Weatherhead Page 7

  Oh god, he sobbed, I ended her and this place was her vengeance and he went on in this vein for some time as all the pent-up rage and wildishness and lies of his dommerer failed self-murders of the past nine months poured out of his accommodating face. He opened one eye and snapped,

  “What’d you see on your walk?”

  She’d dressed in black, her hoodie and jogging pants. Yesterday it had always been Valentine’s. Why wasn’t she dressed in red? “Everything true is alive at night,” she replied softly, “it can all come on out, play and love and nobody’d be any better off for the knowin’.”

  That rosy color to her ears and neck—resigned to waiting to die? No, this was not what that night told him. He climbed down from the Untower and as he walked through Weatherhead, eyes full of mumbles came out of side streets watching him pass and why hadn’t she had been as filthy as her fingernails that night, he wondered aloud as he felt himself bristling with a new energy, her voices rained down around his ears

  Someone had murdered her. He would solve the death of Maggie Mechaine. He would remember her. All that she hadn’t been in life she was here in death. He had to put her back together again. He would remember her. This was why he’d been brought here. It never occurred to him that he had brought himself here. This would’ve saved a lot of trouble and woe, but, we are imperfect creatures, especially when confronted with the magnitude that death and love, even once-love, breathe into us as we stand on their lips, though they are lips we haven’t touched in a thousand years.

  Like the rumor of a spy, he made confusions of shades and silhouettes. Which would be which? He decided to set this question aside and set Maggie Mechaine loose from him and just pretend for a moment that this woman was indeed someone else. Go along with the dead, no longer cower behind what memory told him and what it didn’t. These pieces would have to be rearranged, fit back together. He had her in him, didn’t he? Wasn’t that what Love dragged out of you? The other?

  Love. Maggie Mechaine had been in pieces once. Then again. Never again, he promised Weatherhead. What had she always told him? “Know the pitch, know the strike.” Something had hit Maggie Mechaine and broke her. What if it had it been him?

  ⧜

  This was the area on fire a few days before, but whatever the source of the conflagration (though he had his suspicions) and the extent of its rage, he couldn’t find a single sign or memory of it. Here the ramshackles and half-falls of concrete, beam, and glass that façade stood for in this city were decrepit, yes, collapses sped by her war against the city, yes, but if fire had delivered her pentecost of the ash out of its flickering, stuttering orange mouths, it’d been robbed of its permanence. When he asked a few people about the firestorm he’d witnessed raging here, the dusty folk merely shrugged, assuring him there were too many terrible things in Weatherhead to make a calendar out of. Fires, he learned, were often acts of desperation at the nature of Weatherhead, but were usually confined to the person immolating his or herself. There was little wooden in the city, so it rarely spread. One woman, a creature of about his age who had no legs and scooted through the streets, wending her way in and out of abandoned trucks and abandoned pedestrians, told him, tucking her would-be baroness’ hair up under her woolen cap (she had once been lovely, the corner of her mouth whispered while the rest of her spoke), She fires the city, yes, yes, there was the library—the museum—the prison—whores turned into virtues and blessings in those days. She was looking for someone, yes, yes! All the houses were turned out in those early days, like she had lost something, yes, yes, she continued. And as suddenly as it started it stopped. I’ve heard prey tell of guns too big for her, though, and a secret army of flints, tinders, and matches that—

  He soon found that talking to these people was as profitable as trying to make your reflection in the mirror yawn. Most of them would still just shudder and hurry past him if he hailed them, more so now because they recognized him from his duel against her and didn’t want to be seen as accessories to his crimes. So he just wandered about, studying ruined posters peeling off the walls, scurf of the city, advertisements for abandoned, wholesale beauty and the future’s hilarious arc of promise. An illustration of a red-headed mother, beaming at the viewer, installing cabling into the mouths of her two children, an ecstatic if empty-eyed boy and girl. REMammaries, it said. The rest had been torn off, leaving a dairy allergy warning in one corner. Another showed a 50s-style drawing of a sheen-licked young couple, in the yard or a park, setting pigeons on fire with some sort of leafblower-sized flame-throwing unit. Be yourself the sun on the feather! Keep Weatherhead bird free! Down with the Up!

