The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  There’s a man named Yoth Begail behind the counter, scraggle jaw and white yellow beard, tin of chew in his front pocket and stretched tendons in his neck giving him the look of a scarecrow gone sentient. There’s pawned-off precious in the glass cases, dust on everything thick enough to epic it. These are the gun hoards of suicides from the local police repo, snuck out by janitors looking to buy other things, trading them over to Yoth Begail for the time being, taking his cash off to dealers and alimonies.

  Yoth’s been out here sixty-five years, give or take. Pawnshops are robber beacons, and people come in a couple times a year to gunpoint Yoth, who pulls his own weapon from undercounter, no hesitation. Yoth’s got no town rules to live by. He sells things no one else can sell.

  Got a case of stones brought in by the woman out near the reactor. Bunch of folks that way went to Heaven and left their blood behind, crystalized into little geodes, and the woman, only one still out there, has been selling them for years. They left bones that look like milk opal too, centered with garnet marrow and Yoth’s got some of those as well. The woman tried to sell him a skull, but he didn’t want that glittering thing around, the stony brain visible inside the opal casing. All of it was like to get him sick. Rest of the stones out here are hunks of green tourmaline, but the muddy kind, and tourmaline is rough luck.

  Oh, Yoth’s got the usual pawn glories too. All the things people come to him to forget. He’s like a confessor in that way. Bingo-bought prizes and family heirlooms, forlorn valuables traded for canned-good grocery dollars. Pearl necklaces bought in Tahiti on the only vacation, engagement rings wrung off arthritic fingers. Televisions and trophies, couple of gold bars somebody brought in from a hoard, pennies on the dollar, cause you can’t spend gold at the Walmart. He’s got a gunshop license, and he can sell whatever he wants, to anybody he likes. These guns have been used to kill all kinds of things: animals, trespassers, ownselves.

  Up high on the wall, there’s a glass case containing Yoth’s best rifle. It’s a black powder model, so in federal terms it’s not even a firearm. It can be sold to anyone, held by anyone. Black powder doesn’t need a license. When Yoth’s in the mood, he turns out the lights in the pawn, drinks a beer, and lets the rifle shine. Under the fluorescents it looks like any old firearm, dents and pits, but it came with weird copper-cased bullets, and the bullets are hot to the touch, even now, unfired since the 1800s.

  Or rather, fired only once, by Yoth himself, and he got what he needed.

  It’s not for sale, but the pawn ticket’s out there still. Brought in by a young woman with tattoos on her eyelids, who said there was no place out far enough that she could be sure people wouldn’t find it, so she was entrusting it to Yoth Begail and his pawn palace for the time being.

  “Welp,” said Yoth, who was familiar with people trying to keep their fingers on their valuables from afar. “I’ll take it off your hands, then, ma’am.”

  “You have to keep it safe,” she said. “It’s a damned old thing and it’s been in some trouble.”

  “Nothing’s damned without it’s had human hands on it,” Yoth said. “That’s just a black powder rifle. It’s the man with bad aim that’s the problem.”

  “So you say,” she said. “But you’d be wrong. I’ll be back for it. I haven’t slept in a while, and it’s that thing’s fault. Every so often, I need a rest bad. There has to be a bargain made.”

  Yoth considered that. He was a young man then, and he thought for a moment he could consider a wife like her, if he’d consider any wife, but in her stare, he saw nothing he liked. Woman looked like a wild dog, and when she shut her eyes she looked like a rattler. She was wearing clothes so old you’d have thought she lived in a cave, and she had white fur draped around her shoulders, fur of some animal he didn’t know. Leather pants so filthy she might’ve been an animal from the waist down.

  “You a hunter, then?” he asked.

  “Am that,” she said. “Been hunting in these woods years now. Trapping too.”

  “Why haven’t I seen you before?” asked Yoth. She couldn’t have been much older than he was.

  “I was out a long time, this last one,” she said. “Years. Got any tobacco? Can’t smoke when I’m hunting these.”

  “Animals don’t care,” said Yoth, passing her a cigarette, lighting it for her. This was before he took to chewing, safer in a pawnshop.

