Indigo Springs Read online

  “But you did this before,” she mumbled.

  “That’s right. I initiated my cousin Ron, years ago.”

  “And he died of that sick thing.”

  “I thought becoming a spring-tapper might cure his leukemia. No such luck, though. I tried another fellow too, but he had a bad accident. I’d been hoping my little sister…well, she ran off East with that fellow.”

  “That’s why it has to be me,” Astrid said.

  “But, see, I’m better at initiating…better than my grandmother, than anyone.” Dad stroked her cheek. “It’s gonna be fine, Bundle. Third time’s the charm.”

  She shuddered. Dad was careful not to touch her scalp with the mixture of vitagua and tears, simply drawing it through her hair. The combing brought with it a sense of hollowness, awareness of unfilled spaces inside her body, vaults of room between her molecules.

  She heard ice groaning, a sound of dripping…and below that a murmur that sounded like her name.

  The fear dissolved. “Can I make a chantment now?”

  “I’m not quite finished, Bun.” Taking the nail clippers, Dad chopped off a few strands of her hair, laying them on the kerchief. He took a fingernail clipping too, then handed her a small pin.

  Astrid poked her finger. A single drop of blood welled out; she dribbled it on the fabric.

  “When you’ve done something once, you get ideas for next time.” Digging in his pocket, he produced two white nubs.

  “Are those my baby teeth?”

  She must have scowled, for her father grinned. “I paid the Tooth Fairy good money for ’em, I promise.”

  She giggled. Dad added the teeth, poured the last of the tears onto the kerchief, and pulled its corners up into a bundle. He wound another strand of Astrid’s hair around a strong piece of twine, using it to bind the kerchief shut. Then he pierced his own finger. Vitagua flowed out.

  “Watch,” he said. The fabric folded in on itself as he chanted it, becoming hard and blue like stone, a lump as wrinkled as a walnut or a brain. “Now we get rid of it.”

  “Where?”

  “In the creek.”

  The memory cut off there, cleanly truncated upon the two of them leaving the attic. Astrid ran out back to the edge of the ravine, looking for a path. When she found it, she pushed both hands down through twigs and weeds, groping for soil.

  There—she remembered eight-year-old Astrid walking solemnly to a sheer edge of the path.

  It had been cold and snowy; her breath hung in the air. She had thrown the bundle, underhand. It arced up, maybe five feet, and then tumbled down the incline, leaving small dents in the snowpack. When it reached the iced-over thread of the creek, it punched down, like a fist going through drywall. A tremor ran through the ground. A fall of slush from the snowbank tumbled down, covering the small hole in the ice.

  “You’re done.” Albert sighed, clearly relieved, and wrapped her in a hug. “Thank you, Bundle.”

  “Can I make a chantment now?” The distant grumbles were friendly; she wanted to please them and Dad too.

  “First things first—let’s see if the spirit water will mind you.” Young Astrid watched as he squeezed a drop of vitagua into the golden bowl. “Hold your hand over it.”

  Staring at the blue droplet so hard her eyes hurt, Astrid obeyed. Her fingers tingled, and she felt as if the bead of vitagua was all but in her grasp, like a watermelon seed sheathed in slippery fruit juice.

  “Push it around inside the bowl,” Albert said. “Don’t worry too much if it won’t go the first time.”

  Easy, so easy, one of the grumbles whispered. Imagine the spaces inside yourself compressing.

  “Hop, hop,” Astrid crooned. The bead of vitagua shot up, over the lip of the bowl, and struck a nodding, snow-covered daffodil.

  “Um, okay.” Albert laughed, looking for the droplet and seeming only slowly to realize how far it had gone. He darted to rip up the flower. Its dirty roots protruded from the bulb, writhing like worms, tinged with blue and growing longer in his grip. “What’d I say about first times?”

  He was uneasy, the adult Astrid thought, remembering his expression. A hand on her shoulder drew her still further from the mystic reverie. She wobbled, off balance, and Jacks steadied her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Touching things,” she said. “Remembering.”

