Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Who are—?”

The camel bit me.

“She’s really sweet,” Sher said as I rubbed my forearm. “You just don’t want to ignore her.”

“You’re darn right.”

The camel pulled her lips back blissfully once more.

Josh’s brand of tiptoeing wasn’t verbal. It wasn’t even tiptoeing, really; it was a different kind of caution, another sort of concern for my mental state, and it manifested itself in watching me. I’d known he was doing it, but I hadn’t known how thoroughly he was doing it until he stopped. I brought it up one evening, in his surgery, where he’d had an emergency call. Large Bob Beher had broken his left wrist; I assisted at the cast-making. (Josh’s principles of doctor-patient formality were, based on this example, a little slippery; Large Bob referred to the doctor as “Josh, you sonofabitch,” and Josh addressed the patient as “Mr. Beher, you horse’s ass.”)

We were alone, and I was gathering up the last ends of plaster gauze and the pan of chalky water when I said, “Did you think I was going to kill myself?”

Josh looked up from his dishpan full of scary stainless-steel implements. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know you before, you see. But I knew while I was sealing up the outside of you, that something inside was broken. Then, when you…”

“When I did my imitation of a garden hose all over the carrot patch,” I said.

“Whatever. I couldn’t tell if that helped or hurt. Acceptance of despair sometimes looks like that, too. That’s why people often say of suicides that they seemed so much better the day before.”

“I couldn’t have done it. Frances would have been furious, after I kept…” I took a moment to decide if I was really going to do what I thought I was. “Josh, do you have any beer?”

He looked affronted. “I have an icebox, don’t I?”

“I’ll tell you the whole story if you want to hear it. But I don’t think I can do it yet without drinking some beer.”

“These things take practice,” he agreed. “How ‘bout the porch?”

So we sat outside in the dark, reeking of pennyroyal to keep the mosquitoes off, with three bottles of home-brewed beer apiece, and I told him what I was and how I’d managed to end up blood-boltered in his front yard. Josh whistled and invoked gods in all the appropriate places. When I was done, he took a long, meditative swallow of beer and said, “What are you going to do now?”

I hadn’t expected that. “I don’t know,” I answered after some thought. “Do I have to do anything?”

“Maybe not. Probably not. But in the larger scheme of things, we’re close to the City. We do a lot of trading there. This seems like the kind of business any sane person would leave unfinished, but you may find that it won’t leave you.”

I finished my third bottle. “Maybe I ought to go.”

“Where?”

“South again? Or I could try Mick’s idea, and head for the border.”

“Not the border,” Josh said. “You wouldn’t get across openly, anyway.”

“Have they closed it?”

“No. But they’d ask for your health card. And when you couldn’t show them one, they’d give you a physical. Then they’d take you out back and shoot you.”

“Oh. Not fond of unusual foreigners up north, huh?”

He finished his third beer. “Besides, you might not have to go anywhere at all. Then what’ll you do?”

“Prune the raspberries?”

He laughed. “Be careful what you ask for.” Then he set his bottle down on the porch and leaned forward in his chair, looking out at the village circle. “Has anyone explained to you about hoodoo?”

“I know about hoodoo,” I said, a little sharply.

“Really? Well. Ask Sherrea,” said Josh in an odd, pleasant voice, “about this town.”

The tone put my back up. It occurred to me that Josh could have meant it to; he might not have been all-knowing, but he had a respectable average with me. “She said it used to be the zoo.”

“That probably had something to do with it, but that’s not what I mean.”

“Will she know what you mean?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do I have to ask her tonight?”

Josh opened his eyes wide. “You don’t have to ask her at all.”

Frances would probably have had an elegant and corrosive response to that. I only sighed and took six empty bottles back to the kitchen.

The next day the weather was beautiful, in a way it rarely was so close to midsummer: warm, but full of fresh wind and high, white clouds. Theo and I spent almost the whole of it in a shed-turned-machine-shop, overhauling a generator. We came out, sweaty and filthy, and discovered the tail end of what we’d missed just as the sun touched, blinding, on the treetops. Theo scrambled to the top rail of the fence and sat with his face to the dazzle, his eyes closed. I didn’t have the energy to climb; I just leaned.

“This is okay,” Theo said. “You know, for the boondocks.”

“Philistine,” I said contentedly.

He twisted on his rail and looked down at me. “You like it, don’t you? Here, I mean.”

“I don’t… know. That is, yeah, of course I like it. But if you’re saying, am I going to stay here, then I don’t know.”

“There’s not enough tape here,” he said to the field before us.

“No. But I don’t know what to think about that anymore, either.”

“What’s to think about it?”

“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want to suck my living out of the past like a leech, Theo. I’m afraid of it. I’m still afraid of all the stuff I woke up knowing. It was put there to be useful over sixty years ago, so why should it be any good to anyone now?”

“It’s been useful,” he said, ruffled, “and it is useful. So who cares why?”

I sighed. “I do. Because I’ve been useful, Theo, and I am useful, I think. But I popped to the surface fifteen years ago wide awake and full of trivia, and now I want to know why .”

“Zeus and Damballah?” said Theo in a determinedly neutral tone, as if he thought someone ought to bring it up.

“Oh, sure. Or how about—was it the Blue Fairy? Who zapped Pinocchio? No strings on me.” I stopped, because that way lay self-pity, and I was trying to kick the habit.

“I always thought you were more like the Scarecrow,” said Theo. “You know—’If I only had a brain.’“

“This from the man who watched Guns II six times. What do you want to do?”

He knew I wasn’t talking about the next ten minutes. “Get everything at the Underbridge to work at once.”

“Then I guess you’re not an atheist.”

“Hell, to do that, I’d have to be God. I’d like to record those drummers who played the other night. Man, if I’d had a DAT recorder…” He sat quiet for a moment; then he peeled all his brown hair back from his face with both hands. “I want to go back, Sparrow. And I can’t. And I hate it.” He did, too. It was in his suddenly harrowed voice, the desperate closing of his fingers. Those things sealed my mouth and robbed my mind of comforting phrases.

“Well, hey,” he said suddenly, slipping down off the fence. “We’re young, we’re strong, and we know how to wire a quarter-inch phone plug. Something’ll come along.”

“Any minute,” I said. I looked up at the sky, held out my hands, and added loudly, “Preferably in Hi-8 format, with a copy of Casablanca loaded.” I turned back to him. He was smiling, a little. “You’ve got grease all over your nose, from pushing your glasses up.”

Theo was staying in LeRoy’s house across the circle from Josh’s, a two-and-a-half-story log building so new it still had the heated smell of cut wood. When we reached it, Theo led the way around to the back porch. There was a pump beside the steps, and a big jar of soft soap on the porch railing. Theo pulled his shirt over his head, which, I found, made me uncomfortable. I sat on the top step and pretended to be absorbed in brushing dirt off my jungle boots.