Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (20 page)

Tam sighed loud and breathed in a mouthful of air so clean it hurt her Angeleno lungs, and she wished she had a cigarette.
Just get it the fuck over with,
she thought, stern and patient thought for herself. But she made sure to aim the camera just low enough to cut the tops off both their heads in the photo.

Halfway back to the car, a small squeal of surprise and delight from Lark. “
What
?” Crispin asked, “What is it?” Lark stooped and picked up something from the rough bed of redwood needles.

“Just get in the goddamned car, okay?” Tam begged, but Lark wasn’t listening, held her discovery out for Crispin to see, presented for his approval. He made a face that was equal parts disgust and alarm and took a step away from Lark and the pale yellow thing in her hands.

“
Yuck,
” he sneered. “Put it back down, Lark, before it bites you or stings you or something.” 

“Oh, it’s only a banana slug, you big sissy,” she said and frowned like she was trying to impersonate Tam. “See? It can’t hurt you,” and she stuck it right under Crispin’s nose.

“
Gagh,
” he moaned. “It’s
huge
,” and he headed for the car, climbed into the backseat and hid in the shadows.

“It’s only a banana slug,” Lark said again. “I’m gonna keep him for a pet and name him Chiquita.”

“You’re going to put down the worm and get back in the fucking car,” Tam said, standing at the rear fender and rattling Magwitch’s key ring in one hand like a particularly noisy pair of dice. “Either that, Lark, or I’m going to leave your skinny ass standing out here with the bears.”

“And the sasquatches!” Crispin shouted from inside the car. Tam silenced him with a glare through the rear windshield.

“Jesus, Tam. It’s not gonna
hurt
anything. Really. I’ll put it in my purse, okay? It’s not gonna hurt anything if it’s inside my purse, right?” But Tam narrowed her eyes and jabbed a finger at the ground, at the needle-littered space between herself and Lark. 

“You’re going to put the motherfucking worm
down
, on the ground,” she growled, “and then you’re going to get back in the motherfucking car.”

Lark didn’t move, stared stubbornly down at the fat slug as it crawled cautiously over her right palm, leaving a wide trail of sparkling slime on her skin. “No,” she said.

“
Now
, Lark.”

“No,” Lark repeated, glancing up at Tam through the cascade of her white bangs. “It won’t hurt anything.”

Just two short, quick steps and Tam was on top of her, almost a head taller, anyway, and her teeth bared like all the grizzly bears and sasquatches in the world.

“Stop!” Lark screeched. “Crispin, make her stop!” She tried too late to turn and run away, but Tam already had what she wanted, had already snatched it squirming from Lark’s sticky hands, and Chiquita the banana slug went sailing off into the trees. It landed somewhere among the ferns and mossy, rotting logs with a very small but audible
thump
.

“Now,” Tam said, smiling and wiping slug slime off her hand onto the front of Lark’s black Switchblade Symphony T-shirt. “Get in the car.
Pretty
please.”

And for a moment, the time it took Tam to get behind the wheel and give the engine a couple of loud, warning revs, Lark stood, staring silently towards the spot in the woods where the slug had come down. She might have cried, if she hadn’t known that Tam really would leave her stranded there. The third rev brought a big puff of sooty exhaust from the Impala’s noisy muffler, and Lark was already opening the passenger-side door, already slipping in beside Tam. 

She was quiet for a while, staring out at the forest and the stingy glimpses of rocky coastline, still close enough to tears that Tam could see the wet shimmer in the window-trapped reflection of her blue eyes.

So the highway carries them south, between the ocean and the weathered western slopes of the Klamath Mountains, over rocks from the time of Crispin’s dinosaurs, rocks laid down in warm and serpent-haunted seas; out of the protected cathedral stands of virgin redwood, into hills and gorges where the sequoias are forced to rub branches with less privileged trees, mere Douglas fir and hemlock and oak. And gradually their view of the narrow, dark beaches becomes more frequent, the sharp and towering headlands setting them one from another like sedimentary parentheses. 

