Newford Stories (19 page)

Katy sighed again. "Tell me a story," she
said.

"What kind of story?"

"Something about the crow girls."

"The crow girls," Jack repeated.

He leaned his head back against the sofa,
which made his hat push up and fall down over his eyes. "I can do
that," he said.

4.

This is how it was in the long ago: Everyone
respected the crow girls. Didn't matter where you were, walking the
medicine lands or right here in this world with the roots and dirt
underfoot. You could look up and call their names, and there they'd
be looking back down at you, two pieces of magic perched high up in
a forever tree, black feathers shining, dark eyes watching, heads
cocked, listening.

Some people say Raven was older, and wiser,
too, but the crow girls were kinder. Any mischief they got into
never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it. Knew all the questions and
most of the answers, always did. Never had rules, never told you
what to do, but they would teach you how to find your own answers,
if you asked nicely enough.

Now no one remembers them. Not that way.

I think maybe we started to forget when we
stopped looking up. Instead of remembering there was a world of sky
up there above our heads, we'd sit on the ground and look at our
feet. We'd get together around the trunk of some old tree and tell
stories, consider how it was that the world began, try to make
sense of how we got here and why—same as people do now, except we
did it first because we were here first. Back then, we were the
people. Animal people. Same as you, but feathered and furred and
scaled. Those stories you tell each other, you got them from us,
all of them. First World, the Garden, the Ocean of Blood, the
Mother's Womb.

Everybody would take a turn, make up how
they thought it was. Except for Raven and the crow girls. They
didn't have to speak. They didn't have to make up stories. Because
they knew. They were there, right from the beginning when the
medicine lands came up out of the long ago and this world
began.

Only the corbae remember that first story.
But Raven and the crow girls never needed to tell it and no one
ever really listens to me. Problem is, I didn't always remember it.
It took me a long time, trying on different sets of words the way
some of us try on skins, until I finally got past guessing and into
remembering. I guess I ended up like that little boy crying wolf,
told so many stories that when I finally got hold of the real ones,
no one was ready to listen to me anymore.

No, that's not true. People listen. They
just don't believe.

5.

Didn't he go on, Moth thought as they sat
around listening to another of Jack's stories later that night. But
this was a good one. Moth had heard it before. All about how you
didn't fall from grace, but into it.

Jack continued the tale:

"Cody, he's looking around. Trying to get
the corbae to understand, but they're not listening. Those crows
don't listen to much except for what they've got to say
themselves.

" 'See,' Cody, he tries again, 'If you're
going to be pure and good, you can't be sexy. You can't be
creative. You can't think for yourself. You want to get along with
the big boss, you've got to be an obedient little sheep.'

"Raven, he laughs. 'You think we don't know
that?' he says.

" 'Maybe some of you still do,' Cody says
right back. 'But most of you forgot.' "

Moth nodded. Cody and the crowfolk never got
along in Jack's stories. Canid and corbae, they were like oil and
water. Sometimes Jack told a story from one viewpoint, sometimes
from the other, but it always came back to how most of the time
they agreed, they just didn't know it, which didn't make them all
that different from ordinary folks. 'Course there was one thing
hardly anybody agreed on: Everybody thought sex and knowledge was
what got folks booted out of paradise, but like so much else, the
churchmen got it wrong. People didn't find the potential for
paradise until they left the garden and started thinking for
themselves. Screwed up more often than they didn't, but hell,
everybody made mistakes. Another word for that was "experience."
The only reason any of them were here tonight was because of some
mistake or other.

Take Benny; he never could hold down a life.
Man had a serious gambling jones, would bet on a traffic light if
he could find the percentage in it. One day he lost the big one—had
the moneymen on his ass and the next thing he knew, job, house,
family were all gone, just like that, whole life changed from one
day to the next. Says his mama used to take him to the track when
he was a kid, that's where he caught the fever, but Moth didn't see
that as an excuse. A man had to take responsibility for his own
life at some point. Benny had been a good-looking man once, before
the alcohol poisoning settled in. He could clean himself up. He
just wasn't ready yet. Maybe he never would be.