  The women in all these posters were her. The men, he didn’t recognize, were him.

  In a filthy park clotted with piles of debris and trash, he encountered a rag-tag group of ex-musicians warming their hands over a burning pile of sheet music. They greeted him with shady nods and shadier glances. Fires were easy to tuck into their conversation.

  Might be the windows, a genial old fellow told him, rubbing his stubble, she always leaves the windows as they were. She likes to get them by themselves—burns the rest. He pointed at the curling embers of symphonies, cantatas, concertos as if to say, we burn the music to free the tune, see?

  Best to ask her, squawked a fellow, weeping perpetually out of his one good eye. She likes the tiny corpses of letters, words that live in the earth, but she likes you more, they say.

  How’s that, he grunted testily.

  The old man squinted up at him. Ye’re alive, aintchee?

  Ah. Ha. He blinked. This was very true. Hesitation was not comfortable in her vast repertoire of death.

  Finding her was easy. All he had to do was follow the fearful glances of the townspeople and go to where they ran from. He fell into step beside her, matching her loping stride, even the swing of her arms as they helled along an avenue lined with a strange assortment of wooden stalls where the people of Weatherhead hawked their wares. He felt in the presence of this woman who, for now, wasn’t Maggie Mechaine, but who so resembled his deceased wife, something that is what puts chills in chases across moors at night. Palpable evil, like a fog.

  What’re you batting today, cracker jack? The old nickname didn’t resonate, he saw.

  She looked up at him strangely savagely sideways, surveying the misericordia she had drawn across his face with bruises. She gushed, breath somewhere between flirtatious exasperation and amusement, Prey, haven’t I beaten you enough? You are too curious after me! How tall? About this tall? Does she wear a crown? On her ass or on her head? So many questions. I definitely don’t know who you are. She pursed her lips. I’d call you suitor if you weren’t such an unhappy beast screaming no, please, no! out of your skin half the day, she mocked. She spoke to him, he noticed, as a simpleton, perhaps mistakenly thinking that his height had overtaken his wits.

  All in, he thought. Does the name Maggie Mechaine mean anything to you? She had stopped and was dragging her hands over a neat stack of fallen ash laid out on the table for sale. She pulled one out and hefted it, putting it straight out, end tucked her chin and sighted along it as if it were a rifle. She tossed it from hand to hand, lapping at the weight with her fingertips. She flung it out then, bringing it in a wide arc that ended abruptly just beside his ear.

  What does it mean to you? she rejoined calmly. How far apart does she plant her feet? Does she shave her genitals? Does she look in hotel bibles? Spit in them? Shit in them? She was mocking him. It was obvious the name meant nothing to her.

  He fought against his thoughts in desperation. Was it he who was mad? She wept honey out of her laughs while he hopped from one insanity to the next. He pushed the bat aside.

  Where are you from? How did you come here? To this town?

  Why, I attacked it, she said gaily. Nearby citizenry kowtowed anxiously, exchanging disbelieving glances and nodding in his direction—can you believe the nerve! I conquered it. It is mine!

  No, I mean—

&nb
sp; She cut him off with a question: How do you spend your Aprils through Decembers? At his side appeared the four bandits. He jumped back in alarm. Frank and Mr. Moustache grabbed him by the biceps, sinking their fingers into his armpits. Let go! Let—

  Maggie Mechaine tucked the bat between her boots and let it stand there while she spat on her palms and rubbed them together.

  No—please! No! he screamed, but to his surprise, she laughed and shook her head and turned away from him. Following invisible orders, Rapey, the young man with no face from the band of bandits got down on his knees a few feet out from her. All watched blank-of-face, save him, as she wound up, hip shot back as he’d seen it a thousand times, Rapey just laughed goofily and rolled his eyes around and up at her in heady adoration, the eagle-eyed could see he was aroused even, and she arced that ash down and up and connected roundly with the young man’s skull. The sound of the bone shatter reminded him of the sad crumple of an ancient television he and his friends had once pelted with rocks.

