Most everything nice in Torchtown came from raids Sharkey’s helped to orchestrate. Like his books. The Chaw Shop electrolier. His rhino-foot trash can. His pinky ring. He still helms expeditions, commands them from afar, but he’s lost his old ambition. Today’s raiders are small-time, out for a score. They want currency, porn, they want to turn it all over right away. Torchtown’s all they know, all their parents and grandparents knew. It’s all Sharkey knows too, but these young ones lack imagination. They don’t have an interest in the finer things. Most don’t even think about staying out there. On the loose.
Sharkey goes down the concrete stoop steps, opens the metal hatch in the sidewalk, descends the concrete basement stairs. He’s making chaw today.
Sharkey steps beneath a clothesline hung with undershirts into the concrete cell. He’s got a kitchen upstairs where he cooks his dinners, but the basement is where he performs his art. In the middle of it is a hulking gas stove, six burners, covered in blackened grease. On the counter to the left is a cast-iron frying pan, a set of knives in a wood block, a stained wood spoon, and a jar of grain alcohol. To the right is a set of wire mesh shelves, laden with cans, jars, bottles, vials, pouches. A lidded crate fills the bottom shelf. The only window is close to the ceiling, barred up and gray with soot. Sharkey lights the wall sconces. He spits what’s left in his mouth into the spittoon. He puts the frying pan on the burner and cranks up the flames. He figured out how to reconnect the gas a long time ago.
Sharkey makes ninety-two varieties of chaw. His recipes are secret. They’re not written down. He uses bricks of loam, dried and packed with rice in crates, but no one knows from where. And beyond that his ingredients are a mystery to everyone but him. Today Sharkey starts off with a jug of hard apple cider, boils the liquid away to a glaze, then douses the pan with the contents of a small brown bottle and a pinch of fine red powder from a cup made from an ox’s horn. The liquid sizzles. Sharkey adds some yellow dust and a dash of salt from a shaker shaped like a piglet in a chef’s hat. He lightly drizzles the hissing pan with maple syrup. Then he upends a jar of molasses. He thumps the bottom a few times; when the glob finally plops out, liquid spills down onto the burner below. Sharkey curses. He’s sweating. The gray strands in his chest hair sparkle in the dim light. He’s making variety number twenty-nine, Forbidden Fruit Jam.
When the mixture on the stove is stirred and bubbling, Sharkey tastes it, mutters, salts it some more, adds a few slices of dried apple that fall into the brew as white and spongy as human ears. Then he flips off the heat, takes a new brick of loam from the crate, and carves off a hefty slice with his biggest knife. It’s dull greenish-brown and fragrant, like musk and fresh-turned earth. Sharkey crumbles it into the goo on the stovetop and folds it in with the wooden spoon.
Once it’s cool, he’ll come back down and shape it into ropes: penny width, two-penny width. He’ll wrap them in rags and twine and hang them over the clothesline to dry, in heavy twisted coils like nooses. Then he’ll douse the pan with grain alcohol and light it on fire, to burn away the traces. He’s not sloppy with his chaw. A new batch is never tainted with the aftertaste of the last one.
Sharkey peels off his undershirt, dunks it in the bucket on the floor, and pats his face with it. Then he takes a new undershirt from the clothesline and walks up the basement stairs. No one’s on the street. The gator snaps at him. He kicks it in the teeth.
4
ELECTRICITY
Duncan Ripple is writing his name on the inside of her body. The Girl holds him close while he grunts and puffs, breathing in the woolly dust of the saddle blanket beneath them. His face is hot and near, but she doesn’t notice the greasiness of his unwashed hair, the clogged pores on his forehead, his morning breath, or his chapped lips, which occasionally scrape her neck. When he mumbles, “Hey, fem? Hey, Abby, is this technique too hardcore for you?” she doesn’t respond in words-out-loud. Instead, she shapes her mouth around each letter of this foreign alphabet, spelled out in flesh and ache and heat, reverse tattoos on the inside of her skin. The R is two pairs of legs, hers looped around the top of his. The I is a blue-green vein pulsing in his temple. The PPLE is the beginning of please, the beginning of pleasure. Ripple moves clumsily, persistently, in his one-handed push-ups. A mouse skitters across the floor. In the corner of the ceiling glows a patch of morning sun. Who is he? Who is she? Answers beyond language fill her heart. The Girl breathes in the Island, this fragrant museum of a dying world, then breathes it out. The horse trailer contracts around them, her bird lets out a cry, and the shapeless, nameless thing within her vanishes in the new light.
