Weatherhead Read online

  Well, he’d show her.

  The highest point in Weatherhead, he discovered, was the tower unsullied by tower that she’d stranded him in after their first public brawl. The UnTower, he called it, with its naked, drifting windows stacking up, up, up. Why did he go there? He thought, for one, maybe this was where she was hiding. For two, he thought maybe he could hide there. Maggie Mechaine was always trembly over heights and anything associated with Up. It’s why, he felt, she had always kept such close tabs on the weather. But, he considered, she was the one who’d brought him up here, and her fears were of man-made heights, anyway, she was just fine with mountains and locally grown and fed elevations. Now he’d just confused himself. Had Maggie Mechaine—no, wait—was Maggie Mechaine afraid of heights or not?

  At the top of the brickcloud, his impromptu name for the invisible stories unfolding under his feet, he leaned out through a frame and blew a kiss at the city. Whatever she was afraid of, where was she?

  He was suddenly not alone. Hadn’t been for some time. Someone was sitting opposite him, perched on nothing. It was, he saw with a shock, the Colored Girl, the Bandolera, one-fourth of Love. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see him. She nodded at him with a friendly smile and went back to rolling the cigarette whose makings were spread out on a canvas cloth across her knees.

  He’d been a racist as long as he could remember, a hatred inherited from both his mother and father. It always made Maggie Mechaine laugh. She was of an inveterate southern temperament that anyone and everyone had the potential to be a stark and utter piece of shit, which tempered her prejudice somewhat to a manageable degree. She simply didn’t care. It just sounded worse when she occasionally dipped into hatreds because of the structures of her drawl. He, on the other hand, city-born and city-bruised, viewed anyone outside the confines of his particular configuration of pigmentation with something approaching keen-eyed loathing. He had no real reason to feel this way. No person of a different shade had ever done him harm. They were just—shady. He didn’t trust the way light didn’t fall anywhere on them. It disguised something, he imagined. They all seemed to hate him. He thought they spoke in a code against him.

  His best friend, Mal, who was black, laughed at him, too. Hate without reason, he declared, was the worst kind of hate. “Focus, man, focus. Here: hit me,” he’d say, “I just stole your hubcaps.” It was, though, the American way, Maggie asserted.

  Being now for weeks in a city where even his shadow was his enemy and where everyone was treated with suspicion if not outright venom, though, had softened his rancor a bit. He now felt ashamed to think that he could’ve ever excoriated this woman, lashed out at her simply because of her colors. She had so damn many of them anyway, he couldn’t fix on one to insult. She was all of them at once. How could he feel hatred towards multi-hued Love?

  She held out the finished cigarette for him, saying Rose eminence with a violet smile. He took it and nodded thanks. He made a show of patting his pockets.

  I don’t have any—fire? Orange? She waved him forward. She was rolling one for herself, but paused and grabbed his wrist roughly. She brought the end up to her pursed lips and made a sound like a plink of water over top of it. It burst into flame.

  Many oranges, she winked up at him slyly.

  Ah, right, yes, he stammered, dragging dragon. After she finished rolling her own and lit it the same delectable way, she leaned back on her hands and smoked stealthy with him. He had the growing, gnawing uneasy feeling that neither one of them were supposed to be there just then. As if she read his thoughts, she sat forward, tilting her hat back and pinching the butt of her cigarette between her front teeth she exclaimed,

  Foster blue blue blue! Silvers three, navy menace.

  Oh, but there was a key to her, he discovered quickly. He discovered it by accident by sarcastically replying, Blue balls and parades of magenta! Right? He hated Weatherhead’s games just then. But she was not of Weatherhead, of course, merely passing through.

  With a cry, she coursed dark pink and nearly fell off her perch. He jumped away from him. Had he just insulted her in color? She dropped her cigarette and her hat, fumbled for both from where she’d fallen, staring up at him in wonder. Burnt sienna, she whistled. She stood up, twirling her hat on her forefinger, one eye squinting at him. Her color had returned to normal. She flapped her hand at him. She wanted him to do it again.

