Weatherhead Page 10

  “For fairies,” she swore. Then there was awe.

  He took the shoebox. It was a diorama of the Iranian hostage rescue attempt, so the faded label on the bottom told him. Inside, a melted model helicopter and a few plastic skeletons were glued to a piece of sandpaper. “Maggie was always so good at making these, capturing these little moments. This was her father’s favorite. Now where’s that other one—the one about the future, Maggie?”

  Maggie snorted laughter. Her niece imitated her. “Be careful, my little duck,” the grandmother said, “or your aunt’s gonna steal you away from your parents if you keep actin’ so much alike. Aunt’ll think you’re hers! Speakin’ of which—“ She winked up at him.

  “Not for a lack of trying, believe me,” he winked back. Maggie turned as red as her hair and her mother laughed and laughed.

  “I’m gonna start calling you the ‘natural’. In like flint,” Maggie muttered. “We’re just all a buncha yokels to you, city boy, yeah?”

  “I dunno,” he found it hard to believe they were actually sitting on a porch swing together under dixon, south of heaven, “don’t sell yourself short, I think of it more as a city mouse, country mouse kinda thing.”

  “Well, there’s always a cat, ain’t there?” and that wisdom closed philosophy for the day and they made a little war with their mouths then.

  (13 Down) I am Married to Scents.

  He caught up to her, careful to fall shy of her kindling, and drew even, falling into step with her. She didn’t greet him, but turned her face up to him and smiled approvingly at his obeisance. He thought that however she had exhumed herself back out of the ash, she’d done a splendid job rearranging all her own bits. He’d had no such luck with the 51 bits of her in the snow, because the blood kept melting the surface beneath it and there was no uniformity to the geometrical plane on which he had tried to lay her out. Here in Weatherhead, she was hearty and had that ruddy pulse that he remembered had, over time, faded. She was spring and autumn all rolled into one. He would not fear her, he decided, this woman of puzzles. He had been brought here for a reason. He made this his mantra.

  They walked wood-tall and leaf-drift for a while, making a tree together out of the shadows they threw down in the preceding currents of the wake they cut through the streets. She pointed this out to him with a sharp laugh.

  Better autumn than earthquakes, is that what you’re trying to tell me?

  He had the sudden urge to put the palm of his hand on the nape of her neck and see what’d happen. He dared not, though. Her response would be dangerous, he guessed.

  A scream from across the street drew his gaze. It was the four bandits, the ones who had captured him and delivered him to Weatherhead, his periodic tormentors. He traced their path from across the street where he stood with her. The three men were roughly handling an old woman, beating her about the face and arms with the flats of their bayonets. The Colored Girl stood off to one side going through an old flappy briefcase.

  Who are those fiends, the ones that brought me here?

  Love, was her simple reply.

  Love? Is that their band name—I thought they were thieves or robbers or something—

  They are, was her simple reply. Love’s just a bunch of acts of random violence done by one person to another. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Or the self. A kiss fired into the crowd at random. She liked the sound of this, he thought, for she smiled to herself and began whistling a jaunty tune. This summoned a mob; a foaming crest of faces appeared lining the left side of the road. She grabbed a random hand-wringer by the hand and kissed them roughly. Another she backhanded across the face. There was a rush of sighs and a reef of faces was exposed by the ebb of this sigh and she delighted in running its gauntlet, here with fists punching, now with kisses, scratching this face, licking the next.

  He found all this appalling and made this clear by averting his gaze from this display of mindless fealty to her barbarian code and paying her no mind. Certain it would not end well, this strategic—or stupid—aloofness of his, he was stunned when she dispelled the fawners with a snarl and they faded back into the wormwork of the city.

  She shrugged. They walked on. She whistled. He dug curls of scurf out from under his fingernails.

  After a while, he spoke, I was curious—I’ve heard talk about some of the machines of Weatherhead. I thought maybe if it wasn’t—forbidden—that I could see some?

  She looked him up and down, then inclined her head. Hm. I don’t see why not. Let me show you something better first.

