Heiresses of Russ 2013

by Tenea D. Johnson

  “I’m not going anywhere tomorrow, remember Casey? Because I quit your stupid show. Remember?”

  Ball Cap laughed. He’d introduced himself some time, but Casey’d forgotten it four or five drinks ago. She could feel a burning in her belly, and was glad she’d stopped putting back the rotgut. A hangover was worse after a night sleeping on the ground.

  She slipped her cue back into the rack. Now Jolene was whispering something in Cowboy Hat’s ear, pressing his hand against her tit. Casey shook her head in disgust.

  “Hey, you been flirting with me all night. What the shit’s going on?” Ball Cap’s face was red and twisted ugly.

  Jolie giggled. He put his hand out to grab her shirt, but misjudged and closed his fist on air.

  Casey stepped between the two. “She’s drunk. She gets real dumb when she’s drunk.” She dug her fingers in Jolie’s biceps. “Come on, Jolie, we’ve done enough damage here.”

  “But I feel terrific.” Jolene wobbled a second and then settled her head on Casey’s shoulder.

  Ball Cap pulled back his fist. “You two dykes? Think it’s funny coming on to men and leaving them worked up?”

  Casey felt ice knot around the booze in her gut. She had a knife in her boot, but she wanted a gun. Hell, she wanted her mech.

  Cowboy Hat snorted. “Aww, shit, Bruce. She wasn’t into you. I was the one gonna take her home.”

  Then Jolene’s legs went out from under her, and Casey just managed to catch her by the elbows, and she wished like hell she’d already paid the bar tab and could run out of this dark and muggy place before something horrible happened.

  “Ain’t worth wasting your time now,” Cowboy Hat laughed. “That girl’s passed out.”

  Casey didn’t say a word as she started backing out of the bar, Jolie’s heels bouncing on the bumps and cracks in the worn floor. She slipped her arm around Jolie’s middle so she had a free hand to find the last of their money in her pocket. She dropped a hundred dollar bill on the counter and didn’t bother waiting for her change.

  Her stomach loosened a little as the door closed behind them.

  Out on the front step, a little breeze ruffled the strands that had come loose of Casey’s braid. She closed her eyes to work up the energy to drag Jolie onto her feet. The breeze felt cool and sweet after the bar’s closeness, and her head felt pleasantly light. It could have been a good night if Jolene hadn’t fucked up back there.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Casey pivoted Jolene with reflexes sharp despite the alcohol. She hadn’t dealt with a puker since her first tour of duty, but some skills are never lost. She breathed shallowly through her mouth while Jolene emptied a pint or two of pseudo-tequila all over the bar’s siding.

  Jolene coughed and retched again. She gave a whimper and took a few steps away from the mess, wobbling a little before thumping down on her ass in the thick dust. Her shoulders shook, and it took Casey a second to realize she was crying.

  She squatted beside Jolene, rubbing her back.

  “I’m sorry.” Jolie heaved between her knees, but there was nothing left to come up. “That was stupid.”

  “S’okay.”

  “Oh fuck, Casey, I don’t know what to do.” She spat over her shoulder and wiped her face on her arm. “The VA says they’re canceling my funds. They say the national allotment of graduate students has been exceeded, and they’re cutting money devoted to the theoretical programs.”

  Casey sank onto her butt. “Shit.”

  “They say I can reapply next year. But I’ll have to take a year off from school while I wait for the bullshit paperwork to clear. What the hell am I going to do for a year, Casey? I can’t stay at the university without money!”

  Casey pressed her cheek against Jolene’s shoulder. She didn’t have an answer. But Jolene’s moods this summer finally made sense.

  “They say they’re upping the agricultural workers quota. Gonna make me work on a farm.” She leaned her head against Casey’s and choked off a sob.

  And then they heard it. Maybe there’d been other sounds when they’d stumbled out of the bar, but the sound of a girl shrieking “Leave me alone!” finally penetrated the haze of booze and unhappiness.

  Jolene went stiff. Casey found herself reaching for the sidearm she no longer carried. Adrenaline replaced alcohol, and they jumped to their feet, running toward the sound.