Anita, now she was a piece of work. On one
hand, she was a first-class accountant—did Moth's books for the
junkyard, the ones he showed the feds and the real ones—on the
other, a sensei-level mechanic. If she couldn't fix it, sometimes
with no more than bobby pins and duct tape, well, it probably
couldn't be fixed. A stand-up woman. Stuck to her man through a lot
of bad times, put him through law school, the whole number, then
got dumped for a trophy wife when he made partner.

A handsome woman, but not pretty enough to
be an important lawyer's wife. The man didn't even see that she'd
be looked after. Took her for everything and laughed when she tried
to fight back. Moth didn't think she'd ever fully recovered from
the betrayal. But she wasn't one to quit. When her husband stole
away her old life, she turned around and made herself a new one,
worked in a diner where Moth first met her while she took a few of
those courses you see advertised on matchbook covers. Did so well
on them she could've got a job with anybody, but she was through
with the high-roller crowd and came to work for Moth instead. She
never said why, but Moth knew. He and his crew could give her the
one thing nobody else was interested in offering: a sense of
family.

Hank, he just got himself born into the
wrong family, simple as that. Junkie mother, old man a mean drunk
when he wasn't doing time. The only surprise with Hank was that
he'd turned out to have as good a heart as he did. In and out of
foster homes and juvie hall since he was five, a couple of turns in
county, and one stretch in the pen after that. He had more reason
to be bitter than anyone here, maybe, but it didn't pan out that
way. He was always picking up strays, helping somebody out. Kept
what he was feeling locked up pretty tight behind an easy
disposition, which Moth didn't think was necessarily a good thing,
but he understood. Brought up the way Hank had been, you learned
pretty quick not to give anything away.

Now Jack, he was the kind of man who, one
day, just up and walked away from everything he had. Maybe it was a
mistake, maybe it was the only right thing to do. Hard to know for
sure without understanding his history, but Moth knew the type.
Once upon a time, people might've called him a hobo, now he was
just another bum.

Moth leaned back in his lawn chair and shook
a smoke free from the pack he kept in the sleeve of his T-shirt. As
he fired it up, he considered the red-haired woman who'd taken to
hanging around with Jack the last year or so. They were another
kind of oil and water, didn't seem to mix at all, but they broke
the rules and got on well, so go figure. Katy had to be a third of
Jack's sixty-some years and two-thirds his size, a small street
punk to his old-timey hobo with her hair shaved on the sides, long
on top before it fell down in dreads going halfway down her back.
Hard to tell what she looked like under those green leggings and
the oversized purple sweater, but she had a sweet, heart-shaped
face and the bluest eyes he'd ever seen.

He didn't know what had put her on the
street, but a nice-looking kid like that, it had to be something
bad. She might have done time. She had that stillness down pat, the
ability to sit so quiet she became pretty much invisible. The only
other place Moth had seen that was inside. He'd learned the trick
from an old habitual con who'd taken him under his wing—back before
he'd discovered the weight room and had needed an edge, just to
stay alive. Once he'd put on some muscle and got himself a
don't-screw-with-me attitude, he didn't much need to be invisible
anymore, but it wasn't something you forgot.

Jack was finishing up his story with a new
ending: Cody got a few of the foxfolk to help him trick Raven out
of his magic cauldron—it looked like a tin can this time around—and
started stirring up some trouble out of it again. 'Course Raven
would get it back, but that'd be another story.

Moth took a drag from his smoke and flicked
it away. The butt landed in a shower of sparks in the dirt and one
of his dogs growled. Judith, the pit bull. Still jumpy after living
with Moth for going on three years now. Her previous owner had
turned her out on the dogfight circuit before he'd run into an
unfortunate accident and Moth had inherited her. Moth never felt
sorry for the way things had worked out. Any time he got an attack
of conscience, he just had to take a look at the webwork of scars
that circled her throat and ran like a city street map along her
flanks and stomach.

