177) The Salvation of Eden, Chapter 13 -- Snakey & Squirrelly

Food and shelter were the first challenge. If they kept stealing they were going to get caught eventually. Besides, it WAS stealing, no matter how much they justified it to themselves. Lenny didn’t seem to care either way, but Kohra just couldn’t bring herself to embrace this new identity as criminals. No, they needed to do this legit. They needed to make money.

         Their first idea, Kohra’s, was to do chores for people in exchange for food and a place to sleep. It worked well enough, although it wasn’t exactly fun. Three vagabonds offering manual labor for a hot meal was a real opportunity for people to exploit. Almost everyone had long-unwashed bathrooms, outhouses, animal pens, trash piles, sheds full of old junk, attics with mice nests and cellars with mouldy dank corners. Sometimes, they got good jobs, like helping to build a fence, dig a trench, or do some gardening. But usually, it involved feces, maggots, or something equally gross.

         Somehow, Kohra always seemed to end up doing the worst of the jobs. She brought this up to Lenny and Dominic, not infrequently, but they maintained a united front of denial.

         Arrowhead, who was usually wrapped around Dominic’s shoulders and upper torso, turned out to be quite popular with most of the people they encountered, in that scared-but-irresistibly-fascinated kind of way. And Squirrelly, of course, made instant friends with everyone, especially kids.

         One late afternoon, they were digging a skunk carcass out from under a woodpile when Lenny stuck her shovel in the ground, wiped her brow and stated with absolute finality. “Screw this. I’m done.”

         “Lenny! I don’t want to do this by myself,” Kohra pleaded. Her eyes were watering from the stench. She looked over into the field where Dom was teaching an archery lesson, apparently, to an awfully giggly young farm girl. Kohra rolled her eyes.

         “I mean it this time. I’m done. I’d rather steal food and take my chances. But if you wanna be all moral, then go ahead and dig skunk.” Lenny gazed thoughtfully towards the house, where a gaggle of children were laughing as Squirrelly performed tricks for peanuts, running up a pole, and scampering along the top of a fence.

         Lenny grabbed Kohra’s arm and hauled her up from the smelly woodpile. “C’mon!”

         “What? We can’t just leave,” Kohra protested.

         “We’re business-people now! Respectable folk. We don’t dig crap for people anymore. Instead, they serve us bonbons and welcome us with a red carpet!” Lenny laughed, a bit hysterically, hauling Kohra into the middle of the kids. “Hey kids!” She grabbed the first child, a little freckled girl of about 3, and picked her right up, giving her a hug. “Thank you!” Then, incomprehensibly, Lenny laughed, spinning the girl around. Instantly, of course, all the kids wanted to be picked up and spun, and Lenny was happy to oblige, winding up buried under a shrieking, wrestling pile of small children.

         When she finally disentangled herself, she stood up, gave each kid a high-five and thanked them sincerely for “saving her life.” The kids mostly squealed and ran around in excited circles.

         Then she called to Kohra, “We gotta go! We have an appointment to keep!” With that, she gathered up all three of their packs, slung them awkardly over her shoulders, and staggered down the laneway, waving goodbye to the shrieking mob, most of whom were running along beside her.

         Dominic came dashing in from the field. “What’s going on?”

         Kohra spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Lenny decided we’re leaving.” 

         “Better grab the rest of our stuff,” he muttered, scurrying around. This wasn’t the first time Lenny had caused them to make a quick exit. He figured he’d find out the whole story on the road. It was probably stealing something, lighting something on fire, or trying to saddle and ride some pigs.  (Yes, she did that. Twice.)

         While Dominic hunted for Arrowhead, Kohra apologized to the family. “An emergency came up. We’re very sorry about your woodpile.” Then she waited down by the road, standing awkwardly by herself, watching Lenny turn into a small speck in the distance before disappearing over a hill.

         It took Dominic quite a while to find Arrowhead, who was mouse-hunting in the barn. By the time they caught up with Lenny she was a few miles down the road.

         “Lenny! Stop already!” Dominic shouted as they got within earshot. Lenny promptly dropped the packs in the middle of the road and fell over. Squirrelly jumped off her shoulder to land on one of the packs, while Lenny lay, spread-eagle, for several seconds. Then she sat up and took a long drink out of a waterskin that was hanging off her pack.

