Weatherhead Read online

  He cried, Pieces of what?!?

  “You and me, we got it covered,” she sounded satisfied, “we’re just pieces of that big dumb ol’ American dream, right?” He’d begged her to stay low for this function for the veterans of the war—his war. His division had been inactivated and the vets of the tristate area were honoring, well, honoring themselves. No one else seemed to want to. “War and baseball!” Maggie quacked. Queasy smiles turned towards her. And weed. Weed, yes. That was her tripartite division of what America meant, but she deigned politely to leave the latter out. Everyone could probably figure out for themselves that’s that what was talking anyhow, he guessed, from the audacious ash plume that was annotation and footnote to her speech. Her words were always so much smoke.

  Suddenly she had a spider pinched between her fingers. She held it up in front of his face. “Check it out.” She turned it this way and that. “This little guy, he doesn’t ask why, he just builds it, see? Builds traps and eats. Don’t need no answers. Even—“ she pinched it liquid. If she’d suddenly popped it into her mouth, he wouldn’t’ve been surprised.

  His grip on her arm was no serum and she wrenched herself free and stood hunched in the parking lot. “That was some Valentine’s date,” she said.

  “Do you know how embarrassing that was?” He stood over her, loomed over her. He was far taller than she and always felt it.

  “What’d I do? War is hell, man,” she insisted. She slapped her knee but missed. Oh, how he hated her. He said this to her just then and she stopped laughing. Just stood there still bent forward slightly, leaning on her knees, staring up at him. “Blink,” she said and did, “now open again.” She popped her eyes open again. She repeated the words and motion several times.

  Sick last hours exposed for what they were.

  Maggie Mechaine died out on an empty service road, sweeping curve of road next to the water, a little snow on the ground—She didn’t run out there. “Why run?”

  “Pretend you’re chasing something.” It’d maybe make her feel better. “Running is a big part of who we are?”

  She knew he was trying to press her into a confrontation, accusing her of—what? Running from what? “Why would I chase anything?” Instead, she went and hit balls into the ocean.

  “Isn’t this why I bought you the cage?”

  “Dunno. Is it?” He looked at her closely. God, she’d grown—dimmer, somehow, greyer, sapped of color. She’d lost her sheen and not even thirty. He’d really noticed it for the first time after his worst birthday ever. It was all his fault, he felt. No, she insisted. I’m just tired. She stretched out like deafness on the couch, knit her fingers together. He tried to sit at her head and stroke her hair, but he couldn’t quite find it. The hair. Or her. Oh, shit, he wasn’t even home when the notion struck him. Too late. How old could they get?

  (8 Across) I Wonder at This Heart-Shaped Exile.

  He was tied to a dead woman. They were fighting in the street, a repeat of her bloody defeat of the man the first day he had come to Weatherhead, except today she had a bat. She stood facing him as a lanky, sallow fellow with a sunken chest and flagging sails for eyelids, bound them together at hand and foot with the umbilical length of chain. Around them surged the mob. The mob seemed severed parts of her struggling to re-attach themselves until she had to beat them back out of the ring with a harshly ground series of curses.

  She was wrapping coarse yellowed tape around her palms. He recognized this tape. She wound her hands this way when she played baseball. She didn’t offer him any tape. Or a bat.

  Why are we doing this? I don’t want to hurt you—

  You won’t. She put her bat under her arm for a moment and held up both hands and turned them over before continuing, Have you ever shut a door in the dark? In dark so dark that your eyes are worthless but you can hear—hear—everything around you to an increased degree? And the door, when it reaches the jamb, think of the whisper it makes and then as you press it home, there’s that sudden rush of darkness—darkness your ear thinks for the eye is deaf—just before it shuts, like a wave of black sound. She spat on her palms and rubbed them together vigorously. Is that what death is? One has to wonder. To stop being outranks everything—everything—is part of every part of our imaginations. Everything we imagine and desire is a reminder that we are consumed with it. Death I dole out on a whim. Her eyes met his, he thought perhaps for the first time since he had been brought to this place. Isn’t that why you’re here?

