Weatherhead Page 26

  Suddenly she looked up. Oh! There you are. She’d been looking for him. And he for her.

  In the grass? This white grass perplexed him. At first he thought it might be snow, ash, or dandruff. But it was merely white, gagged, mirked away from chlorophyll, as if his encounter with the Colored Girl the night before had bled the pigment out of the patch, and out of her as well.

  As good a place as any, she said wickedly. I thought maybe you’d been dashed to pieces falling off the UnTower. She was angry, she said with her eyes and teeth, angry because of his rejection of her after the ball. Angry because—oh, no, he grimaced, did she know he’d laid with the Colored Girl, made her look like—

  I’ve been—gravity is rude, he attempted to cover himself in the vernacular. Maggie Mechaine always knew about his lies and other women. But that was because then he’d flat-out admitted it. Did she? His inabstinent forehead throbbed with a dull, dead ache. It’s rude—and I was looking for you? She glared at him from where she knelt. Where have you been?

  I am not here. She wasn’t, he saw. She’d folded herself up like a caul-cutting missionary and stopped ruining omens—outta town. Not even all of his strength of piety towards her ghastly religion nor his overripe desire for the neverborn, for the dead wife who’d never been what he wanted while alive, could keep her pinioned to the earth. She simply wasn’t there anymore. Anxious, he went down on one knee in the albino yard. Maybe the snow was green, he found himself thinking. And what had she been looking for? Someone had drawn a crazy configuration of arrows and other markings in the ways the blades bent. Almost like a map—

  He remained in this attitude, a study in absurdity for some time, when he realized that someone—several someones—were standing over him watching him. They always came in fours, it seemed, to the doomed portholes of his soul’s sinking ship.

  The corpses of the musicians—for she sought them out first—she ground their bones into a fine powder and used it to whiten her face, did you know that?

  It’s what you’re sitting in. She thinks it makes her pretty. This idea is born out of the outer limits of her heresy, indolence and dreams of nail-torn pillowcases.

  Before births were outlawed, she hung mother and infant from their own umbilical nooses.

  She thinks we are all born cursed. We used to pretend she came out of our dreams at midnight. But it was we who did.

  He listened to them calmly, remaining in his forensic attitude as they spoke. They were three men and one woman, siblings, he guessed, for they all had the same protruding noses and lips, faces leaping out ahead of them, the same thick black hair, and heights higher than eyelids. They were identical: the girl even had a faint blur of hair on her upper lip. They began talking in hushed tones. They were the Giants of the Sabbath and it was their ingenious ruse that they made the curious, spiked shoes that many in Weatherhead wore. They were the cobblers and stompers of the provinces. They accompanied, usually in pairs, he learned later, her conquests of the surrounding lands. It was thus that they believed themselves free of suspicion and at least somewhere within the black, black orbits of her patronage. They even had names, he was moved to hear, the first he’d heard in the city: Sir Burn, Gympie, Spindle, and the girl was called Machine Eel. They all carried mountains in their voices whether the blacks n’ bullets or no, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t help but feel that he knew these people.

  Memory shat out of mirrors.

  With a cautious look about, the girl Machine Eel, leaned forward at the waist, cupped her hand to her mouth and whispered to him, The fist is man’s greatest invention. The others nodded.

  He climbed to his feet and warily studied them. Not the art of suffering? He indicated Weatherhead. They shook their heads as one. Masts, they gently explained, can be torn out by many kinds of winds. But the best kinds of winds were the ones that lulled the ship to sleep first.

  He decoded this poetry of solemnity thus: You’re trying to fight her, he laughed at them. He was tossed between amusement and horror. Smiles drunk with disloyalty and trickery bloomed in front of him. There was a resistance in Weatherhead. No. This wasn’t possible. They couldn’t fight her. If anything, she was fighting herself, he thought. This notion, emergent for the first time, his virginal suspicions as to the true nature of Weatherhead finally bleeding out of him, made him feel unwell. Her life, her own death, was fighting against her. He tried to tell them this, warn them off their path of self-destruction, but how could they understand? It’s what always happened. I just need—I need—

  Spindle frowned. Love? Love cannot help us. They work for her.

