Valknut: The Binding, page 18
Lennie nearly screamed when a camping lantern flickered on behind her. A man straightened from the lamp and stared at her bleakly. He hardly looked like the Bill Sutter who had pointed her toward Bones O’Riley’s mulligan stew that morning. His fleshy cheeks sagged, pale and glistening with sweat, and a dark clot of blood showed through his thin, blond hair. Lennie nudged Junkyard.
“Hang on,” he grunted. He finished fastening the last tie without looking up. “That’ll hold ’em. For about five seconds.” He let his head droop and braced his hands on his knees like a winded basketball player. “I feel like I’m breathing fire.”
Bill leaned on the display case unsteadily. A duffle bag dangled from one hand and he clutched a railroad police badge in the other. His disheveled, blood-streaked face had a look of desperation that Lennie didn’t like. She thumped Junkyard’s back harder.
“Ouch!” Junkyard straightened and rubbed his back. He looked at the man and frowned. “Jeez, Bill, you look terrible. What happened?”
Bill’s shadow-haunted eyes flicked between Junkyard and Lennie. He seemed to have forgotten the duffle bag in his half-raised hand. Then he shook his head as though to clear it and breath exploded from him.
“Holy crap, Doug.” He dropped the police badge into the duffle bag and swept a hand through his hair, laying some of the longer strands over the bloody spot. “I thought you were—” he hesitated, swallowing, “well, someone else.”
“Who—” Junkyard began, then shook his head. “No, tell us later. Right now, better turn off that damn light before—”
“Vatos! Look, a light in that tent.”
“Shit.” Junkyard met Lennie’s eyes. They were trapped.
“That’s gotta be them,” another voice said. It sounded like the Ragman. “Save the chica for El Lobo, but leave the man for me. Lo chingaré!”
“Dammit, Doug.” Color washed into Bill’s face. He frowned, looking more like the bull Lennie had met that morning. “I thought you stopped picking fights. I can’t keep bailing you out.”
“Hey, he started it.”
The scuff of running feet reached through the tent walls. Bill grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled a gun from its pocket. “Never mind, tell me about it later. Pull up the canvas and run. This, I can handle.”
Junkyard shook his head. “You can’t face them alone, Bill,” he said in a low whisper. “Between the three of us, we’ll scare them off.”
Lennie backed away from the door until she bumped into the rear wall. “It’s nice of you to include me, but I doubt any gangbangers would be scared of me.”
“She’s right. Just keep quiet and get her out of here,” Bill whispered. He stuck the gun in the back waistband of his pants. “As far as they need to know, you were never here.”
The sounds of running stopped outside the tent. Bill, Junkyard, and Lennie fell silent, listening to the harsh breathing at the door. The tent flap shook violently.
“Shit, man,” a voice said. “Double knots.”
“Cut it. Just cut it.”
Something snicked. A knife poked between the flaps and sawed into a tie at head-level. Junkyard pulled his own knife and started toward the door, but Bill caught his arm.
“Who’s out there?” Bill called in a stern voice. He motioned Junkyard and Lennie to the back of the tent.
The blade paused for a heartbeat. “Let us in and find out.”
The voices laughed and the knife slid once more across the tie, parting it. Junkyard dropped silently to the ground, pulling Lennie down with him. Wind battered the walls, widening the gap in the door. Arms crossed, Bill stepped in front of it to block the view.
“Hello, Ragman. You don’t need to slice up my tent. If you want in from the storm, all you gotta do is ask.”
“Lo siento, Bill. We didn’t know it was yours,” the Ragman said, but he didn’t sound apologetic. “We were jus’ looking for two amigos, si? A gringo with sideburns and a skinny woman with wild hair.”
“Friends of yours?” Thunder rolled, almost obscuring Bill’s voice. “From the description, I’d say they don’t sound like your type.”
“Me and my compadres, we like all types.”
The gangbangers laughed. Not a pleasant sound. Lennie wanted out. Now. Carefully, quietly, she sidled to the back wall. Junkyard did the same.
“Tell me, mi amigo.” The Ragman’s voice turned hard and humorless. The knife went to work on the next set of ties. “Do you know where they are?”
