by Paula Guran
Lou shrugged. “Who knows. Probably in a Foxville chopshop having their serial numbers changed. Jilly, you’ve got to get Zinc to tell us who he was working with. Christ, they took off, leaving him to hold the bag. He doesn’t owe them a thing now.”
Jilly shook her head slowly. “This doesn’t make any sense. Zinc’s not the criminal kind.”
“I’ll tell you what doesn’t make any sense,” Lou said. “The kid himself. He’s heading straight for the looney bin with all his talk about Elvis clones and Venusian thought machines and feral-fuc—” He glanced at Sue and covered up the profanity with a cough. “Feral bicycles leading the domesticated ones away.”
“He said that?”
Lou nodded. “That’s why he was clipping the locks—to set the bikes free so that they could follow their, and I quote, ‘spiritual leader, home to the place of mystery.’ ”
“That’s a new one,” Jilly said.
“You’re having me on—right?” Lou said. “That’s all you can say? It’s a new one? The Elvis clones are old hat now? Christ on a comet. Would you give me a break? Just get the kid to roll over and I’ll make sure things go easy for him.”
“Christ on a comet?” Sue repeated softly.
“C’mon, Lou,” Jilly said. “How can I make Zinc tell you something he doesn’t know? Maybe he found those wire cutters on the street—just before the patrol car came. For all we know he could—”
“He said he cut the locks.”
The air went out of Jilly. “Right,” she said. She slouched in her chair. “I forgot you’d said that.”
“Maybe the bikes really did just go off on their own,” Sue said.
Lou gave her a weary look, but Jilly sat up straighter. “I wonder,” she began.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sue said. “I was only joking.”
“I know you were,” Jilly said. “But I’ve seen enough odd things in this world that I won’t say anything’s impossible anymore.”
“The police department doesn’t see things quite the same way,” Lou told Jilly. The dryness of his tone wasn’t lost on her.
“I know.”
“I want these bike thieves, Jilly.”
“Are you arresting Zinc?”
Lou shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hold him on except for circumstantial evidence.”
“I thought you said he admitted to cutting the locks,” Sue said.
Jilly shot her a quick fierce look that plainly said, don’t make waves when he’s giving us what we came for.
Lou nodded. “Yeah. He admitted to that. He also admitted to knowing a hobo who was really a spy from Pluto. Asked why the patrolmen had traded in their white Vegas suits for uniforms and wanted to hear them sing ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ For next of kin he put down Bigfoot.”
“Gigantopithecus blacki,” Jilly said.
Lou looked at her. “What?”
“Some guy at Washington State University’s given Bigfoot a Latin name now. Giganto—”
Lou cut her off. “That’s what I thought you said.” He turned back to Sue.
“So you see, his admitting to cutting the locks isn’t really going to amount to much. Not when a lawyer with half a brain can get him off without even having to work up a sweat.”
“Does that mean he’s free to go then?” Jilly asked.
Lou nodded. “Yeah. He can go. But keep him out of trouble, Jilly. He’s in here again, and I’m sending him straight to the Zeb for psychiatric testing. And try to convince him to come clean on this—okay? It’s not just for me, it’s for him too. We break this case and find out he’s involved, nobody’s going to go easy on him. We don’t give out rainchecks.”
“Not even for dinner?” Jilly asked brightly, happy now that she knew Zinc was getting out.
“What do you mean?”
Jilly grabbed a pencil and paper from his desk and scrawled “Jilly Coppercorn owes Hotshot Lou one dinner, restaurant of her choice,” and passed it over to him.
“I think they call this a bribe,” he said.
“I call it keeping in touch with your friends,” Jilly replied and gave him a big grin.
Lou glanced at Sue and rolled his eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m the sane one here.”
“You wish,” Jilly told her.
Lou heaved himself to his feet with exaggerated weariness. “C’mon, let’s get your friend out of here before he decides to sue us because we don’t have our coffee flown in from the Twilight Zone,” he said as he led the way down to the holding cells.
Zinc had the look of a street kid about two days away from a good meal. His jeans, T-shirt, and cotton jacket were ragged, but clean; his hair had the look of a badly mowed lawn, with tufts standing up here and there like exclamation points. The pupils of his dark brown eyes seemed too large for someone who never did drugs. He was seventeen, but acted half his age.
The only home he had was a squat in Upper Foxville that he shared with a couple of performance artists, so that was where Jilly and Sue took him in Sue’s Mazda. The living space he shared with the artists was on the upper story of a deserted tenement where someone had put together a makeshift loft by the simple method of removing all the walls, leaving a large empty area cluttered only by support pillars and the squatters’ belongings.
Lucia and Ursula were there when they arrived, practicing one of their pieces to the accompaniment of speakers pumping out a mixture of electronic music and the sound of breaking glass at a barely audible volume. Lucia was wrapped in plastic and lying on the floor, her black hair spread out in an arc around her head. Every few moments one of her limbs would twitch, the plastic wrap stretching tight against her skin with the movement. Ursula crouched beside the blaster, chanting a poem that consisted only of the line, “There are no patterns.” She’d shaved her head since the last time Jilly had seen her.
