This Census-Taker(20)

She said to you, “Is anyone coming?”

“I think someone was on the hill.”

Some other gang children looked up from where they lay at the quiet caucus. Drobe and Samma pointed them back to sleep and they pretended to obey.

Samma leaned out and scanned the bridge. A light rain now fell. “Come on,” she whispered to you. “Come on right now.”

Watched by those silent comrades, Samma and Drobe took you to your dismay back out into the night. You could see the lines of the country now, rising into quickly ebbing darkness, the hills’ shoulders coming visible. Each streetlamp wore a corona.

Your guides surprised you. They took you left, above the bats’ arches, to cross the bridge. Past that dark cart, as absolute in its aspect as any rock, into the southern half of the town. A street slanted up. They took you higher. Your skin was wet.

It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers you noticed may as well have been dispassionate observers from some austere alternative, so opaque were their regards. Destitutes lying but not asleep under leaves in a graveyard, marking you from their locations, cozied up to the railings as if to give the dead their room. In a chair by her open doorway a woman waited for the sun and nodded as your escorts took you past. You cried out because something terrible clawed from her mouth, a dark tangle, as if something hookfooted was emerging from her and she didn’t care.

“Hush,” Drobe said. “We have to be quick and quiet.”

To the east there are beetles the size of hands and their shells tell fortunes. If you boil them you can chew their dead legs, as did the woman, and suck out narcotic blood. But you didn’t know that then.

“Ah now,” whispered Samma. She spoke in Drobe’s ear and he thought a moment and whispered back and her eyes widened and she nodded.

Perhaps someone was behind you, glancingly visible as the town came into its gray self. You tried to keep watch of any watcher. Drobe yanked you so you lost your grip on Samma’s hand and he pulled you into alleys, and you reached back but Drobe was too strong and fast, and Samma kept on in plain sight on the main way while you left her and headed into the snarls of the south side.

“She’ll come for us, she’ll come,” Drobe said, patting down the hands with which you reached back in her direction. “She’s getting things you’ll need. Come with me.”

Need? It was light so quickly. Drobe rushed you in through the windows of a barely musty cellar. From there, when the rain slowed, through a fence of barrel hoops, by a junction past two big men in butcher’s aprons who put down their tools at the sight of you and came after you yelling, chase instinct provoked by your speed.

In a foundation pit, the weeds were thick so you knew the building was stillborn. You hid while the men hunted. When they were gone, Drobe sniffed as if he could smell empty places. This early the sky looked like an ash version of itself. The air already smelt of diesel and there was smoke to run through.

“Samma’ll bring what you need to go,” he said. Then in a rush he said, “Hey, maybe I’ll come too.”

I didn’t want to go. “And Samma?” I said.

“Well, she can’t, can she?” he mumbled. “She can’t just walk out, can she?”

A big windowless brick hall rose on slanting foundations. Drobe pulled aside corrugated metal and led us into a dusty, still room, where water and wan light angled through the ceiling holes. The floor was deep in bird shit and down. It sloped gently to a stage and a wall of ragged canvas. Things roosted.

“It used to be a picture-house,” Drobe said. I imagined what that might be. “No one’s here,” he said. “Good,” he said.

He hallooed and got no answer.

“Whose house is this?” I said.

“No one’s,” he said. He thought that over. “Sort of.”

We steamed. He went to the stage and lifted a flap of canvas as gently as if it were ripped skin. Behind it was wadded-up cloth and a pile of other things.

On his knees, Drobe picked through someone’s hide. He showed no surprise to find a box of papers covered with ink, some kept pristinely flat, some torn and crumpled, some printed, some handwritten. He touched them. Carefully he examined a stiff envelope banded with red, the remains of its seal visible. I went to pick something up too but he stopped me, made me lean over and look without touching. They weren’t written in my language, and Drobe couldn’t read.

“All right, let’s wait,” he said at last. “Until she comes.”

“Samma,” I said.

“Samma,” he said, “or who these belong to.”

—

There were stairs to where bricks were missing, so you could lie on your tummy and look down at the street, to where a woman prodded a donkey past, dragging a big machine.

“You want to know who lives here for the moment?” Drobe said. “A traveler. I met her.”

“Where?” I said.

“In the streets. She’s a visitor. I ain’t seen her here but she told me this is where she was and this stuff’s hers.”

He pointed at the papers.

“She had a boss, but things went wrong. He thinks he’s done for her but he don’t know her. Don’t know she’s here, watching. She could get away and keep moving. She came here. He took her away from something bad, years gone, so it was like she owed him, she told me. It was all right for a long time, till it weren’t, till she could read all the paperwork and realized things were off.”