Every Mountain Made Low

by Alex White

  Loxley had always feared the neon of the Bazaar, but this lone sign scarcely bothered her. When she was a child, her mother had once bought her a head of cotton candy, and though Loxley could not bring herself to eat it, she sensed its nature: sticky, fluffy, a little scratchy if it were crushed. This sign was cotton candy in the air, and she tasted its syrupy sweet nature. Perhaps Quentin would also be just like cotton candy – flamboyant and exciting, yet almost entirely devoid of substance.

  “There she is,” said Quentin. “The Hound’s Tail.”

  When they got closer, she could make out features of the building over the blaze of pink. The club was a three-story building, capped on each floor with a ring of elegant stonework. The bottom floor had no windows, only a mildewed concrete relief depicting the sun rising on a field of farm workers. The top two floors had rows of tall windows, scrollwork snaking around each one. This building had been built in the old style, with a large amount of money, and seemed out of place here – the one good tooth in a rotten mouth. It was nowhere near the beauty of Duke’s house, but Loxley didn’t imagine there were a lot of places in the world like Bellebrook.

  Shapes loomed in the darkness around it, swaying and chattering: a few dozen people, waiting to get into the club. The brass façade on the doors flashed like a knife blade as people shuffled inside. Loxley reached out and grabbed Quentin’s arm, stopping in her tracks.

  “I can’t go in that way,” she said.

  “Not a problem, sugar. I wasn’t taking you in that door.”

  “You weren’t?”

  He laughed. “Hell, no. We got standards here, and you don’t meet a damned one of them until you have a bath and some new clothes. Maybe a little lipstick to help out that cute face.”

  Nora had tried to put makeup on her once. It was a lot like tape – greasy, smeared tape.

  “No makeup,” said Loxley.

  “Suit yourself. Lipstick would look good on you, though.”

  She wondered why anyone would want to make lipstick look good, but she dropped the subject. They circled the building and went into the back door, directly into the kitchen. The smells of fresh bread and sizzling meat assaulted her, along with the clang of dishes. A million tiles on the tiled walls. Clusters of six pots here on a rack, eight pots there. Five plumes of steam. Twelve cooks of every color, their uniforms bespeckled with grease stains. Flickering fluorescent lights. Four ovens. Three butcher blocks with ten knives apiece. At least a hundred jars of spices. So many shouts. So much motion.

  Loxley whimpered and spun to bury her head in Quentin’s chest, trying to shut out the tempestuous kitchen. Up close, the man was solid as a rock. She’d surprised herself by acting so familiar with him, and remembered Officer Crutchfield. Maybe he’d tried to fuck her because she’d asked him to take her across the Bazaar. Maybe, if she’d just gone home, instead of forcing him to help her, nothing would have changed. She wouldn’t be in the weird world. He wouldn’t have touched her in that way. Was it all her fault?

  “Are you scared?” he said, stroking her hair. She could hear his heartbeat and the thunder of his voice through his skin.

  She nodded. “Sort of. There’s too much. I don’t know if we can go in this way.”

  “How do you manage to handle the train station?”

  “Every time a train comes, I start playing my violin. Music straightens out the tangles.”

  “Hey, boys!” he shouted as he gently pushed her aside. “Stop doing your shit for a minute!”

  Everyone turned to look at him, but the sounds, sights and smells continued to ravage her senses. “Are you going to sing? That would make me feel better, and momma says negroes like to sing.”

  “Your mother was kind of a racist, wasn’t she?” Quentin took a few steps into the kitchen, looking back at her expectantly.

  Loxley bit her lip and followed him, her shaking fists balled at her sides.

  The cooks grinned at her, staring in her direction. Did they think this was funny? She forced herself to return the smile of the nearest fellow, but judging from his reaction, she had no idea what face she’d made. The kitchen had to be as long as her apartment hallway, and by the time she got to the end of it, she’d counted fifteen men, cooking everything from deserts to ducks. It all smelled incredible, and she grabbed her tummy as it rumbled.

  Quentin stood by the door on the other side, holding it open for her. “Come on, baby. Let’s go.”

