Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  “Kill you.” His voice was rough, sort of a wheeze now from coughing up marsh water.

  “Well, duh. Yeah. Question is what you thought that was supposed to accomplish?” He just stuck out his bottom lip. Put me in mind of Albinia, age eight.

  “Ain’t I done told your bosses, time and again, getting rid of me is gonna do em not one whit of good? Ain’t I told em how it’s the oracle decides whether or not the Water Museum’s ever gonna open up a pipeline and exercise its rights to sell? And if I hadn’t told em, ain’t it right there in our charter, a matter of public record for every passing pissant to read it if he remembers his A-B-Cs? Well, ain’t it?”

  My killer kinda shrunk his shoulders in. Breeze picked up some, rustling the reeds. I’m pretty well insulated, but Jasper couldn’t help a little shiver. That was all I got out of him that while, though.

  I left him and walked a couple of baskets to the boathouse for a life jacket. Had to untie his arms to get it on, and he wanted to wrestle then, having dried out enough to get his dander up. I got a hold on his nice new necktie and pulled. Finished bundling him up while he was trying to recall if he still knew how to breathe. I gave us both a chance to calm down, then dumped him back in the marsh.

  Good thing I had Buddy’s harness on him. I whistled him over, hooked up Jasper’s life jacket and we were on our way once more.

  “You’re in luck,” I told my assassin. “Usually we skip this part of the tour, but I noticed you gronking all the technical dingle-dangles. So I figure you’ll get a large charge out of our sewage treatment facilities.”

  The jacket worked fine. Buddy paddled joyfully along next to the bridges. He likes to make himself useful.

  It wasn’t far to the settling ponds. I gave Jasper plenty of chances to tell me about Colorado wildlife and the dying riparian ecosystem, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood. He was mostly silent, excepting the odd snort when Buddy kicked up too big a wake.

  Really, the ponds weren’t that bad. Joy, my youngest daughter, got the Museum a contract with a local trailer park, but they’re pretty much dormant till early May. Right then, the park was mostly empty, just a few old retirees, so the effluent came mainly from my offices and the tanks of a couple friends.

  I glossed over that, though, in my lecture. I concentrated instead on wind-driven aeration paddles, ultra-sound and tank resonance, and oh, yes, our patented, prize-winning, bacteriophagic eels. As the ponds got murkier and murkier, Jasper’s gills got greener and greener, so to speak. He held up well. I had dragged him over two locks, and had him belly down on the third when he broke.

  “Nonononono!” he gibbered at me. “What is it, what is it, don’t let it touch me, please!” I bent over and looked where he was looking. Something was floating in the water. I fished it out. One end of a cucumber had my killer sobbing out his heart and wriggling like a worm with eyes to see the hook.

  People are funny.

  Girlfriend came up and sniffed the piece of cucumber. It was kind of rotten, and after all, she is a dog. I threw it back to the eels, unhitched Buddy’s harness and rolled Jasper over on his back. “You ready to come clean?” I asked him. He nodded desperately.

  I wasted quite a few minutes trying to untie the wet silk knotted around his ankles. Then I got disgusted and sawed it through with my car keys. Still left him hobbled at the knees as I marched him off to the laundry room.

  We came in through the “Secret Tunnel,” what the girls like to call it. Really, it’s just a old storm sewer from under the highway. But when I excavated the place and found how close it passed, I annexed the pipe onto my basement there. Handy, sometimes. Grate keeps out most of the possum and nutrias. The big ones, anyways. I locked that into place and set Jasper down on a bench next to the washer, under the skylight.

  I nabbed a towel off the steam rack and wrecked it rubbing Buddy down. Took off his poor harness while carefully considering my killer.

  He looked a sorrowful mess. His tee shirt was gonna need some enzyme action before you could come anywheres close to calling it white again, and his jeans and jacket weren’t never gonna smell clothesline fresh no more, no matter what. His hat was gone, his hair matted down with algae and such. His eyes were red from crying, his upper lip glistened unbecomingly, and the rest of him steamed in the cool laundry room air.

  I prayed for a washday miracle.

