Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  c) Care to explain yourself?

  I do not. The upper hand is wasted on the weak and compassionate. She walks hobbly. Not this time, baby.

  To ignore. This is a new weapon. It is to say: I am my world, and you are not a part of it.

  She millicks. She gnashes. A slam. I hear nothing. No doubt she is baking a cake to surprise me. A thousand cakes.

  V.

  Word for word, the story that took the place of the monster.

  The telescope has been redirected. Next door. Seventh floor. To the sexless anomaly.

  The sheets are clean so I wipe myself with them. Confusion. A weapon.

  The couch is frayed. Teeth marks from her incessant gnawing. Should have sprung for cast iron.

  The Truth About the Western Bluebird

  The Western Bluebird is not blue at all. It shows some chestnut color on the shoulders and upper back. Belly and undertail are generally gray. And the brilliant feathers from which it takes its name are, for the most part, an illusion. Melanins produce earth tones — grays and blacks, brown and buff colors. Carotenoids are pigments derived from diet and come in red, orange, yellow, and certain blues and greens. Flamingo-red is one of the carotenoids. Porphyrins are either iron-related (reds and browns found in owls and bustards, for instance) or copper-related (the magenta wing colors in turacos and the unique turaco green).

  But the Western has none of that. Its blues, rather, are caused by tiny particles in the surface cells of its feathers that scatter shorter wavelengths of light and allow longer wavelengths to pass through and be absorbed, leaving only the blue to be seen. Thus the blue in a Western’s feather can only be seen by reflected light; if you were to hold one up with the light behind it, you wouldn’t see the blue at all.

  Not that Chris Eaton cares about these sorts of things. To him, they’re just birds he sees on his morning runs through City Park, the three-hundred-and-seventy-acre green space right in the middle of the city, right below the apartment he and Rachel found when they first moved there. He is likewise completely unaware of the birds’ current plight, the myriad threats to their very existence, from a lack of proper habitat and pesticides killing their main source of foods to invasive species like starlings and sparrows, as he is to the recent efforts by conservationists to save the Blue from local extinction. Bird freaks. He is surrounded by these vigilante twitchers, camouflaged in their blinds within striking distance of the boxes they’ve nailed to trees and snowdrift posts, defending them against the tribes of sparrows and flying squirrels. Under his foot, at the very second we see him, is a trampled bluebird fledgling, ripped from its artificial nest by a territorial wren and then pumiced into the asphalt by runners like him, or the bicycles that aren’t supposed to even be there.

  Not that the pasted chick is anything special in this regard. Chris Eaton is similarly oblivious to the plover, unconscious of the cormorant and grebe, even the heron; ambivalent towards the vireo, the poorwill, the dunlin and pipit, seven kinds of hummingbird, eight woodpeckers, the shoveler and gadwall, the wigeon, the teal, three sapsuckers, flycatchers and nuthatchers (red-breasted, white-breasted, and pygmy), the warbler, the meadowlark, yank kestrel, and frigate bird; the murrelet; birds he can’t even pronounce, like the pyrrhuloxia or phainopepla, the gallinule, the phalarope, the avocet; and birds that would make him laugh were he more aware, like the titmouse, bushtit and dickcissel; water-bound mallards, canvasbacks, scoters and scaups; a pigeon with his head unfortunately stuck in a bagel hole, about to be bludgeoned to death by his hungry brothers and sisters; there’s even the occasional flood of sandpipers, mostly of the semipalmated variety but mixed occasionally with a lesser yellowleg or two, funneling into the Arsenal Wildlife Reserve north of the city like great schools of fish, a great gray cloud he can sometimes catch on the horizon but not now, blocking out the sky on their path north to the Arctic; more hawks and egrets than you could imagine; a trimming of finches; a raft of teal; a covey of grouse; a desert of lapwings; the dowitcher, godwit, curlew, and whimbrel; towhees and tanagers, jaegers and terns; bunting, bobolink, blackbird, and brant; and dozens to hundreds of gulls, lured by the loaves of bread old widows toss like they’re miniature cabers, the herring gull, laughing gull, California and mew, gulls that are ring-billed, black-backed, black-headed, and glaucous-winged, Andean, ivory, lesser and great, Bonaparte’s, Franklin’s, and even one named for some unknown person, lesser or great, named Ross.

