by Alex White
Officer Crutchfield folded his arms. “You do turn on a dime, don’t you?”
She looked at her feet before realizing it was an expression. It didn’t make sense, and it sounded dumb, so she didn’t ask for an explanation. “I just like laughing.”
“Why were you so tore up a minute ago?”
“I can’t go to my spot, Officer Crutchfield.”
“You know you can call me Burt, Loxley.”
“I know.”
He looked down the road ahead, but he didn’t see the ghost. She knew he wouldn’t. He nodded. “Okay. Why not? Someone say you can’t?”
“No. Someone will hurt me if I go that way.”
“Hurt you?”
“Yes. He’s right over there looking at me.” She pointed to the ghost, on the off chance Crutchfield would see.
He didn’t. “That’s just Mister Carver. Are you telling me Mister Carver threatened you?”
“No.”
“Good. Carver’s a good man.” Crutchfield sighed, resting a forearm on his pistol grip. “Can you tell me who did, then?”
She shook her head. “Don’t know his name, but he’s over there, by the light pole.”
The policeman looked straight at the spirit and nodded. “Okay, Loxley.”
“You can see him?”
His smile returned. “No, but I believe you can, young miss, and trading bells are about to ring.” He tipped his hat. “Let me know if there’s something I can do.”
She caught his arm as he turned to go. “Please take me around through the Bazaar. I can’t go by myself.”
The older man looked around, cleared his throat and leaned in closer. “You understand that it’s my job to keep things fair around here, right?” She could smell the coffee in his whisper. “It’s one thing when you set up outside the market, but it’s another thing to ask me to take you over there and set you up myself. What am I supposed to tell people? A lot of guys get here early just to pop up a tent or a sign.”
She looked over Crutchfield’s expectant face, then glanced at the ghost, who hadn’t moved an inch. “I could give you some broccoli or a bag of pot.”
He deflated and rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky you’re too crazy for me to call that a real bribery attempt. Come on, girl. Get your cart and I’ll take you around.”
She picked up and followed him down a side street. “But I’m not crazy.”
They wandered through alleyways and across busy roads for most of an hour. When they reached the north end of the Bazaar, the lights, sounds and bustle crushed Loxley under the weight of their chaos. A man shouted for fresh meat, a neon sign buzzed and blinked under the aluminum awning, twenty, no, twenty-six people shuffled back and forth through the intersection, their feet falling across the cobblestone cracks, a cowbell sounded out, a distant buzzsaw, the scent of grilling lamb, a weaver’s booth blossomed with every color, two men argued, a child stood by her mother, another cart rumbled through the thoroughfare with barrels of grain clump clump clump bumpa clump. As she drew closer, she felt panic rising in her throat, and she was unable to take another step. She dropped her cart and cupped her hands over her ears. A thousand disparate sounds became a gentle roar, not unlike the thrum of her window air conditioner in the summer. Like the pain of a fresh burn, her fear would not diminish, and she stamped her feet and shut her eyes, willing it away.
She felt Officer Crutchfield’s hand on her shoulder, and she let out a long breath. He said something, but she couldn’t hear with her hands over her ears.
Her lips trembled as she spoke, in spite of her wishes. “I can’t get across here, Officer. It’s too much. Just too much. I can’t.”
She heard a muffled reply.
“Please help me. Please don’t go.”
He wrapped an arm around her and pressed her head to his barrel chest. He smelled like soap and cigarettes. She pulled her hands away, feeling his calloused palm slide over her ear. The policeman’s heart thumped under her cheek, and she opened an eye to see him grabbing the cart handle with his free hand. He took an awkward step, moving the pair toward the maelstrom of activity ahead. She shook out her fingertips and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him tightly as they walked.
She felt the shade of the great aluminum snake on the back of her head. They were inside the market. She tried not to look up, and counted the cobblestones as she stepped over them. She put her toes right in the middle of the round blocks, settling into a pattern. It calmed her heart with each step that she hit her target. The chaos had started to fade when she nearly tripped the both of them.
