The harmonica was silent: the bare-breasted girl had gone from her blanket.
“How’d you get that scratch?”
“Just an accident. With John.” She shrugged. “From one of those, actually.” She nodded toward his orchid. “It isn’t anything.”
He leaned to touch it, looked at her: She hadn’t moved. So he lay his forefinger on her shin, moved it down. The scab line ran under his callous like a tiny rasp.
She frowned. “It really isn’t anything.” Framed in heavy red, it was a gentle frown. “What’s that?” She pointed. “Around your wrist.”
His cuff had pulled up when he’d leaned.
He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin. “Something I found.” He wondered if she heard the question mark on his sentence, small as a period.
Her eyebrow’s movement said she had: which amused him.
The optical glass flamed over his knobby wrist.
“Where do you get it? I’ve seen several people wear that…kind of chain.”
He nodded. “I just found it.”
“Where?” Her gentle smile urged.
“Where did you get your scratch?”
Still smiling, she returned a bewildered look.
He had expected it. And he mistrusted it. “I…” and the thought resolved some internal cadence: “want to know about you!” He was suddenly and astonishingly happy. “Have you been here long? Where are you from? Mildred? Mildred what? Why did you come here? How long are you going to stay? Do you like Japanese food? Poetry?” He laughed. “Silence? Water? Someone saying your name?”
“Um…” He saw she was immensely pleased. “Mildred Fabian, and people do call me Milly, like Tak does. John just feels he has to be formal when new people come around. I was here at State University. But I come from Ohio…Euclid, Ohio?”
He nodded again.
“But State’s got such a damned good poli-sci department. Had, anyway. So I came here. And…” She dropped her eyes (brown, he realized with a half-second memory, as he looked at her lowered, corn-colored lashes—brown with a coppery backing, copper like her hair) “…I stayed.”
“You were here when it happened?”
“…yes.” He heard a question mark there bigger than any in the type-box.
“What…” and when he said, “…happened?” he didn’t want an answer.
Her eyes widened, dropped again; her shoulders sank; her back rounded. She reached toward his hand in its cage, lying between them on the bench.
As she took a shiny blade tip between two fingers, he was aware of his palm’s suspension in its harness.
“Does…I’ve always…well, could you make an…” She tugged the point to the side (he felt the pressure on his wrist and stiffened his hand), released it: A muffled Dmmmmm. “Oh.”
He was puzzled.
“I was wondering,” she explained, “if you could make it ring. Like an instrument. All the blades are different lengths. I thought if they made notes, perhaps you could…play them.”
“Blade steel? I don’t think it’s brittle enough. Bells and things are iron.”
She bent her head to the side.
“Things have to be brittle if they’re going to ring. Like glass. Knives are hard, sure; but they’re too flexible.”
She looked up after a moment. “I like music. I was going to major in music. At State. But the poli-sci department was so good. I don’t think I’ve seen one Japanese restaurant in Bellona, since I’ve been in school here. But there used to be several good Chinese ones…” Something happened in her face, a loosening, part exhaustion, part despair. “We’re doing the best we can, you know…?”
“What?”
“We’re doing the best we can. Here.”
He nodded a small nod.
“When it happened,” she said softly, “it was terrible.” “Terrible” was perfectly flat, the way he remembered a man in a brown suit once say “elevator.” It’s that tone, he thought, remembering when it had denuded Tak’s speech. She said: “We stayed. I stayed. I guess I felt I had to stay. I don’t know how long…I mean, I’m going to stay for. But we have to do something. Since we’re here, we have to.” She took a breath. A muscle leaped in her jaw. “You…?”
“Me what?”
“What do you like, Kidd? Someone saying your name?”
He knew it was innocent; and was annoyed anyway. His lips began a Well, but only breath came.
“Silence?”
Breath became a hiss; the hiss became, “…sometimes.”
“Who are you? Where are you from?”
He hesitated, and watched her eyes pick something from it:
“You’re afraid because you’re new here…I think. I’m afraid, I think, because I’ve been here…an awfully long time!” She looked around the campsite.
Two long-haired youngsters stood by the cinderblocks. One held up his hands, either to warm them, or just to feel heat.
It is a warm morning. I do not recognize any protection in this leafy blister. There is no articulation in the juncture of object and shadow, no fixed angle between fuel and flame. Where would they put their shelters, foundations sunk on ash; doors and windows sinking in cinders? There is nothing else to trust but what warms.
Mildred’s lips parted, her eyes narrowed. “You know what John did? I think it was brave, too. We had just finished building that fireplace; there were only a few of us here, then. Somebody was going to light it with a cigarette lighter. But John said, wait; then went off all the way to Holland Lake. That was when the burning was much worse than it is now. And he brought back a brand—an old, dried, burning stick. In fact he had to transfer the fire to several other sticks on the way back. And with that fire—” she nodded where one of the youngsters was now poking at the logs with a broken broom-handle—“he lit ours.” The other waited with a chunk of wood in his arms. “I think that was very brave. Don’t you?” The chunk fell. Sparks geysered through the grate, higher than the lowest branches.
“Hey, Milly!”
Sparks whirled, and he wondered why they all spoke so loud with so many sleeping.
“Milly! Look what I found.”
She had put on a blue workshirt, still unbuttoned. In one hand was her harmonica, in the other a spiral notebook.
“What is it?” Milly called back.
As she passed the furnace, she swung the notebook through the sparks; they whipped into Catherine wheels, and sank. “Does it belong to anybody around here? It’s burned. On the cover.”
She sat with it, between them, shoulders hunched, face in a concentrated scowl. “It’s somebody’s exercise book.” The cardboard was flaky black at one corner. Heat had stained half the back.
“What’s in it?” Milly asked.
She shrugged. Her shoulder and her hip moved on his. He slid down the bench to give her room, considered sliding back, but, instead, picked up the newspaper and opened it—blades tore one side—to the second page.
“Who ripped out the first pages?” Milly asked.
“That’s the way I found it.”
“But you can see the torn edges, still inside the wire.”
“Neat handwriting.”
“Can you make out what it says?”
“Not in this light. I read some down by the park lamp. Let’s take it over by the fire.”
The page he stared at flickered with backlight, the print on both sides visible. All he could make out was the Gothic masthead:
BELLONA TIMES
And below it:
ROGER CALKINS.
Editor and Publisher.
He closed the paper.
The girls had gone to the fireplace.
He stood, left the paper on the bench, stepped, one after another, over three sleeping bags and a blanket roll. “What does it say?”
Her harmonica was still in one fist.
Her hair was short and thick. Her eyes, when she looked at him directly, were Kelly green. Propping the book on the crook of her arm, with her free hand she turned back the cardboard cover for him to see the first page. Remnants of green polish flecked her nails.