when required, failed to give his flesh to the Zobranoirundisi in atonement.
THE HARROWERS
Eric Gregory
The kid didn’t have a feed. He glanced over his shoulder and scratched the back of his head, and I saw there was nothing in his neck. You didn’t find many folks without feeds in the city. Right away, I knew he’d brought me a problem. “I’m looking for Ez,” he said, and I said yeah, I was him.
He looked relieved then lowered his voice. “And you’re a guide?”
I wiped grease on the front of my jeans, closed the hood of the 4Runner, and gestured for the kid to follow me. He took the hint, nodding with absurd gratitude, and I led him down past the line of old rigs, all waiting to be stripped. Across the yard, someone cranked up a saw.
“Who gave you my name?” I asked.
“Guy called himself Coroner.”
“You don’t want to talk to him again.”
The kid gave a sad sort of smile. “No. I really don’t.”
He wasn’t the roughneck sort who usually came around looking for a guide. Right age, maybe: Seventeen, eighteen. But the boy had a pressed, conservative look to him. Skinny, clean-shaven, all done up in slacks and suspenders and a white, sweaty shirt. I didn’t know what to make of him, and I didn’t like that I didn’t know.
“You from around here?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, sir. Lynchburg.”
“Nice town,” I lied. Hive of fanatics. “How long you been here, then?”
“Not quite a day.”
“And you already want to go outside.” I grinned. “Jesus.”
It wasn’t much cooler in the office, but there was beer and shade. The kid settled onto my ratty, floral-print sofa, and I opened two Yanjings, thinking maybe he was used to the fancy stuff. I still couldn’t get a fix on him, but he dressed like a big spender. He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the knee, glancing at the old gas station signs on the wall.
“What do I call you?” I said.
He frowned into his beer. “P.K.”
“All right, P.K. You want to tell me about your deathwish?”
He shook his head.
“No deathwish. I just want to see my old man again.”
My turn to frown. “Your old man.”
“Yessir. He’s outside.”
I slid my bottle across the desk, back and forth from one hand to the other.
“How far outside?”
“Cherokee North. Between here and Johnson City.”
“That’s a lot of forest.”
He shrugged.
Some guides don’t like to get nosy. Take the job, don’t ask questions. Lot of those guides develop a nasty case of dead.
“You want my help,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what he was doing there.” If Coroner had sent him, I didn’t have many choices here, but maybe the boy didn’t know that. He nodded, answered without hesitation.
“We were out harrowing.”
“You were with him,” I said.
“Yessir.”
“He preaches, you shoot. That how it works?”
The kid looked embarrassed. “I haven’t learned to bless yet.”
“And you got separated?”
He inclined his head. “Pack of wolves surprised us. We were running, and my father—” He paused. “He fell. Over a ledge. I saw him roll, heard him call out, but the slope sharpened and—I didn’t see where he landed. I searched until sundown. I love my father, but—”he pursed his lips—”but I’m not stupid.”
“You did right.” I leaned forward. “But you understand he’s dead.”
The boy was silent.
“I ain’t gonna sell you false hope. Your daddy’s gone. I’ll take your money, I’ll take you out there, and I’ll help you make whatever amends you want to make. But I want us both to understand what’s going on here. I don’t want any confusion between us. You have to show me that you know we’re not going to find him smiling.”
“I have to find him,” he said. “I know the odds.”
I wasn’t sure he did. “I ain’t cheap. And I ain’t stupid either.” I told him the deposit. “I need to see triple the advance in a credit account, and I need the account linked to my feed. In the event of my death, the triple transfers automatically to my family.”
Little joke, there. Family.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And if I die?”
“We link your feed to my account. The deposit transfers back.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a feed.”
I’d forgotten. Mark of the Devil. I smiled through a stir of jealousy. The little metal nub in my neck let me work in the city, let me spend and collect credit, but mostly it just felt like a warm seed of debt, always itching beneath my skin, waiting for me to die or default, always threatening to grow.
“We can go to my credit agency and set up a timed withdrawal from my account,” I said. “If you’re not around to cancel it in three days, the advance’ll transfer to the account of your choice.”
He nodded. “Works for me.”
“I think we understand one another, P.K.” I took the Colt from my drawer, set it on my desk. The old, faded sticker on the grip said
And just like that, we were in business.
No one ran outside the law in Asheville without owing money to Coroner. He found you when you were down, desperate, earthless. He fed you, paid your rent. If you wanted to be a guide, he made it easy: Set you up as a company mechanic, pulled all the right bureaucratic triggers to assign you to truckers on his payroll, to divert shipping routes. Last Christmas, he’d bought me a suit of skintight armor straight out of Cupertino. Sometimes it was hard to figure out where the companies ended and Coroner began, but it was absolutely clear who owned you.
Coroner had placed me and Xin Sun together so often that I could tell you her granddaddy’s favorite singer (Johnny Cash) and the city where her mama was born (Raleigh). She was short, wiry, somewhere in her forties, with a line of faded hearts tattooed around her wrist. Her rig was a behemoth, a messy cross between a Humvee and an old furniture truck. I sat in the cab, behind the old automatic rifle mounted on the hood. P.K. huddled in the cargo crawlspace with the liquor.
Xin caught my eye as she eased toward the gate. “You’re a bad person, Ez.”
“Yeah?”
“The daddy’s gone,” she said. “Boy don’t need to see that.”
“I told him. He can make up his own mind.”
She shook her head, scratched her neck. “He’s green as shit. The dead on the moon can see it. You ought to know better.”
