Under the Empyrean Sky (17 page)

A PROPOSITION, THICK AND FOUL

MAYOR BARNES IS
sauced. Not fall-on-his-face drunk; he never is. The elder Boyland always walks the razor-thin bridge between clear-headed sobriety and full-on dipsomania. Even now he sits there in the kitchen of the farmhouse with the pewter mug he carries with him most times. Cael can smell the sour beer within. The mayor swirls his mug, takes a deep breath by sticking his nose in it, and then satisfies himself with a long, indulgent slurp. As if it’s his morning coffee.

The mayor and his bloody-lipped son are now the focal point of the room. Barnes Sr. sits at their small table alone. Barnes Jr. stands behind him, arms crossed, chest puffed out like a strutting rooster, a smug look on his face that
shows he knows what’s coming next. Cael, his friends, and Pop stand at the other end of the room.

Pop leans his body so it’s tilted away from his bad hip. It must be hurting.

But something else is bothering him, too.

Cael thinks Pop is afraid. He can’t suss out why, but there it is.

“Boys,” the mayor says, winking and dipping his chin in a friendly nod. The man tucks a thumb under one of his red suspenders, draws it out like a bowstring. “I’m to understand you’re having some difficulty with your operation.”

Cael sees the flash of satisfaction across Junior’s face.

“Now, that’s a right shame,” the mayor continues. “Your crew always did… nice work. Forever number two, hot on the heels of Junior’s operation. Scavenging, as you know, is useful—perhaps even critical—to our town’s survival. The Empyrean, Lord and Lady bless them and favor them, have instituted a stiff policy of self-reliance, which is a wonderful thing. We Heartlanders take to self-reliance the way a squealer takes to mud: we like to get all up in it.”

Lane bristles.

“Scavenging prevents us from seeking handouts from our friends in the heavens. It lets us embrace that self-reliance. Whether you find a crate of canned peas or a binary carburetor for an old model Straw-Walker, well, that’s just
one more thing we do ourselves. Ain’t that right?”

Cael and his crew share bitter glances. Grudgingly, they nod.

“You might think I was happy to hear of your predicament, what with that limiting competition for my son’s crew and thus increasing his potential compensation.” Mayor Barnes leans in, smacking his lips, his jowls trembling. “But that could not be further from the truth, boys. The loss of one of your crew is a detriment to Boxelder’s continued survival.”

Cael can’t help it; he speaks up. “We didn’t lose a crewmate; she was
stolen
, and we’re not in a predicament! We got a boat now, and we’re getting her up to speed. It’ll just be a day or three—”

“Fixing up that boat means buying parts, but last I checked, those parts seemed woefully unavailable.” Did Cael just see the two Boylands share a conspiratorial look?
Of course they’re unavailable, you sonsabitches.
“Your farm’s already behind. You’re just not bringing in the ace notes. Maybe you want to dip into your savings?”

The mayor waits. Cael’s sparking mad now, and it takes everything he’s got not to say something that will only sink him in deeper.

The elder Barnes
mmm-hmm
s and nods. “Don’t have savings? Lord and Lady, who could blame you? People’s
piggy banks ain’t full of fatback—hell, the only thing sitting in most of those banks is the squeal of the pig. Times are tough for all of us.”

“Tough for you,” Pop says, sucking air between his teeth. “Nice yacht. Big house. A cut of all the ace notes that get kicked upstairs. Sounds hardscrabble, Mr. Mayor.”

Barnes shoots Pop a sly look—his mouth is smiling, but his eyes flash with sudden irritation. Then the mayor stifles a quiet burp, thumps his diaphragm with the side of his fist. He turns back to Cael, ignoring Pop. “What I’m saying, boys, is that you’re just not bringing in the money. You’re all getting older, so it seems a good time to let another, younger crew come up—I hear the Shustacks got a strong captain candidate in their son Lucas.”

“Lucas is only twelve!” Rigo blurts.

Cael steadies himself against the table with both hands. He leans in to the mayor and feels his shoulders slump with the burden of what he’s about to say. “Sir, Mr. Mayor, please. We’re a good crew. This is just one bad kernel in a good cob—we’re strong scavengers, each of us has another year in us, easy. We’ll be getting back on our feet in no time at all.”