Later that morning, Ripple lies stunned, stark naked except for his bandage, on a sagging trampoline near the water’s edge. The Girl adorns his hair with bows of dental floss. Gulls tug at fish entrails amid the busted rocks.
“Whoa,” he murmurs. His eyes are shut. “I can’t believe it. We just fucked.”
The girl ties a bow around a lock of his chest hair.
“Yes, fucked,” she says with approval.
Ripple coughs noisily, wheezes. A few yards away, a gull squawks in answer. “I mean, I can believe it, but for you, it must be like discovering fire or something. Well, you’ve already got fire, I guess, but you know what I mean. It’s like an alien came down from Mars and ate your planet’s face. Only, you know, in a good way, obviously.”
The girl adds another bow to his sideburn. She tries to tie his neckbeard, but the stubble there is too short.
“And I mean, not just once, even. That was three times in under two hours. I was like, ‘Let’s go, wench,’ and you were like, ‘Bring it, son.’ That was hot. That was so hot I didn’t care about the bird watching us. This is the best day of my life.”
The girl admires her handiwork. “You’re pretty.”
“I bet I hit your G-spot. I’m pretty sure. I struck oil the first time I drilled.”
The girl winds what’s left of the dental floss around the metal trampoline frame. “Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Go fishing now?”
He yawns. “Do what you gotta do. I’m pretty comfortable right here.”
“OK!” The girl springs up and bounces off the elastic mat. Ripple raises himself up on his good elbow.
“Hey. Hey, Abby?”
She’s zipping on her coat. “Uh-huh?”
“You don’t happen to have a few brewskis lying around, do you?”
She rubs her nose with the back of her hand, perplexed.
“Never mind.”
He watches her as she scrambles away, over the exploded macrozap ovens and cracked PVC pipes. Then he looks beyond her, out to where the water is flashing and twinkling with the full light of midday. No barges toot in the distance; no HowFlys roar overhead. So ironic, the coolest thing he ever did, and no one was around to watch. What would his old film crew say about this?
The thought makes him sad for a second, but only a second: he feels too good for regrets. Sure, he could stand some pills to numb his arm, but right now his body’s making quite a few chemicals all on its own. Maybe sex works like acupuncture, or massage, or that weird thing with the candles and suction cups. Holistic healing—his mom believes that shit. It needs some time to work, is all.
It might be just as well to stay lost another day.
* * *
Katya Ripple can tell her husband isn’t enjoying the lap dance. She tosses her head, platinum hair cascading down her back, and shimmies, moving her shoulders faster and faster until her bangles shake. Her manicured hands cup the delicate fabric of her gold lamé bikini top, then release its central clasp. Out bob two tanned, perfect breasts, naked except for tasseled pasties. Distractedly, Humphrey fingers her ruby-encrusted belly-button ring, plucks the G-string of her thong. She grinds her hips a moment more, then rises and sulkily sashays back to her pole in the center of the room.
“Please call the police,” she says, squeezing the polished chrome between two toned thighs. She enunciates
her words with the uninflected care of a nonnative speaker. She arches her back, the column of her throat, and the platinum hair sweeps the floor. “It’s on your mind too, I know. Three days, Hummer. I’m asking you. If anything, we’ve waited too long.”
“What good will it do to get them involved?” Humphrey sighs. His toupee is askew. He releases the backrest of his leather recliner and reaches for the half-empty bag of BacoCrisps on the nearby end table. “It’s a family matter. I grease enough palms as is. Besides, he’s a big boy. He’ll get found when he wants to get found.”
Katya kicks her leg and hugs the pole in a waist-high knee hold. She licks the daggerish spike of her six-inch metallic heel. “And that child the Torchers took, whose electric heart they used to charge the motors of their SkateBlades? He didn’t want to be found?”
