Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (6 page)

A sick sense of apprehension settled in
Tarc’s stomach. He said, “She got sent on an errand.”

“Well,” the
stranger said with a greasy gap toothed grin, “
she’s
the one that took my order. Therefore, she’s the one I’m givin’ my coppers to.” His eyebrows bounced up and down, “When she gets back from her
errand
, send her on back out here to collect the money.” The man picked up his fork and turned away from Tarc, effectively dismissing him.

Tarc
stood there uncertainly for a moment, trying to think how to demand payment from someone who frightened him. “We take payment when we bring the food here at Hyllis’ Tavern,” he said, but without the authority he had hoped to project.

“Oh, I’ll
pay
, make no mistake,” the man said, glancing up at Tarc from under a lowered eyebrow. “But, I ain’t paying
you
. I’m payin’ that
hot
little blond chica.” He grinned at the man across the table from him, “Hell, I’d pay some extra coppers just to rest my weary eyes on her again,” he said with an ugly laugh.

His stomach in a knot,
Tarc stood for another moment, then abruptly turned and headed back to the kitchen.
How can this be happening again?
he wondered. He’d worked in this tavern his entire life. He’d seen fights, of course. It was a tavern after all and men sometimes drank too much. Sometimes, the fights were over women. But not the women in Tarc’s
family
!
Could Daussie really be so… pretty that she’s driving some of these men crazy?

Tarc
just couldn’t see it.

Back in the kitchen with his mother,
Tarc realized he’d just walked past Denny Smith without acknowledging her presence. Worse his mother turned to him and said, “So, what’s wrong with Denny?”

Tarc
dithered a moment. He knew he should tell his mother about the two men, but didn’t want to confess that he’d failed to obtain their payment. He was supposed to pick up their plates and bring them back to the kitchen if they didn’t pay, but they’d reminded him too much of the big soldier from the week before. He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d been
afraid
to try to take their plates.

He didn’t want to talk to his mother about Denny Smith either, but it seemed the lesser of two evils. “Um, something’s wrong with her bladder.” He shrugged, “I think?”

His mother looked at him consideringly. “Okaaay. So, tell me the story.”

“Um, she says it… burns
, down there,” he waved nebulously down towards his own crotch, “when she pees.”

Eva grinned at him, “And you’re embarrassed. And I suppose she is too?”

Tarc nodded, feeling himself blush again.

“Well, if you’re going to be a healer, you’re gonna have to get over being embarrassed. Tell me the rest of her story.”

Tarc stumbled through the story Denny had given him, and her answers to the questions he’d asked.

“Does her urine smell bad?”

Aghast, Tarc hissed, “I didn’t ask her
that
!”

“I just finished telling you, if you’re going to take care of people
, you can’t be embarrassed about these things!” She lifted an eyebrow, “If you
act
embarrassed, they’ll
feel
embarrassed.” Eva turned and opened the cabinet where she kept her medical supplies. She pulled out a small glass cup, one so perfect it had to be from the old days. It had no warping or discolorations in it like new glass would have had. She handed it to Tarc, “Go ask her to pee in this.”

“Mom!”
Tarc said, eyes wide, “Can’t you ask her? Besides she just went out to pee. When I…” Tarc ran down, not knowing quite how to explain what had just happened.

“When you what?”

“Uh, I was using my ghost to… you know… see what was different down there. But I, I, wasn’t sure what was different because she’s a girl…”

“Oh Lordy,” Eva grinned at him over the pot she was stirring, “you were comparing her parts to yours?”

Tarc felt a hot flush come over his face, “That’s what you said to do!”

Eva started with a little giggle but was soon laughing so hard she bent over and tears came to her eyes. Still snorting, she stood, wiped at her cheeks, and said, “Found quite a few differences, did you?”

Still embarrassed, but also angry, Tarc nodded. “The wall of her bladder is thicker than mine, but I didn’t know if that was just a boy-girl difference or something wrong. So I tugged on it a little…”

“
Tugged
on it?” Eva’s eyes were very wide. “You can
move
things like your dad?”

“Um, yeah.” He had just been assuming, he realized, that his mother and father could do the
same
things with their talent. “You can’t?”

“No,” she breathed, “I can only feel the insides of things. Your dad told me that you could feel a silver inside his fist
, but he didn’t say you could move things. Does he
know
you can do that?”

“Yeah. I moved a copper for him on the bar.”

“That man, sometimes I swear…” She grinned, starting to turn pieces of chicken on the grill and shaking her head. “I suppose he wanted it to be a surprise,” she mused. She turned the last piece of chicken, then turned and threw her arms around Tarc, squeezing him hard. “Oh Tarc, that’s wonderful! Being able to sense the insides of people
and
move things will let you do so many more things to help your patients!”

Feeling his mother’s
pride in him lifted Tarc’s spirits immeasurably. Then his thoughts stumbled, “Wait, Dad can sense things. He told me… he knows where the sun is, and can tell where people are!”

“Yeah, we both can
tell where warm things are. But only I can feel inside of things, and only he can move things.” She lifted an eyebrow at him as she turned to stir the soup again. “Feeling the insides of people to know what’s wrong with them is
tremendously
useful for a healer. I’ve always wished I could move things inside them too. Then I could poke at the different parts to tell which structures were really hurting. That would be… incredibly helpful for making a better diagnosis.”

Tarc
tilted his head, “Can’t you just ask dad to move things for you?”