  “Jasper,” I told him, “you are in a terrible spot right now.” He nodded a couple times, agreeable as any schoolchild. “Sometimes, the only way outta danger is in. You gotta go through it to get to the other side. You gotta sink to swim.

  “I’m telling you honest and true that in spite of what went on out there I bear you absolutely no grudges. You believe me?” Again the nod. “Good. Try to bear it in mind over the next few days.”

  I reached my shears down from the shelf above his head and cut away the rest of where I’d tied him up: hands first, elbows next, then knees. Those were some nice scarves, too. One my favorite. I was sure hoping he’d be worth it.

  “Strip,” I told him. He only hung back a second, then he put off his modesty or pride or whatever, and the rest of his wet, useless things right after. Girlfriend tried to run off with a sock but I made her bring it back. “Dump that shit in the washer.” I had him set it to low, hot wash, cold rinse, add my powder, and switch on. He didn’t seem to know his way around the control panel, and I wondered who’d been taking care of him back home.

  Pale goose pimples ain’t exactly my cup of vodka, but Jasper was a nice enough looking young man. Given the circumstances. I admired his bumptious little backside as I scooted him on ahead of me over to the Sunshower. Light shafted down through the glass, glittering off the walls of black sand that lined its path for all of two hundred and fifty feet. It was midday by then, and the water pretty warm. He stayed under there a good, long while. I could tell he was finished when he started to look for a way to turn it off. Weren’t none, of course. It ain’t my job to tell the water when to stop, only to help it through the flow. And naturally, any little deviations I do participate in ain’t nothing like what them so called “Water Interest” cowboys got in mind.

  “Leave it, Jasper,” I told him, motioning him on with my shears. Girlfriend gruffed a little bit to underline the suggestion. We took him along the hall past the Glowing Pool and the steps down to the Well. Later, on his way out, I planned on stopping to offer him a sweet, cold dipperful. Like drinking a cup of stars.

  Gradually, the way we walked kept getting darker, the skylights scarcer and more spaced out. Joy and Gerrietta’s mosaics running up and down the walls barely glittered by the time we hit the Slipstream, and I heard Jasper gasp as he stepped into swiftly moving water. “Keep going,” I told him, and he sloshed obediently on ahead. The dogs were between us, now.

  Somewhere close by came the sound of icebergs calving, the underwater songs of whales. I barely heard them as I fumed to myself, wondering if I loaded up a fleet of helicopters to drop off leaflets and trained a flock of condors to fly across the whole United States with a banner in their beaks, if I could make them idiots realize they were not gonna get their Great Lakes pipeline open by killing me off.

  Maybe the first few assassins were just to put a touch of fear on me. Maybe they thought the oracle wasn’t nothing but a sham, and I could be bullied into letting them use the Museum’s exclusive access.

  For a while there, looked like they really did want to kill me. With my oldest girl, Albinia, off in the wild blue yonder, there’d be a bit of a legal tussle over the Directorship. Guess they might of planned to take advantage of the confusion ensuing upon my untimely demise.

  Lately, most of their moves they seemed to make just purely to annoy me. Sending out an amateur like this here Jasper—

  Up ahead, the sloshing stopped. My killer stood waiting for us on the ledge, in the dark.

  “Here’s where you’ll be staying.” I opened the door to the Dressing Room. He didn’t seem much taken with the plac
e. Sure, the ceiling’s kind of low, ’cept for that two-hundred-foot skylight. And you got to sleep on the floor or in the sandpit. But that sand is soft, and nice and warm on account of the solar heat-exchanger underneath. “I’ll give you a little while in here by yourself to figure out what you’re gonna be when you come out. Say, a week maybe. Then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you’ll be needing.”

  “But—food, water!”

  “They’re here.” He looked around at the bare driftwood walls. “You doubting my word? You’re a bright boy, Jasper, I’m sure you’ll find where they’re at in plenty time.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re not trying to torture me are you? I mean, if you want a confession I’ve already—”

  “You don’t understand? Then let me explain. I don’t need a confession. I got that the first time them cowboys sent someone up here to murder me, fourteen years agone. That’s right, Jasper, you are by no means the first hired killer I met up with, though you have got to be the most naive by a crane’s holler. Hitchhiking to the hit? Talk about your sore thumbs!”