  Black ditzy black, he laughed, once I’d beat you black and blue, brownie—

  She didn’t understand, he saw, she only heard the color words, missed the jibe, but kept nodding crazily for him to go on. Blue seemed to resonate, so he ran through a litany of every shade he could think of, Dark blue denim blue light blue sky blue midnight blue navy blue powder blue steel blue true blue—I need those paint sample tabs, right? I sound like one—

  She cocked her hips as she listened. Around her waist, there was a heavy sort of belt and holster there, with an ancient-looking, worn-handled pistol jutting out of it. The shift of its weight caused a riding-lower of her road-spun, dusty trousers. He looked away from this, back at her laughing eyes, And turquoise of course, can’t forget that. That’s blue, right?

  She hummed aquatic, then, and a weird sea took the place of her skin and crashed back in on itself and she slapped her knees and grinned at him, encouraging him with her mouth and hands to keep going. For he was the first man in Weatherhead to address her in color and she’d been bored out of her skull ‘til now, so he inferred from her sing-song, Brown greyest charcoal to furnace red yellow!

  Yellow, huh? He flicked his butt through a frame and watched it spin end-over-end to the darkening streets below. Yellow it is and he went on again, trying to cram every shade of yellow he could possible permutate into his jaws. They delighted in this game, children for a while, he indulging her lovely speech with every configuration of the rainbow he could think of. It didn’t matter whether it was coherent or not, whether there was any meaning to his random collisions of the spectrum. She’d respond in kind, he thought, though since color was her native tongue, she seemed to imbue her speech with a greater hue of meaning than he was able to. Part of it was inflection, he learned, part body language, but he lacked the nature of the shades that she had, for when he spoke to her, though not vice versa, she could flit chameleon along the entire chromatic scale, so it was more a call-and-response than an actual dialogue. He could understand her much better than she him, for he was a flat grey at bottom. As they stood, smoked, and crayoned on, she showed him another trick. She was a kind of shade-shifter channeled through and drawn by heats of all kinds as colors are wont to be.

  A cry came up from below. It was white. Her comrades. She needed to leave him. She did so with a flicker of orange that ate up her eyes.

  ⧜

  She used to stand at the window with the lights off and—this was before they moved to Alaska, when they lived in a tenement on the northeast side of their city, their first home together—watch their neighbors fight, transfixed by the blows landing on each other, the shatter of things across upraised arms, the occasional knife brandish or chemical spray, window cleaner one time, in the other’s face. She’d only tell him later after it was all over because, as she told him, he couldn’t—shouldn’t—interfere, for it was love, she tried to persuade him and how is that and you have to look deeper than the blows for what else is love but having one’s attentions, cares, and lunges consumed by one person completely? She’d spin tales of boxers falling in love after a bout for it was the tenderness of the hand touching face, no matter its velocity, that she gave such weight to. She pretended that this was what was happening across the alley.

  He laughed at her. “Do you want me to hit you?” He balled up his fist and shook it in her nose. She stared down at it.

  “If it’d count for something, yeah, maybe.” And he never knew if she was kidding or not, because he wouldn’t.

  She used to stand at the window with the lights off and—this was before they moved to Ala
ska, when they lived in their apartment on the northeast side of their city, their first home together—watch their neighbors fuck, tucked off to one side of the window, entranced by the blows of hammer flesh on anvil flesh, the mutter of things across upturned faces, the occasional yin-yang of mouths to tumescent bits or swollen agonies where there should be none. Once she waved him over to show him, to his horror, not for any purposes of voyeurism—this thought never crossed her mind—but, she said, to prove to him that in the end everyone wins.

  He laughed at her. “Do you want me to just fuck you right here?” He trudged into her. She stared down at him.

  “If it’d count for something, yeah, maybe.” And he never knew if she was kidding or not, because he wouldn’t.

  (30 Across) I am She Who Warned You God Will Make You Breathless.

