Weatherhead Page 23

  It took him a moment to realize she was at his elbow saying all of this in a veiled voice. He started when he looked down and saw her reds swaying to their own chant. She hadn’t slept either, by the looks of her, her eyes a study in lean, devouring wolves, my lean, devouring wolves—he wanted to clap one of his massive hands over the back of her skull and smash it into the ground just then for it was a simple matter, these barbarities happening before him: these were all her dark gifts to him bound up in one crime. She had done this for him. She was in league with Hate, not Love.

  They’re anointing the grooms, she pulled him down, stood on her tip-toes, cursed in his ear, they’re abandoned now, the fools! They will dance and we can slam shutters of fire shut over top of them! Come on! She sank the jaw of her hand into the neck of his wrist and he let himself be pulled along until they stopped in front of a row of small metal gas cans, the old kind, with the metal necks like robot swans and as the couples danced the two of them swerved through them, splashing them with gasoline, to the cheers of the assembled mob.

  He felt very tired by the time they finished but she insisted they douse the ground as well and, walking backwards in her bare feet, her boots forgotten in her frenzy by the sidelines, she traced the last of the fuel around the group of newlyweds, forming a diamond shape, he saw.

  Now light it! She clapped her hands. When he protested that he had nothing to light this humane fire with, she called him an idiot, spun, and sprinted off to the mob clawing at the mud at every side and swiped a torch out of someone’s hand.

  She stood for a while kicking dirt in the faces of those who dared crawl out from under the conflagration. She’d ran out of bullets about half an hour earlier and thrown her pistol down with petulant, pouting fury and resorted to fancy footwork against these deserters. She felt his eyes on her and she tapped her chin against her sternum. Why does this horrible taste in my mouth disguise itself as these white women? She stared down at her hands. Whoever could’ve thought that these would become such desperate, blunted things? Bullets are such fine first night lovers, aren’t they?

  There was nothing he could say. Nothing he could say. She hadn’t slept either, he guessed. She stood, quiet, white, body swelling and collapsing with pitched, hitching pants, and watched the fires.

  Suddenly, she helled in front of him and grabbed his hands and pressed them over her face, over her mouth, breathing heat onto the palms through hysterics and frenzy. Now they were looters in a battlefield’s last twitchings and she wanted him, her spit told his hands’ hollows. She drew him to the table prepared a thousand years ago for the would-be feast and disappeared underneath it. The ruins of a cake still dominated the affair. Someone had torn it to shreds, defecated in it, smeared it on some of the nearby charred corpses. The crumbs were the corpse of the cake, he could see. Her head appeared above the edge of the table. First her sickly-red rimmed blue eyes, then her long thin nose, finally a mouth touched by all things sinful at the corners. How she had murdered the remains of the weddings!

  He raged at her then: Why’d you kill those people? I said birthday. She called it our birthday. His head swam with fatigue, horror.

  Birth—death—certainties bound by one thing only—

  Love—he croaked, doubling over and burying his fists in his throat. Get her away—

  Ha! No! Lean on my eyes, if you need to, you can find a murderer’s comfort there. She crooked a feral finger at him.

  He knew that there he would only find the chute-failed skydiver’s sudden misgivings about being on the ground. No, goddammit, no, Maggie hadn’t become this—what had happened to her—was this hell? Whose hell? Hers? But she seemed so happy here—his hell? But he wasn’t dead. Was it her heaven, then? No, not Mags—she wasn’t dead either—she

  —you did this for me—

  She grinned as if she heard this thought. And now she wanted him to consummate their bestial union of sicknesses.

  He crept to her under the table on his knees and made the audacious decision to seize her hands. They weren’t cold as he thought they’d be. This was because she wasn’t dead, he told himself.

  Look, it’s me. You don’t remember me, sometimes. She twisted her face away from him.

  You never know anyone. Wastelands aren’t supposed to be shared. Who would want that wished upon another? Who brought you here? She stood up and shoved him away. Tell me again who brought you here, King Fool.

  You know who did, Love did—

  Love? This cracked her up. Your petty tricks don’t matter a whit! She turned her face up to the grey and laughed and laughed.

