Chapter 7: a southern drawl, the world unseen
It's bigger than he thought.
From outside it seemed big, those walls, the way he could see more of them inside, half fallen and worn away but still recognizable as a structure. As structures. If this was a house, he can now see that it was an oddly large and complex one for the space it occupies, so he's leaning more toward a mill. Maybe a combination. Dating from the Civil War, maybe. Maybe even earlier. It feels old, and as she leads him on he thinks again about how it doesn't feel dead, about how it feels very much alive and it doesn't actually have much to do with the life crawling all over it and filling up its corners and carpeting its floor, decorating it with color, cloaking it with green.
He's always been most comfortable outdoors for a variety of complex and profoundly psychological reasons, but he's also from a place where ruin means something different, and where age is a different shape. Where time doesn't always run in this kind of direction. He stops in the center of what must once have been a large room and looks up, all around, sure now that there was at least a second additional floor, and he feels slightly disoriented.
He's never cared about getting out of the country, but he knows about ruins elsewhere, old shit, hundreds and even thousands of years, and he wonders if those things feel like this. Haunted, but not in a bad way.
He doesn't think like this. Ever. What the fuck.
She's stopped just ahead of him and she turns back to face him, one hand holding her other arm, and she no longer looks nervous. She looks curious. And waiting. Like now that she knows this is going well, she wants to see the finer points of how he'll react.
He wonders if she has more complicated reasons for bringing him here than just doing him a favor.
He wonders if he'll work up the courage to ask.
"What?"
He shrugs. He can barely articulate this to himself; he's not sure how he's supposed to talk about it to her. "Just lookin'."
"Look all you want." Little smile. Soft. She's pleased with all of this, like he thought before. Pleased with his reaction. Pleased with him. "Like I said, not like it's goin' anywhere."
"Been here for a while." That's sort of close to what's circling around the inside of his head. A while. Technically correct even if it's insufficient to capture the essence of what he's feeling. Sensing.
"Yeah. I dunno how long. I haven't asked... Again, like I said, I don't think anyone else knows about it. Kinda wanna keep it that way."
He nods. He knows how people take places like this and trash them. Fuck them up, fill them full of junk, and he has a vague idea of what motivates that. A kind of resentment. A kind of primitive nihilism. Wanting to hit back at something without really knowing what, without a clear target. Swinging wildly, throwing punches wide.
He won't admit it to her, especially not here, but he's been there. Been one of those people. He's done those things. He's been angry at everything. Still kind of is. But this makes all that anger feel very far away.
Anyway, more and more of the time he's just tired.
He wants to go to one of the walls. He wants to lay a hand on the stone and feel how rough and cool it is. He wants to be connected to this place in a way he isn't, just standing here. There's a significance in the tactile, in the act of touching, and while touching people and being touched by them isn't something with which he's comfortable, isn't something he likes - and only partly because most of the time he's touching and being touched via punches and kicks - it's easy to touch things. It's easy to feel them under his hands, easy to understand them that way. Comprehension through the skin, through nerves. Texture, temperature, solidity. Density.
This place is dense.
He wants to touch, so he does - walks over to the wall and lays a hand on it, closes his eyes, and he knows she's watching him and he doesn't mind. He doesn't mind whatever she's thinking, and the truth is that it's not that he doesn't care. He does.
He just knows she's not laughing at him, and she's not judging him. She doesn't think it's crazy or stupid. If she brought him here, and if he's the first person she really trusts enough to do so, there's no way she would think it was crazy or stupid.
And standing here, hand on cool stone and gentle roughness against the pads of his fingers, his head caught in a patch of warm sun, smelling the mud and the grass and a creek running high with days of runoff, and her a few feet away...
He feels safe.
She makes him feel safe.
That's mildly remarkable.
He opens his eyes and looks back at her, and when he sees that she's still smiling he returns it with one of his own. Very small, but he feels it, he knows it's there, and it feels good. He never smiles unless he means it, and he never smiles with intention. He's not capable of doing so. If a smile comes, it comes out of a place in him that contains no thought and only that same instinct that made him watch her as she went down the muddy incline, made him ready to catch her if she fell.
"You really do like it, huh."
No sense in pretending he doesn't. He nods.
"Ever been someplace like this before?"
He shakes his head.
