Episodul 180 · The Other End

Soles shut the door and went back to the kitchen and sat down.

Nobody said anything for a while. The stove ticked. Tesa turned her mug around and around on the table with her hand, a quarter turn at a time, like a woman tightening a nut she did not trust.

It was Maxim who said it.

— You tightened one end, he said, and the other went slack.

He said it the way he said everything about loads and cranes, without any drama, as a thing anyone who had ever tied down a truck would know. Then he heard what he had said, and he looked at Soles, and for once he did not follow it with a joke.

— We don’t know that, Krista said.

— No.

— It’s three hundred kilometers.

— I know.

— It could be anything. Something underground. A spring. Something nobody’s measured before because nobody’s ever had a reason to.

— I know, Maxim said. I’m only saying how it would look on a truck.

Krista had her notebook open on the table, though she had not written anything in it. She looked at the blank page anyway, the way she looked at a photograph before deciding where to crop it. Then she drew a short line across it, put a dot at one end, and left the other end empty.

Soles sat with his hands on the table and looked at the left one, and it was open, and he kept it open on purpose. Under the table Mina leaned against his shin and stayed there.

He thought of the washroom. The wet light. The blade going in like a knife into wet rope, and then into nothing. He had thought of it as a thing that had happened in that room, in that yard, to that guard, and was over. He had not thought of it as one end of anything.

If you cut a rope that’s holding something, it doesn’t stop holding. It drops it somewhere else.

— So what do we do, Tesa said. Go north?

— With what? Maxim said. Look at us. We’d have to hire someone to carry us.

— The other branch is going at the end of the week, Krista said. If we go, we’re there with them. If we don’t, they’re there without anyone.

— And we’ve never seen the place, Soles said. We don’t know anyone there. We don’t know what’s there. We’d walk into a town we’ve never seen, past people we’ve never met, and start telling them their river is our fault.

He heard how that sounded, and it was not what he had meant, and it was also true.

Nobody answered him at once. Maxim rubbed his thumb along a scratch in the table, the way he did when a delivery had gone wrong and he was deciding whose fault it was going to be. Krista closed the notebook on her one line.

Tesa looked at him across the table, the long weighing look she gave a fighter between rounds.

— That’s not why you don’t want to go.

— No.

— Then say why.

— Because we made someone a promise here first.

He did not have to say who. Krista had said it in this kitchen, at this table, with the snow coming down outside. He’s alone with it. He’s sitting somewhere with warm hands, and nobody is going to tell him he isn’t crazy. And he had said we’ll find him, and then he had let the weeks go by, because the man in the gray coat was watching, and because there was always something closer and louder.

— When the man in the gray coat stops watching, Maxim said. That’s what we said.

— He’s not going to stop, Krista said.

— No, Soles said. I think that was the point of him.

Tesa stopped turning the mug.

— Then he’s watching us too.

— He’s been watching us for weeks, Maxim said. I wave at him now. He never waves back. Very bad manners, for a man with that much time on his hands.

The stove ticked. Lucky shifted under Maxim’s foot and sighed the long sigh of a dog who has been used as furniture and intends to remember it.

— Then we find the guard, Tesa said. And we think about the north while we do it. We can’t fix a place three hundred kilometers away by talking around this table. We can at least find one man in this town.

— Tomorrow, Soles said.

— Tomorrow, Krista agreed.

It was a small word to set against three hundred kilometers, but it was the only size of word any of them could lift tonight, and they all held on to it.

Maxim began to say something about how tomorrow had a habit of turning into next week in this house. He did not finish, because Lucky stood up under his foot and went to the hall, and stood there with his ears up and his tail low, not barking.

Then someone knocked.

It was not Tarn’s knock. Tarn knocked like a man who had been taught how. This was quieter, three times, with a long pause after, the knock of someone who had stood on the step for a while deciding whether to knock at all.

Soles got up, went down the hall with Lucky against his leg and opened the door just wide enough to keep the dog inside. Cold came in around the edge of it, and with it the smell of coal smoke from the street and something else, faintly, like a stove left on in an empty room.

The man on the step was in a parka that was too thin for the weather and no hat. Soles knew him before he knew from where. It was the stance, the way he stood half-turned toward the street, as if he had spent a long time standing at posts and could not stop. Then it came to him. The prison yard, the stones, the steam. A guard stepping away from the warm heap and stepping back.

— You said you’d find me, the guard said.

He did not sound angry. He sounded tired, and a little embarrassed, like a man returning something he has borrowed for too long.

Soles had practiced several things to say to this man, in the weeks of not finding him. None of them had started on his own doorstep. In most of them he had been the one knocking.

— We said when the man in the gray coat stopped watching you.

— He hasn’t stopped.

The guard glanced back over his shoulder. Down the street, past the lamp on the corner, a gray car sat at the curb with its engine running and its lights off. Soles could see the exhaust going up in the cold, slow and white. Nobody got out of it. Nobody needed to.

— So I got tired of waiting, the guard said. I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go. The investigator told me which street I mustn’t come to. He was very clear about it. He said it twice.

Behind Soles, Maxim laughed once, through his nose, and turned it into a cough. Tesa had come into the hall too. She stood behind Maxim with her arms folded, not in the way and not out of it.

The guard took his hands out of his pockets, as if he had only just remembered he was standing at someone’s door and ought to look respectable. He was not wearing gloves. In that cold, his hands should have been red. They were not.

— I signed something, he said. About that night. I want to unsign it.