Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Coil coal and chasm black, the Colored Girl breathed coldly nearby. There was black lumen to her black eye: the pupil had bled out and over, black moon to the white sun. Light was not-hell. Light was gone from her stare. He’d never noticed before, but she had a flower tucked through the top buttonhole of her bandit’s shortcoat. So did Frank. They were beautiful, he thought and then he wondered, wherever did they find those flowers?

  I’m not gonna tell you what to do or what not to do, my friend. But Hate plays a dangerous game makin’ a rare lady whose hair you couldn’t possibly count every one of ‘em. If I was you, an’ I ain’t, I’d best beat it—lead you not into temptation and alla that jive. But I ain’t your pops.

  Hate. He called Spindle and the others Hate? He fought this notion. I was just thinking, Frank, he replied, that I’d do it “My Way”?

  Frank shook his head in defeat. Then you can take only what you take witchoo. But we ain’t gonna go in there. The Colored Girl glared at her partner. It was clear she didn’t agree with this strategy. But she winked at him. She knew.

  What could Love be afraid of, he asked before setting off down the hallway after Spindle.

  Eight doors for eight deaths, Spindle rubbed his hands with glee as he saw him approaching at last. We have put pleasant faces on our move against her, made all the ways you can destroy her a gentle meander through murder’s supposed insult against her and Weatherhead. These are just suggestions, mind you, for her destruction, so please: use your imagination when the time comes. There is a chalk box she stands in and those fools outside, your so-called friends, the fiends that brought you here in the first place, a blessing in disguise, a curse about-face, would have you rub it out with your knees while you lick shit off her boots. Nuh-uh. She is an insult and we will tear off the lips that utter it with our teeth, won’t we? He thumped him on the back. And after we rape her on the rooftops of every building in the city, you can have her head, yes?

  He said nothing. He walked over to the door to the first exhibit. It was another buckling, atrophied cardboard door. A small placard, actual for-real words, each letter inked in hideous runes inside thorn-throned squares, read: Rain-stopped Play . Inside the room there was a church, a bombed-out church whose central altar made loinless gestures out towards a row of crumpled, makeshift cardboard pews. Someone was giggling nearby, but it was a forced sort of sound, up-from-under-so-youse-can-hear-it. He looked back. Spindle was no longer in the hallway, had he ever been.

  Did I drown?

  He crept all low-ghost between the columns, seeking out the source of the giggling. Oh, it was there. At first he thought someone was throwing up in a bucket, but the twitch of the legs was all wrong and no one was holding her hair out of her face. So it was a living exhibit, he nodded. He stole over to one side and watched the young woman drown in the vat of communion wine. When her body finally slumped and decided to throe in the towel, she drew himself up and out and took a mighty breath, reds streaming down her face and off her red wig. He took a step back. He knew this woman somehow. As she toweled off her uppers, she began her commentary:

  To drown is to discover the value of all the pennies at the bottom of the well. Not even the most ancient eyes can put back together a puzzle of the water’s surface. To drown is the only time a corpse moves up. Graves don’t undig themselves and jumps never bounce back out of the ground the way spit might.

  He snorted. You’ve got your waters all wrong. She drank but never got drunk. She never put wishes in her pennies. Instead, she made the pennies wish. She made them wish they’d be put in her pocket, or held between her fingers like the stupidest brass-knuckles ever. And with that he tipped over the vat. There was nothing in it. Satisfied, he left the girl blinking there on the stones.

  The next door said Fireplug written in violence. Inside the room was an alley, the one behind their old apartment in their old city. Out of a trash dumpster jutted burning deadfalls and a young man whose skin was puckering and melt-waxing off his face. The wood, whose right angles were just all wrong, he saw, seemed more upset than the fellow. The latter’s face had been turned up, letting the flames lick his throat, but when the door opened, he greeted the visitor casually:

  To be burned alive is not merely the province of the witch-worthy or witches themselves, but also belongs to those for whom ash is not enough. She gives all the names she can to woods and then she betrays them by putting them to sleep with her red dance.

