I could see the truth of it written on her face.
She was not a monster, she had never been a monster, and how I wished I could take her in my arms, her frail bones sharp and splintering as a porcupine; how I wished I could whisper the words of comfort to her. But she did not wish to be comforted. Her spine was made of sprung steel. She would not break herself upon this, for she knew what loss was and what mistakes were and the hardness of carrying on anyway. My sister knew this. She had buried a husband she loved. She had cried tears for her own lost boy, and knitted a scarf for him in green and gold, and hung it upon the cold reminder of his body in the yard.
Her fingers twitched, knuckling the bone china cup. I wanted to take her hand, but I knew something of her pride, the pride and the grief and the love of all of us missuses of the Hollow.
“Let us do something,” I say. “Even if it is a small thing.”
It is an easy thing to take a handful of snow and fashion it into a boy, easier than most anyone would believe. Snow longs to be something else. Bread does not wish to be flesh, water does not wish to be wine, stones do not wish to bleed—but snow, snow wishes always to be the thing that is not, a thing that might survive the spring thaw and live out its days whole and untouched. And a boy, a boy who is loved, well, what finer shape is there?
And so we two fashioned it into a shape, and we set the silver dollars for its eyes and we wrote its name upon its forehead. Then, of course, it was not a thing of snow any longer but a thing of flesh: a thing with Milo Sandifer’s bright blue eyes, barely nudging five-feet, and still as tongue-tied as any boy ever was.
“Missus Suh-s-sabatelli,” he whispered, trying out that fresh new mouth of his.
“Yes, boy,” I allowed with a sigh. “That I am. Now get you home to your mother, she’s been calling after you, and don’t you bother her with what you’ve been getting up to. Just give her a kiss, you hear?”
“Right,” the boy said, “Yes, of course. I’ll do that. Thank you, ma’am.”
Already his tongue was working better than poor Milo’s ever did. But it wouldn’t matter none, I reckoned. Missus Felder unwound the scarf from around the king snowman’s neck. The hole in its chest where we had dug out the boy yawned like a chasm. Like Adam’s unknit ribcage.
“Here,” she said, and she wrapped the scarf around Milo. “You ought to keep warm now. Little boys catch cold so easily.”
He blinked at her as if trying to remember something, but then he shrugged the way that little boys do. Then he was off, scampering across lawns and driveways, home to his mother. I looked on after him, staring at the places where his feet had touched the ground, barely making a dent in the dusting of white over the grass.
“What do you reckon?” I asked Cheryl. She’d gone to patting away at her snowman and sealing him up again, eyeless, blinded, a naked thing without that scarf, only the hat on him now, only that gorgeous silk thing to make him a man and not just a lump.
“He’ll last as long as he lasts,” she said with a sniff. “Snow is snow. Even if it wants to be a boy.”
“And Lillian?”
She didn’t speak for a time, and I had to rub at my arms for warmth. For me it had already gone February and the little snowflakes that landed upon my cheeks were crueller things than the ones the other missuses would be feeling as they took their sons and daughters to church.
“Maybe it’s a kindness you’ve done here, and maybe it isn’t.” She wasn’t looking at me. Cheryl couldn’t ever look at you when she was speaking truths. She smoothed the freeze over the place where she drew out the boy, and her fingers were like twigs, black and brittle, against the white of it. “You can’t ever know the thing a person truly wants, but you keep on trying, don’t you? I hope your husband is a happy man, I hope you give him children of your own one day.”
“Well,” I said, but I didn’t know what more to add to that.
She was right, of course, she always was about such things: maybe it was a blessing and maybe it wasn’t, but the boy came home to find his mother curled up in his bed surrounded by arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. And he kissed her gently on the forehead, and she looked at him and smiled, her heart giving out, just like that, at the joy of seeing him once again. But the boy had been made good and sweet, and so he wrapped himself in her arms, and he lay next to her until the heat of her had faded away entirely.
That heat.
Poor thing didn’t know any better. But snow is snow, even when it is flesh. A thing always remembers what it was first. When Joe Sandifer came home it was to find his wife had passed on, and from the dampness of the sheets he knew she must have been crying an ocean.
Joe was a good man and a strong man; his fingers were long and graceful. He pulled up the sheet around his wife, and he kissed her gently, and he buried her the following Tuesday. Perhaps it was hard for him for a time; it must have been, for he had loved his wife dearly, and he had lived only to see her smile, but the spring came and went, and then a year, and then another year, and he was not the kind of man who needed wait long for a partner. It was Ellie Hawley in the end, childlike and sweet, whose husband had brought her the blue dress with the raglan sleeves, whose husband had left her behind when he found a Boston widow with a dress that didn’t make it past the knees and legs that went all the way to the floor. Ellie was the one who managed to bring a smile to Joe’s face and to teach him that there were still beautiful things left in the world for a man who had lost both wife and son.
And so it goes.
And it goes and it goes and it goes.
Until one day Milo came back.
“Missus Sabatelli,” he said when I opened the door to him, that bright June Tuesday with the scent of fresh-mown grass drifting through the neighbourhood, nine in the morning, just like he used to.