  Jasper turned red from the collarbone up. “My van broke down in Bliss.”

  “Yeah, well, guess you couldn’t afford a rental, and probably just as conspicuous to get one of them, anyways. But you coulda just given up. Couldn’t you?”

  That’s when my killer started in again about the blackbirds, and added a sheep farm and I don’t know what all else. It wasn’t the sense of his words I paid attention to: none of them ever had much worth listening to to say at this point. The Earth owed them a living, and a silver teat to suck. And it better be a mighty long dug, cause it wasn’t supposed to dry up, no matter how hard them cowboys chewed.

  They all seemed to need to give their little speeches, though, so I had got used to sitting politely and listening to the kinds of sounds they made. Rattles and grates and angry, poisonous buzzings was what they usually come up with.

  Jasper surprised me with an awful good imitation of a red-winged blackbird. Lower register, of course. But his voice trilled up and spilled over the same way, throbbing sweet and pure, straight from his poor little heart. A pretty song, but he was singing it to the wrong audience.

  Once, I was one of the richest women on this continent. Powerball winnings. I took and built the Water Museum, then finessed an old congressman of a lover of mine into pushing through our charter. He secured us the sole, exclusive rights to be selling off the Great Lakes’ water to irrigate them thirsty Western states.

  Or not.

  Didn’t them cowboys kick up a dust storm! Kept us real busy for a while there, in the courts and on the talkiest of the talk shows.

  I’m not rich no more. What I didn’t use building the Museum or fighting to protect our charter, I wound up giving us as a donation. Not so famous no more, neither. And important? Not in the least.

  During the season, I sell tickets and polish windows, hand out sea-weed candy to unsuspecting kids. Nothing but that would stop because I died, much less if I changed my feeble mind.

  I sighed. Jasper had finished his aria, and I prepared to shut the door. Then, shears still held tight, and Buddy close and attentive at hand, I did the funniest thing. I kissed him, right on his damp, still-kinda-smelly forehead. He looked up at me, and he done something funny, too. He smiled. I smiled again, but neither of us said a thing. I backed out, still careful, and locked him in. I have a sneaky suspicion this one might turn out to be interesting. When he’s good and ready.

  But She’s Only a Dream

  An old man named Roscoe reminisces, tilting his chair back as the sun sets. “She musta been from somewhere ’round here. Kansas City ain’t that big a town. But no one ever seen her ’cept at jam sessions and gigs. Sittin by, listenin in. Never liftin her voice above what was ladylike to speak let alone tryin to sing. She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.”

  Darktown pops and sizzles like a bonfire, but daytimes the flame’s invisible. Charcoal and ash flicker to the strobe, faces grimace and turn to it, scarves snap to it, newspapers crackle to the nameless music of the streets.

  This is a frantic song, a sixty-cycle-a-second scuffle. Not till evening does the light mellow. Then, golden horns fill certain cellars with a smooth hush, a yellow melody rising from below linked shadows. The soft sounds spill upwards, pooling at the feet of passers-by.

  Laura seems a little nervous, standing there on the sidewalk, tugging at her hat, her clothes, her hair. Yet she is perfect: lipstick even, stocking seams straight, beige- and brown-dotted hem swirling just so, brown pumps clicking just right down the cement steps.

  She opens the door on a room full of men and instruments; already the dampness is warming with body heat. They have traded axes, goofing themselves loose. Winks and nods greet her entry, and she smiles in return, working her way to the sofa at the far end of the room. A skinny, coal-colored youth sits there restlessly, waiting for the games to end.

  It isn’t long. First a slow blues. Then “Just You, Just Me,” and they’re really cooking. Smells good. Laura weaves her head in time to the fumes, delicate nostrils wide with pleasure. The next tune, a rhythm-and-blues, starts out at a medium tempo, but the drummer winds it up midway to a fast burn. At different times different musicians glance at Laura to see the music made visible. Her black eyes are afire with secrets.

