Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She took him aside, eyes on Hate. On a single, lonely bench they found their clothes, their dusty trousers, coats, and ancient boots. The contours of their ferocity were to be molded to both the savage and the refinements of civilized crime, she told him with her eyes. By this argument, she held up her trousers in front of her and tossed them aside. Crossing to silent, fuming Hate, Weatherhead, in a single slash of her knife across the remaining shoulder strap, removed the lavender tattered garment and slipped it over her own head. A tickling, gentle breeze tied the dress back in place. It wore like a foehn at dusk. She shrugged on her duster, pulled on her boots and laced them, and watched him dress, heavy and slow from the bench.

  Love with no name, come, she beckoned with her moist, Ekman tongue. On one knee in front of her, he shoved up the hem of her violent dress. There was a garter of bullets there, a small bandolier tied around the upper reaches of her thigh.

  He looked up at her. There were no bullets in Weatherhead except for—

  Love’s. Ours. She winked at him. Content, he stroked the inside of her leg, drew out three bullets, which was all he needed, stood, and loaded his revolver as Lux watched them with a sneer.

  The ruler of Weatherhead played out the chain of wind and they two moved to stand apart from Lux, thus staged in a rough sort of triangle, if lines had radiated out from each of them to the other. In the center of the circle, he placed a stone. On it, he told Hate, was written their names. Last one standing gets the names.

  Lux Vomika, Hate, mocked them and was unrelenting, desperate now in the hour of flowering exile. She turned her golden lips to him, Why did they never find the truck, sire—

  Don’t call him that, she of Weatherhead shot, that was a busy highway with truckers and trucks and he and I, the one I love, we truck in all manner of crimes and miracles. She rolled the chamber of her pistol and returned it to her hip. He did the same.

  Lux tried to spread her hands. Winds that spat perfume and the smell of wood tore at her voice and hair. This is no fair fight—I have no bullets—no gun—

  Nope. The tyrant of Weatherhead very well could’ve smiled, but she didn’t bother.

  How long they stood there, two lovers facing down Hate, he would never be able to tell. Time was a reckoning, a measure of movements forward, a determinant, while they, the two criminals, both did not move at all and at once moved and expanded together outwards into every direction, their breaths, sighs, gasps, touches, caresses, words, half-words, sleeps, wakenings, their warmths and their bitter colds, their scarlet symphonies, their fears, and, finally, their bullets all as one became larger than the world, larger even than the plain, for this is the terrible freedom that love creates for those in it: the right to conquer, to endanger, to plunder, to laugh at the perfection of the senses, to muddy, to muddle, to murmur, to mutter, to swim and sing in the silk of the other’s violence, to steal each other’s wisdom and to arouse the sun and bring the miracle of the un-night. Magic, when in love, was what one wore: the other.

  Lux Vomika put her black eyes on him and made a plaintive face. How many nights had she cradled him? How many hunters like him had she put to her breast? Mother-without-womb. Even the echoes of her voice smelled like rot. Who kept his blood from drying out in his straw? Who had kept him replete with women? Even the hearing of her smelled like pus.

  I love her despite all illusions, he cried, smashing his eyes shut for a moment. His hand gripped the butt of his revolver.

  Maggie nodded at Hate, whose eyes went wide. Desperate, Lux dug her heels in the dirt of the field and began kissing the backs of her own hands, working her half-bared teeth towards the clouds around her wrists. If-she-could-only. And you, dame— and there was already a rattle to her voice as she stood there naked, confused, trapped in a frame of Hate’s own self-perpetuating evil—the truck? The other women? Could I tell you, dame, how many there were? They wouldn’t have fit standing in the bed of that truck—

  The first bullet tore through Lux’s throat. She didn’t twist or scream or make any sound. She just half-staggered back on one foot, and her head jerked to one side. There to his left he saw the curl of smoke from the pistol of the ruler of Weatherhead. She’d shot expertly from the hip. Her face was serene. Lux put her hands to the gouge lead put in her voice. He was surprised to see quite a gush of blood passing between her fingers. He never imagined Hate would bleed.

