The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (11 page)

She frowned. “The rattlesnake sphinx is in the last issue,” she said. “I thought you were only on number eight?”

“I’m on number eight the second time through. I read them all once for the story, and the art. I’m reading it again to see what I missed.” Jonathan tapped the page in front of him. “Like this, when the sea monster’s fin surfaces from the rain barrel, I missed that the first time, so it was a surprise when the townspeople found out that was what had been killing all the cattle.”

“There was an actual sea monster,” Marzi said. “It didn’t live in a rain barrel, and it didn’t eat anyone, but a sea serpent was caught, at Newport Beach. It was over thirty feet long. They say another one, ten times as long, got away. There’s a photograph of the dead serpent, with people lined up along its length to provide scale. It looks like a giant eel. The body disappeared, though. A lot of the stuff in the comic is based on history, actually. I twist it out of true, but the seed is often historical. Charles Hatfield was a real rainmaker, and that stuff about Pancho Villa’s head is all true, and—”

“And Aaron Burr,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know much about him, except that he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel.”

“Burr was nearly convicted of treason. There’s evidence that he planned to found his own empire in the West, using a cache of stolen gold to finance the economy. That didn’t work out for him, in the real world. But in my story, Burr succeeded in founding that empire, and he rules the land beyond the Western Door.”

“But the Outlaw is really the one in charge.”

“No,” Marzi said. “Burr is a bad guy, but he’s a builder. He builds towns, empires, alliances; all for his own gain, never for a good reason, but still. The Outlaw doesn’t build. He tears things down. He’s an earthquake wearing boots.”

Jonathan nodded. “I get it.” He closed the comic. “Anyway. I didn’t mean to go on and on.”

“Yes, please, by all means, stop praising me.” The waitress came back with the rest of her food, and Marzi leaned in to smell the soup, closing her eyes as she inhaled. She was hungrier than she’d realized.

Jonathan looked as if he were about to say something, but then he just half-smiled and looked down at his coffee cup.

“What?” Marzi said.

“Nothing,” Jonathan said. “Just . . . I just wanted to say thanks. You and Lindsay have made me feel really welcome here.”

“Please. It’s been all spilled beer, crazy people, and—well. Other things.” She didn’t want to mention Daniel, or even think about him, dead in the Red Room, victim of bad brains or something stranger. She pushed her plate over a little, to cover a Western book cover that depicted a masked man aiming his guns at a stagecoach.

“It’s been an eventful couple of days, sure,” Jonathan said. “But it hasn’t been all bad.”

“No. I guess not.”

“I was wondering . . .”

“Yeah?” She dipped a cheese-covered french fry into a puddle of ketchup and popped it in her mouth.

“Ah. Is Marzipan really your name?”

Marzi rolled her eyes, chewed, swallowed. “Yeah. It’s the curse of having unrepentant hippies for parents. It could’ve been worse. One of our neighbors had a little boy named Sunbeam. If I ever have a daughter, I’m going to name her Jennifer or Sue or something.” She cocked her head. “Is that really what you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, no. I was going to ask if you had any plans today, but then I decided maybe you wouldn’t want to spend time with me, since it hasn’t turned out well the last couple of times.”

“Maybe we should go someplace where we’re unlikely to be assaulted, then,” she said.

He spread his hands. “It’s your town.”

“I can think of a place, but it requires driving.”

“I’ve got gas money if you’ve got wheels,” Jonathan said. “Or do you lead a carless, monastic life?”

Marzi seesawed her hand. “I’ve got a beat-up little Honda that used to belong to my dad, but it mostly just sits in my parking space at home. I wouldn’t trust it on a road trip, but it’ll do for a few miles. Just let me finish eating.”

“You sure this is the right place?” Jonathan asked, as Marzi eased her car over one of the calamitously deep potholes on the side of the road.

“Yep. Been here a million times.” They’d driven down Highway 1, the scenic coast road, past fields and ocean views. A few miles outside of town, she’d pulled off onto a wide patch of scraped dirt on the shoulder that served as an ad-hoc parking lot. “Just be glad it’s not the rainy season. Some of these potholes turn into little ponds. Lindsay got stuck up to her fenders once going through one.” She stopped the car and pulled up the parking brake. “See the trail?”

Jonathan nodded, and they got out. Jonathan looked west, toward the sea, and whistled. “That’s beautiful. I’ve never been to a beach where cliffs went right up to the water like this.”

