Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Her orgasm— the defining characteristic for him of any woman, typified and classified with an elaborate system of his own design—was a rope pulling apart as you climb hand over hand, she frayed, there was no climactic roar, she fell until she seemed to have exited the room. (Maggie’s were his favorites: her playful laughter, her scrunch down on him, not a pulling away—a seizure within a seizure)

  Summer had way too many feelings, he’d decided early on. She was, in fact, the opposite of Maggie Mechaine, who seemed too have too few, if any. Born of small desires and disintegrating love and the seeming disinterested, Summer Gruel became a slick sheen of welter about him. She’d graze him at the station, playing tag with their hips; she always dressed him, for she loved the order of the belt, its loop, its holes and she’d fasten it and unfasten it around his waist a dozen times before deciding if she wanted it back off or over-on; she exuded him in that tormenting way that new loves have, that crushing incapacity that one feels, as if one isn’t big enough to fit the other into them: the embrace had its genesis in this little death-wish of collisions and crammings.

  Whereas Maggie Mechaine had a fundamental impracticality that she combined with acute apathy to produce an almost harrowing innocence and its sister silence, Summer Gruel had a molten spool that unwound her words from somewhere back in her throat that tried to govern the world with its noose and order: she always got her way. Maggie Mechaine loved the contained fight: her frames, her batting cages, cells for letters in her crosswords, and now, in Weatherhead, her knives and fists. Summer Gruel, with her improbably long arms and legs kicked out against the world, determined to reel it all in to her bosom where she’d refashion it at her whim.

  He remembered the day he first kissed Summer Gruel. A thousand black birds rioted around him on a bridge over train tracks and she finally found him there. They thought the engines’ roars would hide them from prying ears. They weren’t worried about being seen, just heard. Peels of thunder as they undressed each other in her fastidious home. Son and daughter of hatreds, they pressed together naked and at the same time dressed in such languages of discipline and supposed necessity so that no one else would understand them. They were at once unclothed and armored, their lie the true source of their warmth, the summation of months of unspent ferocity, of sculptors circling the lie of their clay.

  He had even pretended to hate Maggie that first day, putting her down as mere half-enchanted cancellation, a cloudy element, something that had never become a pleasure, just a poorly-understood nuisance.

  “I’m not gonna lay here and shit-talk your wife,” Summer snorted. “Is this all this is?”

  What else was there?

  Summer was a crass woman, which made her even more like a man. She abhorred faiths of all kinds, played a game with his cock, a variant of Here’s the church, here’s the steeple with a purple-fevered fundamentalist the sole occupant of her pew. She found pleasure in many things in addition to him. One was the nickel alchemy of theft. Another was the iron alchemy of the zoo. With monies and pennies she’d steal out of evidence troughs and wells, she’d take him to the zoo where she loved to laugh at the animals’ plight and where she knew he loved to drop coins in the fountains. She had this thing against nature and the nature’s of things, he learned quickly, for a third pleasure was the copper alchemy of false atrocity. She’d blaspheme and curse from afar only, hatred from a distance, for she became all coy and cuddly when, say, faith drew near enough to hear her, or temperate she’d be when the off-white were dangerous enough to her to stop her blatant racisms, something the two of them shared, he a tad more tactful, though. Mal loathed Summer Gruel and it almost destroyed the two men’s friendship, this affair.

  She could not, it seemed, get her fill of anything. “So—“ Summer tapped two fingers on the tableland between them, “this is obviously more than just—just us.”

  What else was there? He stared up. Waiters and waitresses know: they hover over lovers longer, a feral try at catching a whiff of the traitor’s stench to take away with them to bottle and keep for later. He dismissed the fellow with a jerk of his head.

  What else was there? How long had this gone on? The better part of a year? What did Summer want? She wanted to run naked across the year with him. Of colossal venture and guile, she found confession a pointless nuance, somewhere between complication and the occult. “You told her. You told Maggie.”

  He winced when Summer said the name. Don’t say her name, he cautioned.

  “Maggie Maggie Maggie,” she taunted him. She had refused from the beginning to think of the two of them as a criminal union. If anything, the interloper was the redhead redneck, red square, Summer called her.

