Weatherhead Read online

  “I’m pretty sure most people hold the light in high regard,” he sat up. She was trying to make him angry.

  “I didn’t mean for the light. How’d that little baby die?”

  “No one loved it.”

  “Ah-men.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

  There are few spoils where your enemy has just finished loving you, she told him now here in Weatherhead as they exited the church. She nodded farewell and left him standing in the avenue.

  He tried to escape that day. There weren’t any walls to climb in Weatherhead, though. Nor were there police. He didn’t count, the only law around.

  (6 Across) I Lap the Miles.

  It was morning again in Weatherhead. His sleep, though long in the tooth in coming, had been untroubled. Neither the morning nor its phantom words were low which meant that the bandits had brought him far from Alaska, whatever that was, and the low sort of thing that passed for flaccid, sunless light here licked his eyes with a southern lilt in its spit. Where had the sun and sky gone?

  Mornings were bad enough. It distressed him not a little, missing his ritual suicide. He looked around the bare room he was in, trying to think up a substitute. But he soon gave up and, for a fleeting, peaceful moment, he forgot everything. He couldn’t remember how exactly he had come to this place or even how he knew that it was designated his. He just knew this to be. It seemed to conform roughly to a place.

  There was no one to convey him that morning now that his provisional status had been given the nod so, having accepted his troubling circumstances, he set out to look for the creature that looked like Maggie Mechaine. His empty room lay on the periphery of the town, to the left of where they had entered. He thought perhaps he’d have good fortune to find her in a church or an orphanage, eating gods or babies or both. Christmas was right around the corner. Nowhere did he see a sign that said ‘rib tip’.

  He saw in the distance a swarm of people fussing about the road and he made for them. There was a great hustle and bustle about a large crevice that had swallowed part of one of the broad avenues of the city. Railroad tracks ran to its lip, drooped spaghetti downwards into darkness where they took on despair and then continued on the far side. They had built a bridge out of her dresses, they said, to span this great split that had appeared in the hinterlands of town. They told him that an earthquake had occurred during the night.

  Land is slave to rail, a Mongol told him. He looked tired and pulled behind him a duffel bag full of railroad ties.

  He nodded as if he understood anything. Dresses, he thought. Dresses? Maggie Mechaine had never worn dresses, thus, she could not be Maggie Mechaine, right? Curious, though, he risked asking, Do you think I could sneak a look at her dresses?

  Be my guest, said another man, nude above the waist save for an old lavender-colored sort of bandolier that bristled with pincushions and shears. Be careful, though, he coughed, we had to call in some industrial looms and some of the seams need to be shored up.

  Here, the Mongol handed him a pair of short wooden handles whose ends were slender curved hooks and took a moment to show him how to use them.

  He went forward uneasy on his hands and knees, hooking the tenters gingerly under the fabric as he’d been told, walking slowly, using them as supports. The whole swaying structure was undergirded by cloth and every step meant to him the risk of tearing right through the fabric with his weight. But with slow, sliding movements and knuckle-bound shimmies with the tiny hooks, he picked his way out over the skirts and hems and ruffles to the center of the bridge of dresses. It creaked and swayed. Someone on the other side of the crevice was shouting at him to get the hell down. He halted and studied the span.

  Had Maggie Mechaine ever owned a dress? He couldn’t decide, to be honest. Obviously their wedding day had seen this but he couldn’t even attest to that so orphaned and adopted by someone else seemed that life now. She certainly had never owned this many. Not enough to build a railway bridge out of them. He got down on all fours, queasy at the sway and ran his hands over the different colors and fabrics. None of them felt or smelled familiar, none of them could he recall peeling off of her, buying for her, pretending not to know her and admiring her in them from afar—No. Maggie Mechaine had never worn dresses.

  Are there many trains into town, he asked when he climbed back to land which, in its own way, was also the spread of her across rock. The workers were milling about drinking steaming mugs of thick, brown water and smoking empty paper cylinders and exhaling empty infinities.

