Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She was speaking softly soft, downy words that begged stroke and caress. He’d never heard the ruler of Weatherhead speak thus. But he could barely make out her sing-song cant. He felt the hunter shift uneasily behind him. At once he knew that the rifle had been brought to bear at him should he betray their presence. He nodded into the meat of himself.

  She knelt down, first lifting up the playful tease of the edge of her sky-slip, that dress that was moon-backed cloud at midnight. She reached out, forming a rake out of her fingers and drew it through the dirt, making long and perfect ruts. He caught fragments of her witch fever’s prayer:

  Barrows—

  And

  A sickly silence—

  And

  A straggling few—in deep despair—a few—clung to the hope that springs—human breast.

  She was drawing something in the dirt with the lead in the black-smeared tips of her fingers. And why had they always been black in the morning? She was making deep cuts in the earth, five by five by five—

  —tore the cover off— and she whipped out a long white, rough-edged strip of cloth. Had she torn it off her dress—

  —when the dust had lifted—

  She rocked forward on her haunches. He could see a waterline of mud skirting her feet. She looked like a widow sifting through graves looking for just the right one, but she was smiling.

  —then from 5000 throats—

  Or 51, he thought in his zealotry.

  She, sudden bottle of sun, tipped herself forward as if to straddle the troughs she’d rent in the mother-ground.

  —It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat—

  What was she doing? Was she feeding the dust with her exhaust? Her movements were as intermittent as the logic of her words. She moved up and down the finger-troughs. With mild disgust he considered that she was urinating her curses down onto the dirt, but, no—

  He strained forward. He heard a –click!—behind him and he thought better.

  She peered down between her feet. Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt.

  He saw. Not water, but blood. Not urine, but blood. Not sweat, but blood.

  From his watching hour, he could see that it was blood on the ends of her fingers that she tested her betweens with. Into the rough trough she’d carved she wiped her hand. She did this several times before, a look of utter and wonderful contentment on her face, she hitched her white dress up around her hips and squatted there over the trough. He could hear her humming. A delicate stippling of blood. There was a certain, unspoken elegance now to her bleeding into the dust for he’d never seen her bleed like this before. He’d missed seeing her steaming reds make veins in the snow, gratuitous gift for the spring.

  Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore—“Kill him!”

  His stomach turned in horror, and there was no heart to race: she’d stolen blood, all their bloods and now she used them as fluvial poetry to feed the mud. This blood she gave ground was the eviction of unfulfilled promises and the promise of more, a never-ending collaboration of biology, color, and Love. She was menstruating with all the bloods of Weatherhead, all except her own.

  Is she forever? No one is sure. What is she writing there in the prayer of the dirt? A new bible for a new kind of god: the one who—

  A new sound came to his hears and he peered back through the split wall of his deadhome. She was laughing—wiping her hand in the dampening, dark dirt and laughing. But there is no joy in Mudville.

  He wanted to scream, but her thin, dour lips were traced out of fire, how he’d forgotten, and as livid and etch as the molten can make the word and he watched as the drunken soil, veils plucked with the dripsmack of her fit, succulent reds, veins swollen with her crimson soups, redolent with heady alphabets and tricks and ornaments that disguised jest as betrayal and desire as murder, these veins, the troughs she’d cut into the plain, attained new, horizontal velocities and began to lengthen and stretch, disappearing under the ruined house, extending outwards and outwards back towards Weatherhead. Blood was fuel for the engines of the city. She fed its veins with her blood.

  She stood then. She shrugged off her slip and stood there, naked, rapacious, and scabbard. Her red-stained fingers she raised up and as if they were little harpoons of erasure their stabs at the air brutishly smashed out the timber above her head. He pressed his eyes and insanities against the crack, one as wide as the other.

  Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. As she said this, she came alive once more inside the clock. The end of the nocturne had come. She rubbed her hands together quickly and, as if hugging herself, wrapped her arms around her thin, little frame and pressed two red handprints on her sides. Afterwards, these here—and he after me, behind, maybe, above, distant, tomorrow, so much, not enough—

  She meant him. All his stations. He dug his fingers into the rotting wood on either side of his head. It was neither witch’s blood nor killer’s blood nor the blood of widow or widower—it was first-night’s blood, knight’s blood, boat’s blood that refuses to freeze. Shalott.

  She was looking up at the furious sky of this country. Folding himself down, he did the same. The circles of her blood were spells that made thunder envious for there was deep magic in them deeper than its boom, softer than its absence.

  Up there, the clouds were bones stacked up against the dawn, as they always were in Weatherhead, but—there! There it shone through! The cracks above became swollen with light. Her voice grew as he scrabbled back in the dust, screaming, Is that the sun? Ohmigod—run! Run! The light!

  She had gone beautifully mad. Dawn can’t be undone. Ten thousand hands seized him.

  ⧜

  Menstruation—men are constantly puzzled by it. He was never sure why this was or why so many men found it repulsive, untouchable, but it’d never bothered him. Maybe it was ‘cause Maggie had such vivid reds: her hair, her blood she spilt from time to time, in the sink, in the toilet—he was always fascinated by her reds. If he had confidence in one thing in her troubled whole, it was her reds. It was so strange to catch them asleep and see them unviolent and unkindled: tucked into her ball of sleep she anointed her pillow with red, her crimson reign over the dreams refused by wakefulness.

  She always went to bed much later than him. During these first few years together, he’d been initiate-cursed by being forced on night duty and she’d stay up with him, if distant, and she fell into a nocturnal habit of working on her impossible puzzles while he was slouching about the city looking for bad things and bad people. She’d eat sleep after he returned at dawn for three or four hours before she left to open her shop while he slept and she’d be home in time so they could eat dinner together. They never talked much. Occasionally she’d present him a finished puzzle, “finished while you were coppin’ around” as if it were a dance, a feel, or a cavort.

  To the blood, though. He’d always been fascinated with her blood. She had a very violent pulse—her tics had led him into her—a crimson-beaconed lighthouse of vein and capillary—and he could feel it especially if he placed his hand over the back of hers. There she beat against everything. She had very pronounced veins there. She had been alive. Not ever dead. He knew this from the blood. He had no compunctions against piercing the mantle of her blood, this blood or that blood; he could stab her in every season, smother his legend in her red-wept honeys because blood is flesh’s bet on the race of debt against debt and he felt that he owed her nothing. More, he thought nothing is owed to anyone ever whatsoever. So, let it spill. Oh, don’t misunderstand, he’d never taken a knife or blade to her, never struck her in anger and used the magnets of his knuckles to draw scarlet ore up out of the mines of her lips, as much as she might have wanted him to, but he did know her blood well.

  In the beginning, she had bled almost every time they tried to make love and somehow this thought delighted and enthralled him. This was the only way he could get her, maybe, every slide
of him into her a first-night, a kind of renewable virginity powered by a loin of surrender—surrender to him—that was his and his alone. This was why, he thought, he didn’t seek out other women in the beginning. He didn’t need to. His wolf’s spirit was sated almost daily by her face like an angry child’s staring up at him in frustration as she suffered both their desires, assuaged by the crimson forge she put at his disposal. No, he never minded the blood. Until that day she died when he got too much. He’d never been prepared for how much blood there could be in that little network of hers.

  “Your little heart beats so fast when you’re asleep,” he informed her.

  “I get ready for morning before I even wake up, I guess,” she yawned, put the back of her hand to her mouth, then put it into his hair. “Little?”

  He shrugged. Why had he called it little? He stared at the sun through her hair. What color did you call that?

  So not dead, she stretched herself out beside him. She was naked, he saw, somehow. She begged the question, “What wakes up with a kiss?”

