Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  I have been participant to executions where the crowd had a kind of inexplicable joviality, as if it were a celebration. Blankets laid out, lunches unpacked. Children had played games while the gallows stood within arm’s reach. But there was none of that today.

  Joan was brought forth eventually and led the half dozen steps up the scaffold. Bracketing her was a pair of men I knew from their visits of mercy to the constabulary: the Fathers Isambart de la Pierre and Martin Ladvenu. Pious men. Good men, as far as those of their kind went. Joan was a diminutive girl no taller than Lavendu’s shoulder. Her hair had been shorn, badly. She was dungeon-pale and murmured prayers to herself, her eyes closed tight.

  “Witch!” someone in the crowd screamed in a voice shrill as scree loosing itself along a cliff side. No one took up the call. I saw more than a few English gloves tighten on the hafts of swords.

  Lavendu took quiet counsel with Joan as she was lashed to the pillar and Cauchon, sweating in his cassock, ordered his men to lay the mounds of tinder beneath the scaffold on which she stood. Bitterly dry wood, stove-lengths of it, bleached white by the sun somewhere.

  After some minutes of this, and disagreements among the men as to the best manner in which to stack the wood, Cauchon walked onto the scaffold and held a scroll before him. His judgment began with the words, “In the Name of the Lord: Amen,” and his voice was high and reedy, wind whistling through the cracks in a wall.

  I loathed him. He was little more than a bully hiding behind the impenetrable armor of Godliness, and it was beyond true that I had had my fill of bullies by then. Of course, I was one too, a monstrous one. A murderous one. It was our similarity, I realized, that drove me to hate him.

  Cauchon pronounced Joan a relapsed heretic and it was read that we as a people would act as witness; we would see her cast off from the Church and she would be put to death. There was nothing beyond the sound of Cauchon’s pitched voice and the occasional burst of wind soughing along the city walls. Crows cawed their dumb flap-winged amusements from the garrets.

  Cauchon stepped down and Joan’s lashings were adjusted again. Then the crowd grew still when she cast her gaze upon us and implored us all to pray for her and begged our pardon. She pardoned us for any harm we had done her. Her voice was high but without tremor and she asked Lavendu for a cross that she might pray with. Like I said, she was a pale girl, and her eyes were dusted with fatigue but also fiercely bright.

  And I stood amazed when I saw an English soldier with a cross hanging loose in his tunic take it and, without a second glance, hand it to Father Lavendu. The father held it dumbly in his hand and looked back at the man, and I thought, maybe.

  But then Lavendu stepped up the scaffold and placed it in the folds of Joan’s tunic so that she could look down at it, and I felt then the terrible velocity with which we were moving, this end that we were all moving toward. Some great and untenable act from which we would not be able to come back.

  And I understood then, looking out at those faces, how sometimes people feel a strident desire to finish a thing, even if it is the wrong thing. Even if it’s terrible.

  Another Englishman turned to Cauchon and cried, “What, priest, you’ll keep us here until suppertime?” A scattering of laughter among them. An English captain turned to me with teeth like dark beads in his mouth and said, grinning, “That’s right. Do it soon, harrier, or we will.”

  Joan prayed, gazing down at that ragged, twine-lashed cross leaning crooked in the folds of her clothing. The sky was flat and white above us all and I felt the nearness of God for the first time in my life.

  No, that’s wrong. Not the nearness of God.

  What I felt was Joan’s perfect, impervious belief in God.

  Joan’s belief.

  I looked at her up there on the scaffold, and her faith was like a living thing nearly coruscating around her. In all my days of leading men toward death, cajoling them toward it, hurtling them, all of my days in which a mere glance from me was enough to set them rambling and begging for their lives, I had never seen anyone approach death like this. And I looked around and there were those in the crowd now openly weeping, studied men and layman alike with eyes streaming tears under that frank iron sky. People of both countries, of supposedly different Gods, armed with different intentions. Openly weeping.

  Cauchon was in meeting now with the Englishmen and his judges and there was another glimmer of hope then, of possibility, but then Cauchon’s eyes found mine across the throng of people and I saw nothing there but a thirst to slake, a fear to quell, and he sent a runner to me who told me in a husky voice rife with bitterness, “The Bishop orders the pyre lit.”

