by Anna North
“Bless you,” said the bird, its voice like gravel in a cheese-food can. “Bless you, bless you, bless you.”
The nun looked at Darcy with the same weird fixed stare they all had, like they were counting up a column of numbers written inside your face—a look that would earn anyone else a beating. Then she reached into her pocket and handed Darcy a flyer. On the front was a picture of a church and an Avenida address. On the back were the words “DRUG COUNSELING, YOUTH GROUPS, FREE MEDICAL CARE.”
“Services Sundays,” the bird was saying now. “Eleven and four-thirty. Blessed are those who hear the Word.”
Darcy put the flyer in her pocket, and the nun passed Darcy by, her flat, thin-soled shoes softly brushing against the floor of the bus.
On the Strip Darcy kept her head down. She hoped the T-shirt would obscure her face from any circus people, but every time she saw a man who looked like Tug she tried to duck behind someone else, until a woman in a Seaboard headdress shaped like a boat turned and growled into her face. When she got within sight of the Big Top she pretended to stand in line for the midnight show at the Desert Palace, peering around the nervous businessmen and drunk University kids to search the street for a sign of Ansel.
A block ahead, a street show was beginning. Two players held up a Seaboard cutout of a house and made it bob in orange Seafiber waves.
“Help me!” called a man in a flowered dress. “My house is in the ocean and my babies are drowning.”
The actor playing Tyson pranced and preened.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s all watch a baseball game to take our minds off our troubles.”
“That’s a great idea,” said the man in the dress. “I love baseball.”
“Wonderful,” said the player Tyson. “That’ll be three thousand dollars.”
“But I don’t have three thousand dollars!”
“Well then, you can read about it in the flyers the next day. It’s just as much fun!”
It wasn’t raining yet, but the air was thick and wet and hot and it bent the shapes of people on their way to Darcy’s eye, making pushers sashay like dancers and dancers slither like snakes and one tall drag queen seem to melt from the knees down into a flume of liquid metal. Darcy squinted and blinked, but the colors ran and bled, until the street was dappled and reticulated in maroon and lemonade and green.
“Ticket?” someone said to her, and she jumped back as though shaken from sleep.
“Sorry.”
She moved out of the line, rubbing her eyes.
The ticket taker muttered “cunt,” matter-of-factly, like it was a number.
She crossed the street so she was opposite the Big Top, tugged the T-shirt down low over her eyes, and half hopped, half hobbled her way past. She could manage walking if she let only the outside edge of her right foot touch the ground. The polar bear poster was gone, replaced by “Pecos BILL and the Giant RATTLER.” The line out front looked shorter than before. Tug was working the door, smoking a fat seaweed cigarillo—he looked Darcy’s way and her muscles clutched around her guts. Then she saw him turn and argue with a couple in wedding clothes. She passed the Big Top, passed the chapels, stopped by the side of the Ring Road to catch her breath. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting—Ansel standing on the street, waiting for her? He couldn’t be very welcome at the Big Top either.
Five hookers by the side of the Ring Road waved at passing cars and fattened their red mouths in kissing shapes. One of them was dressed like a cowgirl—ten-gallon hat, fake leather boots, Seafiber minidress with sheriff stars painted on it. She held a flaccid lasso in her sharp-nailed hand. It was a long shot, but a whore might have cause to know someone in a shady information-gathering organization—if Ansel’s organization was even real.
“Excuse me,” Darcy said, “do you know someone named Ansel?”
The cowgirl gave her a look of sleepy half attention. She was tall on top of her cowgirl boots. She looked like she didn’t have time for anyone.
“I don’t ask for names,” she said.
She sounded like she said this a lot. Two of the others turned to look. They were in costumes too—a rich girl, with too-bright blond hair and a pink skirt suit, and a last-boater, with smeared eyeliner, a torn tank top, and an empty solvent plug hanging from one earlobe by what looked like Seafiber thread.
“No,” Darcy went on, “I mean—he used to work around here. At the Big Top?”