  Experience taught him that the high voice, whosever it was, came regardless of whether she was in the city or not. All the same, his breath hitched when he heard these words for it suddenly made him fear for knots in the lowlands of his sisters. Babies would not be able to breathe breath if this was prophecy not riddle. His sisters—where were they? He panicked. He had forgotten about his sisters.

  He was dangling by one hand from the bottom edge of one of the Untower’s window frames several hundred feet above the town. He felt guard dog bristle’s memory at his predicament, forgetting his quartet of sisters for the moment.

  Safety last! he cried out over the waking city. He had risen before dawn to take up position here above Weatherhead, half- and more-than-half-hoping the Colored Girl would show up a second time. It was nice to have someone to talk to, in color if not in black and white. And he had an idea. Squinting up through the empty central shaft of the building, he saw that the upper reaches where they had swapped colors the night before appeared empty. No one there. Plus, when he’d felt about for the beginning of the brickcloud staircase, it was nowhere to be—well, it just wasn’t there.

  Big empty. Okay—okay—no big deal. He looked up. He could do this. His arms were strong. They could crush Maggie Mechaine without effort. He started climbing, making a slow ascent by grabbing the bottom edges of the window above, pulling himself up onto it, standing almost fully upright inside the frame, suspended moment of a crude inmate’s huddle, and then pulling himself to the top of this frame and repeating the process. When the voice came with the lightening of the caul or hymen or whatever it was that obscured the heavens, he’d been climbing for a while. The vastness of this phrase and its invocation of the humble contraction of life, made him almost lose his grasp. Eventually, he made it and, arms roaring with fiery cairns grinding against each other, and testing that this brickcloud roof was still there, just as he knew it would be, he threw himself out onto the highest point of Weatherhead and slept.

  He dreamt of Maggie. What else was there lost to dream of? She’d built what she called City Wolf out of loose puzzle pieces she’d collected together in her apron. She’d built in their kitchen, not in Alaska, the old one from before they moved. “Acknowledge the royal boundaries,” it said with her voice. She worked the jaw with two pencils and a rubber band.

  “Jesus—“ he rolled over and threw his arm across her, “you gimme the weirdest dreams.”

  “What?” She was in the bathroom. He could see her through the half-open door. She was shaving her legs which meant she was going to the batting cages.

  “Does stubble,” he asked her once, “slow down your swing? Like hair does to bicycle riders and swimmers?

  He looked at the clock. He looked out the window. The sun was setting. He had to go to work. She wanted to drop him off and go swinging and was that cool? She pipped back into the bedroom naked. “19-strikeout start,” she was muttering.

  “Are you fucking around with Randy again?” He knew the score, but he didn’t broach the subject, waited until she did.

  “A 19-strikeout start,” she repeated. She sat with her back away from him to shield her ovaries from his glare, and she added, “I’m not pregnant.” Her ain’ts had gone in and out recently he noticed. Country mouse eating city cheese. City wolf eating—he pushed this thought out of his mind.

  “Well, if at first you don’t succeed—“

  She was so easy to pick up. He could do this. His arms were strong. They could crush Maggie Mechaine without effort.

  ⧜

  Someone was tapping him on the nape of his neck. He shot up. Where was he? Sitting in the gods of the UnTower. The Colored Girl was standing over him, a grinning faint outline against the fading sky. Had he been asleep all day—trick of the light.

  Blue to blue, she reached down and ruffled his hair playfully bright, yellows desperate, yellows five. He jumped to his feet, still groggy. She stood, hands clasped behind her back, waiting for his reply. She loved talking to him, this exile out of time, pulse, and color. For all his grey, he had quite the chromatic tongue. She fed off his dyeing words.

  Browns are warmer than yellows, he told her. She practiced coyness and her hue swelled with a glissandi of earths. He looked around to make sure they were alone. How you’d get all the way up here? The stairs were—gone. The gone stairs are gone. She peered out over the edge as he did.

  Level greens, greens of pinch.

