Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  If you write anything new, he took leave of the older man, say to hell with principle and return here to this part of the plain and sing it to us.

  I will, son. The bandit touched his fingers to the brim of his hat.

  One more thing while he remembered the story. He took Frank aside: I’m bothered about Rapey— and he explained, the forespoken, unforgiven, charm-runner’s curse that had beset the poor young fellow, falsely accused of rape simply because he loved a goddess.

  Don’t be. It’s part of his curse forevermore. It was impetuous, feral love.

  He didn’t rape her, did he? That woman he loved that you told me about?

  No, of course not. Frank stared away, suddenly sad.

  So.

  Love left them to their own path.

  He and she watched them disappear through the ruins. Afterthought of, Rapey reappeared around a corner, rubbed his chin and studied the rubble before dragging out a shattered, crippled rocking chair that he pulled along, bumpity-bump behind him. Final and genial, he turned back to them and snicker-shouted, You two don’t even know you’re alive! Love’s greater ‘n death.

  And he was gone. They were gone.

  Together they gathered up their things, the bat and the cairn of baseballs. He looked in the direction of her last home run. Weren’t there black mountains there once? She answered by kissing his heart and saying,

  Soon you’ll have to leave me. The wanted posters were already going up around Weatherhead, his face, her bounty. Her hunters were about, returned to the city by her writ, now no longer banished, the preceding generations of attempts to seek out this lover-thief, drunk with piety in a religion of crime. Outside of Wellingwish, she reported, in the deserts outside Wellingwish, she sang, waited his skulk of thieves vs. foxes, for her redtailed counter-crime and the toothless rape between the pair of lovers, all for show only, were acute and pandemic. These men of his skulk were made out of the very desert in which they stood, sandmen for the scarecrow, their leader stuffed with straw, which, she observed, burns so easily, they with sand. Several of our daughters, she warned, will marry these men one day. And there’s a colored feller there, their leader—

  He knew this man. An old friend, a one-eyed colored fella name of Henchvaunt. She pursed her lips. She’d never named the people in her city, she confessed. Well, she should, he retorted. She ignored him and went on: she swore she’d keep the arenas going for their assignations, their wrist-chained duels—it’d be the only way she could keep him close, away from adjudication and punishment (theirs, not hers). One of her untidy constables, a lean, older woman who spoke in prohibitions yet was generous with her drink—he recognized her as a long shadow sister of his—had reluctantly accepted the task of hollowing out tunnels from the dueling arena to her garage. Oh, but she’d listen, this constable, Skate she’d be called, it was decided for the ruler of Weatherhead controlled the city through subtleties and subtitles now, using the weather veins that’d sprouted on the rooftops—

  Vanes, I think you mean.

  No, she shot back, veins. She tapped her wrist. She continued: under the cover of the fogs of the mind and eye she could wend out of the weather, the two lovers could take turns playing anvil with each other’s sexes while the city thought they fought. The perfection of the hideous, they named it.

  The city streets were empty now and the light was nearly gone. They parked the truck in the garage. She left the door of her sanctum open though, to catch the wind. And there it was that he showed her all her faces, the weathers of all the heads.

  He left the torture of walking in the wake of her storm and blocked her path as she made for the insides of things. Since it’s twicewise our birthday and wedding day I have something for you. You may have wondered how I found my way here. I’ve often asked myself.

  The road is not easy, she nodded. She’d been waiting for this moment. She’d written it long ago.

  Yes. I have a present for you on our birthday. A book of faces.

  She turned pale and nervously licked her lips. Don’t you see—didn’t you see that this was the way of it? The way to Weatherhead? But—love, I didn’t mean for you to die—

  He shushed her with a hex-kiss. There were too many beds to set fire to to dally with what-ifs anymore and whatnot. He gestured to her with the imperfection of ago. He pointed at the ⧜ at their feet. There was, on a sudden, a table between them. They knelt down. Suddenly she was no longer there.

