says, “perhaps, the animals of the forest taught her.” “I’m not a ninja!” she yells. The boys sit in chastened silence for a long moment. Then, as if her denial has given final proof to a theory once tenuous, Brett says, “She’s a ninja.” Jacob says, “But does she possess preternatural powers?” The boys talk in a way that is alarming and exciting to her—fantastical, gently celebratory, silly. To Turtle, slow of speech, with her inward and circular mind, their facility for language is dizzying. She feels brilliantly included within that province of things she wants, lit up from within by possibility. Giddy and nervous, she watches them, chewing on her fingertips. A new world is opening up for her. She thinks, these boys will be there when I go to high school. She thinks, and what would that be like—to have friends there, to have friends like this? She thinks, every day, get up and get on the bus, and it would be, what, another adventure? And all I would have to do is open my mouth and say, ‘help me with this class,’ and they would help. Slowly, the boys drop off to sleep, and Turtle lies opposite them. She thinks, I love him, I love him so goddamn much, but, but let me stay out. Let him come after me. We will see what he does, won’t we? Here is a game we play, and I think he knows we play it; I hate him for something, something he does, he goes too far, and I hate him, but I am unsure in my hatred; guilty and self-doubting and hating myself almost too much to hold it against him; that is me, a goddamn slut; and so I trespass again to see if he will again do something so bad; it is a way to see if I am right to hate him; I want to know. So you take off and you ask yourself: should I hate him? And I guess you will have your answer when you come back, because he will respond to your absence in a way you can love or he will respond beyond all reason, and that will be the proof, but always, Turtle—and you know this—he is ahead of you in this game. He will look at you and know exactly how far he can go and he will take you right to the brink, and then he will see he has come to the brink and he will step back; but perhaps not, perhaps he will go too far, or perhaps there is no such calculation in him. An itch is developing on her lower back. She runs her hand along the waistline of her jeans and finds the tick just above the elastic of her panties. She can feel its pearl-smooth body. “Brett?” she breathes, unbelting her pants and removing the holster, sliding it deeper into the bag to hide it. “Jacob?” “Yeah?” Jacob breathes back. “Do you have tweezers?” “Brett does,” Jacob says, “in his bag.” She hears Jacob sit up in the dark. He rustles around in the bag for seemingly a very long time before he finds them. “Got them,” he says. “Tick?” “Yeah, tick,” she says. “Where is it?” “Low down on my back.” “All right,” he says. “I can’t get it myself,” she says. “All right.” She rolls over onto her belly, hitches her jeans down and her shirt up to bare her lower back. Jacob crawls quietly over to her, trying not to disturb the sleeping Brett. She lies with her cheek resting on the cold black plastic of the ground cloth. Jacob kneels beside her. He turns the headlamp on, and they are bathed in its blue glow. “I’ve never done this before,” he says. “Get the head,” she says. “Do you twist it clockwise?” he asks. “I’ve heard they screw themselves in. Their mouthparts are an auger.” “No. It’ll vomit out its stomach contents when you start on it. Just pull it straight out in one go if you can,” she says. “Okay,” he says. He puts one hand on the small of her back, framing the tick between thumb and forefinger. His hand is warm and confident, her skin ringing electric. Her vision is narrowly of the black ground cloth, dirty, lapped up in wrinkles, but her focus is entirely on him, unseen, bending over her. “Just do it,” she says. He is silent. She feels the tweezers fasten down on the tick. They bite into her flesh, and then there is a plucking sensation. “You get it all?” she says. “I got it,” he says. “You get it all?” “I got it all, Turtle.” “Good,” she says. She hitches her T-shirt down and rolls back over. She can hear Jacob crushing the tick to death with the tweezer points. The rain drums on the tarp stretched taut above them. Jacob switches off the light, and she listens to them, there in the dark with her. Seven (#ulink_d3d1e4fd-0ef3-5e26-b38f-3d7e66c5cfcd) TURTLE AWAKES WITH A START, HEART POUNDING, AND WAITS, listening, eyes gummy from her dehydration, her mouth leathery. Someone has kicked the center pole away