by Rebecca Ore
“The sexual engineer.” Partridge, her eyes sly, slid down into the bed. Her hips wiggled at Maude. Maude felt naked. Partridge said, “If you have any feeling other than lust for him, tell him to go back to Berkeley. He ought to get away while he can.”
“I’ve told him he can’t become a witch, but he doesn’t believe me. He wants to learn magic. Luke told him men could learn, but women had to be born to it.”
“Maybe you could put him away in that research institute old Follette carries around in the back of his truck. He’d be safe there.”
“As Follette’s pet? Follette’s dying.”
“Yeah, Follette’s entity doesn’t want him anymore,” Partridge said. “He’s not the worst of them, old Follette.”
“You sound better.”
“You want to hear me sounding better so you won’t feel guilty sneaking off to see your lover.”
Maude realized then that Partridge could live for many years, each one getting more difficult. Partridge looked up and said, “Maude, don’t wish me dead. I don’t know where I’d go.”
Maude had always hoped that the deadjust dissolved, though posthumous justice intrigued her when she wasn’t feeling particularly guilty herself. “I’ll be back.”
Outside, the little MiniCooper looked battered. Maude opened the hood—bonnet for this car, she thought—and checked the oil, rubbing it between her fingers. It felt faintly gritty. She decided to ask Esther’s mechanic to change it, then shut the hood and got in the car. Since Doug came, she hadn’t driven her car often. She turned the key in the ignition. The motor sounded vaguely different, she thought, but perhaps the mechanic could check that, too.
Esther’s trailer looked better. She’d just had a prefab redwood porch attached to the whole front of the trailer. Maude suspected she was seeing in this new addition the money Esther earned from her family. Empty flower pots of all sizes sat around the edge of the porch. In summer, plants would hang from the porch eaves and grow up from the floor—green stalactites and stalagmites. Esther came out and said, “I’ll half about have my own brush arbor in the summer.”
“It’d look like a green cave.”
“I’d always wanted a good porch. You want to come in?”
“I’m rather in a hurry to get down to North Carolina. And I’d like to get your mechanic to change my oil if he has time.”
“Yeah, you need to see about Douglas.”
“I tried to save the soul of the boy John shot.”
“He was either saved or not, way before you came along.”
“His people wanted me to try.”
“It’s a trick, the business of souls captured by humans.”
Maude bowed her head, not wanting to argue with her grandmother’s nurse. Esther added, “Well, let me get my coat then, and we can go pick up my car.”
Maude wondered if Esther could fit in the MiniCooper, but she did, barely. As Esther pointed out the roads, Maude turned four turns off the highway to a cinderblock building surrounded by wrecks and junkers. Despite the ugliness, the garage felt as safe as the hospital, no magic jangling the air. She followed Esther into the building. A black man and a white man cranked on a winch to lift an engine out of a 1967 Corvette. Which one’s boss? Maude wondered.
“Turner and Roach met in ’Nam fixing jeeps,” Esther said. “Turner’s daddy had some property here.”
“Which one’s Turner?” Maude asked, not sure whether Turner and Roach were first names, last names, or nicknames.
“Turner’s the black man,” Esther said. “Roach comes from Ireland somewhere on his granddad’s side.”
Maude looked around and saw a small Apple computer glowing in one corner of the shop, screen filled with figures. She wondered how these two country mechanics came to keep their accounts on a computer. When she looked back at the Corvette, the men were still busy. The two women waited until the men had the engine at a convenient stopping place, then the black man turned and said, “We had to work on you car valves, Esther. Something been burning them.”
Maude said, “Would you have enough time to change the oil in my car? I’ve got to go down to North Carolina today to see a friend in the hospital.”
The two men looked at each other, then Roach nodded. He came out with her and popped the hood of the Cooper, then checked the oil, feeling it with his fingers. “Had the compression checked lately?”
“No.”
Roach didn’t say anything, but closed the hood and opened the garage door over one of the grease pits. He came back and said, “Key?”
Maude handed him the key and he drove the car over the grease pit. As Roach began working beneath the car, Esther came from paying Turner and said, “I best get to your grannie.”
“Sure. Thanks for staying last night.”
Esther said, “What happens happens.” She went to her car, a late model small Plymouth. Maude watched Esther drive off and thought about how fragile cars were.
After the oil change, Roach tested the compression. “You plan to junk it when the engine gets worse?”
“I’d like to keep it.”
“We could rebuild it for you.”
Maude wondered if Partridge would give her the money for the rebuild. “How much would it cost me?”
“Say $500, thereabouts.”
“Soon,” Maude said.
The mechanic poured borax over his hands and went to the sink to wash them. He said to Turner, “Check the computer.”
Turner walked over to the screen. “It’s okay.”
Roach said, “We maybe could rebuild for less. You need to think about it.”
“What’s on the computer screen?”
The black mechanic smiled and nodded to his white partner. Roach said, “Witch alarm, among other things.”
“I don’t practice.”
Turner said, “Don’t think you’d have Miz Gilliculty for a nurse if you did.”
Maude felt embarrassed that she didn’t know Esther’s last name. “Witchcraft takes from reality.”
