I cheerfully refuse, p.16
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 16
If I had “some money” I wouldn’t need a pawnshop, but then she said her uncle who was called King Richard had a store with a gas pump and paraffin and shelves of canned groceries, which he was happy to trade for knives or old coins or military stuff or ammunition of any kind. This reminded me of the long-barreled pistol Erik had left aboard Flower. It was still in its spot under the galley stove, wrapped in its oiled rag. I dug it out and held it up.
“Would Richard be interested in this?”
“King Richard. You got to call him that.”
“That’s his name? King?”
“No, he just likes it. It’s the name of his shop, King Richard’s. He has a shield with lions on it hanging on the wall. He has a sword and it’s pretty sharp. Also a crown but that’s just for show.”
“What would he think of this pistol.”
She stuck out her hand as she had for the tomato but I wasn’t about to let her hold that weapon which anyway was long as her arm. I ran the rag over it and showed her one side then the other. Pulled out the clip and blew into the handle and shoved the clip back home, making all the stout clanking noises just as if I had some idea what I was doing.
“Got any bullets for it?”
“No.”
“He’ll want it anyway,” she said.
While we walked into town I considered priorities. I carried the three-gallon jerrican for gas, an empty bottle for paraffin. Dried potatoes would be welcome, macaroni and cheese. I was low on beans and wouldn’t quarrel with a few cans of corned beef. In the warm sun the drying suit scraped against my skin. I needed soap, a toothbrush. I asked the girl whether the boat would be safe at the dock or if somebody might steal it or get aboard and steal something else.
“Like what?”
“Electric bass.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“A low guitar.”
She didn’t answer immediately. In Icebridge I felt easy about leaving the boat at the dock, but then I knew everyone in Icebridge. Here I was suspicious. So far, Winton looked savage and pummeled.
“I’ll need to be quick with Richard,” I said.
“King Richard.”
As the sun rose so did the wind. Skeins of sand blew down the wide street. I was aware of the heavy pistol in its oiled wrap under my arm. I never felt easy carrying a gun but soon realized it wasn’t out of place here. Of the dozen people we saw on the way to Richard’s, nearly all hauled around some vicious deterrent—shoulder-slung rifles, pistols jammed in waistbands, an arthritic old man crabbing along under a twelve-gauge goose gun. A woman pushed her baby in a stroller equipped with a side holster, a first for me. The girl herself looked frankly underequipped carrying only a three-pronged spear. Why all the gear, I inquired. Widespread panic? Was Winton at war with a neighboring town? I remember she looked at me sideways like she didn’t understand the question or maybe it was just dull. Off she went into livelier topics. A man up the street lost three fingers to fireworks. Every so often the fingers returned to visit him in the night, two of them joined at the root and the third hopping along crying wait for me in a tragic small voice. Another witchy neighbor knew the future but never revealed it since the news was always bad. If she nodded knowingly you kept your head down. If she appeared at your door with a casserole you were minutes from a death in the family. The girl was good company. The sun threw our shadows in front of us, a scraggy upright bruin and a junior devil with pitchfork.
The fork suddenly pointed: we were at King Richard’s. The shop had two gas pumps and a hand-painted sign of a royal crest. I tried the door, which was locked, and looked through the bars at a few shelves of beef hash and shoelaces and the grotesque faux coffee called Postum.
“Sometimes he’s not here,” she told me. “He’ll be at home with the black dog.”
“All right. Thanks anyway. I’ll find someplace else.”
She then convinced me to walk another few blocks along the same street to King Richard’s house, saying he needed the business, that he would certainly come back and open the shop if I bought even a gallon of gas and a pack of cards. Winton didn’t become more charming en route, so many steel wheels and shrines to saints obscure and front-yard stacks of gunshot liquor bottles you never imagined, but “Here we are,” she sang, and if anyone has wondered what sort of person erects before his house a machine-gun cross with a crown of bandoliers, why the answer is King Richard. He sat in a lawn chair from which the webbing hung in strips, a silent shaven-headed watcher of the street. He stood up to frown hard at the girl while holding his hand out to me. I didn’t want to shake it but I did—an antique custom in this germy century of ours. But Richard had an easy disregard for germs and more so those who feared them. I unwrapped the pistol and told him what I wanted. He liked the gun. He pointed out with delight where the serial number used to be. Its absence bought me credibility with Richard. He said there was no need to return to the shop—his reservoirs were empty with no deliveries all week—but he had a fuel tank out back and inventory in the basement of everything but paraffin. On the way inside, he kissed his fingertips and brushed the cross as he passed. It was made of two automatic rifles welded at right angles and mounted on a wooden post so the crossmember was eye level to average sinners. The guns looked functional and the bandoliers were full of bullets. My mood sank and I hoped the black dog was not inside that house waiting to snap and foam at my calves. The front door opened into a grubby little kitchen where Richard left me while he thundered down a set of steps and up again with surprising alacrity. He emerged with a crate of cans and bottles while giving his abbreviated memoir, wife dead of something undiagnosed, children striving in the gardens of astronauts out east, his neighbor a fearsome seer of mayhem whose spiel gained credence by the day. As he talked I became aware of something, a smell that crept out from everywhere, deep and distilled. It occurred to me that maybe the dog had died somewhere, but this was before the girl explained that black dog just meant sadness. I knew that creature. In any case I made my purchases and looked around, but the girl was gone and who could blame her? Richard shook my hand a second time and I got out of that stinking house. The sun was in and out of clouds. A gusty wind scooted trash along the gutters. I walked with conscious restraint, resisting the urge to go faster every step.
