Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Ah. He stood up. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And so have you. We think of death as something final, lasting.

  She rose with him. It is spring, with all its attendant flowerings and fucks. Spring is when queens of quiet lands declare that all the heads be cut off the snowmen!

  Across the way, one of the ropes tethering the house to Weatherhead snapped all firecracker. A man walked by, jumped back, stooped and scooped up an apple. With a headhunter’s crisp bite, he took a chunk out of it and ran off pale. Something swayed in the weather. She grabbed his hands in excitement as he told her, In death as alive as alive!

  Together they sprung a quick step circle in place, and she gasped, Spring is the place of children’s blood, thawed out of winter, chloroform over the mouth of the maze! Oh, spring is so stubborn! No matter how much alike winter makes everyone seem, spring wakes up all the names, wakes up all the hair and hands.

  Crack went another rope on the wooden house. Out of sleep a blue height reached down and for a moment the overcast grey shroud above seemed very unsure of itself. On the air he tasted ripeness, the supple honeys that flow after funerals.

  Please—

  You’re nothing more than confused, midnight thunder, stranger. She stared up into his eyes. You always steal back inside the houses I capture, thunder and siren. Why don’t you just leave? I’ll kill you. I swear I will. I won’t be able to stop it.

  What if I’m already dead? At this, her brow wrinkled and her teeth sank into her lip. He took a step back, just in case. Has anyone ever told you that they loved you?

  She walked away a bit and knelt down, kneaded dirt with her fingers. Around them, Weatherhead greyed again, rotted again. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why did you come here?

  As a reminder, I think. To remind you that once—you were alive and you were my wife.

  Stop. I’m as alive now as I ever have been.

  Then where is the spring you sing of?

  I sing without a pitch. I don’t sing of spring. I sing of autumn.

  I had a dream, too, he told her, a dream of being thrown down a well.

  That was you that did it, you great idiot. Her eyes sharpened. Weatherhead is misbehaving these last few days, she said with a mischievous, deadly coy smile, with all that smacks of poetry and spring-times and spring-tithes. Let’s not speak of dreams any longer, dreams are not supple—they’re only distant outposts in a suspect empire. I can show you something, something better than a fistful of fog or sugar. Come, come with, said each of her mouths, according to the song. Come with me and I’ll show you. Come and see how.

  There was a lone person dying in the derelict hospital of Weatherhead. This time the hospital was an overturned fishing boat of some kind. Archaeologists think Weatherhead was once under the sea, a frozen sea, she said as they entered. I always assumed I had drowned.

  He paused outside and was brought up short. A knobby head was poked around the corner of the inverted boat, watching them. Is that a dinosaur?

  She stifled a yawn, one hand on the hatch leading inwards. Mhm.

  He walked casually over and poked likewise his head around the edge. It was indeed a dinosaur. A strap around its extinct neck held a tray of wares. He returned to her a moment later. Here. I bought you a flower. He held out his hand. A crimson blush purred in his palm.

  She recoiled. Where did you get that, she demanded to know.

  From the dinosaur, he explained.

  Extinctions stick together, eh? Things dead are best left dead and things not dead have no place with the dead, was all she said and, refusing his gift, bade him follow.

  They were up in the hull. He peered through the curtains. Who is it?

  It wasn’t a woman anymore. Last time he’d been here, it’d been a woman. Whoever it was, they had begun to grow into and become part of the hospital bed. The latter, he saw, too, had once been metal and now was wood. The patient, whoever he or she was, was growing into or out of the wooden frame.

  The last line in Weatherhead, she whispered in reverence.

  I thought you said she—he was the last law in Weatherhead.

  No, that’s me, fool.

  So is that you, then? Someone told me it was the librarian. Is it a book?

  She snorted. Are you looking for a book? I destroyed all the books.

  The patient murmured and it was the voice of a backtracked song. They scoobied and shaggied forward. She stared down at the reposing form. It broadcasts from time to time.

  Like a radio.

  No. Like a very wide spell. A broad cast. Wizard’s curses spoken into a mirror. When I first found it, it was a map—a map glued to the bottom of a table.

  He paled. She stared intently at him and asked after his sudden pallor. Nothing. I just—I remember this—the bottom of a table. And a book made out of faces.

  Not a dress? Not a dress made out of faces?

  Nope. Definitely a book.