“That it does,” Roach said. “And sometimes it’s just a delusion.”
Maude took the highway out toward the North Carolina line. She found herself in fog and turned around going toward Taylorsville. She got back on the road to the North Carolina line and found herself headed into Kobold.
Maude got back on the highway and her joints began to ache. The best way, she decided, is to sneak out.
Maude drove to the edge of the allochthon, her car skipping. Her head began to ache. She turned back, thinking to leave by a side road. She found herself stopped, off to the side, the North Carolina road sign visible ten feet away. She stepped out of the car, feeling nauseous.
Why? Why not? She thought she’d stopped the car pointed south, but when she looked at it, the windshield reflected the mountains to the northwest. Can I even walk across? She began to walk to the line. Zeno’s paradox attacked her, each step increasing the half distances to infinity.
Then something beat her. She whirled, circled by invisible blows. The black grandmothers hunted John. John hunted Doug. She’d gotten in the way. Each blow hit realizations into her.
You can’t leave until it’s resolved. The thought inserted itself like a knife. The brain has no nerves, Maude tried to tell it. But the mind can hurt, the next thought told her.
Maude stumbled to the welcome to north Carolina sign and leaned her back against it, crying. I don’t want this to be real She imagined herself working for the two mechanics in their logic-ordered shop, the witch telltale on the computer. She didn’t even know how the program worked.
Her car was waiting for her. She couldn’t remember how she’d parked it. The mountains shone in her windscreen. They looked like Wales. They looked like Africa. They were the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Her nerves burned. She said, “Stop. I give up.”
When she passed a creek, she stopped the car on the other side of the bridge and looked down into the water. She saw a school of rusty-sided su
ckers, but they weren’t rusty now in late fall, out of breeding season. Trapped here, she thought, like an endemic fish.
“I couldn’t get out,” Maude told Doug after Esther had brought him back from North Carolina.
“Why not?” He walked in on crutches with Esther behind him.
“Magic.”
“And you wouldn’t fight it with your own magic.” Doug lowered himself into a chair and swung his crutches to the side. “It’s awfully lonely in a hospital without visitors.” Esther went in to Partridge. Maude said, “I tried to get away, but I won’t become a witch just to keep you from being lonely.”
“You’re so superciliously scrupulous. You’d lie to welfare, fuck men you picked up in bars, but you won’t work magic. I don’t understand. It’s like you want to be a loser.” Maude said, “Magic damages the world.”
“I may be permanently crippled because you won’t work magic or tell me how to work it myself.”
“You can’t work it. You must put yourself under the protection of someone who can fight it.”
“I must?”
“Or go back to Berkeley. I’ll go with you.”
Doug sat in the chair for a while, then said, “You could protect me, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t want to be a witch.”
“Not even for me?”
Maude wondered if some of her kin became witches because of the weak people who needed someone strong to protect them. A pickup and car crashed on the outskirts of Atlanta. A child cried by a black pond inside a map. Doug with his lame foot stared at her. “Doug, if you work in engineering, computers, create a common order…”
“I could work for Follette.”
“Yes, you’d be safe for a while. But it’s only temporary. Follette’s entity set cancer in him because it was bored.”
“Luke said men could learn magic.”
And I’m just a woman he met in a Berkeley singles bar. “You believe Luke?” I’m a woman who fucked and fucked up in Berkeley. But Maude realized after she spoke that Doug’s tone had been questioning. Her question drove him toward Luke.
“Do you know for a fact Luke’s lying? If you hadn’t tried to steal back the black kid’s soul, I wouldn’t have been shot. Yes, I believe Luke. You’re not helping me.”
“John’s playing with your fear of guns.”
“So what happens next?”
Maude realized her witch kin were also playing with Doug’s curiosity. “Magic beatings, magic battles. I can’t escape them, but you could.” Perhaps he wasn’t so sure of what Luke promised. “But I… magic unravels the real world.” Perhaps he’s right and I am too scrupulous.
Doug sat silently in the chair, swaying slightly as his heart beat. Maude felt the air darken, something trying to cloud her mind. Doug went slack-jawed. Maude saw the skull under his flesh—the hallucination of a moment, or real, she didn’t know. He had steel bones in his foot.
Then, in her mind’s eye, a bull charged, dilemma’s horns gleaming. If I work magic, he lives. Without my magic, he dies to make magic—Luke’s magic—stronger.
15
* * *
DOOMED TO IT
As the earth turned to winter, Partridge began dying in earnest. Her heart and arteries went flabby while she watched from her bed as Esther guided quilt pieces through the Singer. “Maude, I’m too cold,” Partridge said. She turned in the bed. Her fingers plucked at the covers. She stared at them and jerked them up.
“Soon, you have a nice quilt to keep you warm,” Esther said.
“It’s my death quilt, bitch.”
“I’m not superstitious.”
Partridge said, “I wasn’t plucking the covers the way people do before they die. I was trying to get warm.”
Maude wondered if keeping faith with general reality paid off enough to justify old age.
