Weatherhead Read online

  Content, she settled back and squinted at him in the morning. The sun was always in her face. “They won’t stop fucking,” she casually observed.

  He cast. “Yeah, well, if we get to that age and can still manage that—“

  “Maybe it ain’t the age, but the mileage,” she mused with an odd gentleness.

  “We could make, like, 40 our cutoff for the fucking,” he offered.

  “30,” she proposed. She would never see her thirtieth birthday. Something that morning, he now saw, seemed to suggest this, for although she’d be dead in a little less than five years, she seemed content at the prospect of unburdening herself of uncertainties as to the longevity of the flesh. Yes, the whole world seemed calm that morning once Maggie Mechaine declared her outward range of existence as something to be made love to. She pulled out a puzzle book and her joint and pencil traded places more times than he cared to count. More than 30, maybe. She stuck her tongue out at the puzzles and started. They drifted into a storm of ducks. She was desperately afraid of birds. This always made him laugh, but he batted them away with an oar.

  “My hero,” she twanged, “see how we float.”

  Her hand trailed in the water. She wilted in sunshine. Her shiny white roots pulled up into her anemic shadow. A good poet would’ve called her an evening primrose. He wasn’t, so once he called her an unflower. He watched her pull her hood up. With the winged threat dispelled, she resumed laughing at her crosswords. What did she ever find funny in them? Her fingertips were black.

  After a while, she spoke. He thought she’d dozed off. “You haven’t caught a thing all week.” She used to fish with her brother, he knew. She was not unknowing.

  “Nope.” He leaned over the side and stared down with a frown. “I’m not even sure that there’re fish in this lake.”

  “Using a worm or something might help,” she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Or is it all about the chase?”

  The sun rose higher and their little boat drifted. They both enjoyed each other’s silence. It was an unspoken richness that the one found in the other. It had always been this way. And so it was this day.

  He threw her a beer. She said, “I like that she always wears blue.”

  He studied the water. He had a sudden memory of a book about King Arthur he’d had as a child. One of the illustrations inside was a very famous painting of a woman in a boat that he thought was the ‘Lady of the Lake’.

  “No,” his sister Silver said with her customary gentle reproach, tapping the page, “the Lady of the Lake always drowns. This lady was cursed.” Whoever she was, he thought of her now. Because of how much she looked like Maggie Mechaine, trapped in a boat, a frame, a curse.

  “Fuck,” she exhaled. Beer spilt down her calves.

  He ignored this. “Who wears blue?”

  She wiped at her legs with the edge of her hoodie. “Mal’s girlfriend.”

  “Random.”

  Maggie opened a bag of potato chips. He stared at her for a long time. The Lady of the Lake drowns. Silver was right. The other woman froze. “Do you miss your mom?” she asked suddenly and didn’t wait for an answer. “Do you believe in ghosts? When I was a little kid, a little girl, I’d always scare myself silly with ghost stories.” He’d heard this before, but her let talk because he loved her stories. “There was this one—I’ll never forget it—where this guy keeps—every time he looks in the mirror he keeps seeing this other person. Whenever he looked in mirrors, this weird guy was always there but—“ She leaned forward. So did he. “—every time the guy in the reflection—he’s always a little bit closer—a little bit closer and closer each time—“ He inched towards her. She didn’t notice. “And finally the guy freaks out! And won’t look in mirrors until someone looks in his eyes and the evil ghost or whatever is, like, right there! Right there! Ahh!” She pulled her hood down over her face, laughing. “After that, maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but after that, whenever I looked in the mirror I thought I was seeing the same thing, this crazy little girl ghost—then I realized the ghost was me! Shit! I’m a ghost!” She cracked up, throwing her head and hood back, spilling her hair out everywhere. The woman in the painting never laughed like this. “Man, was I fucking stupid or what?”

  He had moved close to her and their knees were touching. He favored this Maggie Mechaine, the one allergic to sunlight, but not averse to floating in it, allergic to the forest, but not averse to sucking it in between immunity’s lips. “What were you, like fifteen or something? Sixteen?”