  There was a jigsaw puzzle glued under the table, its center bulged out. He could see that the original center of the puzzle had been removed since that time she’d disappeared and reglued in, but with the pieces of a different puzzle. He smiled. With the tip of a knife, he gently prised apart the pieces. There was a bulky, thick manila envelope inside. It was large, long, and laden. On one side it said A map.

  He blinked. Louis and the niece and the rest of the family had been gone a week or so before he remembered the bottom of this table. He had been afraid that, finally alone, the death of Maggie Mechaine would pollute the house with accusations and regrets but, to be honest with himself, for once, nothing of the sort happened. He left things unstirred: her bed never-made. Her neatly packed dimebag still on top of her stereo, the stereo that had five of her terrible heavy metal discs still in rotation in it. Afraid to end her momentum, lest she return like a fool to haunt, he let the wake of her living life continue on.

  It was her spirit, he kept telling himself, that had failed. Not his. People of the long shadows are always, always wrong about such things.

  Then he remembered the under of the table. Inside the envelope, there were a few loose sheets of paper and a metal spiral bound rectangle. He looked at the official-looking papers first. “The New England Women’s Baseball League,” he read out loud. There was such a thing? He shuffled through the papers. It was a contract. Maggie Mechaine, it said in several places, Maggie Mechaine was being called out and up. That had been his wife’s name. He looked at the date though calendars die just like people do, stripped and exed, and cannot, therefore be trusted: June 2001.

  He huddled there for a long time, half under the table to hide from the world, the abominable world that he had made, sick on a wine sucked out of wretched vine, time maligned and misaligned. There rose the triumphant urge to vomit, to purge—what had he done to her? She’d never told him about this. His fury imploded the papers but her name still lilted lily up from the crumples. She’d done it. She’d done what she always said she would: best all the others. And he—what had he done? Offer the caged fox the humblest, tired scraps? How could he have been such a fool as to never have learned the measure of the compass of this quiet and sad woman’s soul? He had reached a day of terrible hate and fear—not of Maggie Mechaine, but of himself.

  There was a sketchbook, too. The 51. Inside he counted, 51 faces of Maggie Mechaine.

  Sketchbook! She had drawn? He had never known this, had never known her to ever express any kind of remote sign that she had made this.

  He flipped through. She had drawn her face over and over again, different expressions, different angles, different emotions. Under each sketch she had written what read like a staccato morse weather report. Under one where her eyes flamed and her eyebrows dragon-breathed out over and curl-up in relation to her eyes like her sneering lip she had written simply Thunder. He could hardly remember her angry, maybe a few times over the years.

  Then he saw that she’d written somethings on the backs of things, on the backs of all things, but on the backs of pages in sketchbooks too.

  “I am the Lie. I am Tomorrow,” he read out loud in a trembling voice. He touched the number she’d scrawled before it. “One Down.” He flipped through. They all had the same thing. The last face, her last head, sketched in blacks and greys, her face turned down—was she smiling?—was forecast as bow echo. On the back, the 51st, it said—

  Fearful, hollowed, he clapped the book shut. These’d been the questions to her crosswords, now hidden captions
to a story and all the answers to these clues pointed to one thing: Maggie Mechaine. But he did not know these faces, these heads, these weathers.

  Maggie Mechaine had died out on an empty highway, a sweeping curve of road, a little snow on the ground that morning—he walked back out there again, alone with her book of faces. He intended to throw it into the sea.

  She never ran out there on this road, just hit balls into the sea. She screwed up her face at him. “Why run?”

  “Pretend you’re chasing something.” It’d maybe make her feel better. “Running is a big part of who we are?”

  She knew he was trying to press her into a confrontation, accusing her of—what? Running from what? “Why would I chase anything?” Instead, she went and hit baseballs into the ocean.

  He watched her from the road, arms crossed. “Isn’t this why I bought you the cage?”

