The Meq (13 page)

“You need to know for what?”

“To start a new life. Right here.”

I turned in a circle and looked around at where we were. I saw nothing but wealth couched in castles of abstinence, discipline, and propriety—very conservative, very Victorian.

“Doing what?” I asked and Carolina looked right at me. Her eyes were bright and her freckles stood out.

“I thought about it, Z. It came to me the other day when I read in the newspaper that there’s going to be two national political conventions in St. Louis this summer, and Union Station’s got more railroads coming in and out than any other point in the United States, and ‘old money’ like their vices close by, they don’t like the risk in risqué, and then, at the opera, I was sure of it; I studied the faces around me and I knew,
I knew,
this was the right place.”

“The right place for what?”

“A whorehouse.”

I looked around again. “Here? In this house? On this street?”

“Yes. That’s the beauty of it. What they can’t get at home, they can get right next door, or at least down the street, or down the street from someone they know. Private. Expensive. Very discreet and filled with beautiful, intelligent women who
want
to be there, not
have
to be there.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“Yes.”

“And Solomon agrees?”

“Yes.”

“Does Thomas Eliot know he’s going to be living in a red-light district?”

She laughed and said, “No, and don’t tell him either. He’ll think we’re the Muses. And we will be.”

We got back on our bicycles and rode until we turned on McPherson and stopped for chocolate at Bissinger’s. I was still thinking about her plan, seeing only disadvantages. “Seriously, Carolina, is this what you want to do? It is against the law, you know?”

“It’s what I know how to do, Z. It’s what Georgia and I learned. I can’t just quit because Georgia’s gone and it’s illegal. I never make anyone do anything they don’t want to do and I won’t allow anyone around who does. I’ll have Li close by to make sure of that. I’ll also bet ‘the law’ is our best customer.”

“I guess it is better than having babies.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Z. Just because I’m for one thing doesn’t mean I’m against another.”

“I’m sorry, that was stupid.”

“I love babies,” she said.

There was an awkward moment that passed between us. It happened rarely, but it did happen; the unspoken knowledge and fact that our difference wasn’t just in our remarks, it was deeper in the blood, further back in time. It was a difference that we ignored, but would forever keep us apart, a difference we could not change. Carolina used the tension to tell me more.

“Another thing, Z. I know you’ve been thinking about that evil one, that one that did those things to Mrs. Bennings and Georgia. I want you to stop. I want you to let it go and remember Georgia, not avenge her. I know Sailor wants you to do something, not about that, but about something else. I don’t know what it is, but I think you ought to do it. For your own good.”

Her words hit me hard. Inside, underneath everything else, I knew she was right. I was changing, but all I was really changing was one obsession for another. In my heart of hearts, chasing Sailor had turned into chasing the Fleur-du-Mal, and for all the wrong reasons. I knew she was right about Sailor too. I knew he wanted me to do something, but he hadn’t mentioned his “offer” since that first day.

“I hope you have lots of babies,” I said, “and I hereby bestow Mama’s baseball glove upon your firstborn.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

We rode our bicycles back the way we came and turned them in at Forest Park. We walked back to the Statler Hotel in the twilight, a long walk, but a good one at that time of year. The next day Sailor made his “offer.”

We took the train west out of Union Station to the Meramec Highlands, an amusement park that the Frisco Railroad had a direct line to, hauling five hundred passengers a day. Once there, you could ride horses, pedal bicycles, row boats, or swim in the Meramec River. “Privacy in Public” was their motto.

Solomon, Carolina, and Ray chose horseback riding. Sailor said he wanted to row a boat and he asked for my company. As we launched our boat, I asked him if he didn’t think the name “Mera-mec” was ironic, considering the circumstances. He said no, he hadn’t thought about it, but that was in the area of what he wanted to discuss. We set out on the water, Sailor rowing easily, gracefully, better than any twelve-year-old in the world.