  Lux gargled, For all the deep drunk dark I could familiar into your heart, it unfolds thus, sire? Dame? She looked from one to the other, appealing in her final panic to good or evil.

  Good n’ evil don’t enter into it, he laughed, we are something else, my love and me. The second bullet, his, pierced her shoulder, shattering the use of her arm. It sent her reeling back. She fell back on one hand. Blood had spattered upon her cheek. In truth, there was no one who wouldn’t want to lap it off. With her desert rainbow sensuality, the ruler of Weatherhead, her feet firmly planted far apart, raised her pistol again. Hate shrank back from Her.

  There is, ma’am, no place for you any longer in this story. Weatherhead hates you. Her revolver barked once, twice, giving birth to the same cursed, leaden infants that sought Hate’s black milk, burying themselves in her breasts. Lux was hurled back and into the dust and leaves by the shots. He felt suddenly embarrassed for her ruin like this. But Hate hardly deserved better, hanging about on people’s eyelids the way it does, putting an awful film on tongues, teeth, and lips that could never be scrubbed away because words have a bleak echo that nothing could scrape away. There at the edge where the air rushes out he and his lover stood, watching Hate gasp and hitch for breath. Still, it persisted:

  Hate—who drove the truck, dame? You—she raised a wretched finger to the despot without a shadow to throw over her –you wandered the plain, calling on every soul in the plain, in the world, looking for something—for Me. You were empty, unfinished. Hate wanted to remake you, make you complete, unhollow your infamy. This fool—he killed you—he turned them all against you before he even came from the long shadows. He torments you, dogs you even into death.

  He listened to this diatribe outside of his own flesh. He’d heard enough. Hate would never understand the inherent violence of Love and love. Hate would never understand the liquid, limping sex that extracted light and shadow from pores, the defeat and surrender of all pitches to the singular, buried note that, though invisible to the ear, burned through lovers. It was hunger and satiation at once, thirst and flood, past and future, spring and autumn, all things unified only by the third thing, their third creature, between them: the illusion of endings. All feeds into the other. This was the unfinished infinity, ever-encircling, ever-enclosing. Even Love into Hate, Hate into Love. And just as all stories have endings, so they have beginnings. And just as all crimes have victims, so they have perpetrators.

  The ruler of Weatherhead walked over and picked up the rock he’d placed in the center of their triangle. There is no name here, she laughed, a lightness, but then she sensed his poise, his frozen fear. He was pointing down at the ground. The rock had had something under it, though.There lay a book. She took a step back. Behind them, Lux made a low, growling sound, pathetic and dying in all her dark places.

  Quickly, he took up the book. It was large, long, and rectangular, with a metal spiraling spine. It was a sketchbook. I came down from the black mountains with this as my map. You left this map for me. He put it inside his coat. She stared at this place next to his heart for a long time, her lips thin, her eyes unwavering. Ignoring her, he crossed to Lux and knelt down. I found the book of faces, you see?

  Lux’s face turned beat red, her black eyes rotated in their sockets. Faces are fictions for the heart beneath. You have betrayed me. You have killed me.

  Of duels, there is little left to tell.

  Together, they stuffed Hate’s mouth full of red and orange leaves. They lashed the bat as a yoke across Lux’s shoulders and tied it there with lengths of rotting cord.. Though she bled, asunder, Hate struggl
ed to its feet and they dragged it along behind them. As they passed through Weatherhead, ruined and hesitant Weatherhead, a soft wind sighed and soughed through the buildings, the whimsy and whisper of the breaths of the ruler of the city, lover of he who’d come down out of the black mountains to follow her red steps, she who summoned hail and rain and storm by blowing kisses over the backs of her hand, she, they whispered to each other as they peered over sills in the stillness of the unreasoning autumn morning, she who wore nudity as boredom, she whose cloudy brow and breast, both exposed to the elements, made tell of the weakness of the duet between town and country, she who had stolen them all from their freedoms and innocence, the young and old alike, their city conquered, raped, stripped down to violences and puzzles so that even the buildings, as they pulled them down, broke neatly into jigsawn sections. Oh, she had wounded them, many had suffered, many things forbidden—but there had been things wondered, suffocated and bidden also—for who was afraid to put the knife of poetry between their teeth, to let the tongue of Weatherhead lie across theirs and bleed into their words? Who would question the ultimate proscriptions that she demanded: children, paper, pens, time, up? These were all things strangled and unbreathed. And why, they wondered now? As long as their eyes stayed closed, they would never know, but now, seeing the fox-haired deviless stride through the empty devastation of Weatherhead, peeking anxiously out of their hollows, the people of Weatherhead knew a red truth: She forbade these things because they were hers. The desires of the long shadows were the dreams of the plain. She was composed out of disgraceful acts because there had been no one there to remind her of what it was she coveted most.