He was a grown man then, the height of his father, with his father’s good looks and easy smile. A handsome man. The kind of man you’d fall in love with, easy, but the kind of man you’d never know if he loved you back.
“Milo,” I said, and I had to hold on to the doorframe. I was half expecting him to be wearing that star-spattered cloak of his, to chew on his words as if they were gristle in his mouth. But he didn’t.
“Thank you for that kindness,” he said, “but I’m not Milo any longer. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.” I saw then that he was right. Whoever he was, he wasn’t little Milo Sandifer.
“You’ve come back,” I said. I shivered. For him it was June, but for me the wind was already blowing crisp and cool, carrying the smoky scent of September with it. Time was running faster and faster ahead of me.
“Yes,” Sayer said, lingering on that “s” with a lazy smile as if to show me he could do it now and easily at that. “I’ve come home again. Would you mind if I stepped inside, Marianne? I’m not one to gab on porches, and if it’s not too impertinent I could use a cup of coffee something fierce.”
“Of course, boy.”
He chuckled, and the sound was rich and deep and expansive. I stepped aside, and he took off his hat as he came in. Not the hat, of course. The one he wore was an expensive, grey Trilby that matched his expensive, grey suit and his expensive, leather shoes. He followed me into the kitchen: I regretted that I hadn’t had time to clear up properly that morning, but he didn’t seem to mind so much. He said nice, polite things about the colour of the curtains and about the state of things in general, and when he sat it seemed as if he were too big for the chair, as if that chair wanted to hold a small boy in it but had now discovered a man instead. The coffee’s aroma was thick in the air, and I found I could use a cup myself so I poured for both of us, and served it plain. He seemed the sort to take his coffee black.
I was nervous. It had been some time since there had been a man in my house.
“You found your way then?” I asked him.
“I did, ma’am. I surely di
d.”
“And you know about your mother?”
He smiled, but this time there was something else to the smile. “I do,” he said. “Missus Felder told me of all that, and I’m sorry for it, I suppose. She whispered it to me while I was gone. She cajoled, she begged, and she pleaded. She has a tongue on her could scald boiling water, Missus Felder does, could strip paint off a fence.”
His eyes were bright blue, and surprisingly clear. I wondered if he was lying to me. I could see he had learned how to lie. Like lying was easy and beautiful.
“You didn’t come back for her,” I said.
“I did not.” He paused, and breathed in deep, like he never smelled coffee before and found it the finest thing in the world. “I could say that I was unable.” He glanced at me underneath a fan of handsome eyelashes, quick as a bird. “But you know that’s not true, you know that’s not how magic works, don’t you? I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay, and it didn’t matter. What Missus Felder did—your sister, yes, I know about that—what she did was cruel in its own way, sure, but not in the way you’d think—”
“No, boy,” I cut him off. He looked surprised at that, like he was not used to people cutting him off. I wondered who this new boy was, this boy that Cheryl and I had made. “We figured it out, of course, though it was too late for anything to be done. You were always a boy who was looking for magic, even then, even then you were, and we knew it, Cheryl and I both knew it, but we had hoped it might be a different sort of magic. A kinder sort.”
“But it wasn’t,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t. You found something in there, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“And you stayed for it.”
“I did.”
“And now?”
“Now I have taken what I need from it,” he said, and he flexed his fingers, long and graceful. They were not the fingers he had when he was a boy, those poor stubby things that couldn’t palm a quarter or pull off a faro shuffle. These were magician’s fingers.
“So I see you have, my boy. Has it done ill for you or aught?”
At this he paused. I could see he wanted to get into his patter now, and it was not the same kind of pause as when he was young, when he knew the word but still it tripped him up; this was a different beast.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I want you to tell me. That’s why I’m here, I suppose, Marianne.”
“No one can tell you that, Sayer.”
He took to studying his fingernails. Maybe he learned that trick from Cheryl, not looking at a person. “I think you can. I think you are afraid to tell me.”
A shiver ran down my spine like ice melting. I tried to shake the feeling though.
“No, boy.” He looked up at that word. “Your sense of timing was always characteristically awful. You never learned how to wait for a thing. Don’t you know that? When you try to cheat magic, it just gets worse and worse and worse. What you found in that hat—some sort of secondhand magic I’m reckoning, that piece of truth you were looking for all that time—it’s yours now. It ain’t your daddy’s magic. It ain’t Lillian’s either. Poor, sweet Lillian. You’ve suffered for it, and you’ve caused suffering for it, so it’s yours to own, yours to do with as you will.”
“There is a bad thing coming at the end of this,” Sayer told me. He reached out that long-fingered hand of his, and he touched me on the wrist.
“I know, boy,” I said. “We always know these things. Time’s always racing on for us; even if most other folk can’t see it properly, you can. But, God, the thing we never learned right, Cheryl and I, is that magic is about waiting, it’s about letting the bad things happen. It’s about letting the children pass on into adults, and the mothers grieve, and the fathers lose their way, or find it, and the sons come home again when they are ready to come home. That is the thing you will not have learned in that place you went to, because that is only a thing you can learn out here. What are you going to be, Sayer Sandifer? Why, whatever it is you choose to be. You saw what was coming that day when you invited her up on the stage with you. Boy, there were twenty people out in the audience who loved you, who would have waited with you, who would have helped you get there on your own, but you wanted what she had and so you took it.”
