Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  Everything was slipping back to chaos, out of concert. All the shit was getting dragged into shadows, where he couldn’t kick it any more. He couldn’t see the edges, the details. He was losing the names, the sites, the map for God’s sake.

  Where was he?

  Back in Spookleton.

  His headache was gone, but his palm throbbed with four cuts the shape of ill-trimmed nails.

  † † †

  Back in the church, the first thing Lor did was kick Alistair’s map tube down the stairs. Then he seized the abandoned drill and pierced the wall in a dozen places, widening the holes with a punch and the hammer, finally throwing the punch away and just hammering gashes into the plaster. Picking up the upright vacuum, he aimed for a stained-glass window. Light sliced his eyeballs and burst into prisms.

  He stopped, vacuum held high, biceps quivering.

  What the fuck was he doing? Acting out the mulish delusions of a punk hangover, clamping creation to destruction yet again. What profound bullshit.

  He fled the church into an afternoon awash with autumn smells. Leaf decay, crab apples squashed and gone to wine, river steaming to winter sleep. He collapsed high atop a coulee, beside a rotting cactus, under the cooling sun. There he sat, while crows patrolled a nearby stand of tacamahac.

  I have to stop smashing stuff, he thought.

  Down in the river, something grey and pointy floated by. The tip of a drowned witch.

  Lor stood, leaned forward, squinted.

  “Holy shit.”

  It was Alistair’s hat.

  † † †

  A full chinook finally seeped over the Rocky Mountains and nudged the thermometer up ten degrees. Old-Time Chinook, said the Spookleton greybeards, not hot and dry, but warm and smooth. The kids came out in droves to greet it, riding bikes and go-carts. Bug-eyed boys and goggled girls, chanting, singing, armed with sticks. Over there—some crewcut redhead dragging a cow’s skull through the weeds. Over there—twins riding a wolfhound, whistling strange melodies, trailing barbecue perfume through strange avenues.

  A quickening. Lor felt it.

  I’m going to remake my black guitar, he thought suddenly. Fix it.

  He sat on the coulee till the sun was overturned by chattering stars, then rose, dusted his pants, and headed back. Cotton swept the sidewalk. He sneezed, and noticed chalkmarks on the road. Hopscotch lines in black and blue, childish spells against the coming winter.

  † † †

  Frontenac the violin-maker had his own gruff charms. His shop, tucked in a tight curve on Spookleton Road, reeked of resin and sausage. Frontenac himself dispensed measured doses of garlic from his mouth and pores, so fat he looked like he had been injected into his skin with a silicon gun.

  Lor liked him immediately.

  “Do you sell woodworking tools?” Lor asked, out for an afternoon wander.

  Frontenac laughed. “No. Yes. Of course. For whom?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We have no tools. Beat it.”

  “For me.”

  “In that case. Hmmph. Perhaps.”

  “Do you sell instruments?”

  “No!”

  “Whose violins are these?”

  “All mine. My wife’s. My brother-in-law’s. Go home.”

  It took Lor two days of gentle prodding before he could get a decent answer. Frontenac did sell instruments, and tools, depending on who was asking, the time of day, the week. Something to do with a creepy CSIS agent who shut down music stores.

  “How can an agent do that?” Lor said.

  Frontenac shrugged, whistled between his teeth. “I have to eat supper now. Beat it.”

  On the third day Lor scraped together all his pennies and a few crumpled bills. After searching carefully over Frontenac’s shelves, he scooped some pellets of hot hide glue, an old-fashioned glue pot, spaghetti tubes, and a violin-maker’s knife.

  “How does the knife work?” he said.

  Frontenac rubbed his belly with a ham-hand. “The blade will shorten after sharpening. The handle is made of wood, see? Cut the wood away to get more blade.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Cut the knife so the knife can cut.”

  “Yeah. How much for the lot?”

  “How much do you have?”

  Lor spread his shekels on the counter-top and made a quick calculation.

  “Twenty-one fifty,” he said.

  Frontenac rang up an ancient cash register and ripped off the reciept. “Twenty-one fifty. Go home.”

