Heiresses of Russ 2014

by Melissa Scott

  Traffic has always been potentially two-way. They had to leave it so to operate and manipulate you. Now you tear that path into a wound, and what flies free is not their erasing of Krungthep, their unraveling of the dream-grid. It is their future laid bare. A hemorrhage of classified data and logistics, maps of where they’re strong and where they’re weak—the weapons they have, the weapons they don’t have; what survives of their country and what does not. There will be no war for them to win.

  They shut everything down: too late. That opening was all anyone needed, and at the other end there are waiting hands on machines which reel in and gather the data you’ve unspooled. Data that can be used to keep Krungthep alive. Data that can be sold, for that’s the game everyone must play, now.

  You imagine farang men yanking out cords, slamming down on circuit breakers with fists suddenly sweat-wet. You imagine them howling, animal panic.

  The casket opens; the liquids buoying you pour out in a briny flood and the puppet of your skin sags on knees that no longer work. They tear it out, to end your dreams of home and bring you death.

  There is light, and you laugh.

  •

  Of

  Selkies,

  Disco

  Balls,

  and

  Anna Plane

  Cat Rambo

  Here’s Anna Plane and I all through high school: a bushy-haired, white geek girl with a tattered fantasy paperback in the rear pocket of her jeans and me, Arturo, an equally geeky Hispanic theater boy.

  Here’s us a few years later, dividing time between jobs we hated and the college classes those jobs paid for. Still best friends (of a sort), still sharing trials and tribulations, still with an unspoken question between us mostly on Anna’s part, because I knew the answer.

  And here’s when I finally answered it, and broke Anna’s heart.

  •

  South Bend, Indiana, didn’t house many dance clubs, even in the height of the disco scene. Saturday Night Fever had made it more mainstream, but most of the citizenry still regarded disco with a touch of suspicion as a breeding den of sex-borne illness and drugs, even though it was already dying at that point in 1982.

  Not so Anna. Disco was everything she’d ever dreamed of, the glitter and glitz of an ersatz fairyland. She watched Dance Fever every weekend. She could tell you the latest steps, the top 40 hits, the name of every member of Abba.

  She hadn’t been that way in high school. She’d scorned the school dances, saying they were just a way for the popular kids to reinforce their social presence and make everyone feel like shit. But something about disco drew her.

  Even though we’d drifted away from our former closeness, divided by differences in class schedules and then, increasingly, in our interests, I did keep in touch. That’s how I found out what she’d been hiding.

  It was one of our television nights. She had a fancy laser disc machine, and a stack of every sci-fi or fantasy movie available in that format.

  We settled in with popcorn on the couch. She shared a shitty little apartment over on Colfax Avenue with a woman, Dionne, who worked at Waldenbooks but who I had yet to see read anything more than the back of a cereal box, and was usually over at her boyfriend’s.

  We sat around and shared our troubles in between throwing popcorn kernels at the screen during the cheesy moments. The restaurant she’d been working at had just closed down, so she was looking for a new job.

  Dionne had already informed her Waldenbooks wasn’t hiring, she said wryly.

  I shook out the ink-pungent folds of the South Bend Tribune and we went through the ads circling them, imagining new jobs, new existences for her.

  There really weren’t that many opportunities out there. Finally we gave up and lapsed into conversation, trailing off into “Remember when?” and asking “What happened to…” as though we’d been out of high school three decades rather than three years.

  One of the apartment’s oddities was that each of the two bathrooms was reached by going through its accompanying bedroom. I’d gotten used to it and so when need called, I wandered into Anna’s bedroom.

  So much of it was familiar to me: the old type drawer hanging on the wall to hold several scores of lead figurines, the bookcase devoted to gaming manuals, the Han Solo poster facing off with the black light poster of a woman turning into a tiger I’d gotten her. Stacks of paperbacks.

  When I noticed the closet door partly ajar, I wasn’t tempted to go look. What clothes could Anna have that I didn’t know? Hell, I’d been with her when she bought half of them. But something unexpected peeked out, sparkling like the Witch’s Slippers in the Wizard of Oz: a length of ruby sequins hanging where it had snagged on the doorknob, as though she’d put it away hurriedly, perhaps when I’d arrived.

  What was it?

  I drifted towards the door, stood for just a breath looking at that red material. I reached for the doorknob as gingerly as though petting a dog I was unsure of.

  When the door swung open, the disco dress blared forth, a slinky thing of red spangles and Lycra. Black hose were draped over the shoulder, lacy things with a line of crimson crystals along the back. On the closet floor sat two high-heeled strappy black Armani shoes.

  It stunned me. Was it a gift for someone? A costume?

  An entire outfit meant it could only be for her.

  I hadn’t realized she loved it that much. I’d thought she was content to watch dancers on television, not that she pictured herself there, the dancing queen, in the midst of it all.

  You don’t hide things from your best friend. I pulled it out, and went back into the other room, holding it in front of me like a flag.

  Anna turned almost as red as the dress. She said, “Why were you going through my things?”

  “It was hanging out! How could I not notice something that color?”

