Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Frank wondered, Why wait ‘til her blood is frozen slowly? ‘Til her eyes are darkened wholly?

  And singing in her song she dies, he finished for Love. Weatherhead was teaching him songs now. He hung his head. They wanted him to take the battle to her, whatever form it took, and he was seized by an attack of dizziness there in the street, whether from the flames or the prospect of murdering her a third time, he couldn’t say.

  After what seemed like forever, centrifugal force brought him to his feet, the Ekman of Love’s whispered entreaties built a litter out of smoke for him and when he wandered back into the grey gloom of Weatherhead, he saw Love, hunkered down nearby, smoking thoughtfully.

  Moreto life n’ bein’ reduced to a red thought, son, Mr. Moustache smiled down at him and extended his rough hand out. As he yanked the younger man to his feet, the oldest part of Love explained that he had a plan to attack Weatherhead’s sole apiary that afternoon.

  What for? He tried not to sound too skeptical.

  The honey, man, the honey! We need its sweetness. It’s the only sweet thing in Weatherhead! She hoards it all here. Mr. Moustache crushed a cigarette between his palms. And you, sir, are much in her good graces for the moment and you can distract her if she be near!

  Sweetness? She has sweetness?

  Aye—yer alive, aintchee, Rapey exclaimed.

  He folded his arms. If Maggie Mechaine is one thing, it is not a thief of sweetness.

  Love winced at the name so rarely uttered here and only, mostly, by him. Frank adjusted his hat, You are as foolish as you are blasphemous! She keeps th’ sweetness hidden. Has Weatherhead taught you nothin’?

  It taught me that you are Love, he softly said in reply. This had an immediate effect: the four ruffians’ faces flushed red, they clenched and unclenched their fists as one, and then sighed in unison. With a deft movement, Mr. Moustache flicked his spent butt into his mouth. The Colored Girl, Bow, right there in the street, threw an arm around his shoulders and, with one crackerjack hand, popped the caps off of four more bottles of beer. Frank did not drink.

  So you want me to help you raid a beehive?

  Ayuh, ya-yes, Mr. Moustache nodded, sloshing his beer around, for the purpose of apipuncture. This was, he went on, the use of the sting of the bee to remedy all kinds of common, household and househeart woes such as slouching of the kinching-cove, tithes for morts and dells, and as panacea for the bed-pins and blood-pricks of the hammering trade once-thrushed in churches and groves, what the declassical folk of this age call ‘marriage’.

  And we need this for—

  Frank spoke now, You need it, chuck, oh, most certainly! A knife-fight is more than skilful feint and clumsy stab. It is a dance, a seduction even. It is the Moment When. You need the stuff, her only source of sweetness in this place. You need the sting’s sweet.

  Correct-a-mundo, Mr. Moustache cried, patting his man’s knee, mundo here havin’ little ta do of the world. Now—let’s be off!

  They made to leave the others but before they parted ways, he closed in on the Colored Girl and squeezed her arm, muttering Purple of purples for kings and queens both, and she shoved him away with a terrific laugh and a wag of her finger.

  No story is complete without its fools, Frank said to the sky.

  As Mr. Moustache led him through the tumult of the city, he now became aware of the growing cold swelt and sweat of the air about the buildings and frames-in-nothing that dotted the skyline, as if the city had a fever. Weatherhead always had the air of a conquered city. And because time meant little in Weatherhead, these were premonitions of things that had already come to pass.

  He’d seen such cities before, driving up a road of death, a road limned with fire that stole skin and left men mere husks leaning out of truck windows mid-toll, cities emptied of breath, the very air replaced with the gum-gauze invisible screams of the corpse-chorus that any war left in its wake, the sutlers desperate flies and hungry shovels selling their services like whores to the dead.

  “Doesn’t even look real,” someone said.

  “It looks like Pompeii,” someone else said from behind him.

  It did indeed. The sky had become as soot. Fires lined the horizon. The land and the people were blasted by hell. A blistered, blackened hand reached up out of the ash and sand. What held it up, he wondered—even now, what held it up—

  They were walking up a broad avenue, one of the few he’d ever seen in Weatherhead. From the silent, buildingless windows above, someone had hung dresses. A breeze had picked up, tossed them about, eyelashes of dazed, empty eyes batting and batting—

  You said so, yourself, she’s a beast. She isn’t Maggie. She’s a bad forgery.

  Mr. Moustache grunted, If the hands are lovely, does it make the photograph lovelier?