  She wiped her bat off on her sleeve. There were white flecks of gauze there mingled with gore and fleshlies. Five hundred, she tossed at him, I’m batting five hundred. She nodded at him and moved on her way.

  ⧜

  On their first date—to him: she would never admit to the crime—they ran out of gas.

  “A great beginning. Why didn’t you bring your police car?” she asked politely. “I bet those things never run out of gas, do they?”

  “They can, yes,” he grunted. They sat death row for a moment, he felt. He’d lost. She turned to him slightly. She was dressed plainly in a dark blue cardigan and a turtleneck. She smelled like she had just shaved her legs. She had, in a mad rush in the bathroom of her shop. “I don’t have my own cruiser yet.” They sat in silence. He had never been more terrified in his life and he no slouch at bedding girls. This must be what love feels like, he thought: terror.

  “Is there some reason,” she went on, plain as day, like they were sitting on a bench outside heaven, “why cops always hide behind car doors in shootouts? Is there extra armor there?” She looked down at her door and imagined enemies everywhere.

  He sighed. “I think it’s because of the window. You can shoot through it and have a place to hide at the same time.”

  She rolled down her window with her squint and aimed her finger out at traffic. “Yeah, you’re right. Blam blam!” Then, “It’s okay, I don’t like movies anyway, I was just being nice. There’s a payphone over there—“

  His hands strangled the steering wheel for a moment, then he asked “Are you old enough to drink?”

  She was.

  She had a tiny, empty picture frame inside her purse and as they walked to the bar across the street she held it out before her and fired into oncoming traffic through it “blam blam!” until finally she seemed to remember something and handed it to him without looking up. It was going to be a present for him, she said quietly with long vowels, for taking her out to the dinosaur movie. “Plus,” she said, “it isn’t the same without the door holding it up, I guess.”

  It started snowing.

  (11 Down) I’d Bruise Easily on a Planet Made of Earthquakes.

  Yep. This place is built out of punishments, he told the hands cupped around his mouth. Oh, shit—they were his. Not hers? Trying to smother him with those palms that scoffed at blood, where coughs hid, biding their time until they were tipped down into his throat out of hers? He stared down at his massive hands. Ten years’ worth of Maggie Mechaine in there somewhere. He held them up and turned them this way and that, the clot of his ghost-cold breath wreathing them. Haptic memory—that was it. He’d taken a mandatory forensics course after he became a detective, part of which dealt with the different ways we remember things. One way, of course, was touch. How many ways had he touched Maggie Mechaine? His hands bent and curved. He was conducting a black symphony of recall: held her hand this way—smooth down her hair—raise a hand to strike—grip her by the ass so—grab her arm thus—cup her side—fetch that piece of leg out of the icy white—

  It was cold, so cold in his cardboard house. Even the glass was cardboard, affording no light, so he thought it best to retreat outside and at least warm himself in the mob. He was shaken by all his previous days. This place was built out of punishments, mostly for him, he reckoned, though, and his eyes burned when he thought of it, not to the exclusion of others. Like poor Rapey, beast though he was.

  Outside, dark sounds sang of sickness through the alleyways—called wind elsewhere—and was it autumn already? He had no pity for the calendar that immolated itself, but there were leaves blowing about everywhere—no, not leaves, for they chased the people of Weatherhead down alleys and they ran and rattled, screaming tears and terrible noises as these white sheaves put paper cuts on the morning. He reached out and grabbed one after a spry, shameful elderly couple ducked around him, fleeing the flutterings. He uncrumpled the paper the wind scattered about like jewels or fools who wore their hearts on their waxen wings. It was graph paper. Oh. Ah.

  Now, Maggie Mechaine had a curious grief-lined and tumultuous relationship with graph paper. In her life, she had used it for several, not dramatically different, purposes. She used it to tabulate her befuddling sphinx-eyed baseball calculations. She used it to record her daily barometric readings. She used it, at work, with a ruler, to plot frames. And now, here it was, serving as stand-ins for Weatherhead’s abscissions. He turned the paper over and found it the same on both sides. Squinting, there was actually some faint lettering there, entombed in the plots. He could make out a few words, but none that made any sense. For all he knew, it was a faded crossword puzzle for it would be very like a malicious Maggie Mechaine-shaped shade or tumor on the world to have these white word-wings flapping terribly through mourning light in her own personal hell.

