THE CRYSTAL CITY, Page 2

  "I was going to ask you the same question," said Abe. "Did you have a good time with that lady you fell so much in love with?"

  Coz started to brag. "Oh, you bet I did." Only they could all see from his face that he actually had no memory of what might have happened. "It was amazing. She was-only maybe I shouldn't tell you all about it in front of the boy."

  "No, best not," said Abe. "You must have got powerful drunk last night."

  "Last night?" asked Coz, looking around.

  "It's been a whole night and a day since you took off with her. I reckon you probably spent every dime of your half of the money. But I'm a-tellin' you, Coz, I'm not giving you any of my half, I'm just not."

  Coz patted himself and realized his wallet was missing. "Oh, that snickety-pickle. That blimmety-blam."

  "Coz has him a knack for swearing in front of children," said Abe.

  "My wallet's gone," he said.

  "I reckon that includes the money in it," said Abe.

  "Well she wouldn't steal the wallet and leave the money, would she?" said Coz.

  "So you're sure she stole it?" said Abe.

  "Well how else would my wallet turn up missing?" said Coz.

  "You spent a whole night and day carousing. How do you know you didn't spend it all? Or give it to her as a present? Or make six more friends and buy them drinks till you ran out of money, and then you traded the wallet for one last drink?"

  Coz looked like he'd been kicked in the belly, he was so stunned and forlorn. "Do you think I did, Abe? I got to admit, I have no memory of what I did last night."

  Then he reached up and touched his head. "I must have slept my way clear past the hangover."

  "You don't look too steady," said Abe. "Maybe you don't have a hangover cause you're still drunk."

  "I am a little wobbly," said Coz. "Tell me, the three of you, am I talking slurry? Do I sound drunk?"

  Alvin shrugged. "Maybe you sound like a man as just woke up."

  "Kind of a frog in your throat," said Arthur Stuart.

  "I've seen you drunker," said Abe.

  "Oh, I'm never gonna live down the shame of this, Abe," said Coz. "You warned me not to go off with her. And whether she robbed me or somebody else did or I spent it all or I clean lost it from being so stupid drunk, I'm going home empty-handed and Ma'll kill me, she'll just ream me out a new ear, she'll cuss me up so bad."

  "Oh, Coz, you know I won't leave you in such a bad way," said Abe.

  "Won't you? You mean it? You'll give me a share of your half?"

  "Enough to be respectable," said Abe. "We'll just say you ... invested the rest of it, on speculation, kind of, but it went bad. They'll believe that, right? That's better than getting robbed or spending it on likker."

  "Oh, it is, Abe. You're a saint. You're my best friend. And you won't have to lie for me, Abe. I know you hate to lie, so you just tell folks to ask me and I'll do all the lyin'."

  Abe reached into his pocket and took out Coz's own wallet and handed it to him. "You just take from that wallet as much as you think you'll need to make your story stick."

  Coz started counting out the twenty-dollar gold pieces, but it only took a few before his conscience started getting to him. "Every coin I take is taken from you, Abe. I can't do this. You decide how much you can spare for me."

  "No, you do the calculatin'," said Abe. "You know I'm no good at accounts, or my store wouldn't have gone bust the way it did last year."

  "But I feel like I'm robbing you, taking money out of your wallet like this."

  "Oh, that ain't my wallet," said Abe.

  Coz looked at him like he was crazy. "You took it out of your own pocket," he said. "And if it ain't yours, then whose is it?"

  When Abe didn't answer, Coz looked at the wallet again.

  "It's mine," he said.

  "It does look like yours," said Abe.

  "You took it out of my own pocket when I was sleeping!" said Coz, outraged.

  "I can tell you honestly that I did not," said Abe. "And these gentlemen can affirm that I did not touch you with more than the toe of my boot as you laid there snoring like a choir of angels."

  "Then how'd you get it?"

  "I stole it from you before you even went off with that girl," said Abe.

  "You ... but then ... then how could I have done all those things last night?"

  "Last night?" said Abe. "As I recall, last night you were on the boat with us."