  He mulled over this for a while and decided to change the subject, I’m sorry if this is rude, but why do you have a second face?

  I keep an echo around, just in case, was all he said.

  They came to the dreary eastern outskirts of Weatherhead. Here was where she’d put her apiary. There was even a line of refugees lining up around the apiary, all daughters, he saw, of varying ages and heights, all with the same, filthy black piles of curls pouring off their heads like curses, all dressed in habitual greys and duns. He studied this unfed string of orphaned oracles. There were not supposed to be children in Weatherhead.

  He looked at his grim companion and asked, Who are they?

  Mr. Moustache frowned and fussed with his bandolier. Let’s not cry over spilled milk, son—

  Daughters, then, daughters of the hunters?

  Mr. Moustache said nothing.

  So, fine. Don’t tell me. Can I borrow your pen?

  Mr. Moustache hesitated. The things not of Weatherhead were not of Weatherhead. And how had he known Love carried such a blasphemy here where such things were forbidden?

  C’mon, I know you have one.

  With leaden reluctance, Love tipped him a blue pen out of an inner pocket of his trench coat. One eye on the slow shuffle of the dark girls, he scribbled hurriedly on his forearm. Mr. Moustache looked down and chuckled. They remained where they were, squatting down behind the low wall facing the apiary for a good hour or so, smoking without speaking until the line of daughters petered out to nothing around the corner of the building.

  Mr. Moustache backhanded his shoulder. Let’s move. Her secret sweetness is within. It was a low gate, squat and heckled. As Love fiddled with the lock,

  Why bees, he wondered out loud.

  With a grunt, Mr. Moustache declared this a sound wonderment. Bees are a happy lot. They shit sweetness, they dance, they have a mother-goddess to worship. They had it made. Bees are the secret-in-trade of Love in some lands. The sting of sweetness—

  To Hate’s venomous flowers. I get it.

  Good! Good! It’s about where the one meets its intended. A blossom can kill as readily as a sting can soothe. Tell me, son, if the wound is lovely, is the photograph lovelier?

  Yes, he answered without hesitation. His companion nodded. Are you picking that lock with autumn? Yes.

  The lock fell open and Mr. Moustache crushed it in his palm, letting its red drift fallout to the dirt. Before he pushed the gate open, he turned to his young charge. Listen. We will find three things in here: strength, evil, and passion, the three venoms of the sting of sweetness. Tomorrow, Hate will spring one of its traps and you will fight her with knives. This is one of those rare times when the invisible war between us wells up to the swollen surface of things like a kinda pus.

  Lovely.

  To some. She will be vulnerable. Hate is tryin’ to turn Weatherhead ag’int her usin’ you. Noticed, Mr. Moustache asked, anything different in Weatherhead?

  He thought. The days are longer. Faces are longer. Oh! Ah! Fruit and flowers! How can they do that? Weatherhead is hers—

  She will shatter again. Remember how she was spread across the earth—

  The snow. She was spread acros
s the snow.

  The snow, yes—the 52.

  51. There were only 51 pieces of Maggie.

  Mr. Moustache tapped his nose. That’s we’re yer wrong, miboy. Take this. An ancient, scarred revolver slid into his palm. The touch of this gun sent a thrill up his arm—not quite electrocution, not quite arousal. He’d forgotten how to shoot. The last time he’d held a gun it’d grown out of his chin like the worst beard ever. 51 alphabets, 51 Maggie Mechaines. He checked the chamber. There were no bullets in it.

  He backed away from Mr. Moustache. The tiny face scowled at him, but the prime face ignored him and went on, What was missing? She was lacking what was outside. What wuz inside got all jumbled up: strength, evil, and passion. She can’t remember. He tapped his chest. Look at Love. What are we? I’m not some prancing faggot with wings and a slingshot? An obese, diaper-wearin’ man-child skilled in archery? Am I? AM I?

  He recoiled further. N-no. You’re thieves, bandits, s-scoundrels.

  Mr. Moustache put both his hands on his shoulders. We’re an act of violence, not because of the way she died—but because of the way she lived. And now, if she dies again, what will Weatherhead become then?

  Something worse.

  Remember: be foolish if you need to be, wrong if you must.

  He nodded. You are wise love, last love.

  Yes. I am. I am also first love. I am going to show you somethings that few people ever know of: the iswaswillbe.

  Izwuzwilby?

  Close enough! Let’s move.