  “Get anything useful?”

  She beamed. “Nice things…about Dad.”

  He tweaked her nose. “I’m glad. Listen, I had an urge to roust you and…maybe go somewhere?”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno.” Jacks held the watch to his ear, as if listening to it tick. “Hiking? Biking? I’m still getting the hang of this thing.”

  “There’s a hang? I thought it dragged you around like a dog on a leash.”

  “Woof. You want to come, or not?”

  She glanced at the house.

  “Come on, Sahara’s helping Mrs. Skye sort out the garbage in her basement. Fixing her, you might say.”

  “I might say helping her out, being neighborly.”

  “Whatever. Let’s go up Yellowtail Trail.”

  “My bike brakes are shot.”

  “I fixed ’em.” He raised his hands, showing off smudges of oil and dust. “You’re tuned and ready to go.”

  Minutes later they were pedaling down Main Street, driving past the brick façade of the courthouse. The building was undergoing reconstruction, an earthquake-prevention measure mandated, despite local disapproval, by the State. Beds of flowers were blooming along the streets. People everywhere looked happy to be outdoors.

  “Look, there’s Mrs. Kale.” She waved to the history teacher who had taught them both during Astrid’s abortive attempt to return to high school. “Reader, reader?”

  Jacks laughed—it was a game they hadn’t played in years. “Olive mostly sells her true crime books.”

  Astrid scanned the square for someone else they knew, finally pointing at the aging dentist.

  “Doc Liam? He reads novels about animals. Call of the Wild, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s right, we’ve done him before. Amy Burkette?”

  “Magazines only. Makeup, celebrities, diet fads.”

  They stopped at the lights and Astrid’s gaze fell on a woman who was crossing in front of the truck. “Her?”

  “Newcomer. If she’s been to Olive’s, it’s since I stopped working in the bookstore.” Jacks leaned sharply to one side, stamping a foot down. His boot came down on the leash of a terrier on the run from its owner.

  “Guess the magic watch has done its good deed for the day,” Astrid said, after he’d handed back the dog. “Is that all it wanted? Should we go home?”

  He shook his head. “Turn right at the Grand Hotel.”

  “I thought you said Yellowtail Trail?”

  “Change of plan.” They crossed onto a secondary highway, starting uphill. With every mile the trees crept closer to the ditch, while fences, power poles, and other signs of human occupation—everything but the road itself—began to thin out. They were well out of town when Astrid saw the bottle-factory sign.

  Jacks’s body bunched, as if he was going to put on a burst of speed and pass the turnoff. Then his tire slid, and he had to brake.

  Astrid stopped beside him. “I guess we’re here?”

  “I guess,” Jacks grunted. They pushed the bikes to the gate and he punched a code into its electronic lock. The latch clunked.

  “Chief gave you a code?” Astrid asked.

  “Last time he started in on me about coming to work here.” He frowned at the two-story brick factory. “I keep telling him to sell the place and retire.”

  Stubbornness is a family trait, Astrid thought. “Aren’t you afraid we’ll bump into him?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely, the way my luck’s running.” Even so, he didn’t object when Astrid chose to push her bike all the way around to the back, out of sight of the road.

  Peeling off
her helmet, she eyed the building. oregon bottleworks, est. 1812, was painted on a sign hung at roof level; the letters looked newly retouched.

  “We going in?”

  “That I don’t have a key for, but there’s a ladder to the roof. Want to see?” He trotted to the corner, peeking around in a way that suggested he was more spooked than he’d admit by the prospect of seeing his father.

  Astrid followed, expecting to find a fire escape. Instead Jacks was halfway up an aluminum ladder with i.s.f.d. painted on every other rung. Up top, she found a tar-and-gravel roof punctuated by humps of moss. Rain-bleached playing cards, beer bottles, and poker chips were scattered among the rocks. Jacks lifted a blue tarp that lay flat in a corner, revealing a card table underneath.

  “Dad has poker games up here in the summer sometimes.”

