This Census-Taker(27)

She looked taller and underfed and much older to me. She looked drawn so far from the bridge. But she smiled, and it was not too wary, and she waved me down to where she waited.

I thought of the jackal slinking away from our reunion. But I still couldn’t move my feet further down the hill, so I raised my arms and, deciding she could overcome herself, beckoned her urgently in turn to come up a little more.

—

Another twenty steps for her and she struggled as if there wasn’t enough air.

I whispered, “See?”

When she reached me, first she shook my hand as if we were adults, and I liked that. Then she hugged me in a rough way, hesitated and did it again, so hard I let out sounds.

“You’re here!” I said into her clothes. “How did you know to find me?”

“I heard something,” she said. Her voice was sluggish. “There was a shot. Right near here. I thought that might mean something. I got thinking you might come down.”

She was lying. She must have been here when the shot came to know it had been close, which meant she’d been there a long time. I suspected then that she’d been up night after night, as far as, according to the constraints she’d laid, she was able, to wait and hope to find me. I’d come at last.

She shivered on the rocks and spread a blanket on the dirt for us and sat me down beside her. She had food for me. Sugary brittle. Vegetables you could eat raw. I gnawed them.

Eventually I said, “That boy said Drobe was gone.”

We stopped eating. She didn’t look stricken. She didn’t look anything except calm and unhappy. “People go,” she said.

“Why did he go?” I said. “He’d never just go.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t come by you? I thought he’d come for you. What if he did, though? Maybe he tried.”

I heard sniffing: our hungry watcher had come back with a companion, it sounded like. We weren’t frightened.

“You know,” Samma said. “Maybe he did. Maybe he just went.”

Boys and girls might become more solitary thieves. They might find a way or a person with whom to become some sort of adult. They might antagonize the wrong someone and disappear.

“Maybe it was the police,” she said. “He kept telling them to take your father. Maybe they took him instead.”

“What about his friend?” I said. “He was waiting for someone in the picture-house. Not just you, I mean. Someone not from the town.”

She inclined her head.

“When we went back to that hall,” she said, “when your father took you, someone had been there and took everything away except what Drobe had.” I remembered him holding that sealed packet we couldn’t read.

“You know everyone in the bridgetown,” I said. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I never saw Drobe’s friend, either, the girl he told you about.” She paused. “Whoever it is has come to town now, they find you, you can’t find them—.” Her voice was low.

She looked away from me. “I can’t come back for a bit,” she said.

I didn’t answer. Just watched her and tried not to let my lips quiver.

She told me she had the others to think of too, especially now. “It ain’t like I could keep coming back,” she said as if I was arguing with her. “And it ain’t like Drobe’s coming back.”

She gave me a knife with a blade that folded into its handle. “If he comes for you,” she said. She stabbed the air to show me.

She told me a few quick stories.

“I wanted to give you those papers,” she said at last. “The ones Drobe found.”

“Why?”

“You can read, can’t you? But if he still had them he must have took them with him.”

She hesitated. She eyed me and I persuaded her to say whatever it was that I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to say.

“There was a woman,” she told me. “Or a girl.”

Days after Drobe had gone, days since she’d seen him. Late in the evening, Samma standing looking out of the window of her second-favorite bridge-top house as if to discern where he’d gone. She’d fallen back in shock as a face swooped in to stare at her from the dark.

“She was like shadow herself,” Samma said. “She whispered something. It was hard to understand her. She had a young voice. I think she wasn’t older than me, or not by much.”

“Was it a ghost?” I said. Samma shrugged.

“What did she say?” I said.

“Like I say, it was hard to tell. I don’t even think she was looking at me.” In turn Samma did not look at me; her eyes were fixed in recollection. “Like she was looking behind me into the room for someone else. None of the others saw her. She sounded proper upset. I think she said, ‘Where is Drobe? Where’s the repeal?’ Then she was gone and I don’t even know,” she said.

Samma took a big bottle from her bag. She gave it to me. I could barely lift its green glass.

“He left that,” she said. “Drobe went to get it then left it. I think it’s for you.”

In the bottom of the bottle was a scaly scrap and discolored and broken animal bones.

Samma gave me a fast and surly hug without looking at me. I wanted to say anything to her, anything so she’d stay longer. I felt sorry for her as well as for me and, all over again, I didn’t want to be alone on the hill with my father. But I couldn’t stop her.