and the tarp hangs down cupped and half full of water, sunken leaves forming a black circle of detritus at the bottom. She waits, breathing, wondering what woke her, if Martin is standing outside, beside this stump, with his auto shotgun. Slowly, silently she draws the Sig Sauer and touches it to her cheek, the steel almost warm from the captured heat of the sleeping quilt. She can hear her own labored breath. She thinks, calm down, but she cannot calm down and she begins to breathe harder, and she thinks, this is bad, this is very bad. Something strikes the water and Turtle jerks, watches a fist-sized object comet through the water toward her, touch the tarp, and float away. She waits, the gun held against her face in two shaking hands. It is a pinecone, probably a bishop pinecone. This is what woke her: the cones splashing into the pool and striking the tarp. She takes a deep breath, and then startles as a second cone strikes the water and plunges down, slowing as it comes toward her. It touches the tarp, and then floats up and away. Ripples expand across the surface. Their shadows lave across the boys, the sleeping bags, the backpacks, the mess of this little hovel. She thinks, I love everything of theirs because it is theirs, and I like how crowded we are here with things, the riot and disorder, everything damp and warm, and she thinks, I love it. She pushes her feet down against the wet nylon of Jacob’s sleeping bag. She lies, her muscles loosening, and when she can, she holsters the gun and waits with her hands on her throat, looking up at the pool. She wants to draw the gun and cannot bear to lie there without it, and she puts her hand on the grip and touches the uncocked hammer and she thinks, leave it, leave it, and she takes her hand away and lies listening to the water above and to the forest beyond. She thinks, for a moment, I was sure it was him and the only thing I didn’t know was how far he would go, and how angry he would be. She thinks, he has always been able to surprise me. When she is calm again she climbs out, slithering awkwardly through a gap between the tarp and the stump. She sits on the stump’s crown, barefoot, jeans sodden and cleaving to her thighs, drinking from the tarp water. She drops off the stump and sits on a log covered in translucent mushrooms shaped like deformed ears. She draws her knife and begins cleaning thorns and slivers from her callused feet. Around her, wild ginger grows among the redwood roots, its leaves dark green and heart-shaped, its purple flowers, with their open throats and liver-colored tusks, deeply buried in the foliage. She puts her fist against her forehead. If something happens to them, she thinks, what are you doing, Turtle? You are forgetting who you are and you are thinking that you can be someone else, and you will get yourself hurt and you will get Martin hurt, and god help you, you will get these boys hurt and that is the worst of it, but somehow you cannot care so much for the risk they are taking, being with you. It seems worth the risk and that shows that you aren’t thinking clearly, because it isn’t worth the risk, not for them, not if you put the question to them, and not if you could explain how far your daddy might go. She thinks, I know that he came after me and the only question is if he could find me out here, and I bet he could, but I don’t know. She thinks, I can’t seem to get that answer straight, because sometimes I think of him, and it seems to me he could do anything. He could, she thinks, hurt these boys. She knows that and she thinks, don’t think of it. She thinks, it is light enough now. I could make it back and it wouldn’t even be hard, except—what are you giving up on, if you do that? She thinks, you know exactly what you’re giving up on, and the question is, what are you willing to risk? When it comes down to it, she thinks, I am willing to risk a great deal. I am willing to risk these boys and it’s just for myself and it’s nothing to them, they don’t even know, and I won’t even tell them. She thinks, if they find out, they find out, and I will take that risk because I am a bitch. Before long, Jacob crawls out and climbs with difficulty down the stump’s side. He sits beside her and looks at her feet, which are small, with painfully high arches. They look lathed almost, or worked, articulated tendons and bones without any softness. Her callus is contoured like a streambed and grained like a fingerprint. Jacob watches for a moment. She is glad to see him, and she is particularly glad to see him because of the