  † † †

  When Lor opened the guitar case, he despaired. The thing was trashed beyond hope. The neck was broken at the heel and split at the peghead. Some of the frets were twisted, others had fallen out. The body was chipped and cracked in many places, the pickguard cracked in half, exposing wiry shreds.

  Start with the neck, he guessed.

  He heated up the hide glue and checked over the peghead. Diagonal grain, too short, shitty workmanship. He worked in the hot glue and clamped, then fell into despair again. He wandered out to spend the rest of the day high above the river, close to the edge of the coulee, daydreaming of hats.

  The next morning he checked the peghead, and, finding it solid, felt better. He used the violin knife to trim the dried glue, then set to work on the heel. It was cracked, but the main damage was at the bolt-holes where the bolts had ripped out of the body. He glued the cracks, clamped, and drilled larger holes for larger bolts.

  No way this was going to work. How would he get the right neck angle? This thing was going to be a mutant.

  He unkinked and smiled. A mutant. Hell yeah, why not? He guessed at the neck angle, set the action high, adjusted the truss rod as far as it would go in reverse bow. Then put all the springs in at the bridge, so the string tension would be cranked. Easy.

  The frets were another problem. First he took a pair of cutting pliers and ground them flat, then tried to rip out the frets. They held, rooted to the neck’s brittle ebony fingerboard. The pliers slipped. He gashed himself.

  So he took a pair of long wrenches and sawed them in half, busting the saw blade. He ground the ends of the broken wrenches to make two chisels, then inserted them on either side of the frets and punched. The frets popped out like toast.

  He smiled. Imagine breaking tools in order to fix something.

  Inspiration hit him. Why re-fret the thing at all? He’d leave the mutant fretless, like a violin, invite those whiny smears and microtones. Hell, why not? He used the violin knife to chip out the inlays all along the fingerboard, until there were no markings at all.

  Screw the map.

  Sensing a pattern, he filled in the large body fractures with chunks of plywood and wood-dust mixed with glue. No sense trying to make anything match. No sense trying to preserve the tone. The smaller chips he filled with a mixture of glue and shredded sermon, tightly packed.

  He turned his attention to the wiring. He insulated the leads with the spaghetti tubing and crimped everything, then grounded the strings by running a wire from the tailpiece to what he guessed was a suitable ground-point.

  By this time he was tired of the whole process. But the mutant guitar was whispering, demanding a certain tone. So Lor rewound the pickups, a tedious task. Finally he glued the pickguard back together, screwed it on, and re-strung. He stepped back to admire.

  The black guitar, the wise but capricious one, was now a reclamation project. My God, he thought, it’s a Frankenstein. But how interesting that a thing could be remade to outwit its original destination. And how interesting that it still carried all the old cracks inside, almost like a skeleton. That, for some reason, just felt cool. Lor laughed from the belly, and the unfamiliarity of that made him laugh even louder. In the space of three days he had gone from smasher to fixer.

  But something was still missing.

  † † †

  In the middle of the night the guitar fell over and hit a strange chord. Lor awoke in a nest of cushions, wonderi
ng what the mutant was trying to tell him. He got up, dressed, hoisted himself out the window, and stumbled into darkness.

  The coulees were brindled with light and dark. The river carried the sky’s reflections north. Lor sat. Light, but no inspiration.

  On the way back he heard two magpies screaming from deep inside a gnarled poplar. In the middle of the street, in a puddle of light and blood, a third—dead, on its back, feet twitching.

  Magpies, he thought, remembering the bellboy. One for sorrow, two for mirth, but what was three for?—death? He shuddered. High above, a pale sickle moon pressed against still-blue sky, waning out of season. Floating cotton settled in his hair. Then he heard music, and sat on the street.

  This was a new experience. Music in his head, blaring right out his ears. Cotton swimming night air, glittering, green and blue.

  He leaped up, pictures meshing with music. Of course—green and blue glitter. That’s what that damn guitar needed, green and blue, highlights to the black.

  He ran back to the church. He set the mutant against the wall and painted a thin sheen of glue over the body, then pinched a bit of iridescent powder from its pouch. He threw. The powder hit the guitar and stuck in whorls.

