The Dark Country (19 page)

He dropped another coin into the box.

"Good morning, St. John's, may I help you?"

He couldn't remember the room number. He described the man, the accident, the date. Sixth floor, yes, that was right. He kept talking until she got it.

There was a pause. Hold.

He waited.

"Sir?"

He didn't say anything. It was as if he had no words left. "I'm terribly sorry . . ."

He felt the blood drain from him. His fingers were cold and numb.

"... But I'm afraid the surgery wasn't successful. The party did not recover. If you wish I'll connect you with—"

"The party's name was White Feather," he said mechanically. The receiver fell and dangled, swinging like the pendulum of a clock.

He braced his legs against the sides of the booth. After what seemed like a very long time he found himself reaching re-flexly for his cigarettes. He took one from the crushed pack, straightened it and hung it on his lips.

On the other side of the frosted glass, featureless shapes lumbered by on the boulevard. He watched them for a while.

He picked up a book of matches from the floor, lit two together and held them close to the glass. The flame burned a clear spot through the moisture.

Try to set the night on fire,
he thought stupidly, repeating the words until they and any others he could think of lost meaning.

The fire started to burn his fingers. He hardly felt it. He wondered if there was anything else that would burn, anything and everything. He squeezed his eyelids together. When he opened them, he was looking down at his own clothing.

He peered out through the clear spot in the glass.

Outside, the outline fuzzy and distorted but quite unmistakable, was a blue van. It was waiting at the curb.

The little girl stood gazing north, toward the rich houses and the pier restaurant that was still faintly outlined through the mist. The high windows captured the white light of the sky in small squares, like a row of mirrors for the gulls; the pilings and struts underneath could have been stiff black legs risen from the sea and frozen in the November wind, never to walk again.

Is Maria coming? she wondered.

She had hurried to the corral first thing, of course, but Pebbles was gone. Maria must have come home early and taken him out, down past the big rocks to the Sea Manor, maybe, or up under the pier to the tidepools by the point at the edge of the Colony. She did not know what time Maria's school let out, had never asked, but still had always managed to be the first one home; she would be laying out the bridles or patching a break in the fence with driftwood from under the burned-out house by the time Maria came running—always, it seemed. Yes, always. Every time.

She began to wander back along the wet sand, found a stick and paused to block out a word in the sand—C-O-P-P-E-R— turning round over each letter and humming to herself to keep the chill away. But the fog came setding in now, a thick, tule fog it looked like, and she saw her breath making more fog in

front of her face and so hastened the rest of the way with her head down, hearing only the cold breaking of the waves out on the dark, musseled rocks.

She stayed with Copper for as long as she could, leaving extra feed for Pebbles, too, so that Maria would not have to bother when she brought him back. Copper seemed restless, bobbing and pawing the sand, eager to be taken out. She tried to explain that it was too late now for a real ride and instead walked her out and around the cliffside and back, over the leach line creek that trickled from the cottages to the ocean. The tiny rivulet with its sculptured and terraced bed—she and Maria, trotting the ponies carefully from one crumbling tier to the other, liked to imagine that it was the Grand Canyon. But the truth was that she had no heart for riding, not now. Not with the dark coming on so soon and the fog all around. Not alone.

She was cold and growing colder as she climbed the wooden stairway and let herself in through the side door, the one to the storage room, and then slipped into the house as quietly as she could. She started to close the door on the fog, but decided to leave it ajar for Grandfather, who would probably be coming in soon.

She heard the television voices from the living room, the same ones she always heard when she went into the house after school. They laughed a lot, though there was an edge to the voices whenever they were interrupted by the music or the buzzer, which was almost all the time, it seemed. They were probably pretty nervous, too, about being kept on the program for so long, day after day, week after week; sometimes, of course, one of the voices would say the right things and win enough money to buy its freedom, and then they would have to let it go home and the next afternoon there would be another voice, a new one, to take its place. They always sounded excited and happy when they said a right answer, and then the audience would not laugh and the buzzer would not buzz.

She padded over the jute-covered floor and slipped around the doorway into the kitchen. She stopped with her hand on the refrigerator door. She looked back at the rattan chair and couch, the sandbag ashtrays, the clock and the flying metal geese on the wall, the shiny black panther on the table, the

lamp shaped like a Hawaiian dancer, the ivy planter, the kissing Dutch girl and boy, the picture of the crying clown and the ones of the father and mother in the stand-up frames. She turned away. She opened the refrigerator and poured a glass of Kool-Aid.

"Is that you, Darcy?"

"Ye-es," she called sweetly,
Grandma,
but would not say i
t.

"Have you seen Maria yet?" She heard the grandmother climbing out of her chair, not waiting for an answer. "I must talk with you, dear. This morning we received a most disturbing telephone call. ..."

The grandmother was coming, even though the TV was still on. It must be something bad, she thought.

On the other side of the kitchen window the fog was descending heavily, almost like rain. In fact she heard a tapping begin on the low roof—but no, that would be Grandfather, hammering with his short strokes, scraping his slippers on the rough tar paper.
Just a minute, I have to talk to Grandfather.
Would that be good enough? She turned from the window to watch the doorway for the black walking shoes, the hem of the flowered dress. Another kind of movement caught her eye, down low by the floor, but she knew that would only be the fog.

There was the hammering on the roof, the plinking of the wind chimes by the geraniums out on the railing of the sun deck, the fog deepening until it, too, could almost be heard settling over the house. There was the slow, unsteady pursuit of the grandmother, nearly upon her now.

