“What do you want?” I ask him. We are on the second floor. I could shove him off and listen for the crack and the snap. And the screaming, I suppose, if he didn’t die clean.
“Why didn’t you want to come with us?”
“Us?” There is no us. There was once, but Mallery was never part of my Us. “Go away,” I say. “Before you wake my sister.”
He kisses me before he goes, and it tastes like the bloody red heart I cannot find. It tastes small and lonely.
*
Milly twirls for me, dancing on demi-pointe, the wings of her new dress curling about her thighs. In the long mirror, her reflection dances and the ivory dress drapes her like liquid bones.
“So.” She flops next to me on my bed.
I stop chewing on the end of my pencil and close the little diary I have begun. “So what?”
“What do you think?”
“Of?”
She pokes my shoulder. “The dress, stupid.” She leans over and I can smell the wine and mint chewing gum on her breath, sour and sharp. “What’s this then you’re writing then?”
“Nothing.”
“So do you think Mallery will like the dress?”
“I suppose.”
She hums to herself as she holds earrings against her cheeks, discarding this one and that one. I frown. She’s off-key. Milly knows this piece as well as she knows the angles and planes of her own face—she would usually correct herself immediately if she went even the slightest bit flat.
It digs into my eardrums like the morning screeching of the hadeda ibis flocks and I will my sister to go, to take her tuneless happiness away from me.
When she leaves I erase all the words I have written until they are just faint scratches on the paper, ghost writing, ghost dreams. I write a new diary over the old; inconsequential nonsense and I like that, because I can remember the bones of what I wrote underneath, like fossils. I smile and obliterate my dreams of Mallery, of finding my heart in the lake mud and playing a perfect piano, singing a song better and brighter than anything Milly can do. Could do.
*
This is how the summer holiday passes. I learn to keep secrets from my sister, and she grows a new life that doesn’t include me. At night, when she is dreaming, I slip through the house and meet Mallery by the peaty beach, and we stand barefoot in the cold black water and count the ripples of moonbreath on the skin of Vera’s lake, listen to the screaming things. He tells me he has seen the elephants in the forest pass by like ghosts, and I tell him he is a liar, that they are all dead.
“The forest is full of things that people say don’t exist.”
We kiss until I learn what a heart tastes like.
“You’re not like your sister,” Mallery says, but I cannot tell if that is meant to be a compliment or a critique.
I straighten, turn away from him, my arms folded across my chest, cradling the things I feel and keeping them safe.
Mallery touches the back of my neck. “I would like to hear you sing.”
“So you can see which of us is better?” I shift away from him, shrug off his touch.
“Maybe,” he says, but he laughs as he does and I know he has already chosen.
“Milly thinks that you’re in love with her.” I tell him, though he already knows this. “And that she’s in love with you.”
“Millicent is capable of thinking many things, not all of which I agree with.”
Finally, I turn to look at him. He’s thoughtful, brow crinkled softly. I think of forests, of wild things, of ghost animals. Of the gleam of moonlight and kisses until the shadow of my sister slides between us. I frown.
“Would you like to see how I make a violin?” Mallery asks.
*
The perfect violin needs the right material, and even then, the luthier needs to work with that material, shape it so that it can sing the song inside itself, its heart. Mallery tells me this, and explains what he needs.
“She’ll be beautiful, you’ll see,” he says. “But it takes time, preparation.”
I nod. My fingers itch, my throat is dry with want. I cannot speak. My lungs have filled with a strange fluid, like drowning in sloe-gin and honeyed wine. When Mallery smiles at me, I think of witch blood, of fairy blood.
“She’s not what she used to be, is she?” Mallery whispers to me as he holds me closer. His whispers curl around me, tight as threads.
She’s not my sister anymore, that much is true. But Mallery made her that way. Didn’t he?
Didn’t he?
She was supposed to trap his name in an ink heart and then forget about him. Like she always does. It’s Milly who changed. Not me. Not anyone else. She broke the rules.
“I can make her like she was again,” Mallery says. “Give her back her voice.”