  He fired again, spinning to his head’s music. The dust spattered and sparked. The guitar danced into three dimensions. He pitched until he was out of breath, then dropped to the floor.

  A witchy shadow hovered on the wall.

  Lor spun on the floor, heart knocking, fingers covered with glue and sparkles.

  “Who?” He pointed at the darkened door frame, to a tall figure in a stunning white hat.

  “Well, fuck, ’migo, just me, back from the abyss, no less, to conspire anew with my best compatriot. What’s with the sparkly fingers? You been whacking off an angel?”

  † † †

  Alistair perched on a high stool in the church’s tiny kitchen, while the tap dripped into a sink full of ancient dishes and Lor brewed tea in a stock pot, stabbing the tea bag repeatedly with a knife.

  “That hat,” Lor said, twisting the dial on the stove.

  Alistair lit his pipe. His new hat was even taller and pointier than the old one, with a wider brim, if that were possible. The water boiled. Lor yanked the tea bags and dashed them into the garbage, then poured into a chipped blue mug and a Styrofoam cup. He gritted his teeth and strained the tea. “Don’t you always show up when least expected. What happened?”

  Alistair cleared his throat. “Well, compadre, after you babes fled, the butterball arrested me without warrant—what else, considering the crime, duh—’n dragged me down to the Man’s holding tank, fingerprints and all, where I languished for, what?—five days.”

  “Charged with?”

  “Fuck-a-duck, who knows—violent crime against the community, obstructing a peace officer, public mischief. . . .” He took another sip. “. . . obscenity, perjury, buggery, extortion, abortion, contortions, personality disorder without mitigating factors, paperhanging, immoral performance, injuring or endangering cattle—”

  “Okay, enough,” Lor said.

  “—conspiracy to accept bribes which incite a child to commit failure to provide a breath sample—”

  “Enough!”

  “Yeah. Don’t forget to turn off the stove.”

  Lor punched the dial and poked a calloused finger at the fading orange element. “Are you on your own recognizance?”

  “Nix, man, I had a bail hearing this afternoon, the judge was in a good mood, we bonded over mutual midlife crises—mine ’specially manufactured for the occasion—and he let me go taking into account my lack of criminal record.”

  “You have no record?”

  “Nope. Well, not now.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Many strange things are possible.”

  “Shit.”

  Lor squashed his cup and ransacked through dusty shelves. He found a box of soda crackers, magically preserved.

  “Who paid?” He tore the wrapper.

  “Dawn Cherry.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know, like, sixty-nine pesos or something.”

  Lor munched. The cracker surprisingly crunchy. “Conditions?”

  “Abstention from alcohol and drugs, remain within jurisdiction.”

  Lor felt his heart squint. “When’s your court date?”

  “Seven months hence, May, June, something.”

  “So you’re staying?” Lor smashed the cracker to the counter.

  Alistair leaned forward and pointed a long finger. “Don’t worry, ’migo, I have a plan. We’re heading north right after the Christmas Eve gig. Without you. I even have a harp.”

  “You play the harp now?” Lor crushed the Styrofoam cup again, threw it at the sink, stalked out of the kitchen. He collapsed into his cushions and ripped off his ancient Doc Martens. “What the hell you staring at?”

  “Criminy,” Alistair said from the doorway. “Talking to your guitar, ’migo?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Suddenly the guitar made Lor sick, with its secret cracks and incandescence and cranked-up string tension. He threw a Doc at the neck. It sproinged off, E minor.

  “Leave me alone,” he said.

  Alistair removed his hat. “Me, or the magpie guitar?”

  “Both.”

  Alistair blew smoke rings through stained moonlight, and, for once, said nothing. The magpie guitar twinkled, still ringing with overtones.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Furious Goodbye

  For weeks Lor despaired of ever escaping his past. The Weird was seasonal, had always been with him. He dwelled on the looming cabaret. He threw rocks at the crow in the tacamahac. He did not touch the magpie guitar.