And something else, something else.

A dull, familiar thumping.

She looked quickly and saw, through the window, a moving shape approaching along the beach. She knew at once that it was Pebbles. The pony hesitated, breathing steam, and the vapor thinned around him momentarily so that his markings showed clear and unmistakable, like a cluster of moonstones through the white water of a pool at low tide, far out by the broken sea wall.

"Got to go," she yelled,
Grandma.
"Maria's got Copper. Ooh, that girl—!"

She darted out and, by the time the refrigerator door had

swung shut and before the grandmother could object, had dropped from the deck and was sprinting toward Maria and the pony. It wasn't true, of course; of course not. Maria was riding Pebbles. But it had worked.

"Hey," she called. Then, again, when there was no answer, "He-ey!"

Maria, small and dark atop her pony, reined and turned Pebbles, his hooves slapping the slick, packed sand. She had kept near the water, had not even come close to Darcy's house; but she had had to pass by on the way back, and now she held her body tense and distant, almost as though afraid she might meet something there on the beach—herself, say—with which she knew she would not be able to cope. "Hey, yourself," she said, because she had to say something. But her face did not change.

"Did you stay home today?" tried Darcy. She waited and, trying to make it look like she was not, had not been waiting, leaned forward and watched her feet as they dug down into the sand. She stepped back, and the imprints of her toes began to fill up with water. "Well, were you sick or something?"

"I got to go now," answered Maria.

She was like that. Once, when they were playing and Darcy had said something wrong—it must have been something she had said because nothing had happened, they had only been sitting with their knees up, molding little houses in the sand with a paper cup—Maria had stopped and stared over the water with that smooth, flat face of hers, as if hearing what no one else on the beach or in the world could hear. And then she had said that, the same thing, /
got to go now,
and she had jumped up, brushed off her hands and started running—and not even toward her own house, so that Darcy knew Maria hadn't been called home, even if she couldn't hear it herself. Maria was like that.

The pony started walking.

"You better not ride him anymore today, Maria," yelled Darcy. "Ma-ri-a, he'll get all sweaty and sick for sure, you'll see!"

Maria kept riding.

"Well," said Darcy, "I waited."

At the corral Maria dismounted but did not raise her eyes when her friend finally caught up.

"What do you care about Pebbles," Maria said to her.

Only then did Darcy notice the scratches, fresh and deep, on Pebbles' right flank. Three parallel lines sliced into flesh that was still pink and glistening.

Darcy sucked in her breath. "Maria!" She forgot everything else. "Who did
that?"

Maria walked away. She trailed her fingers over the makeshift fence, the tarp that covered the hay, and went to sit in the ruins, in the shadows, under the starfish that someone had nailed crucifixion-style to the supports of the big house years ago, before it burned; now the hard, pointille arms, singed black at the tips, still clutched tight to the flaking, splintery wood. She put her elbows on her knees and her face in her arms and started to cry.

Copper had sidled over to Pebbles, but the other pony shied away, protecting his flank. Copper snorted and tried to nuzzle. Darcy reached for a blanket to throw over Pebbles, but hesitated because of the wound.

She joined her friend under the house.

After a time Darcy said, "I'll tell Grandfather. He'll get the vet to come over. You'll see."

"No."

Maria was crying deep down inside herself, from a place so protected that there were no sounds and nothing to show, nothing but the tears.

"Well, I'll go get some Zephiran right now from my house. And we'll fix it ourselves. I will, if you want me to, Maria."

"No!"

"Maria," she said patiently, "what happened?" Maria's narrow lips barely moved. "It came. In the night, just like.you said." "What did?"

"You know what. The—the—"

"Oh no.'' Darcy felt a sinking inside, like an elevator going down too fast; she hadn't felt it for a long, long time. The last had been when she was very small, about the time that the mother and father went away. She couldn't remember the feeling very clearly; in fact, she couldn't even be sure what it was about; surely, she knew, it was about something she did not and could not understand. "Don't you be silly. It wasn't really real." That was right. It wasn't, it wasn't. "Maria, that was only a story. Ma-ri-a."

"That was what my Daddy said," the dark girl went on. "But he said you were still evil to make me scared of it." She was beginning to rush the words, almost as though afraid she might hear something and have to go away before she could finish. "You were the one, the one who told me about him, about how he comes at night and sees in your window and if you were bad, then—you know. You know what he does, the Nighthawk."

The Nighthawk.
Of course she remembered the story. It had always been just that, a story to scare children into being good, the kind of story thought up by grandmothers to stop too much running in the house and laughing and playing games in bed. But it was also a story you never forgot, and eventually it became a special late kind of story for telling on the beach, huddled close to a campfire, under the stars, seeing who could scare the other the worse, all shivery in sleeping bags, hidden from the unknowable mysteries of a sudden falling star or the sound of wings brushing the dark edge of the moon.

She didn't know what to say.

The two of them sat that way for a while.

"Well, I'll help you take care of him," she offered at last. "You know that."

"It doesn't matter."

"He'll be good as new. You'll see."

"Maybe. But not because of you."

Darcy looked at her friend as though seeing her for the first time.

Maria let out a long sigh that sounded like all the breaths she had ever taken going out at once. "My Daddy's getting a better place. Up in the canyon, by the real stables. He said Pebbles can't stay here till we find out what hurt him. And he says I can't play with you anymore."

"Why?"

"Because."

"But
why?"