Weatherhead Read online

  What’s that for?

  I use it to measure death. Here, she pressed it to his chest. She squinted at the readout. Weird—

  What?

  She produced a set of heart bellows identical to the one Rapey carried with him. Or life. She fussed about with the tubing and dials, comparing it to the reading she’d taken off her barometer made out of bones.

  Of course, he thought, this is what Maggie Mechaine recorded with this thing, called a barometer: life. It was nominally for measuring something to do with the weather, he recalled her explaining this to him. Maggie Mechaine, he took a series of deep, deep breaths as if saved from drowning, that was his wife’s name. Once, she’d been wrong with her device. It didn’t rain yesterday, he had pointed out with not a little smugness. She just nodded. Different world, she had replied with her rapier simplicity.

  With horror he realized what was happening. The moment when the spit hit the street. The moment when effect and cause were one. She hunkered down in front of him, he nailed to the dirt, and with a gentle fingertip raised his chin until his eyes stared into her pale blues. “I have two lazy eyes,” she’d sworn to him on one of their first dates. Not now—now she swore other things. Sleep is never bottomless. No fall is. This is why we are driven to jump in piles of leaves. She gripped the front of his shirt. Now you decide, in that tangle of empty churches you call soul, whether you stay or go.

  What?! He could hear an approaching engine. The bandits, his bandits, the ones she named Love were suddenly there, then, standing in a row behind her, fidgeting nervously. She looked up at them and shook her head.

  A rickety-bones, emaciated old bus drove up. Paint and decades-old movie posters peeled off it, made it appear as leprous as it was, torn down by the hours now, the minutes, then the seconds. Pressed against the windows were an array of incandescent faces forming constellations of terror and despair along the length of the thing, faces dislocated by their very natures, faces that, frankly, had no place here out on the plain between the mountains and the sea that was nothing but a lie that the fish made up. This bus, too, was a lie, the grin that insisted it had invented the smile was but the grille on the front—the wheels were mere hooves for a hearse and buggy—there was something unsuperstitious about the whole thing, so grand was its untruth. Even the driver with his silver-encased fingers curling over the steering wheel and his wheel of faces was but an expression of the intimacy of futility with abandon.

  He stared at the truck and figured himself a stray legend in these parts and, yet, he loved his misfortune, the daily lamentation of being cursed with his birth being under the same sky as hers.

  They’s comin for ye, lad, Mr. Moustache shouted over the unmuffled din of the creature’s engine. Deportingizations.

  This is not my doing, she cursed into his face. It was then that he realized that what she was telling him, what she had no words for, no kindesses for, was that—she didn’t want him to leave. And they—she indicated the bandits—they won’t interfere unless—unless—

  Unless him, he knew. She, for once, was powerless. All her wits—

  He looked up at Mr. Moustache and Frank, ranged on either side of her. Rapey and the Colored Girl were in the background, casting antsy glances at the pants and pockets, all the minted and monied places of coze of the citizens milling about the makeshift bus station, curious at this wheeled thing’s presence for only she was allowed such a conveyance within the city walls and the sight of another was rare. He looked at her again. Her face was close to his, angry and full of incisions. Would he ever speak the prayer-tongue of Weatherhead? Turn sermon into curse? Afraid, he had never been so alone.

  You— There was no word for ‘please’ in Weatherhead. You must—

  “Say you love me.” And he hadn’t. She had died. What had once never seemed forbidden did so now with a rush that sent him to his feet, undoing her nailings-down. Love, quartet, surrounded him as he rose and each put a hand on him, holding him down, in place. Each other hand held a knife or pistol. Oh god, he cried to himself, couldn’t it’ve been the briefest of nightmares, this place, where at the end I could roll over, no matter how dead my heart, and she’d be there—I could do first breaths again, last ones, too—why here? So far from everything that she was—and, how we love, he now knew, was far less important than why we love. Her fingers playing over his shoulders like butterflies, the curl of smoke from the corner of her mouth, ten fingers splayed on ten puzzle pieces—dawn arrived with her reds and whites, even on the day he found 51 pieces of her.