  She never took revenge, he admitted, she just makes fun of me and you.

  “She what?” Summer stormed and smacked her palm on the table.

  “Summer, huh?” It worked out well: Maggie Mechaine called the seasons the practical joke of the eternal return. Likewise did she treat his confession. Afterwards, she laughed at him and said things like, “Is summer over?” and “Summer’s come and gone” until he couldn’t take it anymore and he’d shout at her to shut up which was just what she wanted anyhow.

  “What’s the matter? Summer breeze—“ she sang in a hoarse voice, were those to be tears in that choke? No. “Get it? ‘Summer breeze’? Did she ever cut one over that big ol’ dick of yours?”

  His fist through the wall next to her head only made her laugh harder. He never hit her. Nor she him.

  Summer glared at him. He felt as if he were reading the instructions to something written in the worst typeface ever designed, one that ran across the page, uncontained—he needed some of Maggie’s cells—

  More than just us, Summer said. What else was there?

  “She fucking makes fun of me? Of us? She didn’t want to, I dunno, leave or anything?” She threw up her hands. Summer had nothing here. Her selfish, distant plea via the sexual possession of Maggie’s husband went unheeded. How could he explain it to Summer? The weather fretted over Maggie Mechaine as much as she it. She was protected from all kinds of storms by the quiet, little one she kept back behind her throat, by the calm, murderous wind that she drew in and breathed out, and by the fall and rise of the pressure of the worlds, all the worlds—all he could say in response, then, was,

  “She can never leave.”

  Summer didn’t truck in poetry. There was nothing of the fell or of the old, wooden ways of the world about her. As a season, she was constant in her fickle ways as she was inconstant in her wavering mood. “Then what about us?”

  He thought about these two women: one he thought he hated; one he thought he loved. He’d been unfaithful to Maggie myriad times, but never like this. Summer, unmindful of the perils of possession, would accept nothing less than his full attentions and desires. No more playacting. Love, then, wrote a play that wasn’t a play for her, it was one that made her yellow hair praise her optimism, made her hard, grim mouth praise her steadfastness, threw short shadows over her breasts, her impossibly long torso in order to praise her conquering sex—in short, it was a play of one actor, Summer, and an audience of one, him. His role was to avoid confessing his observer’s status to her as he had—

  Oh. Ah. As he had to Maggie. His confession to Maggie, he thought, had been an attempt to drive her away. But no. It was a confession of conspiracy, admonition, of Love. And Maggie knew a comedy when she saw one. Maggie saw the sign that said “rib tip”. Maggie had always gone along on the stupidest trip ever. When he came clean about Summer he was also admitting that there was nothing else.

  He hated the wrong woman.

  “There isn’t anything more than just us,” he finally said. Summer, who didn’t touch alcohol or spirits, upset only water when she shot to her feet. Unfeeling of temptation’s wound, Summer hated losing.

  So Summer came and went. Then one day a few months later, Summer called him and said, “I wanted to let you know—I’m pregnant. Now—before you say
anything, I’m going to keep the—“

  “Fuck you,” he replied and hung up.

  When Maggie Mechaine died with the March of Spring, she somehow found his number and called to say, “God, I’m so sorry” and for once she meant it.

  “Fuck you,” he replied and hung up. The memory of him and her lingered like a bad joke being passed around the peripheries of a party before returning worn and drained to lean on the door frame. Somehow this one feint against Maggie meant more than all the other times combined. Why? Because he thought, for once, that he loved someone?

  No. It was because he thought he didn’t.

  What else was there?

  Ah, yes—Maggie loved knife-fights.

  (43 Down) I Hum Along to Your Scarlet Symphony.

  How could the high voice know this music? Had it been with him and Mr. Moustache when the latter showed him what Love’s ears hear? He scolded, cursed himself for a fool. Why should he assume he was privy alone to Love’s musicks? How did Silver know? No—Silver was reading from the book of Maggie Mechaine—so, how then, had Maggie heard the occulted final sob of Mr. Moustache’s life? And which one had she heard? He’d said that the tune had been broken up and shared out to fill in silences both large and small. Had she dreamed of it without knowing?