  No, they—no. He gave up. You’re right.

  Gympie pawed the ground with his foot. It’s a question of questions and dissent—

  Descent?

  No, dissent, Sir Burn said, exasperated. Your questions speak volumes—you must lead us! Level, he stared him straight in the eyes.

  Ah. This was why they’d come. He stared down into the sick grass. All he wanted to do was help her look for something. He was good at finding things in whites. How can you trust me? The day the zoo escaped—I saved her. You know that.

  Saved her from the improper death, that is all! Yes! But we all know, hers must be special! You of all people should know that. She must die. Trucks won’t drive themselves. They all nodded save him.

  Who were these people? It’d been them, them driving the truck that’d almost killed her again. They knew his thoughts and their eyes twinkled, Yes.

  He thought of her almost erotic madness, her undefined sense of danger. But, he didn’t bother to protest to these young conspirators, she was the swallow to death’s spit, wasn’t she? They were fools to think that they could devour the world before she did. But this excess of stupidity couldn’t go innocently to a noisy end, keelhauled on the rough, knotty stones of Weatherhead’s streets.

  So? Gympie frowned at him, then looked at the others.

  He said nothing. He simply indicated, with a silent, tenebrous crucifixion of his speech, yes.

  ⧜

  The last night of her life they had gone out to dinner where she had said, between fries, “There’s a lot we don’t want to do and we do them anyway—things that make more sense. I never did those things. Like you. You’re always on about who we are, wondering who we all are. That’s philosophy, man, philosophy, and philosophy is just a bunch of fancy ways of avoiding what we all know.”

  She was stone-cold sober he noted. “Which is what?”

  “We’re just a parade of bones up through a bag of meat falling off a cliff called gravity. Falling. Falling. Falling.” She started crying quietly. “Who had I been? Just keep asking yourself that.”

  He grabbed her hand on a sudden. Salt grains were minutiae on that white thing, felt but not seen. He started to speak but she just snorted, and pulled her hand away and rubbed the heel of her hand against the hell of her eye.

  “Lies feed tomorrow,” she cursed, “did your mother ever teach you that? I know she did. My mom and daddy lived long enough to learn that they didn’t know who the other person was. Did we?” She looked down at the newspaper she’d laid over her plate and smoothed it out with both hands. She raised a tear-stained finger and cleared her throat. “Listen:

  Dear Miss Manners: When I worked in the steel mill, one of the rules was "the load has the right of way." In other words, you stepped aside when approached by someone carrying equipment or materials to allow them passage. This made a lot of sense, and I assumed that it was a rule of etiquette as well. However, if it is a rule of etiquette, it doesn't seem to be observed. I was at a party with a buffet luncheon. As I left the buffet with my dish of food, I was pushed out of the way by another guest rushing to get in line. Is there an etiquette rule governing these situations or is it pretty much a matter of anything goes?”

  Maggie Mechaine had a demented, tortured obsession with Miss Manners that, as far as he could tell, extended far back into a childhood desperately free of etiquette, to the point, as s
he described it, of near-barbarism. Maggie was to Miss Manners as topsoil was to hail—or lighthouse is to storm—a warning amongst, perhaps. He could never tell if she read Miss Manners as a kind of war or as a fulfillment of purpose: soil or lighthouse could be either. Miss Manners, like the puzzles, held god-cushioned answers.

  He listened to her read quietly, he, Man, uprooter, defiler.

  He couldn’t believe it, but his voice cracked when he asked, “And what did Miss Manners say?”

  Maggie’s sad, red-rimmed eyes scanned the paper. He looked into them as he never had, they just peeking over the top of the paper, two syllables to all that was left of her weary, weary name. “’Hem. Miss M. sez that the mill is more civilized than the buffet. Line up. Take your turn at bat. Greed tramples on decency. Obey the rules.” She folded the paper with a pert movement and tossed it aside. She levelled her awful gaze at him, a genesis in reverse, where everything was taken away from the earth until nothing remained but darkness and a voice: “Why do I feel like there has only ever been one person in love in the world?”