She shrugged, “I can
ask
him, but he can only really push on things he can see. Since he can’t see inside of people, he can’t push on the right things to be helpful.” She shrugged again, “Even if I
could
get him to tug on things he couldn’t see, he’d still have to tug on them hard enough for me to feel them move so that I would know what he was actually tugging on.”

“
Why wouldn’t that work?”

“We’ve tried. It would be really hard with a real patient because we couldn’t talk back and forth in front of them about what
we were trying to do. But, I’ve had him try moving things inside me or inside animal carcasses. The amount of force you guys can exert is so little that it’s hard to tell for sure what it is that you’re wiggling.”

“Really?”
Tarc asked with surprise.

“Yeah…” she frowned,
“Wait, how hard can
you
push on things?”

Tarc
shrugged, then reached out with his ghost and pushed her index finger to one side.

Eva let out a
startled squeak, and stared at Tarc with wide eyes. “Oh my God! Tarc that’s amazing… and wonderful! We’re going to be able to do so much more for people!” Her eyes turned towards the great room and she frowned, “Did you push that hard on Denny’s bladder? ‘Cause, if you tugged that hard, maybe
anyone
would have felt like they had to pee.”

“No, I barely tugged at all. It sure affected her though.” He reached down with his ghost and tugged on his own bladder. He could feel something happen, but it wasn’t painful. It didn’t even make him feel like he had to pee, and his bladder was a lot
fuller than Denny’s had been. “A lot more than it affects me when I tug on my bladder the same amount,” he said to his mother.

“Tug on mine the same amount then,” his mother said.

Tarc’s eyes widened, something just seemed wrong about fooling with his mother’s… whatever.
Stuff down there,
he thought.

His mother rolled her eyes, “Come on
Tarc, if you’re going to be a healer you’re going to have to
stop
being so squeamish!”

Tarc
reached out with his ghost,
found
his mother’s bladder which certainly had a lot more urine in it than Denny’s, and gave it a little tug.

A small crease formed between his mother’s eyebrows and she said, “That’s all the harder you tugged on Denny’s bladder?”

He nodded.

“Well then, her bladder’s certainly very irritable.” She turned back to the grill and moved some things around
, then stirred the big pot. “It would be better if you could get her to pee in the cup, but I’ll bet she doesn’t have any left. Then we would smell it to see if it has a bad odor, and look at it to see if it’s cloudy. Both of those things suggest an infection in the urine.” Despite her admonition to Tarc that he needed to stop being so self-conscious, she blushed a little, “Infections in the urine are common in women right after they get married.”

Tarc
blushed as well. About all he knew about sex came from the stories boys his age told one another, but from those stories he could guess how getting married might affect your bladder. Especially after he’d just finished poking around down inside Denny Smith with his ghost and knew how close together things were down there. A sense of foreboding came over him. Infections were really terrible things. He wondered. “Is… Denny gonna die?”

“Well,” his mother said, tilting her head
and thought, “maybe. But usually not. The body can fight off a lot of urine infections itself, especially if we give it some help.”

Tarc
frowned, “What kind of help can we give? I thought there weren’t any medicines for infection anymore.”

Eva got down a couple of plates and started loading them with food off the grill. “Mostly, we give her advice. She needs to drink lots of fluid so that she’ll make lots of urine to wash away the bacteria causing the infection. Cranberries are good for UTI
, though there aren’t any fresh ones this time of year. Usually Benson’s store has dried cranberries and I keep some in case they run out.

“UTI?”

“That’s what your grandmother called it. She said it stood for ‘urinary tract infection.’ That was what they called it back in the old days when they had medicines that would cure a UTI with just a few doses.” She held out the plates, “Here, take these to the Garcias. I’m going to take a quick look out back to see if Daussie has gotten over her snit. Then we’ll talk to Denny together.”

Just then Daussie came in the door, looking sullen. She looked at the plates, “I’ll take them out
; apparently that’s all
I’m
good for anyway.”

Tarc
already had the plates in his hands. He suddenly remembered the two men by the door, “No, I’ll take them.”

Daussie sneered at him, “Since when are
you
willing to do any extra work?”

Tarc
considered just turning and going out there with the plates.
But, what if Daussie comes out into the big room after me?
“Um, those two men by the door…? They’re trouble. You shouldn’t go out there.”

Daussie’s eyes narrowed, “What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”  She started to step towards the door as if she were going to peer out into the big room.

Tarc blocked her from the door and said uncomfortably, “They said things, um, about you… Like that big soldier from a week or so ago. They wouldn’t pay me, said they wanted
you
to pick up the money. I don’t think you should go out there.”

Now his mother frowned at him, “You left them their food when they didn’t pay?!”

It was Tarc’s turn to look sullen. But he also blushed with some embarrassment. Quietly he said, “They’re pretty scary. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You just pick their plates up and bring them back to the kitchen!”

“I know.” Tarc said miserably, “I’m sorry.”

“At the least,” Eva said, “you should have told me about it right away. By now they’ll have finished eating it all!”

“Sorry. I was going to, but then you asked me about Denny…”

His mother stepped to the door and peered out of the kitchen
at the two men. When she turned back she had an unhappy look on her face. “I can see why they worried you.”

Eva
turned to Daussie, “He’s right, you shouldn’t go back out there until they’re gone. In fact, I think you should go offer the deputies a free meal again. We won’t ask those men for their payment again until after the deputies come in.” She looked at Tarc, “You go ahead and take this food to the Garcias. Then stop and let your dad know what’s going on. When you get back we’ll talk to Denny together.”