by Terry Griggs
The captain didn’t have to shout a warning—although he did—for Grif had already dropped onto the dock and flattened himself out. A bullet whistled overhead and hit the water, with a hissing thuck as the lake swallowed it. With his face pressed into the wood of the dock, his lips kissing the grain, the smell of tar coiling up his nostrils, Grif had to wonder about the gift of second sight Roland had promised him. He couldn’t see much from this vantage point. He couldn’t even see the breakfast he had envisioned only moments before. Instead of that knife and fork, all he could picture grasping firmly in his hands was Avice’s pulsing throat. As he rose from the dock, legs rubbery, fingers twitching, he decided that he was going to have to forswear his telling cups of rue, and his breakfast, and do something about that woman. His hands were working already as he walked briskly away from the water’s edge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
blue ruin
Hugh lay on her bed. The peanut balanced on his throat-boll kept the room from rocking. His face was stretched tight as a drum and each dust mote that drifted down from the ceiling hit it with a loud ping that hurt like a pinprick. Hugh was thoroughly gin-rinsed, addled, pickled, half eaten by a spirituous solvent. There was nothing left of his brain but lace, and his body was a jumble of spare parts stuck so loosely together that, if he moved it even an inch in an effort to puke in the bucket Avice had put by the side of the bed, he would collapse into a pile of screws, rat turds and loose change.
Her pacing. Back and forth, back and forth. Every time she walked by the bed, he could feel her passing right through him. Her intensity was painful. Even at the best of times, to touch her was to get a shock of spirit conducted through metal—direct contact with hell’s heat. She was enough to make a man’s hair howl. And his toenails. By God, he was sure they were going to shoot off the end of his toes and stick into the wall.
He should have listened to that little angel in the barroom. White dress, straw hat, ten, eleven years old, bible clasped to her breast, and singing so sweetly … Jesus the water of life will give. The water of life—whisky. Hugh knew that; why else was it called corpse reviver? But the Lord as distiller? This was a whole new angle on religion he hadn’t considered before. Then she sang “Rock of Ages” and some prohibition song … The drunkard shall not perish, in misery and pain … her voice so pure that men were falling on their knees, praying and singing along and shouting out the abstinence pledge. After she left, everybody felt so virtuous and worthy that they jumped right up, slapped the sawdust off their pant legs and hollered for another round.
But whose slack-witted notion was it, anyway, to send such a pretty young thing into that filthy place? The temperance hags, that’s who. Too chickenshit to enter the tavern themselves, their long, pointy noses turned up in disgust. Temperance! Got nothing better to do than ruin a man’s pleasure. Somebody ought to cork their yaps with a good thick fist. Man works his arse off all week, nothing wrong with a few drinks. Only … it was the thirty or so following the first few that Hugh wasn’t feeling too confident about at the moment.
Take Avice. She’s different, she don’t care. Kill yourself with the stuff, it’s all the same to her. There she goes. He shuddered. He could swear that woman had walked ten miles in this room already. You’d think it was the road to happiness.
If Hugh had had the physical means, he might have craned his neck, lifted his head just enough to watch her whip her hairpiece out of the wash bowl where she kept it and attach it onto her boy cut with a few deft, artful motions that often looked to Hugh like she was sticking pins right into her skull. He loved to dig into that bowl of hair himself. He loved the silky feel of it in his fingers, loved to rub his face with it and drink down its smoky fragrance, her hair that smelled like no other, like a field on fire. Never mind that the stuff made him sneeze. Shit, if he sneezed now, he’d blow himself apart.
Her tireless pacing disturbed the air, roiled it like a pool. It had been washing over him ceaselessly, the rhythmic torture of it so relentless that it took him a while to realize she was gone. What relief. Sleep—he dropped into it like a grave. Once there, not even his dream of being a log fed through the sawmill—his own snores ripping through his head—could wake him.
If Grif and Avice had taken to stalking one another down the same alleys and passageways, they might have actually met and resolved their marriage one way or another—inventively or disastrously. Although they were currently living within the same half-block, on the same street, in the same small town, Avice could not find him because she was lost in a labyrinth of revenge, and Grif had even less luck locating her, for she had become strangely elusive. Finding her was like trying to isolate a lick of wind for observation. And once the desire to throttle her, to take her neck in his hands and halt the pulsing life in it, had dissipated, he did want to observe her, in taxonomic detail, from claw to wing tip. He needed to sift through her to find what it was that held him. He understood that she had changed. She was fierce, wanton, remorseless, and possibly, unaccountably, more vulnerable than ever—but the change that interested him involved something far less obvious. It was almost as if they had consummated their marriage and thereby become inextricably mixed, trapped in each other’s bodies. They were married just enough to be snagged, caught on one another by something broken and ragged—a nail or piece of bone, a vow pointed and sharp as a fish hook.
The allure of what she withheld, like an unacknowledged impregnation, disturbed him, and drew him.
If he was searching for something scarcely perceptible in her, and willing to construct her cell by cell around this mystery, she had her sights set, less fancifully, on the whole man, whom she would gladly break down into the smallest of pieces and scatter far and wide.
