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said them nice things about the cornbread. You're real handsome. And I think you are a gentleman."
"A what?"
"A gentleman. Like them in Olympia."
"No," Jarrod says. "I am not."
"Well. Anyway."
For a moment, Jarrod feels desire growing. The foggy morning hangs about the spring, about Darlene,
and the brown wisps of her hair are dewy and lank. He reaches over to her, strokes her face. She is flush
and warm.
"You can't be fourteen," he says.
"I am, too."
She takes his hand from her face, moves it to her breast. But he feels only the soft burr of Darlene's shift.
Old cotton. From the time before. She is a scavenger. Her kind take from the land, suck the life from the
land. Disgusting, like a tick, like a fungus. Timberlanders crawling through the land they destroyed, living
in their own slime. Darlene's nipple hardens under his touch. He can feel it through the thin, worn cotton.
"Don't you like me? Come to the windbreak."
"Child, I "
"I'm a woman."
"Yes. You are."
"I know how to do it. Come to the windbreak."
Jarrod sees himself in those woods. He sees the girl on her stomach, bent over a fallen log, her legs
parted, himself thrusting inside her from behind. Blood on her legs. Telling him how much it hurts. How
much it hurts, what he is doing. That would be the only way with a Timberlander. Like an animal.
You couldn't stop me from hurting you, he thinks. And I would. I would want to hurt you.
"I may come back this way," he says. "And you'll be older."
"I'm old enough." She is whining. Jarrod smiles, draws his hand away.
"For some things."
"For this."
If you were only old enough to fight back. Fight back hard.
"No," he says. He bends down, picks up her water pail. "Let's go in."
She follows, sulky, reluctant, back into the inn.
"I'm making pancakes," Darlene says in a defiant tone, and grabs the bucket. "I am making pancakes."
Jarrod sits at the kitchen table and watches her. In an hour or so, Maggie and Dave Johnson sit down to
the table. They spoon honey onto the pancakes and roll them into cylinders. They eat their food with their
bare hands.
* * *
Maggie seems much more at ease on the ride to Olympia. Getting past the Cedar Rat gang has done her
good, she says. Jarrod suddenly wonders why it is she is doing this for him. Until now, events have
flowed and carried him along as if he has fallen into a deep, fast river. He wonders if the beginnings of all
great journeys and difficult tasks are like this. He has nothing to compare this beginning with.
The day is cloudy, but there is no rain. The new-growth woods give way to fields once more.
Occasionally the sun breaks through to light patches of corn or fruit trees there are orchards now.
Once or twice, Jarrod catches himself enjoying the play of the sun patches across the swaying corn, the
dark green of the fruit tree foliage against the lighter green of the land. How alien. How wrong and
beautiful.
Maggie hums more songs, some of which seem almost familiar to Jarrod, as if they were twisted versions
of ranger lullabies. He imagines they must be. Two hundred years ago, he thinks, we were all U.S.
citizens and everybody got along.
"Why are you helping me, Maggie?" he asks when they are just outside Olympia.
She hums along for a while, as if she hasn't heard him, then answers in the same singsong voice. "To close
the circle. I've never had one of you come back."
"I'm not coming back. I'm just passing through."
"Yep. I also picked up some good tidbits from Dave Johnson. Valuable in certain places."
"What tidbits? I didn't see you trade a thing with him."
Maggie hums a few more bars, laughs softly in the middle of the song. "Do you know what I went to
school for?" she asks.
Jarrod shakes his head.
"Library science."
"Can you still do that? Where was that?"
"It was in Seattle, at the University of Washington is where, and no you can't. There was only three
hundred of us students when I went there. Long, long ago. My senior year, the Aberdeen mariners sailed
up the Interlake Canal. They raided us. Do you know the one of you they called Skully?"
"Uncle Skully? Yes, of course. I "
"He's my son by one of them damn mariners. Caught me in the library. In British lit, I believe it was, the
PRs." Maggie laughs, but this laugh is far more bitter than any of her others.
"After that, he set fire to the place. And they burned the school down, too. All of it."
"So you never graduated?"
"Nope. But I'm an information specialist." Maggie enunciates the words carefully, and with a pride that
Jarrod has not heard in her voice until now. "I collect it and give it out. Sometimes I make a little from it
to keep me going."
"I don't have any trade, if that's what you're saying."
"Oh, you never know," she says. "You never do know until you know."
They come into Olympia on Interstate 5, through gullies of collapsed concrete and road deck that is in
many places worn through to the rebar. Hildie doesn't like the way she must walk, but Maggie keeps her
steady and out of harm's way, as they descend from the Willapa Hills and see the dull metallic glow of the
capitol building.
"She's in the governor's mansion," Maggie says. "But we'll have to go through some rigmarole to get
there."
They arrive at the gates of the city. Maggie takes a twisted device of feather and metal from her bag of
goods and shows it to the guard. He waves them through.
Jarrod immediately sees that there has been a fire, but long ago. The ground and vegetation still show
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