Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  “Equinox—like equal, you’re just fuckin’ with me. You know what it means.”

  “Day and night are the same, right? Same length?”

  “Mhm.” She leaned forward and rested her chin on her knees, nestled on her dopethrone, Chinese-eyed, blitzed, Genghised, “It’s the place,” and now he knew that Weatherhead was never far from them, never had been, “where a poem becomes something we eat because no matter what it says all the words innit become the same length and the night is so short there ain’t nothin’ else to hunt. Naw, the mean-ins are eaten, maybe that’s what I mean. Everythin’ just comes down ta havin’ the same mean-in.” Her knee was scabby. She traced a finger around the border of the wound. “And we eat ‘em all up, we lick ‘em up like eyes lookin’ at love for the first time.”

  The fingerprint powder had turned skein on the surface of the water. Whenever she shifted or lifted a bit of her skin out of the water, tiny white flecks stuck to her. He’d have to rinse her well and good when she got out, he thought. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

  “Mhm.”

  “Where were you, really, Mags?”

  “You weren’t never any good at readin’ maps, were you?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Guess, don’t ask no more.”

  She wasn’t part of a circus, part of a medical experiment, part of a cult, part of a crew filming a Hollywood blockbuster, part of a white-slavery ring, part of a biker gang, part of a prayer meeting, part of a geological expedition, part of a pilgrimage, part of a farm, part of a mind-control experiment, a groupie for a heavy metal band, apprenticed to a mechanic, a congressional page,

  “Winning.” She wasn’t part of anything, she told him. “It was jus’ me. You ain’t ever gonna understand anythin’ if you don’t understand that. It’s like the equinoxes. You’re playin’ solstices, man.”

  She was just high. She shook her head. The joint was still in the interrogation room, she pointed out. She hadn’t wanted it. She wanted him with a clear mind and portentous scars.

  “I need you to do it, keep me secret—keep me safe. ‘Member the bird? The one Randy killed? I keep thinkin’ about that bird. What put that bird there? What’re the chances? I don’t wanna be like that. I don’t wanna be random. That’s why—“ she playfully splashed the water around, “that’s why I made you pay three times. I didn’t like the chance that day. I hadta make it my own doin’, my own bindin’.”

  “You talk like a witch, sometimes, didja know that?”

  In a slender movement, she was up and out of the tub. It was so hot that day she didn’t shiver, goose up, towel off, she just stood there looking new. As he dried her off, she raised her arms, crooked her legs, bent forward slightly.

  The nights had been lost to her, but she wouldn’t untrap his dreams or his nightmares.

  Droit de la reine, she the rebellious one put her white caress alongside this unfaithful meat of deceits. He begged her again to tell him.

  “Chase, yes. Catch, no,” she denied him, “but I’ll keep your confessions close since you told me n’ all.” He hadn’t told her all. Nope, no, he hadn’t. He was addicted to the prod of alien eyelashes against his navel, to votive stakes and central fires coming together to entertain a god or goddess of blasphemy, the one’s whose undue precautions had landed them long ago in a prison of sighs and fleeting looks, making love to one another across the distance between cells, in the hopes of creating a bastard who can carry their clarion call back out into the world, prophet of betrayal, prophet of assignation, prophet of the barely-chewed. He, for his part, had been spat back out. He was an inventor of oases. “We’ll call it even,” she mocked him now as she negotiated her way through the detritus of her return, tapping a finger on her bat which, he saw, still leaned by the front door. Her walk confessed a crackle of ozone that hellhounded out from her bare thighs. She refused to dress. He’d never seen her so alive. He couldn’t decide if she wanted him to take her or—or—or what? She seemed unexploited and virginal, an impossible, indomitable extension of his rage and his sex

  “I’ve left maps for you,” she bit his ear with her word-knives, “to find me next time when I’m gone, for when I might not ever come back. But it won’t be because I wanna stay gone. You gotta follow me, come after me. I’ll send help if I can.”

