LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

good that is, how rare, but she doesn’t know how to say such a thing. She undoes Jacob’s knot, then makes the next knot with conspicuous slowness. She ties a slipknot high on the standing line. She takes the bitter end, which passes around a branch, and brings it through the slipknot and bends it back down, making a pulley. She hauls on the line until the cord cuts paling corrugations across her palms. The pulley tightens the whole system; the tarp creaks with strain. She looks at him again.

      Rain runs down his face, and he wipes his eyes, nodding.

      She ties the tension off with half hitches, making them with exaggerated slowness. She glances back at him again, and plucks the cord.

      “Ahh,” he says.

      “The rain,” she says, “loosens the lines.”

      He nods again.

      Here is the difference between me and Martin, she thinks, here is the difference—it is that I know the rain loosens the lines and I care, and Martin knows that the rain loosens the lines and he does not care, and I do not know why, I do not understand how you could not care, because it is important to do things right, and if that isn’t true, I don’t know what is.

      She circles the stump, testing each guyline, cinching them down and doubling them up with half hitches, thinking, goddamn Martin, and how I will pay for this, how I will get down on my knees and beg not to pay and how I will pay anyway.

      “It’s like she can see in the dark,” Brett says.

      “She can,” Jacob says. “You can tell she can.”

      “No, like she can really see in the dark. And not just a little.”

      “Yeah,” Jacob says. “That’s what I mean.”

      “Where do you think she is right now?”

      “In her head,” Jacob says.

      “I can hear you,” Turtle says. She climbs up the side of the stump and helps Jacob after her.

      “She’s so quiet.”

      “Not all of us,” Jacob says, “go through life in a caffeine-fueled rage, Brett.”

      “Hey,” Brett says, “it’s good for your stomach. The coffee burns the ulcers right off your stomach lining.”

      “What are you talking about?” Turtle says.

      “Coffee,” Jacob says, “and how it mineralizes your bones.”

      “Is that true?”

      “No,” Jacob says.

      Inside, they have made a kind of dark, wet grotto, ten feet across, maybe four feet deep. Brett has laid down a heavy-duty plastic ground cloth, and now he hunches at the far end of the grotto, huddled up in his sleeping bag, his arms wrapped around himself, shivering. Jacob is unpacking his bag. He takes out a siliconized nylon stuff sack and offers it to her.

      “What?” she says.

      “Take my sleeping bag.”

      “No way.”

      “You’re shivering.”

      “So are you,” she says.

      “I’m going to spoon Brett,” he says.

      Brett says, “What?”

      “Take the bag,” Jacob says.

      “No,” she says.

      “First of all, we owe you,” Jacob says. “We never would’ve found somewhere dry if not for you. Second of all, Marcus Aurelius says—”

      Brett groans. “If only,” he says, “the emperor’s journal had been burned, as he asked. Should we really follow the instructions of a man whose final instruction was that his former instructions be destroyed?”

      “Marcus Aurelius says,” Jacob continues, “that ‘joy for humans lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt of the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.’ This—loaning you my bag—satisfies all of those conditions. Please take it.”

      Turtle is looking at him, incredulous.

      “What’s happening?” Brett says.

      “I don’t know,” Jacob says. “Maybe she’s making an expression?”

      “What?” Turtle says.

      “Please, let me give you the bag.”

      “No.”

      Brett says, “Turtle, take the bag. Seriously. His grasp of reality is tenuous at best, so arguing with him is dangerous. Nobody knows what will shake off that last handhold and send him spiraling into madness. Also, I have a sleeping bag that we can sort of spread out like a blanket.”

      Turtle looks from one to the other of the boys, and tentatively accepts the sleeping bag and begins pulling it out of its sack. The nylon is of such a high grade that it is soft as silk. It is homemade and has no zipper. She slips into it. The rain drums on the plastic ceiling, filling the chamber with noise. She can feel her breath in moist plumes, and she runs her cold hands together, the fingertips turned to raisins. She can hear the boys in the dark, their ragged exhalations, their movements as they huddle close under the one sleeping bag.

      Brett says, “Jacob?”

      “Yeah?”

      “Jacob, do you think she’s a ninja?”

      She says, “I’m not a ninja.”

      Brett says, “She’s a ninja, isn’t she, Jacob?”

      “I’m not a ninja,” she says.

      “Hmmm …” Brett hems and haws. “Hmmmm … sort of, yes, actually, sort of a ninja.”

      “No.”

      “Where is your ninja school?” Brett asks.

      “I didn’t go to ninja school,” she says.

      “She’s bound by covenants of secrecy,” Jacob observes.

      “Or perhaps,” Brett says, “perhaps, the animals of the forest taught her.”

      “I’m not a ninja!” she yells.

      The boys sit in chastened silence for a long moment. Then, as if her denial has given final proof to a theory once tenuous, Brett says, “She’s a ninja.”

      Jacob says, “But does she possess preternatural powers?”

      The boys talk in a way that is alarming and exciting to her—fantastical, gently celebratory, silly. To Turtle, slow of speech, with her inward and circular mind, their facility for language is dizzying. She feels brilliantly included within that province of things she wants, lit up from within by possibility. Giddy and nervous, she watches them, chewing on her fingertips. A new world is opening up for her. She thinks, these boys will be there when I go to high school. She thinks, and what would that be like—to have friends there, to have friends like this? She thinks, every day, get up and get on the bus, and it would be, what, another adventure? And all I would have to do is open my mouth and say, ‘help me with this class,’ and they would help.

      Slowly, the boys drop off to sleep, and Turtle lies opposite them. She thinks, I love him, I love him so goddamn much, but, but let me stay out. Let him come after me. We will see what he does, won’t we? Here is a game we play, and I think he knows we play it; I hate him for something, something he does, he goes too far, and I hate him, but I am unsure in my hatred; guilty and self-doubting and hating myself almost too much to hold it against him; that is me, a goddamn slut; and so I trespass again to see if he will again do something so bad; it is a way to see if I am right to hate him; I want to know. So you take off and you ask yourself: should I hate him? And I guess you will have your answer when you come back, because he will respond to your absence in a way you can love or he will respond

Скачать книгу