Weatherhead Read online

  He stood then and silently dressed. He peeled a fifty and a one off of his wallet and laid it across a set of false teeth on the table by the door. They were stained red. She shrugged again when he said it was all the cash he had. “Wasn’t ever pretty, at least in summer,” she cackled, “I take what I can get.” He began to say something about her son. Yes, that was why he had come to this place. “Ah, everybody loses somebody if they wait around long enough,” she said, “your bullet, his or mine, wouldn’t a made a difference to him.”

  ⧜

  He didn’t care much for television. There was always a war on and he had gotten tired of watching it. It wasn’t really like his war. Same floor, different party. For a moment he considered how poetic it was that the beginning and end of Maggie Mechaine, to him, at least, were bookended by wars in same deserts.

  Anyway, with all the time on his hands he had gotten it in his mind to read. He had never been much for books, but he admitted there had to be some value in it, people had always told him that, and so he had bought a collection of relevant, geographically, at the very least, Jack London.

  “’It was in the Klondike that I found myself’,” he read out loud. This was from the introduction to one of London’s novels. He had never been much of a reader, even when he was a kid. When he did attempt to read, he was fascinated by the Introductions to things, so much so that he’d abandon the book after finishing them. Why go on? The roots of the author’s journey into fiction meant much more to him than the narrative itself. “’Life is bestial’.” The main character in the book was a dog, which he found interesting. It was about a civilized dog that had to learn to be feral again. In other words, it had to be re-taught how to value an existence predicated on instincts that’d guarantee its survival. He wrote this down. This didn’t sound like him at all. Nope, Maggie’d’ve said, no, it don’t.

  (2 Across) I am Strange Weather.

  Her happy lights were ranged around him in a semicircle as if he was sitting for a portrait. He hadn’t left her room or her things as they were. This is a false trope assigned to the bereaved. You, in fact, want nothing more than to be rid of it all, be rid of every reminder that they would never again swing this bat, hog this pillow, smoke this bowl. She hadn’t had much to begin with and what there was he didn’t bother with much. It was all crammed into a wall of square drawers he’d built in the room she used to be in. The happy lights he’d appropriated as additional illumination in the garage until today when he dragged them all back inside and set them up in a circle as if for an interrogation. Scattered about he’d left out some of her puzzles, determined to finish at least one. A few baseballs dotted surfaces here and there. Same with stuff like music, how you’re expected to want to listen to what the deceased loved to listen to, but he’d always hated her taste in music, and she his.

  He sat in the ring of lights and put on his show for himself, dressed by severed hands. He had on a cap. A sketchbook lay across his knees. The tips of his fingers were black. His face was ashen gray. He thought of a question. Who had she been? He had no answer. In the nine months since her death, he had barely thought of her. Sifting through her now that she was gone—he closed his eyes. The enigma of another is not made easier to decipher by death’s simple solution of cutting it all short before it gets too complicated.

  The aspect of the air in the room suddenly shifted. It was like being trapped in someone’s lung because they breathed you in but now you had grown and with each inhalation and exhalation the mood became more desperate as you tried to climb out on the wind. You can’t fit anymore. There was a slow tiring to the beat of things, he felt, and a great unease came over him. Momentum had become redefined as something inward and each breath drawn in was another rough shove against whoever that was pounding on the inside wall of his chest. Who had he breathed in? Was it Maggie Mechaine? She hadn’t been cremated though. There seemed little point. The pounding grew louder. He put his hands on his chest and pressed.

  He realized that there was someone knocking on the door.

  He recognized them immediately. They were the four brother officers that had been discussing Christ’s penis in the hallway the day he’d been generously suspended. Why had they come? Was it because of Maggie? Suspicions had never ever even been whispers in anyone’s ears. Now they hounded out his other hauntings. They were here about Maggie, but—

  The leader had wide circus eyes and smiles, two, and frizzle-wring grey strings growing out of all of his head except the top. He had removed his dress hat and covered his heart with it apologetically. His suit was all wrong, he saw, misbuttoned and misaligned and it was too small for the gentleman, obviously stolen. There were even bits of straw and confetti sticking out here and there where possible. The others stood in a line behind him and were, for the moment, obscured.