•
Straightaway I got under sail. Didn’t even start the motor, just raised the main and swept up the anchor as Flower sliced past in the last minute of sun. The wind was southerly, neither too much nor too little. Supper was bread toasted on the stove and topped with a fried egg.
I was probably two hours gone when a rustling sound took my eyes off the horizon—a muffled scurry, with elbow whacks. As I watched, the lid to the portside cockpit locker opened deliberately as if by a vampire checking for daylight, and there was a set of spidery fingers followed by crazy sea-child hair and eyeballs gleaming like a plan to cut my throat.
Fairly sure I leapt back at the tiller. It’s possible I roared. It seemed wicked magic, the girl being on Flower when I’d made good time myself and wasted not a moment getting underway.
“It’s only me!” she shouted. “Come on, it’s only me.” She pushed the locker open and stood out in her long thin shirt like a wraith. Maybe I said something harsh. I remember how she shrank away. Maybe she thought I’d be glad to see her, on account I had been decent earlier and gave her that tomato.
“Sit down and hang on.” I brought our nose into the wind and let the sails go soft and flutter and change sides.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking you home.” The sails refilled, I trimmed them and we headed toward the lights of Winton, still visible on the dark horizon.
“You’re not. Come on, we’re miles away.”
“We are, and I am.”
Her fury was evident but I was furious too and scared. Already pursued by deathless bloodhound Werryck I had now, however accidentally, stolen a child whose uncle demanded to be called King and who daily kissed a machine-gun cross. In a hundred years she couldn’t have chosen an unluckier sailor with whom to stow away. I tried explaining this but did she understand? She was only nine I was soon to learn—could she see how it was, or anywhere close? Can she see it now?
I said, “It’s not like you’re safer out here with me.”
“He’s not my uncle,” she replied. “We’re not even related.”
“You called him Uncle.”
“I never heard of him until my folks dropped me off, and I never saw them since.”
“You’re changing your story,” I pointed out, but honestly who wouldn’t? Who, living in King Richard’s ghastly shadow, wouldn’t trade it for whatever came along, including a tattered boat sailed by a talking bear?
“He smells and he’s awful and he’s so heavy you can’t move,” she added, an observation that got worse every time I thought of it.
“If he’s your legal guardian—”
“I’m an animal he owns.”
“Will you let me think a minute?”
“There used to be two older girls who weren’t his nieces either. He’d come in our room at night and touch one of them on the head or sometimes both and they’d get up and follow him away. One day they both went someplace else. I asked King Richard where. He pretended they were never here at all. Said I made them up.”
Two hours it took to reach Winton and a longer haul would be hard to invent. Yes I’d just hung on through a three-day blow, had been tossed and dragged and half drowned and frozen, the whole blue-faced parade, but try two hours captive to a fully alert child relating savage history. The storm was less painful. We often hear stories that make us desperate to help, but the person is not usually two feet away talking vividly about what will happen if we don’t. There are phrases babies shouldn’t know. Nearing the lights of town the breeze dropped almost entirely away, and I went down and got my bass and tuned as best I could in the open cockpit. No amplification, obviously, but on the sea gone quiet it made a nice resonant sound. The girl fell silent, her expression one of listlessness or exhaustion. My playing comforted me more than her. When I wrapped the bass back in its blanket, she said, “I like that guitar.”
“Me too.”
I tucked it below and took down the sails and leaned over the outboard. We neared the Winton pier.
“You don’t have to be in charge of me. Just get near shore and let me swim. That way you’re not kidnapping, and I’m away from that pighog, Richard.”
It wasn’t the last time I’d hear her call him pighog. I liked it. It was funny, and also it reminded me she was nine, quick and smart and sovereign though she was in most respects.
“Someone has to be responsible for you,” I said.
“That’s what Richard says, right before he’s mean.”
“I can’t just let you run off on your own.”
“People say that and then they hand me over. It isn’t right. Papa Griff wouldn’t do it. Papa Griff wouldn’t take me back to Richard.”
“Who’s this now?”
“Papa Griff. He’s old. He’s my gramps,” she said. “I used to stay with him sometimes. He’s got a pantry and two griddles and a four-slice toaster. He used to be an actor, combs his hair in a pompadorg. He hid me when people came looking.”
“Back up. Who came looking?”
“People Daddy knew. People in his business. Papa Griff didn’t like their appearance. He has a secret door that he built himself. I stayed back there until they left.”
“So where’s this Griff? Where does he live? Wait, hang on. Is he your gramps like Richard’s your uncle?”
“He isn’t nothing like Richard. He isn’t mean. He lives in Redfield.”