  N—no! He took a step toward her and the entire crowd fell silent. I didn’t want to—I don’t want to die.

  You may as well, she shrugged. If life and death met and didn’t at least yell at each other for a while it would be ridiculous. She swung. Air ran from wood and wood knocked on bone. He rang like the worst bell ever.

  ⧜

  His sister, the silver one, told him the day they buried Maggie Mechaine, try and remember the good things about her, the kinds of things you’d put exclamation marks after.

  After she was killed, he wrote somewhere: Maggie Mechaine is—

  He scratched out ‘is’. In its place he put W-A-S. Maggie Mechaine was. He chewed on the end of the pencil, hers. He meddled with it for a moment and produced: Maggie Mechaine was!

  She had inherited the sneak-a-wink dent squint in one of her eyes of her mother and uncle and the off-tempo half-reds off the top of her father’s head. Because of this squint, she often looked as if she had something in her eye, which she didn’t. It also made her look suspicious, which she never was. It also made her look like a pirate, which she wasn’t. Although when he had first met her, she was an inveterate drinker. She loved mimosas in particular. A trait of the relief-seeking sea-locked who had washed ashore at the foot of a tavern? She was smoky, too, like Blackbeard with his firecrackers stuck in her hair. So—Maggie Mechaine was piratic? he could hear Silver ask.

  He hadn’t been sure how old she was when he first met her. Her slight frame and that timidity rendered fiction by time always kept her young.

  What else about her could he recall?

  Detritus:

  “Margaret,” she replied. “Is that a problem?”

  “A fairy brings it to me.”

  That Halloween she dressed up as a stained-glass window.

  She nicknamed his semen ‘white lies’.

  These were all just pieces, though. No one ever really knows anyone else. She had said that, more than once, too many times, maybe. Was she trying to tell him something now that he didn’t already know?

  He tried to escape one day, many days, but the only walls were around Maggie.

  (9 Down) I am the Balistraria

  came that silvery voice again. It was shivery out of an all hallow’s sleeve on an empty scarecrow out of bleak october firsts. Sometimes cross-shaped, other times a mere line.

  It couldn’t be the same day, yet there she was standing over him studying the blood on the underside of her baseball bat where she’d whacked him good upside the head, as she might’ve said. She made laughs like leaves trip and tip out of her mouth. No. They weren’t in the square anymore. She’d had someone drag him into this place of dark color illuminated only by the battered wives of broken windows set into the sky at irregular intervals. Oh, so they were up so high, oh, in the gods, in the frames he’d seen from below.

  Chip and foam, she yawned, inspecting her club and fingering a splinter left there by its impact with his skull. I thought for some time that my wooden poison had done done you in, but I kept a close watch over you through the night and you seem worthier than death, today, I s’pose.

  He struggled to rise to his feet. His skull still rang with thunder. When he closed his eyes all he saw against the nights of his eyes were the dashes and flashes of little soups of bones thrown into his face. Whatever he had thought love would be like, it hadn’t been this. Bruised of knee, he knelt under the knocking knell, unable to stand. She slow-clapped her hands and stared at him with her languid, lazy eyes.
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br />   There is a well somewhere near Weatherhead that has your name in it up to the brim, she laid the bat across her shoulders like a yoke, but I can’t figure your terror. Are you viper-father in a daughter-body? Or iron-mother clapped on a daughter-wrist? By the looks of things, you’re a man. Did a son climb up out of my tomb? I’ll have you know: up is forbidden in this city. She gestured with the bat out across the heightless greys.

  No, I’m— he paused. She looked down at him with disdain and waited for him to continue. He thought furiously. Would it matter what he said, any of it? Maggie Mechaine by all appearances, but she would’ve never—

  Her mouth fell. Would’ve and will? Didn’t you hear me? What do you put faith in? The gun? Or the bullet? The hand? Or the knife? The truck? Or the driver?