  He had never known the answer until now, in Weatherhead: her camouflaged heart. Her love of the loud to drown out the quiet inside, the smoke for hiding, and the dresses—the dresses she wore almost always. Had she never not worn them? How could he have been so wrong about that?

  She is nothing hidden, he reminded himself as he was dragged away across the plain, torn from the grove by walking scratches-on-the-skin, scabs awoken by his trespasses—why? Nothing had ever healed over, he shouted in their faces. He pointed at his own arms, the sleeves torn off in the struggle, the frozen alphabets there that he’d etched with the point of a toothbrush.

  You remember now: Every morning she put on the same dress. It was pale and skintight and had a few freckles here and there. It was skinny, too skinny, the bosom was fleeting, interrupted only by her terror-rousing butterfly curve holding up her legs, the only part of her, the miserly part of her, that could be called sexy.

  “I like your ass in that.”

  She looked down. “I’m not wearing anything. Did you hit your eye?”

  He had hit it on her. He didn’t dare say this out loud, though. That she was pure white filth, something beyond white trash, but still below whatever came after that in the hierarchy of contemporary American castes, did not obligate him to do so. This thought, only a half-jest, made him laugh.

  This sound pricked at her ears and she looked over the top of her reading at him. She set it down and began peeling an orange. This act sent a spray of citrus across her sternum. His poorly-combed eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from this acidic dew between her breasts. Lily, she pushed the coffee at him. They were both buried in that pleasant burr that the mild hangover gives one, the kind in which the wine just refuses to say farewell and that golden warmth doesn’t leave one entirely; the kind in which sleep is impossible, dreaming even more so, so that the hues and edges of the world take on the indistinct roles of a press-ganged theatre troupe who greet the spurious dawn with misremembered lines and cues and nothing just ever seems to come out right; the kind where beyond the sensual there is nothing: all they could do, either of them, was want the other in various, atypical, satanic ways that only mornings like this could generate. He wanted to shave her pubic hair off. She wanted to make love holding his service revolver. They compromised by retreating to a suspicious breakfast, for where had the food come from?

  She began carefully dissecting the wedges of her fruit. Her cheeks were still ruddy from sex. She was still naked. She was sitting on a towel. She was explaining the behaviors of fluids to him as best she could before they got their second wind. They’d swapped fluids in a whitesmear barter for which the haggling had taken place over the period of a good hour. Now, the retreat before they began again.

  “It’s all about the weather,” she told him. The wind, the air moved over surfaces one way and caused the surface currents below to rotate away from it, to the right. The turning of the earth makes this even more so, and the water’s movement is deflected to the right. “If we weren’t all moving in the same direction, then the weather couldn’t push the fluids like that. It’s how fluids behave.” She spoke of permeable boundaries, geostrophic flows, all in a tongue he’d never heard from her. She attacked the words. Her tongue wasn’t velvet or vicarage—she had neither the honey-tongue nor the perjurer’s wag to woo or convince—but there was a quiet didactic vanguard behind that drawl that he only ever heard once or twice, when she explained things, which she hardly ever did.

  She flipped to the book’s endpaper and sharpened her pencil against the paper by way of drawing a brief sketch of what she described. He moved to stand behind her.

  “That’s a scarecrow,” he observed. It was quite a good one too. He looked down in surprise. He never knew she could draw like that.

  “Yup. He was put up badly. Watch how he moves in the wind. It pushes him.” With a rapid hand she drew a series of further scarecrows, tilting and turning away from the giant brick arrow she’d drawn heading up its straw-side. She was turning the paper at the same time to simulate a flat earth. He still didn’t get it.

  “Pretend I’m the wind and horizontal, and you’re the surface of fluids and we’re tryin’ to predict how they’re gonna behave. No matter how I move across you—“ and with a circular zephyr’s trot she’d undressed him, “—you’re always gonna get pushed away from me.” There seemed to be smoke in her syllables. She was trying now to draw with his clearblood.

  “And the fluids—“ He looked down at her work.