Grif had learned to be careful when entering his room after his chores at the hotel were finished for the day. He had learned not to propel himself with too much eagerness toward his longed-for bed. A man too avid for comfort might leave his head behind, suspended on the threshold where someone had strung a thin wire; his head served up like a block of cheese, the only smile left the one topping his neck. He had learned not to use the water from the pitcher on his washstand without first dropping a roach in it to see if the creature dissolved like a tablet. He had discovered that in standing too close to the window, one not only got air, but aerated: his walls had acquired several bullet holes during his residence. And his bed was always more welcoming without the broken glass concealed in the covers; likewise the leghold trap. At times deliberation was required, and at other times its very opposite. When entering Turner’s Dry Goods on an errand for Roland, he had the disconcerting experience of seeing the better part of his earlobe precede him, skewered on the tip of a stiletto, his own skin racing him to the counter.
His skin in fact was getting a real education—that being the only way it could save itself. It had developed a keen sensitivity to murderous intent in the immediate environment, and ever seemed to be yanking him, its contents, this way and that to safety, pulling him behind posts, making him sprawl on the floor. Grif found himself ducking and diving, jerking around like a puppet, but for the life of him he couldn’t nail down her intent. Did she want to control him, make a fool of him, unnerve him, or simply drive him into the hands of the law? She had his journal and yet had not used it against him; she had his life in her hands and had not yet taken it. If she really wanted to do him in, surely she would have done it already, without the provocative foreplay. Or her thuggish friend would have.
Roland, like Jean and Ned before him, wanted to tell Grif stories (was there something about him, he wondered, that stimulated the anecdotal impulse?), and he was generous with his one bottle of whisky, although the boy was not a drinker himself. While they sat together that morning in the front room of the Sun, its lobby and bar, he told Grif about a woman who used to live in town, who for her entire life believed she was being followed by someone. The unsettling thing was that she could never catch sight of this person. If she tu
rned quickly, she might almost see him. This invisible other always remained on the very edge of her vision, the merest fraction away from being seen.
“He?”
“She was certain it was a man. She could feel his breath on her neck. Could smell it even, and it was like water, she said. The smell of the lake.”
“She was crazy, of course.”
“She got there eventually. He drove her to it.”
“And when she arrived, did he finally reveal himself to her?” Grif wasn’t taking this too seriously.
“No. That’s not what madness is like.”
The story was a parable, Grif concluded, a coded warning. Although he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be the one on the periphery playing the part of the shadowy predator, the illusory stalker stepping out of bad dreams, or if he was the one being driven mad. Avice was following him, but every time he turned to catch her at it, all he saw of her was a glimpse of her black dress disappearing around a corner, or a faint heel print in the dust. She left very little evidence behind of her presence, his newly shy and retiring wife. She had withdrawn into unreality, and was luring him there, over the precarious edge of his sanity.
Hugh, on the other hand, was all too visible. Grif had watched him reeling pie-eyed down the street. Hit by white lightning, drenched in panther piss. He saw him propped up against the Post Office, chewing his tongue, slack-jawed and stupefied, or leaning over the balcony of the Mansion House, staring down at him, puzzled. And pizzled. It disgusted Grif to think she could bear to let him touch her. Adultery with an ogre. He was nightmare material, fungus-faced, something that might surface in a bog. He was the dark slub in the gut of the alley, the town’s malignant growth, its tumour completely cut and floating dangerously free.
Grif understood that Hugh was her rebuke to him in subhuman form, the agent of her dirty work and his would-be assassin. But assuming that she wanted him more unbalanced than dead, which seemed to be the case, he was not consoled. As far as he could tell, the guy was plastered about one hundred percent of the time, his aim not true. If she wanted to maintain the margin, however slim, between his living and his dead self, he did not see how Hugh, with the finesse of an enraged bull, was going to manage it. Grif had guessed (correctly) that she had not told Hugh anything much about him—or them; and that alone was what probably kept those bullets on a wider trajectory, or the knife from finding a slot in the very centre of his head. Whatever shreds of information she fed him, it must have been enough to keep him in the background, menacing but more or less satisfied, not hungry enough to come forward and make a meal of Grif. Not yet.
Poor maligned Hugh. Sure, he had performed a few services for Avice. She was a lady, and ladies expected that. She was not like his ma (fat sow) or those prune-faced old maids who were fighting to make this a dry town—dry as their shrivelled twats. He wasn’t blind (blind drunk was a different matter). He saw how Avice had taken a disliking to that mollycoddle who was staying at the Sun. Hugh didn’t much like the looks of him either. He wasn’t respectable. His clothes didn’t even fit. He weren’t no reverend, neither. For Avice, Hugh would gladly rearrange those looks any way she liked. If she wanted the clown to dance, Hugh would make him dance, right into the ground if need be.
For the time being he had his own business to attend to. He was still trying to fight his way out of that sawmill dream. Christ, now he was a stack of planks! If he didn’t wake up soon, that faceless figure in his dream, that man running the mill, in top hat and cape no less, was going to cart him away and build something out of him—a shithouse, his gaping mouth for the hole. Mind, he figured he could always drive a sliver up the guy’s arse. Hugh wasn’t without tactics, even in the most trying of circumstances. He was not as stupid as he looked, which in itself would have been an accomplishment.