  This brother officer fidgeted for a moment with his cap, tossing looks back at the others, who were in various states of growl and grimace at their companion. You are so-and-so?

  “Yes. What’s this about?” Had they finally come to inquire as to his whereabouts on the morning Maggie shattered? Had they ever held him in suspicion? The very thought turned his stomach. How could they? They’d never know how he was to her and she to him.

  Your wife—she—your wife is not actually dead. The brother had another face on the bottom of his face, the top of the moustache, framing a tiny little head, was its hair. It spoke with a delay of one second creating a queer echoing effect when he—they? — spoke.

  “Actually, she is dead,” was his reply to this madman. “I didn’t miss a single piece. I went over that ground for hours.”

  The brother looked back at his companions again and chuckled, Yes, well, there—there seems to have been a mistake, see?

  The one in the back of the line, an Asian fellow, leaned to one side and he explained in a gruff voice, You’re gonna hafta come with us. Dere’s some issues with your case.

  “My case? Where? Come with you where?”

  Why, to Weatherhead, they all said as one. They had a jaunty and sinister air. He decided to play along. He had thumbed open his gun while they spoke and now he cast a look down to inspect it. There were no bullets. Shit.

  Put this crème on, man, the third fellow said as he stepped out, hat in hand and handed him out of it a label-less little jar. This fellow bore corn-row bird-fear. He had a livid white face to the right of his face and his skin was not so much ivory as it was the echo it left behind when extracted. To put it simply, his face cancelled itself out. He had no face.

  “What is this?” He unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. It smelled like the boat’s kiss against water.

  An unguent, cap’n, an unguent, replied the leader, hooking his thumbs through his suspenders. And, er, he waggled a finger downwards, it’ll have to be applied without yer clothes there on.

  “Fine. But come in, it’s cold—“

  Come in? They all stared at each other in bemusement. To where?

  “I’m not gonna change out here,” he jerked his thumb at the door to indicate in-the-opposite-of-out but there wasn’t a door there anymore. The four officers laughed at him something fierce. “Fine—fine.” He’d play along. They watched half-amused, half wary, eyes-on-the-lane, as he stripped naked on what had once been his front stoop. He shivered in the cold but once he started daubing the grainy paste on his skin he felt better, warmer, more able than he had.

  He turned into—“What am I? A cop?” He looked down. The paste had thickened after a moment, setting like batter, cementing around him in the rough contours of a uniform of some sort. The four strangers circled around him, making notes on their sleeves with felt tip pens, nodding and exchanging the occasional curt observation. He held out his arms. They were crawling with Thursdays and the sleeves of the shirt that had grown in place of his skin was only half-imaginary.

  Not anymore. We’re not police, either. And with that, they set out.

  He noticed that as they walked along through the stre
ets of the town that those nearby fell into what he took for epileptic fits as he and his captors passed by. At first they marched him along two on each side but he was surprised to find himself being overtaken by the four of them who lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in front of him and, with glances made to one side and the other, began shedding their suits. Jackets were peeled off revealing roughspun, flaxen shirts fastened and misfastened, tunics, loafers sloughed off their skins revealing tattered, worn, road-spattered boots, pants were peeled away revealing patchy, soiled trousers, service revolvers were casually broken down as they walked revealing their inner workings to be knives and derringers and, in one of them, even a pair of ruddy brass knuckles. The shorter, Asian one had some kind of skullcap or yarmulke on and, without missing a beat he reached up with one hand and began unscrewing this like the lid to a jar, finally loosening it enough and removing it. The other three tossed their felt-tip pens and clothes inside then clapped their knees and elbows together in a fluid jig barking out indeterminate hoo-hah! noises as they walked.

  They took it in turns to act as surgeons to dear things as they caromed through the dark crust of the town, amputating purses off of arms with a flick of a dagger, the leader and the faceless fellow uprooted a parking meter without missing a beat and made an incision in the front window of a computing concern. This sort of dastard and criminality, unbecoming in would-be officers of the law, slackened off, though, as they reached the edge of whatever town this was they had been moving through, and they tromped off into blackened day.