  Oh, how he wished he could dream what Maggie Mechaine dreamed—he could build her a new city—another city on the plain, where only one path was visible, a path wide enough for both of them—no knives—no winters—only autumns and the offshore roar of musicks that are measured in their half-distances between remembering and forgetting.

  He discovered an idea just then.

  It became dawn again, heavy, silt-shit, and grey, morning salted and peppered with overcast cold and what he’d take for a sea gale if he didn’t know better. He stared out from under his cardboard hovel, hands knitting words on the backs of his hands.

  All was scattered and shattered.

  It was the day of the Autumn Fete. What would her barometer back home have read? Zero and falling, falling, falling? There was certainly no autumn on evidence. Oh, no, he’d denied her that, hadn’t he? He’d fallen right into Hate’s clutches—Hate was the engineer of the revolt against her rule.

  He stared down at the barometer put there on the wall by his own hand. She was still asleep behind him, buried in the solid ivory creamscapes of her down comforters. She’d slept all winter long, he thought. She hadn’t laughed for years. She was the sole surviving child of a series of hauntable wars waged by time against ghosts against they themselves, he and she. When she did finally sit up in her coffin, drunk with sleep, and she smiled half-sheepish and put a hand to her hair in momentary alarm because it was all gone, and almost forgot for a moment how much she pretended that she hated him, he snatched a glance at the barometer to see: did it change when she was awake? Was the crush that drove up through her the scarlet force of autumn? Was she the red of the age, the tumult that blasted the veins of the body of the age?

  “God stopped working a long time ago,” she told him with a nod. She wove a new season out of the fall of the old one. “But the barometer never will.” The weather, she meant, was more constant than gods and goddesses. But what was her weather? He buried his face in his hands.

  Alaska was outside only.

  Only inside she knew the scarlet symphony. Think of the red of man.

  He scuttled out into the streets of Weatherhead, the past an acute fever driving him up and out. How many times had he fallen here only to be pulled back up by the bootstraps, by spit’s—

  Think of the red of man.

  “If I walk in one day and this thing reads zero, that’ll mean you’re gone?”

  Her pupils shrank as her eyes opened wide. Black whirlpooled in drowning blue. “Why would it? I’m not the world.”

  Not yet. “You’ve never killed anyone before—“

  “Not yet.” She invited him into her den, the footprint of her body beckoned as she slid over to make a space for him. “What’s it like?”

  He climbed in next to her. “It’s like wind pushing a door shut—rushing through a house where you forgot all the windows and doors—everything is open and then—bam!” He clapped his hands shut in front of her face. “You know something just left, but maybe you’re not sure what or who or why and you’ll never now because it’s something that just doesn’t exist anymore. You cut all your hair off.”

  Eye of the needle to his thread she sank against him and put her face into his neck. She was so warm. “I don’t believe that’s true,” she finally offered, “that it doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t mean ghosts and all that. That just sounds like a bunch of bullcrap some poets or philosophy people thought up.” Her voice was muffled and punctuated by the way she was kissing his neck. “I think it all depends on—we have five senses. With one you can never forget. It’s like the weather. It never ends, like a song. It’s always there, we can always find it—we might find it a little different, but it’s still the same thing.” She put her ear to his chest.

  “You cut all your hair off,” he said again. She had, a few weeks before she died. It was all this all over again. He shifted until she was left in the hollow first she and then he had made in her blankets. He put his arm half-a-distance beneath her and stared down at her. She didn’t seem half as far away again as she had the last few months. Staring down at her wasn’t like staring into a coffin anymore. She was close to the surface today, more than the testimony of the dead, she had, with all her red animal nature, welled back up to her skin, her lips filled with the song of a loud laughter that was more autumn than fall. She had ripened, arched her back to death, but she did not fall, was not plucked, there was no plan of escape, no getaway car purring out at the snowy curb—how light she was, how easy to turn over this way and that. How dead she’d be in mere weeks!