“Kitty, that’s an urban legend. Next you’re going to tell me Duncan’s been abducted by Leather Lungs.”
“He would have texted. He would have called.”
“He would’ve thought twice about worrying his mother.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not worried too.”
“I’ll get worried if I have to contact the Dahlbergs for a postponement. Pippi doesn’t miss a trick; she’ll make us pay out the nose. Leave it to your son to pull a stunt like this less than two weeks before the wedding.”
“He’s your son too. Maybe he has cold feet and is too afraid to tell you.”
“Good. He should be.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Honey, you’re a beautiful dancer. Don’t let this weigh on you so much.” Humphrey picks up his copy of insight guru Maxwell Gladfish’s It Feels Like You’re Thinking! and brushes orange crumbs off the expanse of his hand-stitched maroon velour tracksuit. He chews noisily. The conversation is over.
Katya frowns. She swings around the pole one more time, then traipses across the room to switch off the low funk music emanating from the room’s surround sound.
“Get me a tallboy while you’re up?” Humphrey calls after her as she leaves the room.
Katya Ripple, age thirty-seven, strides down the hallway of her mansion in a T-back and bunny pumps, thinking about her son. She’s never lost the model’s way of walking, and even now, she holds her shoulders low and her head high, her narrow hips swinging with cool insistence. Her face is the Golden Ratio made flesh; her body is hairless, ageless, and glowing. Generations of Ripple men leer at her from their portraits on the walls to either side. Her placid eyes do not return their gaze. With these shoes on, she’s nearly tall enough to see the dust atop the picture frames.
Katya enters the kitchen. Two dishwashers sit at the center island, eating their lunch beneath the elaborate mobile of copper pots and pans suspended from the ceiling rack. They look up, and in their eyes, Katya recognizes the gaze men have cast in her direction since the first stutters of her adolescence. For an instant, she is twelve again, walking the frozen river to school, while the neighbor boys and tradesmen stare down from the banks, halted by the sight of her. Her homeland had given up religion on principle, deposed God like all the rulers before, but on the back roads they still practiced the ways of awe.
“Pardon,” she murmurs. She pulls open the steel door of the walk-in fridge; steam pours off her body as she enters.
Katya came from Smoczek, a village in the snowy east of an adjacent continent. In her country, girls entered at birth into the National Attractiveness Registry and underwent development inspections once annually—if their aggregate scores qualified, they were permitted at age fourteen to apply to the National Modeling Bureau, which shipped top candidates overseas for government-sanctioned fashion and prostitution assignments. It was either that or chop work in the National Ice Manufactory. Although her life hasn’t turned out exactly as she dreamed, Katya still feels that she chose wisely.
She wasn’t so certain her first two years in the city, which she spent on a packboat in the Empire Island harbor, cramped in a hull moist with the breathy hope of a dozen other girls, every surface strewn with lingerie. Always she was bent toward a radiant mirror, eyes wide, mouth an O of surprise, an implement of beauty trembling in her hand. Always was the fear, indistinguishable from the sensation of being awake, that she would gain a pound, an inch, a blemish, a size—that she would take up too much space, and she would be sent back. There were more where she came from, so many more. So many pretty girls. And Empire Island was no longer even a top destination: all but the richest and most eccentric zillionaires had already fled the city.
Why, Katya sometimes wondered, would anyone stay here, least of all these men, who could carry their wealth and privilege with them far away—to the ends of the Earth? It would be a long time before she learned how riches could tether you in place, harness you to a burdensome hoard that made true flight impossible. The remainders, as the city’s bachelor holdouts were known, were in one sense already married, to their real estate and their investments in infrastructure, to the institutions their ancestors had founded, the streets in their names. To disavow these assets would cause a panic, a loss; it could wipe them out entirely.
Nevertheless, she and her sisters hunted those remainders with a single-minded desperation. The models were technically competitors, but they banded together as orphans in a strange land do. Katya hardly knew her own body, her own thoughts, from the others’. By day, they piled together in the packboat waterbeds, golden limbs interlaced, makeup smearing the pillowcases. By night, their eyes burned in their starved faces as they designer-stripped on the catwalks of deserted nightspots to the songs of distant and not-so-distant sirens.
