Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  What did he see? Deserted horizons were coming alive again, thick with the reds and once-greens of autumn. The long winter was over. See, she yelled over the noise of the engine, who needs spring?

  They drove out over a lake. It was only about a feet deep but immense in circumference. Just under the surface, if he leaned out of the truck far enough, he could see, stretching off as far as he could see, a vast honeycomb of window panes. They were, he realized, the windows from Weatherhead.

  She observed him and cleared her throat. This was not something they should dwell upon, she cried over the sound of the engine. He withdrew back into the cab.

  Now you see, but she said calmly, why I thought I drowned. She reached out and patted the roof of the truck. It was better this way, right?

  He wasn’t sure what to say.

  Love’s just a bunch of acts of random violence done by one person to another, he thought. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, listening. Or the self.

  Finally she let the engine die with a string of furious curses and shocking acts. They had come to rest above the lake of windows on a gently sloping hill, covered in petals and blossoms that fell in silent, feathery drifts down out of the clouds. Beneath these was a shock of knee-high grass, summer-weary and ready for the rest that autumn portended. Beyond this, beyond the lake, they could see to the south the city and its surroundings. There, she pointed out, was the grove with its well. There was the excavation of the great stone head. There was a hunter, ant-sized, heading east for—well, for east. Everything was sigh and sough. Everything in the plain seemed to make love to everything else. The light was low on this long day of bite and triumph.

  They sat, knee-to-knee on the roof of the cab, and watched the world drowse. The bed had already been made in the bed. Tonight they would make love for the first of many first times. She was explaining her plan for after he left Weatherhead, and the loss of her subsequent virginities: –and every time we meet, you must pretend not to know me and there must be a chase, a rough hunt, a seduction, and, finally, temptation’s vainglorious victory! We’ll take turns thieving. Sometimes we can even meet on the road between cities as rival highwaymen—women, I mean. And we’ll take turns violating. For this and other reasons, we must keep our betrothal a secret. I’ve plans to build a wharf nigh Weatherhead when the floods feed the river enough. There we’ll have a secret safehouse where we can make love free of the guise of rapes and forespeaking and whatnot—it has to be on the wharf. She’d become so excited her knife sighed out of her boot and danced on its tip across the backs of her knuckles.

  He threw back his head and laughed. Hers was a crimson, swashing, buckling lust. She cried out as he leaned in and bit her neck.

  They sat in silence after that and watched the plain grow dark. They smoked. They threw pennies. They wished.

  Long after nightfall, he asked her quietly, Can you show me the sun here? The sun at midnight?

  To his surprise, to his horror, she swore at him in a fury, and jumped away, cracked her hand across his face, shouted, What did I tell you about that shipwreck? No poetry for it!

  Fumbling tongue. What had he done? I’m—sorry. It was a different shipwreck. She was confusing plain and long shadows. It was worse at night once one remembered not just how they died, but how they lived.

  The injured look on his face made her soften. Don’t be sorry, my love. But, to be fair, it was only a slightly different shipwreck. All shipwrecks brought me here, see?

  For they were gone but here and gone but not ghosts and for the promise that his palm gave her nape, she stood and stepped down into the center of the bed of their truck. Piece by piece, she shed her clothing until she stood white body in the dark space of the world that they ruled, steam off the broth of the blacknesses and it began to bleed out off of her, this lovely ivory anti-shadow, bleed out into the world like a painting escaping its frame. Her nudity exuded light and all that was occluded and occulted in the land of the long shadows. She turned away from him and he studied the ridge of her spine, the laughing lines of her ribs, her head bent forward, one hand looking for ghosts between her thighs, the other caught in her hair.

  He heard her say, Look up as I did when I died that first time.