  The next day, the longest day of hate he’d ever known, she left early to open her shop and set about to work. She took her bat. He didn’t see her until the next morning. Naked, he tiptoed over the floor. On his knees under her table, he gently pried apart the puzzle-within-a-puzzle and found one of these maps, a map to a place that, for Maggie Mechaine, would never exist again.

  “We’re not even,” he said and wept into his hands.

  (39 Down) I am a Blind Eye Book Pushing on the Daisies.

  They stayed up all night, warily watching the other until rain chilly rain on the day was the rhythm she beat on her belt buckle. He sat and stared out the frame wondering where the wall had gone. He’d never seen it rain in Weatherhead before. Rain in Weatherhead meant war, whispered the bitter cradle, and spending the night trying to stay awake and listening to her terrible, congealing tales of her blood-spill and defiling of the city was like sleeping next to an open wound snoring pus. Occasionally he’d prod her gently with seemingly innocent questions: Why did she keep the pitches inside the wooden heart of the stone hospital? Why had that building awoken? She said it protected her, but from what? Him? But it was when he asked, where did the wood come from, for it was alien to Weatherhead, but for her bats and things, for there were no live trees in the city that he’d seen, save for the dead and dying ashes, that she turned peculiar and ramshackle.

  There had been six secret elements protecting the city when she found it, she explained. She’d disarmed them all, possessed them fully now, had converted them into places where the citizens of Weatherhead could practice protecting lovers, usually scarecrows or sallow dolls, or practice dying which she treated as the same thing, all save stone which would not suffer softly at all. The stone churches of Weatherhead, she told him in a low, silken voice, were eleventy-five in number and were more constant than the other buildings in the city, harder to pull down, yet less alive. He puzzled after this, teasing out a meaning from the legends of her poetry-speak as she talked in her low, curled doom-tone. Maggie Mechaine had been about as religious as a brick. Yes, but what had she told him once? “I’ve always loved how much you love god”?

  I leave the stones in, she said, stones are the veins of the earth, did you know?

  What’s the blood?

  We are, she answered, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Around what he guessed passed as midnight, there were screams in the street outside. He had decided then and there to try an experiment. Churches, he drew closer to where she laid, propped up on her elbow, how deadly she did not look in that moment, how suddenly meek and half-pretty, how content with her flower-word love she might be on a lost, storm-tossed night by the sea when the sea sought a kiss against the lighthouse and threw its wet lips up against the window where she sat, churches are one of the few buildings that never sleep. Did you know that? They stay up all night waiting, guarding, ‘cause rock is patient.

  Hmph. Hospitals stay up all night, too, are vigilant. And police stations.

  He blanched, but he pressed further. All these places have something in common: somewhere there is someone they are waiting for or protecting. A church is not only sanctuary or station for messages to go up, it’s a place where armies can clash and messages can come down from on high. It’s not only a shelter but it’s a parade of all the weathers that there is no way to hide from, the weathers we can’t see, the ones the gods make. I can’t remember the name of my home anymore, or the address of the house that my wife and I built, but I can always remember my sleepwalking church—my work—the place where I was snatched away from the grave by men and women with the gift of knives while my wife stood
by me and read to me—

  She had red hairs, like me, part of the red weather band? She looked confused suddenly as if she had no control over her words and fetched about herself with her blues. As I said, I don’t pull down the stones. I can let my knuckles breathe in the walls—I like to hit churches—but I can’t—won’t tear them down. Let’s not talk of weathers, she pressed a hand to her temple, they are murdered things in these lands, inventions for the souths of men and women to tremble at, storms that discontinue day and night— She sat up and drew into herself. Or hospitals, which are drinking-holes for terror and cauterizations about the face and hands with tears and nail-digs. With the sole of a boot, for they hadn’t undressed for the simple reason that no love would be made in this hovel they’d found to spend the night in, she rolled her wooden stick—her bat, he quickly corrected himself—back and forth, back and forth. And as for the other, I don’t know what police are—forgotten psalms from some bible or another, maybe? A suffering place whose map walks beside us?