  We haven’t had any come through in a good while, the Mongol scratched under his cap, coupla years, maybe? Hard to tell. Lotta trucks, more. T’ain’t no gasoline, though, we reckon. She has it. No trucks or trains—he exchanged dark looks with the other workers milling about— not for a good spell now, so’s we don’t have call for it much.

  Why bother with the bridge then if there’s no cars or trains using it?

  The fellow squinted at him and said, There are times when she goes about naked to the waist and there is a color about her the shape of a wheel—something between black and chrome. The size of the prayer she doesn’t give a damn about. When she comes, you answer to her accent, friend, there’s no second way about it. She tells us, You and he and they and everyone used to be; fix the bridge and that’s that.

  He pressed the man, Who is she?

  The Mongol shuddered. I am but the mere edge of a man and thus lack the geometry necessary—his words faltered, became weak on a sudden—he cast a fatal look back over his shoulder. Welcome to Weatherhead, friend.

  That day he only saw her from a distance several times. He was sure she had seen him at least once because he’d seen that pale red head turn his way, but she didn’t approach or address him. No one did. She moved through the town as sure a phantom as he thought her to be, a phantom that the lie of the dresses proved her to be, unnoticed or ignored by the citizens of Weatherhead who took the low perfection of her apparent brutality for granted. He spent the bulk of the day following her through the winding streets both to see where her feet might take her and because he dreaded and coveted that red, but that red led him nowhere and eventually he found her sleeping with her bare back turned to him.

  “Venetian blonde,” he told her when she turned to him. Her eyes flicked to the window.

  “Why? What?” She was barely awake. “Open them, then.”

  “Blonde, not blind.” He made sure by staring a path down her spine to the curve in space thereabouts down.

  “I don’t need any details, just leave my half of our shit on the table by the door,” she groaned. Of them, only she joked about divorce. Her bare shoulders were inserted into the sheets, her arms formed a vee across the front of her.

  “I’m not talking about another woman. I’m talking about your hair.”

  “My what?” Her face took shelter with its arms, but the apocalyptic brambles of her thens took its revolution against the pillows. Her hair was a clumsy alchemist’s spill, scarlet pale gold poured over white. It was, he thought just then, the prettiest thing about her. Maybe the only.

  “They call it Venetian blonde,” he said again. He considered ducking under her lowness, to attempt to drink before the cork, but his phone started ringing. Christ, he had just got home from work—

  Uncanny atmospheric conditions up north in Manhattan today, meteorology said, rain the shape of airplanes, put death and toll back on your feet and get back down here and leave that alchemy behind. You’ll never get anything finer than a tepid quiver out of that lead, anyway. He wondered, how did they know?

  He told her shoulder and that avalanche that didn’t need his color he had to go back and this brought her around. The eyes want their smoke, lips their smoke more hopeful. “Don’t turn on the TV.”

  “Randy Johnson,” she croaked. “Why—“

  “There ain’t gonna be any baseball games today.” He stood up.

  He didn’t come home until past midnight. She was still awake,
in her habitual, portable stupor of thirteens that turned everything into afterward and before. He should’ve seen even then, maybe before that, how horrible much tomorrow brought her, how whole she was in her lithe, fatal purity.

  She stared at his perjury when he walked in. “I remember the first time I saw a photograph of myself. When I was just a little kid, right?” In an act of submission, he withdrew. He knew better than to smash himself against this Maggie Mechaine, the Maggie of coarse pardon who would unattack him with her mouth. He left her at the computer replaying and replaying and replaying. When she comes to panic, she’ll forget where she is and remember him, he told himself. Maybe. He went to hold his head in his hands somewhere else.

  (7 Down) I am the Most Chaste City.