As December ended, Doug began looking for work. He spent a lot of time talking to people at Follette’s research institute. Maude felt doomed to wait.
Follette was dying, too, as he went between Bracken County, Charlottesville, and Richmond. He looked thinner and thinner, a man thrown to the Crab by his gods.
Doug said of Follette, “He’s gotten some amazing things for this county. I’m just not sure the county knows what to do with them.” He still limped, but was sure he’d be back to normal soon. If not, he’d have more surgery.
“I hate waiting,” Maude said. She wasn’t sure she’d been honest when she said that. She hated waiting for the conclusion. But if she could push the conclusion off into the indefinite future, perhaps that was better than getting to Partridge’s death.
While Maude wondered what she really wanted, time went so slowly she could watch a snowflake descending for hours. As she watched one bunch of ice fibers whirling slowly down, Maude wonder how much of a witch she could be.
Esther touched her on the shoulder and the snowflake’s crystals broke on the walk. Maude thought, I’m a witch already, hut not getting through time isn’t the right solution. Esther said, “Your grannie’s asking for you.”
Maude went in to her grandmother’s room. The quilt top lay by the sewing machine. Maude picked it up and saw that it was almost completely pieced, just lacking the row of squares along the side. Partridge said, “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. If you won’t wash my body, then you can at least sit to that work.”
“I feel like all my life I’ve been waiting for something, holding time.”
“Don’t say that.”
Maude felt the moment hold around them.
Partridge said, “Stones live in different time than we do. But I don’t consider becoming a stone.”
Maude felt the allochthon under her, helpless under centuries of rain, chunks and grains headed for the Atlantic, the allochthon itself unable to keep the ocean from opening. Allochthon trapped by normal faults, by normalcy. “The stone under us is conscious in its own way.”
“Oh, Maude, can’t you do something better? Delaying, always delaying what you’re going to do with your life.” Partridge meant something better than being on welfare or pulling them all to stone time.
Maude said, “You could live forever.”
“Ain’t nobody that amusing to the entities.”
Maude remembered the cocks, the ones who fought on slowly, crippled but game, but lacking the flash to hold the main arena, left in the side pits to fight to the end. She remembered Follette’s face after his bird lost.
“I’m linked with time,” Maude said.
“Chronos always eats his children.”
“Or maybe I’m not linked with time, someone else is, and I’m deluded into thinking it’s me,” Maude said.
“You want to keep your innocence?” Partridge asked. “Strange goal for a welfare cheat and fornicatrix.”
“I wasn’t responsible for anything.”
Partridge said, “Finish my quilt. You might ought do some work.”
Maude said, hating her flipness as she spoke, “After temp typing, waitressing, shoplifting, and a short gig sewing for a traveling minor rock band, getting on welfare in California seemed like a solid career move.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Partridge said. “I know witches from the inside.”
Maude remembered herself drifting across the country, a drink bottle abandoned half-full in Davenport, Iowa, going west on the Grey Rabbit with pregnant runaway dental technicians, semipro whores, hippie mothers traveling cheap, and a business major whose hair seemed to get shorter and clothes more pressed from ride start to ride end. Maude remembered the semi-whore’s marijuana, the feeling of total helplessness of being stoned incoherent in Buford, Wyoming, at three in the afternoon watching the local losers play endless pool. Had that been dope time or witch time running three p.m. in Buford for hours and hours?
“So you sift your memories, trying to see where you might have undone the chain that led your life to this moment,” Partridge said. “You can do that forever. But it doesn’t lead to the next moment
at all.”
“I… I don’t want you to die.”
“You don’t want to deal with doing something new after my dying.”
Maude tried to say that’s not true, but realized that being here for her grandmother had given her a role she hadn’t realized she’d missed until now. She wondered how much money Partridge would leave her, then felt guilty. “John’s really safe from those black people,” Maude said, almost asking.
“Depends on who they bring against him. Could be quite a witch fight. Why are you just sitting there? I don’t need to be watched every second.”
Maude turned to the sewing machine and began piecing the quilt. “Partridge?”
“You good enough to talk while you work?”
“Are you in pain?”
“Don’t try to break my nerve. Lula broke it once.”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t know whether it hurts worse later or not. If it eases, then I’m going in the right direction.”
Maude said, “I guess after you die, I’ll begin planning.” The Singer treadled smoothly, the needle a blur, the feed-dog teeth pulling the cloth in steps too tiny and fast to feel as individual motions.
Partridge said, “You’re not doing much. You could start planning now. Since we’ve got Esther here, you could go for your teaching certificate or try a trade.”
“Don’t you like Esther?”
“If I’ve got to have strange Christians around, then you need to do something more with yourself. Order seeds and trees and start a garden and an orchard. You best be planning now.”
“I don’t have any land. And it’s winter.”
“You’ll have two acres around the house when I’m dead.”
And that’s all, Maude realized. “I don’t know anything about gardening.”
“You might ought learn. Hate to think I died for the integrity of a world you refuse to fit into.”
“I thought I was doing good enough not to be a witch.”
“Are you sure you’re not practicing already?”
Maude remembered the slow snowflake just minutes before Esther touched her shoulder.