On the last day of summer I drown the thing that used to be my sister. I count out the seconds in silvery bubbles, past her flailing hands.
When she is still and quiet, Mallery cuts a lock of her sun-bleached hair with a pair of my embroidery scissors. He curls Milly’s hair up into a tight little noose, wraps it in his handkerchief, then tucks it back into his shirt pocket. I am a little jealous of that intimacy; her palomino hair embraced in monogrammed cotton, pressed close to his heartbeat.
We weight the body with stones before we push the corpse deep. The lake bed is a sludgy mess of drowned trees and silt so deep Millicent’s body will be swaddled away, waiting for us to return. I mark where the body goes below, or I’ll never find her. Then I wipe the shallow grazes on my arms clean, and stare at them. She didn’t fight us very much. The thing that was my sister knew it had to drown.
Although I know I lost her when summer started, I find myself sobbing. Mallery says nothing to my grief, just watches me crouch at the edge of the lake, my legs black with mud, my tears salting the water.
*
Next summer I go back to Vera’s lake alone, one half of Us. I have cried myself out, emptied the space inside, ready to find my heart in the dark. I told my story over and over, that I did not see her go into the lake, that she was meant to meet me, and never turned up. Divers came all the way from George to search the lake, but found nothing, and the police soon turned their attention to the forests, and to the workers who lived on the neighboring farms.
Vera is sombre-faced, older than she likes to pretend she isn’t. “Oh, darling,” she says. “Are you sure?”
I’m wearing my bathing togs, a borrowed towel slung over one shoulder. “I have to,” I tell her. “Do you understand?” And then in a whisper. “I have to.”
She doesn’t tell me to be careful, just cries silent tears that fall down her cheeks like slow worms. But she nods, because I suppose she thinks she understands.
I meet Mallery by the water’s edge and we dive in the place where we sank Milly, holding our breath until it feels like we are drowning, our fingers carding through the mud.
I’m the one who finds her, cushioned and pillowed and blanketed in her lakebed, and we pull up the clumps of her that we can use and afterward I sit on the bench in Mallery’s workshop and watch him as he whittles and carves her breastbone into a violin neck, makes tuning pegs from her knuckle bones. He strings her hair on the bow, rosins it ready, and it is perfect, so beautiful, just like my sister.
When she’s ready, Mallery plays for me, and the strings weep under the white-bleach hair of the bow. I listen to my sister sing, sweet and filled with her sobbing. Then he lowers his bow, tucks the golden violin into the crook of his arm, and waits for my reaction.
“Oh,” I say. “Bow and balance me.” I take the violin from him and set it on my shoulder, tuck it under my chin. Mallery comes to stand behind me, correcting my grip on the bow, and when I slide my sister’s taut-pulled hair across the gut strings, the first long, sweeping note throbs in my chest.
KIMA JONES
–
Nine
Friday
TANNER NAMED THE motel Star Motel because calling the plac
e North Star Motel would’ve been asking for it. Colored folks recognized that “star” and the little lights Jessie insisted they burn in the windows. Most of their customers were hungry, travel-weary young men who did not believe the VACANCY sign as they approached the motel and did not believe that Tanner, round as a dishpan, wide as the door, was its owner. None of them had the nerve to ask her if she was a man or a woman, but she saw their longways looks anytime she entered a room. They never stayed more than a night or two and spent most of that time asleep. Tanner checked them in at $1.25 a night on weekdays and $2.00 on weekends. She never shamed anyone for not having the full fee and would accept three quarters and a “thank you kindly.”
“Get up, Tanner, sounds like the iceman is here. Last time he didn’t ring the bell and most of the ice melted all over the porch. We don’t have money to waste, and I can’t stretch half a block of ice for a whole week.” Jessie was sitting up in bed, her breasts and collarbone soaking in the day’s first light. “I said go on and get the ice. The Campbells are checking out this morning, and Flo needs to get breakfast out to them by nine.”
“If you run me out this bed one more time, woman, you’re going to know it.”