  He let this booming voice bang around inside his head for a while. What did it mean? Who was speaking? It was a woman. He wasn’t sure anymore it was Maggie Mechaine. She’d never been able to put thoughts into his head before, had she? Had she? This made him think of dinosaurs and empty stadiums, then, and he began to get a splinter of an eye-wink sun at the horizon that, just like these words falling down like petals out of the air, that there was something more to all this than just scratches on the skin. Maybe it was the city itself.

  Who was this woman, this feral empress, masquerading as his late wife? Why had he been brought here? Who was this city? Who was he to it?

  He looked around at the remains of his cardboard house, this hovel that he felt bound by memory and familiarity amidst horror to keep returning to. Somehow the bandits had lifted his entire life and transplanted it here to this city, to Weatherhead. It had been stripped of everything. Even the floor had been scalped, leaving nothing but the most ordinary rectangle of dirt beneath his feet. The stairs were gone, so he couldn’t check upstairs. He wasn’t even sure anymore if this was his house, the one he and Maggie Mechaine had rented after they had moved. The House of Smoke and Snow. The house that, in its own way, had killed Maggie Mechaine simply by being there for her to spend her last day in. Had the house not existed, would she have gone out for a walk or to knock baseballs into the sea that morning? He considered this. As he watched, the long, pathetic shadows that the no-dawn made rich in this sunless, grey space began to lose themselves in themselves.

  He was getting sick of asking the same questions. He needed to find out what was going on here. There was a procedure to this sort of thing. Of course! What had he been thinking? He needed to get out there and ask. He was a detective, for christ’s sake and there was a logic to the process of gathering information: first, one must have a question; two, one must ask it; three, and most important, one must receive an answer. He never thought to just ask the hell and howl of what had been.

  When it came to Maggie Mechaine he had rarely ever gotten as far as the first. She herself viewed the first stage as an encumbrance, a pesky, unnecessary stage in the trudge towards whatever sick enlightenment she envisioned herself writhing towards. “Ask too many questions, you’re gonna forget about the answers. Answers’re all that matters,” she told him once. Like many forsakers of unpolluted air, there seemed to be a certain mystical quality to the smoke she drank.

  “This coming from the girl who spends half her day doing crossword puzzles?”

  “I never said I read the clues.” She didn’t. She had her own arcane, preternatural method. When he discovered this for himself, she was already dead. But then, there, in this first year together after their fistful of wedding, when they were still young and they both seemed so seductively stupid to each other, how could he’ve known that for Maggie Mechaine, questions and answers were mere palimpsest for vainglorious love. He could only see it from time to time in the way she laid her head on his hand or the time his gun accidentally went off in the house and she put a little empty frame around the hole it left in the wall that somehow the landlord never noticed, or the way she’d torture herself on the rack and wrack of their bed, stretched to her brief height beneath him. She never closed her eyes when they made love.

  He pushed these thoughts aside. Maggie Mechaine was dead. Happiness for her—nope, she’d never been happy, he knew, for happiness was for those who wear watches and dream practical dreams, right?

  He smoothed out his colorless clothes, beat them free of dust, for he had slept on the floor by all appearances, and ran his fingers through his gigantic hair to tone down the hilarity else no one would take his inquiries seriously. He set out, feeling a curious hiccup in his steps, tricked by logic’s buoyancy.

  His explorations of Weatherhead had thus far been confined to what he called the “city center” and its concentric environs, that is, the square where he’d seen her brutally beat a man three times her size in front of a frothing crowd. Over the last few days he hadn’t strayed far save for the day he discovered the bridge of dresses, but, try as he might, he couldn’t find the bridge and its crevice again. It was always overcast, minus the cloud parts, and it was hard to orientate oneself by the sun which seemed to hide everywhere in the sky. He had grown familiar with the area between his mock-up house, the cathedral and the square and today he decided to strike out to the right of his door away from this part of the city. The skyline to the right was full of black smoke and from snippets of street-talk he gathered that part of the city was burning. With any luck, he could find the city wall and plot another escape. In the meantime, he stepped into the flow of people minus destinations and tried to tune himself to the rhythm of the place.