risks she is taking to make it possible. He doesn’t know what he is involved in and it makes the moment of sitting on the log, beside him, important to her. He says, “Well, that’s strangely attractive.” He nods to where she is digging into the callus with the knifepoint. His voice is guileless but full of humor, and she smiles despite herself. She does not know if he is making fun of her or if he is making fun of himself, and then, immediately after her smile, she understands. She stiffens, stooped over her feet with knife in hand, tightening her jaw, acutely aware of her bitch face and ugly skin. Her whiteness is ugly and uneven, she knows, a freckled semitransparent whiteness so that her boobs, pathetically small and milkily untanned, are almost blue. She feels girded with imperfection and wants to play along with Jacob’s teasing, as if her repulsiveness is a prank she’s played on herself. She smiles her lopsided half smile, and smiling, wants to smash to pieces, because she has told herself not to play along when someone is cruel to her, but this boy has so unraveled her that she cannot stick to her intentions. He has a way of watching her that makes her feel as if she is the most important thing in the world. She stoops there, thinking, slit, slit, slit, that unlovely slot lodged between her legs, unfinished by inattention or design, opening into her own peculiarity, its aperture and its sign, and she understands it now; the slit is illiterate—that word undresses her of all that she has knotted and buckled up about herself; she feels collapsed—every bitter, sluttish part of her collapsed and made identical to that horrible clam. He says, “Where to next, Mowgli?” “You want my help?” Still looking at him, willing to let it go, but unwilling to go without dignity. She is asking for something, and he gives her all of it in his expression alone, which is open and generous and sorry. “Yes. Very much.” “No poison oak rashes yet,” she observes. “It’s gonna be bad,” he says. “Yeah,” she says, “I can help.” He says, “So, it’s none of my business—” “Yes?” “But I couldn’t help notice, just now, that you have a gun.” “Yeah.” “Why?” he says. She leans and spits into the duff. “Because I can.” “Well, that’s true,” he says, “but are you—do you think that you might need to shoot someone?” “It’s a precaution,” she says. “Is it, though?” he says. “Owning a gun, you are nine times more likely to be shot by a family member than by an intruder.” She cracks a knuckle, unimpressed. “I’m sorry,” he says, softening. “I’m not challenging you, or criticizing—not at all—I just want to hear your perspective. That’s all. I don’t really think that you’re gonna be shot by a family member.” Before she can answer, Brett groans and stirs, then peeks his head out from under the tarp. They break camp. Jacob unknots each line and holds the raveling ends over a lighter, turning the nylon between thumb and forefinger to form a bulb of black. They shake the tarp out, and then she and Brett fold it together until they have a long rectangle. Jacob rolls the bundles on his thighs. Turtle parcels them with half hitches and lashes them to the backpack. Then she stands in the stump and throws down their things to them, and they load all this into the backpacks. They follow the north bank of the river, eating focaccia and hunks of cheese, following broad avenues among the trees where the trickling runoff sorts the rust-colored needles into ripples. Soon they come to a winding paved road, the asphalt seamed with tar where the cracks have been patched. She thinks, the hell, I’m just delaying the moment, but the moment will come, and then we will see, and he will be fair with me, or he will be unfair, and if he is fair, then it will be hard. They reach a large engraved redwood burl that reads RIVENDELL SPRINGS AHEAD. They have seen no cars and no other people. The world is theirs alone. Brett says, “I think my mom does massage therapy here.” “You mean, she’s there right now?” Jacob says. “Probably. Most days. If she got called in.” “Would she give us a ride?” “Sure.” They follow the turnoff to a parking lot with sprays of fairy wands in large blue and gold clay pots and a high redwood gate. A dozen run-down cars. Brett opens a Ford Explorer with a key from the gas cap and they stash their bags. A dream catcher hangs from the rearview mirror, the center console is filled with oils, sunscreens, hand salves, beeswax lip balms. Unopened bills clutter the dash. Jacob pulls off his muddy T-shirt and balls it up and throws it into the passenger footwell