“I’ll call you tonight,” Chance says. “I promise,” and she manages a weary smile.
“You do that, Momma Bear,” Alice tells her, and then she leaves Chance alone with her red pen and galley pages, her Kleenex and self-doubt. Chance leans back in her chair and stares at the office door, at the defiled Calvin and Hobbes strip and a postcard from her visit to the Yale Peabody Museum taped up next to it. She tries in vain to recall the world before she met Alice Sprinkle, or a world without her, and in a few minutes she gives up and goes back to work.
In the dream, and he knows that it’s a dream, Deacon is standing in the doorway of Soda’s apartment, watching while the blonde woman undresses. Soda’s sitting in the center of the bed, sitting there cross-legged in nothing but a dirty pair of navy-blue boxers and a smile, talking his white-boy shit, the king of the goddamn world, Mr. Smooth, and if this were not only a dream, Deacon would try to warn him. If he knew, instead, that he was wide awake and these moments were not already history, he would tell Soda about the knife. If he were awake, he would tell Soda lots of things. But Soda is already dead, sliced and diced, decapitated and carted away to the city morgue, where the police pathologists have already had their turns at his corpse. Soda is already evidence of the murder that still hasn’t happened in this dream, this now inside his brain, and Deacon sits down on a wobbly chair near the door and watches.
“Hey, man,” Soda shouts at him. “Were you raised in a fuckin’ barn or what? Shut the goddamn door!” So Deacon closes the door, and the latch clicks loud, like someone cocking a gun on TV.
“Maybe I’ll leave a few scraps for you, dawg,” Soda says and grins at Deacon, showing off his crooked yellow teeth.
“I’m a married man now,” Deacon says. “But thanks, anyway.”
“Oh, hell,” Soda giggles. “You ain’t that married, bro. Ain’t nobody with a dick that married.”
Deacon knows this is a dream because his migraine has stopped.
The tall woman unbuttons her blouse, and Soda’s drooling like a kid waiting for the ice-cream truck; her long fingers with their long unpolished nails work the buttons one after another, bottom to top, and her belly is as flat and smooth and white as milk.
“Oh yeah,” Soda says, “That’s what I want to see,” and Deacon reaches for the bottle of Jack on the floor beside the chair. He breaks the paper seal, twists the cap off, but when he raises it to his lips, he realizes that there’s nothing inside but sand. Sand that smells like the sea, and he thinks if he were to put the mouth of the bottle to his ear he would hear waves crashing against the shore, somewhere far away.
“Have you ever seen the moon bleed?” the woman asks Soda, and he nods his head enthusiastically, still grinning that stupid grin.
“I’ll see whatever you want me to see, baby.”
“Have you ever seen it red and swollen and hanging so low above the world you could reach out and brush it with the tips of your fingers?”
Her voice like satin and rust, and “Baby, I’ll say I seen Elvis and the Pope scootin’ around in a goddamn flyin’ saucer, if that’s what you wanna hear.”
Deacon sets the bottle of beach sand back down on the mangy gray-green carpet. “Dude, peep this,” Soda says, as the woman slips her blouse off her shoulders and it falls to the floor. There’s a stiff mane of short blonde hair running from the base of her neck all the way to the waistband of her jeans.
“Maybe I should go now,” Deacon says, and Soda laughs and shakes his head.
“Hell no,” he says. “This shit’s just gettin’ interesting. You know you gotta stick around. You gotta see what this fine bitch is gonna do next.”
If the woman knows that Deacon’s watching them, she’s chosen to ignore him. Her yellow eyes on Soda and nothing else, ghost of a smile on her full red lips, and Deacon tries to remember if he’s ever seen anyone with yellow eyes before.
“When I was a little girl,” the woman says and steps out of her jeans, “the moon came down from the sky and scraped itself raw against the sharp edges of the horizon. When I was a little girl, the moon bled for me.” Now Deacon can see that the stiff mane runs all the way to the base of her spine, where it ends in a whitish tuft of hair. A single tattoo on each side of her ass, black ink and shades of gray against her pale skin, unfamiliar runes or ideograms, and Deacon tries to memorize them because they might be important later.