  And in the end, it’s all just a list nobody cares about. Even the daily act of running is not important, so routine, so plebeian, hardly the sort of thing that might define someone. There are runners in the world, to be certain, people who don’t feel whole unless they are in full motion, who mark their lives by 10ks and marathons, or their quarterly footwear purchases. There are those who others see and think to themselves, with envy or pity, there’s a runner, that person is a runner. But even for them, the daily act of running, while therapeutic and invigorating, can be so habitual and repetitive that it blurs one day into the next, without definition or influence. He forgot his runs much as he forgot how he got home after a night of drinking, a trip he made so often that it would never again imprint itself on his memory. The running was part of him, but not a part that was likely to shape his life in new directions, not likely to truly shape who he was.

  Then, one day on his morning run, he found a magic coin.

  Had the man at the collector’s shop on South Broadway been more knowledgeable about these sorts of things, there would probably have been a sharp intake of breath, and with one eye closed and the other tightly gripping the loupe, he might have turned to a shelf beneath the counter, beneath the displays of French Louis d’ors and Napoleons, crouched like an old woman raising her skirts to pee, and returned with a tome likely covered in dust and, if the imagined cliché really called for it, cobwebs. A puff of air, a wave of the hand, and he would have had it open to page three hundred and fourteen, or more likely something like three hundred and sixty, then worked back page by page, haunted by the image of the page but not certain of its exact whereabouts until the loupe blew it up in front of his face.

  There it would be, a drawing of the coin Chris Eaton had found, with a short description of how Britain’s King George III had used them as indicators of a person’s worth, bestowing them on people he wished to provide with protection, or privilege, or a message, such as the one he gave to his parliamentary emissary to France, Sean Richard Vath (also known as Ricardo Vath, for his years in the Spanish military as a youth, training first at the Colegio Real de Guardiamarinas before joining the campaign on Sicily in 1718, becoming a knight of the Spanish Military (Order of Santiago) in 1737, and then returning to Ireland as Minister of Foreign Affairs), to offer Louis XV an end to the Seven Years’ War, after which Vath was made the official ambassador to that country, and further down the page, a list of other known owners including a Swiss pirate by the name of Aar, who was thought to have actually been given the coin unbeknownst to the King by one of his own favored English noblemen, the Viscount of Rhode, who supposedly used Aar on the sly to increase his own wealth.

  Most historians now surmise that Pirate Aar and Honorable Viscount Rhode were more likely both Finnish (see the section on the Jokinens in Garwood’s The World of the Pirate), possibly even related (Ron Vaschat’s Pirate Horde), and masters at changing their identities as it suited their needs — two sides of the same coin, so to speak. They were certainly both arrested and interned in Kazan in the late 1760s for allegedly conspiring against Russia’s presence in Poland. At that point, Rhode was claiming to be a Hungarian prince named Benyovsky, of which, he was also fond of joking, there were already too many; the country had had so many revolutions and upheavals that anyone could rightly claim to be descended from one of its victors. He was a descendant of both the Revays and Urbanovskys, and his presence in Poland, he assured the tribunal, was purely to seek out long-lost family relations under the
name Beniowski, who had apparently left him a large sum of money, of which he was told he might find some in Smolensk. Perhaps it was true. Luckily for him, the similar roots of Hungarian and Finnish made the difference in accent undetectable by the Russian soldiers who took him in. Less likely was Aar’s story of being an Italian on holiday. But still he gave his name as Arno and claimed to have never even heard of Poland.

  They were supposed to stand trial as prisoners of war in the fall of 1769, but as Austria swept into the Hungarian Szepes, attention was deferred from war to diplomacy, and Polish land was used as a form of political appeasement. Meanwhile, Aar and Rhode managed to escape by land, spending several months as novices in Tibet before making off with a gilt bronze lama, a Mongolian painting depicting the Buddha Shakyamuni flanked by two disciples, a bronze statuette of a standing Padmapani, and a pair of Tibetan wood carvings, one depicting the three deities of the lotus family and the other more abstract but meant to represent the time directly before the Buddha’s birth in Lumbini, all of which they hoped to sell in Macau (though they’d taken the wood pieces mostly for personal aesthetic reasons). In Macau, the pair learned to sail from Choi Tse-Ran, who had taken Chinese shipbuilding out of the junk era into the time of elegant vessels similar to the multi-masted American schooners. They eventually hit the high seas as rice merchants and settled in Madagascar, where Aar, now pretending to be a French naturalist and sportsman by the name of Ruisseau, studying the effects of isolation on evolution (specifically how the island’s early separation from the continent had preserved the lemur population), managed to practically exterminate that same lemur population with a new breech-loading rifle prototype and subsequently spent some time as the island’s elected tribal Ampansacabe, or king.