  “Who?” He dreaded the answer. It would kill her.

  Then they were standing on a rocky shore from over a year before. “Me. Look.” Neither one of them had ever seen the Pacific Ocean before they came here. It was flatter and on the wrong side of the sun. He watched her faint outline in the darkness, pointing out into the froth of the world’s throat. “Somewhere here, somewhere there,” came her voice, floating up out of the darkness. Don’t You See? You paid three times for that picture you wanted framed and you never got it. How many times would you pay for me, she asked? She felt like a princess selling herself in secret on the docks, sails and slavery billowing behind her. Only true love would outbid everyone else.

  (32 Across) I Swallow Gallows.

  She was wearing a cincture around her waist, dancing around it with a murderer’s bliss, hands clasped behind her back, skipping. Curious, he stepped forward. If that was indeed her speaking, the High Voice, then she must’ve returned with her body to Weatherhead. And hungry, he wagered, if she were eating deathwood.

  Once again, he’d been looking for her for days. He had wandered through Weatherhead, asking after her. Was it as it always was in stories like this? A secret place somewhere she secreted herself? A garden? A single rose somewhere that she knelt by? Hidden beauty in this terrible place that sang to her terrible, terrible heart?

  No.

  He squinted through the dust the crowds were kicking up in the lane, scanning for the dancing woman. There she was! It had to be her. She was dressed in faded white trousers and tunic, almost medieval, with that bright red sash dangling off her waist. The hair’d been tucked up under a rough woolen cap, but he knew that walk and nape anywhere. He’d kissed both so many times. He’d caught the edge of her eye when she passed by him on his bench and, tormented by her absence, he’d given chase. Certain of her anger at his encounter with the Colored Girl, for she must’ve known, and set to unease by his encounter and subsequent falling-in with the would-be revolutionaries of Weatherhead, he wanted to make amends with her. For whatever reason he was here, it had to do with her or Maggie Mechaine. The last thing he needed was distance. He needed to keep her close now, as he never had. Especially if she were to be destroyed once again. It would have to be different this time.

  She led him on a merry dodge through the winding streets at the city’s center. There were immense crowds frothing about the market’s stalls and the half-crushed windpipes of shop doors, an ebullience sang out over the white faces of Weatherhead, untowards, he even caught wisps of something like laughter here and there, half-erect joy maddened at a splay. All this peculiar muddle pressed arrogant against his eye and he dived back and forth between bodies, having lost sight of her in the thicket of people, cursing holiday-makers and the terrifying grimaces and leers that smecked up at him out of the mob’s spasm, an almost pubic layer of public charlatanry that disguised what lay beneath the faces welling up like blood out of a wound before his eyes.

  There! Gripping an elderly man by his shoulders, lifting him, and placing him out of his path, he shot to the right, down an alley where the end of a crimson rope hung in the air for a moment. This rope bled off her hips, he knew.

  He turned the corner to make with all godspeed down the narrow lane when he was brought up short by a clot of bodies. People were standing around, staring down at something in the road. He found himself at the edge of this group next to a group of people wearing masks.

  I’m a dinosaur, said the young woman beside him. She stared at him. He tried to ignore her.

  I see that. How nice for you.

  Beast, she grabbed his arm, we all are. He looked at her companions. They were indeed all wearing dinosaur masks.

  The dead brought back to entertain us, he said wryly. I saw a movie about you guys once. I tried to take the woman I married to see it. They recoiled at the word ‘married’.

  He glanced down at the object of their attentions. There was a corpse lying in the street. Another young woman who’d landed on her face not her feet. There was too much red. He knelt down. One of the dinosaurs stood at his shoulder. Are you gonna rape her now?

