Weatherhead Page 13

  Shit, it was a coffin-shaped life, that’s all I can recall. Had a name like saying ‘bye to the winds. Been some weeks since I’ve seen it.

  Their conversation was truncated by the appearance at the head of the square of the red woman. The people scattered away from her. She hooked her thumbs in her worn, scuffed belt, then approached without a word. Drawing herself up with a sigh, the ruler of Weatherhead stared at the strange old woman with narrowed eyes, then at him. You know this woman.

  No—n-not really—

  He killed my son, she half-coughed, half-laughed. It was the first sign she’d given that she knew him. He was lucky, that boy, she sighed, thunder rolls across a valley or a town like this—in the beginning it is fresh and red, by the end of things, old and stale. Better that it end somewhere just above—where you can hear its full-throated shout at its greatest.

  It doesn’t matter, the red scorn shade of Maggie Mechaine scoffed, no one ever listens. And if they had, well—look at you, you dirty shit whore. The older woman just snorted. She didn’t move an inch or make a peep as Maggie Mechaine’s horrible, evil twin walked over and quite simply tore out the other woman’s throat as if it were cardboard.

  She flung her hand out to clean it off and glared at him. We don’t truck in what-ifs here in Weatherhead, she told him imperiously, and turned away to leave.

  He knelt down with a retch and fingered the death-dealing wound. He clapped a hand over his mouth. It was cardboard. Her neck. All of it, the blood, vein, and gristle. All cardboard.

  ⧜

  Maggie Mechaine was a prophetess tried-and-true. She was drawn to prediction. She’d have breathed anthracomancy in if she’d known the word, peered down misty fried into the stoogly end of her joints to see the shape of things to come. Capnomancy or catoptromancy, mirrors underwater, in baptismal founts, maybe. Delphi’d been choked with smoke, too. So.

  “Sleep my magic sleep.” She was drawn to prediction the way fears of the future drove people to oracles and horoscopes, but she wasn’t afraid of anything, wasn’t seeking anything and thus wasn’t afraid of the future. She wasn’t afraid of anything. If anything, she wanted to make other people afraid, he thought. She was the middlewoman in a process of desires for both forethought and the vague recesses of the universe from which they emanate. She only had a passing interest in what these omens meant, she was passive spectator to both the airs and the games.

  She was a prophetess in two ways and two ways only, though with her acumen at forecasting and cleaving imminence in two and staring at its innards, she could’ve excelled at them all, he guessed. These two methods of prophecy were second-guessing the institution of meteorology and calculating pitches and hits in baseball. This could be further reduced to the simple idea of what will be thrown at one next, hail or a curveball? Sometimes it was both.

  A pitcher, she told him, could be as conniving and false as nature or god, whichever way you looked at it. But you can beat both, she swore up and down, stay one step ahead of them. It was all a matter of moods and faces. She could predict every face except her own. “No one ever really knows anybody,” she always said, often adding the qualifier: “except a pitcher and his batter.” The key, she said, was to step in between them. “Like a priest, maybe. Between god and a sinner. Confession or whatever. Right?” Her would-be arch-foe, her nemesis, Randy Johnson populated her daydreams. She knew the guy in and out, she maintained, could hit off of him, she swore.

  He sighed. Maggie could peel a player apart, know how he hit, know how he swung, know how he pitched, but damned if she knew the first thing about faith. She actually had plenty; it was just all in herself. “Fakeout,” she’d call and an instant later there’d be a ballsy lead-off walking back shame-faced to the dugout. She prodded him a few minutes later. “A knuckler. You’ll see.” She turned her arm over so he could read. He didn’t see. He knew fuck-all about baseball. For all he knew she was making it all up. But it wasn’t like he didn’t try. He couldn’t abide the sport, but he made a good-faith effort. For example, he endured numerous baseball films for her sake, even though she despised every single one. She, for her part, acquiesced in watching them because she thought his efforts at bridging the gap were cute even though she hated watching movies.