  You’ve got your fires all wrong. She only burns the ends of things, not their cores. The cores are taken into her the same way she breathes in sex, the same way she breathes in scars. You’re wasting good skin here, my friend. She only gives names to their skins. She sleeps in hollow logs. Sleep is outside the dominion of death. He perched himself on the edge of the dumpster and emptied his bladder over the fires. There was a hiss from the false-bottomed suicide. Satisfied, he left the yellow man sitting under wrinkles and winces.

  In front of the next door, which read Silver Bullets , Spindle caught up to him and grabbed his arm roughly, What’re you doing, friend? You’re making a mess of things vandalizing the exhibits so? What gives? Is this your crotchwood acting?

  There might be, he grunted, some historical inaccuracies in the layout of your museum. I am merely correcting them.

  I see, I see, Spindle’s frown crowned out of the cunt of his mouth as he watched. Was it fire? Bullets? Wrist? Noose? Overdose? And what will it be, eh?

  He nodded. I’m not sure why I wasn’t consulted. I’m the turn-a-page of the book itself, the ledger of her horror, he half-lied, still uncertain, if anyone knows how best to bring her low, slit and bite her, it’s me.

  We were—concerned that other factors might be, heh, clouding your judgment.

  You mean Love.

  Spindle hissed. There was a disjointed series of lows and curses from the neighboring rooms. We forgive the violence of your rejection of Machine Eel, but we never thought you’d hollow out yourself to that lot.

  They understood nothing, he now knew. Neither him nor Maggie Mechaine, for that’s what this was about, the slow contest amongst comradely methods to see which one was the least savage.

  He smiled secretly as Spindle followed him into the next room where, as they watched, a young woman placed an overly large pistol under her chin and pulled the trigger. Her lips, clotted with gore, moved and spoke as if nothing had happened, commentating until he ramshackled her facts, reminding her why they called it dead of night and angles and velocities and how impure the bullet was, how futile its path towards the scourge of Weatherhead for she laid many false tracks to confuse their pursuit of her and these means were part of that tentacular clusterfork of roads. Spindle listened quietly, watched without comment as he wrenched the pistol out of the girl’s hand and buffaloed her with it before tossing it aside, suckled and worthless.

  And he moved on. There was a room of poisons and a room of heights but her cheeks were flushed with a thousand ruddy rudiments of venoms and adulterations of words and below her red sobs that her head wept down her book was a kind of wing, faded white canvas that caught the wind and dragged her along with it, fluttering backdrop to her joyful scream and pitch into the White, so these two exhibits were also wrong, he told the men populating the rooms popping pills and vacuuming up vomit with their blue lips, the men icarusing off towers of shit. How little, he told Spindle, they understood Weatherhead. Perhaps it was not Hate’s game after all. This infuriated the rebel.

  In the Hung with a Loss, In the Hung with a Lass. He studied these glyphs on the fifth door for a moment, ignoring the curator. In my lung, he convulsed. He leaned forward on his knees, bile a foam in his mouth. No. Not the lung. The breath. That was what she’d meant that day of their high encounter. What was outside. Not the noose, the swing. He pushed open the door to see who dangled.

  It was Machine Eel. She winked down at him. She looked wan, blue-less. Her toes were a good three feet off the floor. She made a show of twitch and gag-gar
gle. Her reticent hands pulled at the noose, all to no avail. He stood, hands clasped before him, watching her die, waiting for her nevertheless, her lecture to ensue, as the others had. But as he waited, he felt his defiance of them shift, and a huge rock seemed to tumble out of his throat because he couldn’t bring himself to ruin this part of the museum. He couldn’t break the act: he had to just stop it, save her, whoever she was, no matter how much she looked like his mother—except for her spreading legs—

  Before he could move forward, a blurry, rich smear of color pushed past him, rushing at the hangwoman. He was shocked to see that it was the Colored Girl. With two trim movements, her nimble fingers in this moment as scarlet as the inside of a heart, a razor flashed in her hand. First, it made mute the creak of the rope. Machine Eel fell right into the other woman’s grasp. Second, it was drawn in a simple, greaseless motion along the horizontal and Machine Eel’s throat split open. He heard himself cry out as this black-blue dread let the body fall and her hips snaked through the world as she turned neat on her heel, smiled casually at him, tipped her cowboy hat and went back out into the hall.