The cowgirl shrugged. A minicar drove up, black and waxy with only a few salt scars on its hood, and she switched her lasso and called out, “Giddyup!” in a high-pitched baby voice.
The car slowed to a stop, and the cowgirl leaned into the passenger-side window, resting raw elbows on the frame.
Someone tapped Darcy on the shoulder. It was the girl in the pink suit. Up close, Darcy saw her nipples poking through the thin material of the jacket. The skirt was slit all the way up to her faded red panties. She wore thick pink lipstick and false eyelashes. Darcy thought of the girls from Manhattanville and Upper Chicagoland who sometimes came down to the Avenida in nervous groups of three and four, talking about “authentic Mexican food.” They wore stranger, better clothes than this, and they always looked clean, even when they began to sweat in the nighttime heat.
“I know Ansel,” she said. She wasn’t smiling. “Hey Christmas, you remember Ansel Adams Rivera?”
The last-boat girl disengaged herself from her hip-first stance and came over, graceful in her high-heeled shoes. Her arms were covered in colorful tattoos.
“Mr. Big Idea? Of course I do.”
They laughed together in a private way that made Darcy jealous. They reminded her of the hard girls she knew in school, girls who acted like they were the only ones who knew about solvent, or sex, or how to get what you wanted. The girl in pink recovered first. She adjusted her blond hair; a spider leg of brown escaped from beneath it.
“What do you want with Ansel?” she asked. “He owe you money?”
“No, he’s helping me with something. Do you know where he is?”
The girl in pink turned to Christmas.
“Ansel ever help you with anything?” she asked.
“He helped my mom get rid of all that extra food she had. That was a big favor.”
“He’s bad news,” the girl in pink said. “He used to hang out with my brother, and he’d get this look in his eye. He’s going to do something dangerous someday.”
Christmas rolled her eyes.
“Nah,” she said, “he’s just a freeloader. He’s not going to do anything except what he’s always done—hang around and mooch.”
“Whatever,” said the girl in pink. “Free advice: if you’re looking for help, don’t look for Ansel.”
“Oh, and don’t look for help either,” Christmas said. “Unless you’re willing to—” She mimed a penis going in and out of her cheek. The girls cackled.
“Thanks,” Darcy said. “I don’t need any advice.”
“Oh yeah,” Christmas said. “You look like you’re doing real well for yourself. What happened to your leg? Slip in the shower?”
“Are you kidding?” the girl in pink said. “Look at her hair. This girl’s too good for showering.”
She wanted to say something cutting, to show she was better than them even if she didn’t look like it. But everything about her was as it seemed—she had dirty hair, her leg was busted, she was not doing well for herself. When she was little and other kids made fun of her, her mother had told her to imagine living inside an egg, a cool yellow-white place no one could see inside. But now no place she could make for herself seemed pleasant, nothing of hers was worth keeping safe. She let them jeer and yell at her as she limped away, and she said nothing in return.
The night was hardening around its core. The air was cooler—sweat dried on her skin and stuck there, spit-thick and itchy. The wind shifted and blew the smoke in from Detroitville. Below that was the ominous smell of the coming rain.
Darcy hobb
led a block north of the Strip and headed back toward the bus stop. Her whole lower leg was starting to seize up with a cold pain like ice against a sensitive tooth. Against the door of a dark pawn shop, a woman lay crumpled in a solvent sleep. Darcy envied her for a moment—whatever was the most awful thing in her life, she wasn’t thinking of it now. The street was badly lit—a man emerged from a stain of dark and whispered at her, “Solve your problems?”
Darcy still had seven dollars in her pocket. She could buy a hit of solvent, sink into its springy surface, and not climb out until morning. She’d had the powder kind once, at a party with some older kids from the high school, and it had melted time, condensing her birth and her childhood and her adolescence and the six frenetic hours of the party itself into a single homogeneous substance, translucent and crystalline like amber. If she took a hit now, maybe her mother would come back to her, smiling across the eternal present like a painting on the inside of her eyelids. She stuck her hand in her pocket and pressed the money against her palm. Then she remembered running down the street inside the yellow room of her fear, and she imagined that feeling cooked down into a liquid and mixed with every second of her life before and since, and she retched and tasted bile in her throat. She shook her head at the man and walked on.