“Ha,” Marzi said, walking around him. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She led him over the railroad tracks, to the edge of the cliff, then toward a steep incline where the barest suggestion of a path switchbacked down to a cove below. “Be careful, some of the rocks are loose.”

“Is this where you dump the bodies?”

“Ha. You try getting down there with a victim wrapped in burlap thrown over your shoulder.” She led the way, picking her steps but moving quickly, with a smoothness born of familiarity. Jonathan came after, more tentative. Marzi waited for him at the bottom. He jumped the last few feet, landing on the sand in a squat, then stood up and looked around. “This is lovely,” he said. The beach was a sandy semicircle, scattered with a few boulders, bordered by cliffs behind them and on both sides, with the gently rolling blue-gray Pacific beyond.

“We call it the hole in the wall,” Marzi said.

Jonathan nodded, still looking around, then frowned. “Why?”

“You’ll see.” She took his hand and led him toward one of the largest rocks, then around it, revealing an arch in the cliff wall, nestled in the shadows and blocked from casual view by the rock. Like a doorway to Wonderland, a mouse-hole-in-the-baseboard-shaped hole in a rock wall, just big enough for two people to pass through, walking side by side. They walked through, to the long expanse of beach beyond the arch, that stretch of sand that was always a surprise and a revelation, inevitably bigger than Marzi remembered, with water on one side and nearly vertical cliffs on the other. It stretched on for hundreds of yards, a narrow band of clean sand that ended in a tumbling wall of rocks, the collapsed remains of a natural bridge stretching out into the sea.

“Oh, that’s like magic,” Jonathan said, and Marzi could only agree. She realized she was still holding his hand, and though he hadn’t complained, she let go.

Marzi walked about halfway down the beach and then sat down, facing the water. The sky beyond was cloudless blue and infinite, the blurry horizon revealing the curvature of the earth.

“I’ve never seen the Pacific before,” Jonathan said, sitting with her. “I’ve been to the Atlantic Ocean lots of times, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the Pacific. It’s . . . different, somehow. Hard to say why. Maybe just the rocks, the sky, the cliffs . . . I don’t know. There’s some qualitative difference here. It looks more peaceful, deeper, somehow, than the Atlantic. Not as gray.”

“Really? I’ve never been to the beach on the East Coast, really, just visited Washington, D.C., and New York a couple of times. You’re from North Carolina, right?”

“Born and raised.”

“You don’t have much of a Southern accent.”

“Yeah, well. I worked hard to avoid one.” He picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through his fingers. “My mom’s from the Midwest, and she taught me to talk, so I’m fortunate enough to have a bland accent.”

“I don’t know. Accents can be sexy.” Marzi wondered at herself. She was flirting, wasn’t she? Well. Why not? Hadn’t she closed herself off long enough?

“The
Gone with the Wind
kind of Southern accent, maybe, but that’s not the way they talk in eastern North Carolina, the land of pickup trucks and tobacco fields and turkey houses and swamps. Doesn’t matter how smart the person talking is—to anyone from outside the area, hearing that accent, they think ‘hick.’ It’s too bad. We’ve got the best barbecue in the world down there.”

“So you like it there?” She settled back on her elbows in the warm sand.

“Never really lived anywhere else. I’ve visited a few places, New York and Boston and such, but never lived in them for any amount of time. Grew up in the country, then moved to Raleigh when my mom got a better job. The move . . . was pretty hard on me. I left all my friends behind, went to a new high school, and fell in with a different sort of crowd.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marzi remembered Lindsay’s talk of Jonathan’s desperado vibe, which she’d never particularly noticed. “You’ve got a dark past?”

“Well, you know. Raleigh’s not a big city by some standards, but it was the most urban place I’d ever been. I rode my skateboard, smoked weed, stuff like that. But one of my buddies was a drug dealer, and there were a few times when things got . . . unpleasantly heavy. Pissed-off customers once, and once another dealer. My mom talked about throwing me out of the house for a while, told me I was following in my father’s footsteps, which was funny, since I’d never met the guy.”

“Wow,” Marzi said. “That’s rough. How’d you go from juvenile delinquent to art student?”

He shrugged. “I realized I was being stupid, and decided to stop.”

“That simple, huh? Just woke up one morning and decided to change your life?”

He sighed. “Not exactly.” He lifted his T-shirt. “See that?” She did, right away: a white line of scar tissue, three or four inches long, running diagonally just to the left of his right nipple, standing out against his skin. She reached out, unthinking, and touched the leading edge of the scar, then drew her hand back. “It’s okay,” he said, and she pressed her fingertip there again for a moment, feeling the raised texture.