“What am I doing here?” Sue asked softly. She made no effort to keep the look of astonishment from her features.
“Seeing how the other half lives,” Jilly said as she led the way across the loft to where Zinc’s junkyard of belongings took up a good third of the available space.
“But just look at this stuff,” Sue said. “And how did he get that in here?” She pointed to a Volkswagen bug that was sitting up on blocks, missing only its wheels and front hood. Scattered all around it was a hodgepodge of metal scraps, old furniture, boxes filled with wiring and God only knew what.
“Piece by piece,” Jilly told her.
“And then he assembled it here?”
Jilly nodded.
“Okay. I’ll bite. Why?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
Jilly grinned as Sue quickly shook her head. The entire trip from the precinct station, Zinc had carefully explained his theory of the world to her, how the planet earth was actually an asylum for insane aliens, and that was why nothing made sense.
Zinc followed the pair of them across the room, stopping only long enough to greet his squat-mates. “Hi, Luce. Hi, Urse.”
Lucia never looked at him.
“There are no patterns,” Ursula said.
Zinc nodded thoughtfully.
“Maybe there’s a pattern in that,” Sue offered.
“Don’t start,” Jilly said. She turned to Zinc. “Are you going to be all right?”
“You should’ve seen them go, Jill,” Zinc said. “All shiny and wet, just whizzing down the street, heading for the hills.”
“I’m sure it was really something, but you’ve got to promise me to stay off the streets for a while. Will you do that, Zinc? At least until they catch this gang of bike thieves?”
“But there weren’t any thieves. It’s like I told Elvis Two, they left on their own.”
Sue gave him an odd look. “Elvis too?”
“Don’t ask,” Jilly said. She touched Zinc’s arm. “Just stay in for a while—okay? Let the bikes take off on their own.”
“But I like to watch them go.”
“Do it as a favor to me, would you?”
“I’ll try.”
Jilly gave him a quick smile. “Thanks. Is there anything you need? Do you need money for some food?”
Zinc shook his head. Jilly gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and tousled the exclamation point hair tufts sticking up from his head.
“I’ll drop by to see you tomorrow, then—okay?” At his nod, Jilly started back across the room. “C’mon, Sue,” she said when her companion paused beside the speaker where Ursula was still chanting.
“So what about this stock market stuff?” she asked the poet.
“There are no patterns,” Ursula said.
“That’s what I thought,” Sue said, but then Jilly was tugging her arm.
“Couldn’t resist, could you?” Jilly said.
Sue just grinned.
“Why do you humor him?” Sue asked when she pulled up in front of Jilly’s loft.
“What makes you think I am?”
“I’m being serious, Jilly.”
“So am I. He believes in what he’s talking about. That’s good enough for me.”
“But all this stuff he goes on about . . . Elvis clones and insane aliens—”
“Don’t forget animated bicycles.”
Sue gave Jilly a pained look. “I’m not. That’s just what I mean—it’s all so crazy.
“What if it’s not?”
Sue shook her head. “I can’t buy it.”
“It’s not hurting anybody.” Jilly leaned over and gave Sue a quick kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run. Thanks for everything.”
“Maybe it’s hurting him,” Sue said as Jilly opened the door to get out. “Maybe it’s closing the door on any chance he has of living a normal life. You know—opportunity comes knocking, but there’s nobody home? He’s not just eccentric, Jilly. He’s crazy.”
Jilly sighed. “His mother was a hooker, Sue. The reason he’s a little flaky is her pimp threw him down two flights of stairs when he was six years old—not because Zinc did anything, or because his mother didn’t trick enough johns that night, but just because the creep felt like doing it. That’s what normal was for Zinc. He’s happy now—a lot happier than when Social Services tried to put him in a foster home where they only wanted him for the support check they got once a month for taking him in. And a lot happier than he’d be in the Zeb, all doped up or sitting around in a padded cell whenever he tried to tell people about the things he sees.
“He’s got his own life now. It’s not much—not by your standards, maybe not even by mine, but it’s his and I don’t want anybody to take it away from him.”
“But—“
“I know you mean well,” Jilly said, “but things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to. Nobody’s got time for a kid like Zinc in Social Services. There he’s just a statistic that they shuffle around with all the rest of their files and red tape. Out here on the street, we’ve got a system that works. We take care of our own. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Cat Lady, sleeping in an alleyway with a half-dozen mangy toms, or Rude Ruthie, haranguing the commuters on the subway, we take care of each other.”
“Utopia,” Sue said.
A corner of Jilly’s mouth twitched with the shadow of a humorless smile.
“Yeah. I know. We’ve got a high asshole quotient, but what can you do? You try to get by—that’s all. You just try to get by.”
“I wish I could understand it better,” Sue said.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re good people, but this just isn’t your world. You can visit, but you wouldn’t want to live in it, Sue.”
“I guess.”
Jilly started to add something more, but then just smiled encouragingly and got out of the car.
“See you Friday?” she asked, leaning in the door.
Sue nodded.