  It had come from the automotive shop. Casey thought of the pickup truck full of teenagers, stupid and now drunk and probably stoned out of their brains, and her heart raced even as her training kicked in. She ran to the left, Jolene to the right, their boots quiet on the gravel road. Running lightly. Taking their weapons from their boot tops. Civilians might be forbidden firearms, but that didn’t mean they were stupid enough to travel without weaponry.

  Casey shifted her switchblade to her left hand and her brass knuckles to her right. The red pickup still sat at the charging station, and bent over its hood she could see the beautiful blond, pinned down by the good-looking boy with his hand wriggling beneath her t-shirt. The girl wriggled, and the boy slapped her with his free hand.

  “Stop being such a bitch, Mel.”

  There were other sounds, giggles from the back of the red pickup, crickets in the distant fields, her own breathing, but they disappeared in the tidal surge of Casey’s rage.

  He turned around at the sound of her snarl.

  She reached the boy at the same time as Jolene. Their fists took parallel paths into his face, side-by-side explosions of teeth and spit and blood. They didn’t bother with the switchblades. He wasn’t that much bigger than either of them.

  Jolene lashed out with her boot, toppling him. There were no sounds from the pickup truck anymore. The sound of his whimpers were that much louder.

  Jolene stepped down onto his gut, pinning him in place. She held the blond girl’s gaze. “You want a shot at him?” They were surrounded by a knot of staring teenagers, but Jolene didn’t spare them a glance.

  The girl stared down at him. He clutched his face, already puffy even in the faint phosphor glow of the station’s nighttime lighting. Her lips twisted. “Hell yeah.”

  She kicked him in the ribs, twice. “I told you leave me alone!” She kicked him again. When she looked up, her eyes were bright and her nose ran snot down her lip. She wasn’t crying. She was keeping it in. “How many times did I have to ask him to just leave me alone?”

  The girl swiped at the snot and left streaks of grease across her face. It hit Casey then: the grease-black hands, the stained rag stuffed in her back pocket, the faded and holey clothes. She worked at the automotive shop. She was the girl Casey had been at eighteen, but thin and beautiful, not awkward and stocky.

  Casey’s heart twisted for the girl. She stretched out a hand to her, squeezed her shoulder. “You going to be okay?”

  The girl nodded. “I think so.” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand again. “At least he’ll have some tender targets for me to aim at the next time.”

  She sounded resigned to the idea of a next time. And in a place like this, flat and boring and short on anything beautiful, it was probably only a matter of time until there was. Casey thought of Ball Cap, back in the bar, and felt lucky that kind of next time hadn’t happened to her or Jolie.

  She reached for some kind of advice, something she could tell the girl that would protect her or help her in any way. “Be careful,” she finally said. She wanted to say come with us. She wanted to say I’ll save you. But there was no way to say it.

  Jolene kicked the boy in the ass as she turned away, and Casey knew it was time to get out of town. The kids were starting to whisper now, and two of the boys were kneeling next to their buddy. Casey gave the girl an awkward wave and followed Jolene back to the main road. The dust seemed drier and thicker than it had when they’d first come into town.

  They made it almost a hundred yards before the girl shouted at them. They stopped and let her catch up. She panted a litt
le, her cheeks gloriously flushed as she tried to catch her breath.

  “You’re the ladies with the flying show. The mech pilots.”

  Casey nodded.

  “Did you fly in the Air Force? Is that where you learned it?”

  “Yeah. I served two tours of duty on Luna, and Jolene served two and a half tours in the asteroid belt and the Martian combat zone. Protecting our mining bases.”

  The girl’s eyes looked huge in the moonlight. She hesitated, looking from Casey to Jolene. “Did you like the Air Force? Was it okay?”

  Jolene opened her mouth, and for a second, Casey thought that she would spill it all out, the dead husband, the chronic pain, the artificial heart, the grad school fuck-over. But instead, Jolene said: “It’s pretty good.”

  Casey just stared at her.

  “Yeah, the service can really take you places if you let it. It paid for me to go to college. I’m in grad school now.”