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I knew you played, but I didn’t know he does.”

  “Dad was the one who taught me. Manly arts are required learning for the Glade men.”

  “Poker’s manly, huh? But you don’t play together, you and him.”

  “Not in ages,” he agreed, letting the tarp fall.

  Astrid nudged a beer bottle with her toe. Much of what Jacks did was an obvious reaction to the Chief’s values: embracing his mother’s peacenik politics, refusing to hunt or fish. A natural athlete, he had shunned team sports, depriving his father of a football or baseball star to brag about. Instead he favored uncompetitive pursuits like hiking and rock climbing. His friends were all good guys, but they too might have been hand-picked to annoy the Chief. Unemployed stoners, Lee had called them once.

  Unemployed stoners. She was suddenly angry. Woolly-headed nature freaks. That ol’ drunk Al Lethewood.

  “What do you think of the view?” Jacks said.

  “We’re on the Bluffs,” she answered, surprised. A stand of wood sheltered the factory road. It hid the near side of town, the part that was tucked against the low edge of Indigo Creek and the ravine. Across the ravine the land rose again, and Astrid could see the steeples of the Catholic and Baptist churches, the courthouse with its scaffold-encrusted dome, the beige-and-yellow block of the high school. A tall rocket-shaped slide poked up above a line of maple trees, marking a playground where Albert had taken her as a kid. Flags drooped from poles here and there; the breeze was too gentle to unfurl them. Blue mail trucks hunkered around Ev’s post office, which in turn was dwarfed by the fire hall’s four-story training tower.

  “Why did you quit the Fire Department, Jacks?”

  He kicked a bottle over the edge of the roof. “You ever wonder how the town can afford six firefighters and a truck? The Sheriff’s Department has two deputies.”

  “Never considered it,” she admitted.

  “I wondered. I was in the fire hall, where the records live, so I had a look. I found out the building was bequeathed to the volunteer fire squad of the day—not the town, as you’d expect—in the eighteen hundreds.”

  “So?”

  “That was right after their chief dropped the investigation into the fire at that Native potlatch.”

  He was watching her face carefully, trying to look neutral, but Astrid could sense his tension.

  “Okay, I admit it’s suspicious. Who did the bequeathing?”

  Right answer—he relaxed a hair. “The name on the records was Lionel Sparks.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  He pointed up at the fire hall. “He owned that hill and all the timber rights for fifty miles in every direction. Pillar of the community. The sort of founding father libraries and highways get named after.”

  “Like I said, never heard of him.”

  “I went to Kettle Falls and Wallowa. He’s all over their historical records. Ran a lumber mill, hired hundreds, blah blah blah. Union-buster too—he had this crew of thugs who burned out a labor meeting once.”

  “Burned out. You think they set the potlatch fire?”

  “It’s suggestive, isn’t it?”

  “Jacks, I’m having trouble seeing why the Chief would care about any of this. It can’t affect the department’s reputation now.”

  “The story goes that twenty years after the potlatch fire, one of the survivors started making trouble. Said she could prove the fire was arson. She disappeared.”

  “Which still sounds like ancient history.”

  “My great-great-great-grandfather Glade gave Lionel and his firebugs an alibi for the night this witness vanished. Sparks probably had her killed—”

  “Or maybe just run out of town,” Astrid said.

  “Either way. The great-Grandchief lied, and ten years later Lionel died and left the department an endowment.”

  “Endowment?”

  “Enough to run the department pretty much forever, salaries and all…as long as they invested well and raised money to keep up with inflation and capital costs.”

  “It was a payoff?” Astrid asked.

  “Huge payoff.”

  “That is awfully ugly.” She scratched her head. “Still, Jacks—”

  “What?” His voice was sharp.

  “You know your dad isn’t my favorite person, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I understand why you’d be mad—”

  “Try sickened, Astrid.”

  “Sickened, then, if your ancestors covered up a bunch of murders and got paid for it.”

  “Are you saying that’s not the logical conclusion?”