  In the center of a small lot there was set a stone door. In the center of this stone door was set a spyhole. Eyes pressed agonizingly to it on either side were a young man and a young woman. He noted that they were themselves pressed against what he assumed to be cold stone. Correction: they were nailed to the stone; giant black bolts had been plunged through their wrists and the backs of their calves holding them in place. They didn’t seem to be in any pain, in fact, they must have been asleep, for when she prowled around the side of the door where she could see them both she shouted, startling them both, Eye to spy to eye! Decide and describe what you see! Her booming demand stirred them and their suspensions snapped to.

  An—an eye! The young woman’s voice was muffled, lips mushed against the stone.

  Their empress screwed up her face and leaned in, crying into an ear, An eye? More than an eye?! What about you? She prodded the young man in the ribs.

  The same! An eye! An eye!

  She frowned. They were raised here, she explained, nailed to this door from their youth. At the word youth, the pair began wailing in unison until the ruler of Weatherhead hushed them with furious kicks. She shot a glance at him, studied his expression. No. I had nothing to do with it. You will see as your shadow lengthens here in fair Weatherhead, that much of the horror here preceded me. She turned to go.

  Is that why, he called with a curt laugh, you showed me this? To make me feel better?

  Why, she called back without pausing, does it make you feel better?

  ⧜

  He could never start a conversation with her because he was never at all certain which way it might wend. Even when he admitted to his affairs he could not be certain how she would react.

  The reason why was this: it is often believed that the people close to us are predictable in their outcomes even if we do not admit it to them or ourselves. We champion their cause no matter how unrealistic, we bend to their whim, and tact is a coup against honesty. This was an impossible illusion with Maggie Mechaine.

  She yawned inside her mouth as she listened and her face swelled out and her eyes teared up a little, not because of his confession, spurred by half-guilt, but because of the yawn. She made clear her utter disinterest in speculating over his infidelities. He wanted her angry, leaving. But she just nodded. All she said was, “Well.” She pronounced it like “whale”.

  His best friend Mal had warned him about Maggie Mechaine once in this way: “She’s got the worst kind of choreography: all unquiet.”

  He stared at his friend across his cloud-capped mug. “What, are you a poet now or something, too? What the hell does that even mean?” Of all honesty, he knew exactly what Mal meant, for he had never forgotten that hidden shout that Maggie Mechaine kept folded to her chest, that one he’d seen that first time in the frame shop. Even caught in the thick of all those other women, he had never forgotten that shout, that roar.

  Mal motioned with his head by way of reply. She was sitting a little ways away from them, arms crossed under chin under mouth set against the game below. Around her were scattered the remnants of beers. A cigarette was cannonade behind her ear. You could see that she was talking to herself. From time to time she’d produce a pen from behind her other ear and write on her forearm. Stats, he knew. Guesses. Prophecies. She did it at home, too. “I trust my skin more’n some strange paper,” she’d crack. God alone knew that tree’s true purpose.

  He stared at Mal. “Wh
at?” He didn’t follow. It was Maggie as she always was: over there.

  Now, Mal was also a cop. Even worse, he was a painter, too, which probably trebled his powers of apprehension when it came to face-taking, or profiling, as they called it nowadays. They were both up for promotion to detective, too, talented as the both were. But Mal did him one better when it came to collaring Maggie Mechaine. Mal had always been completely cautionless when it came to her. “Her jaw. Her knuckles. The side of her throat. Her feet. Observe.” He scooted down.

  “Whatcha writin’, Mags?” He straddled the bleacher beside her. She looked at him half-wise.

  “I’m guessin’ pitches,” he heard her tell Mal, “they say nobody ever knows anybody else except for your own worst enemy which in baseball, anyway, ain’t you—“

  “—it’s the pitcher,” Mal laughed. “Must be like second-guessin’ God?”

  She looked at him strangely. “Yeah, something like that.”