  In the silver margins of the story, faces began to appear behind the nervous glances. Here and there in frames of windows, frames of doorways, frames of the seizures the storms had left in their wake, her subjects unhid themselves. She, their empress, had come to cool their faces with weather, a few insisted to his and her fellows. Head cocked, he gathered these voices as they walked. He looked over to Her but her face was peaceful, impassive, fallen quiet after bulletfall. More and more people appeared as they passed through the thick districts of the city where the destruction had been greatest, all the citizenry turned out to gawk and gape and wonder at their triumphant tyranness. Above, the winds smeared with smells jostled the clouds-as-flowers and light broke through aflame here and there and all stared up in terror and wonder. Who had ever seen the light? And what of the junkyard in heaven? Caught in her mad inertia, they began to stream out and stare up at the sky and there they saw, the tangled wrecks, all the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand prohibited storms, weather diverted into the Up, all the wreckage had fallen through the blossoms, a new kind of hail, like rotting teeth or bullets, had fallen and there in her frames which dotted and littered the sky of the city like diffused punctuation to the story of Weatherhead, the detritus had come to rest and hang and sway in the breezes, heaven emptied and all its nostalgia forgotten. Female voices took up a diamond-shaped dirge, their pitches ebbing and flowing like the floodwaters outside the walls and an enterprising few began clambering up the brickclouds with smoke-rope and hooks to drag down the debris.

  They would rebuild Weatherhead for her. The nameless stranger had saved her, loved her, given her a delirious face, even if not beautiful, even if plain, given her unpinned weathers. The City and She were One. Here the story begins.

  Hundreds turned out into the streets to follow them, but she didn’t seem to notice them until they came to the swollen river that ran through the center of town. She stood and looked at the throngs ringing the bridges. She looked back at Lux Vomika who stood there unsteady and bloody. They don’t hate me anymore. Didn’t you know? Where my 51 pieces landed, they will worship at every bit of my shatter and break waiting for the day when He would chase me down and help me remember all my weathers. Weather. Weather of dirt-steadied diamond. Weather of navel smoke. Weather of wind-kissed kites. Weather of houses and homes and demons. Weather of flower bleeding rain.

  He forced Hate to its knees. He stepped behind it, one hand cupping its throat, the other hovering at its nape where the needle protruded. The ruler of Weatherhead crouched down before Hate. She took it by the chin and forced it to stare into her eyes. Then, the ruler of Weatherhead pressed her lips to Hate’s and stamped dew there. The tyranness stood and nodded to him.

  The dead, withered eyes of Lux Vomika fell away, no longer black and shiny, but white and uncaressing, arid and drained. With a single motion, he plucked the glittering strand out of her neck. It ended in a slender needle. Hate didn’t scream or shriek. It slumped forward heavily, blind behind its cataracts. In an instant, it had aged eighty years and become a dead game. Its hands fell limply into its lap. He felt nothing. No rush of darkness out of himself, no yawn after nightmare. All he felt was that the door never really shuts. He handed his lover the needle and thread. With a deft movement, she plucked it from between his fingers and wove it temporarily along the front of her coat.