  The guard inside the entrance to the beehive was Mal. He had a cutlass and a beekeeper’s uniform. Two amputated feet, a parrot, he assumed, had been glued to the shoulder of this crinkling suit. Maggie Mechaine hated birds, so. Before this guard, the shade of his friend, could raise the alarm or react at all, Mr. Moustache had gracefully buffaloed the poor fellow, sending him crumpling to the ground. He stood over the ex-pirate, wondering at the likeness.

  There’s just one guard?

  No one knows what sweetness is anymore in this part of the plain. C’mon!

  The apiary itself was a low, concrete loaf of bread lymphing up out of the dirt within the walls. There was another lock here and Mr. Moustache bade him open it.

  With what? he cried in exasperation. He feared discovery.

  Autumn, you great ass, Mr. Moustache swore, autumn is the way to all things, life in the harvest, death in the long shadows of the year! Oh! You’ve either lived not enough or you’ve lived too long! You know it by heart; we all do, we who are outside her—you best, who are also inside her.

  Of course, he thought. Bending his fingers in towards his palm he summoned the key-shaped scent of the fall of her hair over his chest, the faint and fair scarlets of her matching compass roses on the map of her chest, hand cupped like a fever over her mouth—the way he unlocked her in love—

  The lock dripped to the ground and formed a puddle around his boots. With a curt nod of admiration, Love led him into the apiary.

  It was a long low, dimly lit room bordered by rock, he saw with a start. He’d imagined the squat, low dormitories of hives that he’d assumed would be here, the tiered trap-hearths for a stolen queen and her brood. Instead, cut into the living stone were large arched squares spaced out uniformly. Inside each were what looked like upturned baskets, what he assumed were the hives. Skeps, Mr. Moustache called them. These were three to four feet tall, some made out of straw, others made out of maroon clay. The air was thick and clotted with bees so that it was what gave the illusion of darkness, for the swarmings about blocked what little illumination came in from the slitted windows above the rock and at first he balked. Weren’t there special suits for this sort of thing? An image of a man covered in bees drifted up out of his own past.

  He had forgotten again: Love is the armor for all things.

  To dispel the bees, Mr. Moustache fitted their pistols with a contrivance that dispelled smoke when one inhaled deeply from the barrow-barrel and like a pair of the worst dragons ever they spun through the apiary, inhaling and dispelling until, finally, the chamber had been largely cleared and they were, he discovered, both quite high.

  This is weed, he choked back tears, staring red-eyed into the barrel of his gun.

  Mr. Moustache ignored him. He’d moved over to one of the baskets and prodded it. See how they built out of sweetness? Weatherhead was built out of something else entirely. But, here, you see, she stowed what remained. For the Is-Was-Will-Be.

  Is th-that—she forgot this p-place? Is that w-why there was only the one guard? Is that why she put M-mal outside?

  Aye. This place is tied to the grove. Blood and honey. One leaves her, the other is not of her. One feeds Weatherhead, the other Weatherhead refuses. Signaling him to help, the two of them wrestled the straw hive, which was surprisingly heavy out of its niche and down onto the ground. Now, Mr. Moustache looked to the door, then back down at the strawhold, rubbing his palms on his pants, turn away. This is something I promise you you don’t want to see.

  Why? What’s in there?

  Part of the queen.

  Part of? I thought there was a queen bee or whatever—

  Blood and honey. One leaves her, the other is not of her. He produced a wicked-looking dagger from his boot, twirled it in his hand and gestured for him to turn away.

  Fine—

  He could hear Mr. Moustache’s grunt as he removed the lid to the hive. There was a squelch and a sigh. Don’t turn around, son. I’m stealing the stinger—for its honey and its venom—for the queens of the hives of Weatherhead milk both—and replacing it with my knife ‘fore she notices it’s gone. The effects of the smoke wear off quickly—so’s I gotta be quick.

  As he listened to Mr. Moustache’s discourse, his gaze wandered around the room. Ignoring the sounds coming from behind him, he proceeded to count the number of hives.

  There’s 51, he said softly. He knew before he was through.

  ‘Course there are. This was why I wanted to bring you here. Inside here they, the sum of all things, built out of sweetness. Outside, the queen builds out of bad things. And she took away the weathers, too, which is why the hives have to be kept in here and in here only, lest they die.

  The weathers—the weathers, he thought, why did this prickle his ears and hair so? They were outside, a thing outside—and the weathers were her. But why? All he ever saw of her was cloud and fog, just like Weatherhead now. But wasn’t there more? A sun at midnight? Smiles and dresses and wiles and presses?

