Just North of Nowhere (2 page)

Looking back, the death of her old red cat started her. Understand: this was a dozen years before Cristobel actually did anything, before she was Cristobel for that matter. She was already well-versed in the Craft when that tired old cat, Creature by name and by then only skinned bone and white fur tufting from a ratty red coat, scooted out the door. He never came back. Died, presumably, out somewhere by itself. Cats did that.

Cris already knew she was filled by magic. For one thing, her hair: Mahogany brown from birth, it suddenly sprouted a white streak above her right eye. The streak spread over her crown and flowed down her back. “The Lightning Kiss,” Nonna called it.

That was one thing.

Her Nonna knew Cris had the Craft; said as much when Chris was a child, before the hair and long before Creature fled. That was the other thing: Nonna Chiaravino, tall, thin, angles everywhere, had the gift and gifts are bound to show up somewhere else.

Cris trusted this assessment. She was small. She trusted tall people.

Years went. Not too many. Cris was no longer so small and Nonna… Nonna had begun to be smaller. Shorter, narrower, and she curved, now, was not so angular.

Then. . .

Well, the way it went was this: one day, after cutting the pasta with the
guitar
she’d brought from the old country, Nonna lay down on the mohair sofa. A nap before supper. By now she was small—if she hadn’t actually passed Cris, rising, she was very nearly her size. Dwindling black-clad Nonna put a damp hanky across her face—the evening was hot—and when Cris came to nudge her for dinner the old lady gasped awake—too suddenly, maybe. From behind the veil, the old lady sucked a screech, half sat up and without removing the hanky breathed a revelation into Cris's six-year face: “One day,” she said, her voice full of phlegm, “there will be a wind in your life, child. And that wind, ah, will move you! You resist, but it takes you! Fly with it! Fly, child when the wind comes. You have the Craft in you. The wind gives you the way.”

Then the old lady died. She ended squeezing Cris's hands, each squeeze held longer, gripped looser and, finally, not gripped at all.

Cris wasn’t allowed to go to the viewing or the funeral. She did see the box Nonna was to be buried in, though. No bigger than a boot box.

She must have been wrong.

Years went by.

Cris grew. She read the ways of the
strega
– which is what people called her Nonna in whispers.

Cris learned that, yes, she
probably
was filled with magic – the Craft.

She worked on the profession of her faith.

Faith?

Yes! To become
strega
was to embrace belief no less vigorous than any other orthodoxy!
Strega
lived in the deepest places of the world, moved in realities as chilly as commerce and as fulsome as science. Strega held strengths that could sooth the future and enflame joy as easily as it could dissuade history or teach fright.

Cris followed the Way and had done remarkable things. She had achieved!

And she really loved that damn red cat! Everyone else had problems with Creature. She loved him—
loved
him!

When Creature became sick, she compounded cures. The animal grew sicker.

Then he got better and Cristobel—she called herself Cristobel by then—Cristobel held her head high, an eyebrow arched. For days she looked down her long nose at everything.

Then Creature began to crap an awful leaky brown stuff. He passed water from everywhere. He crept at the edge of rooms, embarrassed for himself.

Reluctantly, and too late, she took him to the vet. It had always been too late, the vet said. The cat’s end was an inevitability; walking dead, his kidneys had failed, failed completely.

The cat, finally. . .

Well, Chris was to have kept him in the house, at home, under the protection of medicine and regimens.

Creature slipped out. Disappeared. Cats do that. That was it.

She debated. Then she acted; worked a rising spell, a resurrection.

Worse than she feared, worse than Creature’s return with the stench of deep death on stiffly motile flesh, worse than his presence shadowed by preternatural wisdom or glimmering dark urges born from a cat's view of the Great Forever, worse than all she had considered, Creature never returned at all. The resurrection had failed. She’d failed completely.

She gave it time. For a month, she fully expected the animal to appear at the door in the night. Half dreaded, always expected. No question.

One day she didn't expect. That morning, she realized the powers had been accidents, the Craft, just recipes and coincidence. Woman's work for gosh sakes! She got on with life. She resisted the Strega part of her—she was young—she got a job and got on with it.

She married.

Twelve years later she knew a lot more. She hadn't practiced the faith, not since Creature and her failure, but she’d read. A hobby. An affectation. A chuckle, she thought. She spoke the makings and pronounced the words and smiled as she made dinner for her husband!

She dreamed. Dreaming was wonderful. Things walked in her dreams. In her dreams she saw preparations, watched herself grind ingredients to bits, work the bits to powders. She made pastes and poultices in her dreams, burned herbs and breathed their vapors.

Her dreams became more vivid: grinding, powdering, coating beeswax with dust and lighting fragrant oils. Nights, she watched and the stars breathed vaporous sendings to her. Dreams.

Looking back, the husband wasn't important. Looking back, he was important only insofar as he had anaesthetized her to the world. Through him, she stopped needing to feel. She stopped tasting food, air, stopped hearing spring and the sweep of snow on the panes. She’d stopped smelling the lightning. Well, that was it: she’d simply stopped. It hadn't hurt, that was the point, she hadn’t needed the warnings that pain brought, nor the direction the senses gave. She had him. He warned. He pointed. Her husband was the
News at Eleven
whenever she needed it.

When he said they had to talk, she laughed. “You’re leaving?” she laughed.

His right eye squinted.

“That’s what women say when we’re on the move, Sweet!” She feigned a serious face, “'We have to talk.'“ She said it again, feigning deep emotion: a woman opening a monologic discussion with a to-be-left lover. She laughed again: So silly that he would say such a woman’s thing. Him! And him
such
a man. Too much a man to use “we have to talk” faintness.

He didn't laugh. He
was
on the move. They talked – he talked. At the end of the words, he left. It was a windy day.