  “It’ll make it easier for you to know it’s me,” she explained. She touched her naked ear. “And it’ll be easier for me to hear you when you are near me.”

  ⧜

  You said you’re a what? A please man? She frowned up at him where he hung. You’re a gun? ‘Please’ means a gun in Weatherhead. She patted her low-slung belt but her holster was empty. She looked down and frowned. Where’d it be? You know what I mean.

  Please. Po-lease. Police, he croaked. There was no wind now to make the rope creak. I protect people. He was surprised he could still make sounds. As much as he waggled his feet, he couldn’t get the noose to draw any tighter around his throat.

  Not me you don’t. She said this in jest, but her eyes flashed bleak and her knife flashed in her hand and somehow the opposite was true. She cut him down with one graceful gesture and leapt back to the ground. But a noble effort.

  He picked himself up from where he’d fallen and unstrung his neck, rubbing the chafe there. So much for suicide, he thought. Weatherhead mocked him then by rustling up a frontier breeze to tousle their hair and throw it together redblackone. She took a step away from him and stood staring at him hunched over, catching his breath. Her hair was as long as it’d ever been. Maybe he should’ve used it instead of rope?

  Why swing, stranger? She studied the noose. It was made from kite-string. Kite shops had appeared again, expectant that she’d sanction a little Up after the Autumn Fete. She’d lost her rifle, too, though, along with her pistol.

  Well, he coughed and hacked and trembled, unused to the half-horizon death puts between itself and any distance, such as that of breath’s breadth, I figured there weren’t such things as trials in Weatherhead. So—

  There aren’t, she said drily, but setting punishments for the crime of crawling out of the mountains? You overstep your jury’s-diction. All this flotsam is mine, including you. Why do you persist in listening to me with your hands over your ears? Is that the way of the age from wherever you came from? From this I’ll-Ask-A? Do you not exist except behind your eyelids? Am I just the dream of a shipwreck? Remember the sky over Weatherhead that I showed you: all
the shipwrecks are mine. All but one and it is far, far away from Weatherhead, the wreck of the ship of the white girls.

  He attempted to assuage her annoyance. I wasn’t trying—I didn’t want to break your rule—I just—I knew you’d come and cut me down.

  Oh so. Her shoulders lowered slightly. She circled him at a wary distance. She squinted up at the ash tree that’d failed him. How long did you hang?

  Couple hours.

  There are, she half-laughed, other ways to get my attention. She watched him rearrange his coat and trousers with a thoughtful frown. I was looking about for you, as it stands. It is good that you summoned me whatfor for the phones in Weatherhead in terrible.

  He had never seen one. He imagined them disconnected ears linked by veins or choke-cords or kite-string, even.

  She stared at his belt where he’d absent-mindedly stuffed the archaic six-shooter that Mr. Moustache had given him for the raid on the sweetness. You had a gun, didn’t you? Before you came across the mountains?

  Yes. It was a fact that before one experiences war the body seems sacrosanct, incapable of being torn, something inviolable, not a page to be ripped out of the score, a mere collection of processes woven together by blood and spirit. She’d seen too many wars in her time to not recognize even the most hidden kind: the war against oneself. He’d had enough war to know how pliable the flesh and red really is. So he wanted to tear himself apart, did he?

  It was a lie that things that cannot be seen do not exist. It was a lie that things that cannot be heard do not exist. She looked from his gun to his face and back again. She knew that it’d been a velocity and a thunderclap that’d paid his passing over the black mountains. He knew this not by the quantity of desperation he saw blow over her face, but by the quality of desperation there. The beast of Weatherhead drew only the flavor of a smile tight across the bottom of her face, but there was a grimace in the corners of her eyes, two tiny little languages that demanded that fall forever, autumn forever, was her purview, and that all death was her domain now. She hated this gun suddenly, hated all guns, the same way that a pond hates someone drinking from it, disturbing it, rifling its surface with ripples. She pursed her lips, opened her mouth to say one black thing, but said a blue one instead, Did you ever get really upset and fire it into the air in anger? I’ve always wanted to do that. Her grin turned hungry.