  This just made her laugh harder and clap her hands over his knees. “I don’t think I ever told anybody this but until I was older—I used to think mirror—reflections were like future ghosts, like in whatsit—“ She tugged on his sleeve.

  “A Christmas Carol?”

  “Yeah, and now, you what I think? Ghosts are just reflections kept in the hours—in the glass, going from mirror to mirror, picking up the pieces and putting its life back together again. When it’s done with that—”

  “What?” She was peeking over the side of the boat as he had. The boat was barely rocking. He stared at her ear, her nape and twisted red around his finger.

  “Maybe it gets to live through it all together again.”

  The sun made them lazy, but not the boat. He rowed them away from their cabin on its hill, choked with the ululations and fetid grunts of old-people-sex.

  “What if it’s out of order?”

  “What if what is?” She finished her third beer.

  “Like a roll of film, movie film. If you have to gather up every little cell and put it back into order, but you fucked it up, nothing would be in sequence, see what I mean? You’d have the rescue first, the kidnapping last. The crash first, the descent last—“

  “The fish first, the worm last? There’s no worm on your hook,” she observed for the second or third time.

  “Yeah,” he patted his pockets, “I don’t have any.”

  “Hunting with blanks,” she nodded solemnly.

  “Feast before the hunt.”

  “It’d save time.”

  They were lost, he told her half an hour later. Follow the squeak of the unoiled bedframe, she advised. No, no, he warned, they were lost and, to boot, the sun was getting eaten up by clouds that wanted to rain on them just them. Converse, she pushed her hood back and sat up blinking in the unlight. “Pier pressure,” she quipped and peered into the water. Her ghost’d been turned into dueling ripples made by watery bullets falling back onto the earth. She stuffed her bag of marijuana down the front of her shorts which made him snort with laughter. They came upon another cove that he thought he recognized. There was a cabin here, so they’d at least be able to cower on the porch, inside if possible. They were a good hour’s row from their place.

  Noon pitch, she whistled between her teeth which were grey now, so together they rowed, put in, ran up the dirt and cowered under the small awning on the cabin’s back deck back-to-back. Rain lashed their lashes and thunder crashed their crash. He looked through the glass, disappeared around front and came back almost immediately. No one home, he yelled over the storm. They were soaking wet already, but sought shelter within. It was a seasonal, for hunters, he thought. There’d been a key under the mat, grimy and spit, he explained. No one had been in here for a while. The power was off and the only light came from a skylight above and a pair of windows on either side of the stove and its chimney which fed them lightning. She shivered, but unzipped her hoodie, sloughing it off and hanging it over the back of a wooden chair.

  “Only you can still pull off wearing the Iron Maiden shirt.”

  She didn’t reply. Rubbing her arms with her arms, an inane asymmetry of heat exchange, he thought, if the arms were cold to begin with, she took a turn around the room studying all that loomed up at her. Bookcase. Pair of beds. Couch. Old television. VCR. Minor kitchen.

  “Two people enter the house in which I am asleep,” she softly sang.

  “There’s no one here. It
’s just this room and a bathroom,” he said, “doesn’t look like anyone’s been here this year.”

  “Maybe they died,” she whispered. She reached behind the sofa with a deft movement and pulled out a “Lite-Brite”. “Remember these?” She poked her nose inside. Someone had spelled out B-E-W-A-R-E on it.

  “No, they didn’t,” but he looked anyway.

  “I want this,” she hugged the box and petted his face with her eyelashes. They still beaded with rain.

  “No! You can’t steal shit out of here,” he hissed. It got darker. They had to speak louder to be heard over the tumult smashing down from above.

  “Maybe they died,” she repeated, “maybe they’re here remembering rainstorms and their Lite-Brites, pickin’ up the pieces—just like I said—or they got murdered? Committed suicide?

  “Help the ghost, then,” he whispered.

  “Let’s be the ghost,” she countered, “we can help solve the mystery.” So they made up their great and secret game, she with her lighter held up, he with his giant hands on her hips to keep her fixed on this plane, only able to follow her lumen for her reds disappeared in the black, as she wandered through the debris of an anonymous life, piecing together who the deceased cabin owner was.