She expected her leg to stop hurting when she got on the bus, but when it finally came and she lowered herself onto the duct-tape-mended seat, the pain only spread out around her like a skirt. When she moved her leg, she thought she could feel edges of bone grinding against one another. She remembered the flyer the nun had given her, the words “free medical care.” She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the address: 1219 Avenida, near Sixteenth Street.
It took her three passes to find the church, wedged in between a convenience store and a place that sold solvent pipes. Its Seaboard sign was small and rain-faded. Even this late at night, a narrow door stood open, and through it she could see a row of folding chairs. She walked inside. The room wasn’t air-conditioned, but it was cooler than the street, and pleasantly dim, and it smelled like clean laundry. She listened for birds, but heard nothing; she looked around for a doctor’s office, but saw only a line of light from underneath the door of an inner room. She walked toward it and was forming her hand into a fist for knocking, when a woman opened the door.
“Can I help you with something?” the woman asked. She was shorter than Darcy, small and indeterminately old, and her hair was put away underneath a green cloth. A blue and red macaw sat quiet on her shoulder.
“I thought you guys weren’t allowed to talk,” Darcy blurted.
“I can,” said the nun. “I’m the extern. Ann.”
She extended her hand, gnarled but with beautiful nails. Darcy shook it.
“What’s an extern?” she asked.
“Somebody has to order the Communion wafers, deal with the landlord. The birds aren’t real good at that.”
The macaw turned its vibrant head and regarded Darcy balefully. It opened its beak; its tongue was black as asphalt.
Darcy held up the flyer. “I hurt my leg,” she said. “It says ‘free medical care.’ ”
Ann motioned to one of the folding chairs. “Sit,” she said. “I can take a look at it.”
She unwrapped the filthy shirt from around Darcy’s ankle. Even the air on her skin seemed to hurt a little. Darcy looked away as Ann moved her fingers down the inflated flesh. Then her thumb hit a spot of perfect pain. Darcy cried out.
“Yup, that’s a break all right,” Ann said. “I can give you some medicine and wrap it up for you, but you need to get it set properly or it’s not going to heal right.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Darcy, mentally calculating the cost of a hospital visit. Especially without Sarah’s salary, medicine and wrapping were going to have to be enough.
Ann went into the inner room, and Darcy heard her rummaging in drawers. Through the door, she could see a drawing of a man in brown robes surrounded by strange animals, and another of a man in some sort of jail, with white birds flying around him. Ann came back with a tube, a Seaboard splint, and a roll of clean white gauze.
“This is a topical preparation,” she explained, squeezing cream from the tube into her palm. The cream was the color of an old tooth and smelled like basil. When she put it on Darcy’s ankle, the skin went hot like it was blushing, and then numb.
“We’ll want to let it sink in a minute before we wrap it,” Ann said, and then she sat down in one of the folding chairs and looked at the wall with such fixity and serenity that Darcy was immediately uncomfortable. The bird, on the other hand, craned its neck to look directly at Darcy.
“What’s the deal with the birds anyway?” Darcy asked, trying to direct the question to Ann and not the macaw. “Are they in the Bible?”
Ann laughed. Darcy looked at her blankly.
“Sorry. No, they aren’t in the Bible. It’s a thing our founder came up with. We take a vow of silence to symbolize the plight of the voiceless, and then we talk only to the birds, who have voice but no understanding.”
“But who are the voiceless?” Darcy asked. “I mean, besides you.”
Ann’s smile was like her laugh, full of mirth and bitterness.
“I used to wonder that,” she said. “Then I lived on the island for a while.”
She knelt again, and without asking slid off Darcy’s clammy shoe and sock and wound the gauze under her instep.