  He watched them talk. Mal was old hand at her. He had this way of yanking her up by the seat of her pants and making her remember the rest of the world. She hadn’t always been like this. She’d always been quiet and reserved, shy. But never withdrawn. For him, he never knew how to take what she did give him because there was so little. “There’s loners and then there’s aloners,” his silver sister told him much later when he puzzled over Maggie’s death. “We never talk about loners, we never sing their praises, idolize them, because we know nothing about them.” But he didn’t believe this was true. Maggie Mechaine was a series of delicious traps laid for him, he thought in the beginning. He thought that there was tact in her taciturn nature. She kept her hand out at her side and made a nook for accidents and his real error was in thinking that she didn’t control down to a tee every bit of the world around her. But he had the habit of being a man, and men and women alike can’t abide without seeing patterns in everything, even empire hearts that are ruled by changes. This was what Mal was trying to tell him now: Maggie Mechaine was alive.

  She and Mal continued talking quietly. He hated Mal for a satisfying drip of time. How much better a husband he would be for Maggie. He made everyone he spoke to feel like he carried their throne on his shoulder, he was so disarming. Good man or evil man, Mal’d fall into their company like a prayer for rain on the hair of the desert. It wasn’t guilt for his own indiscretions that drove him to these thoughts, it was his fear of Maggie that thundered in him, made him terrible, made him plot terrible configurations and inebriations and sly bridge-buildings with men he knew to try and push her into their arms. So-and-so loves baseball, too, maybe you two could go to a game? Divert so-and-so to get some framing done, why don’t you? It never worked, though, and he was too much in the habit of being a man to see why. He could spend his life disguising himself as a soldier, a cop, an odor in the hallway, but none of this would change the fact that once upon a time when he looked into Maggie Mechaine’s eyes he saw a shipwreck of a ship full of wild beasts that wanted so badly just for him to be wind, wave, and welter.

  In the end, she did trick him into being just that. Her ultimate act of love was that she wanted to die.

  He studied her where Mal had said. The jaw ached outwards, outrunning the rest of the face, a ribbon of rebel red touched its tip to its edge. The tip of her tongue would be between her teeth, he knew, top ones back a bit. Her knuckles did the same, the bone strove against the skin, pulling taut its translucence, putting white against the red, the veins on the back of her hand thrown in relief as she squeezed her pen. Her throat showed a cord, he saw it as a bowstring slave to her jaw’s tug. Her feet she’d slipped out of her sneakers, they were at right angles almost to the ground, balls of her feet digging into the concrete. Now he saw what Mal meant, what Mal wanted him to see: she seemed about to leap right out of herself, straight up and out like the worst calm ever. There was nothing reserved here. It made him blink, what quiet? She was all pounce and leaden heavy with a lightness that he’d never noticed.

  Mal sat back down next to him and darkly nodded.

  He stared at his friend, “What were you talking about with her?”

  Mal quaffed his beer and surveyed the field. “What makes us happy.”

  His mouth flickered in and out of existence. “What? What’d she say?”

  Mal took up his beer again. “You saw what she said.” People, he explained can be pinned down moment by moment if you really try. All he was saying, Mal, was that nothing was taking place around us other than what is right there next to us. Paint a person, he said, and you are there to the utmost. That’s when, he said, you see at their clearest those little pressure points where life builds up inside someone. For some people it’s in their fists. Others, their mouths. Others, their dicks.

  “You laugh,” Mal countered with a lowered brow, “but it’s true. Like in that hungry dragon don’t fuck with the tiger movie you dragged me to last year—“

  “Not fair, man, I thought it’d be a cultural kind of thing—“

  “She is not Chinese—look, forget it. Remember that part where the chick touches those guys she’s fightin’? Freezes their asses? It’s like that. There are points within people, all you need to know is how to spot them and then act on them. They’re like little junctures where we all fit together. Press ‘em the right way—like a puzzle box. Release that pressure or they’ll just burst! Maggie—she’s got a lot of them.” She’d split along these in due time.

  He listened to his friend and wondered what moment would be the strongest in his own life? Would it be one with her?

