He swore softly, shaking damp hair from his eyes. Against his chest the amulet bounced, and he steadied it, grimacing, before heading upstream.
The bug-ridden sign swayed at the railroad station: Kamensic Village. Beneath it stood a single bench, straddled by the same kid Andrew remembered from childhood: misshapen helmet protecting his head, starry topaz eyes widening when he saw Andrew pass the station.
“Hey,” the boy yelled, just as if he remembered Andrew from years back. “HEY!”
“Hey, Buster.” Andrew waved without stopping.
He passed the Kamensic Village Pharmacy, where Mr. Weinstein still doled out egg creams; Hayden’s Delicatessen with its great vat of iced tea, lemons bobbing like toy turtles in the amber liquid. The library, open four days a week (Closed Today). That was where he had seen puppet shows, and heard an astronaut talk once, years ago when he and his mother still came up in the summer to rent the cottage. And, next to the library, the seventeenth-century courthouse, now a museum.
“Fifty cents for students.” The same old lady peered suspiciously at Andrew’s damp hair and red-rimmed eyes. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“Visiting,” Andrew mumbled as she dropped the quarters into a little tin box. “I got relatives here.”
He shook his head at her offer to walk him through the rooms.
“I been here before,” he explained. He tried to smile. “On vacation.”
The courtroom smelled the same, of lemon polish and the old lady’s Chanel No.5. The Indian Display waited where it always had, in a whitewashed corner of the courtroom where dead bluebottles drifted like lapis beads. Andrew’s chest tightened when he saw it. His hand closed around the amulet on its string.
A frayed map of the northern county starred with arrowheads indicated where the tribes had settled. Ax blades and skin scrapers marked their battles. A deer hide frayed with moth holes provided a backdrop for the dusty case. From beneath the doeskin winked a vole’s skull.
At the bottom of the case rested a small printed board. Andrew leaned his head against the glass and closed his eyes, mouthing the words without reading them as he fingered the stone.
… members of the Tankiteke tribe of the Wappinger Confederacy of Mohicans: Iroquois warriors of the Algonquin Nation …
When he opened his eyes they fixed upon an object at the bottom of the case: a carved gray stone in the image of a tiny animal with long eyes and smooth sharp teeth.
Shaman’s Talisman [Animistic Figure]
The Tankiteke believed their shamans could change shape at will
and worshipped animal spirits.
From the narrow hallway leading to the front room came the creak of a door opening, the answering hiss of women’s laughter.
“Some boy,” Andrew heard the old lady reply. He bit his lip. “Said he had relatives, but I think he’s just skipping school … ”
Andrew glanced around the courtroom, looking for new exhibits, tools, books. There was nothing. No more artifacts; no other talisman. He slipped through a door leading to an anteroom and found there another door leading outside. Unlocked; there would be no locked doors in Kamensic Village. In the orchard behind the courthouse, he scooped up an early apple and ate it, wincing at the bitter flesh. Then he headed for the road that led to The Fallows.”
In the dreams, Howell walked on the moon …
The air he breathed was the same stale air, redolent of urine and refrigeration, that had always filled the capsules. Yet he was conscious in the dreams that it tasted different on the moon, filtered through the spare silver ducts coiled on his back. Above him the sky loomed sable, so cold that his hands tingled inside heated gloves at the sight of it: as he had always known it would be, algid, black, speared with stars that pulsed and sang as they never did inside the capsule. He lifted his eyes then and saw the orbiter passing overhead. He raised one hand to wave, so slowly it seemed he might start to drift into the stark air in the pattern of that wave. And then the voice crackled in his ears, clipped words echoing phrases from memoranda and newscasts. His own voice, calling to Howell that it was time to return.
That was when he woke, shivering despite quilts and Festus snoring beside him. A long while he lay in bed, trying to recall the season—winter, surely, because of the fogged windows.
But no. Beneath the humming cough of air-conditioning, cicadas droned. Howell struggled to his feet.
Behind the bungalow the woods shimmered, birch and ancient oaks silvered by the moonlight streaming from the sky. Howell opened the casement and leaned out. Light and warmth spilled upon him as though the moonlight were warm milk, and he blinked and stretched his hands to catch it.
Years before, during the final two moon landings, Howell had been the man who waited inside the orbiter.
Long ago, before the actors and writers and wealthy children of the exurbs migrated to Kamensic Village, a colony of earnest socialists settled upon the scrubby shores of the gray water named Muscanth. Their utopia had shattered years before. The cozy stage and studios rotted and softly sank back into the fen. But the cottages remained, some of them still rented to summer visitors from the city. Andrew had to ask in Scotts Corners for directions—he hadn’t been here since he was ten—and was surprised by how much longer it took to reach The Fallows on foot. No autos passed, Only a young girl in jeans and flannel shirt, riding a black horse, her braids flying as her mount cantered by him. Andrew laughed. She waved, grinning, before disappearing around a kink in the birchy lane.
With that sharp laugh, something fell from Andrew: as if grief could be contained in small cold breaths, and he had just exhaled. He noticed for the first time sweat streaking his chest, and unbuttoned his shirt. The shirt smelled stale and oily, as though it had absorbed the city’s foul air, its grimy clouds of exhaust and factory smoke.
But here the sky gleamed slick and blue as a bunting’s wing, Andrew laughed again, shook his head so that sky and leaves and scattering birds all flickered in a bright blink. And when he focused again upon the road, the path snaked there: just where he had left it four years ago, carefully cleared of curling ferns and moldering birch,
I’m here, he thought as he stepped shyly off the dirt road, glancing back to make certain no car or rider marked where he broke trail. In the distance glittered the lake. A cloud of red admiral butterflies rose from a crab-apple stump and skimmed beside him along the overgrown path Andrew ran, laughing. He was home.
The abandoned cottage had grown larger with decay and disuse. Ladders of nectarine fungi and staghorn lichen covered it from eaves to floor, and between this patchwork straggled owls’ nests and the downy homes of deer mice.
The door did not give easily It was unlocked, but swollen from snow and rain. Andrew had to fling himself full force against the timbers before they groaned and relented. Amber light streamed from chinks and cracks in the walls, enough light that ferns and pokeweed grew from clefts in the pine floor. Something scurried beneath the room’s single chair, Andrew turned in time to see a deer mouse, still soft in its gray infant fur, disappear into the wall.
There had been other visitors as well. In the tiny bedroom, Andrew found fox scat and long rufous hairs clinging to the splintered cedar walclass="underline" by the front door, rabbit pellets. Mud daubers had plastered the kitchen with their fulvous cells. The linoleum was scattered with undigested feathers and the crushed spines of voles. He paced the cottage, yanking up pokeweed and tossing it into the corner, dragged the chair into the center of the room and sat there a long time. Finally, he took a deep breath, opened his knapsack and withdrew a bottle of gin pilfered from his mother’s bureau, still nearly full. He took a swig, shut his eyes and waited for it to steam through his throat to his head.