  Why do you laugh so much here? he shouted in her face. Why?

  Because—she wiped her mouth as a corpse would, sloppily, I was trying to keep you out of Weatherhead, you stupid, stupid man! Well! Now you’re here! And what of it?

  Something in the core of him sank blackly—if his soul could be his pants they’d been prank-shucked down into the dirt. God—no, he thought. No—my wife—she told me once—our wedding day was our birthday—

  Birth, she laughed, is nothing more than noon standing fixed over a graveyard. The arc goes on from there—goes down. And with that, she declared she’d walk him home, he having squandered his chance to have her, there on the cold stone, surrounded by death and cake.

  ⧜

  Her fingers were always smudged back. He thought she’d burnt them on her bowl. He was wrong. He was sure of her depression, though. He had no idea what to do about it. With her he was always half-sure of things, always had half an answer: his, never hers. A few years before she killed herself, that year of the best ever World Series, according to her and, well, everyone else, that year when she stopped sleeping for fear of falling, he asked her, “Why are you so sad?”

  Quick as a wink she replied, “Why aren’t you?”

  Games with words was all she was. She looked exhausted, to which she countered,

  “You go sleep,” she suggested with her curious lilt of playfulness, that lilt that revived her fading drawl and promise, “close your eyes. Less to see don’t mean less to want.”

  She had inherited the sneak-a-wink dent squint half of always in one of her eyes from her mother. Her brother had it, too, but it was more pronounced in her because it was out of character with the rest of her sleepy, dream-riddled face. When she smoked, she looked like Popeye, he playfully told her once. That made him Bluto, she supposed. Or a stroke victim, he added, face half-right, half-wrong.

  “Watch—watch—see? I stopped breathing!” She was crying out to the golden room. The sun was setting somewhere nearby for what Maggie Mechaine thought was, for her, the last time ever, apparently.

  He folded his arms and looked down at her, pale, stuck in bed, pinned down by her paranoia. “You made yourself stop breathing,” he sighed.

  “Why would I do that?” she cried hoarsely. He stared at the why, quicksilver in his palm: her fever had peaked at 105˚ for almost three days. She had never been sick before, he realized with a shudder. He fought off an urge to check the nearby barometer for zeroes.

  “Still alive! Still alive!” she kept crying out in her no-sleep. He seriously considered taking her to the hospital. No doctors, she cried. He knew she had no insurance, but this hardly mattered at this point. How small she looked! His hand gently cupping her forehead looked massive compared to her sweaty, pasty skull. She twisted and turned for a moment and then settled down into sleep again.

  There was a curious frame she had once made, he had forgotten about it until now, this night in Weatherhead, he wondered what had ever happened to it, a frame shaped like a hand with the fingers slightly parted, waving goodbye maybe—saying hello, maybe, she shot back. The picture fit into the oval that formed the palm. She’d often had it in her to make custom, odd frames like this but lacked the gumption. During this fever, she’d stare at it glassy for an hour at a time. She’d kept it by their bed, then her bed after Summer came, for many years.

  “My god—“ she cried out
one night during the worst of her sickness, “what am I staring at?” She’d begged him to keep a lamp on but if she opened her eyes all she could see was the silhouette of this terrible, terrible hand. If he tried to take it away, her hand would clap over his wrist even if she were asleep. There was no picture in it, like all the others. He wondered after it.

  The last night, when the firestorm was at its height, raging up and down the space between her breasts down to her navel and making her breaths shallow and death-gale Kansas-will-die, wind-under-shutter, he found her on all fours facing the wall. She didn’t turn when he softly said her name, didn’t know he was there. She was drawing a last desperate face on the wall, he saw. A face?

  “Help me—“ she whispered. Her nightshirt had slipped down, exposing her chest and shoulders. She was a camp-tossed refugee. Someone could’ve made a nice something-or-other out of her hair, he thought, if it’d been gathered up better—

  He stepped to her side and stroked her back as he once had, the way corpses like. “You should sleep.” He could feel it, the fever was shattering, breaking all over the room, that furious open skylight-in-winter cold that browbeat one out of sleep, rushing out of her, deflating her, slapping her in the face with nature’s indecency. He leaned over her. She was drawing a face. Was it hers, maybe?