“Goddamn it, Loxley,” grumbled Officer Crutchfield. “Stand up and walk straight.”
She did as she was told, even though it made her uncomfortable. She could not let him abandon her here. The Bazaar did not always have a way out, as many vendors would block the roads with their stalls. Her cart surely made maneuvering difficult; the policeman would have to find a wide walkway to the outside.
BE BRAVE, BABY, her mother told her that so many times. Her mother was brave. Officer Crutchfield was brave. They could walk through the Bazaar without the crackles. The mongers could sit in the miasma of noise and light all day, and they didn’t get scared. Loxley wasn’t born brave; she was born with a rabbit’s heart.
Sunlight spilled across her path as they found their way back outside. The wall of sound crumbled, and she felt the policeman’s grip on her head relax. She looked up and saw her spot – a stucco wall in front of an old warehouse. A set of stairs ran up to the front doors, and she could nestle into the corner to protect herself from the wind. She let out a delighted chuckle to be back in such familiar surroundings, and set about grabbing her shop materials from the back of the cart.
She spread a thick quilt over the cracked sidewalk and set up a folding chair before laying out her wares. Loxley took special pride in arraying her products from largest to smallest, then by color – most intense to least.
“Uh, Loxley,” said Officer Crutchfield.
“Yeah?” she asked, trying to decide which of her cucumbers was the most viridescent.
“Haven’t you got something to say? I went out of my way for you.”
She contemplated his meaning before snatching up a large, ripe stalk of broccoli and a small bag of marijuana. She turned to him, holding them both at eye level so he could make a good decision. “Which one?”
“Rather have a ‘Thank you, Officer.’”
“Thank you, Officer,” she said, and promptly got back to work.
“You’re just too much, girl,” he said to her back.
“Too much what?” she repeated, but when she turned to address him directly, she saw him wandering back into the Bazaar.
She shrugged and fell into her routine. Her normal customers came by, prodding through her goods. Sales were brisk, and all thoughts of Birdie and the ghost quickly faded from her mind.
Loxley fetched an old book on agriculture from the back of her cart – a Consortium manual they gave to their employees living on the Great Plains. She ran a hand over the cover; the paper had faded and crumpled along the edges, and the interior pages had turned a lovely shade of yellow. Orange block letters across the top of the cover read, A Primer in Modern Technique, with the Con’s logo underneath. She’d gotten it from Rick almost ten years ago, and through it, she’d learned to garden. He said he hated the Consortium and was going to throw it away, but she wanted it. When she asked him why, he’d told her about being a boy before the Consortium owned everything; she’d gotten too bored to keep listening. She opened the book and read for what seemed like the millionth time. When she got to her favorite page, she stopped.
A full bleed, black and white photo of cotton rows spread over the right hand page, and the left contained a schedule of fertilization. Wispy clouds hovered in the sky, and she could almost feel the autumn wind on her face. A combine rumbled through the background, and she saw a tiny black square that she felt certain was a farmhouse. She squinted a
t the halftone dots, as she always did, trying to make out a window or door. She wondered if anyone lived there, if one day she might live there, too. She glanced up at the surging Bazaar. Both places were full of life, but plants were so much cleaner than people, in spite of having sprung from dirt.
She sang to herself when no one was around, keeping a beat with the distant hammering of the Foundry. She had no words, just a wandering lilt that infected her feet. She’d memorized most of the tables in the book, but she tested her memory by reciting the top ten numbers without looking. She wasn’t good at the fertilizer table, but she had no idea what most of those chemicals were, anyway. They certainly hadn’t been made available to her. Some of the chemicals had asterisks, marking them as combustible, so she made an effort to memorize the dangerous ones. She raised worms in a compost pile, so she had what she needed for her own garden.
“What’s at the top of page thirty-three?” came a woman’s voice.
“Don’t know,” said Loxley, turning to page thirty-three. “Oh. The end of a paragraph about rotations: ‘... through dissimilarity between seasons, recouping lost soil nitrogen reserves.’”