  Oh god—oh god—there was blood everywhere, animating intimate inmate free, so free. Spindle hadn’t moved from the door, had, indeed, neatly stepped aside when that part of Love, over whom he had no power, came in and left. Face white and lips pinched, Spindle dabbed at his mouth with a piece of sandpaper.

  And finally, with mounting dread, he came to the last door. He stood there for five hours, he reckoned, patiently scraping Machine Eel’s dried-out blood off his fingernails. Spindle leaned nearby, nodding off. Hate is lazy.

  He knew what was inside, the last wrong way. The seventh door held Alaska and Alaska only. The bruise of that curve of that road that snaked off through the white by the sea’s polishing the shore. There was no one to be seen. He trudged out a few steps into the snow. It wasn’t cold at all, being false and there were no press gangs or tears or press gangs made out of tears, no eternities, no knees.

  Rapey, Frank, and the Colored Girl were at the door by the time he started laughing. He sensed them at once but didn’t turn, just kept guffawing, slapping his knees. Ha! But—but see? They got it all wrong. When they rushed to the threshold (none of the three of them dared enter) they saw him on his knees, inches deep in accumulated scurf and dandruff standing in for snow. The angle of the tires.

  Oh. Wait. He should stop talking. He stood up. He was supposed to be the curator here. His fingers curled around one another. He squatted down and threw up rumors and sand. Pushing past Love, Sir Burn and Spindle materialized, crouching down beside him, perplexed that their project had failed so badly. A history of Weatherhead was nothing but recollected death, wasn’t it? How had they erred so badly? Were there such thorns in the stem of flesh of the ruler of the city that even here, in nostalgia, she held sway?

  He ignored their questions and stared out over the painted sea. There’s only seven doors. You said there were eight. The two revolutionaries pulled him up but Frank blocked their path.

  Come, hero, Sir Burn dug his fingers into his bicep and stared down Frank.

  He looked up at Love wildly, for he was lucid, as lucid as he had been since Alaska. How’d you get into my house, he asked Frank and Rapey, shrugging off Sir Burn’s grasp, that day? And shut up—he dismissed the Colored Girl’s imminent ambiguities with a toss of his hand. Why’d you come?

  Rapey’s face contorted with anger but Frank made a motion with his hand and the younger fellow abated. Frank put his hands on his shoulders and stared flatly into his face. Dis is the eighth room, pal.

  What?

  Sir Burn cawed laughter and threw his immense hands up to the ceiling. Oh, there’s a new war coming and she must die before it begins. And we needed remittance and now we have it. The trap of the past is that it is restless and we knew that with time we’d know how you did it and now we do! Ha!

  As their opposite crowed, Love sank back, its preternatural war had exhausted itself. He looked from Love to Hate. What war are you talking about?

  Why, this is why she’s blanks and absences here today and this is why we celebrate the slash of the throat, the incestuous stomp of boot to throat, the penny forgotten in the chamber that puts copper in your skull—she is mustering for a new campaign.

  Against who? He felt the Colored Girl’s fingers on the back of his neck and fallen, frozen ivory milks icicled there for a moment. He shivered. ‘Gainst who, he repeated with fervor.

  Gympie smoothed out the creases in his cassock. The city rising on the plain. Name of Wellingwish.

  A feeble god born out of a feeble rape, an immortal no one invoked had savaged the pointless domain of a mortal no one had ever loved, he reeled for a moment. Her vulpine lust for chase and chaos was back—he had failed. Arrest this innocent fool, Law, and send him back into the black mountain! Who lives there? In that city?

  Sir Burn’s laugh was a lake drained and filled with prey. This was all a trap. There was a dam somewhere above, a dam built to fail. Why, no one. No one lives there. No one at all.

  Before anyone could react, Rapey’s arm lashed out and a knife caught Spindle just under the eye. With a grunt of pleasure, Rapey smacked the flat of his other palm into the hilt, driving the thing into the other man’s skull. This made a terrible, grating sound. Frank pushed him back as pistols flashed in the hands of Rapey and the Colored Girl, but the confraternity of atrocity ended there as, walking backwards, Love, teeth bared, eyes narrowed, and pistols levelled, ushered him down, out into the street.