         “Oh, hey guys!” she said brightly, as though nothing in particular was happening.

         “What the Hells, Lenny?” Kohra panted. “It’s going to be dark soon! We had a place to stay! They even had cots!”

         Lenny jumped to her feet and grabbed Kohra by both shoulders. “Kohra my dear, see that?” She pointed to a black peaked-roof sticking above the treetops a couple of miles away on the upslope of a hill. “That, is an Inn, and tonight,” she threw back her head and laughed, “tonight, we are going to FEAST in that Inn! MWAHAHAHAHAAA!” Lenny tossed a pack at her. “I’ll explain on the way.”

* * * * *

         For the rest of their lives, however long or short they ended up being, each of them would look back on the next several weeks as the Golden Age of their entire adventure. Over those weeks, they transformed from uncertain, desperate urchins living on the edge, to confident, capable people who knew they could take care of themselves. And they had a ton of fun doing it.

         By the time they got to the building with the peaked roof, which was indeed an Inn, they had an acrobatic routine worked out for Squirrelly, and a comedy sketch worked out between Squirrelly and Arrowhead, which mainly involved putting them in the same vicinity and letting Squirrelly threaten and annoy Arrowhead, while he restrained himself from eating her. So basically, their normal relationship. People ate it up, and soon, the Inn had turned into a rollicking party.

         Lenny was right; they feasted. And even made money from tips!

         Instantly, their lives changed. Lenny stepped into the role of business promoter and entertainer with a flourish, and Squirrelly seemed born for the stage. Arrowhead wasn’t thrilled at first, but warmed up to it eventually. The two animals seemed to understand that they weren’t enemies anymore. They were a team.

         Days passed, and they became more skilled as performers, developing their routines into elaborate skits. Arrowhead took on a very active role as the Villain. Cute, floofy Squirrelly would be prancing around, all charming and adorable, and then the big bad snake would come along and mess it all up. As the tension built to a crescendo, Arrowhead would strike, narrowly missing the squirrel as she leapt heroically out of the way to the astonished gasps of the crowd. Even Arrowhead was sold on the performance. He had become a star. 

         Kohra helped out as general stage-hand, but also ended up cajoled into playing the foil in pranks and archery tricks that Dominic performed. He, like Squirrelly, had a natural flair for the stage, and both his sense of humour and skill with a bow made for nice additions to their show.

         Kohra, on the other hand, was not at all comfortable in the spotlight. But as it turned out, people loved to laugh at a nervous, bumbling person who obviously doesn’t want to be there.

         Mmm-hmm, hilarious.

         Otherwise, life was pretty easy. With a steady income, they could afford to stay in Inns, eat hot meals, and enjoy the comforts of civilization (well, what passed for civilization out in the Borderlands). The days of sneaking into barns and stealing chicken eggs became distant memories, and Lenny took to the spoils of wealth with gusto, often spending all of their profits on extravagant meals, massages and steam baths.

         Kohra didn’t mind what Lenny did with the money. She’d never cared much for money anyway. Besides, they kept getting paid, and everybody was having a great time. She even started to sing on stage sometimes, and Dominic was becoming quite the professional ham, leaving audiences in stitches night after night. (And attracting quite a bit of attention from the local lasses.)

         Kohra, for her part, had no shortage of interest from the local lads either. Indeed, after she started taking the stage and singing, and even moreso after her “poor li’l ol’ me” routine of being Dominic’s beleaguered sidekick, she found herself attracting quite a bit of attention, from the dapper well-dressed gents flashing money around, to the straight-talkin’ outbackers, more used to scaring off tigers than courting a lady, and taking a not-too-dissimilar approach.

         Kohra found the outbackers far easier to deal with than the well-to-do gents with the soft hands and evaluative eyes, who tended to have a more difficult time reading “no” signals.

         Also, the outbackers were far more fun to talk to!  Their stories were hilarious, and their very awkwardness had its own charm. Not to mention the rather colourful vernacular they tended to employ. Kohra picked up more than a few phrases she stored away for “potential use” someday, like if she was ever in a swearing contest with sailors, or needed to peel the paint off a barn, or wanted to pretend to be an Earthborn for some reason.

         And then there was Lenny.