  And I have sometimes permitted myself the luxury of wondering what would have happened had I not? Had I strode up the scaffolding and loosened Joan’s bonds with the halberd in my belt? Would we have risen up against the English with their axes and swords? Eight hundred Englishmen against two thousand unarmed villagers, farmers?

  Would that slaughter have been any more just or righteous or Godly than what I did instead?

  I walked to where the torch was held for me, and Cauchon then would not turn his eyes my way. I held the torch, its sputtering flame, its dripping sparks and little globs of tumbling fire, and the English captain laughed again.

  Joan’s faith was like a radiance around her, but me? I was only myself. I was the grand summation of the things I had done.

  “Hold a cross in your hand that I might see it,” Joan pleaded, and Lavendu, weeping, pushed past me and placed himself in the crowd where she could see him, another cross in his hand now. She looked at the sky for a moment. The torch I held narrowed and flared against a flurry of wind.

  She looked down at me then. The floor of the scaffold stood level with my chest, the wood piled beneath it. The look in her eyes was terrible, a thing beyond my understanding.

  It was clear she pitied me.

  “God be with you,” she said kindly.

  “And with you,” I said, and turned my face away as I lowered the torch to the tinder.

  The flames leapt, roared, wood blackening and soon glowing white and pink at their cores in hardly a minute, the smoke and heat rising in a shimmering funnel. The scaffolding lit then. The first flames licked her. Joan leaned her head against the pillar and cried Jesus’s name. Her form wavered in the haze. The heat pulled my skin tight.

  The flames ate her form, swallowed her. She cried Jesus’s name again.

  The world was a roaring cavalcade of fire and the faces around me, warped and shimmered, dark faces, and I looked to the sky for respite and this—oh!—this is what I saw near the end: I saw a white curl of smoke leave the flames and rise in the sky and take on the shape of a dove. It flew into the sky, wings beating, and vanished.

  It was her soul, I knew. Joan’s soul. Leaving her body, ascending to the heavens.

  I dropped to my knees right there.

  I had damned myself.

  • • •

  Truth be told, I had centuries of terrible violence to draw from. Even after my life as Geoffroy, there had been any number of horrors I had seen and taken part in. A willful participant.

  All that’s to say the fight that unfolded before us in the dining room of the Tip-Top was a little anticlimactic.

  “Well, do it if you’re gonna do it, boy,” one of the counter men said to Casper, who stood there with his bat aloft.

  Another sighed and said, “Go ahead and get your string up, son. My God.”

  “Couple of limp dicks,” muttered a third, and turned back to his coffee cup. It was this that seemed to inspire both of the combatants toward some kind of action. The skinny one, Dunk, crab-walked across the floor, and Casper finally swung. I couldn’t help but wince when the bat connected to the floor with a hollow thwock that you could see run all the way up his arms. Vale stood looking confused and very drunk in front of the lounge door.

  Casper said, “You owe me an EMF meter, Dunk. Among other things.”

&
nbsp; “You’re living a lie, man,” Dunk cried out, still on his ass, arms raised in front of him.

  “What about Specter Detectives? Huh?”

  “No one’s gonna watch your stupid show, idiot! Rectum Detectives is more like it.”

  “Why would you say that?” Casper lunged again, and now Dunk was scuttling around the table on his hands and knees. Casper lurched behind him, his hands choked up around the bat. We could all see he didn’t have it in him.

  “This is one sad deal,” one of the men said, disgusted. He turned back to his plate.

  “I want my money,” Casper said. “My money or my gear. You pick.”

  “Jesus wept,” the last counterman said before wheeling around on his stool.

  Then Gary, our mechanic, walked past me and threaded his way though the tables. He laid his hand on the end of the bat. Casper turned and looked at him. What little fight there was deflated out of him like a balloon. Almost lovingly, Gary put him in a headlock.

  “Casper, Duncan sold your meter for a bag of crank days ago. Give it a break. Getting money from him is like getting Thousand Island from a basset hound’s tits, man. You can squeeze all you want, but it ain’t happening.”