  She stood up, scattering popcorn kernels, and snatched it from my hand. “You had no right!” She marched into the bedroom, disregarding the popcorn crunching beneath her heavy steps, and replaced the dress.

  Returning, she stood in the doorway, folded her arms, and said, “It’s just in case.”

  “In case Donna Summer happens to lose her luggage?”

  Her chin came up, pointed at me. “In case I want to go out. I do go out sometimes, you know.”

  “Where?”

  “I went to Cinnabar’s, till it closed,” she said. “They had good dance music.”

  I knew how I could make things up to her for all my absences of late.

  “Go put it on,” I said. “We’re going dancing.”

  •

  Along the way, I explained the guidelines to her. “Look, Anna. You have to know, this place, it’s got great music and fabulous people and everything, but there’s something else. It’s a gay bar.”

  She blinked. “South Bend doesn’t have any gay bars.”

  I laughed at her. “You’d be surprised. Jeff showed me this one. Best place for dancing I know.”

  She didn’t ask the obvious question. I could see her burying it. If she didn’t ask, I didn’t have to tell her, did I?

  I loved Anna, but not in that way. There wasn’t any need to rub her nose in it.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Diana’s Hunt.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” I eyed her dress. “You’ll fit right in.”

  Her face was unhappy. “You think I look ridiculous.”

  “It’s just not what I expected.”

  She turned to stare into the night sliding past the car window. “Sometimes,” she said softly, maybe to me, maybe to herself, “you want to be someone else.”

  •

  From the outside, the place didn’t look like much. A gravel parking lot clustered with cars, a loopy-lettered red neon sign that simply said “Diana’s,” and a sign on the door, “21 and older only.” Anna trailed me, our footsteps crunching over the gravel.

  I wondered if I was making a mistake. I had
n’t shared this part of my life with her before. It didn’t feel right.

  But when I glanced over my shoulder, she was a flash of red in the parking lot lights, tall and beautiful.

  She held herself differently in that dress, no longer the too-tall slump-shouldered girl everyone assumed played basketball in high school. Now her shoulders were back, and despite her hesitation, anticipation gleamed in her eyes.

  I liked this new Anna. She seemed happier.

  So I swung open the door, and the music reached out and pulled us in.

  •

  The bar was named for its owner, Diana. I could tell Anna had never seen anyone like her before.

  Diana was short and swarthy, and of indeterminate age. She kept her hair butch short, wore jeans and T-shirts, with a men’s tuxedo jacket over that, sleeves rolled up to mid forearm to expose three silver bangles on her left wrist. She was muscular, broad-shouldered. She was an ex-roller derby queen; she’d skated under the name Morgan le Fleet.

  Her lover, Clementine, kept the music playing from a booth towards the back. Most of the light system was homemade or scavenged theater lighting, but one piece shouted the bar’s intent the minute you walked in. Suspended from the metal rafters some twenty high above hung a great mirror ball, at least four feet in diameter. It was positioned over the booth, casting a cloud of falling, glittering light around Clementine.

  She was dark-haired like Diana, but milk pale. Her hair fell to her shoulders, sleek as a seal’s pelt, framing a narrow face. She was beautiful but intense. She had a way of looking at you as though she expected, maybe even demanded something. You had the feeling she was on the verge of scorning you for failing to live up to that demand.

  When we came in, she was playing Alicia Bridges, demanding that we celebrate the nightlife. The sapphire lights shining on the disco ball drew purple sparkles from Anna’s dress as she stepped up beside me.

  I heard her take a breath as it hit her. From the name I’d expected something very different, say, classical Greek to the core, the first time I’d come, with Jeff in a pack of other theater people. Instead, an amazing assemblage of souvenirs of other times, other places covered the walls, things Diana had found or been given. A three-foot tall statue of the Virgin Mary hung over an enormous silver guitar while next to it were a pair of gilded roller skates. A spear-gun was mounted with two bright blue flippers behind it.

  There were spotlights, a stuffed giraffe head, pink flamingos, Luchador masks, clown faces, and a Civil War era sword, with dusty tassels hanging from its stock. Christmas lights everywhere glittering off the faces of the rhinestone covered ukulele and the matador’s suit and a huge plastic mosquito that Diana joked was from her hometown in Upper Peninsula Michigan, which someone had glued a fake moustache on.

  The air was full of cigarette smoke, and underfoot the floor sucked at our steps, sticky with the spills from sugary mixed drinks.

  I’d worried unnecessarily. Anna, at least the new Anna, wearing unfamiliar clothing, fit right in. We’ve never done anything harder than the occasional joint or whiffed—or so I thought—but when we got separated, I saw her near the bathroom door, doing a line of coke someone had offered.

  There were plenty of people making out on the dance floor or in darker corners, but the Hunt wasn’t about sex. It was about being there, about feeling the thump of the four-on-the-floor beat going through you, shaking you down to your bones, rearranging your atoms.

  It was about being part of the glittering crowd, feeling tribe members all around you, caught up by the music, moving any way they could. Mostly men on the dance floor, but the women danced too. Here, everyone was just another body jostling close to yours.

  And when Sister Sledge came on, and “We are family” began, Anna was there, singing and waving her arms with the rest of us.