         Lenny was in a league of her own, when it came to “making an impact” on the local folks. Kohra could never figure out if Lenny was imbibing substances when nobody was looking, or if this was just her being true to herself; but she would invariably end up on the bar, a stage, or someone’s table, kicking up her heels and inspiring everyone around her into a dancing maelstrom.

         As the days of traveling and the nights of entertaining went on, and on, and on, Kohra found herself settling into a groove. Maybe she could live like this. Maybe she didn’t have to settle down like she had always assumed. Maybe she could “settle” into a life on the move, making the road, and thus everywhere, her home.

         Surprisingly (to Kohra at least), many of the folk living out here on the fringe seemed to resonate with Dominic’s philosophizing about a society without doors. He found himself with a cadre of supporters many nights, and developed this into another act, an argumentative routine that frequently resulted in heated debates with members of the audience. People loved seeing their own local smarty-pants get their butt whupped in intelligent debate.

         Besides, most Borderlanders eventually agreed with him, once they thought about it and got over their initial reactions. They tended to have a deep faith in their fellow person, plus a secure confidence in their own ability to defend themselves. The ideals of an open society were not much of a stretch for them.  

         Kohra was flat-out amazed to discover this. It still seemed insane to her, the notion of a society without doors. She thought back to the “suitors” she encountered not infrequently as a performer, and came to the conclusion that the attractiveness of a door-less society probably depended on the extent to which one tended to attract unwanted attention. If you always felt safe, then maybe it sounded great….

         She brought this up with Dominic, who countered passionately, of course. He argued that yes, there WOULD be many circumstances in which people would violate the privacy, comfort, even safety of others, and this would cause all sorts of problems. But, as a result, the society as a whole would EVOLVE. It would figure out ways of communicating about and respecting each others’ boundaries and needs for privacy. Yes, having no doors would suck at first, but then, BECAUSE it sucked, people would figure out how to live together more peacefully.

         Kohra still wasn’t convinced. And when she retired to sleep for a night, she was awfully glad when she had a door to close.

* * * * *

         As the months passed, Kohra realized that the Borderlands were comprised of two very different types of people, like two cultures placed on top of each other. First, there were the locals, the farmers and hamlet-dwellers, those who had plopped themselves down on a plot of land somewhere and were making a go of it, come Hells or highwater. The other type were the travelers, the adventurers, those just passing through, the ne’er do wells and vagabonds, the lost souls and wanderers, and of course, three young people with a traveling snake-and-squirrel show.

         She started to believe that she could spot the difference between the two types — the Locals vs. the Travelers — simply by their eyes. The Locals’ eyes shone with a friendly contentment. They were bright and attentive, darting about from face to face, seeking to connect with their fellows, always looking for the smile and nod and “How’s it goin’?”

         The Travelers, on the other hand, were always gazing somewhere far away, toward the horizon and away from the people around them. Their eyes held a vacant emptiness, a longing, as though they knew that whatever joys they might discover today would slip through their fingers by tomorrow.

         It was sad, Kohra thought. Tragic even. In the midst of these bustling villages of families and farmers and craftspeople laboring at their trades, you had this second layer of the rootless, the unfamiliar, people who could come and go like the wind and the rain but remain as unknown and uncared for as any individual raindrop in any individual rainstorm. It seemed wrong, as though people were not meant to wander about without anyone recognizing them, remembering them as a child, or knowing the history of their family name.

         Something vital is lost in the anonymity of infinite freedom.

         She mentioned her insights to Lenny one night, and Lenny, as usual, scoffed. “Hells no! It’s completely the opposite! The locals’ eyes look soft as beer bellies! They’ve been looking at the same places, the same people, for so long they’re all half asleep! The only time there’s any spark in them is when they’re looking at people like us, and we breeze in, all exotic and awesome, on the road of adventure! Whereas look at the Travelers we meet — their eyes are sharp and alive, because every day is different, and every place is new and interesting. You’ve got it totally backwards, Kohra.” Lenny grinned, and then, as usual, Flounced! away.

         Maybe Lenny’s right. Maybe staying in the same place for too long really does suck the vibrancy out of you.

         Maybe something vital is lost in the safety of hearth and home.

         Maybe “roots” are actually “chains.”

         Or maybe trying to read people’s eyes is a bunch of bunk.

         Maybe people’s eyes aren’t windows to their souls; maybe they are mirrors of your own.