  She was raging at the bus now, he saw, putting hells on her lips, her bat in hand, she walked down its length smashing and denting the rusty metal. It was no longer that she wouldn’t let him leave. She didn’t want him to leave. He watched her storm and shake the frame of the thing come to convey him away. What a hunted, haunted world this was!

  He looked at Mr. Moustache and gently pushed his hand away. The bandit smiled his rough, cruel smile, revealing his yellow teeth, and winked at Frank. They both nodded in unison. We can help, aye, Frank smiled. Love’s four hiked up their gunbelts, waved him back and ranged themselves in a line in front of the bus. A great burden assumed once again its position over his soul and he slumped forward as if winter had come and made lies out of his shoulders, making it snow there and only there until he was crushed down under its weight.

  At a signal, Love, to her astonishment, fanned out, slashing tires, shooting out windows and headlights, emptying chambers into the thick-warded driver’s faces, all seven of them, as they made their rounds of reincarnatible vile between death and death and death—her mazement lobbed its ‘a’ through the back windshield and she threw herself into the fray, pouring herself over the fragments of glass poking up out of the frame as she stormed the art inside (the other passengers were tricks; cardboard realities of famous people from works of art; even Mona Lisa took a bat to the smile)—mazes meant for him shuddered as their walls bent double in screams as she and Love rent the bus asunder—the Colored Girl was setting the ancient wheels on fire with a can of hairspray and her cigarette while Rapey, pants exiled to ankledom, had his way with a spring-loaded confection of seats.

  How horrible and wonderful at once they all were, Love and this demoness! How craven their censuring the vehicle’s limp away from them to hide its stripped-down frame! Love itself took umbrage with the thing’s skirting the proper grammatical tense and stood, or in one case, squatted, over its remains and urinated with aplomb and child-like glee on it. All in the name of themselves coursed their triumph.

  As for her, she was still self-stranded in the rubble at the center of the thing. It had pitched forward down into the dust once the wheels melted enough and she’d banged her head a fine one on a pane of broken glass, but the wound was hidden in her reds atop her head—was it bleeding? He doubted it. Life forces down hurt, tethers it to the ground. This he knew for certain as he stood, hands in his pockets, and watched the empress of Weatherhead tear apart seats and their backs with her teeth and nails.

  He would cling to Weatherhead. It had become his nothing-but.

  Keep them low, she had told him on one of his first days in Weatherhead, it is my singular will and wit.

  ⧜

  Maggie Mechaine was dead. No, no, the first time she killed herself.

  One afternoon, clawed up to him the memory, there had been a Maggie Mechaine of laughter and light, not a Maggie Mechaine of physics-less cages, snow, and swanlakes into the fronts of trucks.

  “The pressure hardly ever wavers.” She spoke strongly of the device as if her insight into the workings of the winds gave her the privilege of taking on airs and speaking in this curiously expert vernacular. She never trusted the weather man, insisted on measuring rainfall herself and in fact her numbers were wildly divergent. He told her the rain liked her more. She was quiet, then, pondering, perhaps, he thought, being the receiving end of all the world’s storms.

  He asked, seeing the state of her lazy blue eyes. �
��What is it again?”

  “It’s a barometer,” she sighed. They had just moved in together: the first thing she’d done was nail this thing next to the door in the extra room designated “hers” by her emptying out a box of puzzle books all over its floor. They were still there, three days later. She’d been busy with work, she maintained. This he didn’t question: everyone left things lying about, especially words. The emptying out of several boxes of puzzles onto the floor and her subsequent stirring them into each other with a bent toe, though, was another matter. He stared down at his feet. She must’ve emptied more, ‘cause he could easily snuggle his feet down into the depth of fragments and watch his toes vanish. It was like curling your toes in sand. He found it eerily calming.