  Here they come, my people. One by one, they’ll put their blades into her, she told him, beat her, hack her. From afar the rise and fall of their knives and axes looked like winks on trampolines trying to stab the sun. The hands were cut first, since they tried to ward off the first few blows. The skull crumpled under the bat. In the end, they tied Lux Vomika’s still-heaving form to a warped board and tossed her into the river with a bag of pennies weighing heavily on her sunken chest. Then the citizens of Weatherhead pelted her with baseballs until she was out of sight, carried away by the flood.

  Side by side in the silence they stood and watched all this from afar, her finger hooked through all of his. In that moment he understood what that woman named Maggie had once told him, that all pictures must needs fall out of their frames the same way voices fall out of earshot, when distance fails. This red-haired thin terror beside him, maybe he could persuade her that her name was Maggie, too—she heard every sound in Weatherhead. She’d played, so she said with a liar’s cough, seven innings of who’s and whose just under his eyeshot.

  She was, in turn he told her, the rain inside the well. And all the hate in her was carried away by the flood of tears that she blinked down and out. They walked alone. Heady from their brutality, they swam together against the breeze but never not standing still. He began to laugh and she looked up at him, curious. I always told you what Love is, didn’t I?

  She daubed at the gunpowder on his face and did not reply. There was nothing to say.

  Churches—why were there churches in Weatherhead? These were churches that seemed to bend their loins to her as they passed. All the trappings inside, which he could see through the torn down walls, were empire, though, which meant her. It was all to be rebuilt, like Maggie’s puzzles, her impossible puzzles—what if she had actually never finished any? And why did none of the edges of Weatherhead’s skyline fit together the right way?

  Alone together now and always, they wandered through the deserted streets. The crowds were still choking the bridges along the river, careful not to stain her dresses with their boots and shoes, cursing Lux Vomika on her way out of town. They were silent for a while, enjoying the lush whisper and rustle of the abscissions of their fates. All their meanderings had been meanderings in their fates. And now, with it all over and done with, they sought solace in the worthlessness of words.

  They climbed back up the UnTower and with his coat he became a kite and, to her horror, leapt out and up, plucked an imperial blossom from the clouds and suicided back down, old hand at that now, tucking the pearly rose into the top buttonhole of her coat. Lightning lingered in the wet of her tear-makers and she spoke of what a good season it’d be, leaning on her bat there at the top of her world.

  And they came to speak, in confessional tones as militant martyrs always do, half-whispers, half-crazed shouts and in the cursed tongue of the long shadows, of what had once been even though it was the story of Weatherhead only that kept the long shadows thrown across the plain for
them to read. He sighed, “I always wished there were wells in Alaska. Maggie was never happy there.” He watched her face.

  She too spoke with a tongue that lied with the past, though at first the words were tumble-clumsy. “I was happy. I thought you weren’t, ‘cuz of those other girls n’ all. That was all before that, I guess.” She stared out over Weatherhead. She wanted it to rain but she couldn’t remember how to make it.

  “A keen eye of fire is all,” he stroked her forearms. She’d written guesses on outcomes there that he’d once taken for cracks in her stained-glass skin before he’d washed it all off.

  She smoked a poet. “I figgered, if I was louder maybe—maybe you’d hear me this time.”

  I did. I came. Why was it so easy for her to speak like that even in the tongue of the long shadows? He had to switch back to Weatherhead. He wet his thumb and rubbed off the 1 through 51 she’d inked on her arms. She’d marked them off with a curt slash, one by one. You only got to 49?

  Cuttin’ it close. A smile flirted with her lips. Her hand tugged on a redtress. Kiss-curls, he used to call them, she wove around her finger. “Yes.”

  Do you hear that?

  She bent her head to the breeze she summoned, carrier wind, she called it. I do. Only think of the chorus one can hear behind one.

  It’s the same as yours.

  “Yes.” She slid her hand over his. “Autumn don’t taste bitter at all, you know?”

  Can I tell you a story?

  Of course. Then we shall loot Weatherhead, you and I. I have a getaway car. Well, a truck. We are not poor, now. We have the plunder and spoils of Weatherhead.