“Ain’t nobody running you, just go get the ice. You can come back to bed after. Oh, and feed Rinny!”
Tanner knew Jessie was lying, but she got out of the bed anyway. By the time Tanner got the ice into the icebox and came back to their bedroom, Jessie would be halfway dressed, talking about the ledgers and dividing the day’s work between them. Best to go get the ice and start the day.
The ice was melting by the time Tanner reached the porch, but not enough to make Jessie have a fit. The iceman slipped everybody’s blocks into their iceboxes. Except for colored people. He left their ice sitting outside, anywhere, in dirt or sand or on a dusty porch. Tanner poured hot water down the block and quickly lifted it inside of the wooden box. Didn’t make no sense to tip the iceman but Jessie tipped him every delivery. “He don’t have to come out here, Tanner. Ain’t like we can leave to go into town and get it,” she would say.
Tanner headed back into the house and to the bedroom she shared with Jessie. “Mr. Campbell say what time they’d be heading out?” Jessie stood wearing a white blouse and ankle length skirt, her brown leather ankle booties tied tightly. “He wants an early start on the road. Almost fifteen hundred miles between here and Seattle. He thinks they could be there by this time tomorrow.”
Tanner grunted. Could be. She tried to talk more sense into Mr. Campbell the night before, but he was determined to make it his way. Tanner thought it would be better for them to stop somewhere in California for a few days and then head back to the road. Maybe leave his wife and newborn in San Francisco for a week or two and then send for them later. But Campbell wouldn’t hear of it. Said he was driving straight through, driving even if his eyeballs went bloodshot and burst through his head. “Give me the rundown, baby,” Tanner said to Jessie as she pulled her work trousers over her belly and bent to cuff them.
“Did you feed Rinny?”
“Yes, I fed Rinny, now give me the rundown.”
“Well, Campbell’s checking out this morning. That’ll leave us empty for the weekend, which is good because we’re sure to fill up the singles.” Tanner nodded. Single people always ran off the job on Fridays, soon as the boss paid them. By Monday morning they were long gone and so far on their way north or west it didn’t make sense to send Klan after their families. They were just gone. “Flo is getting started on the weekend menu, and I’m waiting for a cigarette delivery and the bread delivery. Me and Flo will get the parlor ready for this evening. I’ll air out the singles and Newt will sweep them. All you need to do is change the oil on the Campbells’ car and check the tires and whatnot. Maybe wash down the sides of the house.”
The house was peach-colored with a brown roof and sat a quarter of a mile from the highway. Travellers could see the Star’s marquee from the road whether on foot or automobile. The marquee was its own detached, two-pronged structure painted in mint green and white and lit up every night at 9:00 p.m. The house’s front room served as the motel’s lobby, stripped of all furniture save an upright and uncomfortable sofa, two wing chairs, a wall clock, and a small lobby desk with a silver bell. Tanner kept a wide black leather barstool behind the desk to sit on when her knee acted up. All other times, she preferred to greet her guests standing. The single rooms stood in a row of six to the left of the house. The doubles, another six, off to the right. The only formal place for colored folks to stay headed west on the lonely, desert highway.
It was Flo who came up with the idea of having jook nights on Fridays for the locals and travellers alike. Black folks were starting to stay in Phoenix to make a home and needed a place to go on the weekends. Friday nights at the Star Motel were for card playing, thigh slapping, and smoky mingling. Tanner hated the idea at first. She needed to keep her family safe and didn’t want all of colored Phoenix in their parlor room on Friday nights, but the women were lonely. Flo complained of never having company and Jessie didn’t have to open her mouth for Tanner to know she was cross about it all.
Flo was one of Tanner’s first guests. Flo arrived with a belly brimming over its due date. Tanner knew the kinds of things that would make a woman run, pregnant and all, out of the swamps of Florida. They never spoke about it or how Flo found the place. She was flat out with her intentions when she checked in that night. “I can cook. If you let me stay on until my baby big enough, I’ll be your cook. I used to cook lunches for the orange pickers and deliver them in my truck. I can cook anything, and I can kill anything.” After Flora went into labor, she named the boy Newt, half because Tanner slipped on birth water running over trying to catch him out of the birth canal and half because he kind of looked like one.