  They would live for the next seven years in an unobtrusive rowhouse on the northeast side of town. Here they would stay until weathers got to her so badly she couldn’t stand it anymore and they fled to Alaska where weathers were subsumed and inundated by exile. He remembered it now as a quiet, light place. It was ranged against east and west on a slight rise in the street with its mates so there was always a furthering amount of distal light save for the hour around noon. Most of its rooms ran along its axis, with windows on either side, though the back merely faced the neighboring home. Basement staked by him for his makeshift gym, she had taken the top corner room as far away from him as possible. It had a lovely pair of windows facing the street and was always softly alight. Her forward observation post for the weather. Their bedroom, where they were slowly making inroads, so to speak, to making love, was on the opposite side of the second floor.

  He didn’t see her old apartment until he moved her out. He never found this strange. She lived in an unobtrusive manner, simply and without accruings.

  “I just like figuring things out. See, we’re—we have that in common. You want to be a detective. So do I. For the sky—“

  “There is no weather in pictures,” he pointed out. He knew better. For her it was about the frames, not what was in them. Edge first, he heard her mutter once, edge first.

  “Poo,” she replied. She stared into it. He could see she was studying her own face in the glass, trying to line up the central dial and the hand with the dimensia of her face somehow. Her dull eyes—how dull? How tired? It was too late to wonder, but Weatherhead dragged questions out of one.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I have to zero it. Like resetting it, see?” She shifted to one side. “The mercury is there.”

  “I thought it never got to zero. What happens if it gets to zero?”

  She laughed and ducked her head, “We’d all be dead, I guess? When it goes lower, it means bad weather ahead. It measures—are you makin’ fun of me? You already know the answer—“ She’d tried to explain this to him a dozen times maybe.

  “No—wait!” He grabbed her arm. “So—zero would mean what?”

  “It can’t get that low. That’s—that means there’s no air pressure. Like in outer space. A vacuum. We’d all be dead.”

  “Stop!” She was fiddling with a dial on the device. “You’re gonna put it at zero? You just said—you’re gonna die!“

  She was quite adept at lighting matches one-handed. She always carried strike-anywheres. She could strike anywhere—at any time. She did now and thrust the budding flame at his forearm. “Oh! Go away, you stupid boy! I ain’t god!”

  He had never lived with a woman before. He’d been with numerous women and never spent more than a fugitive night or two pinning them like gasping butterflies to their mattresses in their own beds. Yet, here was Maggie Mechaine, in a black t-shirt and panties, awake when he came home from work, frying eggs with a cigarette dangling off her bottom lip and a cry of pain on her upper lip ‘cause sometimes he’d just try to have her right then on the kitchen counter and there as unscarred lovers are wont to do, walking salutes to love’s undoing of place and time, desire’s unarchitecturing making every surface stage for bare buttocks and in that first year or so consummation was a half-mast deep affair that they worked quite hard at but which, judging by the slits of her eyes and her hisses still caused her no end of discomfort. Practice makes perfect, the doctor had told her.

  He was her only friend. He came to realize this after a few weeks living together. This wasn’t particularly strange. He himself had few friends but they were his. He owned them the way we own pets. But she—he never heard her mention anyone else. Ever. It was if she had decided that he was enough and that was that. For him, though, he could never call this woman his friend. He’d always treated friend and lover as two distinct things: you could love someone all you want, but you could never call them a friend. Love, for him, was more an enemy, a thug in the night, than anything else.

  Places low where to feed were the places for Love, and she knew that she was in the troughs, something to slurp up when his mouth got dry. She’d buckle and curse and talk about how much he and bastards looked alike, covering her eyes with musicks so she wouldn’t have to look at him. He’d complain and she’d turn the dial all the way down to zero but she could still hear it, the way we all can when something you love is muffled and muted—you feel its abscess—not an absence—but the hole, the screaming hole it makes out of the sheer, pure energy of how much you love the thing. She did this with songs and weathers, the few things that bobbed next to her in the troughs.

