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Authors: Rosalie Knecht

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BOOK: Relief Map
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He was unsettled by the quiet of the street. It was only eleven o'clock at night, but no cars passed as he skirted the edge of the town, and he saw few lights in the windows. He stopped in the glare of a gas station to consult his map, and then headed right, under the high arches of a bridge. It was only a mile to the cluster of houses marked
Lomath
on the map.

He was tired. He had been too nervous to eat on the train. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, which had been at five o'clock that morning, in a diner in Philadelphia that had exhaled a puff of hot oil when he'd opened the door. He'd had to order by pointing at a plate of eggs and potatoes and sausages being eaten by a man at the next table. He regretted how little English he could remember from his secondary school days. The alphabet had slipped away from him. Some words looked a little familiar, and he could say
please
and
thank you
and
go
, and also
I
, but otherwise he was helpless. Remembering the food now sharpened his hunger. He pushed his mind out, away from his stomach, into the night air.

It had been only four days since he was at home in his own country, in his own apartment. His own balcony, from which a narrow strip of the green river was visible when the leaves were off the lime trees in the winter. He would probably never see that apartment or that street again. His pulse had not slowed to normal since Wednesday, he thought, and it was Sunday now. He had tried to sleep in the airport and on both turbulent flights but had startled awake over and over, choking for breath, flailing with his right arm, his good arm, upsetting the old woman in the seat next to him. He was too aware of his heart now. His hands went to it whenever he needed to think. He had taken a month's worth of his blood pressure pills with him and he kept checking for the orange bottle in the outer pocket of the old backpack he had brought.

Lomath announced itself with a green metal sign. Revaz climbed off the road just after the bend and found a dry spot in the lee of a rotting sofa that had been dumped over the guardrail. The ground dropped away steeply below him, but he could see nothing in the darkness. There was an ounce or two of whiskey left in the little bottle he'd bought in Philadelphia; he drank it and fell asleep.

It was a damp night. He woke just as the sky was beginning to lighten and found a trio of slugs on the laces
of his tennis shoes. At the bottom of the slope there was a creek that he had only heard in the darkness the night before. He could see the white glint of it now, its busy flow around stands of trees. He pictured himself perched there beside the decaying hulk of the sofa, his thin hair wild, in undignified shoes. A curtain of despair threatened to drop again, but he pushed it away.

Revaz got up stiffly and walked toward the first houses of Lomath, staying back in the woods. He was afraid of dogs more than anything. He could skirt the village easily—it was rarely more than one house and one road deep, and the hills ringed it protectively. He walked and walked along the hills, keeping the houses to his left. His ankle was better than it had been the night before; it wasn't sprained, then. As the sun was rising he found himself at the top of the ridge on the east side of Lomath, his heart a little lightened by the gold in the air. He sat on a stone and watched the valley below him flood with light. There was a small white house with a vegetable garden far below, tucked into a bend in the creek.

The power went out in Lomath while he slept the day away in a rank-smelling deer blind in a tree just over the top of the ridge. Flies harried him while he slept.

The power was still out at seven thirty the next morning when Livy's father woke her. She had a dental checkup at nine, and since Greg Marko was re-shingling a house not far from the dental center that day, he planned to drop her off on his way to work. She took too long getting dressed, out of practice in the summer at getting up early, and he had to come back twice and knock on her door. She brushed her teeth with extra care.

They pulled out of the driveway just after eight thirty and drove down Prospect to White Horse Road. When they came around the turn they saw a van and a truck stopped haphazardly in the road, lights flashing.

“Accident?” Livy said.

Her father downshifted steadily, not yet committing to the brakes. “No, those are all police,” he said. Livy hoisted herself up and peered out through the truck's windshield. He was right; they were marked with the Maronne Police Department logo. Maronne was a steel town a mile away, and Lomath was a small unincorporated outlier of it. An officer got out of the van and walked toward them slowly, holding up one hand.

Livy's father put the truck in neutral. A couple of sawhorses were set up across the road with chains looped between them. Livy was alert now, her hands spread flat on her lap. Her father had made a long speech to her about the police as soon as she got her license, with heavy stress
on politeness, keeping your hands where they could see them, and describing any movement you were about to make before you made it. He illustrated his points with many anecdotes about traffic stops in his youth, when the cops always said something about his hair, which was long then. They would insinuate that he had drugs, and that if he didn't have them now he would have them soon, and that he was likely to get stopped again, in any event.

Livy had never been in a traffic stop before. She watched the approaching policeman with interest.

“See some ID?” the cop said.

Livy's father nodded. “Let me get out my wallet,” he said. He produced his driver's license, and the officer examined it for a minute and then peered into his face and handed it back.

“We're looking for somebody,” the officer said. He opened a plastic folder with a friendly, lazy flourish. Inside was a blurry color photo of a middle-aged man. Livy leaned over from her seat to see, but her father gave her a look and she settled back. “Have you seen this person?” said the officer.