  She stopped and pointed to some hanging spices. “That sage looks bad. I don’t think that parsley is good, either. You could do better.”

  “You a cook?”

  “No, I’m a –” A what? An apothecary’s assistant? Not likely. Her time with Don was over. A farmer? Her garden probably didn’t exist anymore, and by the time it was safe to go back home, it would be long gone. A merchant? No produce, no cart, no merchant. “... nothing. I’m nothing.”

  The clatter of the kitchen spun up like a rickety engine. She scooted through the door after Quentin and into a wood-paneled hallway. She saw glasses stacked along shelves and a dark, velvet curtain at one end. Stairs led away in the other direction, and her guide climbed ahead of her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “We got to meet your new boss, honey.”

  Then she remembered the answer to his question from moments before. She was a woman, and a killer. No matter what else, that would always be true.

  Tails or Heads

  WHEN THEY GOT to the third story of the Hound’s Tail, Quentin stopped and waited for her on the landing. She climbed up and found it to be entirely unlike the other two floors. It was wealth, but not like the loud opulence of Bellebrook. Polished cherry boards covered the floor, offset by emerald paisley wallpaper. Flickering gas lamps in ornate brass fixtures fought a losing battle against the shadows. Loxley smelled dust and peered into the depths of the building, seeing little beyond tiny flames.

  Festivities had already started below, and she could hear muffled music and laughter.

  Quentin placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Now I want to ask you one thing before we go talk to him.”

  Loxley brushed him off. “Please don’t touch me right now.”

  “Fine, but I want you to take my question seriously, all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you mean any harm to anyone here?” he asked. “Have you taken any sides, ever in your life?”

  She thought of Nora and her fists balled again as her heart thumped. It made her want to hit something. “I’ve taken a side against Duke Wallace. Are you with Duke?”

  “Is he the one that shot your friend?”

  “Might as well have. I’m going to kill him and Hiram McClintock.”

  Quentin took a long, whistling breath through his nose. “You’d better tell all that to the boss.” He gave her a push on the small of her back. “Now, come on. Let’s get you two acquainted.”

  The paisleys crawled along their walls as Loxley walked. Her shadow danced in the gaslight, the figure just as nervous as she was inside. Even before Quentin pointed out his boss’s door, she knew which one it was. Its edges were clearer than the others, its molding more polished. A blink later, it didn’t appear physically different from the other doors. The air here felt crisper, almost electric, compared to the stale hallway. She glanced up at Quentin, his brown eyes glimmering in the shadows. She didn’t understand his expression, but it was the first time he hadn’t returned her gaze when she looked at him.

  He rapped on the wood three times, the sound sharp in the muted hallway. “Boss.”

  “Send her in,” came a low reply, almost inhuman. Loxley drew her arms up to her chest on instinct, and her breath quickened. What kind of man lay in wait on the other side?

  “Don’t you lie to him,” said Quentin. “You’ll just piss him off, and you don’t want that.”

  He gestured to the crystal doorknob, whose complex facets twinkled as though filled with stars. Loxley felt like a bug on a s
pider’s web. First, Nora had walked into the house of a rich man, now Loxley. She was an idiot for coming here. She probably could’ve scraped together the money for a train ticket and left for Atlanta or something. She could still go work the coal mines. They never asked questions in the coal mines, and they kept the lady miners separate, so they wouldn’t get raped; didn’t pay them as much on account of it, though.

  If she wanted to leave for Atlanta now, she could make it after two weeks in the mines. She might not be beyond Duke’s reach, though. She thought of sinking the knife into Pucker-lips’s leg. It had felt good. If she left, she’d never be able to do that to Duke. She wrapped her fingers around the knob and twisted the door open.