“What happened?”

He let his shirt drop. “My buddy Rob was making a drug deal in a park, and I was hanging out with him, when the customer pulled a knife and demanded Rob’s whole stash. Rob, who was never the brightest bulb in the box, tried to knock the guy’s knife away, and he
stabbed
Rob, right in the stomach. I’d never seen anything like it.” Jonathan was staring out at the ocean, but his eyes were focused beyond the horizon. “All the color ran out of Rob’s face, he went pale as milk, and without even thinking I rushed the guy, because he’d just stabbed my friend. But I was stoned, so I couldn’t exactly bring overwhelming force or good reflexes to bear. The guy came at me with the knife, and I went down with this horrible pain in my chest.”

“Did . . . did your friend die?” Marzi reached out and took his hand again.

“No. He was in the hospital for a while, but he lived. I got by with some stitches. The doctor told me how lucky I’d been. If the knife had come at a different angle, the blade might have punctured my heart, or a lung. As it was, it just hit my ribs and slid down, and left me this.”

Marzi squeezed his hand, and he shook his head, losing the thousand-yard stare, and squeezed back. “So after
that
I made some changes in my life. My mom was married to this real asshole by then, and home was not a fun place to be, so I spent any time I wasn’t in school at the library, and then in the art galleries and museums as I got more interested in art. Mom assumed I was still raising hell at all hours, but my grades were suddenly good, so she left me alone.”

“Looks like you turned out pretty good, coming from a background like that.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, I’m not trying to throw a pity party. Lots of people have it harder than me. I got a scholarship, got to go to college, got into a decent grad school, and now I’m out here, following my dreams—or at least, studying Garamond Ray’s dreams, which is just as good for the moment. All that other stuff’s just the past.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to outlive your own history.” She considered telling him about her door-opening phobia, her stint in a mental hospital—wasn’t it fair to swap a confession for a confession? But she hesitated, unwilling to open those doors, and the moment passed.

“Tell me about this place,” he said. “How’d you find it?”

“Lindsay did, actually. She grew up in Santa Cruz, and she’s been coming here since she was a teenager.”

“Ah, Lindsay. She’s something else.”

Marzi laughed. “Yeah. We wound up as roommates when we were freshmen. I thought she was flaky and insincere—turns out I was right about the first one, but dead wrong on the second—and she thought I was a granola-eating self-righteous hippie because I spent a few years on a commune with my parents. Once I realized she really
was
interested in people, and not just faking it, and once she realized I wasn’t a proselytizing vegetarian and that I owned a good stereo, we bonded. She brought me out here one afternoon, and we spent all day throwing a Frisbee.” They’d done more than that, actually—they’d brought down a jug of vodka and orange juice, and gotten drunk, and Lindsay had kissed her. Marzi had gone along with the kiss—what else was college for, if not such experiments?—but hadn’t felt any particular thrill or sparkle, and had gently discouraged Lindsay’s other efforts to get intimate. Always one to pick up on hints, Lindsay had stopped, and their relationship hadn’t noticeably changed after that. For Lindsay, it was just something to try, and Marzi saying no hadn’t particularly bothered her. After a few weeks of feeling odd, Marzi got over it, and they’d been best friends ever since. At least, until Marzi dropped out of college. These days, it seemed they were best friends more in name than in fact. “That first time, Lindsay took me all the way down there.” She pointed to the tumble of rocks at the far end of the beach. “There used to be a natural bridge there, centuries ago, I guess, and it collapsed, so now there’s this weird plateau of rock you can climb up on. It’s a lot of trouble to get up there, slippery and slick with algae, and she wouldn’t tell me why she wanted to go. But once we made it, she took me out a ways, where the remains of the bridge stick out into the ocean pretty far, and she showed me the tide pools. Dozens of them, these tiny self-contained worlds, like miniature universes, you know? Just puddles in the rocks, but full of life. We spent hours there, looking at the sea anemones and starfish. There were fish and crabs, too, which I found so amazing, things that
move,
living in a cleft of rock, a sun-warmed pool, and maybe they had no idea about the whole ocean just beyond them. For all they knew, their tide pool was the whole world. Lindsay and I just stretched out on the rocks and looked into them, watching the fish swim, the crabs scuttle, the plants wave. The water was so clear . . . That was one of the best days of my life.”