  The weather was a different story. She couldn’t make that up. Not back then. Not like she could now. She had an evening routine, once she’d stowed away the frame shop and quietly returned home, of perching herself on the edge of their coffee table and flying through news’ weather channels, choking on her coals and flapping her hand at them, “Rain, my ass! Nope, no!” and she’d rush over to her barometer, take some measurements and snort. She was almost always right, too. She swore by self-prophecy. The so-called experts, she believed, had inculcated the citizenry with a false sense of comfort when it came to all things up and sky and the things with which the sky waged its war against the earth. “What was that one? That fake war movie? With Big Head?”

  “1984? It was a book—“ Of 1984 he told her: A fable that warns against thinking too much. People misunderstood it, he said.

  “Image—imagine that,” she poked her finger at him, “but about the weather.” She looked out the window, suddenly fearful. “Can strike at any moment. It’s always out there.” He’d wake up to find snow boots or umbrellas or sunscreen stationed strategically by the front door for him. She hated the weather she couldn’t predict. She hated the pitches she couldn’t predict, the ones that weren’t part of the drunken, on-high Plan. Planes and birds—they all contributed to her fear of up. Both of those things trumped her prediction for winged, engine precipitation, something driven down should be predictable, but wasn’t, and the bird gettin’ hit by that pitch, well, that was pure freak chaos theory chance, she warned the world. Beware of false things in skies about. But, boy, she knew her enemy well otherwise.

  “Ain’t no shape to ritual,” she buzzed around him. Where had she come from? Her lips were always slightly offset. They looked dead-set against everything. She bent hesitant to his violent outcropping. Which way to turn? “Storms,” she hissed in his ear. You’re the worst, he told her. He pretended he was a scaffold, she had a noose between her legs. They were trying to make a baby. She plotted the pressures and airs behind her navel, waited for that fallopian fastball to whizz down her mound—he always knew when. She became desperately violent when she was ovulating. And it always seemed to storm. Seemed though, he thought, she wasn’t so hot at predicting herself, for years passed without even a bunt.

  Beyond projectile and the way air behaved around itself, though, futures, to her, were of a dubious character and should be avoided at all costs. She never spoke of them. The sole exception was her hesitant, speak-softlies of babies. Her shop was fixed, immutable: it would never expand, she assured him with her apathy. They were always poor despite it. It was if the futures she possessed in her singular manner were enough. Weather was the expression of the world.

  “Fuck poetry,” she assured him, for who needed it when all the winds of the world, the rains, the bloods of sunsets dictated by bloodless circulations about the earth, when she had all these at her beck and call.

  He often wondered what else she could see? Had she forecast her death? Red sleet at low altitudes? Bone and snow likely?

  Then again, maybe she hadn’t needed to. Maybe that’s how she became god.

  (17 Down) I am Cathedral Smut.

  We are the Tournament! replied the crowing crowd as it crawled by his window. So down to the tournament he went. The sky clawed at the ground with its tenterhooks of clouds—so it seemed. But this fog lifted as he made his way through the city, following the desperate, sick conga-line of obeisance that could only but lead to her.

  The clamor was feverish and he could get nothing out of the people about him so he contented himself with towering above them, swept along by the blood-tide of their desperation-crushed and pinched faces. The regular, monotonous features and tones of those of Weatherhead had been re
placed by something almost lusty, almost crimson so excited and near-distraught were they by this tournament day. Like light flooding the dungeon, he thought. What further obligatory evils could the red woman deliver upon this sunless day? He pictured whores in silver, horned masks stealing children, whips screaming and screeching so that they left weals on the air, a violet plague perhaps that redeemed only the fissures and gaps and orifices of the body, setting them free from the flesh to lead empty, holey prophet’s lives in the wastes beyond the city. None of this was beyond her miracle.

  The ‘arena’ was little more than what appeared to be an abandoned high school sports field far out near one of the city’s edges, an area of town he’d never seen before, full of low, cursing hovels and houses, what might have passed for suburbia in a city of less agony. If the field was appendage to a locus of learning, than the latter was nowhere to be seen. He was reasonably certain she’d razed every school in Weatherhead. Keep them blind, blue, and stupid.