  “Dunno. Is it?” He looked at her closely. God, she’d grown—dimmer, somehow, greyer, sapped of color. She’d lost her sheen and not even thirty. He’d really noticed it for the first time after his worst birthday ever. It was all his fault, he felt. He took her home. No, she insisted. I’m just tired. She stretched out like deafness on the couch, knit her fingers together. He tried to sit at her head and stroke her hair, but he couldn’t quite find it. The hair. Or her. Oh, shit, he wasn’t even home when the notion struck him. Too late. How old could they get before?

  His when and why had become unfixed. He stared down at the shadow he pitched across the gravelly, cold ground. He wasn’t afraid of the ground where she’d been scattered, he sat in the middle of it, hoping against hope that something, anything about her would strike him out and down. Hadn’t he loved her, in the end? Hadn’t his indifference just been a straw-stuffed effigy, not him? Or had he not scared away enough birds from her? Given her enough baths? He’d never made her a mother, never would.

  Could he remember her? He looked down at the sketchbook bent into a U in his angry hands. Is the soul really just a futile waste? Was that what Maggie Mechaine would’ve thought? He opened a random page. Laminar, it declared she be. He studied her face, a kind of post-orgasmic arm-throw stretch face— “I Lay Down in Whiteness,” the back warned.

  Life was mere half-birth. Death was the other half. In between—and after—

  He rose and left the seaside. He would never return to this place. Maggie Mechaine, the greatest thief ever, had stolen herself away here. There was little else to learn from the scene of this crime, he decided. He returned home, locked away the sketchbook and sat in the uneasy, stormy dark until time told him it was past midnight, with his gun in his lap and his ear turned to the door. If she walked back in, she’d be a lie, hence the gun, he lied to himself, but why’d he keep putting it under his chin?

  Nine months later, with this very same sketchbook in his lap, he fetched his gun and he set out for Weatherhead.

  ⧜

  She could no longer hear his voice. She moved through the air above the city, stopping behind each reborn frame one by one and whispering something, sometimes gripping the edges, sometimes leaning over and through it, sometimes against an edge. In her other hand she held out before her, like a hymnal laid open, the sketchbook.

  He gripped his chest and made a hoarse, low sound. It was this that he had found, he cried out to her, that he’d spread across his knees—it was this that had brought him to Weatherhead. She’d stopped and was staring down at him. Her ankles and feet were obscured with advections that let her drift, back-sheared anvil, amongst the frames with a quiet violence. She hugged the book to her bosom and moved on.

  “Come back—come back to me,” he called and cried. But she wouldn’t hear him.

  (51 Down) I am all the Weathers of the Heads,

  can’t you see?

  He opened his eyes. Come and sleep, he begged.

  She still stepped silently among the frames, occasionally tapping one, resting her chin on another, ducking under yet another and staring up at the clear skies and soughing-sighing. She hadn’t slept all night. When she sat, where she sat, she’d kept watch over him, her gun in her lap. Occasionally he snapped awake to find her sitting nearby, leafing through the sketches.

  Sunlight strewn itself over the green hills which stretched and yawned as far as one could see. There, far into the back of the world, the black mountains were gone, he saw. Now there were waterfalls at that end of the world of the plain, waterfalls that poured out of the heavens, crashing over the land. You could almost hear it, a roar. Her clear, irreverent, and revenant laughter caught him, pulled him off the roof, a pleasant spill down to her, a waterfall all his own. This was, he thought with shifting peace and terror, the last day he’d remember the long shadows and the story of Weatherhead.

  I, she spoke, was once thought dissoluble or whole. This was the lie today gave tomorrow, don’t you see? In the end, she drawled, what all was I? She tapped a finger on the front of the sketchbook. Ash rained down on the cover from her cigarette. I saw the rush of blood up to the face of the day. I saw how morning expands before me. I heard how night sings its own lullaby to itself. See how the ash trees bend towards the sunlight? Even the bats do! Light to all of Weatherhead and the plains flourish,” she shouted. There was nothing for her voice to echo off of except for him. He smiled at her from where he lay. He loved her angry. He believed it part of a scheme to draw him up over the waistband of her bandit’s breeches and down into the thicket of her godreds.