  There was a great rushing sound about the earth, wind between buildings and over wings, or a cupped hand blocking the sound of the surf, the muffled quakes that resonated up through wheels and tectonics, not a fleeing, but an approaching chase snatched from their laughing and undressing and the heavens began to lighten and the plain beckoned with its meadow-lures and thigh-lashes the flowers down and all the clouds began a drowsy, drunken ballet, their petals parting and glistening as they made wild the hillside as they emptied the sky and she stood there like a hidden glen where fairies fuck, tucked away still into the night, accessible by spell or curse only, all the white and shape and swerve of her body bullet to the face of the night and light began to seep down and out from the frame of the nocturnal. He could see her face in profile staring out over the plain and the lumen off her eyes suckled the blackheaven and then the blue was sucked off their wet, shiny surfaces and up and out, fanning out with the same riotous, joyful calamitous noise, like the roar of a crowd behind them and the light came, the sun at midnight, the impossible and simple thing that love does.

  She turned and they embraced. He was so much larger than every move she made and against her felt like the conquest of a continent. He told her hair, I didn’t come to bring you peace.

  She lifted her face up to him. No shit. You came so our knives could continue to dance together, so you could have me against the splinters on the wall of the red barn. Between the land and the ship, the coin and the thief, there is something else, the third creature.

  The soul?

  Us. The mere idea. We create it. Oh! You stupid man with all your answers and faiths! What about the questions? Have faith in them! They’re way more interesting! Why would any story about love have a clear meaning? S’all a puzzle! Love is—it’s too much. It’s like tryin’ to use poetry to describe light’s tyranny in morning or shadow’s tyranny at night. Love muddles everything. It can make the sun come out at midnight. It can darken the day if she’s not there with you. Why do you think the frames were empty? All the beauty was outside it. I felt like a jailor in that job. She laughed. “You know—you must. Love is an act of violence, a crime, an escaping outward of all that could be imprisoned inside yourself—inside your heart—anarchy, lawlessness—

  The act of theft.

  The act of mutiny and shipwreck. What will we use to cry? Each other. What will we use to love? Each other. What will we use to cut and fight? Each other. Love—it can be as simple as three words or as much a puzzle as Weatherhead is. I don’t want answers. I want more questions. She turned him to the side and drew her hand across the plain. From where they sat facing west and the greatfalls that began somewhere up above the sky and exploded down into the far plain’s edge, Weatherhead there in the center of it all, low and lovely, surrounded on all sides by autumns, all this was her domain.

  In the light, they swapped hexes for a long while and she undressed him as he stood there in the bed of their truck. This is the way the sky looked the morning you died. All she did was nod for her spit-wept hands wove a wet rope between their sexes, dodging back and forth, an exchange of pleasantries that made the truck engine rev violently. He took her face between his hands and made it flower, leaf.

  When he entered the ruler of Weatherhead, she sank her teeth into the back of his hand for, to his surprise, he discovered that she had never, despite all her previous perversions, made love.

  Their scarlet symphonies were joined by fugue, froth, and fury. The tyranness of the plain was a virgin! In the crystal note of upended night, as light flooded their contorting, flexing skin-prisons and muscles, they made love finally and forever and when she passed her white hands over the nape of his neck and his clearblood made its great shout inside her, she flared flooded cr
imson and her foxfire hair grew whips and lashed his face and there would never be anything clockwork or despairing about them. They were free, unfurled hungers, thieves all the more greedy because they’d found each other at last.

  When, a few minutes later, she climbed atop him and guided him in a second time, they did it with knives bared and flashing teeth.

  ⧜

  Oh! There were memories left! And a sleep or two left to trouble though they’d won.

  “Strange ain’t it to get that shop. Until then I hadn’t had a thing in the world. Hadn’t done a thing in the world. It was just mine. Now, see—I’d never wish anything bad on myself. Others—yes—that time you got hit by them bullets—I wondered—I wondered how it’d be different if you died. And you know what I found out? It wouldn’t be any different. I think bad things sometimes. I used to imagine Louis dyin’—all of them, except their little girl and she’d be mine. Ours, I mean. Bad, bad thoughts,” she shook her head as if discussing some other monster. “I read once that people—they suffer because—because it erases all the bad things they’ve ever done. Me—I make up bad things, don’t you see? I make ‘em up because I think maybe that’d explain why we suffer so much.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Why do you always say shit like that, Mags?”