“Is that a fact?” Soda says, his eyes on her breasts, her hard brown nipples. “That must’a been a sight to see.”
“She gets lonely, so far away,” and now the woman’s reaching for the knife tucked into the leather sheath strapped around her left thigh. “It’s cold in Heaven. Cold and dark, and the stars are farther away than God.”
“Show me,” Soda whispers, and there’s a sound from directly overhead, something heavy dragged slowly across a floor, something rolled end over end, and Deacon glances up at the ceiling. There are dozens of stains blooming on the cracked and sagging plaster, opening themselves like red-brown roses, living flowers pressed flat by the weight the woman carries in her soul. One of the stains begins to drip, and soon the others follow its example.
“You don’t have the eyes to see such things,” the woman says, “not yet,” and opens her mouth very wide, and at first Deacon thinks that she’s only yawning. Her teeth like polished ivory, white daggers in her pink gums, lion yawn, hyena yawn, and now there’s so much of the red shit dripping from the ceiling of Soda’s apartment that Deacon’s getting wet and wishing he’d thought to dream an umbrella.
Upstairs, men and women laugh softly among themselves, the clink of glasses and there’s orchestra music, and the dragging, rolling sound grows suddenly louder. The blonde woman draws her knife, and it flicks open in a flash of silver fire before she slices Soda’s throat. More surprise in his wide eyes than either fear or pain, and dark blood dribbles from the corners of his mouth to stain the sheets.
“Now, you’re a different story, Deacon Silvey,” the woman says softly, turning away from Soda gasping and strangling on the bed. “You have vision an oracle would envy. You can see all the way down to the rotten heart of creation.”
“I never asked for it,” Deacon says, unable to look away, the sticky rain from the ruined ceiling painting her pale flesh in streaks of crimson, her yellow eyes flashing red-orange in the gloom of Soda’s basement. “I never wanted it.”
“Do you think that matters?” she asks. “Do you really think I give a shit?”
“No,” he replies, and the phone begins to ring, but it’s all the way on the other side of the room. He’d have to walk past her to answer it, and never mind if this is only a dream, the phone can ring all night long before he takes one goddamned step closer to the woman with her burning eyes and stiletto fingers.
“You have a lovely wife, Deacon Silvey,” the woman growls with the voice of storms and hungry dogs, and he opens his eyes, then, awake in an instant, but the phone’s still ringing. His clothes and hair are drenched in a clammy, cold sweat, and his heart’s racing, his body bathed in the afternoon sunlight spilling warm across the bed. And his head’s pounding, the invisible railroad spike driven deep into his skull, so he knows for sure that he’s awake. Deacon shuts his eyes again, digs his fingers into Chance’s cornflower-blue comforter, hanging on, and in a minute or two the phone gives up and stops ringing.
Chance slows down and turns off Twenty-second onto Morris, trading asphalt for the bumpity cobblestones, and there’s Deacon walking past the Peanut Depot, Deacon in his black sunglasses, unshaved and his hair so wild and spiky he looks like a punk rocker or a crazy, homeless man. She honks the horn, and he stops beside a stack of burlap sacks filled with roasted peanuts, stops and glances behind him as if maybe the sound came from somewhere back there. Chance pulls over and parks the Impala directly across the street from him.
“Deacon!” she shouts from her open window, and his head snaps around again so that he’s staring straight at her, but still no evidence t
hat he’s seen her, no hint of recognition on his stubbled face. He looks lost, she thinks, and then, No, he looks drunk, and the sudden, dizzy surge of fear and anger and adrenaline so strong her heart skips a beat, and the baby kicks sympathetically.
He takes one hesitant step in her direction, bumps into the burlap sacks and stops again. Chance curses, kills the engine and opens her door, unfastens her seat belt and wriggles out from behind the steering wheel. By the time she’s standing on the pavement, Deacon’s crossing the narrow street towards her.