  From beneath the table, Dunk said, “Screw you, Gary.”

  Gary said, “You better stay down there you’re gonna talk that way to me, you dickless wonder.”

  Gary pushed Casper over my way. He held the bat in his other hand. “Got a big heart, this one, but a little short on guts. Anyway I got your van all prepped and jacked up, but it’s pushing nine o’clock and my old lady’s gonna shit a brick if I don’t get home soon. I’m gonna have to get the pump done in the morning.” Conversational, as if stopping an assault was just another thing that was done in the Tip-Top.

  Vale had heard Gary from across the room and threw up his hands in disgust. He said, “Jesus Christ,” and without another word pushed his way back into the lounge. Dunk stood up and made a show of dusting off his clothes, and then slunk into the nearest booth and sat down.

  Gary hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Motel next door’s always got vacancies. I’ll see you over at the shop at seven o’clock sharp. Won’t take long to put that water pump in. I just gotta get home; the wife gets pissed otherwise.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No biggie.”

  “Let me go, Gary,” Casper said, his voice muffled.

  “Shut up,” Gary said, his bicep rising like a pool ball as he gave Casper a good shake. “You’re gonna go over and apologize to Janelle for making a scene. You ought to know better.”

  Casper said, “I ain’t going over there. Not a chance. Dunk’s right there.”

  Gary shook his head and gave me a What are you going to do? kind of look. “Dunk doesn’t care, Casper. He doesn’t have your ghost meter thing but he doesn’t have any shame, either.” Gary spun around with Casper’s head still buried in his armpit. “Dunk,” Gary said, “you care if Casper heads over there?”

  “Hell, I don’t care,” Dunk said glumly, spinning a coffee cup around.

  Gary let him go. “See that?”

  Casper ran his hands over his hair and spent quite a while putting his baseball cap on just right. Then he went over and quietly apologized to Janelle the waitress. He got a fair amount of ribbing from the men at the counter.

  Janelle brought my pie.

  Just a normal night at the Tip-Top.

  18

  There were accidents.

  Quite a lot of them.

  Congress eventually needed to devise a term for them, if only to appease the insurance industry, and so smoke-related accidents and injuries generally fell under the heading of Unintended Collateral Results.

  For instance.

  A Town Hall meeting was held in Encinitas, California in July. There’d been a marked increase in looting and crime downtown since the smokes had appeared; several shops had had their windows broken and a jewelry store, nearly its entire inventory taken. The city council and the sheriff, begrudgingly, came up with a rotating roster of officers to patrol the downtown area twenty-four hours a day.

  “It’s a stop-gap measure,” the sheriff said, but the people didn’t care. The town’s biggest industry was poinsettias, for God’s sake; let someone else, let San Diego have its jewelry heists and crime. People lived in goddamned Encinitas to get away from that.

  During the town’s Classic Car Cruise Night a week later, loads of purring, finned Corvettes and low-slung Mustangs cruised up and down the town’s stretch of 101, the air heady with the scent of exhaust and cotton candy, mothers pushing babies in strollers, sticky-faced toddlers being pulled alongside, with couples in sunglasses walking arm in arm.

  A monthly affair, Cruise Night, and the usual sense of frivolity and raucousness was tampered only slightly by the pairs of police officers stationed every few blocks.

  It was a beautiful evening, the purr of the surf heard beneath the rumbling of the cars, the laughter and clamor of the kids. The moon hung fat over the sea. The police felt prepared, pairs of men glancing steel-eyed among the pedestrians. Prepped for anything: any one of these people could be the mastermind behind a jewelry heist, could be poised to burn down a poinsettia farm for kicks or deface the side of Swami’s. They were ready for anything.

  Anything except the ghost of a Viet Cong soldier appearing in the middle of 101.

  Wearing sandals and dark fatigues that faded to nothingness. A ghost man brandishing a ghost AK-47. Right there in the highway, his eyes wide white O’s.