  Rhode, more jealous than anything, stayed on the ship.

  There, seeing separate and conflicting opportunities, their paths diverged. Rhode, settling in England, was now claiming to be of royal German lineage and a distant cousin of King George III. Not many believed him, but the only important one was George III, who was already quite far into his senility and likely to believe the tricky Finn was the king himself from the future. The elder Jokinen grabbed the king’s ear by claiming to have solved the Longitude problem, which had been set out by an Act of Parliament over half a century prior and came with a reward of £20,000 (worth well over £2 million today). The two of them made plans to set sail the next spring to test his theory, and they spent much of their time together setting and resetting the appropriate menu. George had also recently purchased several new clocks and was under the delusion that he could, if he had them all perfectly synchronized, actually control time’s flow, so he spent much of his time ordering Jokinen around the palace to adjust them to his needs: three seconds forward, one back, four forward on the John Arnold, one forward on the Donisthorp, five back on the double-pendulumed Janvier, nine on the balance-spring Salomon Coster. Although George had forgotten about the sailing trip by winter’s end, and Jokinen’s device was found only to be accurate to a degree rather than the required two minutes, the king still bestowed his latter-day title upon him, with a private estate near Bridgewater in Somerset, and they remained close friends until George mistook him for “his true wife” and declared Charlotte an impostor. “Ruisseau,” on the other hand, tried to obtain support from France and the Americans to use Madagascar as a base against England. And when that didn’t work, he changed his name once more to Aar (it is from his name we get the stereotypical pirate exclamation) and started robbing from all three.

  It’s unclear exactly when Rhode provided Aar with George’s seal, but most often, it appears, Aar seems not to have required it — not even when the British man-of-war HMS Sackville, captained by Admiral A. Cheriston, had set a trap for him at the inlet of Chantie’s Or. Despite all common sense, Aar and his men suddenly changed course and charted through the dangerous reefs rather than sail calmly into Cheriston’s trap. Likewise, at the Battle of Flamborough Head, where Aar had briefly leased out his services to the Americans, his ship came under so much stress that it would completely fall apart two days later, but in the heat of the battle itself, when things seemed their worst and everyone thought he would finally surrender (that he should surrender), he called out that he had not yet begun to fight and captured the HMS Serapis.

  That was how the legends about the seal began, that it had other magical properties beyond royal protection, and could perhaps predict the future, were it ever presented with only two possible options. Aar was often said to have consulted it on all matters from military tactics to what to eat for breakfast. Only once did Aar require the coin for the purpose that Rhode had intended, when the coin instructed him to sail once more into Chantie’s Or, the gubernatorial home of Richard Avon, despite the threats of mutiny from his crew. Upon witnessing the seal with his own eyes, Avon reluctantly welcomed the pirate and his chief officers to dinner with his family, including his comely daughter Julie, with whom Aar was instantly taken. After they had been shown to their rooms, Aar snuck back down to the governor’s daughter, guided by a temptation so great that he must have failed to consult the coin on it, and was struck down in flagrante delicto by Avon himself. The coin was still in his pocket when his body was dumped from the parapets onto the rocks below. Aar’s final meal is actually captured in a painting by the Italian Agostino Brunias, known mostly for his depictions of life in the surrounding islands. Called Richard Avon Eats (1784), the painting shows Avon totally engrossed in his meal while the pirate and his daughter play footsies beneath the table, observed rather closely by a shocked manservant who has bent down to retrieve a fallen shaker of salt.

  Of course, the man at the coin dealership knew none of this, and both surfaces of the coin had worn so much that they were nearly smooth, so he shrugged, handed it back, and told Chris Eaton he was sorry, it looked like it was worthless.