She cried. Of course. The tears felt okay and she cried for a long time. She cut her hair. With her hair boy-short, the white streak that he'd had her dye-away stood out. In a few days its roots showed just above her right eye, white against mahogany richness. When she’d had a pre-Raphaelite cascade, her hair tumbled below her shoulder blades, her Lightning Kiss, as Nonna called it, had poured over her back. She liked it.

He’d
said
he did, too. It was the very
first
thing he’d ever said to her. His opening move: he loved her hair, that streak!

He’d hated it. Eventually, he said it was, well maybe a little too dramatic, could she, like, maybe, do something?

Of course! She did.

That was then.

Now, scalp-short but growing, damn if that white tuft didn't remind her – damn – of the tufted coat of that old red cat in its final days, how that white fluff was all that remained of its fur by the time Creature lay – in her imagination – cold, dead, and un-resurrected by her Craft.

She had failed with the cat, and that made her mad. Chris went to the boxes in the basement. This was a month – maybe a bit more than a month – after the husband’s ‘talk’! Excepting her dreams, she’d not practiced the Craft for a dozen years. The articles from that time had sat those years, among other useless bits – brought instinctively – from her old life: bundles of herbs tied with brown string, her pestles, mortars, and crystals still feathered with greasy dust, phials of oils and tinctures, her stilettos, rods, and wands, tubes and leaf-wrapped pouches, ointments and powders, charts, tables, registers of ingredients, the directions this way and that, the ways, means to make, enhance, augment the philters, her old notes, stained, soaked, crossed out, spattered-upon, over written.

Her damn life was there.
Here I am. THIS phase of me
, she thought.

Opened, the boxes exhaled reeking nebulae of dust. Cris had a large, opulent nose—men learned, grudgingly and after a time, to like that nose. Her wide nostrils bespoke passion, hinted at an urge toward the dark, toward the bed. Without being crude, it suggested, that opulent nose did, that wonders might lie ahead.

Now, in the basement of her recently happy home, those arched nostrils took in the swimming bits of ground bone and pestled powders of a dozen years past. Odor, memory, anger, pain forced a gag from Cris—on top of which she sneezed. Then she threw up. Into the boxes, over the powders, crystals, jars, and tinctures, over the rotted fruits, herbs, and spices, the crumbling weeds and molds, the lean daggers and sheathed blades, she heaved breakfast and last night's cheap wine.

When she finished retching, she breathed again. The scents had opened, cleared her. She was Cristobel.

Later, she packed a few things and drove away. Her car was a twelve-year-old Saab sedan that hadn’t been any damn good since he’d bought it for her. No matter. It was what she had, so she thought no more of it. She drove. The car hummed. Miles slid by.

The day? It had been windy. She drove with the wind, though she didn’t think of it at the time.

Sometimes, she pulled off the road, nights, and slept. A woman, alone, on the highway, nights! Didn’t bother her.

Some nights, she took a room just for a wash and a place to sit quietly surrounded by cinderblock and paint. Other nights she drove, the speed terrifying her into a chattering half-awake dream-state. “American Zen,” she said to no one.

She’d been on her walkabout for. . .

Well, she didn't know for how long! She had been out there for a bit. She had no real idea where she was. She'd seen things along the way, some things, indeed! But now the land was nothing, nowhere, flat, wide and filled with crops, crops of some sort: growth rolled to the lines of the surrounding horizon all day for days. As night settled, the roadway blackened, gradually narrowed to glowing white lines rushing her headlights.

One evening, distant lightning licked between looming darknesses. For a few jagged seconds the sky showed mountains, brightly shadowed ancient hills and arroyos of cloud. The voice of the thunder thumped her chest long after the jagged light had finished.

The landscape changed. In a dozen miles, the only light in the land was hers, her Saab's one flickering headlamp and the dashboard glow on her face in the rearview. The road was narrow and the way wound upward. In the lightning's distance, island hills arose from what had been the drab golden forever of the plains. The car climbed, trees closed in.

She had no idea when she had left the interstate, she had not done it on purpose, a twitch of hand and eye and the old car must have eased onto an exit, and that exit had exited to a road, and that road had given way to others, then to this. She flowed – mercury in lightning, she thought in an image from the Craft – along a channel made for this passage. This hilly land in the northern plains, this place of forest and bluffs led her. . .

Odd
, she thought,
this place ought not be here. This sudden place belongs somewhere, elsewhere.

Nope. Here it was. Rising forested hills narrowed the road and the roadway led her. It wasn’t the land of cloud-mountains seen minutes, hours, before in the lightning. No, this was earth and solid.

Her hands knew the way. She didn't. Turning now, a narrow corridor between trees, under linking branches, the road became: “
County Road H
,” the sign said. She heard it. The voice was hers, of course. She didn’t believe in magic. Not any more. To stamp it proof, she said “County Road H” aloud. “There!” she said.

She could see no more than a hundred yards ahead, fewer behind. The curves and rises, dips and banks through the darkly massed trees embraced, held her close and to the narrow road. Even so, her speed never dipped below too fast. “Too fast for conditions,” her husband would have said.

Such
a husband, the News at Eleven had been.

A high cedar fence chattered, passing. A gate with a sign, a sign that couldn't be read at speed; a drive-in theater, maybe. Closed perhaps. Then it was gone.

A river flowed beyond the trees on her right; she knew it had been there for miles, paralleling her way. She hadn't seen it in the dark, no star or moonlight flicked on water, there were no clear places in the trees and bluffs that had replaced the horizon-spanning fields, but even in the too-fast-for-conditions Saab she smelled river mud in the air stream.
Huh!
There were deer by the roadside, bright eyes on long, sharp faces, impossibly slender legs, angular attention curled in their shining muscles; in her lights for a moment, and they were gone.