“Where were you going?” she asks. “Why didn’t you answer the phone? I tried to call before I left campus.”
“I was just walking,” he replies and hooks his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. “I needed to get out of the apartment for a while, so I was just walking.”
“Have you been drinking, Deke?”
He takes a deep breath, then shakes his head very slowly and gazes past Chance at the car.
“There’s no point lying to me about it.”
“I’m not lying. If I want to get drunk, I’ll fucking get drunk. You know that.”
“Right,” she says and leans against the Impala, taking some of the weight off her feet. “I know that.”
“It’s my head. It’s bad, and I had a nightmare.”
“I tried to call you.”
“Yeah, the phone woke me up. But I didn’t get to it in time.”
“Jesus,” Chance whispers, feeling more ashamed of herself than relieved, and she looks down at Deacon’s feet because she can’t see her own; one of his black tennis shoes is untied. “I’m sorry. I was scared, that’s all. I had a really shitty day, and I shouldn’t have accused you—”
“No, I understand. I’ve definitely been thinking about getting drunk. I’ve been thinking about it long and hard. But I was only going for a walk.”
For a moment neither of them says anything. A train whistle wails, far off but coming closer, and a tall black man in overalls and a white T-shirt brings out another sack of peanuts and stacks it by the curb.
“I may have to do this thing,” Deacon says. “I don’t think I’m going to have any choice.”
Chance looks up, stares into the flat black lenses of his sunglasses. “Of course you have a choice,” she says. “You always have a choice, so don’t stand there and tell me that you don’t.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see his body.”
“But you promised me, you swore you’d never get mixed up in this shit again.”
“I know what I said.”
“This isn’t your responsibility, Deke. That’s why we have policemen. Let them do their job.”
Deacon takes off his sunglasses and squints at her with his watery, bloodshot eyes.
“We aren’t going to argue about this, Chance,” he says. “Not this time.”
“Fine then, you do whatever the hell you want to do,” and she turns back to the car, better to get away from him now before she says something she won’t be able to apologize for later. She gets in and shuts the door, turns the key in the ignition, and the Impala grumbles reluctantly back to life.
“I’ll be home in a little while,” Deacon says. “I just need to walk,” and he puts the sunglasses on again.
“I’m not stopping you, Deke,” and she drives away, leaves him standing there in the middle of the street. When she reaches their building at the intersection with Twenty-third, Chance glances at the rearview mirror, and he’s gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Circle and The Line
Scarborough Pentecost and the pretty black-haired girl who usually calls herself Starling Jane climb the concrete stairway leading up and up to the long viaduct beside the old steel mill. As they go, the girl counts off the steps aloud—fifteen at the first landing, thirty-one at the second, and then she notices a nest with three robin chicks tucked into a cranny beneath the highway. She stops and leans out over the handrail to get a better view of the baby birds, and, “Will you please come on,” Scarborough says impatiently, wishing again that he could have left her in Atlanta, or Charleston, or anywhere, wishing that he’d never gotten stuck with her in the first place.
“But just look at them,” she says and cautiously reaches out towards the birds, three gray-brown, cream-speckled chicks huddled in a nest woven from twigs and dead grass, strips of plastic and paper and bits of a foam coffee cup. The cement behind them is spattered with chalky white smears of robin shit. All three birds remain absolutely motionless as her fingertips hover in the air just above their heads and the traffic roars past overhead, three sets of wide black eyes staring silently back at her.
“If you touch them, their mother will let them starve to death,” Scarborough warns her, and he glances at the angry momma robin perched on a nearby power line. She squawks twice and glares at them with all the fury a robin can muster.
“That’s not true,” Starling Jane says, skeptical, indignant, and her fingers drift an inch or so nearer the chicks. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh yes, she would,” Scarborough says, watching the distraught mother bird.
“No. Not just because I touched them.”
“If you touch them, then they’ll smell like you.”
“I don’t stink.”
“She thinks you do,” and Scarborough points at the bird on the wire. “If her chicks smell like you, she won’t believe they’re hers, and she won’t take care of them anymore.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m afraid robins aren’t terribly bright creatures.”