“Ain’t exactly poetry.”
“Not supposed to be. It’s not a book of poetry.” She flipped back to her table and muttered the numbers to herself. She’d missed two. “Why’d you need to know what was at the top of the page?”
“You going to say hi to me, Loxley?”
She looked up to see Nora Vickers standing over her, hands on her hips, brown hair tied into a colorful bandana. Nora was about Loxley’s age, maybe a little older, and lived on her block in the seventh ring. She was a tall woman, possessed of many freckles and muscles, and nearly blotted out Loxley’s sunlight where she loomed.
Loxley felt a weight lift from her chest. “Hi!”
“Give us a hug, girl,” said Nora, and they embraced. “Now some sugar,” she said, and Loxley kissed her cheek. “There’s my green thumb. Business good?”
Loxley took her seat and put down her book. “I almost didn’t make it here today. There was a ghost.”
Nora frowned and cocked her head.
“He was in the way. I couldn’t get past,” said Loxley.
Nora nodded in the direction of the place where Loxley usually crossed the market. “What? Like over there?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
Nora’s face brightened. “We’ve all got to see the world somehow or another. If it’s real enough for you, that’s what’s important.”
“It’s true, whether you think I’m honest or not. They like me more than anyone else. Used to be the same with my mother.”
The tall woman carefully tiptoed over the produce, so as not to squish any of them. She wrapped an arm around Loxley and kissed the top of her head. “Of course they like you. You’re such a sweetheart.”
Loxley rested her head against Nora’s neck and let out a long breath. Her friend’s coat stunk of the plastics plant on the south end of town. The tall woman worked there most days from sun up to sundown.
Nora squeezed her shoulder and rubbed her arm. “I’d like you if I was a ghost.”
“Why’d you come home in the middle of the night last night? I thought your shift was over at eight.”
“You saw me coming home?”
“I had to pee, and I looked out and saw you coming home. It was two thirty-five.”
Nora’s posture reminded Loxley of a bird about to fly away. “I was having a drink with the foreman.”
“Must be a slow drinker.”
“He did take his time, yes. He likes to talk.”
“Did he talk about plastic?”
Nora swallowed. “It wasn’t interesting. Work stuff, darling.” She pulled out her wallet. “I’m going to need a bag of weed.”
They talked for another hour, about Birdie, about the weather and the greenhouse. Nora promised to come see it, and Loxley told her about all the repairs it needed. Several of the frames had cracked, and the weather shredded the bags over time. She was ashamed for anyone to see it. Then Nora promised she would steal a roll of plastic sheeting from the plant under the guise of taking it to the warehouse. They could replace all of the panels together. The tall woman rolled herself a joint with some of her purchase and offered a toke to Loxley, who declined.
Nora’s personality was a bright fire. Loxley could stare into her, feeling her skin growing hot to the point of discomfort, knowing she would feel safer if she backed away. Every time she wanted to end the conversation and retreat, a spate of flame would bring her gaze back. The tall woman would grow loud, then whisper and giggle. She’d gossip about naughty things, then talk about music or politics in the next sentence as though they were one subject.
People’s faces could be intimidating, their brows twitching this way and that – their mouths smiling even when their eyes didn’t. Trying to understand them could be so infuriating, but not Nora. Loxley looked her right in her large, brown eyes and listened intently, unable to stop herself from smiling.
A black car turned onto her street, pulling across the Bazaar to the complaints of nearby pedestrians – the Consortium automotive from before. The world around seemed to dim. Whoever was driving the car, they’d brought the ghost to her.
Ice water doused Loxley’s heart as she shot to her feet.
“What’s wrong?”
Nora stood and took her hand, and Loxley jerked it away. Her chest felt as though it would explode as her eyes darted back and forth. The dead man was coming, but did he see her yet? She couldn’t get to the cart and hope to get away. Her produce lay arrayed across the blanket, and she could think of no way to gather it all. She reached down to grab her cash box.