  “The fluids,” she gasped, “the fluids move at a right angle to me—in me. And if you’re not careful, they’ll come full circle and you’ll be standin’ next to yourself.”

  He knew this turn-word of hers. “But I want to get you pregnant,” he observed casually.

  “Shush, now, and go get your gun.”

  He refused and, veering off the straight and narrow—was the earth spinning so fast?—he returned to his seat across from her, alert and blooded. “Weather girl. I like the way that sounds.”

  “I don’t. Plus, I ain’t got the knack. Weather takes a knack. Weather’s faces are always changin’. Nobody can guess it—what it’ll do next. I just follow it.”

  He could still see the fineness of the spray of the fruit between her breasts. The heart is a barometer, he told himself. Check hers. He did. She didn’t flinch when he reached across the table pressed two fingers to her sternum. She hummed softly and kept drawing.

  “Tell me more about the jumper,” she suddenly whispered without looking up. This’d change her pulse.

  A failed suicide the day before, tale of woe and edges and windows. She’d made him re-tell it several times already. He did so again, but at a remove. What he didn’t tell her was that he’d been watching events from the ground and the only thing he could remember with any concreteness was how distant it all felt from him. He was most afraid that if the guy did jump, he’d be in the perfect place to see that face of death turned Up to the Down just before it hit pavement, he’d just smirk or smile or laugh at this stranger’s death. He couldn’t see the death. He warned her though, “I felt blind while I was watching, like I wasn’t really there, like this dude dyin’ was like the most ordinary thing ever. It made me feel bad, like—I dunno—blinder than usual, whatever that means.”

  “Sometimes you might just think you’re blind,” she bit into the orange, “but maybe you just ain’t getting’ enough light n’ all the lamps in the world ain’t gonna be enough and you need something bigger, better.” She raised her arms up over her head. “I am right here.” He put his thumbs in her armpits and picked her up and dashed her across the table. His fingers found the rest of the orange. He squeezed it and watched the beads of its want-licks pepper the area between her navel and her belle-weather. He put the exhausted fruit in her biting mouth and held it there.

  “Suicides,” she gasped, “are just unrequited loves.”

  On the wall, her barometer
, the one that wasn’t bone, was unsure what to do with itself.

  The next day was Halloween.

  She’d taken the day off. Her shop was not doing very well and she was in a bubble of give-up. She was sitting in her underwear doing a crossword, cross-legged, never a cross word, in the middle of the den. “Chaste, not caught,” she muttered. Her lip was the podium to the baton of her ink.

  “One word,” she tossed at him, “that describes our low, current mood. I’ve got M-O-R-O. Six letters.” Oh. Ah. She was annoyed about something.

  “Morose,” he suggested. He eastwooded his revolver in a dastardly finger-spin back into its holster.

  Her pencil went scratchy-scratch. “I’m gonna pencil in morons.” She nodded, satisfied.

  “Won’t that mess up the other clues?” He laughed. He smoothed down his uniform.

  “Remember, I’m goin’ this way and the rest are goin’ that way.” She made a cross with her fingers, “an’ I’ll push ‘em where they need to be.”

  “Ekman spirals,” he remembered.

  “Ekman spirals.” She held up the crossword and he squinted at her acute, wither-witch, spidery handwriting. She went on to say, “All it does is change sever into never.” She’d had a knife hidden under the book. She set it aside now with a sigh. “So you lucked out.” He blinked. Maggie Mechaine, the wet, the fatal, and the satanic? Had he nearly been party to a ritual parried by her own dolorous wit?

  At dusk, “Some little redneck headbanger chick is asking for you downstairs.”

  “Uh, that’s my wife, Cheffy.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t even know you were married. You’re married?”

  Arms crossed under her chin on the counter, she stared up at him sleepily as he came down the stairs. “I’d like to file a complaint.” She never came to his work.

  “Okay, what seems to be the problem?”