Her father shrugged. “No, I don't think so.”

“You're sure? Maybe he looks different, maybe he hasn't been shaving?”

Her father leaned closer. “No. Sorry.” He looked up at the cop. “Is he here?”

“We've been
asked to close the roads. And I would ask you to return to your home, sir.”

“Is he dangerous?” His voice rose a little.

“I couldn't say, sir,” said the policeman. “This is coming down from a higher level. Like I said, I'm going to have to ask you to return to your home.”

Livy's father put the truck in reverse and executed a tentative three-point turn in the too-narrow road. As soon as they had moved out of range of the policeman, Livy cleared her throat, scanning the undergrowth on the side of the road for signs of impending action. “Do you think somebody broke out of Emeryville?” she said.

“Could be, I guess. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a minimum-security breakout, though.”

“Is it normal? They just block everything off?”

“If they're looking for somebody, I guess they could.”

They tried the other routes out of the valley. At the next one they found another roadblock, another car, and another polite cop. He asked for her father's identification and showed him the photo, even after he said he'd seen it already. The officer walked in a circle around the truck and lifted the tarp in the back, frowning seriously at the bundles of cedar shakes underneath. Livy and her father did not speak to each other as they turned slowly around and drove away. Her father had turned the radio off, as he sometimes did when he was about to merge
around construction or attempt an especially difficult highway on-ramp. Livy was flexing and relaxing her hands in turn, one after the other, like a cat. It was now only ten minutes until her appointment time, which was not long enough to get there, and if she was late she would have to spend at least an extra hour sitting in the waiting room and listening to the faint squeal of drills through the walls before another time slot opened up. She was afraid of the dentist, and her teeth already ached from clenching her jaw. There was one last route out of the valley, which was Somersburg Road, but as they came around the curve they saw that the intersection was blocked, this time with a low plastic barricade and a strip of tire-puncturing stainless steel. “Shit,” Livy said, and was not rebuked for it. Her father gamely put the truck in neutral again.

The roadblock was manned by a lone officer chewing gum in a cruiser. He made no move to get out of his car. Livy glanced back and forth between her father and the policeman, the two men regarding each other through their windshields. After a long pause, her father opened his door and stepped down from the truck. He ambled toward the car, studiously casual. The two men began to talk in a way that looked friendly. After a moment, not wanting to miss anything, Livy got out of the truck herself.

“He's from the Balkans,”
the cop was saying.

“Really?” her father said.

“That's what they told us. These federal guys, you know.” The cop rolled his eyes. He was older, gray-haired, red-faced. He seemed generous with information, gesturing loosely with the hand that dangled over the sill of his car door.

“Why would he be here?” her father said, waving his hand illustratively at the guardrail, the row of trash cans at the end of a driveway, the ragged pasture across the road.

The cop rolled his eyes again. “FBI guys show up yesterday with a bunch of trucks and now they're in charge. Who knows.”

“Is that why the power's out?” her father said.

“That I don't know. That would be the utility company. You should call.”

“The phones are out too.”

“Really? That's probably the feds, then.”

They were back at the house by nine. They sat in the truck in the yard for a little while before going in, searching for the local stations on the radio, but couldn't find them: it was always hard to get a signal on the weaker frequencies down in the valley. After a few minutes her father
turned the radio off, muttering about running down the battery. Livy trailed after him into the house. His step was quicker than normal, and he kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again.

In the kitchen he turned on the front burner but it failed to light for several seconds, and he had to stop to wave the gas away. “How about pancakes?” he said to Livy.

“Sure,” she said. She hovered around the edges of the kitchen, waiting for a clearer response from him, but there was none. She felt lucky not to be at the dentist; beyond that the morning felt distant and abstract. Her father made pancakes and she took all the toppings she could think of out of the cabinet and lined them up on the table, first in a straight row, then in a circle with a jar of blueberry jam at the center. Her father tended to retreat into an implausible calm when anything frightening or strange happened. She remembered once, when she was seven, watching from the living room window while he walked at a stately pace from the far edge of the yard, shirtless despite the coolness of an early spring day, revealing when he arrived in the kitchen that his shirt was wrapped tightly around his mangled and bleeding right hand. He had been using a rope thrown over the branch of a sugar maple to hoist the engine out of an ancient Volvo, and his right hand had gotten pinned in the engine compartment and twisted, almost severing
his index finger. When she offered to dial 911 for him as she had learned in school—white, shaking, saucer-eyed at the blood soaking through the checked fabric—he had said, “No, I'll drive. Do you know how to heat up a cup of coffee?” Livy had successfully heated the coffee, though she was not normally allowed to use the stove. She had also operated the gearshift all the way to the hospital. Her father was left with a thick scar down the length of the finger and limited range of motion to the second knuckle. Livy had asked him years later about the coffee, and why he wasn't worried that the delay might cost him his finger, but he claimed not to remember it.

BOOK: Relief Map
12.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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