The words were hard stones in my own mouth, but I had chewed them over so long that I had made them round and smooth and true.
“Where is my sister?” I asked him.
“She’s gone now,” Sayer told me, and this time I could tell that he wasn’t lying. I didn’t know what kind of a thing he was, this man drinking his coffee in front of me, this man who had taken power into himself but not knowledge, not wisdom, not the patience of a boy who learns to speak for himself.
“Well,” I said, and the word hung between us.
I felt old. I felt the weight of every summer and winter hanging upon me.
I knew it would only happen if I let it. I knew it would only happen if I wanted it to happen. I knew this just as my sister knew it.
Then Sayer laid down his grey Trilby on the table, and, lo and behold, it was the thing I’d been looking for after all. The hat, the chimney-pot hat. That little piece of secondhand magic. He turned it over so that I could see that yawning chasm inside—the pure blackness of it, deep and terrifying. The place he disappeared to. The place he found his way out of.
“You could marry me,” he said. “You always loved me, and I can see there’s no man about now. Living like that can be awful lonely.”
The words pulled at something inside me. He was right. I was lonely. This life of mine felt old, misshapen, stretched out by the years. But I did not want him. I did not want that stranger. “No,” I said.
He sighed and shook his head like it was my tragedy. My funeral.
“I’m not cruel,” he said to me in that handsome, grown-up voice of his. And he looked at me with eyes wide as two silver dollars, but flat-edged and dull as if the shine had been worn off them by residence in too many dirty pockets. “I swear I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s the world that’s wild and woolly.”
And I knew that magic only worked if you let it. I knew that magic only worked on a thing that wanted it. But I was tired, and I was tired, and I had lost my husband, and I had lost my sister, and I had lost that little boy I loved.
Sayer pushed the hat toward me.
I took it up carefully, studied the dilapidated brim, fingered the soft black silk of it.
And Sayer smiled. Just once.
And then the bad thing happened.
“Honey, I don’t know what now is. A way station maybe. A pit stop on the Road to Somewhere Else.”
I’M THE LADY OF GOOD TIMES,
SHE SAID
It’s barely past midnight on the crumpled asphalt ribbon of Route 66, west of Ash Fork, just past the bridge at the Crookton Road exit on Interstate 40.
We’re in an old, beat-up Studebaker Champ, and disaster is playing like a love song on the radio.
Carl rides shotgun.
You wouldn’t like Carl much. Not many apart from Juney do, but Juney’s got a blind spot for hard luck cases and Carl’s the most hard luck case of all, not counting myself. I know Carl. I bailed him out the time he beat up that girl for short-changing him at the 7-Eleven. The cops told me they had to haul him away, screaming, “For a two-buck tip you better show me your cock-chafing titties, you little whore!”
I never told Juney about that. We aren’t much the kind to keep secrets, but he’s her brother, and I spent enough nights on the couch in the early years to know when to let a thing go.
The Lady of the Ill Wind Blowing, indeed.
So Carl’s riding shotgun and I’m in the driver’s seat, because I sure as Hell wouldn’t let him touch the fucking steering wheel. Even now.
Carl’s angry. You can tell by the way he’s grinding his teeth—been doing that since he’s a kid, I imag
ine, so’s now they’re small and smooth like pebbles, rubbed down to raw little nubblins that hurt him to chew, but he does it anyway.
The other way you can tell Carl’s angry is the Colt. He’s got it trained on me. He’s draped an old U of A football jersey (rah rah, Wild Cats, huh?) over the barrel. Only we two know there’s a gun under it.
It’s my pappy’s Colt. Same one he used to renovate the back of his skull when I was seventeen. I don’t like guns. Must be the only fella in Mojave Country who don’t, but once you’ve seen what a Colt does, what it’s made for—which is turning a living, breathing human bean into ground chuck—well, the shine goes off fast.
Juney and Carl were raised different. Carl’s been shooting beer cans out in the desert since he was five. I seen him at his place with an old air rifle he musta got as a kid. He could pump it just right to knock flies outta the air, leave ’em stunned but whole. Kept ’em in canning jars until they suffocated, bumbling like drunks up against the glass.
Carl knew guns. He knew where I kept the Colt, and I only kept it for Juney. So she’d feel safe. That’s a laugh now.
Carl’s shifting the gun. I can’t see under the shirt but I can feel instinctively—hair on the back of my neck prickling with sweat—that he’s got his finger on the trigger. He’s stroking it. My skin crawls because he could be masturbating for all I can see, that wet gleam in his eyes and his tongue darting out like a lizard’s between his cracked lips.
He’d be crazy to pull the trigger now. I’ve got my hands on the wheel and we’re clocking over sixty, it’d kill us both. But that look in his eyes? He don’t give a damn. That’s what scares me.
So we drive.
I can feel the barrel trained on me. I can see the twitch of his finger. Clutch and release. Clutch and release.
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 4