Girl in Landscape (25 page)

“I know more than you or your little detective here. I know what I knew before you arrived on this planet, Pella Marsh.”

“You don’t know about Hiding Kneel. You just heard.”

Now Efram smiled. “You of all people should know there’s more than one way to learn things, Pella. What about Hugh Merrow?”

She looked at him appalled that he could even say that name aloud.

He was still abusing her secrets, still flaunting his crimes. Still flattering her. She felt warped by his monstrousness. She wanted to fall at his feet.

“Why think you’re the only one around here who snuck a look at Merrow and his Archbuilder?” Efram went on.

Pella began to tremble. Did he inhabit household deer
himself?
Of course. Everything, anything. He lived in the rocks and the air.

Doug Grant stood openmouthed, baffled. The conversation had left him behind. The only thing certain was that his prize, his capture, was being taken from him one way or another. Efram had claimed it.

Meanwhile the disputed shed stood locked, the Archbuilder silent inside. They might as well have been arguing over freeing Ben Barth’s chickens.

“You’re a liar,” Pella said. “And a killer.” The words were unstoppable suddenly. If he didn’t hear them she would plant them in the ground, and they would grow everywhere, like potatoes. “You killed Truth Renowned.”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Efram, his voice bitter, said, “Truth Renowned started a fire.”

He didn’t seem to be talking to Pella, only himself.

He took a step toward them, and Pella flinched. But it was Morris he reached for, with a flick of his hand that was lazy, indifferent. Morris twisted away and scurried behind Pella.

“Doug,” said Efram, “take your brother home.”

“The Archbuilder—” cried Doug, gesturing wildly. As though Hiding Kneel were about to burst out of the shack and terrorize the valley.

“
I’ll
take care of the Archbuilder,” said Efram impatiently. His voice was smoke. “And a few other things. Get your brother out of here. Leave me and Pella to talk.”

“No,” said Pella. She stepped backward and, not looking away from Efram, fished behind her until she found Morris’s arm. She had her one weapon left. Fight spies with spies, she thought. Fires with fire.

Liars with lies.

“Say what you saw,” she said to Morris, pushing him in front of her. “Say it now.”

It seemed to Pella that it took Morris Grant an hour to produce the words, but in that time the four of them didn’t move, and the air itself seemed impossibly still, frozen. They might not have been able to move through it if they’d tried. When he finally spoke the words they’d rehearsed together Morris was obnoxious, indignant, himself again for the first time since she’d made him weep in the darkened clubhouse the night before, as
though for Morris it was only lies that inspired his truest self. And he was inspired. Brilliant.

“I saw
you!
” he shouted, pointing at Efram. “I saw you and Pella! I saw what you did!”

Nobody answered the cry. Nobody spoke.

“I saw you and Pella,” said Morris again, his voice lowered insinuatingly now. “It was you.”

Efram looked at Pella, narrowing his eyes. She met his gaze and nodded once. He understood. She would stand by the words. He knew the power in them. He should. Then she had to close her eyes, against the sun, against Efram. When she opened them he was only a throbbing black shape in the white glare.

“
Raper,
” said Morris. “
Fucker.
”

Efram stood staring at his hands. They were open, grasping slightly at nothing. Pella couldn’t look at his face. She couldn’t speak.

Doug Grant just stared at Efram, his eyes boiling with confusion.

“I told already,” said Morris, his voice singsong, nagging. He’d surpassed the words he and Pella had planned together, was working off sheer inspiration now. “I told Wa, and Joe Kincaid. It’s all over Southport by now. They’ll get you.”

Efram stood completely still now, though he beat like a pulse in Pella’s vision.

“I told Diana Eastling you fucked Pella. I told everybody.”

Lowering his head, Efram took a key from his pocket and went to the shed. He opened the padlock.

Then, in a movement so deft and sudden it was like a splash of water in the languid, spellbound morning, he reached out and grabbed Morris by the ear, and tugged him downward. Morris instantly buckled at the knees, cringing, whining. “Here’s your Archbuilder, little brother,” Efram said. “You deserve each other.” Opening the shed, he shoved Morris inside, then forced the door shut and slipped the padlock back through the latch. In the instant the door was open Pella saw the Archbuilder sitting decorously in a corner on the floor, arms folded together, furred legs in a pool of fluid.

“Don’t put him in there!” screamed Doug Grant.

Efram leaned his weight against the door lazily, and clapped the lock shut.

Doug Grant scrambled up from behind and pummeled on Efram’s shoulders with his fists. “Let him out!” he screamed, his voice gone, shredded to a rasp. And from inside the shed, Morris screamed and beat on the door. It held.

Efram only had to shrug and Doug Grant was flung into the dust behind him, groaning.

“Pella,” Efram said, not glancing back at Doug. “Inventive girl.”

Pella stumbled backward. Morris howled inside the shed. Doug Grant dragged himself up, his face red and wet, and limped toward Efram’s house. Efram took a step toward Pella. She turned, then tangled in her own
legs and fell. She met the hard ground with palms, elbows, cheek. Her hands and face were stung. She tasted the grit. Like a deer watching dispassionately from a distant rock she saw her own skewed, half-finished self in misery on the hot ground. As Efram’s shadow closed over her she shut her eyes in relief. Let him cover the sun. Let her go into the darkness. Efram could make the lie true if he wanted. She owed him that now. Who would miss her? Nobody. Clement was as dead as Caitlin. The rest were gone too. Brooklyn was forgotten. Pella was ready to finish her voyage to the Planet of the Archbuilders. She wouldn’t miss herself.