“Now stop that.” Bill sounded genuinely irritated. “Don’t you know how to untie knots, boy? Here, let me do that.”
Bill went to work on the double knot, still blocking the gangbangers’ view of the interior. The wind struck again, hard, and the tent shuddered violently. Under the cover of flapping canvas, Junkyard lifted the back wall and they rolled through the opening. The wall dropped closed behind them, muffling Bill’s voice.
“Now, do you see? No one in here but me.”
Rain splattered down. Lennie pushed to her feet and tried to look in all directions at once. The gangbangers hadn’t thought to send someone to check the back of the tent. But she felt as if the very shadows were watching her.
“Carnival,” Junkyard whispered, and Lennie forced her stiffening legs to move.
The storm was almost on them. Carnival music blasted at full volume, but the rides had shut down and the few remaining customers were heading for their cars before the sky truly opened. Lightning flashed overhead, followed seconds later by a loud rumble. Lennie ran, half-expecting to hear gunshots at their backs, but there was nothing—no angry shouts, no firecracker pop—just carnival noise and the rush of wind. She slowed and trotted backward to check for pursuit. The lot between them and the tent village was empty.
Then she looked up.
Shadow billowed above the tents like black smoke against the night-darkened clouds. But where smoke would dissipate in the wind, this shadow reached across the parking lot, an oily black snake driving all its malevolence onto the single point that was Lennie.
She stumbled backward, barely keeping to her feet. Pressure swelled in her head, like the morning’s attack, only faster and stronger. Her tattooed hand began to burn and the hairs lifted on her arm. A memory arose in her mind, blocking the storm, the parking lot, even blocking the music from the carnival. She saw her mother lying in a puddle of vomit, unconscious and not breathing. She tried to push the memory away, but the images came anyway, their edges bleeding into yellow haze.
The smell had been the worst. Stale beer and bile. She had opened the front door to it after school on her thirteenth birthday and had wanted to run away without stepping inside, pretending not to see her mother on the floor. But her father had been the one to run out, not Lennie. So she dropped her book bag and addressed the situation as though following a checklist: 1) call 911, 2) clean out victim’s mouth, 3) administer CPR.
When her mother coughed back to life, Lennie found a blanket to keep her warm until the ambulance came. Just another day at the Cook’s residence.
But had it really happened that way? She had found her mother passed out many times, but had she ever stopped breathing? Had it ever happened on Lennie’s birthday?
Real or not, the memory was now hers. Forever.
Electric fire surged in her tattooed hand, clearing her head for a moment. But the pressure returned, worse than before. A new image came—her father’s face, sneering and ugly in the thickening yellow haze. She wanted to claw at the face, tear it away...
Instinctively, she focused on the burning tattoo. A prickling radiated from her hand with an almost audible hum. Her fingers convulsed, but she forced them to spread. The charge built along her lifeline, throbbing, threatening to split the skin. She could feel its power, could sense the potential, but had no idea what to do with it.
Above her head, the shadow recoiled as though sensing her efforts. She thrust her palm toward it, fingers splayed. She could almost picture what she needed to do.
Then Junkyard was there, pulling on her arm. “What’re you doing, Lennie? They’ll see us.”
She yanked her arm free and desperately tried to regain her focus, but the charge faded, leaving her hand cold and numb. “Damn it!”
Still breathing hard, Junkyard scanned the parking lot. “What’s wrong? Did you see them?”
She looked at him, incredulous. “What do you mean? Can’t you see it?”
“See what?” He pulled the bandana from his hair and wiped his face with it. He looked younger, more vulnerable without it. “Lennie, we have to go.”
“There.” She pointed into the sky above Bill’s tent and watched Junkyard’s reaction. His gaze trailed upward, but he looked puzzled. Lennie looked past her still-pointing finger and saw only the ordinary matte black of a stormy night sky. She let her hand drop.
“Never mind.”
She rubbed her tattoo like a talisman, the one solid piece of evidence that she wasn’t hallucinating. Maybe she should tell Junkyard about the mental attacks, the tattoo, everything. If all of it was real, he should be warned. If it wasn’t, if she was crazy, well, maybe he should be warned about that, too.