I got out the chart book. It took her three seconds to point out Redfield on the far side of a massive peninsula like a hooked beak poking out to sea.
It was a week away at best.
We eased up to the pier, cleated her fast beneath the wide and starry. I didn’t want to leave the boat there by itself. Not at night. Even from the dock we could see a shaggy crew darting in and out of shadow on the near streets. Stooping long-armed figures on the hunt.
Before we left the boat I did pull out the wrapped bass guitar, the only thing worth stealing. As for the girl I half expected her to run, to skip away and lose me and not go back to Richard. I wouldn’t have blamed her. Instead she walked close to my side, a hand on the bass as though for comfort. My throat ached a little.
As we neared Richard’s house many lights were burning. Some were flashlights and some torches. People were loping around—looking for the girl it became apparent. I will say that Richard’s friends resembled Richard, meaning hard and humorless. Their skins like galvanized protection. Of course she knew them but for me it was all zigzag beams and hooting in the dark. Richard himself sat in his derelict lawn chair beside a smoky bonfire. He did not seem overjoyed when we came up the walk but got to his feet and stood next to the crucifix and pointed at the girl in a way that seemed a private interaction.
“Nuisance from the start,” said Richard, and to me, “I thank you sir and am sorry for the bother this one put you to.”
He held his hand out. This time I did not shake it, but he didn’t seem to notice and only directed a dire downward glance at her whose shoulders were thrown back in mutiny.
Then Richard with groaning joints lowered to a knee and put his face to hers. “Did you see them, girl?” he said. “All the people come to search for your ungrateful ass? Look now. Look around you at the friends you don’t deserve,” pointing and nodding at several sharp faces with flat eyes shining in the firelight like creatures easing up to the side of a road.
He stood and stepped back. Immediately came a hard hollow concussion. The girl dropped to knees and hands. I didn’t know what had happened. It took her a minute to breathe again, and then it sounded ragged.
“Get up,” said Richard.
When she did I saw the rock that knocked her down.
She must’ve been scared. She didn’t look it. I never saw her look it.
Right then all I wanted was the old anger back again. I wanted to feel a growl climb up from the earth into my legs and bust out of my mouth as a roar. That did not happen. I was the one who was scared.
“Let’s step inside a minute,” I said.
Richard didn’t reply but led the way. Yet again he kissed his fingers, brushed that profane cross aglitter by the fire. He lifted a hand, dismissing his gathered friends who filtered away as we stepped into his kitchen. Again that smell to take the bristles off.
“I hope you aren’t looking to be paid,” King Richard said. He stepped behind the counter.
“Of course not.”
“What then? You brought her back. I thanked you for your effort. What other transaction have you got in mind?”
My hesitation was because I hadn’t thought it through and had no script in mind. There I stood dithering. Then Richard’s face changed. His head sank into his shoulders. His eyes narrowed as though we had something in common. He signaled the girl to vanish and she did. How often had those piggish eyes ordered her away so that she might be discussed?
With her gone he said, “Make your offer.”
I laid my bass guitar on the counter and opened its blanket.
O God that maple fretboard. That swooping mahogany body scarred and long beloved.
I looked away saying, “You take the bass. I take the girl with me.”
“For how long?”
“She never comes back.”
I looked down into Richard’s devious crease of a smile.
“What do you think I am, you come in here and try to buy my girl?”
“She isn’t yours. She arrived as payment of some debt. And I know about the others, the older ones no longer here.”
“Girls who needed help. I helped.”
“You’re not helping this one.”
“She doesn’t starve in my house. No one forces her to stay. To believe one thing she says is to make a tragic error. Others have found this out.”
“Are you turning down my offer?”
“No,” said Richard. “No. In fact, I accept,” he added in the hardening tone of one tolerating an idiot. “And I’ll tell you why. This guitar will not try to burn down my house.” He pointed at the ceiling, stained with greasy smoke. “Who do you think set the fire?”
I made to speak but he cut me off. “This guitar won’t hide a spike under its pillow. How about that? Or put Drano in my Dinty Moore! Is that funny to you? No? I’ll take your offer, but you should know what you are getting. Go on and take her. You think she’ll thank you, but she won’t.”
At this she appeared, soundless as a genie, having thrown some kit in a drawstring sack. Out we went and the door shut hard behind us, followed by metallic snaps as deadbolts shot in place. I remember a V-shaped crack in the clouds that let the moon show its face, swollen with humidity and strangely close by.
“Call me Rainy,” I told her under that moon.
“I’m Sol,” she said.
And what did she think, this Sol, as we walked away from there? Reaching the sidewalk she spun and bobbed in a spontaneous boogie, but her back was sore where the stone had struck her and she turned heedful and stealthy-eyed. I too felt strangely circumspect. Distrustful of the imminent. Glad as I was for her to escape Richard’s house of stink, I knew the bitter limits of my power. I’d protected exactly no one from those who meant them harm—not Lark, not Kellan, not even little Tonio of the heart-shaped head. Moreover, already it was clear Sol carried weight beyond her size. Already this ballast threw me off. I wove along unsteadily until we reached the boat, which by some shocking chance lay untouched at the dock.
Already I missed my bass guitar.