  He was just too damn discordant, though, he discovered. Either the people of Weatherhead were incurious and suspicious of blow-ins or else there was a gag order in effect city-wide, a possible consequence of the recent war. Or, he remembered Mr. Moustache’s grim words; maybe it was because he hadn’t yet registered his pitch. At first, he took a general tact, advancing himself as a fresh-faced newcomer to the city and could you tell him a little about it, please, friend. The people of Weatherhead were understandably reticent to give themselves over to speech, words and their ilk. They were ruled, he apprehended, by a savage tyranness.

  To the limping young woman: Is she alone? Are there other rulers?

  Right from the get-go: Asking too many questions, friend. How many times had he heard this in his career? But only once had his inquisitiveness almost gotten him killed. Today would be the second time. The woman pulled away from him. Others saw this and approached.

  To the scarred fellow in overalls: How far is it to the next city?

  Someone else said: Whatever you think you are, here you are nothing, do you understand?

  To the man with jumper cables attached to the backs of each hand: Are there working vehicles here? This fellow didn’t lash out, merely smiled toothless and held up his hands:

  Me! Yes! These only work on me when she wants them to, tho’!

  A small crowd had gathered around his heresy. Doom draws flies. Is that she who speaks out of the sky?

  They all exchanged glances.

  Who says those words? They wake me every morning.

  The high voice? This was what they called it. Another voice suggested, A woman? No one knows for sure. His heart leapt. Ask enough questions and people will start to answer. Natural human curiosity.

  But is it her? It had to be. Why would none of them admit it? He was the sole believer in that religion, though, the one that said Maggie Mechaine rose from the dead and spoke from above. What do you call her? She must have a name.

  A middle-aged fellow missing an ear shrugged a little grey off his shoulders with his uncertainty, said, Old poets’ names, mostly. Ivies and the like. The climbing plants, words that grow.

  This was getting him nowhere. What do you mean, words that grow? None of you speak straight.

  On the contrary, said the man with broken spectacles and a shredded cardigan, you’re the one with all your alien adverbs and what not.

  A rabid young man hopped up and down on the edge of the group: She would’ve burned down the whole city if they’d let her.r />
  He leapt forward, seizing this, They? They who? They backed away from him, clamming up, wringing their hands at him, suddenly taboo. Where is Weatherhead?

  Back of beyond, mate—past the mountains that were made out of black bullets snick and snack against the sky and then the symmetry of their fall downwards.

  In relation to the seas—

  Lies are the eighth sea. You don’t see, stranger, said the limping woman, talon is useless to hawk. Fang is useless to wolf. Answer is useless to question. Evil struggles in vain to free itself from her clutches which are far blacker than it.

  That’s why we use our teeth as coinage here in Weatherhead, put in a thin-faced, bespectacled man. Now, how were we taught—He scratched his forehead. Bite marks in fives count as—what—

  One Weatherhead dollar, the crowd droned. Several people held up scarred forearms, kicked out gnawed shins.

  No—please—listen! He wrung his hands at them, the fools.

  This is why, the man with glasses said, there are no beggars in the city.

  She keeps us safe, a terrified voice came.

  And in gnathematics, came another.

  Do you need some cash? came a shriek over the rest of the rising voices. A flash of teeth took a swipe at his arm where he’d been writing down what they said.

  Ah! Fuck— He stumbled backwards and the small mob surged towards him.

  To the man who has everything: the bandits tore out of the crowd around him, grabbing his arms and legs, he thought initially to save him from the gnashings and snarlings of these rabid townspeople. But no, with Mr. Moustache and Rapey holding his arms, Frank and the Colored Girl took turns pummeling him in the ribs. When he vomited up enough blood, according to the small slide rule that Rapey held out to his side, they stopped and then they arrested him. Mr. Moustache clucked his tongues as Frank bound his hands, Falling to pieces, mate, falling to pieces.