  She’d flown witch, naturally, he translated. That there were such creatures about in Weatherhead was reassuring to him. It meant not all magic was dead. They sat down in opposite frames and she rolled them each a cigarette; they had a routine now. He talked and talked. She listened with her outlaw’s grace. He wondered where the brickclouds had gone, had she taken them and why would she? Perhaps she didn’t like them being here? And where was she? Watching him somewhere? He eyed the Colored Girl, fetching out tales of jealousy over these clandestine colorings at the top of the UnTower. But she had none. All she did was fling her wide-brimmed bandit’s hat in the air and catch it on the descent between her teeth. She then perched it on an unseen protuberance that she greyed out of nothing.

  Suddenly he understood. It was you? She laughed. She’d taken the invisible stairs away! She’d wanted to see: How desperate was his yellow? And what could he do to sink his eyeteeth in part of Love again?

  They finished smoking and moved to sit on the air across from each other, each with a leg drawn up. She hooked her right leg through his left suddenly. Violent violet, he warned her. Her cracked leather jacket was open, her stark white tunic, too, and he saw his hypothesis confirmed when the exposed tops of her breasts purpled at his words. No one would see them. Night had come.

  He first spoke to her of whites and greys. She listened carefully, tongue between her teeth. Whites for the witness and meat, save the knuckles and neck; grey for the remainder of the butcher’s theater and the dawn wan of the thigh meats. To the litany, he next added reds, for red is the spell of change, ruddy hues and rosy pallors—red is saline and traitor to the speaking-holes both for its smear across the cheeks and sternum and for its arrogance being a condition of legend for the midnight storming of purples into the ends of things when the heart no longer figures in these matters. For a tin of coffee he’d stolen at the market that morning, he convinced her to strip. While she stepped out of her clothes, she watched his mouth.

  He stepped back and studied her. The hues he’d perfected, save her hands, which he left black to hide them in the night but also to remind him who this really was. Already, they were spidering down the front of his mud-caked trousers as he worked trickster with getting her skin just right—the face, torso, buttocks.

  Good. The color was right but she was too voluptuous, too full. He began with her breasts, closing his eyes and letting his breath mist them with mutters along the wavelengths until the spectrum of her generous bosom was reduced to the familiar.

  She was whispering in oranges to him the whole time as he moved his palette hands and mouth over her, the bad, black magic of her own hands queued up behind her mouth now, he slid his hands down her back, nodded, satisfied with the hair, sucked air in betwe
en his teeth as her mouth bled orange-blue highwayman along him.

  He grabbed her under her armpits and stood her up. He licked under her eyes. Unblind whites and blues. Maggie always kept her eyes open when they made love.

  White like, rose like? She slid down onto him, orange drool linking their mouths.

  Rose—yes— He ran his hands up familiar thighs, resculpting them to perfection. Memory is in the hands. Maggie Mechaine had honest breasts. Had had.

  When she came, she seized his flesh with her black claws and her hue erupted bluish-violet for a good half a minute as she gawked up at the night, panics in her breath.

  When he emptied his palette inside her a few minutes later, she laughed gaily like she was on a porch swing at dusk with a butterfly on her knee and she swooned all purple night over him in the cloister of their strange dark orange fog.

  She rolled them each another cigarette. She was blackest night again, staring at him with a curious half-smile, half-frown. Yellow-white, she said quietly.

  He yawned. What’s that?

  Reds to whites to purples to burnt black greys, she explained. She suddenly looked sad.

  It—helps me remember, he told her. Thank you.

  Blind whites, the Colored Girl said, shrugging on her ancient vest. With her chin, she gestured below. He looked out over the bruised night lights of Weatherhead, its murders and its wards for several minutes. When he turned back, she’d joined the ink of the night the way that sleep doesn’t and she was gone.

  (31 Down) I am the Shunt of the Engine Hinge.

  He saw Maggie Mechaine in a sweatshirt—she always sat with her back to the window, high, or she’d appear sometimes hanging onto the top edge wearing one of his wife-beaters looking for all the world like a prisoner. She had the same look now down on her hands and knees, her spine’s ridges poked up out of her white back; she was searching for something in the white grass. He remembered this nightgown. She wore it in her blue room with white windows, like a wraith in underwear.