  “College? It’ll pay for college?”

  Both Casey and Jolene nodded.

  The girl launched herself at Jolene, giving her an awkward hug. “Thanks.” She hugged Casey, too. “Thanks,” she repeated.

  “Good luck,” Casey said. And then Jolene was tugging her back down the road, Casey walking backward as she waved at the girl, who beamed and waved back until she was just a speck in the distance.

  •

  The shoulders of the mechs gleamed white in the moonlight, their cockpits sparkling under the twinkle of the stars. It was a clear night, the sky stretching wide without cloud cover or light pollution. At home, back in Seattle, it was never like this. Casey let her head fall back, cricking her neck to take in the glimmering expanse.

  “Ahh shit. I gotta go stow my mech’s graspers.”

  Casey couldn’t take her eyes off the stars. Ursa Major looked ready to tumble down out of the sky. “It’s not gonna rain. Don’t worry about it.” Her earlier anger at Jolene’s silly thumbs-up stunt had disappeared in the booze and the fight.

  “Might as well do it now, so I don’t have to get up and do it in the morning.”

  Casey heard the grass swishing around Jolene’s legs, the hiss of the cockpit opening, the grumble of her PEAV firing up.

  “Hey!”

  She finally dropped her gaze back to earth. “Hey, what?”

  “Let’s fly. Just for fun. Just to remember how good it is.”

  Jolene smiled down at her, a tiny figure in the giant suit of armor. Casey smiled back. In a minute, she was jacking in, the comforting presence of the PEAV operating system appearing in her mind.

  They didn’t even need radio: they just launched in synchronicity, shooting up toward the stars, moving so fast it felt for a second like they might catch themselves on the Big Dipper, lift it back up into the top of the sky where it belonged. Without an audience, they didn’t bother with the colored steam or music cues. They just flew. For themselves. And as the mechs twisted and leaped, flight became dance.

  A barn rose up ahead, and they pulled the mechs up sharp, just clearing the roofline. Casey stretched her grasping unit out to the Jolene’s mech, letting momentum spin the big machine back to her like a ballroom dancer spinning his partner. They whirled a second above the barn.

  This, night flight in a million-dollar killing machine turned to entertainment, this dance above a barn and not inside one—that was what the Air Force had given Casey. And right now, it was enough. Tomorrow there’d be dirt and the long drive to Wichita. She’d be a dyke and Jolene would be a cripple. Tomorrow they’d smile nice for the Air Force recruiter and pray that the check didn’t bounce.

  Tonight they danced.

  •

  Nightfall

  in the Scent Garden

  Claire Humphrey

  If you read this, you’ll tell me what grew over the arbor was ivy, not wisteria. If you are in a forgiving mood, you’ll open the envelope, and you’ll remind me how your father’s van broke down and we were late back. How we sat drinking iced tea while the radiator steamed.

  You might dig out that picture, the one with the two of us sitting on the willow stump, and point out how small we were, how pudgy, how like any other pair of schoolgirls. How our ill-cut hair straggled over the shoulders of our flannel shirts.

  You’ll remind me of the stories we used to tell each other. We spent hours embroidering them, improving on each other’s inventions. We built palaces and peopled them with dynasties, you’ll say, and we made ourselves emperors in every one, and every one was false.

  If you read this, you’ll call your mother, or mine. They’ll confirm what you recall.

  By then, though, you will begin to disbelieve it yourself.

  If you think on it long enough, you’ll recall the kiss. I left it there untouched, the single thread you could pull to unravel this whole tapestry.

  You’ll start to understand none of these things happened the way you remember. If you read this, you’ll learn how I betrayed you.

  •

  We gave ourselves names of power. We signed them in the guest book at the gallery. I called myself Faustine Fiamma, after a dream. And you: Rosa Mundi. Rose of the world, rose of alchemy. Flame and flower, two girls in flannel and training bras. We made up addresses in Paris, Ontario, because we could not speak enough French to have come from the other Paris.