“Uh, Junkyard?” She hesitated. What approach would make her sound the least insane? “I’ve been—”
“Can it wait? We’re vulnerable here. Not enough people around.”
As if to punctuate his statement, the loud music cut out, leaving them in sudden, ominous silence. The shadows seemed to press closer, as if listening to their plans. Junkyard must have felt it, too. He started walking fast enough that Lennie had to trot to keep up. He kept his voice low when he spoke again. “Let’s get to the poetry reading. Some of those ’bos are pretty tough. The ‘bangers won’t want to tangle with them.”
“Uh, sure. But—”
“Besides, I’m a little worried. Jim was supposed to be with Bill. If he’s not at the poetry reading—”
Lightning crashed overhead, so close that there was no lag before the thunder. The sky opened and water came down in wind-blown waves. Junkyard took off at a trot. Frustrated, Lennie followed.
Chapter 14
Running again. This time, through a wall of rain. Lennie wiped at the water streaming down her face and tried not to think about how tired she was. Junkyard seemed ready to run all night, but she was a sprinter, not a marathoner.
Lightning tore the clouds to the north, then again to the south. Thunder rolled across the sky. She cringed, feeling exposed.
“The gods are going bowling,” she murmured, feeling a little delirious. Her father used to say that during storms. Another flash blinded her for a moment, followed by a sharp crack. She ducked, her nerves crackling in response. The gods are going bowling, bowling, bowling. She hated thunderstorms.
“This is...just a little...dangerous.” She didn’t have enough air left to infuse irony into the statement.
Junkyard only grunted and slogged through another puddle. His ponytail had fallen out and the hair-band, knotted at the end of a thin lock, bounced on his shoulder as he ran. Her own hair clung to her neck in wet strings, and her canvas shoes flopped and squished with each step. She hoped the poetry reading was someplace that had a roof. And central heating.
Junkyard slowed when he reached East River Parkway and stopped to study the steep embankment below. A faint odor of dead fish wafted up from the river and mixed with the wormy smell of rain on pavement. Cones of rain-muted light radiated from the streetlights, deepening the surrounding shadow. Lennie leaned over the guardrail. In the weak light, the tangled, leafy mass lining the slope below might have been shrubbery or the tops of tall trees.
“What are we looking for?”
Junkyard answered without turning. “A path. It leads down to an abandoned boathouse.”
“A b-boathouse?” So much for central heating. The old letter jacket had kept Lennie’s arms and torso mostly dry, but her rain-soaked jeans chafed like sandpaper across her thighs and her teeth had started to chatter.
“Hobos’ve been using it for decades, though not so much anymore. In the old days, there might’ve been fifteen, twenty ’bos looking for a place to stay on a night like this. The boathouse was big enough to hold ’em, and the river was handy for cooking and washing. Now, they’d rather jungle up closer to the track than go all the way down to the river. But it’s perfect for the annual poetry reading.”
Junkyard paused as a lone man crossed into the halo of a streetlight. Lennie tensed until she saw that the man wore a cowboy hat and gray coveralls stretched over a large gut. No gangbanger could survive looking like that. Hitching up the legs of his overalls, he climbed over the guardrail and disappeared down the embankment.
“Ah, that must be the path.” Junkyard started toward the spot as two more people stepped into the light. They saw him and waved before following the first man over the side. Junkyard waved back. “The fellow with the forked beard and yellow slicker is old Slim Dandy. Thinks he’s the next Pete Seegar. He’ll probably sing something at the poetry reading.” He swung a leg over the guardrail. “Careful, this mud is slippery.”
Lennie hesitated, uncertain what she was getting herself into. Attending a poetry reading had seemed reasonable enough in the daylight, when Jungle Jim had suggested it. But going to a secluded, abandoned building with a bunch of rough men she didn’t know wasn’t so appealing.
Still, she knew what the gangbangers would do if they caught her. And the poetry reading was her best chance to find out something more about her father. Besides, where else could she go? Exhausted, teeth chattering, she forced her stiff legs to move. Maybe there’d be some coffee boiling over a campfire, like in the movies.