  His head snapped up. He had no faith in wickedness. He never had. Until now. The thing had turned cruel. She reached out suddenly and wrenched him back by his hair. She bent over him. For a moment he thought she was going to either kiss him or spit in his mouth for there was a low hissing coming from between her teeth. There is, she snarled, no arrow in you without me. I am more constant than any killing thing. You will not die in Weatherhead today. But you are forbidden from asking questions in Weatherhead. Did no one tell you this? What does Love tell you?

  Love? he could only croak hoarsely. What’s that? She pushed him away with a roughness that spoke with another body’s wealth. She left him there, his cheek on the foggy concrete, staring out across the town’s low-down through the absence of the opening hanging before him.

  ⧜

  What could he remember? What did Love tell him?

  They both hated flying. Maggie hated up. They had only ever taken one trip using wind when they stayed with his oldest sister in Chicago for the wedding of another sister. He had four sisters, a bewildering tribe of which he served as perfect interloper, squeezed right in the middle. They were as puzzling to him as he was to them. This particular sister, not the one getting married, but the one who hosted them, did not like Maggie Mechaine, called her ‘faux New England white trash’. Maggie Mechaine didn’t know that, though.

  Maggie Mechaine was of the south, yes. She had followed her brother to the city north when a relative had passed and a number of small business concerns passed into their hands, the sole niece and nephew. Her brother had coerced her into emigrating and she had assumed ownership of a frame shop. She had only been eighteen. And no, the city hadn’t rubbed off on her. Instead it had rubbed her the wrong way with agricultural sensibilities and her intolerance of the urban guff.

  “Are you serious? You’re going to marry this thing? I bet she doesn’t take your name.” She wouldn’t. She liked the alliteration and didn’t want to be known by a name that had six syllables too many and that sounded like an overly-confusing city name you’d hear in history class. “She’s a pothead trailer hitch.” This made the brother-in-law guffaw.

  Yes, it was true, Maggie smoked weed like cigarettes. This he tolerated though rarely shared. She’d kept it quite a secret from him for the first year they dated and one day he found her “in the shower”, naked, huddled over in his bathtub puffing smoke out the little window in the bathroom.

  It only really bothered him when Shuteye came into the bed, thus he nicknamed her, and would fall asleep during sex.

  “My thighs were tired,” she’d protest later.

  What had she done all those nights that turned her fingers so black?

  “Have I ever told you how much trouble I’d get into if anyone at work found out about this?” he would later protest.

  “Have I ever told you how much trouble I’d get into if hadn’t found out about this?” She was sharpening a pencil, staring up at him. He and a drill’d put the thing in for her to the right of the door in her den. “It makes my soul all sleepy.” Her unhurried dixon cadence plus the pot drew her words out horizontal.

  “Maybe you should go to church instead or something. That always worked for me.”

  She hated god. “That’d make everything but my soul sleepy, dummy.”

  He was trying to be accommodating, he thought. “I can’t even invite anyone over because the whole apartment smells like Cypress Hill was cremated in here somewhere.”

  To abet ignoring him, she found a barometer level with her hazy hades eyes. “29.5. Rain likely,” she turned her face up to him.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.” Her replies were too thick to promise anything other than destruction.

  “Where do you get it?” he demanded. She only ever left the house to go to work. There, maybe, someone brought it to her.

  “A fairy brings it to me.”

  (10 Across) I Bear an Excessive Resemblance to the Frown on Your Face.

  He spent the night up in that place he called the UnTower, that place of no steps and no walls, just the ghosts of windows that reminded one of what had once been and that now there were only things to be seen through. He had dreamed of fleet foxes. He had also dreamt of Maggie Mechaine and all those frames of hers. He woke up to the high voice and to Weatherhead with a ringing bellwether head and as he lay there, still fatigued from what must have been a close to 24-hour blackout from the concussion she’d bestowed upon him, he wondered, as many of us often do, why are we here?