  She looked at him and laughed. “What I’m hunting likes the smoke. If I smoked, it’d find me before I’m ready to be found.”

  The tattoos on her eyelids were faint enough to be scars, but Yoth could tell someone had inked them in. Treelines on top of the mountains out here, recognizable peaks. A map. He looked at them secretly as he wrote out her pawn ticket.

  “You keep that rifle for me,” she said. “I’ll be back. Don’t fire it unless you want to call up trouble.”

  He peered out the window to watch her go. She was on horseback, the horse draped in an unlikely blanket the color of bluebells, a piebald black and white mane. Her mount moved like someone dragged up out of an armchair to dance to a song he’d never heard before. There was a little monkey in a vest sitting on the back of the saddle. The woman, the horse, and the monkey disappeared into the trees, and not long after that, snow piled up against his windows. Time he managed to dig himself out, Yoth Begail had decided to forget about the strange tracks her horse had left, nothing like hooves.

  That was sixty years ago. Yoth keeps the glass of the case clear, and the rifle oiled, but otherwise he leaves it alone. It’s loaded, unlike the rest of the pawnshop guns. It’s always been loaded. He took the bullets out once and held them, but he got a terrible feeling, and when he put them back in, there were burns on his palms. They took weeks to heal. That time he went to a doctor, who gave him some goat-shit-smelling ointment and told him not to play with matches.

  At night he can hear singing coming from inside the rifle case, but he’s no fool. He’s not tempted.

  Yoth’s four drinks into the dark when the Kid comes through the front door, slipping in without ringing the bell, loping over to the desk where Yoth is sitting. The Kid says, “Old man, give me your best shooter.”

  “You’re not old enough to own a gun,” says Yoth. “I only sell to people old enough to aim.”

  “I’m older than I look,” says the Kid. “And I’m not what you think. I want me some magic.”

  Yoth eyes him.

  “Mind out of here now, kid,” says Yoth. “I got the right to refuse service.”

  Yoth Begail is eighty-six years old when the Kid steals the rifle off the wall of the pawn palace and shoots him dead.

  THE HUNTER WAKES with a start in the middle of a blizzard, her cave filled with grey light. She’s been sleeping a long time. Her hand is clenched around a slip of paper, and her mouth is dry.

  Her heart starts up again, and she waits as blood circulates through her body, locks opening to let salmon through. Now the fish are running, red and pink and silver, bright fish in a bright river. Her horse is there in the entrance of the cave, his blue blanket over him, his mane whiter than it was when she was last awake. She shoves her boots on. The cave is lighter now, and icicles fall from the entrance, spearing the snow, cracking and groaning as they give themselves over to water again. Outside, flowers explode. The Hunter stretches her arms and checks her weapon. Her pawn ticket is still legible.

  “Up, horse,” she says, and the horse stands, and shakes himself. She straightens his blanket. “Up, monkey,” the Hunter says, and the monkey comes out of the saddlebag and looks around, eyes shining.

  “It’s hunting season,” she says.

  ANOTHER STORY FROM the history of the rifle: Yoth Begail fired this rifle just once, twenty years after he received it, into a stick-’em-up who’d opened the door of the pawnshop while Yoth was on the can. He grabbed the rifle without thinking, and pulled trigger into the robber.

  By then Yoth was forty years old and in love with the priest from down in the river v
alley, the one who traveled cabin-to-cabin spreading God like margarine.

  Yoth had his own secrets, and his own once-a-year trip away from the woods to a city where there were bars to drink in, and men to drink to, even if he had no way with words. Sometimes he opened his register and looked at the ticket, and wondered if the Hunter was ever coming back. Yoth was starting not to sleep for thinking of the black powder rifle, worrying that someone would steal it, and he wondered if what she’d told him was true, if it was the thing’s fault, or if that was just his mind running wild.

  The priest – let us call him the Priest, in the tradition of this kind of story – came to the pawnshop one day in spring and knocked on the door. When Yoth opened it, he was startled. Man of God. There was no God out here. That was why he was in the woods. There was only the new reactor, fenced and barb-wired, patrolled by trucks, and the old places, the missionary buildings going to crumble now, nobody worshipping in them anymore. Hunters holed up eating beef jerky in the wood churches these days, pine needles and pitch, rabbit bones splintered beneath the sign of the cross. Piss graffiti on the walls. Yoth himself had spent some time with a smokejumper in one of those shacks, before he stopped that sort of thing cold. Mob of neighbors at the pawn, that was what his kind of love led to, and he didn’t want it.