  I relaxed. She belonged.

  It mattered to me because the Hunt was one of the happiest places I knew. A place where you could forget all your troubles, and live in the moment. Where all you had to worry about was keeping time with the music. We knew disco was dying but none of us were going to give it up anytime soon.

  •

  My happiness that Anna fit in didn’t mean I was thrilled when Diana offered Anna a job there, though. They’d been talking at the bar, which was busy and shorthanded. By the end of the night Anna was there behind it, shoulder to shoulder with Diana, serving drinks.

  Diana wasn’t flirting with her, of course. I never saw her have eyes for anyone but Clementine.

  I can’t say the same for Clementine. Diana and Clementine were inseparable, but you never got the impression Clementine was particularly happy about it. It was an odd match. She stayed in her booth spinning records. Diana waited on her personally, bringing her drinks throughout the evening.

  I never saw Clementine thank her.

  When the evening started to die down, I stayed and helped clean up afterward, since Anna had driven. Diana slipped me twenty bucks for my help, which was nice.

  But it was even nicer to see Anna happier. Sure, I felt a little jealous. The Hunt had been mine, and here she was taking it over. But that thought made me feel mean and dog in the manger-ish.

  I could let her have the Hunt, after all. Maybe she needed it more than I did.

  When we left the club, it was close to two in the morning, one of those hot Indiana summer nights, where the air feels like the cicada buzz is stitching the heat to your skin. The parking lot was almost empty.

  That is, except for the three women on motorcycles.

  They were in the parking lot, watching the bar. They didn’t even really look at us as we went past, which was odd, because everyone at the Hunt was always friendly.

  I didn’t think much about it at the time, only noticed them because of the big rumbling Harleys they drove. Their black gas tanks were painted with an odd Celtic knot work design.

  As I got into Anna’s car, the leader looked at me. She looked enough like Clementine to be her sister.

  •

  After that I didn’t go to the Hunt so much. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Anna. In the process of uncovering her red dress secret, I’d edged a little too close to one of my own.

  In 1982, in Indiana, you didn’t talk about certain things. I’d seen the word “homophobia” for the first time in a New York Times article, but I knew what it was already. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Anna. But I’d kept the secret to myself for so long that I didn’t know how to say it anymore.

  I kept telling myself that she must know. I’d taken her to a gay bar, for God’s sakes.

  She said, on one of our television nights, “You never come down to see me at work.”

  “I’ve been busy,” I said.

  She gave me a look that said, plain as day, I know you’re bullshitting me but I won’t push.

  I decided to distract her. I edged closer to her on the couch. I said, “Do you know what I’m really in the mood for?”

  I regretted it as soon as I said it, but I could already see what she was hoping for in her eyes.

  I pulled back, just a touch, and said, “I’m really in the mood to read a really good science fiction book. Will you lend me a couple to take home?”

  I felt like such a shit.

  •

  So guilt drove me down to the bar, a couple of evenings later. I sat there and chatted with her, listening to “Kung Fu Fighting” and “Do You Think I’m Sexy,” abandoning my stool every once in a while to go dance. She was happy I was there. I could see that in her eyes.

  And she seemed to be getting along fine with Diana and Clementine. When I mentioned a new song I’d heard, she got Clementine to play it for me.

  Every once in a while I’d see some woman flirt with her. Anna was surprisingly adept at handling that, friendly but professional, without making them feel rejected.

  She’d never had good luck with men. I wondered if she was tempted to try something different. She never said anything about it to me
.

  Of course she wouldn’t.

  •

  Summer wound down, and we entered heat-mad August, days of sweat and sunshine so hot you didn’t really want to move. When evening started falling and the air cooled off a little, your energy would return.

  One way to burn some of that off was to drive up to the Michigan dunes, build a fire, and get drunk on the beach. I went up one evening with Anna, and a bunch of other high school friends. I didn’t particularly like them or want to hang around with them; but Anna made me promise to come.

  It was what I had expected: a lot of beer and a couple of bottles of Jaeger getting passed around. We knew a spot that was technically private property, but the owners of the house far above were rarely there to disturb us.

  We sat on the soft sand around a fire made from the wood we’d brought and I watched the stars far out over the lake, wondering when I could gracefully excuse myself and slip away.

  That was why I was the first person to see something out in the water, coming towards our fire. Several somethings, leaving long dark vees as they swam.

  At first I thought they were fish, or seals, or something stranger. Not people. But as the heads came up out of the water, I realized they were human. Women, three of them.

  As they came closer yet, I recognized the women who had been on the motorcycles. I would have leaned over to say something to Anna about it, but she was on the other side of the fire.

  Late night beach campfires have their own rules. So we just nodded to the women when they came up, moved over to make room for them, passed out beers.

  They didn’t introduce themselves to the group, but I saw one talking to Anna.

  After it all broke up, I walked with her to the cars. I said, “Who was that woman and what was she talking to you about?”

  She laughed. “All sorts of crazy things. We got to talking about fantasy books, and she asked what if all of that was real?”

  “What if it was?”

  “I wish. That’d be something wonderful. To learn there was actual magic in the world.”