  It’s funny, he told the bandit leader as he fussed about with the hive, how there’s no weed here—I never saw any until now—she used to smoke pot every day.

  Hm. She doesn’t breathe out here, haven’t you noticed? Not a sigh nor smoke nor gasp. It’s all drawn into her. She’s forgotten what’s outside.

  He means me, he thought, that’s why he keeps saying that over and over again. His echo.

  You can turn around now.

  He did. The hive had been restored to its former state. Mr. Moustache held out to him a slender, naked knife. It was sticky to the touch, coated. He took it, weighed it in his palm. Such was the stinger of the forgotten queens of Weatherhead.

  Fight her with this. All you needs do is scratch her, wound her—that’s what Hate wants.

  And what did he want? Was he mere pawn in a game ranged between two extremes? Shouldn’t the blasphemess be destroyed? Would that not restore Maggie Mechaine? If she shattered, couldn’t he rebuild her again? Mr. Moustache read this on his face. You think to destroy her.

  That is not my wife.

  Yet you’ve spent a lot of breath and mind claimin’ jes that, son.

  She’s a perversion.

  Mr. Moustache reflected on this, humming quietly. There’s a song under everything, son. People everywhere and in everytime give it different names. She called it the ‘third creature’, eh? This third thing—this outside thing, he nodded, between the pitch and the batter, between the bow and string—her third creatur
e, this thing without, outside—she never collided with anything the way she wanted and all that fight—it got turned inside out here.

  He looked down at his boots. Or the hiss of the door, he whispered. A truth: All we are are infinite expressions of a distance between two things.

  Then there’s your traitor’s pitch, he sniffed his coat’s cuff, all your crimes against her. No wonder Weatherhead!

  Is that why Hate is here, then?

  Partly. It’s partly jes Us bein’ here. Black. White. Open. Shut. Opposable unities, son. Weatherhead ain’t heaven or hell, though. It’s yer third thing there you mentioned. Hate, though—I dunno. I don’t guess after those fiends. Did you hate more than you loved? Only you can answer that. That Summer—

  He couldn’t answer that, but he knew something else: Love and Hate. Your third creatures—both of you—they’re us, aren’t they?

  Best not to trouble yourself with these matters. Invisible wars are invisible for a reason. My young companion might tell you that Weatherhead cries out to be spat upon. That she does. But don’t mistake that for hate. Hate’s cozyin’ up with her ‘cause they tricked her into thinkin’ that’s where the way lies. They intend to destroy her.

  I know. He thought for a moment and suddenly felt real, gruesome fear. Can’t you take me with you? When you go, whatever happens?

  Well, he doffed his hat once, twice, and scratched his chins, I’ve never heard that one before!

  I think Weatherhead is hell.

  There is no such place. But I’ll tell ye what I can do for ye: I’ll show ye something grand, since you’re stuck in a bind. Somethin’ most of yous never get to see. Maybe I can—stay by me. There was once a time when I wondered about the way the light played about my head like a halo, when I raised my fists, not to fight, but to welcome the dawn and among my very convoluted ideals I found something fresh and new that had sank its roots deep inside my senses. It was called music, still is, I guess. Not a musical man, then?

  “Not really—“

  The apiary was gone. So was Weatherhead. A moment before, they’d stood before the boles, he still holding out the lovely knife proferred him by Love’s leader—the next moment, Mr. Moustache’s small mouth began uttering black vowels, the blackest vowels he’d ever heard, vowels against the clock, blown dust off the totems of that moment they now stood in, drowned in local colors, in a fine velvet hall brocaded and festooned with red, the floor sloped down for forever crimson and everything that was not here was not supposed to be, it was just as it was—thick with bodies and chatter-banter, the hall was a confessional for the briefly divine, so beautiful, so lovely its cavernous achievements were, that the red forest turned-inside-out that its draped walls and boxes resembled, was little more than boundary to the clearing for the lesser deities gathered here to champion one of their own. An orchestra hemed and hawed on the distant stage. The observed, observing world was jealous of the purr and licentiousness of the crowd with its red mouths and throats, cheeks and palms—in a box above slightly to their right, a row of feisty mistresses watched through metal eyes the lord’s latest sin; turn to draw your gaze opposite this and scions of the lesser nobility describe their lives to poets brought for the occasion, poets who loathe the word tradition; third box in from the stage sit two future suicides, proofs of the theory of the elasticity of ecstasies in man: the soldier loves the soldier.