  Then he remembered she’d told him that the dying form in the hospital had been the last law in Weatherhead. Oh, how the devils played with her tongue and the corners of her mouth! That place, it wasn’t just a hospital—it was a courthouse, a jailhouse, guardian out of a dream called Once. His eyes rolled up in horror/joy. That place—it was his. He’d never white-bled orphans or put paid to the loneliness of Maggie Mechaine—but he had always kept her secret, kept her safe. This is why he’d drawn out the pitches—she was playing a long, wrong game of faustian hammer-smash-face with Weatherhead. That place, that living building, with its lone, wooden, infinitely bedridden patient filled with both musicks and velocities, was a watchtower. He wondered, as he watched her discomfort, what one could see from the roof—

  She plucked up her bat and was drawing in the dirt, an eye with two knives on either side of it. He watched this for a while, oddly content with his discovery. He was supposed to be here. This knowledge satisfied him. But he deigned to press her further. Their conversation had unsettled, uncentered the tyrant of Weatherhead. You said once, when I first came, that you liked to walk in their ruins—of churches.

  And? she shot back.

  Have you ever pressed flowers between the stones? Pressed them in there like between the pages of a book?

  Churches are single stories. One pagers.

  He gestured to her sketch, And what about wood? Did it die in its sleep, too? By your hand? Did you tear down all the wooden houses? The ones with unreadable epitaphs, part of a black question—

  Enough, she barked. She rubbed her eyes. Nice try, though. You will always sound foreign in Weatherhead, I think. She wince-grinned at him. My punishment for showing you where I sleep? It’s barely dawn and the rain makes me stick to myself.

  He watched her shift her position back and forth with a grunt. Raising her arms, she tugged her tunic off over her head. His eyes studied the runes on her bosom, printed on the shirt beneath. Count, he murmured, why do you wear this symbol?

  It’s a number name, she answered, I wear it when I alter cats—altercate.

  Maggie Mechaine had loathed cats. It’s the number 51 written in romans.

  According to your unfailing love.

  He blinked without eyes. There was a man once, this is his number-name. I think. Those men you brawl, the ones you fight in the circle that the people of Weatherhead draw in close around you, it’s always the same man. This man.

  She shrugged. All fools rejoice in the crushing of their bones. Wash me with all the blood you want and I’ll still emerge, whiter than snow.

  Or part of it.

  She bristled. With a grave-robber’s fling, she caught up her bat and threw it behind her nape, hooked her wrists around it and turned one way and the other, stretching her back. Don’t try to put your pitch in someone else’s chorus, stranger. Here, off-key means to be a prisoner.

  Is that what I am?

  She yawned and frowned all at once. I’m not sure what you mean. No one keeps you here.

  You do.

  No. That’s your doing, not mine. She upbraided him for smoking memories as he did, letting himself be quickened by the non-existent rhythms of things like love and sex and guilt. She, for her part, wore shadows like wool and took the ages of tyrants as lovers, not the tyrants themselves, so what did she have to be accused of? Jailor? Tormentor of the people of Weatherhead? Rapist and thief? In depravity, there was more to make an angel weep than in all the world’s ecstasies and martyrdoms. Here, she said, there was no need to create stories of witches whose solution to everything was to simply devour the children. I work simple magicks. You ask after wood. Wood has an excruciating torment at work in its contortions, it twists and bends and branches in agony, trying to escape from the core, from the roots, from its beginnings, trying to wrench itself out of the earth—I tear it out, yes, slash it, burn it, but, in the process, I free it.

  But where does it come from? Where do you find it? And what about the roots? Roots are firstborn and sunken.

  She stood up, towered over him as she never had. I have to go now. You might not see me for some time. She led him out into the nervous street. Crowds had begun to gather, drawn to her dark herald. I’m taking my war to Wellingwish. I must prepare. Hold this. She handed him a roll of white tape. She began mummying her hands up and as he watched her, people, drawn by invisible signs and inaudible summons, began to coalesce and crowd around them, forming a circle. She laughed at his mute, wide-eyed protest. No, don’t be silly. A brute in chains appeared from out of the crowd, another one of the 51ers he’d pressed her about, led by two old women, towering over her by several feet, his drooping moustaches rimed with sweat and cage, curled up at the sight of her. She signaled to the jailors to release the giant and she stepped into the circle, shaking out her hands.