  He asked her about the face the next real morning. She was sitting up in bed with a woozy smile eating toast and eying her bowl. She twisted her neck around and squinted at it. “A way out, maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “from bein’ sick. It ain’t a face, it’s a door. See? That’s a doorknob—“

  “A door with eyes?” he laughed.

  “Oh, yeah,” she frowned and turned her head sideways for there were such things. He fought the disturbing urge to ask her what she saw in that hand. Now he regretted not asking, for what if she had caught a glimpse of Weatherhead?

  She let him carry her to her favorite window and he left her there while he made her some food. “The weather is the same every day here.” He thought she was staring out the window but when he approached her, he saw her eyes were closed. She had never learned the weather here in Alaska. “All I saw are the same things drifting down out of the sky—like feathers and people—“

  “It’s snowing,” he suggested, for it was. Or seemed to be. Who knew? Seemed early for snow.

  “Naw, it ain’t like that. Why is everything that falls down—has nothing left to it. Snow. Rain. People jumping. Do you think they considered those people suicides for jumpin’ or is it still considered murder? Ain’t no hells to guess about, maybe. Sure as hell ain’t no futures to guess here.”

  Except, that wasn’t true. One day she lifted her head up and she saw something—something better. “Thanks for takin’ such good care of me,” she told him. She reached out and took his hand. He carried her away and gave her a bath, spotlit by happy lights, false suns for false dawns.

  What would it be like, he asked her as they parted for the day, to be born and never see the sun?

  The corners of her lips turned down. It would mean never being born. She stood up a little straighter. In me is all the weather. I can see the sun whenever I want.

  Even at midnight?

  She didn’t answer, she pressed her nails into the edge of her coat and, without a word, stormed off into the dead evenings of Weatherhead.

  (27 Down) I’m What the Jump Left Behind.

  There is only one way to die in Weatherhead. The guns are empty. Knots are outlawed.

  He thought he’d be sick, felt something indignant trying to rip through his guts. He decided he wouldn’t move that day. Or maybe it was that he shouldn’t move. The increasing stakes of nightmares in his life here in Weatherhead had driven him to the brink of madness. So he just lay in bed staring at his hands and the cardboard roof and patching together more of what he could remember of his dead wife. It was only she who could unseat the fiend using her face with such voracious blasphemy.

  Dead she could fight, but his was a frantic invocation for she was indeed dead and growing deader by the moment, so he stuck to the unscripted baptisms of memories, for these are the worst and most fleeting. He began with a series of questions, like: Maggie Mechaine—what had made her happy? How could she have just up and killed herself? He beat himself black and blue over these and other questions, especially his inverse accusation of her having killed herself. But she had. She had killed herself. It was what everyone had never said, hid it behind their hands, and they had only made official searches, paper-work-completing searches, for that truck. Now, cuss and custom of Weatherhead, he no longer questioned her being. She was, whoever she was. He no longer denied the reality of this woman-faced wolf. Red wolf. Fox—red fox, he corrected himself.

  Her goddamn hands—they weren’t up. Maggie Mechaine hates Up. She had her fucking hands behind her back and let that truck drive right into her.

  He held those hands again and wept and wept and more memories came, sweeping over Weatherhead with a palace-storming vehemence and some revolutions are all thunder and piss, others are whisper and semen: the past is co-dependent.

  If there was one thing he could remember about Maggie Mechaine that probably stood out starkest for him, long after she was gone, it was her love of baseball which also led to her only extramarital affair. He laughed at the room.

  Maggie claimed, when he derided the sport, that there was a not uncertain equivalence between baseball and yoga. The latter stressed the future of the mind as an eye discretely ringed with sleep—not a rude, I’m-not-paying-attention-to-your-bullshit kind of sleep, but more of an unpolluted kind of sleep, the one that follows an orgasm, a good meal, a shadow still standing at high noon—in other words, the feeling that you’ve beaten everything. The former stressed the future of a single, simple spheroid who had no stake in any game of any kind anywhere. The fate of this ball depended on a single, unpolluted swing. Like yoga, baseball was all about the waiting and being patient, she told him, but it differed in that in yoga, well, you don’t get to win anything. At bat, red hearts lay silent, cultivating the strictest form of sabotage against everything exterior to them, diminishing the universe to two things: the bat and the ball—then—you strike!