  Bedlam ensued. People bolted, single flip-flops lay scattered on the sidewalks like strange carapaces. People dropped water bottles, iPhones. Someone ran their Barracuda into a fire hydrant. Car alarms blared. Babies crying.

  The nearest deputies, both terrified—neither having seen a smoke in person before, both of them thinking more than a little bit that it was all probably some kind of joke—ordered the VC to drop to his knees and release his weapon.

  When the man did not comply, did not even seem to hear them, one of the deputies opened fire. He fired eleven rounds, all the rounds in his pistol, none of which had any effect on the apparition.

  Two rounds, however, entered the chest cavity and exited the back of an eight-year-old boy who had been watching the cars with his father before they were to meet the boy’s mother at a nearby restaurant.

  These things happened. These and more.

  Unintended Collateral Results.

  19

  Marvin went to the motel to get them rooms. Vale invited him to come back for a drink but Marvin begged off. Vale himself was surprised to find that on a Tuesday night, the lounge of the Tip-Top apparently attracted every alcoholic, dope fiend and wanting-to-party redneck within a fifty mile radius. The fox-killing bartender, who everyone called Jimmy Two (or was it Jimmy Too?), muted all the televisions and turned on the jukebox. A nauseating flow of auto-tuned country songs rattled forth.

  Vale ordered shot after shot of whiskey with beer backs. Cowboy hats and mesh-back baseball caps were the only constants throughout the room, and cans of chewing tobacco whitened the back pockets of many a pair of jeans.

  A woman sat down next to Vale at the bar. She had a tsunami of gelled hair and a pair of gigantic breasts that struggled against the constraints of her top and seemed, like everyone else in the bar, infused with a kind of unwitting melancholy, the result, Vale assumed, of having spent your entire life in a thirty-mile radius.

  “Hon,” she said, “you look about like how I feel.” She laughed shrilly and rubbed the bar with one hand as if she had a rag.

  Vale sat silent and petrified. Decades of bravado had vanished with his fleeting fame. He was suddenly vastly interested in the television playing in front of him. He lifted his bottle up, that reassuring clink of glass against his teeth.

  She turned to him and planted an elbow on the bar. “What happened to your head?”

  He couldn’t help it—his eyes skittered up her cleavage like a mol
e rat up a cliffside. She winked at him and pressed her knee against his leg.

  “Motorcycle accident,” he said, the first thing that came to him.

  “Oooh,” the woman said.

  A man stepped up to the bar on Vale’s other side. He slugged back his drink and exhaled, shook his head like a mastiff sloughing off water. He was possibly the hairiest man Vale had ever seen, with a beard that crept up nearly to his eyes. Into the mouth of his glass he said, “Don’t do it, Maura.”

  “I’ll do what I want, Robby,” the woman snapped. “You little two-pump chump.”

  Robby sighed and motioned to Jimmy Two for another drink.

  “Hit me again too,” Maura said, leaning over on her elbows. Jimmy Two shared an uncomfortable glance with Robby and said, “It’s on Robby’s card, Maura. And he says no. Sorry.”

  “I’ll buy her a drink,” Vale said. Maura beamed.

  Jimmy Two looked at all of them, sad and uncomfortable. Vale was too, but here was something—if not the Moment, then at least something else. Some feeling. Robby leaned his massive sagging face toward Vale’s ear and said, almost kindly, “Don’t write a check that your ass can’t cash, mister man.”

  “Whatever he’s saying,” Maura said, “don’t listen to him.”

  Robby peered at her over Vale’s shoulder. “We aren’t divorced yet, Maura.”

  “Consider it done,” she said, waving her hand like she was writing something in the air. “You’ve been infidelitous on me for the last time.”

  Vale pushed a twenty toward the bartender, who said, “I wish you wouldn’t, bud.”

  Vale said, “Get her a drink, Jimmy. Jimmy Two. Can I call you Jimmy Two?”

  Jimmy Two said, “You can’t.” Then he said to Maura, “You know this guy gave a blowjob to the Tasmanian Devil, right?” He walked off with Vale’s money.

  Maura laughed and slapped her hand on the bar like Jimmy Two had told the best joke ever. Vale’s head was full of light and fog.