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  Weatherhead

  By J.M. Hushour

  Copyright © 2014 by J.M. Hushour

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Image by Mark Demsteader used with the permission of the artist.

  “A dead truth is better than a live falsehood.” L. Frank Baum

  Everyone knows that Maggie Mechaine was struck by a rocketing truck and killed, but not everyone knows that she had been in 51 pieces when her husband finally managed to gather her all up again and count her all out.

  He had been the first one to arrive at the scene and had already felt that claw of tomorrow in his gut as he scanned the white pricked with red, could never have known, they said, that it was her until he found some bits of her hair. But he did know, even before he found the first clump of it like red grass jutting up out of the white. He knew that hair well, had gathered it in his fists, brushed it, breathed it, and even made faces at it. He crept forward on the balls of his feet, gathering up bloody tufts in his fists, smelling them, making grimaces and retching sounds when he came to the unfamiliar territories of Maggie Mechaine, those parts of her within that he had never known.

  The others had come then and dared not approach. They stood and watched him on his hands and knees in the snow, unsure what to do. He had bit the face of the first colleague who had put a gentle hand on his shoulder, tried to pull him up, and this fellow now stood off to one side, holding in place the bleeding flap of the only offended part of him and sobbing in silence.

  Maggie Mechaine could not have done this, held herself together. There had been nothing grandiose or poignant or artistic about her death. She was hit face-on by a rocketing truck and solemnly acquiesced in her disintegration. She had lacked the 49 other hands to hold everything in place. There was something else about her hands, though.

  Finding these insufficient hands had been worse than finding the rough quadrants of what was left of her face, for though the latter was where he had collided with her numerous times, it had always been a puzzling place. He already knew it was her anyway, and passed over these scraps of jaw and eye. He knew that hair well. He knew she had come to talk a walk here because she told him she would. It had thus been arranged. But when he had come to her hands, he began to choke. They were pristine and were lying together, laced together just as they had been, at the small of her back, he knew, when the truck had finally touched her.

  When he was finished, he took out his revolver. 51 pieces, he breathed the ghosts of the words out of his own broken face. He looked up. She called these “scaly days” when the cirrus skidmarked the sky. It meant something was coming, a change in the weather, she’d told him once, wherever you found them you could count on an imminence for they were the forward projection of either something awful or something beautiful, like the brutal black crackle of firstwords on a radio. Would it be song or doom?

  The truck, though, in however many shards Maggie Mechaine had left it, was never found.

  (1 Down) I am the Lie. I am Tomorrow.

  He had fallen asleep over the puzzles again. He straightened up and felt as one the creak of the chair and his spine. His hand knocked against the insolent border of the puzzle over which he had sprawled. He fuzzily tried to reassemble it. Spread out before him were five other jigsaws in various states of completion. These could best be classified according to how little of them he had been able to finish.

  He gave up trying to fix the one he’d upset. The bottom edge alone of this particular puzzle, Sandstorm, this posthumous challenge thrown out to him, had taken him three days to piece together. He found his phone nearby and opened its mouth. Time yawned.

  He dressed and found his gun nearby and opened his mouth, pretending to mistake it for a cigarette. He yawned and settled it over his tongue. This was part of his nightly ritual before he went on duty. Gun. Mouth. Breakfast. Mouth. He kept it loaded for appearance’s sake but there had never been a temptation to replace biscuit with lead. He did it merely out a sense of obligation. He felt like he had to at least make an effort, that he should, as if some panel of judges was watching, and so each night he sighed and took his temperature with the barrel. It had a terrible taste. Maybe that’s why, he thought, when you see people do that in the movies the other person never closes their mouth around it. But he did it anyway.

  He dressed and walked to work. He didn’t drive if he didn’t have to. He had missed exactly three days of work: the day she died; the day they buried her; the day after that because her brother’s family was still in town for the funeral and they were simply devastated, especially the daughter, Maggie’s niece, and he felt duty-bound since they’d crossed the country and then some. Two of his sisters had been there, too. He had waved aside commiseration, sessions of various makes, and had even refused to turn over his sidearm. He was, he told them all, coping. And you can’t spell ‘cope’ without ‘cop’, right? Ha ha.

  Someone silver in the beginning had told him, write it all down, what he was feeling, that is. Write about her. But he had become locked inside a question. There could be no writing. There was a simple solution to his dilemma, he had told himself soon after her death: If I have to choose which silence to have to listen to, I choose mine.

  Time crushes the blindness in us. But it answers no riddles.

  Working at night helped. Now it was almost always night. It was easier to see the headlights at night. The snow wasn’t so stark. All the red was hidden. Maggie Mechaine wasn’t in the next room bound together by physics despite the slosh, churn, and drift of her biology. That was an extinct biology, all of its secrets divulged that day. Hers, not his. One of his secrets was this: he had lived a secret life. He had loved her and never told her. He had kept this a secret from her. She had been his wife right up until she died. Now she was—what? Something more? Something less?