  The rain had ceased long ago. They’d emptied the canoe, found their forgotten beers floating in it and retired with the unopened ones to the grassy expanse behind the cabin as the sun reappeared. Neither of them felt like leaving.

  “Yeah, I do miss my mom,” he told her.

  “But what if—what if we’re the only ones captivate—in captivity?” She twisted up twigs and set them at right angles, tying them together with blades of grass, making frames. “Not the ghosts? I got to thinking in there, like if the guy isn’t dead—or your mom—what do we do when we remember? What are we putting back together?”

  She looked displaced, lying there in the grass like that. The green did not suit her. He replied, “Easy. His life. Her life.”

  “No. What we think it is.” She pounded the grass with her little white fist. “What we remember it—“

  “Not our job,” he belched. She sprawled silent.

  Famulus, he followed. She read the sky to him.

  (22 Across) I am Fêted, Chaste, Chased.

  Like hearing the lightning, but blind to the thunder, still the high voice deigned to descend to him, but he hadn’t seen that shade of Maggie Mechaine in a while. Where had she gone?

  We go weeks and not see her, mister, a half-pretty, bespectacled woman told him in the weary street when he asked after the empress.

  Maybe she was angry with him. But for what? He’d been going out of his way to not offend, not prod, just go along with whatever charade of horrors he was trapped in. He had even saved her life, saved her from the hunting of the hunt. And she him when his fall became amnesty and the bus tried to take him out of the city. They’d been dogs out of the truck, but their master had turned on them. This was how he saw it. He had done nothing to perturb her, he thought, though her impertinent, violent whimsy that made of her a blood-lusting harlequin created by a poet painting hell made it difficult to tell when one had transgressed her not. She would just as soon punch him in the gut with a scorpion if he advanced her a kindness as stir back behind her hollow breast the dim outlines of heavy miseries that masked the suffering that came as buffer between him and a smile. There was, simply, no pleasing the beast.

  He did see her at a distance from time to time, though, during this brief estrangement, sometimes in the company of the four thieves, Love. He’d cornered Frank once and he’d warned him away: the ruler of Weatherhead was a fickle, bestial woman, Frank reminded him. Best to wait it out. If he felt lonely, there was always the Colored Girl—

  He saw Rapey once, too, but he’d been no help. His clawed reins gauze-rod was buried in the erratic erotic tartans on a chair that looked vaguely familiar—ah, of course! It had once set to the right of a window where Maggie Mechaine built nests, a window that looked out on the fog-obstacled city where they had first lived and loved, when her brow was calmer and untroubled and to complete the scene they both patiently and respectively whited and whetted the insides of Maggie Mechaine, a supposed factory and dispensary of souls. In fact, as he looked down at Rapey’s odd rape of this chair, actualized only through a sorcery of the contortion of limbs he would’ve thought impossible before he came down out of the mountains made out of black bullet-shaped gargantua, he was fairly certain that at least once she’d been pallid as a bride above him on this chair, bathing him in her tangled pale crimsons and wondering at the noise coming from the park across the street.

  When Rapey had finished, he toyed with the arm of the chair. The youthful, vigorous furniture molester yanked up his zipper and stared.

  He gawked past Rapey, This chair—did it belong to someone of broken sleep? He felt the great weight of melancholy come over him suddenly. No season smiled at him. He rubbed his forehead. Some kind of old stain there—

  You all right, mate? Rapey lacked any sort of empathy, but felt, as Love’s sole representative in this chilly, chalky alleyway, one of Love’s secret places, he felt it incumbent upon himself to keep things in line. Yeh, chik out tha seat on that one? You wanna poke?

  Kiss mingle miss, he muttered by way of reply, who was Alaska? He turned then. Who was this no-face savage gawking at him? Alaska was that woman—we killed her son and then we fucked.

  One night it rained thorns. Rapey became alarmed, shook his arm, tried to get him to reckon with his good sense.