  "What're you..." And then it all came clear. "You dad-blasted gummer-huggit! You flim-jiggy swip-swapp!"

  Abe put a hand to his ear. "Hark! The song of the chuckleheaded Coz-bird!"

  "It's the same day! I wasn't asleep half an hour!"

  "Twenty minutes," offered Alvin. "At least that's my guess."

  "And this is all my own money!" Coz said.

  Abe nodded gravely. "It is, my friend, at least until another girl makes big-eyes at you."

  Coz looked up and down the little alleyway. "But what happened to Fannie? One minute I was walking down this alleyway with my hand on her . .. hand, and the next minute you're pokin' me with your toe."

  "You know something, Coz?" said Abe. "You don't have much of a love life."

  "Look who's talkin'," said Coz sullenly.

  But that seemed to be something of a sore spot with Abe, for though the smile didn't leave his face, the mirth did, and instead of coming back with some jest or jape, he sort of seemed to wander off inside himself somewhere.

  "Come on, let's eat," said Arthur Stuart. "All this talkin' don't fill me up much."

  And that being the most honest and sensible thing that had been said that half hour, they all agreed to it and followed their noses till they found a place that sold food that was mostly dead, didn't have too many legs, wasn't poisonous when alive, and seemed cooked enough to eat. Not an easy search in Barcy.

  After dinner, Coz got him out a pipe which he proceeded to stuff with manure, or so it smelled when he got the thing alight. Alvin toyed with putting out the fire, but he knew he wasn't given his makery gift just to spare himself the occasional stink.

  Instead he took his leave, hoisted his poke onto his shoulder, made sure Arthur Stuart unwound himself from his chair before standing up, and the two lit out in search of a place to stay. None of the miserable fleabitten overpriced understaffed crowded smelly firetraps near the river. Alvin had no idea how long he'd be staying and he only had limited funds, so he'd want a room in a boarding house somewhere in the part of Barcy where decent people lived who aimed to stay a spell. Where a journeyman smith might stay, for instance, while he searched for a shop as needed an extra pair of arms.

  He wasn't thirty steps out of the tavern where they'd dined afore he realized that Abe Lincoln was a-following, and even though Abe had even longer legs than Alvin's, there was no point in making him hasten to catch them up. He stopped, he turned, and only then did he realize that Arthur Stuart wasn't walking with him, he was with Abe.

  It was disconcerting, how Arthur had learnt a way to keep Alvin from noticing his heartfire. Not that Alvin ever failed to find Arthur when he was looking for him. But it used to be Alvin always knew where Arthur Stuart was without even thinking, but ever since Arthur had figured out a bit of real makering-how to het up iron or soften it, which was no mean trick-it seemed he'd also figured out how to make Alvin not notice when he sort of drifted away and went off on his own.

  But now wasn't the time for remonstration, not with Abe a-lookin' on.

  "You decided Coz could be trusted with his own money tonight after all?" asked Alvin.

  "Coz can't be trusted with his own elbows," said Abe, "but it occurred to me that you and Arthur Stuart here have become right good friends, and I'd be sorry to lose track of you."

  "Well, it's bound to happen," said Alvin, "since the only way to get your profits back north is to buy passage and get aboard afore Coz falls in love again."

  "You seem to be a wandering man," said Abe, "and not likely to have a place
where a man can send you a letter. Me, though, I'm rooted. I don't make much money doing much of anything yet, but I know where I want to do it. You write to Abraham Lincoln, town of Springfield, state of Noisy River, that'll reach me right enough."

  Alvin had no shortage of friends in his life, but never had a man he liked so well upon such short acquaintance made it so plain that he liked him back. "Abe, I won't forget that address, and indeed I expect I'll use it. Not only that, but I do have a way that a fellow can write to me. Any letter posted to Alvin Junior in the care of Alvin Miller in the town of Vigor Church would reach me in due time."

  "Your folks, I reckon."

  "I grew up there and we're still on speaking terms," said Alvin with a smile.

  But Abe didn't smile back. "I know the name of Vigor Church, and a dark story attached to the place."