Jook night at Star Motel started at nine o’clock, but folks trickled in around ten thirty. It gave Flora and Jessie time to change, time to tuck Newt in, time to perfume behind the neck, time to cast their muscled legs in nylon. The women always wore all black, including Tanner. That was the rule, everybody in something bright. Other rule was no outside food and no outside liquor. Tanner played the doorman and Jessie worked the bar. Flo managed the kitchen, bringing plates out to the cards players and collecting tips in her bosom. Flo wore a deep, matte red lipstick but kept her fingernails short and bare. “Can’t cook with that shit on my hands,” she’d say and wink at whatever woman was questioning her manicure. The manicure-questioning woman always knew Flo’s reputation: she could outlast a man, she took her time, she could cook, and she didn’t lie. Flo was thickset, with an impressively square jaw and roundish eyes. She openly bedded other women; the few nights a month she spent with Tanner were in one of the single rooms.
Tanner stood at the front door of the house, on the porch, collecting the dollar fee it cost to get in. “Order your plates with Flo,” she said, “All plates from Miss Flora. All booze from Jessie.” The parlor was lit just enough to see a card hand but barely enough to see if you were putting your fork in meat or vegetables. As soon as the brass band started up, Jessie rattled her tambourine. She bounced it off of her hip and then smacked it into her open hand. Her feet moved in time, and her hair wagged back and forth on her head with every tambourine slap. They would bring in an easy three or four hundred dollars between the food and hootch and card games. They split the income evenly and saved for their future plans. Jessie was going to Los Angeles, Miss Flora was sending Newt to Howard, and Tanner would open another motel.
Hours of dancing passed on top of hours of drinking and the night winded down. Couples were filing out on foot, holding each other up. Tanner walked over to each spades and craps table and announced that it was closing time in ten minutes. “Last bets for the night. Make them count.” A hand reached out for Tanner’s and caught her at the wrist. Tanner looked down at her hand and over to the arm holding hers. “Can I help you with something, sir?” She was used to the belligerent drunk from time to ti
me and escorted them to the front yard to sober up. Come morning, they’d be gone and ashamed. This man’s front tooth was as gold as his watch, and he smiled big as payday, not a whiff of alcohol on him. His suit was a butter yellow and his white shoes were unscuffed. There was no dust on them either. He was a good foot and a half taller than Tanner and his reach, she estimated, twice that of hers. “I think maybe you can help me, ma’am. I’m looking for a missing person. Any information you could fetch me would sure be a nice gesture on the part of you and yours. Name is Tanner Harris, wanted dead or alive. Ring any bells for you ma’am?” The man’s grin faded as he whispered through his teeth, “Maybe you want to be clearing the party on out of here so we can settle this. You got a debt to pay, girl.”
Flora, never missing a thing, hit the lights. “All right now, y’all heard Tanner. Jook’s closed. Next week, same time, same place.” She moved from table to table pointing folks to the way out. Some of the drunk ones begged a dance from her, and she chided them, “Go on, now. Go on, I said.” The last patrons bid farewell to Jessie and promised to be back. Jessie thanked them for coming and walked them to the front porch. Tanner stayed in the parlor with the gold-toothed man.
*
When Jessie returned to the parlor, Flora headed in a quick scramble for the kitchen door. “Come on over here and take a seat,” the gold-toothed man said. He kept his hand wrapped tightly around Tanner’s wrist and had a smile on his face as she sat. Flora returned to the parlor with a gun pointed at the back of her head. The man had not come alone. His companion was thin, with a face slender as toilet plumbing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and nudged Flora forward with the gun. “This one here was reaching for this gun, boss.” The gold-toothed man looked over at Flora and smiled at Tanner. “Tanner love a talented woman, don’t you Tanner? I’ll be damned. I come to talk to you and your girlfriend here want to shoot me down.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 11