Betwixt (6 page)

Morgan closed her eyes and tightened her jaw. Neve’s lacy blond hair, charmingly disheveled, pulsed behind her eyelids. That
and her expensive clothes, the navel ring that poked from a stomach that stayed flat and hard no matter how much pizza Jacob
Clowes fed her. The Cloweses were rich and spoiled Neve, though she never seemed to take anything too seriously.

“You always do this, K.A. You always get involved with one of my friends and then you break up with them.” She turned in her
chair. “Besides fucking over a number of very nice girls at McKinley, guess who else gets screwed?”

K.A. bent down and put his hand on her knee. A radio went on in the kitchen and the siblings could hear their mother humming
along to Journey, washing the dishes. Both knew it would be another solitary night for Yvonne:
Will & Grace
reruns, a plate of leftovers, maybe a call to a girlfriend or a visit to her younger boyfriend at the bar he worked at down
the road. Then sleep, and the whole thing would start over again the next day.

Morgan’s head fell. K.A. moved his hand to her shoulder.

“I’m not going to leave you alone, Morgue. I would never do that.”

“How can you say what you will and won’t do? You don’t know.
He
didn’t know.”

“Dad’s an ass.” K.A. held his sister’s chin and kissed her on the forehead. “And I’m not him.”

Morgan looked up.

“Yeah.” He nodded again, smiling his She-Devil smile. “Who loves you?”

“You do.”

“I do.”

She nodded and whispered, almost too quietly for her brother to hear: “I do.”

I
T WASN
’
T HIS FAULT.
It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. With every step of his holey brown boots back through the forest toward downtown
Nix repeated the mantra to himself:
Not my fault!
He said it so many times he started to halfway believe it. Still, Nix knew he’d blown it — big time. Finn Terwilliger had
kicked him out of the squat soon after Tim Bleeker left. He hadn’t said much — just got up from his stump, gave Nix a hug,
and walked away. It meant Nix had to go. Theirs was a clean squat. Finn had told him that from the beginning.

Evelyn couldn’t be around Tim Bleeker when she was still so fragilely sober. So why had Nix brought the dealer there? He’d
known it would mean getting kicked out and he’d done it anyway. Everything he had been working on in Portland for the last
year was falling apart. And despite his mantra, Nix knew it was his own damn fault.

He made it to a grassy clearing and sat on a bench. All of Portland spread out before him — the silver snake of the
Willamette River, the little houses as far as he could see, and the dome of Mount Hood in the distance, so much like an active
volcano that he almost expected a wisp of smoke to swirl from its pointed peak. He ached for his mother, for his uncles and
aunts, for Daddy Saint-Michael, for the cousins he’d left behind in Sitka, and for the island itself — the fish and the trees
and the wind and the ocean.

The mountains before him stretched all the way home. He thought of his grandfather, pointing to them, then pointing to Nix.
Trying to get him to understand something. What was it? What was in those mountains? What was under them, waiting to come
out?

A few families sprawled on the grass picnicking; a couple of kids Nix’s age played Frisbee. A boy kicked a Hacky Sack around.
They seemed so carefree, so happy. Nix wondered what separated him from them. He thought again about his dreams, and dust,
the lights he saw around people, the mess he’d made of his life. There was something wrong with him — something broken. Was
he crazy? Like the bums he saw on the Burnside bus, talking to themselves, reading their Bibles in the hopes that a key to
their madness would be hidden there? He felt like a pariah. A marked man hunted by a vision of light that didn’t make sense,
that was so awful and cruel that it must mean he was crazy.

Yet he didn’t feel crazy. What he did feel was old.

The sun dipped lower in the west. Out there was the ocean.
Ninety miles away: bays and shoals and beaches and cliffs and the wide-open sea. Nix had heard there were tunnels under Portland
that led out to that ocean. Evelyn had told him about them late one night at the squat. Shanghai Tunnels, they were called:
underground passages from the days of the Chinese railroad workers and opium dens and ships that left to fur in Alaska on
the way to the Far East. It was hard to get sailors to volunteer for the years it took for a China voyage, so crooked captains
stole people. They’d get some poor chump drunk or drugged up on opium and smuggle him down through the tunnels and onto waiting
boats — shanghai him, basically. When he came to, he’d be far out at sea, stuck for years sailing the Pacific. Evelyn said
she’d even gone down into them, one night when she was high. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, but she told him one
thing: there were people down there.

“With sharp teeth,” she had whispered. “They had sharp teeth. I remember that.”

The sharp teeth he wrote off to Evie’s habit, but the tunnels … Nix understood why she was captivated. Being shanghaied didn’t
seem so bad to him, sharp teeth and all. It seemed the perfect solution to the mess he was in. He’d take one of those tunnels
and go off into the sun and never come back. Out to some place you could never return from. A place where there weren’t lights
or dust. A safe place, where dreams and waking were the same.

A voice startled him.

“You’re early.”

He turned. A spare young man, square shouldered and long legged, had sat next to him on the park bench, his face obscured
by a black hoodie and black wraparound mirrored sunglasses. Nix might have been surprised had he not been waiting for him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something happened.”

The hooded man nodded, keeping his face turned so all Nix could see was the long nose and the tuft of his dark brown soul
patch jutting out past a full lower lip.

“You got kicked out.”

Nix bristled. “Fuck! How did you know that, man? That happened like less than an hour ago.” He shook his head. “I don’t know
who you get your information from, but you can tell that mofo to get his head out of my ass.”