  The first thing she noticed was a crackling fire in the tremendous fireplace. Above that was the severed head of an elephant, gray ears unfurled like flags, mouth frozen in mid-roar. A dozen barn owls, hawks, eagles and other huge birds perched around the ceiling, all posed in various states of attack, as though her entry would trigger a feeding frenzy. Loxley had never seen a stuffed corpse before, and the effect unsettled her. Atop a mahogany buffet, a surprised red fox carried a dead squirrel. A pair of snowy wolves padded nearby, their lips curled into snarls. Three hedgehogs lounged in a fruit bowl on the ornate desk. Mice scampered along the edge in various states of play, some of them apparently dancing with one another.

  She then noticed the twisting columns lining the walls, their bark-patterned stone untangling into branches with silver leaves. A moon had been painted across the ceiling, along with hundreds of lines and numbers sweeping out like some kind of map. The wallpaper was a deeper shade of green than the paisley in the hall, and depicted trees receding into a murky mist.

  Loxley felt like she’d walked into a teeming forest, and all the animals had stopped to look at her. In a moment, they’d thaw from their surprise to come tear her to pieces.

  Quentin’s boss stood at the desk, hands clasped behind his back, his body covered with a red silk housecoat which rippled in the firelight like flowing blood. He had a stern face, with a wide jaw and thick brow, and the kind of eyes she dared not meet. He had huge, imposing shoulders, but thinner arms and legs – a pie wedge standing on its tip. She spied hard muscles lining his abdomen through the open front of his robe, and felt confident the rest of his body was similarly strong. He leaned forward, uncurling his long fingers to place his palms on his desk.

  “Come on in, sugar,” he said, his voice a rumbling growl.

  Quentin stayed out, and shut the door behind her as she walked in, wringing her hands to keep the crackles out.

  The boss sniffed, perhaps because he wanted to catch her scent. “What’s your name?”

  “Loxley Fiddleback.”

  “Your family name is Fiddleback?”

  “No. I don’t know my family name, so I got to pick one. What’s your name?”

  He crossed his arms. “Tailypo. That’s what people call me. A pleasure, Loxley.”

  “Why do people call you that?”

  He grinned widely, flashing his teeth. They struck Loxley as a little sharper than they should have been, but it was hard to tell. “Because I used to have a tail, but now I don’t.”

  She imagined him with a furry cat’s tail, bright orange with blotchy stripes, and giggled aloud. “No, you didn’t.”

  “People don’t usually laugh when I tell them that.”

  “But it’s funny because cats are funny.”

  Tailypo put his hands on his hips. “Ain’t a cat, Loxley.”

  She shook her head, still laughing. “I didn’t say you were. Tails are funny because cats are funny, and cats have tails.”

  “Well, I still ain’t a cat. I’m a ghost.”

  Loxley stopped laughing. She shook her hands out, even though he was definitely lying. “I know some of those, and you’re not one, Mister Tailypo.”

  The fellow drew closer to her, his olive skin radiant with flickering light. “You know ghosts, do you? What’s the difference between me and them?”

  “Ghosts aren’t people.”

  “Ain’t a person,” he said as he circled her, looking up and down her body. He was crazy or lying.

  She swallowed. “Ghosts are mean for no reason.”

  Tailypo ran his fingers along her shoulder and she shuddered. “Oh, everything has got a reason, no matter what it is.”

  She stamped her feet as he walked behind her, running his hand up the nape of her neck. “And, ghosts... they aren’t alive.”

  He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Neither am I.”

  She yelped and danced away from him, anxiously shifting from foot to foot when she’d put some distance between them. She wasn’t about to let him touch her anymore – not for a hug, not for a handshake. He took a step toward her, but she wasn’t having it, and backed further into the room.

  “You want to know about the tail,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Let’s start the story at the end, first. You know they’re always chasing iron down below, don’t you, Loxley?”

  “Not chasing. Mining.”

  “Call it what you want, but they’ll move the whole earth to get it. They dug so deep that they about tapped this whole place out of the ore. They carved mountains into dust, made them low just to pull it out of the dirt. And when they mined out one layer, they carved another, leaving behind the first like a carcass with all the good meat stripped away. The new folks who came for the iron moved into the new ring, building houses and shops, and the folks on the higher rings fucked them over with taxes and land rights. That why the people from Edgewood are always on top, no matter where they’re at in the Hole.”