  Was he being punished, the sin of unsuitable, insufficient mourning for Maggie Mechaine? Or for all those bad, illicit things that animals do when they think Nature is winking at them? Was it just a dream? Was he? This seemed likely, at first, since he couldn’t remember the name of the place he’d been part of before he was brought here by the four devious bandits. But the past is a fearful thing to look at especially when you then and now hid and hide behind a mask that makes your face look all empty like his had and did. Pretend all you want—throw out the gun to keep the bullets innocent—but in the end you have to lay down and die and if you remember, remember, that which is love, then you might have a fighting chance.

  He sat up. Why love? Why did she ask after Love? Love was just as good as hate. He had often hated Maggie Mechaine, the inconsequential lie of her existence—she was like an army lost at night, you can hear the battle close at hand, but with no moon, no happy light to guide you, you’ll never join it. Was that it then? He was here to lead her into battle? He spat to one side. Hardly. She’d already bested him. If he remembered that which is hate, what good what it do him? She had enough menace for every ghost’s revenge in the world. She was no ghost though. Oh no, she was no shade, no pale analogue to Maggie Mechaine. If anything, that creature that’d dented his skull was Maggie Mechaine embellished. But, he reminded himself, for he had forgotten for a moment, Maggie Mechaine had been so many pieces scattered across the snow by the March sea. Oh ho, but there were ways around this, he knew.

  He’d watched Maggie Mechaine herself do this once. She’d dabbled a few times in stained glass. She liked the shatter effect and the initial illogic to its rearrangement in patterns. But in the end, she said, you’d get something pretty. She hadn’t been very good at it. Her thin little white fingers were oddly indelicate in their movement through the universe so after a while she tried something called fused glass. From what he could gather from her limpid, hushed explanations around the kiln, fused glass was simply amplifying one fragment of colored glass with another. And another. And then another. The glass melted under the extreme heat and the different shatters came together to form something new.

  “They all have to expand the same way,” she told him, “or they’ll all shatter. What makes them new is the new pattern you put them in. So, say, if I did a puzzle upside down—I’d have a whole new way of looking at it and a new way to have to solve it. At the end, maybe even a different picture. Or like, you’re a cop—sometimes you have to mix up your clues and look at it again, right? Same thing. New perspectives.”

  He peered down over her shoulder. “And they won’t come apart?”

  “Not without breaking it. The
n you’d have to re-melt it—is that a word? Re-melt it again, but you’d come up with something different.” That, she said, would be an interesting project, an unending series of fused pieces, then broken, then re-fused, broken, re-fused—what would you end up with?

  The sum of all true things. These words came out of his mouth as smoke. He’d spent the last nine months pregnant with an empty crimsonless ghost, trapped in a dark adapt of his own making. Maggie Mechaine was dead and all he could do was lamely pretend that he wanted to kill himself. What, then, had brought him here? Why was he in this terrible city with its missing buildings and its half-executions? Maggie had always been absent from him, so it wasn’t that. He’d driven—what—driven her away? An exercise as fruitful as swinging a bat at a rainstorm to make it stop. Or punching smoke to cure cancer. There’d be nothing to drive away, had there, but this was not a comforting thought.

  The bridge of dresses, for one, bothered him, puzzled him, made him doubt. Maggie Mechaine—he’d never known her to wear dresses. In many ways, he saw this as mere extension of the idea that love was something inexpressible, something beyond even the most ordinary outwards projections, something that Maggie Mechaine could never have been bothered with. Still, though, this bridge troubled him for it spoke of Maggie Mechaines melted together in a form he had never recognized. He could remember—what could he remember—

  He had loved her once. She’d been so plain she’d been something at once beautiful and not. He was always surprised at her bare arms, the sparse, faint pale gold-red hair there. She did not better the world around her by being in it, there was neither beauty to reflect nor meanness to contrast, Maggie was just so. When she died, there was no anguish clutching at his throat. Even now, with a sensation of ascending horror, he couldn’t help but feel that it’d been the best thing for her, really. She’d waned since he’d met her.