  “It’s the only way you’ll listen.” She stared down at the black and grey tips of her fingers. He should’ve known then why the frames littering the walls of their house were empty. “If I get mad, you listen. If I’m sorta pretty-sweet you—I dunno. Stick needles in the back of my neck to make my freeze.”

  It was mid-June and his birthday. His love of closing his eyes, a habit natural to many, when asleep, had been mooted by the midsummer earth’s insomnia.

  Infinitely imposed on each other. Charm-unique they magicked about each other for months, pretending not to see the other. Last night, she’d stood half-lit in the doorway. Her shadows were longer than they used to be. “What the hell is this?”

  “Our first date that never happened.” She looked down at the space next to him as if he had patted it and nodded with a half-smile. He hadn’t. She tucked herself up near him anyway, half-turned away. He excelled at one line summaries. Of this film, he told her: “Jurassic Park is a film about dredging up the past to entertain ourselves with its harmless curiosities but then it destroys us.”

  “I like the way you describe things.” But she still wouldn’t look at him. “How’d you describe me?”

  He crossed his arms behind his head. “Margaret Mechaine is.”

  On that boat at midnight she’d worn a dress for him. Ha! That was it! This’d nagged him since he’d first gotten to this half-cat-gag shantytown, that dress. He knew she’d had one once. Not that long ago either. Who knew where it came from? She might’ve stolen it off that bridge hereabouts. Sleep teases a man.

  She’d worn a watch that night, too, lookout for midnight. She thought if she got the captain high, he might drive slower and they could prolong their trip. She came down from the top deck. She left it swallowed in smoke.

  “It’s midnight,” she drawled and chided him for nodding off. “Look.”

  “That’s the sun alright,” he croaked. He hadn’t slept in three days. She moved off, away from him, suddenly. That was a midnight sun. She’d wanted to show it to him. She told him happy birthday. But he was so fucking tired, became so angry at her, he just wanted to sleep, he roared at her, sleep forever if he had to, and all of her welled up inside him and she infuriated him with her smoke-heavy eyes and her poor girl’s dress and her pimple on her neck and why had she brought him all the way out here? And for what? He was yelling in her face. Margaret Mechaine was:

  He never saw her everywhere. He never saw her face in the wind. The sky, he hurled at her, was sick of the wind of her. Her mind dreamed of unreal things. Her refusal to answer him ever infuriated him. So did her depression and her refusal to seek help. This made her laugh out loud and he fell back, abashed. God, was he wrong about everything always? He kept going anyway, chafing at and chasing after the chimera of her he’d constructed over the past ten years: Maggie Mechaine, consistent failure and pothead, white trash jailor of other people’s art, barely a voice in the hall or a tapping in the wall—she haunted nothing.

  The few other passengers watched them in alarm, this unnecessary madman and his little woman.

  “For your birthday,” she said again. The trip back she spent sitting up on the bridge, boot up on the railing, her one little sole all he could see of her from below, a trail of her smoke was underscore to this perpetual, accursed day. There’s a scaly day sky up there, he saw, and he knew what that meant.

  “You fuckin’ pirate,” she screamed down to him. Someone had given her a hot chocolate by way of consolation. She poured it over the side, all over his head. She refused to cry. She refused to ride home with him. She walked, pelting the truck with rocks as he coasted beside her, trying to persuade her to get in. “Everyone who has ever loved you is wrong,” she cursed at him from the shoulder of the road, “notice the odds are down, ever? Shithorn,” she screamed, “you are a horn full of shit. We can only talk about wars at parties, remember? I’ll start my own fuckin’ war against you!” She walked all the way home, cursing him mightily. Inside, she smashed her tiny fist through every singly frame she could get her hands on. Thing was, there’d never been any pictures of him or them in ‘em.