  During their break, the cellar darkens with smoke and brightens with talk, most of it about the foregoing jams. Laura doesn’t say too much; once in a while, “Yes, I liked that,” or “Uh-huh, it was real nice.” Her voice is quiet, her words proper. Occasionally a man throws his arm over her shoulders, gives her a friendly squeeze, and her slight smile slightens.

  Everyone knows when it’s time to go back to work and play. Springs sigh, sheet music shuffles, places are resumed. Laura listens feverishly, her small, pointed chin cupped in one hand, elbow balanced on one knee. She can only stay for two more songs. Her mouth looks unsatisfied as she leaves. “Later, boys.”

  “In a minute, Laura.”

  She doesn’t walk far. Scared of the dark, even the brilliant darkness of the black folks’ wide-grinning night. She hails the first cab she sees, gives a fancy uptown address. The cabbie drives her right to the servants’ entrance. She shorts him fifty cents on the fare. “Iffen you wants to wait, I’ll get de res’ fum Miss Anne,” she says. He snorts, but what can he do, drive her back?

  She goes upstairs to the empty boudoir next to the master bedroom. The decor is severely pink, scented, and stiffly starched. She sits at a marble-topped vanity, its surface a mirrored intricacy of shiny vials and pots. She opens a large alabaster box, smoothes a transparent cream on her already creamy skin. A man calls through the door without opening it. “Hey, honey, that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She pulls a pink tissue from a shell-covered box.

  “You’ve been at that meeting this entire time?”

  She wipes quickly, cleaning half her face. “Yes, I have.” She looks long at her reflection. She is half full. She takes another tissue to her face. She is waxing. “We had a lot of work to do. Bazaar’s coming up. You know those poor people depend on us organizing it.”

  “How you women can talk all night about a miserable bunch of niggers is beyond me.”

  She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.

  “Okey-doke, Smoke.” The cabbie slipped the worn dollar bill into his shirt pocket. He had his full fare now and a fifty cent tip.

  “That ain’t my name.” The skinny, coal-colored youth turned away from the cab he had followed all the way from Darktown.

  “Who said it was?” Backing down the drive, the cabbie kept his eyes on the street end. He missed seeing how the coal-colored youth melted into the shadows. Went around the corner of the house. Walked up the steps. Seeking something that he sometimes got a taste of at jam sessions. A pause, while he did something to the lock without using a key. Then through the door.

  Inside, the large kitchen lay mostly dark.
Light from a far-off street lamp filtered through white net curtains over a counter on one side. Straight ahead a glow silhouetted a door and leaked out over blue and green linoleum tiles. The skinny youth pushed the door, and it swung open on a passageway with oyster white walls, tastefully carpeted in beige.

  The same carpet ran up the staircase. So did he, quietly. The stairs doubled back on themselves and left him on the landing where they ended, facing the front of the house. Two doors. He closed his eyes and followed his nose through the one on his left.

  She was in there, seated at the vanity. She swiveled on the pink bench as he entered, giving him the look of a wild thing surprised in its natural habitat but still sure of escape. A silk robe embroidered with rose and coral chrysanthemums clung to the new ivory of her shoulders.

  “Laura,” he whispered.

  “That ain’t my name.”

  He shook his head. Didn’t matter what she called herself here, or how much paler her face. Whatever tricks she played, he would know her anywhere. She was it—inspiration. The breath of air that fed the fire. He took a step closer, drawn by her scent, a mixture of fine cologne and fresh, faint sweat.

  “My husband’s in the next room. I can call him.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Be a shame if anybody found you in a white woman’s boudoir.”

  “Who said you was white?”

  She swung her legs around and planted them firmly before her, placed one hand between her knees and pressed them tight together. Touched the other to her loose, lustrous hair, silken as the robe she wore. “I did.”

  He shook his head once more. “I ain’t come to cause no trouble.”

  The bare skin above her breasts rose and fell sharply as she let out a silent, humorless laugh. “Why, then? You followed me home from that jam session, somehow. You broke in—”