  But, he caught himself, this wasn’t her hell. In Maggie Mechaine’s hell, the letters and numbers would be veering off their squares and, waving knives or crushed barometers, chase her out into the snow, cut her to pieces, wouldn’t they? This led to his next thought:

  If I’m to remember Maggie Mechaine, I must also remember what Maggie Mechaine hated. And she hated outside the lines. It was perhaps what had never bent her hand to the creative. Things shouldn’t exist outside the frames, she often insisted. She and Mal, a painter by nature, went ‘round and ‘round about this.

  Why were her fingertips always black, then? No matter. More importantly: what did she hate? What did she fear? He thought he knew: the betrayal of the line.

  Downtown, they were walking once in a particularly brisk and bright winter day and there she stopped, piecing the sky together from its reflection on the side of a skyscraper, each window carefully punched out along perforated edges and scattered about for the sake of the frisson of initial anarchy, the opening of the puzzle’s box, before reconstruction begins. She’d rage at the clouds disturbing the symmetry and fall of the thing. Why couldn’t they slow down, keep in place, stop moving?? If she were a god or goddess, she warned him, she’d put a stop to these things, but this memory now caused him much anxiety. For, what if it this wish to be divine had now come true?

  The puzzles were all hers, too. He didn’t have the patience before. She did, though. Probably the pot helped. She’d always choose the worst puzzles: ‘Night Sky on the Lunar Far Side’, ‘Ladybug Convention’, ‘The Breaking of the Jellybean Dam’, and so on.

  “This has 8000 pieces,” he observed.

  “The eight is the only solid number here. It’s the eight that tells us for sure. Take away the eight and what’s got left? Buncha zeroes, the liar number. It’s easy.”

  A cabaret of reductions and him standing at the back door, ushering in dysycophants and stale-rot eraser wedges—take away those lines, destroy the line—and he might have a chance at escaping. Leave her the zeroes. Annoy god. Buck the system.

  He immediately had doubts as to his enterprise. For all her tyranny and thousand-wooded slaughters, for all her aren
as and chains, for all her confinements and precisely-trimmed cardboard prisons, Weatherhead was a place devoid of all law and order. There was nothing but crime in Weatherhead. Every transaction between two people or more, he observed as he walked, was an act of desperation: mugging, beating, rape. A simple stroll down the street for a denizen of the town meant at least a random knifing or kneecapping. People had taken to hanging their monies from long poles that hung down in front of them so their assailant could just grab it at will, but this didn’t prevent the attacker from lunging at the bodies themselves. And the bodies! Every turned corner meant a murmuring face-press into concrete, fingers tearing at cloaks and coats—once he even saw an elderly woman covered in what looked like glue razing virginities in the only school he ever saw in Weatherhead. He now understood what the bandits had told him that Weatherhead brings out the worst in everyone, even them. Hadn’t Mr. Moustache been apologetic as they beat him senseless on the hill overlooking the city?

  Doesn’t seem to be much law and order here. It’s more like the zeroes are all that’s left, he told her when he happened upon her. She was standing, arms folded, studying the dead electric eyes set into the asphalt at regular intervals. She paced from one to the other and then back again. She was, she told him when he asked, thinking of how to re-source the inputs for much of Weatherhead’s electrical grid so that the city ran off of orderly conduct.

  The outsider’s eyes speak through the outsider’s mouth. She stared at him. And no wonder when you’ve got half a face. It’s how I want it. I am the red writing hood who changes the meanings of things. To illustrate, she pulled her cloak’s hood up. It was indeed spattered with impossible amounts of blood. Probably to match her hair, he guessed.

  So one man’s order is another woman’s disorder. A convenient untruth.

  It’s easy for a man, when the artillery is yet distant, to sing the praises of war. I go to the war and I make it golden and prayer-worthy. I—