  “Striking is bad,” he observed. Wrong striking, her dour mouth thinned.

  “Shut up,” she replied with uncharacteristic sweetness, a saccharine dagger of half-maternal warmth.

  “It’s just a bunch of standing around nut-scratching.”

  “So is life.” Difference was, she said, in baseball, sometimes you get your chance to bat, get that chance to punch that fucker right outta there. Bam! Her little fist shot out of the park. The game had a perfect geometry, she said, shift from place to place, like the most perfect dance or something, you know?

  “No. No, I don’t know.” He hated baseball, a converse of the eternal story. He found it relentlessly dull, plodding, and lacking any requisite skill except running short distances, hitting stuff, and throwing spheroids, all of which could be accomplished by any of the middling- or higher primates.

  He’d played football in high school and recreationally in the army. The only things he’d ever competed for were women, even after he met Maggie Mechaine, the one woman no one could want but him.

  No, that’s not true. She kept her head down because she was busy, that’s what she said. She didn’t lift it up until she died.

  “No, that ain’t true,” she hurled down at him. She was in the willows, sitting on top of the enormous stack of frames in the backroom of her shop, her legs dangling over the edge. He and Mal were helping her shift inventory around for the Christmas upswing. She and Mal were arguing about baseball. “It was Cone. His ERA was 1.50.”

  Mal stared up at her in awe. Mal was his best friend from way back. They had gone to school together, fought in the same war (Mal was a navy man and would be buried standing up, he wagered), and rediscovered each other when they both returned home and became cops. They measured the boundary between them in terms
of that cautious, male frequency which precludes tears, embraces, and emoting, but is by no means superficial, for they never laughed more than when in the company of each other. Mal saw this otherwise, though, and even gauged his friend’s racism as nothing more than a tepid inquiry into all the different ways we can hate and thus excused it. Mal himself was black. This surprised Maggie Mechaine the first time she met him. So did his eye patch. Being of a particular south, Maggie had never had truck with much of the diversity that the city roiled with, but she was no racist. She approached everyone as an impenetrable curiosity that needed to be kept well away from her. Mal was an exception, as he always was.

  “People’re all stories,” she said once from the bathroom the night she met Mal for the first time. She was brushing her hair, a catastrophic break of habit. He saw in this her dark victory, albeit temporarily, over her alienation. She liked Mal. He made everybody around him feel. It was his way.

  “People’re all stories,” she smiled at Mal over the top of her beer. She asked him what was with the black pirate get-up and he laughed and told her,

  “It happened because of a plane crash.”

  “Into your eye?!”

  Mal paints, he told Maggie. Maggie framed things, he told Mal. They both stared at him in pleasant horror, for now both playfully feared the other: Maggie refused to trap art which was a place with no weather; Mal refused to trap art because that would mean actually finishing something.

  When he joked about Mal’s artistic inclination, his friend shot back, “Yeah, I’m a painter. Oh! I get it. Black people aren’t supposed to be creative. Well, I sell crack, too, on the side, honkey moonwalker. It’s how I pay for the brushes and stuff. We savvy?”

  Now, with she up on that stack of frames, the smell of all the wood of Maggie Mechaine’s frames was, for some reason, making him dogged and curious about the reaches of her legs—she always smelled like wood, didn’t she? Bats and frames, she even had a wooden bowl she used from time to time that scudded the wind with chimney-sleep. Mal went out to use the shop’s phone and he regarded her, just out of his reach, kicking her feet lazily, and he looked up at her, face flushed with the effort of heaving up the large frames they handed up to her that she then planted under her feet (she was half their respective weights, hence her ascent), her red hair under a red bandanna that he’d never seen before but that seemed part of her costume, her collarbone splotched with those blushes of exertion that the fair are cursed or blessed with and he reminded himself again that this creature-on-high was his. He made a playful swat at her ankles. “You’ll never get nearer than the smell,” she sighed, and refused to descend.