Jilly stood on the pavement and watched the Mazda until it turned the corner and its rear lights were lost from view, then she went upstairs to her apartment. The big room seemed too quiet and she felt too wound up to sleep, so she put a cassette in the tape player—Lynn Harrell playing a Schumann concerto—and started to prepare a new canvas to work on in the morning when the light would be better.
2
It was raining again, a soft drizzle that put a glistening sheen on the streets and lampposts, on porch handrails and street signs. Zinc stood in the shadows that had gathered in the mouth of an alleyway, his new pair of wire cutters a comfortable weight in his hand. His eyes sparked with reflected lights. His hair was damp against his scalp. He licked his lips, tasting mountain heights and distant forests within the drizzle’s slightly metallic tang.
Jilly knew a lot about things that were, he thought, and things that might be, and she always meant well, but there was one thing she just couldn’t get right. You didn’t make art by capturing an image on paper, or canvas, or in stone. You didn’t make it by writing down stories and poems. Music and dance came closest to what real art was—but only so long as you didn’t try to record or film it. Musical notation was only so much dead ink on paper. Choreography was planning, not art.
You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.
Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.
That’s what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn’t neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?
To be free.
He bent down and picked up a stone, smiling at the satisfying crack it made when it broke the glass protection of the streetlight, his grin widening as the light inside flickered, then died.
It was part of the secret now, part of the voices that spoke in the night sky.
Free.
Still smiling, he set out across the street to where a bicycle was chained to the railing of a porch.
“Let me tell you about art,” he said to it as he mounted the stairs.
Psycho Puppies were playing at the YoMan on Gracie Street near the corner of Landis Avenue that Friday night. They weren’t anywhere near as punkish as their name implied. If they had been, Jilly would never have been able to get Sue out to see them.
“I don’t care if they damage themselves,” she’d told Jilly the one and only time she’d gone out to one of the punk clubs further west on Gracie, “but I refuse to pay good money just to have someone spit at me and do their best to rupture my eardrums.”
The Puppies were positively tame compared to how that punk band had been. Their music was loud, but melodic, and while there was an undercurrent of social conscience to their lyrics, you could dance to them as well. Jilly couldn’t help but smile to see Sue stepping it up to a chorus of, “You can take my job, but you can’t take me, ain’t nobody gonna steal my dignity.” The crowd was an even mix of slumming uptowners, Crowsea artists, and the neighborhood kids from surrounding Foxville. Jilly and Sue danced with each other, not from lack of offers, but because they didn’t want to feel obligated to any guy that night. Too many men felt that one dance entitled them to ownership—for the night, at least, if not forever—and neither of them felt like going through the ritual repartee that the whole business required.
Sue was on the right side of a bad relationship at the moment, while Jilly was simply eschewing relationships on general principle these days. Relationships required changes, and she wasn’t ready for changes in her life just now. And besides, all the men she’d ever cared for were already taken and she didn’t think it likely that she’d run into her own particular Prince Charming in a Foxville nightclub.
“I like this band,” Sue confided to her when they took a break to finish the beers they’d ordered at the beginning of the set.
Jilly nodded, but she didn’t have anything to say. A glance acros
s the room caught a glimpse of a head with hair enough like Zinc’s badly mowed lawn scalp to remind her that he hadn’t been home when she’d dropped by his place on the way to the club tonight.
Don’t be out setting bicycles free, Zinc, she thought.
“Hey, Tomas. Check this out.”
There were two of them, one Anglo, one Hispanic, neither of them much more than a year or so older than Zinc. They both wore leather jackets and jeans, dark hair greased back in ducktails. The drizzle put a sheen on their jackets and hair. The Hispanic moved closer to see what his companion was pointing out.
Zinc had melted into the shadows at their approach. The streetlights that he had yet to free whispered, careful, careful, as they wrapped him in darkness, their electric light illuminating the pair on the street.
“Well, shit,” the Hispanic said. “Somebody’s doing our work for us.” As he picked up the lock that Zinc had just snipped, the chain holding the bike to the railing fell to the pavement with a clatter. Both teenagers froze, one checking out one end of the street, his companion the other.
“ ’Scool,” the Anglo said. “Nobody here but you, me, and your cooties.”
“Chew on a big one.”
“I don’t do myself, puto.”
“That’s ’cos it’s too small to find.”
The pair of them laughed—a quick nervous sound that belied their bravado-then the Anglo wheeled the bike away from the railing.
“Hey, Bobby-o,” the Hispanic said. “Got another one over here.”
“Well, what’re you waiting for, man? Wheel her down to the van.”
They were setting bicycles free, Zinc realized—just like he was. He’d gotten almost all the way down the block, painstakingly snipping the shackle of each lock, before the pair had arrived.
Careful, careful, the streetlights were still whispering, but Zinc was already moving out of the shadows.
“Hi, guys,” he said.
The teenagers froze, then the Anglo’s gaze took in the wire cutters in Zinc’s hand.
“Well, well,” he said. “What’ve we got here? What’re you doing on the night side of the street, kid?”
Before Zinc could reply, the sound of a siren cut the air. A lone siren, approaching fast.