  They talked a lot as they walked; they had a lot of questions for him, seemingly random. They cooed a bit when, being asked where his family hailed from, he informed them that he was in fact a second-generation Greek. They seemed to be familiar with that distant land. They wouldn’t answer any of his questions. The idea that Maggie Mechaine was still alive was ludicrous, at best. What was their game? They were quite obvious the lowest sort of thug and scoundrel, these four.

  He noticed with the detachment of the ceased longing for something that the sun had begun to live in the sky again. Hadn’t it been winter just now? The function and act of remembering light was itself lost in the fizz of the stuff. He closed his eyes and turned up his face as they trudged on through the wooded tracts they had come to, swerving off the road and the familiar. How could he have ever chased away his face with gunpowder? He would’ve rendered himself unable to breathe in this light and invincible air. He halted. Or would it let in more? None of the four bandits, for that was the only way one could think of them with their bandoliers and dirty fingers and their impulsive hats that they had somehow drawn up out of the earth—the leader’s had nevertheless scrawled in yellow chalk across the front, above the wide brim—turned to look back at him. He was theirs, they all knew. There was nowhere else to go.

  They were traversing a freezing stream when they bade him halt at its halfway point. They fanned out away from him hands outstretched palm-down over the surface of the gentle current. He watched as they lowered their hands down until they were skimming the top and they drew bows and arrows up from its surface as if they were catching them floating by and they made sport for a quarter of an hour or so loosing bolts at him with a kind of lazy playfulness, making no real effort to hit him as he twisted and dodged all awkward up to his knees in water. No one spoke. He could see the bottom of the stream. It was covered by clock faces instead of rocks, all eroded smooth and round by the flow of water over them. Ignoring the fusillade distinguishing him from any other occupant of the waters that might happen upon them, he knelt down and felt for one of the clocks.

  Time is never unanimous, said the owner of the boot that crashed into the side of his skull. He looked up: it was the fiercest of the four, a red-faced dour asian grandparent who, lacking hair, had drawn it on in thick white strokes all the way down to his chin. When he spoke, he spoke-sang: he sounded like Frank Sinatra.

  They all—all have the same time, he shot back.

  Ayuh, Frank nodded, but we’ve no use for that moment here. He reached out, still looming over him, and with a ginger pluck of his thumb and forefinger took it from him, regarded it coolly and tossed it back into the water. Never unanimous, for all your fussing about with time zones and standardizationings. And we, it’s all in with us. We don’t take kindly to nonconformity and strangers like these tagging along.

  Strangers in the night, he croaked, splashing about as he tried to stand.

  T’ain’t no night heer, the one with no face had appeared. He was the youngest, his bones were of such a peculiar degree of lassitude in relation to his flesh that his gender, only betrayed by his voice and his bipedal mode of urination, was imprecise and lacking concurrence. Inside this fellow’s brown corduroy cowboy coat was a faded and torn Foreigner t-shirt. His face, which he originally thought empty, he now saw was covered with a taut layer of what looked like gauze, stretched tightly across the landscape of his face. This feral faceless fellow seized him by the arm and pulled him up.

  Nodding to each other, they frisked him in good measure, checked his wrists, and confiscated his phone. Frank held it up to the sun and then brought it down under his nose and sniffed it. The young bandit grabbed it out of his hand and bit into its corner, then spat

  We get to one place from another place. Now space is closed. Geegraphical space, that is.

  Mr. Moustache cried from shore, Take ‘is pulse! Frank and the young man nodded and oohed.

  No, I’m fine, he maintained, waving his hands at them, really.

  The young man had produced a worn brass trumpet-shaped thing out of his coat. Frank put his hand on his shoulder while the young man put the funnel end to his chest. Hold still, the young man said softly and they stood in silence while he putted it about the prisoner’s chest, ear bent to the opposite end listening with his eyes closed.