  "The story's dark enough, and also true," said Alvin. "But if you know the tale, you know there was some as didn't take part in the massacre of Prophet's Town, and didn't have no curse upon them."

  "I never thought about it, but I reckon there had to be some as had clean hands."

  Alvin held his hands up. "But that doesn't mean as much as it once did, because the curse has been lifted and the sin forgiven."

  "I hadn't heard that."

  "It isn't much spoken of," said Alvin. "If you want to learn the whole of the tale, you're welcome to visit my family there at any time. It's a welcoming house, with many a visitor, and if you tell them you're a friend of me and a certain stepbrother-in-law of mine, they'll serve you extra helpings and perhaps tell you a tale or two that you haven't heard afore."

  "You can be sure I'll go there," said Abe. "And I'm glad to think tonight won't be the last I'll hear of you."

  "You can't be any gladder than me," said Alvin.

  With a handshake they parted yet again, and soon Abe's long legs were carrying him back toward the tavern with a stride that parted the flow of the crowd in the street like an upriver steamboat.

  "I like that man," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Me too," said Alvin. "Though I think there's more to him than making folks laugh."

  "Not to mention being the best-looking ugly man or the ugliest handsome man I ever seen," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Speaking of nothing much," said Alvin, "I wish you wouldn't do that trick of hiding your heartfire from me."

  Arthur Stuart looked at him without blinking an eye and answered just as Alvin supposed he would. "Now that we're away from company, Al, ain't it about time you told me what our business is here in Barcy?"

  Alvin sighed. "I'll tell you now what I told you back in Carthage when we set out on this journey. I'm going because my Peggy sent me here to Barcy, and a good husband does what his wife insists."

  "She didn't send you to Carthage, that's for sure. She thinks you're gonna die there."

  "When I die, I'll be dead everywhere, all at once," said Alvin, a little peeved. "She can send me to the end of the world, and I'll go, but at least I get to choose my own route."

  "You mean you really don't know what you're supposed to do here? When you said that before I thought you were just telling me it was none of my business."

  "It might well be none of your business," said Alvin, "but so far it's apparently none of my business, either. Back on the steamboat, I thought maybe our trip here had something to do with Steve Austin and Jim Bowie and the expedition to Mexico they tried to recruit me for. But then we left them behind and-"

  "And freed two dozen black men as didn't want to be slaves."

  "That was more you than me, and not a thing to be bragging on here in the streets of Barcy," said Alvin.

  "And you still have yet to figger out what Peggy has in mind," said Arthur Stuart.

  "We don't talk like we used to," said Alvin. "And there's times I think she tells me of an urgent errand in one place, just so I won't be in a different place where she saw some awful thing happening to me."

  "It's been known to happen."

  "Well, I don't like it. But I also know she wants our baby to have a living father, and so I go along, though I remind her from time to time that a grown man likes to know why he's doing a thing. And in this case, what the thing is I'm supposed to be doing."

  "Is that what a grown man likes?" said Arthur Stuart, with a grin that was way too wide.

  "You'll find out when you're growed," said Alvin.

  But the truth was, Arthur Stuart might be full grown already. Alvin didn't know whether his father was a tall man, and his mother was so young she might not have been full grown. No matter how tall he might get, at age fifteen it was time for Alvin to stop treating him like a little brother and start treating him like a man who had the right to go his own way, if he so chose.

  Which was probably why Arthur Stuart had gone to the trouble to learn how to hide his heartfire from Alvin. Not hide it completely-he'd never be able to do that. But he could make it so Alvin didn't notice him unless he was particularly looking, and that was more hidden than Alvin ever thought he'd be able to do.

  Alvin did his share of hiding from folks, too, so he couldn't rightly begrudge the boy his privacy. For instance, there was no one who knew that Alvin not only didn't know what errand Margaret had in mind for him, he didn't much care, either. Or about anything else.