  Chris and Rachel, it might have been said, were similarly on the rocks, by which one could interpret that the two were commonly taken to drink, except that, though true, Rachel was more inclined to cheap wines from California than anything with ice, meant to look as though she were trying to buck the establishment, and Chris was more partial to snobbish beers and drinks to which you’d never add more than a few drops of water. The truth was that they were no longer getting along with any regularity, certainly nothing bordering on love, or even in the demilitarized zone of friendship or casual relations. They were having such fun throwing large dinner parties, however, that it was often difficult to notice — under the laughter and stories, alcohol and artisanal cheeses — the firm undercurrent of distrust, mild resentment, and general boredom. Their guest lists, while not yet the veritable Who’s Who of Denver, were often impressive in an underground-art-and-media kind of way, at least on his side, including: several painters who’d had their work shown outside the state, as well as one who’d even made a living selling his work at outsider art fairs until someone discovered his certificate from the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and he was banned for life; a writer from abroad who’d had her work lauded fairly young, come here for the MFA program, then failed to produce anything else of note but remained continuously charming; people who wrote for Westword, the free Denver weekly, on subjects like music, movies, city politics, and perverse sex, when not making unprofitable art of their own; and the indie banjo player who’d had a video on MTV2 and enjoyed much of that delightful buzz and hype without any of that horrible success; but also several of Rachel’s workmates, like the woman who’d joined the agency at the same time yet managed to become the creative director before turning thirty, on the strength of a campaign even Chris respected; and someone Rachel had gone to school with who had founded a niche running magazine for new mothers; and an Ecuadorian, also a workmate, who’d come to do her MBA at Daniels and had instead gotten married to a distant cousin of the McNichols family, for whom the arena in which the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets played was named and with wh
om her husband held a token management position. There was also a DJ they’d met through the banjo player, making a name for himself in clubs none of them had heard of. And the son of a left-leaning politician. And a sommelier, who threw up all over the bathroom and successfully cleaned it up so they never noticed. And a portfolio manager — a friend of the Ecuadorian’s husband — who came uninvited because he was visiting on business and who, when asked what he did, listed his full title as Head of International Equity Portfolio Construction for the Colorado Association of Educators (CAE) Pension Plan in charge of investing over $7 billion for the retirement of the states teachers. And the owner of the sports memorabilia store, who had arrived drunk and started into a tasteless joke about an investor with three girlfriends. The Ecuadorian, who Chris felt might be flirting with him, turned away. The DJ, who had just inherited several thousand dollars from a distant great aunt who had recently passed away, said he could use a few tips on what to do with it, you know? And Rachel, who loved money but was still uncomfortable around it because she could still recall her recent days in a college slum house with six other girls, made a joke about student loans. The sports memorabilia collector, after several attempts, finally hit his punchline just as the Ecuadorian’s husband was trying to diffuse the assay at unpaid financial advice, and the Ecuadorian squeezed her husband’s arm, distracting him momentarily and allowing the DJ to mention specific tech stocks. And Chris heard the portfolio manager say: Tech stocks are for amateurs. And he and the Ecuadorian’s husband had a good laugh. And the collector said his stock in an online browser company was doing fine. And he heard the copywriter say: Gaming systems, that’s where it’s at. And someone else said: Have you heard about hard-disc storage? And he heard the portfolio manager say: Look, maybe you should just leave this sort of thing to the experts, at which the sensitive Ecuadorian tried to change the subject to Rachel’s cat, and eventually even that turned into a confrontation, and he heard someone say: All they do is kill the birds. And he heard that same person later respond: But it’s not like they’re really wild animals, because they wouldn’t really exist without human intervention, they’re more like robots. Or weapons. And Rachel decided to go to the kitchen. And he heard the portfolio manager whisper something to the Ecuadorian’s husband. And finally he heard someone say: Bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and realized it was himself. What is, whispered the Ecuadorian to her husband. What is, said the Ecuadorian’s husband, only louder. Oh, you know, Chris Eaton said. And finally the portfolio manager himself chimed in with: No, we don’t, why don’t you tell us, and it was obvious his back was up, which made Chris Eaton dig in even more, until the two of them had tightened their grips on their drinks, refusing to break eye contact, and Chris Eaton said what he said, and he heard the DJ laugh uncomfortably, and he heard Rachel say: This is ridiculous, but the Ecuadorian seemed to be egging him on, smiling coyly at him now when her husband wasn’t looking, and so he continued, listening to the portfolio manager list off his credentials and, again, the $7 billion, and eventually the challenge re-emerged: You do what you do and I’ll just flip a coin for a month and we’ll see who really deserves your salary. And they shook hands under the pretense of being gentlemen and everybody went home.