The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka

Author:Vanessa Veselka
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

42 Metal Slovakia

THE CASTLE WAS BORDERED by an honest-to-god moat. On the other side of it was a wall blocking her view of the lower half of the castle, clearly unfinished. There was Tyvek on the main tower and plywood had been used as a bridge over the moat, a trench filled with storm water and displaced snakes, and she saw one on the mud bank—a copperhead or a cottonmouth; she’d never seen anything but a garter snake.

On the other side of the plywood bridge was a wooden gate. She tried to open it but she had the vat of peanut butter in one arm and the other gripped a bag of water-logged bread.

“Hello,” she called, “is anybody here?”

She thought she’d seen a car around back so she followed the wall, made of gray stone, carefully mortared, with built-in arrow slits at head height every ten feet. The moat ended and she saw the shell of an ancient blue Volvo in the grass; its hood leaned against the perimeter wall near a gap in the stone, through which she saw a trailer.

“Hello,” she called, stepping into the castle yard. “Hello,” coming to the trailer.

A light went on inside. A man near sixty opened the door. He seemed to have been sleeping. His hair was long and in a ponytail at the top of his head, salt and pepper cascading from his crown in all directions.

“Wow, man. You are really out in this. That’s crazy.” He looked up at the sky and pushed the trailer door open. “Come in. She might come back. If she does we go to the castle.”

He stepped aside so Cheyenne could enter.

There was a love seat with a crocheted throw. A stained-glass bird dangled from fishing line by the window. A blue Formica table was bolted into the floor surrounded by an orange half-circle couch. The thin bang of the tin door closing behind her as he let it go woke her up. She couldn’t remember how she got there.

He invited her to sit.

“What shit is this? Fifteen years I am here. One tornado. Not this crazy end-of-the-world shit. Hold on. I look outside the wall and see where she is.”

He opened the door again, shook his head once, and stepped back inside.

The little sink was full of cups and glasses. A pitted peach lay in two halves on a cutting board. On the side of a cabinet, hanging from a triangle of picture wire, was a Pegasus stenciled on a mirror. She looked at her feet and wondered where her shoes were.

The man sat across from her.

“Where is your car?” he asked.

“In a field.”

“I help you with it later.”

“It’s crunched into a square,” she said.

He considered her. A small gust of wind rattled the trailer.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We deal with all later.” His voice was the ocean gently rocking.

He pulled the crocheted blanket off the love seat and put it over her shoulders. “My friend, I think you may have shock.”

“My car’s just stuck.

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