Tam driving fast, fast as she dares, not so much worried about cops and speeding tickets as losing control in one of the hairpin curves and plunging ass-over-tits into the fucking scenery, taking a dive off one of the narrow bridges and it’s two hundred feet straight down. She chain smokes and has started playing harder music, digging through the shoe box full of pirated cassettes for Nine Inch Nails and Front 242, Type-O Negative and Nitzer Ebb, all the stuff that Lark and Crispin would probably be whining like drowning kittens about if they didn’t know how pissed off she was already. And then the car starts making a sound like someone’s tossed a bucket of nails beneath the hood and the temp light flashes on. Screw you, Tam, here’s some more shit to fuck up your wonderful fucking afternoon by the fucking sea.

“It’s not supposed to do that, is it?” Crispin asks, backseat coy, and she really wants to turn around, stick a finger through one of his eyes until she hits brain.

“
No
, Einstein,” she says instead. “It’s not supposed to do that. Now shut up,” settling for such a weak little jab instead of fresh frontal lobe beneath her nails. The motor spits up a final, grinding cough and dies, leaves her coasting, drifting into the breakdown lane. Pavement traded for rough and pinging gravel. Tam lets the right fender scrape along the guardrail almost twenty feet before she stomps the brakes, the smallest possible fraction of her rage expressed in the squeal of metal against metal; when the Impala has finally stopped moving, she puts on the emergency brake and shifts into park, then turns on the hazard lights.

“We can’t just stop
here
,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here
to
stop at. And, before long, it’ll be getting dark – ”

“Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, baby cakes,” and Tam opens her door, slamming it closed behind her, and leaves the twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.

Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s jammed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches, and that’s not even space for the sharp angles of her waif’s bony shoulders. So, she slides across the faded green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over, and they spill in a loud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the backseat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood.

Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.

“She’d live, probably,” Lark says. “Yeah,” Crispin replies, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.

The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, hissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.

“He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully, but she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerine puddle of blossoms waving heavy calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.

“It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”

“Yeah,” Lark says. “Probably,” but not sounding reassured at all, and Lark stares down the precarious steep slope towards the beach, sand the cinder color of cold apocalypse below the grey shale and sandstone bluff. She also picks a poppy and puts it in Crispin’s hair, tucking it behind his left ear, so they match again. “I want to look for sea shells,” she says “and driftwood,” and she points at a narrow trail just past the poppies. Crispin looks back at Tam once, her black hair wild in the wind, her face in her hands like maybe she’s even crying, and then he follows Lark. 

Mostly just mussels, long shells darker than the beach, curved and flaking like diseased toenails, but Lark puts a few in her purse, anyway. Crispin finds a single crab claw, almost as orange as the poppies in their hair, with an airbrush hint of blue, and she keeps that, too. The driftwood is more plentiful, but all the really good pieces are gigantic, the warped and polished bones of great trees washed down from the mountains and scattered about here, shattered skeletons beyond repair. They walk on warm sand and a thick mat of sequoia bark and spindle twigs, fleshy scraps of kelp, and follow the flotsam to a stream running down to meet the gently crashing sea, wide and shallow interface of saltwater and fresh. Overhead, seagulls wheel and protest the intrusion. The craggy rocks just offshore are covered with their watchful numbers, powder-grey feathers, white feathers, beaks for snatching fish.
And pecking out eyes,
Lark thinks. They squawk and stare, and she gives them the finger, one nail chewed down to the quick and most of the black polish flaked away. 

Crispin bends and lets the stream gurgle about his pale hands. It’s filled with polished stones, muted olive and bottle-green pebbles rounded by their centuries in the cold water. He puts one finger to his lips and licks it cautiously. “Sweet,” he says. “It’s very sweet.”