She opened her eyes at the click. So she saw him a moment before he fired. In the bright sun he was another actor in black silhouette, his expression indistinguishable. He stood at Efram’s house, pointing a rifle at Efram. His arms and the barrel of the rifle were shaking.

Efram turned his head away, as though he were barely interested. The shot exploded his chest.

Efram’s arm reached up and swiped at the sky dismissively. He stumbled backward a step, two. Then he began to fall.

Doug Grant looked once into Pella’s eyes, dropped the rifle, and ran, limbs flailing crazily, through the gate and out, across the rocks, into the unconquered distance.

Hiding Kneel’s chest had already healed somewhat. Under sodden fur shell had knit together in a thick crust, like an excess of glue squeezed out of a carpentered joint. A scar, or possibly a scab, something that would fall away. The Archbuilder moved slowly, tentatively, but it was alive. It was able to join the others in packing the upright figure with the black clay, though it didn’t bend to scoop clay out of the bucket. Earlier it had only stood and watched as the other Archbuilders mounted Efram Nugent’s body in the armature of wires and sticks.

Now Efram’s corpse was nearly concealed inside the hardening sculpture. As the moisture evaporated, the figure turned the color of the valley floor, became another outcropping of the Planet. Another blunted shard pointing nowhere.

The three watching children moved off their vantage on the bluff and slipped away.

•   •   •

The flour was there in the kitchen, and the yeast. David collected eggs from Ben Barth’s chickens while Morris dug up fresh cake and tea potatoes. Earlier that day she and David had moved their things out of Clement’s house, into the Kincaids’ empty rooms. Clement hadn’t objected. David had barely even spoken, just latched onto Pella and followed her everywhere. Morris took a room too, marking it as his own by ceremoniously dropping his curled, greasy comic book on the floor. He’d been at Pella’s side since the morning they felled Efram together.

Now Pella stacked charcoal in Ellen Kincaid’s oven and arranged the bowls and pans, began measuring out scoops of flour.

Soon enough they were all kneading lumps of dough.

“Who’s gonna buy it now?” said Morris. “Wa doesn’t have any customers left.”

“I don’t know,” admitted Pella.

“Archbuilders, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

Early in the morning Pella had felt the urge come back, and wandered out into the valley as a household deer. The pills didn’t matter, once you knew how. The doors to Efram’s were open, not just the house, but the greenhouse and Ben Barth’s chicken coop, too. The chickens were still roosting inside, though. Freedom didn’t tempt them. Pella-deer went inside the farmhouse.
Archbuilders were sleeping in every available space, in the reconstructed Archbuilder room, in Efram’s bedroom, in the kitchen. Hiding Kneel, Gelatinous Stand, Lonely Dumptruck, others Pella had never seen before. They’d moved in, the way she and Morris and David had moved into the Kincaids’.

None of what happened was really about Archbuilders, Pella decided. None of the humans had even met an Archbuilder, or even seen one. It was still all about the humans, what they saw when they looked at the Archbuilders, what they saw instead of the Archbuilders.

Maybe now they would meet them.

Maybe the Archbuilders would buy the bread.

“Morris said the Kincaids had to go because of what me and Martha did,” said David.

He and Pella sat on the porch. Pella had traded the first batch of bread to Wa for cookies and soda and a brush and paint. The loaves were misshapen and heavy but Wa seemed grateful for the commerce, for the show of faith in the dwindled town. Now Pella worked on a hand-lettered sign, brushing white onto a plank rescued from Hugh Merrow’s ruins. It read
CAITLIN
. Town of Caitlin, that would be the name. Because Caitlin brought them here. Not Clement, not really. Clement was as much a passenger as anyone.

Maybe the name would draw Raymond out of hiding, draw him back from Diana Eastling’s house. Let the
whole town be Raymond’s mourning place. The lesbians, and Wa, and Diana Eastling if she ever came back—let them live in
Caitlin
.

Let poor sad crazy Clement live there too.

“Nobody made you do it, right?” she said.

“No.”

“Then forget it. Joe Kincaid thought something else was going on. Something involving Archbuilders.”

“We were just looking at each other. We didn’t even—”

“Shut up about it. If nobody made you do it it’s nothing to make a big deal about.”

David started crying.

Be brave like an arm, Pella thought, but she didn’t say it. Let David mother himself. Let him learn.

She searched the tattered horizon. Somewhere out there roamed Doug Grant. She was glad Bruce was gone now. She wasn’t for him, not anymore if she’d ever been. After Caitlin it wasn’t likely. There was something hard about her. Or worse than hard. Efram had made her, made her know herself, how far she’d traveled. It cost him, too.

She knew Doug Grant was the same. He’ll come back, she thought. He’ll grow up and come back, the new Efram. The one who doesn’t fit in town. The one she killed was still alive in him.

That was who she would wait for.