  What was amiss was this: He needed Her. Without her graceless evil, that savage tregetouress of memory, he could only dimly snatch at what had been Maggie Mechaine. Only dimly snatch at himself! Maggie had been wrong: you didn’t need mirrors, you needed adversary. Only your enemy could give you purpose. His enemy happened to look like his dead wife. Love, alerted by Rapey, came and found him, wandering like a divine through the tomb of Weatherhead, slapped him around, beat the grief out of him in sundry ways, the Colored Girl, with a rush of crimson-violet to her cheeks and tongue, delighted, for instance, in clubbing him in the chest with a large wooden mallet; Frank putting clothespins on his lips and chastising him for the poisons of pagans that his apostasy had put in his veins—

  Mr. Moustache explained later, by way of apology, that he’d slipped a little being off away from her and that he’d been no longer living as the summation of who he and she both were once. He had, quite simply, forgotten who he was. This was why he needed Her.

  So, what, he wondered again, she was a ghost, then? A shade? Specter? Was that why that day on the lake with his wife had returned to him so carelessly? Maybe to remind him of this? It took Love to beat him back into his senses: memory, remembrance—these are no places for frail cries and mourning—no, they are places for sear, burn, shout.

  Still she avoided him, though, despite his addiction to her presence. Perhaps, though, there was a purpose to it, this absence. He sat on the lower tier of bleachers near the town center where the brawls were held. He thought of her anger and then he thought of Maggie Mechaine’s anger. There was nothing congruous here. Was there?

  He could think of only once when she broke out of her drowsy instincts and lashed out in anger, a refusal to acquiesce, she had cussed out a group of guys, thuggie, she called them, who were harassing passersby outside a gas station. One of them had dared hoot at her, call her a name, ‘white trash’ or ‘hickster’ or something like that and she’d flipped them off, cigarette jutting all taunt and so unher sexy out of the place where her lip met her lip met the rest of her face and he watched from inside the store, waited, wanted to see what would happen, so taken with this dervish Maggie Mechaine who’d sat up straight in her coffin.

  They taunted her once more. They were drawn to her, not to her sickness, but to what they perceived as the sheen of her sleaze—the way her waist rejected her jeans, the way she seemed to wash her hair only infrequently, the way her face rejected make-up—thin
gs that he himself had never noticed about her, but just knew, as she became an archetype for these bastards—they snarled at her indignation, tried to be mighty to her outlaw. They failed. My boyfriend is a cop, she growled, just inside, and she pounced forward at these three youths, but I don’t need him, their laughter and ‘redneck cunts’ only fed her royal appetite, he recalled—she would make a dress for the ball out of their hides, she told them now, there would be only dreadful days remaining for them as she paraded about in front of their windsock-cunted girlfriends—the hangman had been tardy and I lost patience, she blushed—he almost ran out then: she was close enough to these fools to reach out and take their faces and they were not insignificant of prowess versus a skinny little trailer trawler like this. But he waited.

  Finally she screamed, “I am the inviolable ventriloquist cat!” and she seemed to get three feet taller and there was something black volcanic that thrust out of her with the words and the tread of her tormentors became as one as they hustled away from the pyroclastics of this walking doom who was unrestricted in her siege of nonsense that battered down their souls, and they ran and stumbled and fell and never spoke of her again.

  What she’d said, why does that sound so familiar? Ah, yes, he rubbed his eyes. It was from her favorite book, that’s why. And she hated to read. He was not a literary man himself, but she had a loathing for the written word that hearkened back to junior high, she’d become angry at books, would put herself in compromising positions for her temper with books, lay her head on her folded arms and pretend to sleep, one eye half-open and when the fan overhead blew back the pages from where she had left the thing open she’d clap it back to where it had been with a curse.

  One time he infuriated her by reducing this book which she’d given him once for his birthday, as was his wont and gift, to a single sentence: Love means always having to die. Whether you’re Christ or an artist or whoever.

  When he got in the car, she mentioned nothing of the incident. She flipped through the stack of movies he’d rented, whistling calmly. Her face was flushed.