  “Heard tell you were up here alone, Yoth Begail,” said the Priest, and smiled. He was a rangy man a little younger than Yoth, wearing a string tie and a black suit, and holding a bible in his hand. His face had an openness normally found in fools, but there it was, on him, a man with a clean shave, nicked jaw, and eyes that showed evidence of a history other than prayer.

  “Am that,” said Yoth.

  “Heard you might be looking for the Lord?”

  “Heard wrong,” said Yoth, who could hardly speak. His throat had a lump big as a cocoon in it, and he had no idea what wanted to emerge. Words he’d never say. “You’re new out here,” he said instead.

  “I came from Missouri,” the Priest said, with palpable awe. “On a train. I’m the new man of God out here.”

  “You are that,” said Yoth. “Got a name?”

  The Priest blushed from beneath his collar, his face heating to the color of a coal in a woodstove. Yoth felt himself blushing too, but he was in the shadow.

  “I’m Weran Root. Not ‘the Priest.’ I don’t know why I said that. This is my first assignment. I’ve never been to a place like this before. It’s far between people. I’ve been walking this mountain since yesterday looking for you.”

  Weran Root came in uninvited and sat down at the jewelry case, gazing in at twenty years of Sunday best. He picked up a red stone and held it to the light.

  “What kind of gem is this?”

  “It’s from when the reactor melted down,” Yoth tells him. “Twenty years ago. All over the news. You remember.”

  Yoth could hear singing coming from the rifle. The jangling noise of a wedding in the wood, a charivari. Coins thrown into the apron of a bride, groom lifted and shaken upside down, laughter, fiddles and howls, whistles and shrieks of ecstasy. He tried to ignore it.

  “What’s that on the radio?” Weran Root said. It was a Sunday, but there was nothing church in the song. He looked up at the case on the wall in wonder.

  Yoth looked at Weran Root in similar wonder.

  Everything was new.

  Six months later, when Yoth was grabbing the rifle from the case in the dark, he heard the singing louder still, and as he fired, the singing reached a pitch of tambourine and cymbal, rattling bells, all that louder than the noise of the shot itself.

  “Wait! I’m here to save you from the Devil!” cried the intruder, reaching for the barrel, but Yoth’s aim was true, and it was already over.

  The smoke was dense and final, a black cloud in his eyes and lungs underlining each cell, a fog like a forest fire. It took a moment to clear, but by the time it did, Yoth already knew what he’d done.

  He’d put a bullet in the heart of the thin man in the white shirt, string tie, and black suit, a bullet from a singing rifle pawned over by a hunter. On his back on the floor lay the love of one man’s life, his heart something unclaimable by ticket.

  Out of the bullet casing came the singer Yoth had been listening to for twenty years, smoke like a roomful of pipes, and in the center of it –

  Yoth fell on his knees as something, someone, expanded from out of the wound in the chest of Weran Root, toes still in the place where the bullet had entered, fingers stretching long and gleaming, body undulating up.

  “Are you the Devil?” Yoth Begail whispered. “Am I the Devil?”

  He was weeping, his hands full of bent wedding rings and crushed cash from the box, things to bribe back his beloved from the land of the dead.

  You get one wish, the smoke said.

  And so Yoth wished.

  FORTY YEARS AFTER Yoth Begail’s wish, the Kid drives down the highway. All he can think about is lack of love. He tells himself a story a night. Girls walking past him in the hallway of the high school. When he prays, he prays to the God of lost causes. He’s a lost cause himself, born bleak in a trailer out in the woods near the reactor, and his mama is a scavenger of skeletons. She smashes them up and makes craft glue mosaics out of them. He wishes she’d smashed and glued him into the shape of some other creature, but she didn’t. Now he’s this. It’s her fault. Their trailer is surrounded by fake white wolves made of cement and paved in mosaics of glass and bone.