If they put us on the processing line, we’ll lose the boat and won’t have a spare hour to spend harvesting that garden.

Mayor Barnes chews on this. It almost looks as though
he’s rolling the idea around his mouth with a drunken tongue. “Well. You’re right that you’re good scavengers. And you do have some more time on that clock—now, I’ve gone ahead and set you up with other jobs already at the processing facility, but I might could hit the brakes on that if you were willing to… dissolve your own crew and join up with the Butchers.”

“Wh…” Rigo can’t even finish the word. “Whuh?”

But it seems Boyland Jr. feels the same way. His jaw near falls off his stunned face. “Dad. Daddy. Come on, you can’t be serious. Don’t mess around, now. They aren’t Butchers material, and you damn well know it!”

Suddenly, the room erupts as everyone talks over everyone else. Lane gets all up in Boyland Jr.’s face, telling the mayor’s son to keep his mouth shut. Rigo’s babbling about what his father’s going to think. Cael’s going back and forth between the elder Barnes and his own father, trying to get one of them to inject a little sanity into this kitchen table meeting.

It’s over when the mayor stands up suddenly, the chair behind him grinding on the floor and almost toppling over. He slugs back the rest of his beer and then clips the mug to a carabiner on his belt. He reaches out with a meaty paw, shakes everybody’s hands from Pop on down.

“I’ll be looking for your answer…” The elder Barnes
stops and thinks. “Well, Lottery’s tomorrow night, so guess we could hold out on the very rare chance one of you wins a free ticket to the life in the big sky above. Let’s call it morning after next, then.”

“Barnes,” Pop starts, but the mayor stops him with a silencing finger.

“Arthur. Boys. One more tiny little thing I may have forgotten to mention. A caviling grackle landed on my shoulder the other day and told me a secret, a secret I’m sure couldn’t be true. That little birdy said that not only had your daughter run away again, Arthur, but that she is sending you packages that could’ve come from nowhere else but upstairs.” The mayor’s presence suddenly looms large, and Pop looks small. “Now, I’m sure that’s not true. You’re an upstanding man with a good family, and the shame of your daughter being a vagrant is enough for you to bear. But I’d hate to have to alert Proctor Agrasanto to all of this ugly business.” He shrugs. “Why not stay still? Why struggle? Lie back and dream of better days.”

“Pop—” Cael starts, but Pop silences him with a sound that could silence a hound.

“Go on, Mayor,” Pop says, forcing a mirthless smile. “You won’t find any trouble here.”

“Good to hear.” The elder Barnes looks to his son. “Come on, boy. Your momma’s probably cooking up some stew.” He
gives a sideways glance to Arthur. “We managed to get a quarter cow. You believe that? A quarter cow.” The message is implicit:
You’ll never get hold of a quarter cow, will you?

And then the Boxelder mayor chuckles and pushes past the boys toward the door. Boyland Jr. follows after but pauses to linger in front of Cael. He sets his jaw and offers his own looming presence. “McAvoy, don’t you even think of joining the Butchers. You do, and I’ll make you wish your daddy never pissed you out into your momma’s—”

Pop shoulders hard into Junior from behind, shoving him forward toward the door. Cael’s father holds up both hands, feigning an accident. “Sorry. This hip makes me clumsier than a drunken moon-cat.” Junior just growls and follows after his father.

Cael watches them mount up into the yacht outside. He sees Mole turning the sail, Felicity giving Gwennie a hard elbow on the way to the rudder wheel.
So she’s not exactly one of the crew
, Cael thinks, but he doesn’t let that thought linger. He can’t be feeling bad for her right now. He’s got his own problems. Not like she’s hurting, either, what with her standing there in a rugged new outfit, her face plastered with makeup.

Gwennie gives Cael a look. A sadness lives there on her face. She doesn’t wave, doesn’t mouth any words. She just stands there and gives him a small, defeated shrug.

She looks pretty
, Cael thinks, and for a moment he wants to yell that out to her.

But then the wind catches the sails, the hover-rails thrum to life, and the prop-fans whirr. The yacht is already pivoting and heading back down the drive, lifting up above the corn tassels.

And then they’re gone.

She’s gone.