Reluctantly, the girl pulls her hand back from the nest and frowns up at Scarborough, then at the momma robin. “Just because I touched them?” she asks. “That’s absolutely wicked. What kind of mother would do such a thing?”
“We don’t have all day,” Scarborough tells her, and Starling Jane sighs, shakes her head, and follows him up the stairway, goes back to counting steps, and there are forty-seven at the top.
“That’s not a bad number,” she says. “Four and seven are both lucky numbers for me, because I was born on the seventh day of the fourth month of—”
“Bullshit. You don’t know when you were born, Starling,” and Scarborough takes a very small pair of binoculars from the inside pocket of his black leather jacket. “Just like the rest of us.”
“They told me I could pick a birthday,” she says. “And I picked April seventh a long time ago.”
“Good for you. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Meaning is in the eye of the beholder.”
“That’s beauty, you silly twit.”
“Same thing,” Starling Jane sneers back at him, and then she watches the cars and trucks rushing past while Scarborough peers through his binoculars at the low, tree-covered mountain two or three miles south of the steel mill. To the west, Birmingham’s stingy, uneven skyline blocks out the horizon and the setting sun; to the north and east, a gray industrial wasteland threaded with back streets and railroads stretches away from the viaduct. There’s a chilly breeze, and she hugs herself, buttons her violet cardigan, and wishes she’d worn something warmer.
“The damned trees are in my way,” Scarborough grumbles and starts walking again, searching for a better view, leaving her behind. Starling Jane stands beside the guardrail and watches him go, willowy boy with his quick, determined stride, his narrow shoulders and straight brown hair tied up in a long ponytail. He stops and scowls back at her.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
“I was just looking around, that’s all,” she says and pretends that she was examining the old mill instead of watching him. She glances over the guardrail at the odd little park that’s been fashioned from the ruins of the mill, fifty feet down to a wide green lawn with its artful scatter of metal sculptures, rust-red skeletons like the shells of giant insects or the wrought-iron bones of dinosaurs. There’s an ancient steam shovel and a toothy ring of severed steam-shovel jaws l
aid out like megalithic stones near weathered heaps of slag. Farther on, a long casting shed where men once poured molten iron to cool in sandy channels, and past the shed, the towering smokestacks and blast stoves, rickety catwalks and a silver water tower with SLOSS printed across it in tall black letters. Starling Jane hugs herself tighter and hurries to catch up with Scarborough.
“Who was Sloss?” she asks, pointing at the water tower.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Sorry. I thought you knew everything,” and she smiles a sly, secretive smile and looks back down at the steam shovel.
“Maybe it was the name of the mill. I don’t know.”
“Maybe so,” she says. “Do you think she knows we’re here yet?”
“Maybe,” Scarborough says. “Probably,” and he peers through his binoculars again. There’s a gap between the casting shed and the furnaces, and from here he has an unobstructed view of the mountain. The tawny autumn-browned heads of trees, the roofs of buildings, a cast-iron giant standing on a stone pedestal at the mountain’s summit.
“That’s Vulcan,” he says. “The house is supposed to be somewhere just west of there.”
“Will she be waiting for us?”
“She’s always waiting for someone,” he replies.
Starling turns towards downtown, thinking how cities all start to look the same after just a while. The same harried loneliness behind tinted skyscraper windows and stone walls, and she wishes she were more like Scarborough and never got homesick.
“Vulcan was the god of the forge,” she says.
“That’s what the Romans said,” and now he’s examining a great gash through the mountainside that men have carved out for the highway, tries to imagine how the mountain must have looked before that wedge of rock was blasted loose and hauled away.
“The Greeks called him Hephaestus,” Starling Jane says. “He was born deformed, and his mother cast him down from Mount Olympus. Of all the gods, he was the only one who was ugly.”
“Is that a fact?” Scarborough asks her, returning his binoculars to his jacket pocket. He turns his back on the steel mill and the mountain and sits down on the guardrail.
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