before pulling on a clean Humboldt T-shirt. Turtle says, “I’m gonna leave you here.” She looks back over the forest and she knows it’s time. “But you can’t go,” Brett says. “Why?” “What if we open that gate,” Jacob says, “and they’re all zombies?” “What?” “If we’re forced to wander the postapocalyptic wastes of Northern California, we want you to be the reticent, shotgun-toting queen of our fellowship.” “I think she’d have to have a chain saw for melee,” Brett says. “For zombies,” Turtle says, “I’d like a .308, but if we really had to hoof it, you could talk me down to 5.56.” “But seriously, what about a chain saw?” Brett says. “You’d throw your chain,” Turtle says. “A samurai sword.” “If you’re saying zombies,” Turtle says, “I’d take a tomahawk, sure. Use all the weight you’d spend on pistol ammo for more 5.56.” “A shotgun,” Jacob says. “Can’t carry enough ammo. For every shotshell you can carry, you could carry three or four rifle shells. Plus, shotguns reload slowly.” Jacob says, “Couldn’t you get an auto shotgun with a magazine, like they have for rifles?” “Sure,” Turtle says, “but rifle shells are metal-jacketed and do well in magazines. Shotshells deform under pressure and jam if stored in mags. Plus, auto shotguns are finicky. When you’ve got to shoot a lot, carry a lot, and scavenge for ammo, 5.56 is king.” “See, we’ll never make it without you. Come on with us,” Jacob says. “Please?” “Please?” She’s grinning. “You’d make it.” “Not without you we wouldn’t.” “She’s coming,” Brett says, “look at her.” “I’ll come.” At the gate, they pull the bell cord and the three of them stand together, arguing about how to arm themselves for the coming apocalypse, Turtle barefoot, jeans rolled up to her knees and laden with drying mud. A shirtless man in hemp trousers opens the door, his chest tattooed with a Buddha over crashing waves, his hair in cigar-thick dreadlocks down to his waist. “Hey, brother,” he says to Brett. “Looks like the weather caught you by surprise.” “Hey, Bodhi—yeah, the weather surprised us some.” “Looking for your mom?” “Hoping for a ride.” “Who’s this?” “My buddy Jacob, and this is Turtle, the future shotgun-toting, chain-saw-wielding queen of postapocalyptic America.” “Is she really?” Bodhi says with some interest. “Well, Jacob, Turtle. Come on in.” He leads them through a meadow and among large glass pyramids into a redwood forest with moss-hung cabins and redwood barrel-style tubs of steaming water. There is a mineral scent in the air from a hot spring somewhere. They pass a group of naked women, Jacob acutely embarrassed, looking up at the shingle roofs, into the trees, anywhere. They pass another barrel-style tub where three old men bask naked, smoking a blown-glass bong. They follow Bodhi to a cottage, the eaves hung with witch’s hair, moss growing between the shingles, and they go into a warm interior with a woodstove in one corner. A naked woman sits cross-legged on a wooden pedestal, eating cherry tomatoes from a lacquered wooden bowl. Jacob’s eyes goggle in surprise. The woman is olive-skinned, with wiry black hair bundled in hemp cords, her face pretty and open, her nipples big, the areolas soft brown and goose-bumpy, her belly somewhere between soft and firm, the skin healthy looking but worn. Her pussy has two little interior pieces of flesh hanging out. Turtle’s own pussy is as trim and compact as an anemone bunkered down to wait out the tide. Brett says, “Guys, this is my mom, Caroline. Mom, could you—” and the woman says, “Julia Alveston?” Both Brett and Jacob turn toward Turtle in surprise. Turtle says, “What?” Brett says, “Mom—could you—could you put on some pants?” Caroline says, “Oh, girlie. I haven’t seen you since you were this high.” She holds out a hand three feet above the ground. “Your mom, Helena, was my best friend, and boy—I tell you—she was a—well.” Turtle feels an immediate revulsion. She thinks, don’t you talk about my mother, you cunt, you stranger. Brett’s mom now turns to look at the boys. “Tell me what’s happened,” she says. Brett says, “Mom, could you—” “Of course,” she says, rising and pulling on hemp drawstring pants while the boys take turns explaining. Jacob says, “She just sort of showed up.” “She was just out in the dark, no flashlight, no backpack, no shoes, nothing, getting along just fine, like she could see in the dark.” “In the pouring rain, pitch-black.” “You should see her feet. Calluses—it’s insane.” “She just walks everywhere barefoot.” “She doesn’t feel cold.” “Or pain.” “Only justice.” “We think she might be a ninja.” “She denies this.” “But of course, she’d have to deny it.” “If she said yes, she was a ninja, we’d know she wasn’t.” “I wouldn’t describe the ninja theory as definitive, but it’s a live possibility.” “Anyway, she led us out of the valley of the shadow.” “She can see in the dark.” “She can walk across water.” “She has her own pace. She just stops and she looks and she stands there looking and you’re all, like, ‘What are you looking at?’ but she just keeps looking and you’re like, ‘Um, aren’t you bored yet?’ But that’s because she’s a Zen master.” “She’s very patient.” “Her conversational pace isn’t what you’d call usual.” “I’m right here,” Turtle says. “She’s thoughtful, but there’s something more and stranger than that.” “It’s less thoughtful than watchful.” “Yeah—yeah! Watchful. You ask her a question and she just, like, watches you and you’re like … ‘Ummmm?’ and if you wait long enough she comes out with an answer.” “She can tie knots, she can find her way in the forest.” “The animals speak to her and tell her their secrets.” When they are done, Caroline says, “Well, boys. That’s very evocative.” Then she turns to Turtle. “How is your father these days?” “He’s good,” Turtle says. “Is he working hard?” “Not too hard,” Turtle says. “Is he dating?” Caroline asks. “I bet he is.” “No,” Turtle says. “No?” Caroline says. “He was always the kind of guy, had to have a woman in his life.” She smiles. “A real charmer, your father.” “No, there’re no women in his life,” Turtle says, a little menacingly. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that; must get lonely up on that hill.” “I don’t know,” Turtle says. “There’s Grandpa, and there’s the orchard, and the creek; and then, he has his poker buddies.” “Well,” Caroline says, “people change. But your father was one of the handsomest men I ever knew. Still is, I bet.” “Mom,” Brett says in exasperation, “that’s gross.” “He was quite a looker,” Caroline says, “and an intelligent man. I always thought he would do something.” “He hasn’t done anything,” Turtle says. “He’s raised you, and what a strong-looking girl you’ve come up to be,” Caroline says. “Though, I have to say, you look about half wild.” Turtle says nothing to that. Caroline says, “So, Julia, they met up with you a couple miles from here?” Turtle nods. “It sounds like it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere.” “I was on a walk,” Turtle says. “Starting where?” “What?” Turtle cups her hand around her ear and leans forward. “Where’d you start out?” “At my house.” “You walked here from Buckhorn?” Caroline says. “Yes, that’s right,” Turtle says, “came up out of Slaughterhouse Gulch, through the airport, and then above the banks of the Albion, sort of past people’s backyards.” “Well, sweetheart, you look roughed-up enough for it, that’s for sure. That must be miles and miles. With no water? No food?” Turtle chews, opening her jaw and closing it. She looks at the floor. Caroline says, “Sweetheart, I’m just worried about you. What were you doing out there in the middle of the night? How far is that from your home, do you think?” “I don’t know,” Turtle says. “Brett,” Caroline says, “why don’t you take Jacob out and show him the glass pyramids.” The boys exchange looks, and Brett jerks his head in a come on gesture and they both leave. Turtle stands in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands together and looking at the base of Caroline’s pedestal. “Did you know,” Caroline says, “I was almost your godmother?” Turtle cracks a knuckle, looks up at Caroline, and can almost remember her from a dim past. She senses a need to go carefully here and to protect her own small life on Buckhorn Hill. “Your mother and I used to tear up the town together, and I tell you, we did our fair share of tramping around in these woods, when we were a little older than you, and it was all kissing boys and dropping acid. After school we used to go down to the headlands, and there was this cypress on the bluffs between Big River and Portuguese Beach. We’d hang our feet over the bluffs and look down at the little hidden coves and out at the islands and we’d talk and talk and talk.” Turtle is silent. She thinks, this bitch. This bitch. “You have any good girlfriends in school?” “No.” “Nobody?” “No.” “How are you liking it?” “Fine.” “But there are women in your life, I hope?” Turtle says nothing. “And Martin? I bet he’s a wonder, helping you.” “Yeah. He is.” “He could explain anything, if he wanted.” “Yeah.” “He has a way with words, doesn’t he?” “Yes, he does.” “He was the most imaginative person I ever