  The local team lost, an unexciting game by all accounts. She didn’t care two huffs, so she said, about who won or who lost in these “little games”. She was waiting for the majors spring training to start and biding her time. It was going to be a stormy year, she predicted.

  “It’s all about playing the game?” he suggested. She rinsed her forearms off at a water fountain near the exit. Mal had already left. He would meet them at a bar later. His girlfriend, pale and evilborn to he and Maggie, was very pregnant and there was a silent, damned imminence to the whole affair. She would soon be unlettered and mapless and take her leave of both him and the child. This is another story.

  “How’d you do?” He pointed to the washing of her arms.

  She shrugged. “Not bad. It’s all in the eyes, you know.”

  He batted poorly against her hint-traps. “Is it? Not in the wrist?” He mimed a swing.

  “No. No, not at all there.”

  They walked out. He picked her up by her hips so easily and set her on the tailgate of his truck.

  The girl named revolt was annoyed. “What.”

  “C’mon.”

  “No.” She banged her calves on the edge of the thing. She looked up. He looked away. The parking lot dribbled away. She spat after it and wiped her mouth with her arm. It left ink on her chin. He was suddenly struck by how little he’d ever looked at her. Or was he just imagining that? Her chin, mouth, it looked unfamiliar, the jaw Mal had bade him peruse. There was a black diagonal slash across it. Jaw and throat, he could see those pressure points Mal called them and he remembered the one on her throat from the first time they’d made love, that little tic. He wanted to wipe off her chin. “No,” she repeated. He grabbed her by the thighs. “No,” she repeated. He dug in his fingers and dragged her forward. She drove her fist into his eye.

  It would be easy to see this as pent-up anger over his cheating on her—he certainly did—but it really wasn’t. She just really wanted to hit him sometimes, so she did for once. She was still blowing on her fist when he got into the cab next to her. “I guess you think I deserved that,” he fumed.

  “Everyone does at one point or another,” she replied. The knuckles he had forgotten to remember, the life in the ends of her knuckles.

  Never forget. Never remember.

  (14 Across) I Menace the Contagious.

  She was laughing, Your alphabet has turned to stone!

  He ignored
her and dug his fingers into the spaces around one of the tiles. These clues—I don’t even know what they mean. He was on his hands and knees atop a crossword puzzle made out of cobblestones. She stood over him with an hourglass. Inside there was smoke instead of sand and one couldn’t tell if it was going up or down. It was circular, boneless time. She called it the pitch-forwards.

  The word was ‘shenanigan’. The game was for him to find the corresponding clues. Problem was, the clues to the words as presented were little more but fuel to the fire of his apparent, wanton stupidity. He wasn’t even sure that the slashes and indications and invocations on the smooth surfaces of the cobbles were actually words in any language anymore as the longer he hovered over one or the other the less coherent they became. It was like trying to write a letter home using the aphorisms and sophisms of the high voice.

  She shook the pitch-forwards, and a cacophony of scream-middled giggles emitted from the tiny spout at its top. Shenanigan, she repeated, is it really so difficult? She took up post next to him and peered over him.

  He ignored her. Dammit, what was it about these stones? He leaned on his knees and studied them, palms out flat. She’d had him here since dawn, playing. Somehow she always found where he was sleeping, the town a blanket she could snake up under and pull him out by his feet. Come, she crooked a finger at him, to toy with him like the flick of an obedient whip. What’s gotten into me, he thought, that I’d count up debts to her like this?

  These are impossible, he gritted his teeth. She heard this sound and laughed and laughed. You always leave these laid out before me like a dare. You always did. Just like it ever was. He regretted these words immediately. He was halfway to a flinch from the blow when none came.

  All there was left was, Don’t say ‘ever’ and ‘was’ to me, she cautioned. Women, to him, spoke a different language. He’d known this from an early age, book-ended by pairs of sisters. Maggie Mechaine spoke something else entirely. This woman made alphabets out of soup. She held up the pitch-forwards again and squinted at it. A long, droning thrum issued from it now. Your time is spent. I win again.