“You want to keep it wrapped pretty tight,” she said. “Tighter than you had that shirt.”
She held the splint against Darcy’s leg and lashed the two together firmly.
“This should hold you for a while. But like I said, you should see a professional. How’d you do that, anyway?”
Darcy looked at Ann’s calm face, the bird’s sly eyes. Ann seemed trustworthy enough, but she didn’t know what went on in that inner room.
“Long story,” was all she said.
Ann nodded, as though satisfied.
“Well good luck, and God bless you.”
She put the tube and the remaining gauze in Darcy’s open hands. As Darcy stood to leave, the macaw lifted its feathers so she could see the pink skin underneath, almost like a human’s.
“Blessed are they who inherit the earth,” it said, “for they will speak for the voiceless.”
Ann shook her head.
“Sometimes they get mixed up,” she said. “They write their own scripture.”
It was after 2 a.m. when Darcy walked home, and the Avenida wore its dismal late-night dress. Empanada wrappers twitched in the breeze. A monkey under a streetlight fiddled with a woman’s shoe. She opened the door to her building; the inside smelled like its inhabitants, their restless nights and sweaty days. She heard a baby begin to fuss and imagined a cool hand reaching down to cup its face. She turned onto her hallway and saw Ansel standing at her door.
He was wearing his trench coat, and she noticed now how tall he was, how there was something regal in his slender head, his beaky nose, the way his shoulders leaned back away from his chest. She saw how he could pass for a Manhattanville executive, someone who assumed good things were due to him in life. Both his coat sleeves were full, and she wondered if he’d been conning her earlier, if he’d somehow faked his amputation just to see what she would do. Then he held his right hand out.
“Shake?”
The hand was the size of a baby’s, chocolate brown, and furry.
“What’s that?” Darcy asked.
“I got it from a stuffed monkey. Look, I got his arm too.”
He rolled up his sleeves and showed her a skinny monkey arm lashed to a piece of plastic tubing.
“Where’s the rest of the monkey?”
He pulled a doll out of his coat pocket. It was Monkey Max from the comics flyers, with white plastic eyes and a laughing, pink-tongued mouth. She imagined a real monkey making short work of it.
“In case I need any more parts,” he explained.
She turned the doll over in
her hands. It was exactly the kind of toy she’d never had as a child, the kind of toy she’d seen in the hands of children in Sonoma Hill or Upper Chicagoland and yearned after with a brainless and unfocused craving. She opened the door to let Ansel in; the only toys she’d ever had were the ones lined up under the window, the crown and the dolls made of rocks.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “I went back to the Big Top.”
He sat on the floor. He picked up the cheese-food crown, balanced it on his head.
“You risked the Tug treatment? You must’ve really wanted to see me.”
He slid the crown over his monkey arm, wore it like a bracelet.
“I wanted to know where you got the names,” she said.
“You know, it was the funniest thing. A bird came to my window—a big, ugly macaw with its feathers falling out—and it just squawked out all these names and then died right there on my floor. I think it’d been poisoned.”
“Ansel, come on. My mom is missing.”
He put the crown back on his head, clasped the monkey hand with his real hand and brought both up to his chin.
“I see. You wish me to be serious.”
Darcy hated how beholden she was to him, this man with a monkey hand sticking out of his coat. The hookers could be right—he could be a worthless freeloader. But in his presence she could feel her joints loosening, the sour panic leaving her blood.
“Please,” she begged.
He pressed his lips together and lowered his brows in a parody of grim resolve.
“You have to understand, Ms. Darcy Pern,” he said, “that my seriousness comes at a price.”
“Right,” said Darcy, “your organization. Explain to me for real what you guys do.”
“We are a multifaceted subversive organization pursuing many avenues of endeavor—”
“Ansel,” said Darcy, “just tell me what you do.”
His face lost its humor then, and she saw what was behind it—something roiling, like rage or desire. A little of the recklessness she’d felt at the casino came back to her now, but darker, not like a rich person’s but like an animal’s.