  At night, messed up on insomnia, he would often wander to the coulees, sometimes all the way down to the river, to watch the black water sponge moonlight and float it northward. On nights when winds howled in from the Arctic, the river seemed to flow in two directions at once. Then Lor would get angry and stamp back up to Spookleton to raid the 7-Eleven, where he strangled American cigarettes and drained Slurpee after Slurpee, gulping small ice like poison was the cure.

  “C’mon, amigo,” Alistair would say. “I do have a plan, damn good one, promise you.”

  “Piss off.” Another rock at the tacamahac, old crow squawking.

  In mid-November the chinook blew itself out, and El Niño went to sleep. Christmas settled on the streets—white snow, red noses, sparkling blue days. Spookleton folk spent chilly evenings warming at the local bonfire, steaming chestnuts in a fire pan and drinking beer from porcelain mugs—laughing, coughing steam, hitching sleighrides with the half-soused Frontenac, who somehow reined the horse and played a fiddle while sipping a frosty winter ale.

  The sleigh bells drove Alistair batty. He stood at the church window, tapping his foot, whispering curses. “Fuck off with the bells.”

  Lor ground his teeth.

  “And, like, what the fuck is my map tube doing on the stairs, covered in dust and bootblack?”

  Lor ground his teeth.

  Sunday mornings church bells cracked air, and Alistair would clomp up the stairs and out the window on his way to worship. Or whatever the hell it was he did. Lor would pretend to sleep until the window slammed shut and a current of chill flowed over his cushions. Then he would get up and make his daily pilgrimage to the river, visiting the 7-Eleven to snag a warm bagel and coffee.

  One Sunday he stopped by a beaver pond, nuzzled in a wildwood of silvery birch. The water’s surface was iced to a pattern of overlapping spirals, as if someone had tossed in three rocks and the ripples had instantly frozen. Lor was spooked, but couldn’t look away. He traced the corkscrews, first with his eyes, then with his fingers. His coffee went cold.

  Dazed and confused, he climbed back to Spookleton, through the church window to his hazy room, where the magpie guitar waited.

  “All right, baby. . . .”

  He picked it up and
strummed a suspended sixth, expecting the open strings to ring. When they didn’t, he strummed again.

  “God.” There was no sustain at all. He’d destroyed the tone completely. He thrummed a few chords, notes drooping from the fingerboard.

  “But.” He shook his head.

  Setting the mutant against the wall, he removed a shoe and lobbed it, gently as he could. It hit the neck at the missing twelfth fret. Harmonics pealed and hung in the air like smoke.

  “Good Lord.” That defied the laws of physics.

  He picked up the guitar again and strummed. His own notes died, even as the ghostly harmonics from the shoe continued to ring.

  “Looks like Van Halen, sounds like a fucking banjo.” Alistair, from the doorway, smoking his pipe.

  Lor looked up. “Looks more like the Frankenstein monster.”

  “Yeah, man, like the Fran Halen Banjo, the Frankenjo, the Ban Halen Vanjo, the, er, Mondo Vankenstein Monjo, the Bandaiden’ Banjo creature for Beaujeaulais Bolsheviks . . . ”

  “Cripes.” Lor forced a laugh.

  “Even Groucho Marx had an off day here ’n there, bello.” Alistair squinted at the guitar. “That’s a mysterious tone. Like, noumenal, man.”

  “Nothing mysterious about it,” Lor said. “I wrecked it, pure physics.”

  “No metaphysics?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then why are them harmonics still ringing?”

  Lor palmed the guitar’s neck, shut up strings, then set the mutant against the wall. A wide silence. Alistair watched smoke drift.

  Lor coughed. “Been to see Dawn Cherry lately?”

  “Nah. Busy.”

  More silence. Lor cleared the tickle in his throat. “So, what’s up?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Eaten?”

  Alistair puffed, chewed the pipe-stem. “’Sup with you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Seem a little pissed off lately, like . . . I don’t know. A personality transplant. Anything in partic’lar, or. . . .”

  “Nah. Just.” Lor pinged the strings of the magpie guitar, above the nut where they tinkled. “You eaten?”