Several minutes passed. I watched his concentration and the way every stroke was complete, none more important than the other, each with a meaning all its own. While still rowing, he said, “I am reminded of the first time I rowed with passion. It was 2,737 years ago, 841 BC by the Roman calendar. It was the time of ‘Those-Who-Fled.’ ” He stopped rowing and looked at me, trying to catch my reaction. I sat still. I hadn’t asked him about these things, but I wanted to know. He started rowing again and went on. “I was escaping a Phoenician ship in what is now the Bay of La Concha, near the Basque village of Gipuzkoa. We left in the dark when the tide was right so we could float in silence before we had to row. There were forty-three of us, all that would fit in the tiny boat. Others had to stay behind. Choices had to be made. It was decided that the five Egizahar families carrying the Stones would leave and the rest would escape later, somewhere, somehow. There was someone very important to me that we left behind on that ship. Someone whose absence from me made me row with hatred for the Phoenicians and fury against any power that would let this happen. They had violated my family, betrayed our Basque protectors, and stolen my Ameq.”

“What is Ameq?” I interrupted.

“My beloved . . . the one for whom I waited. Deza was her name. I tell you this now because you feel hatred for the Fleur-du-Mal and the way he has violated your family, your Giza family. I want you to go with me and meet some of your real family, your own blood, your own protectors, and then make a decision about the Fleur-du-Mal. You may still seek revenge. It will be your decision, but I ask you now, Zianno, to go with me first. There is another way to defeat the Fleur-du-Mal. He knows something we need to know and he thinks we are unable to find it without him. You may have the power within you to find it yourself.”

“What power?”

He stopped rowing altogether and drew in the oars, crossing them over his knees. He leaned forward, closing his left eye and searching my eyes with his right, his ghost eye. “Your dreams,” he said. “You are the Stone of Dreams. Your father and six fathers behind him have carried the Stones since we left that Phoenician ship so long ago. They have all gone deep within their own dreams, but none has found what we need, none has broken through.”

“What do you need?”

“The fifth set of Stones and the Bihazanu of the one that wears them.”

“Bihazanu?”

“It is an old word, a Meq word; it means heartfear. I will tell you of this and much, much more if you go with me to your western United States, to the high desert. There are people there you should meet, people there you must meet.”

“What people?”

“Your protectors; Basque shepherds from the tribe of Vardules and others, old friends of mine.”

He smoothly slipped the oars back into the water and turned us around in an easy, practiced motion. We headed back to the dock and I noticed that all the rowing boats were painted exactly the same. Coming and going, each one, just like the other.

“Yes,” I said suddenly, “I will go with you.”

After that, events moved swiftly. Solomon arranged for us to use his private railroad car and have access to any line on any railroad in the United States; money was no object. We were to meet a man, Owen Bramley, in Denver, and he would make sure everything went according to Solomon’s wishes. Solomon said Bramley was “his man” and would handle everything with efficiency and discretion. “He is one of those damn Scottish men,” he said, “he will pay you no mind and get the job done and done right.”

Even with Ray going, which Sailor had insisted upon, we had very little luggage. I left my baseball glove with Carolina, this time with her full knowledge, but for the same reasons. We spoke very little on the way to Union Station. It was a beautiful, clear green and blue day. This parting seemed natural, expected, and we were both comfortable with it; but leaving is still leaving.

“We have done this before,” I said.

“Yes, we have.” She wore a yellow dress and carried a yellow parasol, unopened. She was sitting on a stranger’s trunk that had been left alone on the platform and she was attracting stares from a few passersby; ladies simply did not sit on trunks.

“I’m not sure why I’m leaving this time.”

“It’s not the why that concerns me, Z. It’s the where. I don’t want to lose touch with you for another twelve years. I’m not a vain woman, but even I might be too old for you by then.”

We both smiled and watched Li and Solomon conferring with the conductor.

“Write to me,” I said. “Solomon told me Owen Bramley will be able to find us anywhere.” I turned to get on the train. Sailor and Ray were already on board.
“Egibizirik bilatu,”
I said.

“What? What does that mean?”

“It has something to do with a long-living truth.”

“I agree,” she said, standing up and opening her parasol at the same time.