  About the surging peoples he slid, ducking between pressed shoulders and flailing arms waving pennants crafted out of cheese and disused, soiled undergarments, adding a fetid pierce to the proceedings. Was it some kind of a game? He couldn’t imagine anything enjoyable or entertaining being associated with her gruesome laughter. There were some middling-sized bleachers on either side of a piebald expanse of grey-green turf, so he made his way towards them to get a view of the field from above. Thousands of people mobbed the sidelines and the whole affair bore the swell and gush of medieval pageantry or super bowelry. He half-expected to see a joust, a national anthem, a foolish diamond carved into the field, worthless. Best to stay as far away from possible, he reckoned. There might be knives or worse.

  He climbed to the top of the bleachers, rusted metal resounding hollowly and ungolden ring under his tired boots. At the top he turned and shielded his eyes against the overcast sky. He imagined a contest, a game, if even to the death—dark plays—instead, what he saw was a gruesome and unhealthy display of every sexual act conceivable to humanity set inside a rectangular pit dug down in the center of the field. Oh! The black lusts of Weatherhead! A flame and storm-bend of the city he’d yet to see unfolded before him. The correspondence between agony, madness and succulent, climactic desire was evident. Faces contorted, necks craned to the sky, fingers hooked like rooks into claws and talons raking flesh, downfalls on knees before spickets bleeding clearblood, swollen thorny nipples trapped between teeth, hell for monks, all manners of spread and black-white dew the testimony of dying stars—along one front, to his left, was ranged the wrath of god, spackled, speckled backsides greeted dying languages and wild fingers—some were distressed red and purple with handprints, here and there a violator’s sorrow pierced starfish’s veil, limbs twisted together in mad roundels and roundings—all sin was evident, light died in the mouths of angels who swooned and succumbed to the filth and hazel breaths that tolled over wretched loins, coughing penultimate sputum onto the sweet remains of what had once been man and woman—a plague of worst, worsted things spreading puddles of white, wrists dug into the earth, chained by grass and hand—someone had built a crude boat in the field and lashed a fellow to the bow while men and women both took turns climbing up, slinging themselves under or over him and raping him—

  Or so it seemed. For those climbing up the ship—those penetrating shaftlong, the battered fleshs, trembling thighs, the icy, sisterly countenances of the four women forming a circle with their mouths and things—all of these, they were all utterly immobile, frozen in their moments of dastard and sodomy—worse, it finally dawned on him: none of them were alive. It was a frozen menagerie of the worst kind of debauchery: that without breath. For a moment sheen betrayed erstwhile life. Was there lie even to the sweat he could see from on high? The emissions and laps of the tongue-races—were they merely illusion, a trick of the white? Oh, but no. He was quite wrong to think these were corpses. They were the shapes of the mimicry of the acts only, what in his land, whose name he could only fuzzily remember, were called statues. Not corpses.

  Mighty cries and hoots went up in waves as the crowd watched, as if the acts were sequential, serial things—as if thrust was followed by withdrawal, tug of the teeth pulling out lip, crack of the hand against backside—but they were not. There was no movement. Statues, no matter how monolithic and life-like, do not move, are instead formed out of the tears or smiles of yesterday, depending on the artist’s mood. Yet the people of Weatherhead went so far as to even wager on the, ahem, outcomes, of the random, myriad acts pinpointed down on the field. Clusters of folk gathered around certain couplings as if the hometown favorite was represented in that bridle shower of leather falling over so-and-so’s back, on all fours in front of whosit.

  He was astounded. A field of frozen fuck and here was half the city watching bait-eyed, singers calling down a gruesome white cavalcade on their own heads with their hoots and shrieks. The crowd surged and roared, hats tossed here and about, clothes rent. Some more enterprising madmen and madwomen tried to break out onto the field to join the physics-less gutter-punching but a volley of crackling lightning scorched a path in front of them when they tried to clamber over the fence.

  Whoever had made these, he reflected, was at least outcast from the waist down and as lonely as hell in heaven. But, he wondered, why was it called a tournament? Who was competing?