  He’d gone to war never thinking, never imagining he’d die. He went to love the same way, never imagining that you’d die for it one day.

  (50 Across) I Can’t Remember, Was I Against Forgetting or Not?

  So much light, he thought as he awoke in love.

  The high voice no longer came from above. It came from between her battle-scarred lips. He studied her thin nudity, the hallowed, underscored source of all things. That there were no shadows to throw her ribs and hips into relief disappointed him a little. They two, he reminded himself, had come from a place that threw shadows everywhere. Here, at last, where there were none, he would have to learn her contours with fingertip and tongue. This was good, he thought. There was no need for further darknesses save the ones they carried within.

  Someone in Weatherhead had once told him that this woman slept somewhere different every night. He’d need secret maps to find her then each dusk when he entered the city. He made a map of her on the ends of his fingers. She didn’t stir. He tried to guess her age and couldn’t. She seemed so familiar—and as he shook off the puzzling sleep of the plain and the painless where dreams are turned inside out and where one is the happening of the dream inside the dream’s sleep, he remembered: she was his wife. She had always been his wife and today was their wedding day except wedding days only happen once, don’t they? But tomorrow would be the same day. She still clasped her knife in her hand. Fearful lest she cut herself, he uncurled her fingers, took the blade, and returned it to the sheath in her discarded boot.

  The sun had lasted all night. The clouds-as-flowers had finally scattered, alit on the earth, blossom’s last gasp, the final, eternal flowering before the descent of a winter that would never come again unless she wished it. An eternal, unvexing blue dominated the Up of the plain. It was cold, yet. The flowers had melted into dew around their bodies. He touched her shoulder, the right of her navel, her chin, in turn. He kissed her breast.

  Someone had laid out fresh clothes for him. Their old, worn coats and trousers and boots were not where they’d left them. The two neat new piles were on the tailgate and he nearly knocked them off into the grass as he stretched and elongated the effort of his yawn.

  Naked, he stepped down into the field into the flowers and urinated, eyes up and shut against the brightness. He considered midnights, depths and heights of hearts and souls that had become mere frames, meant to protect movement and beauty. He considered Weatherhead a curse no more. He considered Weatherhead a curse forever. He considered the first dawn over Weatherhead. Or was it dusk already? Paradise and hell, both
, just as she’d said, no answers. His thoughts turned to the innocence of her ferality, their rejection of the law, the bite and claw of their love and he came to want her then again. Dawn played over his arousal which still thickly bore the traces of her unguents along its shadow-less length. Her weather vein, she’d called it.

  He rubbed his eyes and turned around to study the pile of clothes. There was a faded but pressed, close-patterned pair of trousers, a vest, and a brown shirt. Laid gently in the folds were two pencils, one pen, and a new knife. There was also a scroll that fit over his forearm like a falconist’s glove. He set this aside. He would give it to her, he decided, and spare her skin further inks.

  He dressed in those new clothes and climbed into the cab. He ignited the engine with a polite address to the morning and a relaxed half-bow. Those in love, even if evil, exude pleasantness. He drove for about an hour, across the expanding plain drowning in petals and high-light further away from Weatherhead towards a higher ridge of foothills that blocked the view to the east. Something drew him there, something about the way the high voice spoke through her now. Something she knew and something he didn’t quite.

  He climbed back into the bed of the truck and woke her. Puff-headed and wooze, she stirred. She blinked and stretched her arms up over her head. He licked her armpits clean. We need, she hummed, new birthdays. She drew his head to her chest and she studied the sky. It was so clean and bright that day, remember?

  He laid out beside her, dwarfed her, and watched the blue, too. I would’ve held your hand, turned just so to be hit first, he whispered to her heart, cushioned you, died at you.