  “Think of a lie, then think of tomorrow,” his mother used to warn them all. Had he dreamed about his mother just then? That was where the words had come from. Except it wasn’t his mother speaking. It wasn’t that indomitable and inimitable wall of Mediterranean grace. He stopped. It had been Maggie Mechaine.

  ⧜

  The pistol that had been in his mouth had been loaded, he swore up and down to himself that he had fed it bullets. He always did. He always made sure right before. He fed it first. It made the faceless ritual of the mourning widower’s suicide bear at least a little resonance because of the risk of accident. But the chamber was empty. He discovered this that very same night when he was fired on by some teenaged kid attempting to rape a mom of three. The happy lights were all on in the house when he and his partner came in, illuminating the scene all nativity, he over her on the floor where light met light. The boy was what passed locally for a meth head or a gangbanger, such as they were in these parts, scabby and mangy. They were natives, which meant they’d been pitted against wildernesses for so long that the wildness without had turned inward into violent breasts.

  The first thought he had was that the cold had seized up the gun. When he and Maggie had moved here, one of the first bits of advice they had given him was never oil your gun. It’ll just freeze. And it was the standard issue Glock. Then he realized the chamber was empty. Empty. Had he filled his mouth with bullets? He hadn’t meant to, god, no. He was fingering his gums absent-mindedly looking for telltale gaps when he was pushed roughly aside by his partner who was a much better shot anyway and a moment later they stood over a corpse lying at the crossroads of the happy lights with its pants down, star of a show versus eternal night.

  The woman
had retreated feral into a corner and watched them with dead, headlight eyes. She wasn’t frightened of them, he saw, but he tried to press his gun into her hands in case she wanted to use it, he said. But there were no tears on her face. No sign of that contortionist’s flex that involuntarism brings to the jaw and neck. Plus, they could all see it was willingly free from the burden of bullets. He stood up.

  “Who called this in?” he asked suddenly. “One of your children?” She nodded. She pointed to the body kept warm by the happy lights. The partner was saying something to him but he ignored these admonitions and went over to the corpse and took a phone out of a dead pocket. The dispatcher was still on the line. He looked at the body that was where it had wanted to be, on display, an illuminated text of death. It did look comfortable, wholesome. He took in its margins. “Some monk.”

  The young man had been lucky. The only piece of him missing was the little circle in his cheek and its mate at the base of his skull and all that could have been easily peeled off the tip of the bullet had anyone bothered to extricate it from the wall behind him, he thought. He regretted not trying to retrieve this, at least for the family’s sake. Try to keep them whole if not holy.

  ⧜

  “Think of John the Baptist, poor basterd, all of Europe is littered with his bodily protuberances!”

  “And Jesus’s wee bits! You can reckon on four score foreskins of the fellow populatin’ every otha shrine between Galway n’—“

  “That’s the drawback!”

  “Pink and half-purples!”

  “Yeyessmum.”

  These words were spoken by three policemen and one policewoman, and for him the only thing worse than a policewoman was a black policewoman as she was (but he had little energy left in him to hate) sitting on the bench across from him. Traffic cops, he thought, judging from their superfluity here. He dared not look them in the eye, though, inferior though they might be. He studied his hands, his fingers meshed with his fingers. He often asked himself why hadn’t it been one of these in hers instead of hers and hers alone? But if he had been standing there beside her, she would be here right now. Wouldn’t she? She would listen with her listless gaze to this odd, four-sided conversation and pop her jaw. It would not just be he alone and less a gun waiting outside a superior’s office.

  Honestly, he was more worried about the interruption of his mourning ritual. The gun was an easy, convenient prop. It had been, rather. What was he supposed to do now? Sweetarts in a cyanide bottle? Bathe with some de-Edisoned toaster every morning? Just buy another gun? But his service revolver was familiar; it wasn’t the worst friend in the world. It was consistent in its purpose and never betrayed him, not through any fault of its own anyhow. Plus, he had gotten used to its taste.

  Maggie had had grim mirth over the phrase ‘happy lights’. She thought the idea that darkness lacked solace to be laughable. Why else do we sleep in it, she’d say, fuck in it? She didn’t cuss much. When she did, it threw her otherwise little words into sharp contrast to everything about her and grabbed your attention. She was right in a certain sense. Nights were the comforting haunts of many. She herself had been killed during lucid spring daylight, or what passed for it here, and didn’t that mean that light itself betrayed her? Had it bent around her, people wondered, preventing the truck from seeing her? At night, he secretly wondered, would darkness have been sanctuary to darkness?

  “All that we know of each other together is as little as the sun staring at a pair of lamps switched on at noon,” she told him once. “One thing is for sure, though.”

  “What.” He never listened to her when she was stoned.

  She considered. Maggie spoke slowly, never without thinking. “We all die.” She had spent days with her nose pressed to the screen watching all those people swan-laking out of those windows until she couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t take those windows, frames, people jumping out of a building’s eyes like that. Eyes were made for in not out. Frames held things in. Can’t we just leave? He plotted destinations. Alaska was as far as one could get and have minimal paperwork. It wasn’t even on the map proper, her finger told him with a press and the swatch beneath the nail blushed red. It has its own box, she nodded. So does Hawaii, he pointed out. Too hot, she countered, volcanoes, she fretted, and they were poor. She had to sell her business to pay for the move in the end anyway.