  Everyone living left this area after the accident that didn’t happen, the fire that wasn’t. He and his mother stayed. Some people make peace with disaster, and his mother’s that kind. Maybe the Kid’s not, but he was doomed before he was born.

  The Kid thinks fondly back on himself now, before innocence became experience, before he knew there’d never be any forever for him. He used to walk up and down the road, picking up souvenirs of crystal bones, and holding all that hard blood in his hands, counting it up like he could build something out of it. He had visions of everything, back then. Now no-one notices him.

  Girl’s eyes slant away under lashes, electric blue liner, and who’s that for? Their skin under tight jeans, and who’s that for? It must be for someone. Why not for him? Not for him, because it’s never gonna be him. The Kid’s got no future. He’s only past. There’s nothing for him but hands out in the parking lot of a gas station or in the urinal, head against the wall, looking for salvation in a hot air blower and any drug buyable from anyone who’ll sell to invisible boys.

  Magic doesn’t make anyone love you. All the Kid can do is start a fire in the palm of his hand and that’s a trick he ordered from the back of a magazine.

  Something offered him a wish after he fired that shot in the pawn shop. He’s thinking about it.

  THE FOREST IS deep winter now, and the caves are full of sleep. Animals uncurl from corners, bears in the backs of mountains and bats in the tops of caverns. Out in the ice where the reactor was, there’s a hot, sulphurous spot, and beneath it there is a sound like coins in the pockets of the world. Steam rises from the cut into the frozen air, a cookpot. Out around that spot in the ice there are three black wolves, sitting on their haunches, their winter coats full and their bellies fat, unlike the other wolves in the area. These wolves are fed.

  Wolves are only recently back out here, after years of ranchers and strychnine, and years more of rumor. Wolves speak in howls, and when one is killed the rest know it and walk at night, grieving past the bodies on the fences, past the tufts of fur caught to the barbed wire. Now there are twelve wolves running over this mountain, living on deermeat and rabbit. They eat hot-blooded things, and an occasional bone, brought to them in payment. In the place where the reactor was, there’s heat and smoke, but the ice hides it.

  THE MOTORCYCLE THE Hunter’s riding is gleaming black with white trim, a blue blanket stuffed in the gear bag. The monkey clings to her shoulder, its own little helmet buckled tight. There are rotting snowdrifts in the road, and falle
n trees, and sometimes a dead animal starved and picked clean. A recently done deer looks reproachfully out from the roadside, flies hatching in her nostrils. The Hunter rides along this highway with its silver stripe down the center, her bag jingling as she goes.

  When she gets to the pawnshop, it’s full dark, and there are no lights to say this is a palace. The spot sings out with heat, though, and she has no trouble finding it. It’s loud as a wedding in the woods, if it’s what you’re looking for. She dismounts and takes the monkey in with her, steps over the rubble and rank, the pool of blood, and finds Yoth Begail on the floor.

  The monkey hops down, stands on the man’s forehead, and peers into his mouth. It knocks on Yoth Begail’s chest and his heart resumes beating, like an engine that’s got too cold.

  “You’re not dead,” the Hunter tells Yoth Begail. “You just think you are. Where’d it go?”

  “Who?” asks Yoth, bleary.

  “The one who came out of the bullet,” the Hunter says. “I see you got shot. Did you shoot yourself, or did someone shoot you?”

  “A kid shot me, and took the rifle when he went,” says Yoth.

  “Did he make a wish?”

  “I don’t know,” says Yoth. “Boy was a strange customer, and I was well and truly dead. I regret I didn’t see him coming.”

  She goes. The bike growls, and leaves tracks like a man running barefoot, like a horse galloping in gypsum, and then the tracks are gone again, white hollows in an evening world.

  Yoth turns his head to look at the vision beside him, a tall man in the string tie. All the gemstones that were in the case are on the man’s fingers, and all the music in the shop is played by his hands, and if he is not quite visible, if he lives in the crack between night and day, it’s no huge matter. The shop is as fine a place for shadows as anywhere.

  Yoth’s wish was a switching of places, his dead beloved for the living djinn. He was left with a lover made of smoke.