"Good," she says, and her smile stretches into an honest grin. "So I'm special."
He cocks his head, feeling a pleasant wave of amusement. "Guess so." He steps away from the wall, dropping his hands and looking up again. Little rush of wind and the spreading branches overhead - to one side, because the other side is bank and then water - sway and break up the sun. "You said there was more."
"Yeah, there is." She nods toward the far end of the room, another door and more stone beyond. "This way."
He follows her further in.
There actually isn't a whole lot left to see of the structure itself, but the last doorway - impossible to tell for sure if it's front or back but to him it feels like back - opens out onto a wider patch of ancient lawn, still somehow having escaped being overgrown by shrubs and brush even though it's mostly exposed to the sun. She heads out into the middle of it and turns, swinging her arms slightly. "So this isn't it, but isn't this great?"
He supposes it is, though he's not sure what great means in this context, and anyway great isn't a concept with which he's on especially close terms. It's interesting. It feels good. As with the rest of the place, he likes being here.
"I think this was a yard or somethin' but I don't know what for. Animals? I guess if this was some kinda big house maybe that would make sense?"
"I think it was a mill."
"Huh." She glances around as if this possibility hasn't occurred to her before. "Guess that makes sense too, what with the river an' all."
"So what's it?"
She laughs. "God, you're so pushy."
"You're talkin'."
She looks speculatively at him. "Know what, I think you could do with some pushin'."
Now it's his turn to laugh, a little bark of a thing. "The fuck you talkin' 'bout?"
"Nothin'." She raises a hand and makes an extravagant beckoning gesture, like a bad tour guide. "This way, Mr. Dixon."
He rolls his eyes but her back is already to him, her hair dancing with her movements and with the breeze, shining in the sun. She's shining in general, he notices. She's bright. Everything about her is very persistently bright.
She leads him back into the trees.
There's a path. Not a people path, he can tell, though it's clearly used by people - her, he supposes, and only her. It's a deer path, leading down to the water's edge, and for once and somehow it's not that muddy. A few more minutes and the trees thin out again, and they're right on the bank, the water high and close and running fast, sparkling on the surface but cloudy with sediment. He's looking at it, so for a few seconds he misses what she wants him to see until she gently touches his arm-
And this time he doesn't spook. Doesn't shy away.
He turns, and sees what she brought him out here for.
It's not really all that great, except it kind of is. Not stone but marble, actual marble, a semi-circle of it carved into two long benches and remarkably free of moss and lichen, though water and age have stained it in places. In the center, bisecting the thing, is a fountain - or what was once a fountain, when it still ran. A wolf's head spout, wings to either side. The wolf's lips are pulled back and muzzle wrinkled in a snarl, and the wings are clearly the wings of an eagle. Or some big raptor. Probably an eagle, though. It would make the most sense. Though it strikes him as a bit strange that it's a wolf.
It can't be that old. But something about it feels old, older than the rest of the place. Secret. A place of some kind of power.
He stands and looks at it for a moment, then turns his attention to her. Once again she's watching him, not the thing.
"This is it?"
"Yeah." She doesn't sound nervous now. She sounds secure in his opinion. His approval. "Neat, huh?"
"Mmhm." He won't argue with that. It is neat. And yet another place unlike anywhere he's ever been.
She moves past him to one of the benches and sits down, looks up at him and pats the space beside her. After a moment, he does as he's bidden and joins her, looking out at the water, at the trees, at everything, feeling the cool of the marble under him and against his back, and though she's not pressed right up against him he can feel her warmth against his bare arm.
She radiates.
"Whaddaya come out here to do?"
She shrugs. "Think. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes I just sit'n listen and I don't really do anythin'."
He glances at her, curiosity piqued. "Write? What, like... stories or somethin'?"
"Oh, not like that." She laughs softly. "I just got a journal. I write stuff that's happened. What I think about it. What I feel."
This is an alien concept to him, though he's aware it's a thing some people do. "How come?"
She frowns very slightly - thoughtful rather than irritated by the question, and maybe even a little surprised that he's asking. But willing to answer. "I dunno. It's just somethin' I've always done. Sometimes if I'm havin' trouble with somethin' it helps me think about it... Y'know. Clearer. Sometimes I can figure it out."
"Ever show it to anyone?"