  ⧜

  His captain was there now, talking to him. Had it been nine months? That was the space of a pregnancy, he observed. Had they not been robbed of fertility, nonads, right now she’d be hunched over white blankets dotting it with red and then he would bend over and pick up just that one piece of them, that third piece. He stared at his captain’s teeth. The captain was an older man and hadn’t put much stock in his dentifrice for the bottom row of teeth was contorted and lurch, dented inward as if it had folded inwards under a blow, like the grille of a car after a fender-bender. He couldn’t help but stare at these teeth as he was reprimanded. When the teeth plus the tongue curled up behind them somewhere conspired to tell him his gun would be cut off his belt, he drove his fist into them. They needed to be in more. Now, this superior sighed, he knew there’d be nothing to stop him from getting another gun if he wanted to commit suicide—but he insisted, I don’t! It’s an act, see? The attempts were just that. But none of authority’s ears would take truck with any of this nonsense. He just needed time. Yes, sir, people deal with things in different ways, even long after the fact.

  As he listened, he kept thinking of that woman back there. It hadn’t been a rape, he was told. That was her oldest son, the one, you know, the one who wanted to die? He’d called it in. The mother was trash, too, he was told. Scum.

  He sat and listened to this unclever blister of steady, complacent lynch-word and for a moment he felt himself back in a south, Maggie’s south, laid waste by darkness, a darkness that had been turned out of the victim and spilt and split until it sooted the sky over. He thought of the mother and those asian eyes, her feral calm when he held his gun out butt-first to her.

  He remembered who she reminded him of, but couldn’t place the name: Maggie Mechaine. Why did that name sound familiar—

  He decided maybe they were right: he was going mad.

  ⧜

  “This is a disgusting country.” She squinted at him. “You’re that cop whose wife got killed.” It was a small town.

  “You’re the lady whose son got killed.” His partner had made clear his opposition to the obscenity of her existence, but he had to see it again for himself. He could spy on himself now that he could slip through the town unfettered. And he could sense the town’s ass in the air more intimately on the ground. It simply gave in. There was nothing in his arsenal that he could bring to bear on such hopelessness. They carried it between them as she waved him in and started switching out all the happy lights, humming to herself. She had a tic where she’d shuttle her zipper up and down unconsciously. She kept repeating disconnected words that he couldn’t make out until finally her tic resolved itself in the nadir and she stepped out of her pants.

  “I was always ugly,” she explained, “people don’t look at each other as much as they used to anyway, though, so.” She was rubbing some sort of brown lotion all over her leathery, flappy skin. It smelled like honey, he noted. There couldn’t be anything the thickness of a bee for thousands of miles. She must’ve been at least 50 and had that honest christian’s body, the one that hadn’t been purchased or perfumed with anything other than the retch and convulsion of old-age. He had not met any natives personally since they moved here. Across the border, they called them “First Peoples”. He wondered who the “Last Peoples” would be. Only her breasts could be called liars. He made an oath not to touch those tiny, wasted, airless ghosts. She stretched out across the cot and drew up one leg, coughing. She motioned for him to hurry, waggling a condom at him. He blinked. His original reason for coming here eluded him. He undressed quickly, surprised at his figurehead’s vigilan
ce as her prune-hand shot out.

  “Mind?” Seinfeld was on. He shrugged. They became a single sickness for a bit, faces tilted at the screen. She was snorting laughter when he came inside her. “Jesus, Kramer!”

  “I miss that show,” she stood at the sink in a blue robe several sizes too big for her and washed out the condom and hung it out to dry on the shower rod next to about a dozen others. She saw him staring at this row of translucent cocoons and cackled, “Recyclin’! Ain’t never anything in ‘em anyway.” She shrugged and tipped him a cigarette. He took it. He listened to her discuss Seinfeld with cautious indifference as they smoked, saw her passing through obliterating cycles of light and dark as she puttered about the room, turning on every other happy light. “New York City,” she muttered with a chuckle. “Weird weather they had there a while back, ‘member, coupla years ago? Clear sky and hail the size of people, ‘member?”

  He did. She spoke about old dreams of flight. She was the opposite of Maggie. Maggie had altitude and a fear of looking up—this woman was abyss and everyone in this place just became part of the ground. Leaving this place. It was hard, she told him, to escape when half the time it was so dark you couldn’t see where sky ended and land began or which way to go, the other half so light everyone’d see you runnin’. “Those in-between parts, though, I always watched for those. Where’re you from? Big city. Huh. Married? No? Guy like you? Oh, that’s right. She died. I forgot. Time was people could sit still long enough to fall in love—be in love—“ She looked to where her son’s corpse had lain. Why should even a son be spared indignity, he thought. “I was jest gonna let him do it, too. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. I’d let him before. I thought it’d take away the angry in ‘im. Daddy was the same way. But he wanted to call you all. Maybe it’s my fault. I always told him the easiest thing to do in the world’d be to die. Easiest thing you’ve ever done. After that…that’s what’s hard.”