As soon as they’re out of sight, Cael storms over to a tin pail sitting by the front stoop and kicks it as hard as he can. It sails toward the edge of their property, hits the ground, and rolls into the corn with a rustle.

“Shit!” he yells. “Sonofabitch!”

He kicks a clod of dirt with some dry grass sticking out of it like a bad haircut.

Rigo sits on the front steps, his face drooping. Lane paces like a worried barn cat.

“Cael,” Pop says. “Calm down and we’ll talk this through.”

“Godsdamn, Pop,” Cael says. “Seriously? Talk it
through
? Talk what through? That we just got bent over a barrel
again
, but this time by our own fellow Heartlanders instead of the damn Empyrean? No matter what we do, we can’t catch a break.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“No,
we
won’t figure anything out. I’ll figure it out. You
just keep doing what you do best, which is get punched in the face and smile like someone just fed you a bite of pie.”

But Pop’s pencil-thin eyebrows kink up like two caterpillars inching down the branch of his brow. “I understand, Cael. Maybe you’re right.” Pop stands there for a second, breathing deep through his nose, looking up at the sky. “Well. I… I better get ready. Shift starts soon. I’m going to have to leave early tomorrow, too. Bessie will watch your mother if you’ve got… things to do.”

“We’ve got things to do all right,” Cael says, his words like spit hitting hard earth. “So you go on. Do whatever.”

And Pop does. He gives the boys a spiritless nod and heads off to the house.

Cael tilts his head back, stares up at the wide expanse of sky, so blue it might as well be the sea. Wonders for a moment what his father sees up there: the limitless wonder of the sky or invisible chains connecting those drifting flotillas to the soul of every Heartlander living and dead.

“That was harsh,” Rigo finally says.

Lane moves over to a nearby barrel, starts rolling up a cigarette on the crooked wood. “Rigo’s right. Your pops is a pretty good dude. Rigo’s dad is a mean drunk. Mine is dead because he was dumber than a sack of donkey apples—and never mind the fact my mother is a traitor to everything
I could possibly believe in. Yours taught us everything we know. He’s nice. Doesn’t whup on you. Smart, too. You can’t expect him to be the one man single-handedly sticking his thumb in the eye of Barnes and Agrasanto and everybody else in the Empyrean who thought to shit in our mouths from above.”

Cael knows Lane’s right. But knowing something and feeling something are two different things, and Cael just can’t get past it. He’s mad at his father. He’s been mad at him for a long time, and the anger’s only getting stronger. He says, “You really don’t think one man could make a difference?”

Lane shrugs. “Maybe. But you ask me, you need a group—like the Sleeping Dogs—to change things.” He licks the twisted ends of the ditchweed cig, pinches it between his lips as he lights a match, and takes a few puffs before coughing. “I’m just saying to lay off your pops is all.”

“I don’t want to talk about that anymore,” Cael says. “Because I got a plan.”

Rigo’s eyes light up. “Ooh.”

Lane just frowns and rotates his finger. “Let’s hear it.”

Cael tells them the plan, and the others seem reluctant. But Cael doesn’t want to hear it. “We meet back here tomorrow morning.”

“But tomorrow’s the Lottery,” Rigo says.

Cael cocks an eyebrow. “Fuck the Lottery. We make our own fate.”

“Ballsy,” Lane says. “But hell, I like ballsy. See you tomorrow, Captain.”

That night, with the camel crickets chirping outside, the wind whispering through the corn, Cael slides open his window and crawls out onto the roof.

In the sky, the moon is fat and round. Not yet full but almost. The pregnant moon, they call it. Pregnant with what, Cael never understood. Possibility. Tragedy. Little moon-babies.

A shadow passes in front of the moon. One of the flotillas.

Cael wonders what it must be like for Merelda up there.

The sweet treats and the high society parties. He can’t even imagine how it feels being that high up in the sky. When flying that high, why look down? The Heartland will soon be nothing but a dream to her, Cael knows. He hopes she’ll keep sending care packages.

He wonders when they’ll see her again. Could be never. Not unless they end up on the flotilla, and what are the chances of that? Part of him thinks,
Maybe that’s what we need to do. Run away. Catch a ride up to the sky.

But how much money would that take?

How much of the hidden garden must they harvest?

All of it depends on what secrets Martha’s Bend holds.

Because that’s where they’re going in the morning.