Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

that whole time, except to make sure that I
was gone. I walked back here from Eglinton."

That was five miles away, a good forty minute walk in the night and the
cold and the dark. Greg pried off his sneakers with his toes and then
pulled off his grey, squelching socks. "I couldn't find anyone who'd let
me use the toilet," he said, and Alan saw the stain on his pants.

He stood up and took Greg by the cold hand, as he had when they were
both boys, and said, "It's all right, Gord. We'll get you cleaned up and
changed and put you to bed, okay? Just put your stuff in the hamper in
the bathroom and I'll find you a change of clothes and make a couple
sandwiches, all right?"

And just as easy as that, George's spirit was tamed. He came out of the
shower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam found
for him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam's
bed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they were
reassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal with
raisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto.

"I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?" Alan said as he
poured himself a coffee.

They looked up at him. Ed's eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut.

"And you'll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks,
okay?"

Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put a
purple ten on top of it. "For the taxi to the Greyhound station," he
added.

#

They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the
apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off
his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing
the signs of their stay.

"Well," he said at length. "I should get going to the shop."

"Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could close
his lips again.

"Right," Adam said. "Well."

They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair,
already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and
cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets
absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.

"Well," Adam said.

They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesture
that left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited even
though -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them very
patiently indeed.

And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare
keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.

#

What I found in the cave,

(he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste
of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run
down the hillside)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how
hard to squeeze, whether to caress)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been there
for what he'd seen and heard)

What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her
skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her
red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her
small skull like a halo.

He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the
exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with
rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles of
shit here and there.

The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother
Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn't
find him under there.

Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. Even
Davey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone,
except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the uneven
floor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had run
dry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guano
and gunk sliming her basket.

I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that I
-- I --

I found that I couldn't see in the dark anymore. I'd never had a
moment's pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly,
the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountain
at all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and I
fell twice and hurt my head, here --

(he touched the goose egg he'd raised on his forehead)

and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn't sound right
and I couldn't hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stood
there with them in my arms --

(his hand came back bloody and he wiped it absently on the grass and
Mimi took hold of it)

Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I'd never find them
again. So I bundled them all up and carried them over my head and I
waded in and the water had never been so cold and had never felt so oily
and there was a smell to it, a stagnant smell.

I waded out and I stood and I shivered and I whispered, "Father?" and I
listened.

I heard the sound of the water I'd disturbed, lapping around my ears and
up on the shore. I smelled the sewage and oil smell, but none of the
habitual smells of my father: Clean water, coalface, sulfur, grass, and
lime.

I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the shore, and it
was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and
felt my way back to the summer cave and leaned against my mother and
waited to drip dry. I'd stepped in something soft that squished and
smelled between my mother and my father, and I didn't want to put on my
socks until I'd wiped it off, but I couldn't bring myself to wipe it on
the cave floor.

Marci's eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She'd been laid out with
so much care, I couldn't believe that Davey had had anything to do with
it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking
care.

I closed my eyes so that I wasn't looking into the terrible,
recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I
breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and
walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and
listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn't speaking. And the
smell was getting to me.

#

She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him
standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he'd
collapsed in.

"I need to get Georgie out of the car," he said. "I'm going to leave him
in the cave. It's right."

She bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I can help you with that," she said.

"I don't need help," he said lamely.

"I didn't say you did, but I can help anyway."

They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps
faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood
before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and
looked down.

The journey hadn't been good to Gregg. He'd come undone from his winding
sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor
of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale
or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.

Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it
around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung
to his fingers.

Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she'd been shaking
him for some time. "You can't do that here," she said. "Would you listen
to me? You can't do that here. Someone will see." She held something
up. His keys.

"I'll back it up to the trailhead," she said. "Close the trunk and wait
for me there."

She got behind the wheel and he sloped off to the trailhead and stood,
numbly, holding the lump on his forehead and staring at a rusted Coke
can in a muddy puddle.

She backed the car up almost to his shins, put it in park, and came
around to the trunk. She popped the lid and looked in and wrinkled her
nose.

"Okay," she said. "I'll get him covered and we'll carry him up the
hill."

"Mimi --" he began. "Mimi, it's okay. You don't need to go in there for
me. I know it's hard for you --"

She squeezed his hand. "I'm over it, Andy. Now that I know what's up
there, it's not scary any longer."

He watched her shoulders work, watched her wings work, as she wrapped up
his brother. When she was done, he took one end of the bundle and
hoisted it, trying to ignore the rain of skin and hair that shook off
over the bumper and his trousers.

"Up we go," she said, and moved to take the front. "Tell me when to
turn."

They had to set him down twice before they made it all the way up the
hill. The first time, they just stood in silence, wiping their cramped
hands on their thighs. The second time, she came to him and put her arm
around his shoulders and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek that felt
like a feather.

"Almost there?" she said.

He nodded and bent to pick up his end.

Mimi plunged through the cave mouth without a moment's hesitation and
they set him down just inside the entrance, near a pair of stained
cotton Y-fronts.

Alan waited for his heart to stop thudding and the sweat to cool on his
brow and then he kicked the underwear away as an afterthought.

"God," he said. She moved to him, put her arm around his shoulder.

"You're being brave," she said.

"God," he said again.

"Let it out, you know, if you want to."

But he didn't, he wanted to sit down. He moved to his mother's side and
leaned against her.

Mimi sat on her hunkers before him and took his hand and tried to tilt
his chin up with one finger, but he resisted her pull and she rose and
began to explore the cave. He heard her stop near Marci's skeleton for a
long while, then move some more. She circled him and his mother, then
opened her lid and stared into her hamper. He wanted to tell her not to
touch his mother, but the words sounded ridiculous in his head and he
didn't dare find out how stupid they sounded