Beside his chair, Ranger stirred. He was a
big German shepherd, the alpha dog in Moth's pack, ninety pounds of
goofy good humor that could turn instantly serious on a word from
Moth. Ranger checked Judith out, then turned his attention to Jack,
dark gaze fixed on him like he was thinking of taking a bite out of
him. Jack brought that out in all the dogs, even good-humored
Ranger. None of them ever took to him. "Too much crow in me," Jack
said when Hank mentioned it one time.

Jack and his crows. Moth shook his head.
He'd never seen such a pack of badass birds before, always hanging
around the yard, teasing the dogs. But he let them be because he
could see they were just being playful, keeping the dogs on their
toes, not being mean. Moth couldn't abide meanness.

He leaned down to scratch Ranger behind the
ear, then lit up another cigarette. Hank gave him a look. When Moth
nodded, Hank got up and fetched another round of beer from inside
Moth's trailer. Four bottles. Jack and Katy were drinking some kind
of herb tea they'd brought along in a thermos. Smelled like heaven,
but Moth had tried it once before. It tasted like what you might
get if you brewed up a handful of garbage and weeds.

"Didn't that story have a different ending
the last time you told it?" Benny asked.

Jack shrugged. "Maybe. But it's a true
story. What you've got to remember is that Cody and Raven never had
just the one go at each other. Things that happen between them
happen over and over again. Sometimes the one of them's on top,
sometimes the other."

"But how true are they?" Hank wanted to
know.

Moth caught an odd note in Hank's voice,
like the question was more important than he was letting on.

"True as I can tell them," Jack said.

Anita nodded. "Truth's important."

"But it's not the most important thing we
can offer each other," Katy said.

Now Moth was intrigued. Katy never had much
to say of an evening. She'd sit there, smiling, listening, quiet.
Her voice had a husky quality, like she didn't use it often.

"And what would that be?" he asked.

Katy turned to him and Moth was struck all
over again by the blue of her eyes. It was like a piece of the
bluest summer sky had got caught in them and decided to stay.

"Playing fair," she said.

Moth could go with that. Sometimes the truth
did nobody any good, but playing fair—that never hurt. Karma was
the big recycler. Everything you put out came back again.

Benny stood up from his lawn chair and added
a couple of pieces of an old wooden chair to the fire they had
going in the oil drum. It was a good night. The moon was hanging
low, like it was playing hide-and-seek with them, just the rounded
top showing up from behind the roof of the abandoned factory that
loomed over the back end of the junkyard. The sky was clear—not
like last night. Moth had been out doing a couple of deliveries and
for a while there he'd thought he might drown every time he had to
leave the cab. The dogs were quiet. Nobody prowling around looking
to get a piece of the fortune in cash that he didn't have but was
still supposed to be stashed somewhere in the yard.

He did have a fortune here, but nobody who
came looking for it ever recognized it for what it was. Family.

Jack told another story, one Moth hadn't
heard before, then he and Katy headed off into the night, Jack
making for his trailer, Katy walking with him across the
rubble-strewn yard before cutting off on her own. Nobody knew where
Katy slept and Moth had never tried to find out.

Benny was the next to leave. He had a room
in the basement of a rooming house over on MacNeil this month. Moth
had the feeling he wouldn't make his September rent. Benny'd never
had the same address for more than a couple of months for as long
as Moth had known him.

"You need me tomorrow?" Anita asked.

Moth shook his head.

"Think I'll visit my sister then. We were
talking about taking the kids over to the island for the day, and
here the summer's almost over."

Her sister wasn't blood family. She'd met
Susie while she was still working at the diner, helped her out, got
close in the way a crisis can bring people together. It was
something neither of them had been looking for and maybe that was
why they found it.

"You need any money?" Moth asked.