The man did not turn, but his voice softened. “It’s not important. What is important is that you decided to call me instead
of Tim Bleeker. This is a very good step —”

Nix had heard the spiel before from his mysterious companion, whom he had met a few times. He was a dust dealer someone at
Jacob’s had recommended one night Bleek was up in Seattle. His product was cheaper than Bleek’s, but he would meet Nix only
here, in the open, in the park overlooking the city rather than in the seclusion of the forest Nix preferred. Though the mysterious
stranger dealt in dust — nothing heavier, which
Nix appreciated — he didn’t like to use him. Something about the guy scared him. The way he spoke to Nix as though he knew
him, which, in a way, he did. He knew Nix was from Alaska and that he lived up at the squat with Finn and Evelyn. He knew
that he washed dishes for Jacob, and he spoke to him like a brother might, as if he almost cared about him. Yet Nix didn’t
even know the man’s name. The imbalance unnerved him. The stranger never showed his face and always wore the same hoodie,
the same dark jeans, the same wraparound black glasses. All Nix knew about him was his cell number and that he had a soul
patch and a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist. A tiny blue X, small enough to be hidden by the band of a watch. Nix
had seen it once, when the man had passed him his dust, his sleeve riding up just enough to expose his pale skin. He never
saw it again.

“A good step? Man, you don’t even know me.” Nix took his wallet out, passed the man the same bill he’d tried to give Bleek.
He was irritated at him for knowing so much. “Here’s your twenty. And keep the fuck out of my shit. I gotta go.”

He started to get up but the man extended his right hand — the one the tiny X was on — and Nix felt impelled to sit down again.

“Just relax.” The man took the roll out of his pocket and passed it to him without taking the twenty. “This is on me.” He
stopped. “Under one condition.”

“No, man. I’m not helping you drum up new clients —”

The older boy shook his head. “Listen before you speak.” He put his hands back in his sweatshirt pockets. “My condition is
that you must not, under any circumstances, take any of it tonight.”

“Condition?” Nix almost turned to look the man in the eyes, but the stranger averted his face, looking east toward the plains.
“Are you kidding?”

“Request.”

Nix had been planning to meet K.A. that night. D’Amici was taking him to a party at some rich girl’s house — a friend of his
sister’s — in Northeast. It was the one thing he had looked forward to in this wreck of a day. He was going to get fucked
up, and then he was going to get more fucked up, and then he was going to take dust, and then he was going to go to sleep.
In that sleep he was going to figure out a way to get into those tunnels and out onto one of those boats in the ocean, to
never come back.

“You can’t tell me when to take this, man! That’s none of your business! Jesus. What is your deal?”

“Those are my terms,” the man repeated.

Nix covered his eyes with his hands. What was going on? How did this guy know him? Why was he even considering obeying his
wishes? He felt confused again. Why couldn’t things just be normal, like when he was small, when it was just Bettina and him
and his vision hadn’t started to change?

The man spoke softly but his voice was strong. He raised his right hand. “You must promise, Nicholas Saint-Michael.”

Saint-Michael.
The words echoed in Nix’s head.
Saint-Michael.
How did he know his name? Nix was too confused to think. Something about that hand — that little X.

“All right. I promise.” He got up to leave. “But I’m not calling you again, and I don’t want to see you around. Ever.
Period,
” he threw in, desperate to convince himself.

For the first time, the man on the bench looked at the younger boy. His eyes were obscured by his glasses, the rest of his
face was in shadow — but Nix did notice two things. The stranger was smiling and, despite an odd curve to his incisors that
gave him a hungry, wolfish look, that smile, for the first time, didn’t fill Nix with dread.

D
ARKNESS HAD SETTLED OVER THE WOODS
at the edge of the ragged field past the D’Amici’s white vinyl-sided house. Morgan sat on the front steps and waited for
Ondine. She ran her hand along her smooth legs. The night was still. Owls lived in the woods beyond the house and Morgan could
hear their solemn cries.

Ever since she was a girl, she had been afraid of those woods. K.A. and his friends had haunted them almost every day, building
forts from scraps of board they’d steal from neighbors’ backyards, catching frogs, playing Indian. The few times Morgan accompanied
them, she stayed close to her brother. He allowed it, but boys were boys, and once they had played a prank on her by disappearing.
Though she had been alone in the forest, the green light clogging her vision like a flood, she had felt distinctly
not
alone. The forest was alive, swirling with a presence — many presences. She heard the owls and knew they were owls. She heard
the creaking of trees in the wind. She could even hear the stifled giggles of her brother and his friends somewhere in the
undergrowth. But what scared her — what made her never want to be in the woods alone again — were the whispers. Lisping swirls,
a strange static she somehow knew only she could hear. The whispers seemed to be calling her.
Sweet,
she heard.
My pet,
in a horrid singsong. Her own name in the lightest of voices, lighter than the smallest child could utter, but in a tone
that children would never use.

Morgana.

She began to cry: a hysterical, sobbing wail that never, somehow, ended in tears. She was eight or nine then, and though K.A.
was a full year and a half younger, it was he who comforted her that day, led her out of the woods, and told her he was sorry
for playing a dirty trick on her. From that day on, Morgan never played in the woods again. If their mother told her to get
K.A. for dinner, she’d stand at the edge of the trees and call him in.
She never went beyond the first branches for fear of hearing the voices.

“Sweetheart, why don’t you take this coat —”

Morgan was interrupted by her mother bringing one of her old blazers from her married days out onto the porch. Yvonne held
a lit cigarette in her hand and her voice was husky. Morgan knew she’d already had a beer or two in bed, watching television.

“Because it smells like an ashtray.”

Yvonne stood above her daughter, the coat limp in her hands.

“Jesus. Do you think you could be nice to me for a few minutes? I’m just trying to help.”

“No, you’re trying to stand outside with me until Ondine comes.” She turned her head to her mother and a passing car illuminated
a thin-lipped smile. “That’s all right. My friends are your friends, Mother.”