Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

“Usually I ain’t so careful,” Dougie exclaimed as he laid his patient out. “Usually I just count down from the head bone. But we gotta be careful until we find out what bone is right for you. And for your friend there.” He tipped his head at me, but his eyes never left the stewed kitty. I folded my arms and watched from a distance.

“Hope you don’t mind I go first, Missy Cheryl. I’m an old man, and it’s been two days since my last fifth cat. My Vital Essences need recharging bad.” The blade of his camp knife lifted the cat’s neck and spine free of the clinging meat. I stepped closer to watch. He counted and coaxed free one tiny spinal bone. A gobbet of cord dangled from it when he picked it up in his thick fingers. He popped it into his mouth.

He closed his eyes, rocked back on his heels, and glowed. Glowed like a jack-o’-lantern with a candle inside it. The light outlined the bones of his skull, glowing redly through his nose and eye sockets, showing his teeth against his cheeks. Cheryl gazed at him raptly. I stumbled back until I felt the chain-link highway fence cold against my back.

The glow faded as slowly as embers being masked by ash. Dougie smiled and opened his eyes. He looked more like forty than seventy. My heart was hammering in my chest and the skin of my face went hot with blood. But I wasn’t scared, or even awestruck. I was furious.

See, I’d never respected people who hung crystals from their rearview mirrors and suspended pyramids over their beds and read their horoscopes every day. I laughed at their ignorant hope that they could get through life that way. I respected people who knew the world was real and lumpy, and that you had to make your own way in it, not look for some mystical shortcut. Practical, realistic people who worked hard and bettered themselves with education and saved money for the future. People like me.

I was angry at the monstrous unfairness of it. It worked. It was real. But the whole thing was too damn easy. It wasn’t fair for anything in life to be that easy, for anyone. I didn’t want it to be real, and I was pissed off that it was. It’s tough to find out you’re wrong about something as basic as that.

Cheryl’s eyes were wide. “What happened to the bone?”

“Gone,” he told her, and opened his mouth wide to show her. She craned her head to peer into his mouth.

“So it is!” she exclaimed delightedly. “Okay. Now me. How do I start?”

“Well, let’s just start with the tip of the tail and work forward from there. May take us a while, Missy Cheryl. These cats gotta lotta bones, specially when you get down to all their little toesie bones and such. Let’s hope it ain’t the head bone. Be awful hard to get that under your tongue.”

They laughed together over their feline box social. The mesh fence was cold against my fingers. I let go of it, crept closer. Dougie was neatly laying the tail open, lifting the thread of bones out skillfully. He set it carefully on the grubby piece of cardboard. The tip of his knife blade freed the end one. “Here ya go,” he said, picking it up. “Number one tailbone. Now we gotta keep track, unless you wanna try every bone in every number five cat you ever use. So pay attention. Just pop this under your tongue. If it takes, you’ll know. If not, just pass it on to your friend there. Maybe it’ll be the right one for her.”

“Well, come on, Sheila, don’t just stand there! This is gonna be fun!” Cheryl waved me over excitedly, then opened her mouth to receive the first bone from Dougie’s grubby fingers.

I swallowed as I watched her take it like she was receiving communion. She shut her eyes and rocked back on her heels. After a few seconds she opened them. “Nothing,” she said matter-of-factly, and reached fingers into her mouth to fish out the bone. “Here, Sheila.” She held it out to me.

“No.” I crossed my arms on my chest.

“Yes,” she said simply. “You have to believe it. It works. You saw it. You’d be crazy not to try it.”

“It’s not that.” My skepticism was hanging in tatters. No hiding behind that. “It’s sick. The whole idea of spending your life that way. What are you going to do, Cheryl? Go hiking down freeways forever, sucking on the tailbones of every fifth squashed cat? Is that what life is going to be for you?”

“You’re making it out a bit bare, missy,” Dougie interceded. “It ain’t all asphalt and exhaust, it ain’t even all freeways. A lot of time it’s backcountry roads, with the birches turning gold along the shoulders, or bare white stretches of snowy highway in Utah, or the hilly streets of San Francisco. I mean, squashed cats are everywhere. Crisscrossed this country ten or more times; seen a lot of Canada and Mexico, too. I’ve had blue-sky days and thunderstorm nights; I’ve waited out hailstorms under overpasses and slept in deep sweet-smelling hayfields under harvest moons. My time belongs to me. I get lonely, I hitch a little. Sure, I get a little cold, I get a little wet. But as long as I get my number five cat bone, I don’t get old. Don’t get tired, don’t get sick. It may not be a fancy-dancy way to live. But it ain’t a bad life, and you got no right to go scaring Missy Cheryl away from it.”

Cheryl’s chin had come up. She looked me straight in the eye and spoke with a dignity I’d never known she possessed. “No one’s scaring me away from this. You and me, Sheila, we worked a few months together. You think you know all about me. But it’s me who knows about you. I seen how you are. You’re looking. You believe you’re gonna end up doing something better. Being something better than I’ll ever be. Well, maybe you will. But I won’t. I know that. I’ve seen myself in every truck stop we passed. All those old waitresses, swollen ankles and big behinds. Still getting pinched by the truckers, still putting out cups of coffee for guys who don’t tip. That’s as good as it’s ever going to get for me. And frankly, this looks better.”

She set the rejected bone down on the dusty cardboard and took the next one from Dougie’s fingers.

A curious embarrassment overtook me. I’d always known I was smarter than Cheryl. No. Smarter’s not the right word for it. But the world’s a different place for me. I’ve known hundreds of girls like her. Guys, too. High school was full of them, and all the seedy little jobs I’d taken since screwing up my college had put me right alongside them. The biggest dream the guys ever have is, like, rebuilding the ’66 Thunderbird that’s rusting behind Uncle Joe’s shed. For the girls, it’s always something to do with a guy. A handsomer guy, a richer guy, a sexier guy. The biggest change they ever make is going on a diet or dyeing their hair. I had plans and dreams they didn’t understand. I’d always felt both pity and scorn for them. What I’d never realized was that Cheryl had known, all this time, that my future was brighter than hers, that the things that would work for me would crumble to pieces in her hands. She had always known it and lived with my secret scorn for her shopworn hopes and generic dreams.

What Cheryl was doing right now, placing the second bone under her tongue, took a sort of grubby courage. She was reaching for something a little better than she believed she was entitled to. And I, who had always believed that when my chance came, I would boldly seize it, I was hugging myself with cold hands, shivering in the gliding caress of the raindrops sliding down my arms.

Wimp out.

So I stepped into their magic circle and picked up the bone that Cheryl had discarded. It was warm from the pot and slick with her saliva, but I slipped it under my tongue and waited. Nothing. I set it aside and reached for the next one. Nothing. Now she was waiting for me, and I took the bone she fished out from under her tongue and put it under my own. Nothing. But there was an excitement building, an electrical current jumping and sparking from Dougie to Cheryl to me and yes, to the dead cat, and around again. A mystic togetherness that was warm and friendly. We three would soon be free of the world’s bonds. Another bone. Nothing. We would walk with our heads bare under the bright blue skies of autumn, the scent of falling leaves blowing past us. Another bone. Spring would sprout about our feet. We’d see the Grand Canyon, hike across Death Valley. Nothing. Another bone. The snows of winter might chill us, but the ways of man, of jobs and money and petty rules, would no longer bind us. Nothing. True freedom to see the world with eyes uncluttered by schedules and obligations. Like the old gods, like fey folk. Another bone.