  Dash, he went to the giant fellow’s side. Startled, disarmed, the behemoth took a step back. Your name—it’s Randy—she wears your symbol—your number—

  The man, more beast than anything else, swore at him in a dialect he’d never heard, planted both massive hands on his chest and pushed him roughly away. She, too, gave him an unusual look, he thought she was about to smile, until she turned at her opponent’s cry. She clapped her fist into hand, then, and she lashed out in a beautiful, fertile movement and her fist, leaping up with all of her in a slow, gentle arc, smashed into chin. Ah, she cooed as she landed on her feet in a crouch, the giant reeling backwards into the crowd’s arms, hear? The moment—that moment we talked about. Edge and door, mouth and tongue, paint and teeth—she panted harder. Her violence stirred up his blood and he wanted her then, would’ve beaten down that fellow himself, had her right there in front of everyone, the great rape of Weatherhead!

  Why, was all he could say.

  Weatherhead hates me, she grinned evil. You should ask Love.

  So he did.

  The train through Weatherhead stunned him by running even if off of rumor only. The wound in its track had finally been filled in with loose earth and rocks and her bridge of dresses had been replaced with proper metal ties and spikes. Where the dresses had gone, he did not know. Some said Up. Others had other ideas.

  She takes them on campaigns, methinks, a curious fellow crouched on the train platform told him. He had puppets on each fat hand, and a fig leaf obscuring the genital fury of his forehead. He recognized this obese fellow, recognized him from a faraway room that was a day, a single day.

  He’d thought he might find Love, or at least pieces of it, at the train station where people always seemed to leave it. He was right. Frank was there, out of the rain, under an awning, miming reading a newspaper and smoking gently into the morning, his Genghis-khan eyes moving from right to left over the air between his outstretched hands. When he approached, Frank made a good show of folding up the nothing and stowing it into his pocket. He nodded and tipped him a lit cigarette out of his sleeve, an old Maggie Mechaine trick.

  Thanks, Frank.

  He stud
ied Frank. Frank was what he’d call nigger-shy back when he’d hated, that is, one who never looked one in the eye, shifty, ever-suspicious. Maggie hated this phrase, hated all his hatreds, dared him to give her a reason for them, but he couldn’t or didn’t want to. Here where everyone was hated by the one woman who ruled them, his former prejudices seemed pale, pathetic and regrettable.

  But Frank was Asian or a Mongol or something, not black. A Mongol Sinatra, he was. He smiled. Maggie would’ve liked Frank best. Frank’s turn-o’-the-eye was different, innocent, it really was shy like he knew that you really wouldn’t want him staring you down with the full force of his steppe-brother gaze. Were there hoofmarks on them, around the pupils or—

  Frank nodded to him again, ducking his head down into the collar of his yellowish great-coat, What’s the rumpus?

  They spoke for a while about nothings, few though they were in that place. They watched the fat puppeteer re-enacting scenes from films he vaguely recognized and Frank showed him a trick, a devachanic songster’s trick: he called over the fatman and with a good-natured grin, asked him to remove his puppets; once his chubby hands were exposed, Frank unfolded them for him, palm up, fingers out in fives and crooned in a lovely baritone,

  Everything here, Down or Up, how many, how much, and how far,

  has between ‘em all, a beautiful equation of parts, in all da factors

  so dat when ya put ‘em all together dey become harmonious music,

  and there is between all a’ yas with the right kinda eyes, a similar harmony.

  As Frank sang, he bent forward and kissed each fingertip of the fatman’s hand. The latter didn’t pull away; in fact, he began to giggle, for as Frank’s lips lifted from each digit, a copper coin was left there perched on each fingertip. When the minting song ended, Frank cuffed the fatman on the shoulder with a broad grin and bade him a fare-thee-well, but not before he plucked up one of the coins, Gratuity, he explained. Elated, the fatman moved off, hands held out like martyrs before him, the glint of the coin undiminished by the rains. People ran from him in terror, screaming.