  Fire the joint, Frank told the other two.

  No! That’s my home. I don’t want to leave. Just let me go back to bed. Please. They want me to kill her. She wants me for a fang. She salivates lies but just behind her bite, where I could be inside of her scream and shout forever, I found a truth. He began coughing. I should’ve stayed there. I don’t know what’s outside everything. What is it, Frank? The mountains? Her junkyard above the overcast sky?

  Rapey and the Colored Girl looked back at him, one with contempt, the other with sympathy. They were putting their hands to the bottom edge of his house and making flames there.

  Not good, not good, Frank clucked his tongue, staying in n’ all’s likely to cause you to get yourself all in a fright, see funny things, wander, fall in with bozos like dose guys—the mind’ll wander in Weatherhead, for you even more, man. The longer you’re here, the less you are. You shouldn’t be here.

  You just said I needed to not stay away from her.

  Best thing be’d to leave. He thought for a moment. Or die.

  Why am I here? Why, you fuck! Tell me! He leapt on Frank.

  Rapey and the Colored Girl were on him in an instant, pulling him off their fellow bandit. Take no truck from those coup-coup birds, Frank said, smoothing down his coat collar.

  Yeah, we’ll see. Why should I trust any of you?

  Frank gestured to the others. They crouched down in front of him and she raised her left hand and he pulled out of his coat a severed hand,, curling its fingers into a fist, held it up next to the Colored Girls. Written across their knuckles were, respectively, Love and Hate.

  Only the women can have ink, Rapey explained, because they’re Allmothers. N’ they write everythin’ an’ I mean everthin’. He grinned at his dark sister. An’ she went back in there and cut that li’l hussy all up, dincha? The Colored Girl slapped his shoulder but she smiled.

  Night of the hunter, he whispered, that hand—belonged to Machine Eel?

  We’re always fightin’, friend, Frank told him, fightin’ Hate. Ain’t no other way.

  They all three had flowers stuck in their buttonholes. Rapey had tucked the hand between his legs and was hee-hawin’ and see-sawin’ it back and forth over his monstrous bulge there.

  Pinkish puckering pink, she cautioned, punching his arm this time.

  We can’t, Frank shook his head, discuss this sort of thing.

  Yeah, well, maybe I’d had her figured for a suicid
e from the get-go, huh? Or maybe I fuckin’ drove her to do it.

  Frank and the Colored Girl exchanged a glance. Look, he threw his arm around his shoulders, I’m the practical one—

  If you start singing—

  Should I not?

  No.

  What was she wearing the day she died?

  A dress. She never wore dresses. She didn’t wear a dress that day. But do you know what she said to me? What she said to me the night before?

  Yes, the three said in one.

  He ignored them, went on, She said Buy me a flower that reminds me of you. And I didn’t know what that was. I had no fucking clue what she meant by that.

  Go ask her, then, Frank said, put your face in fronta her fist.

  The Colored Girl had been twisting and braiding a long piece of straw into a square. She held it up and then crushed it shut between her thumb and forefinger. Is it the city or the woman?

  Where is she, he roared at the city. Cunt! Come out and fight! Oh, and Weatherhead was troubled by this fight-want, not out of fear, though, but for other reasons.

  She was there, leaning against a dead tree, laughing silently and shaking her head. Leap of autumn’s leaf, she called him as she stepped out into the street, shrugged off her coat, and raised her fists. There were rolls of pennies clutched in them, he saw. Do you know that sound? When the fist closes on face? She danced towards him with a rain of blows. Fist-kissed-face.

  ⧜

  It wasn’t indifference, or consent, contented or otherwise, that drew them together in the beginning. It was, instead, a strange, confusing jumbling of both.

  Maggie Mechaine once owned a framing shop. The first time he kissed her was through a frame and when she died her head passed into froth through the frame of a windshield of the vehicle that struck her, so in this way their entire existence was bookended and full of things needing to be filled. The first time he’d fill it with a kiss. The last time she’d fill with her death. The two were not unrelated.