  Your father carried his sculpture, wrapped in brown burlap. One of the ones he’d done of you, as a smaller child, dancing. You whispered to me that now every art-lover in Ontario would know you had an outie.

  We slipped away, outdoors: this much, I left you. In the garden was the sundial. A great barbed face streaked with verdigris. It told no time just then; the sun too low behind the curtain of purple blossom, the light pearly. Herbs grew in beds around the plinth. Thyme and rosemary both, probably, and a dozen other things; I don’t remember them all. Only the warmed scents of them on the air. We walked counterclockwise about the beds, touching all of the brass plaques, which bore the names of the herbs in Roman capitals and in Braille.

  You shut your eyes, and I wrapped my scarf about your head and tied it behind, and led you by both hands.

  Here’s where I stopped. To be safe. Here’s where your father came outside and told us it was time to go. I think I made him realistic, don’t you? Fox-bright eyes and hair, and a dozen pockets on his jacket; I think he really had a jacket like that.

  You’re thinking right now that you don’t want to hear what comes next. Stop reading, then. I can make my choice without you, if I must.

  Your father didn’t enter the garden. He didn’t take us out to the van or back to Toronto, not then. He didn’t finish up with his friends in the gallery until after midnight.

  No. You and I circuited the garden. After a while the sun went down, but the light in the sky lingered, grainy and soft like an old photograph. Bats darted overhead.

  “It’s nearly time,” you said.

  “Time?” I plucked a sprig of rosemary; I bit down on one of the leaves, and I placed another at the entrance to your mouth. You opened, tasted it; your breath warm on my fingertips.

  “I’ve had enough of being blind,” you said.

  I untied my scarf from your eyes.

  I saw your pupils blown open. Like those wells the glaciers grind in rock, deep and wide, breathing cold air.

  You looked past me.

  “Can you hear that?” you said. “A horse. Someone’s coming.”

  And you fell down at my feet.

  Grass crushed beneath you. I felt the tender shoots of it smear my hands when I reached under you. I lifted you, by your shoulders; I dragged you against my body but I could not raise you up.

  You were awake, though. Your eyes huge and swimming dark, your lips parted, smiling.

  “She comes for me,” you said.

  She came, indeed. I heard her horse stamp and breathe. I heard her stirrup chime. I felt her step on the earth. I kept my face turned down.

  “Rosa Mundi,” she said.

&nb
sp; •

  You always told me such vivid stories. I countered with stories of my own. We pirouetted through hours of fascinating lies. If we’d been a bit younger, or a bit more innocent, it would have been a game of let’s-pretend.

  Instead it was let’s-become. We spun ourselves costumes to wear into the world. Our stories were about ourselves, the people we might be someday, the people we might love. Play was turning into practice.

  I gave myself a dozen different fathers better than my own, who was no more than a cigar box full of yellowed Polaroids. You gave yourself a wise-woman to replace your mother, who was often drunk in those days. You related how she taught you to weave a chain of clover for luck in your dance recital, to burn an owl-feather to keep away nightmares. It was too bad she was a fiction.

  Or so I thought, until she came for you.

  •

  “Queen of Air,” you said, which was a phrase you had said before, amidst your tales. Your voice strained, winter-husky.

  She laughed, and answered to it. “Rosa,” she said. “My Rosa. You are mine, are you not?”

  “Yes,” you whispered. I pinched your arm, where it was palest and softest, but you twitched away. “Yes,” you said again, nearly soundless.

  “Not your father’s muse. Not your mother’s helper.”

  “No,” your mouth shaped. Your lips began to darken.

  “Not the one to warm your brother’s milk.”

  “No.”

  “Not the one to pour your stepfather’s wine.”

  “No.” You arched your back. Your arm fell free of my embrace.

  “Not your teacher’s pet. Not the one to…. What is it that you are to this one, Rosa Mundi?”

  You tried to answer. Froth burst on your lower lip.

  “She’s my friend,” I said to the ground.

  Her laughter withered the grass around her feet. I saw it shrivel, spreading out from the toe of her slim brown boot.

  I still had not looked at her face.

  “What are the rights of a friend, Rosa Mundi?”