  “What do you think of this one?” She tipped a finger to one panel and titled the book to him. Dart leader, he recited. The drawing: chin thrust up, she led armies, she never lost.

  He loved it as it was her, a new her to him, but what did it mean?

  She took the pose from the picture, wrist curled on hip, other hand extended up and then she whistled, her lips whittled wind, ions were displaced and such—science has no foundation in Weatherhead—and she teased a hiss-spit of lightning out of the clear blue sky. Lightning’s pope spreading the currents of its religion in the strike. She balanced the course of white fire on her fingertip like a blasphemy on Sunday. Seeing his panicked cringe, she flicked it off out over the city. There was a distant squawk and a bird died.

  He watched her for a long time. She was learning how to make her face and faces for the weather. She had netted some wind in a diaphanous noose of some kind and was weaving it in and out of the faces on the pages. It was a pleasant and simple thing to watch, poetries of the air that she drew up off the page and took into her lungs with a titanic inhalation. “Now, thunder,” she said in a mock-basso, blowing out pitch and smoke. She spoke as if she thought herself alone and the ridge abutting her eyes was all murk and ponder and as he watched the weather veins on every roof proved their fealty to her wrists and throat-tic, the underscore to the scarlet symphony and they rang out with an impossible, black voice, part horror, part laughter of a pair of crucified lovers, pinned face-to-face on a dark tree grown out of the lower registers and this black sound shattered all the nearby windows and even she leapt back, took pause and reflected on the perfect poison of this crashsong. What weapons weather held! And what pleasures! Her blood was the city, all her goodred fed the weather now once again and the war between the sky and the ground ended with an armistice—armed with her book of weathers and faces, she was complete now, she could breathe her own blood, no one else’s, stalk the land with her thunders and lightnings, she could sit at an angle above the plain as she did now and call on the fury and fuck of all the seasons and the clouds-as-flowers and her bats, she could put spring in her step and glisten like honeydew where it counted most—she could put scratch on the breeze above sand, cross the legs of her city with a chilling gust, put the silk of winter over smiles and frowns and turn them solid, she could freeze tears, too, make them pearls on cheeks and lips—for even he knew that she loved nothing more than the random track-trickle of a tear to the corner of the mouth—there was something, she swore later, to the bead of liquid at the corner of the mouth
—

  He saw all this and more. He was being shown the pieces of her, what he had gathered up. All he had lacked was the proper order to return them to and this he had found in the sketchbook. He had found the secret of her. That’s why he had chased her to Weatherhead. This much he remembered. And he’d written a story—the name escaped him.

  She tickled a page with her forefinger. Derecho, she said with a dove on her tongue, gay and splendid. She threw her head up and let the sketchbook fall and she kicked off his clothes and started a line of giggling saliva-severity at his toes and worked her way all the way to his neck. She whispered of puzzles and pencils—

  He dragged his grimy nails down her back. I read this book that day—that day the four criminals came—

  You mean Love, she raised up halfway and shook her finger at him, don’t forget who they were, and her eyes leapt wide as she curled an eyebrow up with a wicked smile and hissed an evil word at him: foehn.

  Heat made his lusts swell at this word. Venus copper was his lower’s shade and her stark, hot gales coming off her tongue made it flutter purple. He gasped, I’ve seen this before—these faces. They’re you—

  She was laughing even harder now and spit danced like silver off her teeth. Of course they are!

  No! You don’t get it. I found it, but it was a forgotten book. It left smudges on my fingers, see? He held up his hand but she showed him hers, held out ten black-tipped white sticks. His was gunpowder, she pointed out as she licked them clean. He threw her over on her back and learned about other faces he’d forgotten, dew-on-a-kite, the shout-on-the-rooftop, and the labyrinth thread that he daggerthrew inside that trailed out with him as he slid out of her.