  In life, Maggie had only ever been stricken with horrors out of her control: the occasional illness and the even rarer Shortage. Smoke was light by nature and she appreciated that. She didn’t take it for granted and saw no sin in it. A bad young woman? Hardly. She never spoke ill of anyone, committed any crime other than smoke-crime and, in some states, the occasional acquiescence to the dark cadence of sodomy. Why then had she no friends? Perhaps she just didn’t need them, the same way the ruler of Weatherhead, like him, needed no name.

  It’s not like, he thought, two random sounds can be joined to make a name that has any meaning beyond the noise it makes. “Ma—“

  Don’t call me that. Two disparate sounds equal one poetry. A random meaning may occur. She sounded desperate and hopeful. Secretly, she wanted this. She wanted him to rebuild her. You haven’t been registering your pitch with the central office.

  He shuddered, memory interrupted. My pitch? She had never let him pitch to her. Then he remembered the tuning at the river. I didn’t know I had to.

  This explains, she hefted a length of unhewn ash, why I can’t ever hit you in the face just right. She banged the wood against the bottom edge of a frame.

  No. And she would never. He sought have in his crass agoism again:

  She had no friends to speak of, none of note she had ever mentioned to him. She was very much a lone spirit. And so she died. He was the closest thing to a friend she had. Same with enemies. He was the closest thing to an enemy that she had.

  Even after they moved and he thought maybe it’d do her some good to get out and meet someone other than him, she protested from under her red hood, “I don’t need friends. I don’t need anyone else more than me to show me how undesirable and bad other people are,” she told him. She’d said something similar on her one and only visit to a therapist. He could never tell when she was joking and when she wasn’t. “Now, dim the happy lights,” she ordered, and she laid an arm all woe-is-me across her eyes to beat the darkness without.

  Hadn’t she gone around the house writing ‘barometer’ by the door, ‘sharpener’ over there by the window, stood at imperceptible intervals hanging on pegs her rows and rows of empty frames? Hadn’t that been her? Maybe she could re-start her business out of the Alaska house? He gave over half the cellar to her for this.

  “Yeah, okay, maybe,” she murmured.

  Or go back to school? There was a small college—this just made her laugh.

  Though never prompted to make it functional, he’d always carried an assumption somewhere in his unconscious that potheads were very social creatures. Didn’t the nature of the drug make
one all yappy and hyper-conversant if not hyper-attuned? Maybe the person she bought weed from? Where did she get it in Alaska anyway? Were there fairies here, fairies with parkas and chapped lips and brittle wings?

  She was never depressed or sad, she always firmly swore this. She needed nothing. Happiness was foreign, though. There was only this sliver of a hint as if someone had died in her past-now-future.

  “I don’t need someone,” she burned crimson as she spoke, “to teach me how to be happy. I know how to be happy.”

  He found it difficult to stroke the thighs of future suicide. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Everyone else,” she hissed.

  “So,” he couldn’t help laughing, “we’re all wrong? Fooling ourselves into thinking we know what makes us happy? That’s it? Maggie Mechaine is the only happy person alive?”

  “Or dead.” She was the sort of person who never sought justification for their own existence and she had no patience for those who did. She’d not truck in those who trucked in ideas, which were many people their age, infused with youth’s stupid, orgasmic eruption of siege plans and philosophies. The surrender of the self to an idea or notion submerged the individual. This is what Maggie meant when she said, “I ain’t got time for people who think too much and get diarrhea of the mouth. Everyone talks in fears. They are fearal.” She laughed at her own joke. “I just keep my head down, like a horse in a trough, mindin’ my own business, havin’ a quiet drink. “

  But you wanted to die, he wouldn’t will have said. What he didn’t realize until it was far too late and she got her wish, was that no matter how low she could go, she had him:

  When he’d been bleeding out in the hospital after being shot several times in the chest by a villainous villain, she’d stood there over him and read him into consciousness, read him film tie-ins of all his favorite movies including the one they’d missed because of the shootout.