Avice too might lately have dreamt herself into some architectural form (although nothing so humble as an outhouse), for she had been spending her days in the company of buildings, at times clinging to them like paint, while spying on Grif, tailing him or avoiding him. She had gotten to know this town intimately from its material substance, the quality and texture of its wood (how chinked and dovetailed), its brick and stone (the workmanship in its assembly, or lack of it), her hands sliding across cool surfaces like pond striders. In her strategy of concealment and pursuit, she had adhered so closely to the sides of stores, houses, hotels, that she often felt the life that pulsed through them—sounds and vibrations and heat routed through her. She drank in the fragrance of pitch and turpentine, whitewash and dust, while her face was pressed into cracks, her nose a blunt root, probing. Once, she almost inhaled a moth, its powdery wing clamped like a dun shade across her nostril. She had nicked her tongue, cut it on a shard of tin, and no wonder, for she had driven more than a few choice words deep as nails into these walls when from her hiding place she watched Grif neatly sidestep some carefully constructed trap. How she hated to see his unscathed back moving away from her. How she hoped it was only the fact that he was unharmed that pained her.
Anyone inside these buildings listening to her angry murmur might think the walls were infested with wasps.
This day, having left Hugh to sleep it off, she stationed herself across the street from The Dancing Sun, behind a stack of fish boxes that had been left out in front of the Customs House. The boxes, stacked six and seven high, formed a narrow wall with chinks to peer through. From this vantage she was able to see the hotel clearly without herself being seen, even though she felt more than a bit ridiculous, as if spying on a husband suspected of infidelity … but of a commonplace variety, not Grif’s particular brand of faithlessness. Her surveillance, she found, had become necessary; she couldn’t let it go. He was having a little dalliance with death and it was fascinating to watch. Five minutes and he’d step out of that door. He’d become so predictable. She couldn’t understand why he came out at all, and so punctually, when he knew that his life was hers, and that she was not to be trusted with it. Unless he didn’t take her seriously. Unless he knew something about her that she didn’t know. If this was his thinking, she would have to differ, would have to apprise him of her true character; but she wanted him fully alive to appreciate it.
Alive, yes—and this is where Hugh presented a few problems. Though not at the moment. She had left him behind, so sodden that he was flammable; toss a match on him and he’d light up the room. Hugh was her obedient oaf, her big doggie, loyal but not entirely reliable, and not patient enough to fuss with the intricate machinery of her design. He did have a mind of his own, however meagrely provisioned. She liked him, to be quite honest, but she did not think that her faint feeling for him, genuine as it was, was going to do any of them any good.
Waiting, she caught her breath. The small street sounds around her stopped. Grif was going to appear. When he did, her heart would beat faster and harder. She was thrilling only to the chase, the game, and not to the man. Not that. Although he was … beautiful. Was she the only one who had ever seen that in him? Odd, that he never wore a hat any more. A slovenly habit and one that left his head pathetically exposed, an obvious target. She pictured a bullet, shaped like the end of a woman’s finger, skimming along his scalp, tracing a part right down the middle. In their former life together, their ex and non-existent one, she might have done that, raked her fingers through his black tangle of hair, not painlessly. Did he think she would have been a modest and reticent bride, their lives circumscribed by convention? At-homes, clinking cutlery, lustres and knick-knacks, the smell of lemon polish, the constant nickering of her sisters: the stale interior of marriage would not have defined what they made together. Theirs would have been something wholly uncontained and shockingly pleasurable—no words for it.
She grew very still. There he was. He had stepped outside the hotel and was glancing around, cautiously. Good. Then he looked over at the fish boxes. He was glaring, darkly. Surely he couldn’t see her? She crouched further down, willed herself into a tight, unrec
ognizable form. He began to cross the street, walking straight towards her, as if she were plainly visible. She was appalled by his expression, determined and purposeful, as if he had something of consequence to say. As if he were carrying words in his mouth that could only be passed on directly, physically, pushed down her throat, like a bird feeding its young.
Avice made a dash for the alley between the Customs building and a warehouse, slipping away like water, and Grif followed. And followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
the lady protests
Grif thought it was the moon, knuckled and white, bunched like a fist, that had flown down out of the sky and popped him one. He raised his hand slowly to touch his face, to explore with his fingertips this new terrain, swollen and cut, and so unfamiliar that it might easily have been stamped by the moon, or excavated by it. Her face had been washed in it, the moon’s light. She had been bleached to a spectral shade, her features ghostly pale, when he had finally cornered her, caught her up against the wall of May’s Livery Stable, after hours of hide-and-seek. Confound the woman. Escaping through windows, down stairs, through trap doors, she had managed to evade him like the immaterial and ungraspable moonlight itself. Like quicksilver. What was she made of? Gall for one thing, and bloody raw nerve. So many times it had been only the trailing sound of her voice he managed to catch—laughing at him.