  What—

  Hsh. Another minute or two passed and then the young man nodded to Frank who held the trumpet in place over the prisoner’s chest. The young man next drew out a small accordion from under his hat and squeezed it free of air, making a wan, lowing sound as it emptied its guts. He then snapped a tiny tube onto the instrument and attached its opposite end to where the mouthpiece would’ve been had this been a run-of-the-mill trumpet. The prisoner looked down in alarm, but Frank’s hand on his shoulder tightened:

  It doesn’t hurt.

  Checking his work one last time, the young man took a step back and, hands under straps, slowly drew open the accordion. At once he felt an odd sort of tugging around the musculature of his heart and an internal sagging and sighing the way you’d imagine a deflating potato chip bag might feel when emptied and smoothed out.

  E flat, the young man muttered.

  E flat! Frank called out.

  Mr. Moustache screwed up his face. E flat?

  Done, said the young man. He plucked the trumpet out of Frank’s grimy clutches and stowed it all back where it had originated.

  What’d you just do?

  Took yer pulse, Frank said with a yawn. Indeed they had, for when he pressed his hand to his chest the familiar monotony of his bloodworks had fallen silent. Fingers twain on the wrist proved as ineffective at registering the gust and porridge pour of his redstuffs. So’s you fall under the same rubric as the basis of death, that is, the non-cog-tations of the engine-heart.

  What?

  If you ain’t dead, you must at least make a good show of it, Frank went on as they sloshed through the waters, and here we register you tonally so’s as to not have you found out.

  Found out? Tonally?

  The boy without a face snickered through the flats, Never felt up a harpist or some such musician? If you can git in right behind ‘er when she’s pluckin’ on dem strings—

  Quite vile, Frank hissed.

  I get it. You’re saying I have to pretend that I’m dead—why?

  Frank shrugged.

  Crowed the boy, What a why of whys this why!

  They took pause on the
other side of the stream. He wrung out his shirt and pants while the others crouched in a circle rimmed with their black thread banter and smoked.

  The leader, the one with the limpid moustache and its supplementary face, turned these up to him. Rape must always be done on the leeward side of the dune, the leader, he could think of him only as ‘Mr. Moustache’ now, said matter-of-factly. He nodded, thankful for the lack of deserts in these parts. Young people, Mr. Moustache jerked a thumb at the wild-eyed youth, all rapey and faceless!

  Why not just kill me now? He could no longer doubt that his life was in peril as long as he remained in the company of these intemporal fiends.

  We don’t truck in animal truths, friend, Frank said. His cigarette lolled sadly across his lips. Plus, as I particulated to you just yonder, we operate under the guise of death, nothing more. Death ain’t part of our rubric.

  Or whys and whiches, the fourth ruffian, who had remained silent until now, a dark woman added. Except she didn’t actually say these words. What she said was “reds and greens” though he heard it as “whys and whiches”. He hadn’t paid her much mind yet as she spoke little. She was taller than the others, a lithe and slender black-skinned woman. Although a red-blooded, mild racist, his sudden captivity and inferiority made him blanch at calling her the Colored Girl, for even for people of his ilk this was arcane speak supplanted by more unsubtle slurring. But she did indeed now speak only in colors, so he could think of her no other way. Reds, she whispered. She sprouted smoke out of her mouth and winked at him

  The young one suddenly put in, Greek on purpose?

  Unsure how to respond, he confused his legs with his hands. Mr. Moustache offered him a cigarette that smelled like shaven legs, leaned over and lit it, and said to his youthful, naïve companion: S’always on purpose, you damned stupid dummy. He turned to their charge. Now, ‘kill’ is a one-eyed word, so we’re not gonna use it again, catch me? The prisoner nodded. And as for time, well, ain’t nobody ever died from it, and it ain’t got no elbows here, so let yer ribs breathe free for once, eh? He cuffed the prisoner’s shoulder as he continued, And take in the noiseless raw in jugfuls while ye can, for Weatherhead is an awful island of noise, like all cities in these parts. His four nostrils widened and mighty inhaled the brisk and criminally sweet air.