Humphrey Ripple, financier, didn’t speak to her the first few times she lap danced him, but he kept coming back to her stage. Once he brought a videographer. Once he brought his impotent brother. When at last Humphrey chose her, brought her to his home, he gave her an identity: a name that rendered her visible in his world, collapsing though it was. And when she bore his child, he gave her a vocation too.
Katya peels a grapefruit, delivered here from the balmy tropics, and eats a bitter slice. She knows what Humphrey is worried about. He’s worried Duncan is on the chaw, like the Liddell heir was a few years back. Enterprising torchies do smuggle it out to the surface streets sometimes; some say they travel in the sewers, on a network of dinghies for hire, mercenary gondoliers circulating drugs through the city’s intestines, down where they’re safe from the fires. Katya’s no innocent and she’d like less than anyone to see her son carted off for Chemical Re-Education, but privately, she thinks Humphrey’s giving their son a bit too much credit. Duncan left the house in a Bot Tot hoodie and a pair of pajama pants with dolphins on them. He uses his inhaler like a pacifier (it’s to treat his affluenza, which the pediatrician reassured her “isn’t even a real thing”) and his sneaker soles light up when he walks. Probably the worst thing a chawmonger would give him would be a bloody nose, or some condescending advice. Besides, even if Duncan was using, that’s no reason why he would vanish for three days. If anything, he’d be back to get more cash. Chaw doesn’t make you disappear. She should know. She’s tried it herself.
No, what worries Katya is the possibility of an accident, up there in the sky. When she first arrived in the city, she didn’t know what to make of the dragons. They looked beautiful to her then, the sort of danger, vital and carnal, that spoke in the voice of poetry, nothing like the file-cabinet bureaucracy that reduced her face to the sum of its angles and her waist and hips to their ratio. But death is death is death. Motherhood has taught her there is no poetry in that.
Katya picks up a tallboy and presses the cool aluminum can to her forehead. To her, things are very simple. When your child is missing, you find him and bring him back. She remembers following Dunky’s damp footprints through the hallways of their house, when he was small and naked and refusing to wash himself; coaxing him back inside when he went out on the roof to pet the gargoyles. This situation is the same. But Humphrey doesn’t think Dunky i
s a missing child—he doesn’t think Dunky’s a child at all anymore. He thinks that Dunky is a man, and that it’s high time for him to start acting like one. Which means it’s up to Dunky to find himself. No matter how lost he gets.
Doesn’t Humphrey know that problems like this don’t just go away on their own? Sometimes Katya thinks her husband is a little boy too, stubborn and sulky. Maybe no one born into this family ever chooses to grow up.
Katya leaves the fridge, holds the beer out to one of the dishwashers in the kitchen, a wide-eyed youth not much older than her son. His resemblance to the men of her hometown is no accident. All the members of the house’s staff are imports from her village, cousins and the offspring of cousins, the stepchildren of former friends, charity cases and bastards sent over by packboat at her request. She once believed that surrounding herself with them would bring her comfort, make her feel that this was at last where she belonged, but nothing could be further from the truth. The servants’ quarters make a new village here, a wing of rooms and hallways not so different from the cottages around the ancient square, but she has barred herself from entry. To these maids and underbutlers, she is a lady of this city now; through their eyes she is foreign even to herself. The native words fall leaden from her tongue: “My husband asked for this. See that he gets it.” The young man nods mutely, and wipes sandwich grease from his hands onto his apron before reaching for the can.
Katya skips the stairs and takes the elevator to the sixth-floor library: between her pole dancing and the morning’s session on the mechanical equicizer, she’s gotten her exercise for today. Besides, the elevator is one of her favorite rooms in the house. Lined with gilt-edged mirrors, a sumptuous ruby carpet underfoot, it’s modeled after the dressing room at Fiona Tres Belle, where Humphrey took her at the start of their second date, after he explained that her bra top and tramp pants were most likely verboten at the four-star restaurant where he’d made reservations. It was then that Katya truly realized he was serious, not just out for a good time.
The Sky Is Yours Page 5