met. Goddess, he could read! And talk! Can’t he?” “Yes.” Turtle smiles. “He’s a good guy,” Caroline says, “but when he’s angry, he sure can hit hard, can’t he?” Turtle runs her tongue along her teeth. She says, “What?” She thinks, you bitch, you whore. It is the kind of trick people play with kids, they try and get you to answer a lot of questions and then they ask you a question about your family. Turtle’s seen it before. Women are always cunts in the end. No matter how they start up. Always some axe to grind. Caroline sits cross-legged on her stool and watches Turtle with serene attentiveness, and Turtle thinks, you bitch. You fucking whore. I knew it would come and it came. “Well,” Caroline says, seeing her error, backpedaling, “he used to have a temper on him.” Turtle stands there. “I remember, when we were just kids—just—well, goddess, he had a temper. That’s all I’m saying, just that sometimes he had a temper on him. So, how is he these days?” Caroline asks. “I’ve got to go.” Turtle turns. “Wait,” Caroline says. Turtle strips all emotion out of her face but not quite out of her posture, and she thinks, look at me. She thinks, look at me. You know that I take this seriously. Look at me. If you ever try and take him away, you will see. “Did I say something wrong?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Julia, sweetheart, I’m just wondering how things are at home. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you over these years. How many times I thought I saw you at Corners of the Mouth, or waiting in front of the post office, or walking through Heider Field. And could never be sure, because, of course, I didn’t know you. And now that you’re here—well, of course it’s you. You look just like your mom.” Turtle says, “My daddy would never.” “I know, sweetheart, I’m just curious,” Caroline says. “You know, I was so close to your mother, I’m allowed to worry a little bit. You and I, we’d know each other if she was still alive, and you and Brett would’ve grown up like brother and sister, but instead, I don’t know you at all. I can’t help thinking that it’s a weird turn of fate, you know, that she left us and you grew up not even knowing me. And good goddess, girl, you need some women in your life!” Turtle stares at Caroline, thinking, I have never known a woman I liked, and I will grow up to be nothing like you or like Anna; I will grow up to be forthright and hard and dangerous, not a subtle, smiling, trick-playing cunt like you. “Oh,” Caroline says, “sweetheart. Let me drive you home. I’d like to talk to Marty. It’s been ages.” “I don’t know,” Turtle says. “Oh, honey, I can’t let you walk all those miles back home. I just can’t. If you’d rather, I’ll call your father and he can come pick you up, but it’s an hour out of his way, and I’d much rather just take you home myself.” Turtle thinks, I will be in the car with this woman, and her thinking her things about Martin. But she wants to see how Caroline talks to him. She wants to be there, she half wants to know what Caroline thinks, and half she doesn’t. Eight (#ulink_44cb59ea-4f96-50ac-bf1a-7d5344d18f63) IT IS NEAR SUNDOWN WHEN THEY REACH THE TURNOFF FOR Turtle’s house. Caroline drives hard up the washboard gravel, just about six hundred yards, the Explorer lurching in and out of ruts. She keeps saying, “Look at this, Julia, goddess, if you knew how this place used to look.” The boys have their hands and faces pressed to the glass and look out at the fields with fascination. The driveway runs up the northern edge of the hill, and on their left it’s all shore pines standing above Slaughterhouse Gulch, which cuts west below them. Above them, they can just see the house at the crest of the hill, all of the windows dark. On their right the fields run until they meet the orchard, beyond which, and hidden from them, are the raspberry fields and Grandpa’s trailer. A stream cuts its way through the grass, visible only as a seam of thimbleberry and hazelnut. Turtle thinks, we will see how this goes, but he will not be hard on me until they are gone. Caroline slows down, looking at pampas grass beside the road, and says, “Daniel used to be more proud of that meadow than anything, I think. I don’t know how many hours he spent tending this meadow, and you know, it used to be just all timothy—as far as you could see, just timothy. But he’s let it get away from him, hasn’t he?” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/gabriel-tallent/my-absolute-darling-the-sunday-times-bestseller/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.