The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [12]
He pointed off to a yellow space-age building on his left. Like almost all the buildings it sat high off the ground on stilts of some sort, except this one had rounded walls and windows that looked like portholes.
“It looks like a submarine!”
“Yellow submarine, they call it. Like the Beatles song. Classic. They’re just starting to remodel and repaint it. Locals are sorta pissed. We like to be a bit different here in Bethel.”
Molly laughed with him as the cab hit another giant heave in the road.
“Yeah, different, for sure,” she said. “So many kinds of people. Everything is so expensive. I wish we could have just stayed in the village. No jobs there, though. Too depressing.”
The cab took a hard left and pulled into a dusty parking lot and stopped.
“Here’s the cultural centre,” he said.
John started to unload their bags while Anna went to pay the driver, who stayed in his seat.
“How much do we owe you?” she asked.
“Fourteen dollars.”
“What? It says seven.”
“The trip from the airport to town is seven. You and him equals fourteen.”
“I told you things was a rip-off,” Molly said.
“Hell,” the driver said, “if this is your first time in Bethel, the ride’s on me.”
“Really? Thanks,” Anna said. “What about them?”
“Yeah. My ride better be free then, too. I’m new to Bethel, too,” Molly said.
“Yeah right, lady.”
“We’re paying for them, then,” Anna said. “How much?”
“Twenty-five,” he said.
“What?”
“Five of them.”
“Pay him,” John said as he pulled his backpack from the rear seat. “They said they’d reimburse us.”
“But twenty-five?”
“Just pay him for us,” John said.
“No, I’m paying for them.”
She ducked back in the taxi, paid the driver, shook Molly’s hand, patted the kids on the head again, and closed the door extra hard. As the cab drove off, she tucked her wallet back into her satchel. “The least I could do was help her,” she said.
“You’re generous to a fault, you know?”
“There are worse faults to have, Johnny,” she said, pinching his butt.
He stretched and took a deep breath of the air. It smelled heavy, wet; a cool, swampy dampness hung in the breeze. A few mosquitoes began to gather around their heads and she swatted at them. Houses and buildings were the only thing between him and infinite horizon on all sides of the town.
THE NIGHT BEFORE he found the girl, the night before he planned to start walking, he tore the shrink wrap off a ream of notebooks and took the top one, a red-covered lined one, and opened it to the first page. He took a No. 2 pencil, pre-sharpened, from a box of office supplies in the corner, and tried to write. He didn’t know why he felt like picking up the pencil, or what compelled him to do it, but when he had the paper there in front of him he couldn’t do a thing. No words. Nothing came to him.
He set the graphite tip to the page. Just enough moonlight came through the small attic window that he could still see the blue lines on the paper. The pencil didn’t move. Each exhale of his breath hung around his head and disappeared, only to be followed by another.
He imagined that the pencil would start moving, as if some unseen hand would wrap itself around his and write. He would call out to the spirits and become a human Ouija board, and he would have the answers he needed. They would tell him it was okay through the scratch scratch of the pencil against the notebook paper.
The pencil didn’t move, and he was too scared to call out because he knew no one would answer.
5
He’d been staring into the bowl of broth, a thin brownish liquid, just listening to the girl and the old woman speaking in their tongue. Hearing their quiet voices, the rhythm of the words he would never understand and didn’t need to, felt hypnotizing. He didn’t care what they said. He just wanted to sit, absorb the warmth of the stove, the heat from the bowl.
“She wants to know why you won’t eat,” the girl said. “And