Before she could follow Junkyard over the rail, she heard the scrape of feet on pavement. She looked around, expecting to see another hobo heading for the boathouse.
The street was empty.
But the footsteps continued, and the jingle of coins joined the cadence—shuffle-jingle-shuffle...shuffle-jingle-shuffle. A lot of coins. Someone had deep pockets.
Lennie stood transfixed, caught by the rhythmic duet. Slow and steady, shuffle, jingle, shuffle, Frankenstein’s monster out for an evening stroll.
“Junkyard?” she whispered, but he had disappeared down the trail. She peered into the shadows. Did monsters carry pocket change?
A form distilled out of the mist, dark and undefined at the rim of the streetlight’s world. Another sound joined the cadence, like the faint, steady clicking of squirrel’s teeth on a walnut shell. The figure stepped closer and the streetlight unveiled an incongruous straw hat with a full bouquet of artificial flowers clumped on one side.
The obscured figure became a short, fat old woman laboring down the sidewalk in three layers of mismatched flower-print dress. Shuffle-jingle—the shuffle from an ancient pair of snowmobile boots, the jingle from a luggage-sized purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. Knitting needles clutched in her knobby-knuckled hands clicked at green wool like chopsticks fighting over spinach noodles.
Lennie exhaled. Muscles she had unknowingly clenched ached as she allowed herself to relax. No monster, no mummy, not even a gangbanger. Just a little old bag lady. Who had caught her staring.
The woman stopped in front of her, so close that Lennie could see the dirt imbedded in the straw weave of her hat. An odor wafted from her, strong but not unpleasant, like damp moss growing at the foot of a tree. Small, bright eyes met Lennie’s out of a wrinkled face. Lennie wanted to look away, but she could hardly pretend she hadn’t noticed a person two feet away on an otherwise empty street.
The corners of the bag lady’s eyes crinkled at Lennie’s discomfort. She spoke in a cheery grandmother voice. “Can you spare some change for a hungry old lady?”
The bag lady ran her fingers down a length of green yarn. A shiver ran down Lennie’s spine.
“I’m sorry,” Lennie said with an apologetic smile. “I don’t even have fifty cents to call my mother for a ride.”
Lennie’s voice caught as she realized what she was saying. It was only an expression, a way of saying “I have no money for you,” but it hurt nonetheless. Her smile tightened against sudden tears.
“Oh, dear. That won’t do.” The woman fussed at her purse’s latch. “I think I can spare some change for you.”
The purse’s hinged mouth sprang open, spitting coins to the ground. Distressed, the bag lady put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my!”
Her eyes darted to follow the bouncing and rolling money. When the last coin settled, she lowered herself to her knees, leaving the purse open at Lennie’s feet. It was filled to the top with coins: copper and silver, large and small. Spare change, indeed. The purse must weigh at least thirty pounds.
The bag lady gathered her coins along the curb, hunched on all fours like a gaudy, over-stuffed ottoman. “I’m saving for the future, you know.” She picked up a penny. “It’s never too soon to start.”
Lennie stooped to help, but the bag lady was surprisingly quick. She scraped up the coins by the fistful, dumped them into the purse, and clambered to her feet before Lennie could retrieve more than a handful. Lennie tried to return the coins, but the bag lady folded Lennie’s fingers over the money.
“No, child. You keep those. Use them to make your phone call—though it’ll take more than spare change to reach your mother, now, won’t it.”
“What? How did...who—”
The right question would not congeal. Then Lennie noticed that the woman’s hands, still cupped around her own, were warm and dry despite scrambling after cold, wet coins on puddled pavement. Impossibly, the layered dresses, the boots, the ridiculous fake flowers on her hat, were all untouched by the weather.
The woman was part of it.
Though Lennie’s tattoo remained quiet, though no shadows beat at the doors of her mind, Lennie knew that this woman was no bag lady. She had to be part of the gauzy web of impossibility that had snared Lennie the moment she had latched onto the door of a moving train.