  It’s for The Man Who, a drooling spinster with a monocle told him when he pressed her for information. She was biting her own forearms, staring with wild eyes out across the field. Her loins were surely devoid: she was at least seventy. And yet she frothed. She chooses the best amongst the breakers of the breach. The rest are slain, the swine, and The Man Who she takes him into her embrace and oh, yes, yes, her promises are lethal, but I’d bet my sister’s shade—oh, she might be out there this time, too!—I’d bet my sister’s shade that—

  I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

  A man with eyebrows that formed a crude bird’s drawing at the top of his nose, a ‘W’ of sallow, fallow sadness and a moustache carved poorly out of hair dripping down over the sides of his mouth overheard them and cuffed him on the shoulder. She picks the most brazen and broken for The Man Who. What she does with him, no one knows, but everyone bets on the contest.

  He turned his gaze away from this tragedy-faced man and looked back out at the silent, still field. But they’re just statues. They’re not even—

  A shoe came down on the bridge of his nose, silencing him. You, sir, are a travelling wound! A wound, I say! A third fellow had joined them. He slipped his shoe back on as if ‘nuff said.

  He slipped away from these decaying folk.

  It was rumored, whispered in his ears that she was there in the crowd somewhere watching, for the final dispositions and depositions were at her whim and fancy. Untiring phalli dominated the day. Running commentaries on the fixed acts poured into his ears from all directions.

  No. Not in the crowd. There she was. Hovering above the crowd on her mirror, her coat flapped behind her as she leapt down next to him. The crowd tore up the earth scrambling away from her, crying out in fears best left bedside and behind the grime of the white slime they called teeth in these here parts. She was exultant as a chain on an ankle; she jangled with a sideways grin and that self-same squint of Maggie Mechaine that somehow the devil here had learned over the last few days. The bits of the spectators surrounding them waited for screams or one of her black machines that tickled and trickled death. She had had wind in her face and it had pushed her lips back into a smile. She greeted him with a pleasant nod, passing country lane nod, saying I am swift. I am just. I am the sigh after the hunt for god.

  Hi to you, too. His mouth felt weird, distressed. She was sky-blown beautiful. Would Maggie have been if he’d thrown her out of airplanes more often? Drove with the windows down? Dived out of burning buildings? He waggled his head to dispel the thought that this woman could ever arouse anything in him other than vile. With a grimy hand, he poin
ted to the field. Nice makeshift orgy. Are those old store mannequins?

  She shocked him by laughing. This made the people around them fall to their knees clutching their ears leaving only the two of them standing. In my country, makeshift, she surprised him again by patting his back indulgently, means the panicked, torrid time when the man puts his clearblood into the glare of the world—into the woman. She, too, indicated the field. There is none of that here, wildwound. This was her pet name for him. She’d only used it a few times before. He didn’t like it. It suggested the impossibility of healing. It takes years to apprentice to lie down with the call of the clearblood—it is a dead art—and more so because such softnesses are forbidden in Weatherhead. Didn’t you know that? This is how I give the people a taste of their old world.

  He considered this. It had not escaped his attention what had just happened. All he’d said was one word, one word in a chain of words and suddenly she’d seized it, leaned on it with her slang, pressed with all her will to make the thing fit, made it part of her tyranny over Weatherhead, had even created, on the pyre of course, a past for Weatherhead in keeping with the general hungers and deprivations curling up in everyone’s gullets and, now, laps. This interminable dream minus the trees and sky—was it his or hers? How could he weigh madnesses? Whose versus whose? He wasn’t even sure anymore why he had come here? Or was he forced here? All he knew was that he couldn’t speak the language of Weatherhead’s goddess, but he could invoke to her the power of creation.

  She was staring at him impatiently, waiting for him to speak. He ahemed and changed the subject, so disturbed was he by this—well, makeshift, nightmare—I saw you up there. Flying. I hoped, he cleared his throat, I hoped you’d come speak with me.

  This didn’t disturb her, he saw. I wasn’t flying. You were all pressed down beneath me. She stood on one foot and displayed the sole of her right boot. Under this. She moved closer to him. Her hair was tousled and solar curl storm-swept. What a humiliating physical burden sex is, eh? She was at his elbow, watching with surly eyes the goings-on. I wonder, is it rape if I, the enforcer, am not involved? She tapped her pursed mouth with her finger.