  Interesting. She tapped her chin.

  He pointed at the thing in the bed, the thing that was the bed. What’s it made out of?

  Wood, I think. You can come closer and touch it.

  He did. He ran his hand down its fine old-carved surface. Its contours and turns-of-the-knife reminded him of the totem poles he and Maggie had seen in Alaska. What were those? Stories stacked on top of stories?

  Her smile was a daisy up at him when he said this. It’s a peculiar kind of wood because it changes every time I come here. The whole building does. I make it do things. I think it depends on the pitch.

  Whose? Yours? But she said nothing, so instead he asked, Is it a coffin? He could see hinges on the opposite side as he walked around it.

  Coffin? What’s that? She splayed out her fingers like a pounceful spider across the flat part of the lid, where the heart might be, the heart of the woods. Maggie had the same gesture: she’d stab all five fingers straight down next to a crossword, over a particularly troublesome patch of jigsaw. If she knew how to play the piano, it’d be a five-pronged violentissimo on ivory. Cough-in? No, she shook her head, but I think I lost my virginity inside this box. Nowadays, this is where I keep all the pitches of Weatherhead.

  His eyebrows, wherever they were, leapt up. The pitches. Is mine in there, then?

  No, I keep yours here, it seems. Hand in pocket drew out a white sphere. There was blood sewn into it in funny symmetries, dotted bloods. It was, he saw with a choke of ill-prepared recognition, a baseball.

  This promise of spring made him bold, as all courtships must be: It’s you. Oh. Ah. But the season ends with autumn, doesn’t it?

  She pocketed the sphere. It’s nothing so simple, my—stranger. A knife flashed in her hand, but her other hand came up to caution him. She raised the knife to his throat. Before I came here, I passed bitter seasons in the hidden worlds. The agony was great. All I could hear was the rush of blood to my head, to my feet, to my mound, to my diamond—and, trust, I was well-versed in the knife-in-hand version of things, you just never knew it. You ask after your pitch? See? How clever I was with the needle-and-thread, but, oh, my friend, there are many other magicks I knew, so many other—

  Like what, he croaked. Here she was: awake and alive. The knife was her mouth, drawing a thin bead of blood just under the pockmarked, luckshot-strewn adam’s apple from his eveful eden.

  The putting-in, the pity work, the delicate magicks of the facet-finding, the puzzle, warmwoods—you never knew, did you, what a witch you put the absurd dream of your milks into, eh? This is why we resort to museums! To sky-stutter! What happened to all the weather, then, man? I should cut you up real good and litter the sky with you. But she was kidding, she was only joking, she was only smiling, and the knife was not-a-knife, it was a ticklish, tickling flower. Not all my verbs are black.

  Pinning her arms down and making her writhe was a thrum under. A movement caught his eye. The wood, it’s breathing.

  She nodded. All wood breathes. All things breathe, even when dead. Especially when dead, she reminded h
im, breath flows from throat to throat. That’s pirate’s magick, thieves’ magic, the kind that works off of honey. We all have stingers in our tongues and no one’s allergic to Love anymore. Bee mine. She started giggling and it spread to him. A funny thing happened then as they laughed together gently razor: his worn duster suddenly became heavy, full of lead, like, and his hands scrambled in his pockets which suddenly bulged with—what—

  His giant hands brought out, two in a clutch, four more of the same white spheres, they started spilling out of him, he was an unhinged, runaway coffin as his wooden-colored coat was rent asunder under the avalanche of pitches spilling out of him. Fuck— He struggled to rise up from the bed, but it was part of him now, part and parcel. She dipped her eyes down at him in horror, dug around in his coat, pulled it open wider, a cascade of unimprisoned pitches falling and bouncing around the room and she scattered too, her coat thirsty for wind billowing behind her as she scrambled, trying to scoop them all up. He half-rose, struggling against the roots binding him down and now he could taste metal again, like he did that day, the day he was taken away by Love to this place, the taste of that gun and he looked down and the bed was just a bed, orphaned and metal and as the last bobbing ball rolled off its edge, he swung his legs over and moved to help her.