  He licked his lips. “I was here before this place was the Hole, before it was ever a mine, back when it was just a couple of hills with endless coal and iron tucked underneath. Used to be all kinds of trees back then. We ain’t got any here on the eighth ring. You like trees?”

  “I plant things.”

  “Used to be a forest here, as far as the eye could see. Big one, too. They start knocking it down. So one of the farmers goes to plant crops where the trees used to be, and those crops don’t do so well – all ash and dust after a couple of weeks. And this farmer, he gets hungry; so hungry, in fact, that he ignores the warnings of the foresters and takes his three dogs to come hunting what’s left of the woods. That place was my home.”

  She already didn’t believe him. “How did you live in the trees?”

  “How does anyone live anywhere? I had a house, but nothing as fancy as this. That house stood in our exact location, a couple of hundred feet up, sticks and mud. I looked a little different back then, too. Maybe a bit more hunched. Maybe a bit more hairy. Maybe with a tail, and far fewer human bits. And the dogs, they pick up on my scent, and they go crazy. They decide they’ve got to have a piece of me.”

  Tucked into a shadowy corner of the room, Loxley spotted three hounds, their bodies stiffly pointing.

  “They chase me for hours, and so does the farmer. He’s a hungry son of a bitch, so I understood. I was hungry, too, and if the situation was reversed, maybe I’d have taken a snap at him. Then he finally thinks he has a good shot and takes it, blowing my tail clean off. Musket ball tears the goddamned tree in two behind me. I let out this howl, and the farmer lowers his gun, knowing he done something stupid. The dogs catch the smell of blood and it whips them up even more. So that time, I ran. I don’t like dogs. What do you think of my story so far?”

  “It’s just a story.”

  “You know what? Let me ask you again in a minute,” he said, waving her statement away like a bad smell. “I go back for my tail. Just find a bloody patch and a bit where those bitches had licked up some scraps of meat. I figure that farmer took it. It was a good tail, strong like a monkey’s and full of muscles like an ox’s. That night, when the stars come out to play, I make like a thief out to the edge of the woods, and you know what I smell?”

  It wasn’t hard to guess. “Cooking?�
�

  Tailypo crossed to his desk and plopped down in the chair. “People will eat anything, and I don’t mind telling you: in a time of hunger, with all the game scared away and all the crops dead... I want to go get a bite of my tail, myself. But I can’t. He would have killed me quicker than a heart attack. So I perch in a tree, bleeding and crying, the pain of my empty stomach cutting me as I smell my own cooking meat. Eventually, the fires die, along with the candle lights in the house, and my moon, she hangs at the top of the sky, looking down at all creation. I get to thinking of scraps, and I’m seeing red.

  “I sidle up to the farmhouse porch, and hear them snoring. I can see those hounds through the window, fat and happy from eating part of me. I get up real close to the glass, and without thinking, I mutter something in the tongue of the humans. I say, ‘Who’s got my tail?’ And wouldn’t you know, the old farmer startles awake, screaming for his hounds. Fear takes me and I bolt for the woods, and all three of those mongrels give chase, in spite of the farmer shouting for them to come back.

  “I get down into the deep dark and scrabble up a tree, and I go leaping through the branches in a mad dash to get away. Two of them dogs is too stupid to find me, but one stays hot on the trail, and he keeps me good and treed for a long time. So I wait until his back is turned, and I drop down onto him like a hawk. I dig my claws into his sides and I open up his throat with my teeth.”

  Loxley sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You ate a dog?”

  “You like puppies, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never eaten one. Did it taste good?”

  Tailypo licked his lips and gave a shivering sigh. “Baby, it was the sweetest taste I have yet had. I will never drink something so rich and warm as to fill up my soul like the blood of that mutt. And that’s when I see it: something I never realized before that day. It’s something the first Americans knew, and something I’m going to tell you right now – a home ain’t a home until you lay the bodies of your enemies down on your hearth. Any folk may come and go on your land, but a home stays bought and paid when you’ve washed its stones in the blood of rivals.”