  Because at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Alvin Miller, who had become Alvin Smith, and whose secret name was Alvin Maker; this Alvin, whose birth had been surrounded by such portents, who had been so watched over by good and evil as he was growing up; this same Alvin who had thought he had a great mission and work in his life, had long since come to realize that all those portents came to nothing, that all that watching had been wasted, because the power of makery had been given to the wrong man. In Alvin's hands it had all come to nothing. Whatever he made got unmade just as fast or faster. There was no overtaking the Unmaker in his dire work of unraveling the world. He couldn't teach more than scraps of the power to anyone else, so it's not as though his plan of surrounding himself with other makers was ever going to work.

  He couldn't even save the life of his own baby, or learn languages the way Arthur Stuart could, or see the paths of the future like Margaret, or any of the other practical gifts. He was just a journeyman smith who by sheerest accident got himself a golden plow which he'd been carrying around in a poke for five years now, and for what?

  Alvin had no idea why God had singled him out to be the seventh son of a seventh son, but whatever God's plan might have been at first, Alvin must have muffed it by now, because even the Unmaker seemed to be leaving him alone. Once he had been so formidable that he was surrounded by enemies. Now even his enemies had lost interest in him. What clearer sign of failure could you find than that?

  It was this dark mood that rode in his heart all the way into Barcy proper, and perhaps it was the cloud that it put in his visage that made the first two houses turn them away.

  He was so darkhearted by the time they come to the third house that he didn't even try to be personable. "I'm a journeyman smith from up north," he said, "and this boy is passing as my slave but he's not, he's free, and I'm blamed if I'm going to make him sleep down with the servants. I want a room with two good beds, and I'll pay faithful but I won't have anybody treating this young fellow like a servant."

  The woman at the door looked from him to Arthur Stuart and back again. "If you make that speech at every door, I'm surprised you ain't got you a mob of men with clubs and a rope followin' behind."

  "Mostly I just ask for a room," said Alvin, "but I'm in a bad mood."

  "Well, control your tongue in future," said the woman. "It happens you chose the right door for that speech, by sheer luck or perversity. I have the room you want, with the two beds, and this being a house where slavery is hated as an offense against God, you'll find no one quarrels with you for treating this young man as an equal."

  2

  Squirrel and Moose

  Alvin held out his hand. "Alvin Smith, ma'am."r />
  She shook hands with him. "I heard of an Alvin Smith what has a wife named Margaret, who goes from place to place striking terror into the hearts of them as loves to tell a lie."

  "She puts a bit of a scare into them as hates lying, too," said Arthur Stuart.

  "As for me," said Alvin, "I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people."

  "I'm none too fanatic about telling the truth, myself," said the woman. "For instance, I believe every girl ought to grow up in the firm belief that she's clever and pretty, and every boy that he's strong and good-hearted. In my experience, what starts out as a fib turns into a hope and if you keep it up long enough, it starts to be mostly true."

  "Wish I'd known that fifteen years ago," said Alvin. "Too late to do much with this boy here."

  "I'm pretty," said Arthur Stuart. "I figure that's all I need to get by in this world."

  "You see the problem?" said Alvin.

  "If you're Margaret Larner's husband," said the woman, "then I'll bet this pretty lad here is her brother, Arthur Stuart, who from the look of him is born to be royalty."

  "I wouldn't cross the road to be a king," said Arthur Stuart. "Though if they brought the throne to me, I might sit in it for a spell."

  By now they were inside the house, Alvin holding onto his poke, but Arthur surrendering his bag to the woman readily enough.

  "Y'all afraid of climbing stairs?" she asked.

  "I always climb six flights before breakfast, just so I can be closer to heaven when I say my prayers," said Alvin.

  She looked at him sharply. "I didn't know you was a praying man."

  Alvin was abashed. His lighthearted joke had apparently struck something dear to her.

  "I've been known to pray, ma'am," said Alvin. "I didn't mean to talk light about it, if this is a praying house."

  "It is," said the woman.

  "Seems to me," said Arthur Stuart, "that it's also a house where folks are all named 'you,' cause they haven't heard about 'names' yet."

  She laughed. "I've had so many names in my life that I've lost track by now. Around here, folks just call me Mama Squirrel. And let's have no idle speculation about how I got that name. My husband gave it to me, when he decided that he was Papa Moose."