  No! she screamed and batted his hands away. Mine! She was plucking them up one by one in her left hand, transferring them to her right hand, her right hand tossing them back into the sarcophagus lying open on the bed, where just a moment before he had been, when the entire structure tilted suddenly to one side with a crashing, gnashing sort of groan, the kind that old monsters made out of door-frames and jumblesticks would’ve made as they lurched through violator’s groves chasing the children who stole from their fruits. Oh, you great and secret fool! She shot to her feet. We’ve awakened it! Find your city legs, she cautioned in lush whispers, holding a hand out to silence his yelp of surprise, the hospital is standing up.

  He clutched involuntarily at his wretched, untimely knees as the floor pitched to the left and right, sending the remaining stolen pitches of Weatherhead pinballing this way and that. She skidded across the floor on her knees, this way and that, deftly sweeping them up and lobbing them into the wooden-heart that had taken the place of the hospital bed. Aorta fix this, she snapped. Horror-wise, he snatched a glance back over his off-kilter shoulder and saw an arboreal throb. They were trapped in the chest of the thing.

  She met his panicked stare and started black-laughing. It’s going to fight another building. The wooden house, I think, and the latter will lose. Must lose. No house escapes Weatherhead! Come! We’ll find the eyes and be the stares!

  As they climbed up through the ramshackle, body-building wood structure, he cried an apology. Had he woken the hospital? She shook her head. The house-in-servitude had broken free thanks to him, the upset of the pitches, the heart-attack. Here’s the starecase, she said. And, indeed, there was a small wardrobe of sorts set into the wall between the two arched windows. Inside they found a variety of stares. They sorted through them for a moment until they found ones appropriate to the occasion, peeled them out of their glass scabbards and began smoothing their sticky sides out over the windows.

  Dammit—

  From their hiding places under the stares, they saw a shorter, squat building rearing up, making and unmaking concrete fists and with a whirligig war-whoop, they leapt to their feet as the hospital’s wooden palm easily caught the first punch and lashed out with its free hand, delivering a solid uppercut to the fleeing house.

  He stood, hands braced against the walls, watching her reds blousle and tousle in the wind the fight stirred up, shouting out the eye of the hospital at the combatants and he realized how little he knew this woman.

  ⧜

  Maggie Mechaine once disappeared for two weeks. She vanished without warning, without notice, without telling anyone.

  This was during their last spring in their old, first home, before they moved to Alaska. It was May or June, he thought, just before summer, just after the unfeathering of that unlucky dove, that dove that persisted in haunting her, rising to her lips, half-smile, half-horror—she was already half-rare to him, sirens out of white emergencies signaling a distant, shattered body, but he had privilege to nothing under her eyelid, not after Summer.

  On that first day, he learned of her disappearance only when people—customers— kept calling the house, wondering why the frame shop wasn’t open. He was off that day and where had she gone off to? To Distant Stan? To buy pot? If she’d walked, then, yes. Driving still mostly confounded her; she didn’t like it, like she already knew how she’d die. But then she didn’t come home that night. The batting cages were Maggie-less. He checked her store, in case. Had she fallen? Gotten hurt? Kidnapped? She was the wife of an up-and-coming detective who the villains feared.

  Time out-stripped him finally, that impossible tough, that’s what Summer called him, and something wrong and wretched began to smolder back behind his throat. He checked her room. Things were gone, yes. Her stash of weed she kept in the small wooden, heart-shaped box he’d bought for her was gone. The box was gone. So were her pencils, some clothes, her bat. Her bat?! Essentials all missing. Parts of Maggie Mechaine.

  He was a detective, he reminded himself. There were always answers, processes, rituals for the finding, but maybe not this time. He took this all in. Impossible. She’d left him. He sat down on the edge of her second-bed, the one she used to sleep on when he was on night duty, and the one she used now when she remembered his infidelities between smoke-banks, and found himself twisting and untwisting his fingers around each other. Where had she gone? She was all suppose-shes, did-shes, and what-ifs and he didn’t like it. Maggie Mechaine was, if anything, entirely predictable. She always had been. This was one of the reasons he—he what? He stared down at the floor. There was a penny there. Maggie had always forbidden him from drowning pennies from the year she was born. 1973, he read. She thought it was bad luck to drown those pennies, voodoo pennies, she called them, voodoo economics, he called it. He tucked it under her pillow and wished she was there, was glad she wasn’t.