A cold, colorless hand seized her about the wrist, blasting her senses with searing pain. Alvin Kimball. She knew his real name with his cruel touch.
The dead man stood over her, the contours of his nude body half-eaten by shadow. He raked over her with milky eyes, face contorted with fear. Black tears streamed down his cheeks, and his mouth remained locked in a plea. The dead could only beg.
Loxley screamed, batting the ghost’s hold from her even as she let go of the box. It opened upon striking the ground, releasing her hard-earned money to the breeze. Nora jumped back, shouting for her to calm down, but Loxley would not be swayed. She stumbled onto her rump, shrieking up at the shadowy man looming over her. He leaned closer to grope for her again, and she launched like a frightened cat in the other direction – toward the Bazaar with its searing lights and banging metal.
The cacophony of booths rose around her like waves in a storm, and she heard shouts as she barreled into the crowd. Neon popped across her vision like lightning, and she did everything she could to put one foot in front of the other. Her raw throat and aching wrist battered her panicked mind, and she could feel consciousness capsizing.
Static. All became noise as she fled into endless crowds of surging faces. The world was ending, and she could not stop herself from keening into the void.
Chapter Two
Inside a Pill Bottle
IT’S OKAY, PRETTY baby. It’s okay, Loxa-Loxie-Loxley. Come back to me.
The brightness faded. She ran her fingertips over chalky, fractured pavement as the ground scratched her knees. She recognized her own jagged voice – sharp, short intakes and long sobs. She looked to her wrist to see a burgundy welt. She could almost make out the forms of Mister Kimball’s fingertips in her skin.
She remembered losing her cash and leaving her cart. That cash box had contained a week and a half’s worth of sales. Her cart wasn’t the best, but it was worth a good amount, and her day’s stock would be gone. It was like stepping another month away from her dream of buying her own farm and moving out. It wasn’t the gardening that depressed her, but her other day job.
Then she remembered her book. She’d never seen one like it, and she knew she might never see another. Its cover flashed through her mind like the face of a departed loved
one. She sniffed and wiped the spittle from her chin. The winter air caught up with her, and she shivered, despite her warm clothes. She stood and shook the crackles out of her fingers.
Loxley had run a long way. The familiar brickwork of the fifth ring swelled before her, and she turned to see people staring. She heard the thunderous bells of Ely’s Tower bang out the time: ten in the morning. She had to be at her next job soon. She looked at her pants; they were dusty and torn in places, and she knew her hair was crazy, but she couldn’t be late. Losing her cart meant she couldn’t save for her farm until she got a replacement. Losing her job at Fowler’s would mean she couldn’t pay for her apartment.
She trudged through the streets among the red brick terrace houses of the fifth ring. She didn’t know how old this area was, but it certainly looked older than her part of town. When the original inhabitants of the Hole were carving out for the mine and foundry, folks must have put down roots here. They probably thought they couldn’t sink any lower. The streets were wide, not like the claustrophobic alleyways of the rings below. She always saw a lot more cops around these parts, and a lot fewer men with caps pulled low over their eyes. People seemed proud to live here, even if weren’t much better off than the folks below.
She crossed under the Hoop, a rusty loop of elevated tracks that ran around the entire Hole. No one wanted to trek down into the lower rings to get across town, and who could blame them? The Foundry and mine were far too deadly in the off hours for most. The men and women from the top rings who inspected the steelworks were carefully guided by Consortium guards to their destinations. The Con claimed to own everything on the ninth ring, but Loxley knew better. Going anywhere else on those levels could be dangerous. She knew the trick of it, though: never go down there. Seven was low enough.
She looked up the stairs into the Hoop station as she passed, and she remembered where she’d heard the name Alvin Kimball – he’d been running for mayor only a few weeks prior, and had been glad-handing in the station for votes. The blustery politician had come out of nowhere, laughing, and shook her hand vigorously as he solicited her vote. She looked down at her blistered, bruised wrist. She hadn’t wanted him to grab her arm the first time.