  He shot a sexless look of salt at this cretin. He looked at the others. Dinosaurs, he addressed them, feeling not at all silly, what happened to this young woman? and they all started speaking at once, a jungle of words bent to rituals of invented gods and goddesses, like the crowds a few paces away whose freakish smiles put paid to the man-or-wolf debate—their tongues were rabid, foul things, hydra-headed pollens that branched out, infected his pores, searching for all his places that listen for they had a thousand stories to tell. Savage is the answer sought when the question is born from a carnivorous season. Why did this young woman die? Ha! He may as well have asked the extinction bombarding his ears with lies and inverted truths (a horn-encumbered face thrust into his swore that the corpse was no corpse at all, but a swan-dive in reverse they were waiting to witness—all the red was net—a Street of Spit for rebirths). They jostled about him, these scaly, crested faces—oh! and ow!—they had claws, too, grabbing at his arms and sides as they justified the carcass still unmoving at their feet. A few of the dinosaurs had begun slipping around in the expanding pool of blood radiating out from the facedown.

  Finally, he broke free of their clutches and with a series of violent gestures in which he rained down meteor, snow, and ash upon them, he corralled the lizard kings and queens into collective quiet. Despite what they thought, he told them, there was nothing delicious in this encounter. A young woman had died, murdered even, and they must needs do something. The dinosaurs exchanged uneasy glances.

  He knelt down again and studied the corpse. He’d been a detective once, he remembered. He’d been good at mapping deaths, just not so good at foreseeing them. The banality of this death, this murder, made his passions yawn and see what else was on. He’d already seen her dead so many times, an instant replay of all the different ways that he and she had killed her slowly over the years, that by this point, in a filthy lane in Weatherhead surrounded by people pretending to be dinosaurs, or even vice versa, he felt nothing.

  He turned the body over and the snouts that’d peeked over and around his head and shoulders leapt back with a collective gasp. Death, a colleague had once told him, had a way of making everything more beautiful because it froze a face at the most extreme limit of humanity: the moment of knowing. This face he saw now, Maggie Mechaine’s face—there was nothing beautiful in it. It was absent, solemn, blood-poisoned. The dinosaurs recoiled in terror. It was her. But he knew better than they the tricks and tumbles of the way death dreamt in Weatherhead. He gently laid the head down and stood up, studying the rooftop above.

  Someone threw this woman down. The dinosaurs gathered about him as he explained launch angles, back feet, orientation of bodies, and the placement of the fall, dispossessed of all emotion. She had been pushed. He looked back up at the roof. I need to get up there. He
searched their faces until he found one of the long-necks and bade it give him a boost up.

  Once he clambered along its neck, he stood up on the edge of the roof and looked down at the gaggle of dinosaurs and the corpse. He paced back and forth on the bleeding edge, scuffing his foot on the stone here and there, eying the body, breathing her last few breaths with his eyes and animated hands. Then he turned his attention to the rooftop. It was dusty, chalky. A small shed held a staircase leading down into the squat building, he guessed, so the murderer had had an easy getaway. There were footprints everywhere. The extinction below watched him with baited breath, whispering amongst themselves. He fought the urge to pelt them with stones, tiny lizard genocides, and instead spoke out loud and at length as to the possible scenarios he could see playing out: she could’ve been pushed, dragged to the roof already dead and dropped, tricked into the fall—did she know the person? She’d been facing away from the person, indicating that she didn’t know what was going to happen or—

  Maybe she wanted it to happen, a pterosaur called up, flapping its wings anxiously.

  Maybe she was struck by a car or something, a stegosaur suggested in a drowsy voice. Low mumbles ran through the crowd.

  Check for tire tracks! someone else called. He hadn’t thought of that, but there were none on the roof.

  Then a voice shouted from the back, We must re-enact the crime! It’s the only way to know for sure and all the dinosaurs took up this mantra. Velocity, angle, arc—these things must all be calculated until the wind responsible could be discovered, alibi-free, and be punished. He made a show of consideration before agreeing to this suggestion for now he understood the play. And at his command, they began fanning out into the nearby square. As he watched from his perch above, the dinosaurs rustled around a score of young women and forced them into a single-file march into the maw of the building below, a few moments later, they emerged out onto the roof, false-faced and same-mute.