  As each day passed, he went to great lengths to convince himself that she was with another man. She had to be. He found, to his horror, that he wanted her to be. He stopped asking himself in a panic, What if she never came back? Instead, he started wondering with something approaching satisfaction, indeed, what if she never came back? Over the last couple of years, he’d gradually warmed to the idea that his confession of sleeping with other women occasionally, and the last time wholeheartedly, as a devotion to the coronation of sin and the death of the singleheart, would drive her away. He’d gone out of his way to convince her, albeit indirectly, to do the same, too, hadn’t he? Yes, he had, he confessed to himself. Was this all his own doing? And why did he keep returning to her room, smelling her pillow, sitting in her ache-backed chair?

  A great and grand fool he was. Now, she was gone and his deafness to her, combined with his attempted corruption of her, so thickened by the malaise of the time and his own selfish seasons, cracked and Maggie was decoded against a backdrop of anger, want, and suicided preservation. For all his machinations and crimes, his war against her, he wanted nothing so desperately than to have her back, have her his, couldn’t take the idea that she’d forged an amnesty with the rest of humanity and was haunting new rituals somewhere else. It might’ve been pride or jealousy prompting his fox-hunt, sure. Love, with its quartet artillery, might, after a sound beating, gently remind him that it was love. A great and grand fool he was.

  By the third day, he’d come around to the idea of sounding out the few people who knew her. He undertook this cautiously, for less that he didn’t want to alarm anyone, like her brother, but more for that the greater a fool he appeared to be for letting Maggie Mechaine slip through his fingers just like that, the greater a fool he would, in truth, be. But her brother knew nothing, hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks, nope. Why?
Oh, thought she’d mentioned calling, made me think of calling, see what’s up, we should all get together sometime, uh-huh, bye. Maybe Distant Stan, nee Stanley Magoo, according to public records, knew something but that purveyor of spring’s greens, keeper of the constant season, drawn out of his sanctum, at least his head, anyway, could only tell him:

  “Hey, compadre, I just keep her in leaf, she keeps me in time—“

  He stared down at the monstrous parachute pants crinkling before him. Would it slow this behemoth’s fall? “What’s that mean?”

  “She frames moments for me. Me right now to time is like helium to air.” He threw up his hands. “Gimme a moment though, it’s like tying a balloon to your wrist at a bris! Snip snap snout! No, I haven’t seen her in a coupla weeks.”

  Silver just laughed at his plight because he couldn’t not tell her everything. “She can take care of herself, better than you can, apparently, ha! Sometimes people need to get away, build a fort out away from everyone else, or else you end up building it out of everyone else.”

  He didn’t know what that meant, but, “You know where she is, don’t you?”

  Of course she did, but “Ow! My ear!” and she hung up on him.

  By the fifth night, he started sleeping in her room. He’d gained notoriety around town for his soporifics, that is, when confronted with a case more complex than usual, and once forensics’d had their way with the place, he’d stay over a night in the place in question, gloves, coveralls, and all, go through the motions of being the person who lived there as much as he could garner from the details provided. The breakers of bodies and constitutions always left hallmarks: sometimes the most ordinary habits, placements, and arrangements meant more than all the science in the world. There was always life lived behind every death.

  What did he find? Not much. Maggie Mechaine was the perfect criminal. She had been liberated from the world, it seemed, leaving nary a trace to betray her whereabouts and well-being. That she might return seemed half-likely, though: she’d left behind her barometer, still nailed to the wall and he tapped a finger on it every time he went in or out of her room; her name was still about, her brother remembered her, Silver remembered her, he even managed to find familiar-looking headbangers at the club they went to from time to time who remembered her name—but none of these people knew where she was; she’d left behind an unfinished puzzle, very unlike her—it was called “Droste Effect”—it was a puzzle of unsorted puzzle pieces—he sat down in front of it occasionally during those two weeks, swore at it, and never managed to find a single piece whereas she’d already done about half of it—each piece, he saw had another puzzle printed on it, unimaginably tiny; she had a pink t-shirt that said “Cruciverbalist”—his silver sister had given it to Maggie for her last birthday—the only one that wasn’t black, that wasn’t a band, stuffed in her drawer; papers for the doll: an unopened box of tampons in the bathroom and an unopened pack of rolling papers laid neatly on her cutting board, parallel to the blade. All these things betokened a prodigal return, not splinters after clawing at the bottom of a crucifix. All he wanted was her to come back.