  “I’m saying what could the Chief do about it now? It’s over a century ago.”

  “He’s damned well making sure it stays buried in the past, that’s what.”

  She slipped an arm around him and squeezed. “Albert and I weren’t speaking much before he died. I don’t know what happened—”

  “Maybe if you keep gardening, you’ll find out.”

  “Maybe. My point is that if anything happens to Lee, you could find yourself wishing—”

  “Dad’s indestructible.”

  “He runs into burning buildings for a living.”

  “For fun,” he grunted.

  “As for the bottle factory, if he wants you to have it, so what? You could turn the place into studios. The view…I had no idea you could see so far.”

  “You sure you haven’t been out here before? Your amnesia…”

  “It’s not amnesia,” she said, letting her hands rest on the roof. She felt no sense of her past, but as the metal flashing warmed under her skin, she did feel a thread of something else. “It’s an old building….”

  “You can tell that just by looking,” Jacks said, and the sensation faded.

  She brushed dust off her palms. “This is neat, Jacks, but I don’t see anything lucky around here. Are you sure it was the magic watch that brought us?”

  “Must’ve—I hate this place.” Picking up a weathered tree branch, he staggered around the rooftop, pretending to dowse for water. “Did you ever want to move away?”

  “Leave Indigo Springs? No.”

  “I don’t either, you know. Want to leave.”

  “What about school?”

  “My scholarship applications keep going astray,” he said. “Maybe school’s not meant to be.”

  “Meant to be,” she echoed skeptically.

  “If you believe in magic, why not destiny?”

  “You make your destiny,” she said.

  “Is that your philosophy or did Sahara give it to you?” Avoiding her sharp glance, Jacks hurled the stick, bouncing it off the factory flagpole. “Sorry.”

  “What is your problem with her?”

  “She dumped you,” he said.

  “We weren’t ever—”

  “I saw you kissing,” he interrupted, “before she left.”

  Astrid shut her eyes, letting the memory in just for an instant. Sahara in her Alpine Princess dress, the tiara on her head. The first kiss nothing more than a triumphant smack aimed at Astrid’s cheek and coming square on the lips instead. Shared glee at Sahara’s havin
g won the crown, nothing more.

  Mischief had risen in Sahara’s eyes. She’d kissed Astrid again…and suddenly they were making out. All her hopeless fantasies about necking with her best friend had come true. Her hands wrapped around Sahara’s waist and their tongues slid together. Astrid’s imagination leapt to the end of her favorite daydream, the one about the two of them living together. The rest of her body stayed closer to the moment, singing with desire as her hands inched up the bodice of the ballgown dress, toward her breasts….

  But Mark Clumber’s voice had rumbled up the hallway, and when Astrid tried to pull Sahara away, to flee in the opposite direction, the mood passed.

  Sahara had straightened her crown. “Wanna pick this up tomorrow?” she’d said. “I ought to give someone his walking papers.”

  “Yes,” Astrid had said. “Oh, yes.”

  But the next day Sahara was gone.

  “She didn’t mean anything by it,” was all she could say now.

  “Actually, Astrid, that’s my point,” Jacks said. “People were like toys to her even before she could use the magic mermaid to make them into her little puppets.”

  “I don’t see you complaining about the lucky watch.”

  “I’m not using the watch to warp people’s brains.”

  “Jacks, the mermaid may be the only thing standing between Ma and a nervous breakdown. And it burns energy, just like the other chantments. Sahara won’t…”

  Won’t what—start a cult? The grumbles mocked her.

  “She’s not going to start a religion with it,” she said, feeling shivery and untruthful.

  “I suppose you think she won’t split town either.”

  “Sahara went to college, Jacks. It’s not a crime, it’s what’s you do. Grow up, go to school. She’s back now—”

  “She came because she had nowhere to go. She’d be gone if not for the magic.”

  “She’s been hurt. She needs to feel safe.”

  “She needs to feel like the center of someone’s universe, Astrid, and you indulge her. Sooner or later she’ll find someone else to worship her, and then…”