“What’s that?” Lark asks, pointing, and he looks up, across the stream at a wind-stunted stand of firs on the other side and there’s a sign there, almost as big as a roadside billboard sign and just as gaudy. But no way anyone could see this from the highway. A great sign of planks painted white and lettered crimson, artful, scrolling letters that spell out, ALIVE AND UNTAMED! MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES OF NEPTUNE’S BOSOM! and below, in slightly smaller script, MERMAIDS AND MIRACLES! THE GREAT SEA SERPENT! MEN-EATERS AND DEVILFISH!

“Someone likes exclamation points,” Lark says, but Crispin’s already halfway across the stream, walking on the knobby stones protruding from the water; she follows him, both arms out for balance like a trapeze acrobat.

“Wait,” she calls to him, and, reluctantly, he pauses until she catches up.

The old house trailer sits a little distance up the slope from the beach, just far enough that it’s safe from the high tides. Lark and Crispin stand side by side, holding hands tight, and stare at it, lips parted and eyes wide enough to divulge a hint of their mutual surprise. Lark’s left boot is wet where she missed a stone and her foot went into the stream, and the water’s beginning to seep past leather straps and buckles, through her hose. But she doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t matter, because this is that unexpected. This old husk of sunbleached aluminum walls, corrugated metal skin draped in mop-grey folds of fishing net, so much netting it’s hard to see that the trailer underneath might once have been blue. Like something a giant fisherman dragged up from the sea, and finally, realizing what he had, this inedible hunk of rubbish, he left it here for the gulls and the weather to take care of.

“Wow,” Lark whispers, and Crispin turns, looking over his shoulder to see if maybe Tam has given up on the car and come looking for them. But there’s only the beach, and the waves, and the birds. The air that smells like dead fish and salt wind, and Crispin asks, “You wanna go see?”

“There might be a phone,” Larks says, still whispering. “If there’s a phone, we could call someone to fix the car.”

“Yeah,” Crispin replies, as though they really need an excuse beyond their curiosity. There are more signs leading up to the trailer, splintery bread crumbs teasing them to take the next step, and the next, and the next after that: the mouth that swallowed jonah! and eternal leviathan and charybdis revealed! As they get close they can see other things in the sandy rind of yard surrounding the trailer: the rusting hulks of outboard motors and a ship’s wheel nailed to a post, broken lobster cages and the ivory-white jaws of sharks strung up to dry like toothy laundry. There are huge plywood and canvas façades leaned or hammered against the trailer, one on either side of the narrow door and both taller than the roof: garish seascapes with white-fanged sea monsters breaking the surface, acrylic foam and spray, flailing fins like Japanese fans of flesh and wire, eyes like angry, boiling hemorrhages. 

A sudden gust off the beach, then, and they both have to stop and cover their eyes against the blowing sand. The wind clatters and whistles around all the things in the yard, tugging at the sideshow canvases.

“Maybe we should go back now,” Lark says when the wind has passed, and she brushes sand from her clothes and hair. “She’ll wonder where we’ve gone.”

“Yeah,” Crispin says, his voice grown thin and distant, distracted. “Maybe,” he says, but they’re both still climbing the slope, past the hand-lettered signs and into the ring of junk. Crispin pauses before the shark jaws, yawning cartilage jaws on nylon fishing line, and he runs the tip of one finger lightly across rows of gleaming, serrate triangles. Only a little more pressure and he could draw blood.

And then the door of the trailer creaks open and a man is standing in the dark space leading inside, not what either expected if only because they hadn’t known what to expect. A tall man, gangly knees and elbows through threadbare clothes, pants and shirt the same faded khaki; bony wrists from buttoned sleeves too short for his long arms, arthritis-swollen knuckles on his wide hands. Lark makes a uneasy sound when she sees him, and Crispin jerks his hand away from the shark’s jaw, sneak-child caught in the cookie jar startled, and snags a pinkie, the soft skin torn, and he leaves a gleaming crimson drop of himself behind.