As we pulled out of the station, I waved to Solomon and he gave me the new sign he had been using for “good business”; he gave me a thumbs-up.

Sailor smiled his sly smile and gave a silent nod through the window and a kind of salute to Solomon. Ray was pacing back and forth in the railroad car anxiously looking out both sides and taking his bowler hat off and on. He was nervous about something.

“What’s the matter, Ray?” I asked.

“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. Why?”

“You seem edgy, that’s all.”

“Well, maybe I am, a little, I don’t know. It’s just that I . . . I never been to the mountains. Ain’t that odd? All this time and I never been to the mountains.”

“It’s not the mountains, Ray, and you know it.” It was Sailor who spoke and he spoke in a voice we hadn’t heard him use before—a voice of authority. He was staring out of the window, but he was speaking to both of us.

I looked at Sailor and asked, “What is it then?”

He turned his head and motioned for Ray to sit down, close, so he could see Ray’s eyes. He watched him as the train settled into a steady rhythm. We were nearing the western fringe of the city, where Victorian homes and trolley cars became small farms and cornfields and cattle.

“Ray is nervous because he knows where we are going. He knows we are going to meet some people, some Giza, who not only know who we are, but protect us. Not like Carolina and Solomon. He has known others like them. These people are Basque and he has only heard of them in legend or a story his mother may have told him. This makes him afraid because he is Egipurdiko, not Egizahar. Am I right, Ray?”

Ray looked sheepish. “Am I that easy to read?”

“No, no,” Sailor said, “your anxiety is natural. It is always natural. I knew your mother, or at least I knew her family in the Azores hundreds of years ago. They and others like them have always thought these Basque tribes, if they exist, favor the Egizahar over the ‘diko.’ That somehow, if you are ‘diko,’ you will be found out and harmed. That is wrong. First of all, they do exist, and second, they make no distinction between us. Unfortunately, only
we
make a distinction between us. It is an old, tired practice and needs to be done away with.

“No, Ray, you have nothing to fear from these Basque we shall meet. They are good, honorable people descended from the tribe of Vardules, simple shepherds really. And they would all give their lives to save Zianno and what he wears around his neck. They always have, they always will.”

I thought this was as good a time as any to ask him what had been on my mind for some time. “Why do they protect us? And if they do, why haven’t they come to me?”

Sailor turned the ring on his forefinger, pausing, then looked me in the face. His “ghost eye” was cloudy and swirling. “The answer to that,” he said, “is older than I. I only know that they know of us, they always have. The Basque and the Meq are like sky and water—each taking credit for the other’s origin.

“There are few left; few of them and few of us. And the few who are left honor the old traditions. The first one of which is, Zianno, you come to them—they do not come to you.”

“What do they know about the Stones? Do they know what we can do?”

“Of course. The Stones are a sacred mystery to the few Basque who know of them, as they are to us.”

“What do they think of someone like you? Someone who outlives them all for countless generations and remains a kid? A boy?”

“We have worked that out,” he said. “You will find out what I mean for yourself.”

Ray got up from his seat and walked the length of the car and back. He rubbed his hands over the soft velvet of the furniture and the burl walnut finish of the cabinets. “You say they’re shepherds, is that right?”

“Yes,” Sailor answered.

“Damn.”

The trip through Missouri went too fast. Every stream was blue and every tree was in full leaf and still colored a spring green, not the deep green they would soon be. We were treated like princes by the porters and given everything we needed. By the time we hit the endless, flat prairie of Kansas, we all agreed that if you had to cross this land, this was the way to do it.

In Denver, we were surprised to find that Owen Bramley wasn’t there. After what Solomon had said about him I expected him to be opening our door before the train had stopped. He did leave a telegram for Sailor though. It was sent from San Francisco and said, “Sorry didn’t make connection STOP Am waiting for extra cargo STOP Will meet in Boise STOP Owen Bramley STOP.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Sailor folded the telegram in quarters and placed it inside his boot just below the knee. “I’m not sure,” he said and then smiled. “We may have an unexpected guest.”