She gives his arm a little shove with her shoulder, and he does flinch this time and hopes she doesn't notice.
She really is very warm.
"You can't show people stuff like that. That's the whole point. It's just for me. Don't you know about it?"
He shakes his head.
"Huh." She cocks her head, looking at him, and her gaze is penetrating and to deflect it he roots around in his pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. "Where the hell are you from?"
He sighs as he opens the pack, pulls one out, lights it and inhales. He could just keep refusing to answer this question, but he has the distinct sense that if he does, she might drop it at the time, but she's going to just ask it again later. She's going to keep asking until she gets an answer that satisfies her.
"Mountains. Up north." He rolls a shoulder. "Piece of shit place, don't matter."
"I've been there. It's pretty up there. Blue Ridge."
He looks at her like she's just suggested he actually comes from the edge of one of the larger lunar craters. "You kiddin'?"
"I mean..." She appears a little chastened. She recognizes that she's hit somewhere sore. And it is sore, and he's not entirely pleased that she asked or that he gave in and answered, but he does appreciate that she realizes what being asked and answering has made him feel. "The part I was in was pretty. I guess probably not all of it is."
He leans forward over his knees and blows a stream of smoke at the water. "What were you doin' there?"
"Vacation."
He grunts. Of course. She looks like a girl from a family that takes vacations.
"So what're you doin' here?"
"Told you." He gives her another tiny, crooked smile. "I'm literally a drifter, remember?"
"You an' your brother."
"Yeah." He hesitates for a moment - he has absolutely no reason to say anything else and he probably shouldn't - and then he goes ahead and says it anyway. "Been doin' that for a while. Just kinda movin' around, jobs here and there. Not settlin' down."
"Ever want to?"
Maybe. "Nothin' to settle for."
"Don't mean you don't want to."
He sits back and looks at her, feeling a mix of faint exasperation and amusement and something that might, he supposes, if he had to put a word to it, if someone put a gun to his head and said name that fucking emotion or you're fucking dead, be some species of very vague affection. "You seriously callin' me pushy."
"Like I said, maybe you need pushin'."
He makes a sound somewhere between another sigh and a laugh. "What the fuck, girl?"
Now her face is serious. Not deeply so, but whatever she's got fixed in her mind, she's holding onto it, and possibly she's given it a fair amount of thought. Which would make sense. He doesn't think she just brought him out here in a burst of mad impulse. He can see her being impulsive - she did kiss him, he didn't dream that - but not about this.
About this, he thinks she would take some time and some care.
"'cause I don't think you talk to anyone like this and I think maybe you need to."
He stares at her, cigarette hanging loose between his fingers. Just... stares. He was expecting honesty, even bluntness, but not on that level. Not to this extreme. And she's this teenager, and she's thinking things like that, saying things like that, shoving her nose into his business - and so what if it's a cute nose, and where the fuck did that come from - and he just doesn't...
"What are you, a fuckin' shrink?"
She shakes her head. "No. It's just pretty easy to see."
Easy to see. He's not sure he likes that.
He's also not sure she's wrong. Because he likes this. It's weird and unexpected and it's kind of uncomfortable, and it's also new and she keeps throwing newness at him before he has any time to adjust to the previous round, but the fact remains that she told him he wouldn't be sorry, and he's not.
He likes it. He does.
He makes a little hmph noise and looks away.
But she doesn't say anything else. She just sits in silence with him, and it's not uncomfortable silence. It's not even really silence. There's the water and the breeze, the whisper of leaves, a dove calling somewhere not too far away. Rustle of squirrels. They sit and the sun starts to lower, and at last he murmurs that he should take her home, so she nods. And he does. Still in silence, they head back through the ruins and up the slope to the truck, and the ride back to the farm is silent too.
At her suggestion he lets her out some way up the road, out of sight of the farm, so it'll look like she was out walking on her own. She doesn't seem to feel guilty about this, so he doesn't either. There was no wrong idea. They were just talking. Talking and then not talking, and it was nice.
He's halfway back to town when he goes into his pocket, opens his pack, and realizes what he's done.
The butt of the cigarette is in there, smoked down to the filter. He didn't toss it away there. He kept it.
He kept that place - her place - the way it is. He kept it special.
He flicks it out the window, and the rest of the way home he does a lot of thinking.