Or tries to…but as the seconds tick on, an intense need grips him, a bodily embarrassment more difficult to ignore than the demands of his stomach, bowels, or bladder. He remembers it well, from those lifeless beeping days, when he lay in a hospital bed, drifting from blinding agony to coma and back again; from an unpleasant weekend he spent, post-paralysis, devouring first sleeping pills and then emetics in doses for the record books. Osmond suffers from the worst condition of all, one nigh well impossible to relieve, despite his most sincere intentions. It is the will to live. It beats in him like a stupid bird against a windowpane. Fly away, away, away.
He is too weak to die.
Osmond takes the elevator to the ground floor, hyperventilating, a thousand breaths for every lighted number clicking past. He shifts his motorized chair into S for SPORT as the doors part with a ping. He burns rubber across the lobby’s gleaming floor. Literally: the tracks left by the wheelchair’s tires ignite in his wake, and he hears an unmistakable roar behind, the throaty bellow of flashover. As his invalid carriage rams through the double doors, into the courtyard, the Ripple mansion explodes. BOOM! Crazed glass rains down from above as Osmond skids into the reflecting pool and hurtles facefirst into the basin filled with water and silver wishing coins, the last of the Ripples’ liquid assets.
Heroism once almost killed him, but it is the coward’s curse to survive.
22
WEAPON OF CHOICE
At night, the only light in Empire Island comes from the fires. Once upon a time, neon spelled out in bursts of illumination the names that man has given to this world. But now, the shimmering billboards and flashing signs have all gone dark. In their place is another language, a raging hell-fueled scrawl. The dragons glide above it, silent in the pitchy nothing that separates Earth from the cold void of space. The green one makes a black splotch upon the moon as he cruises past.
The brightest part of the city tonight, as usual, is down in Torchtown, between the brackets of those gun-turreted walls, where three separate fires roar in the tangle of the streets. But darkness lurks there too. And in the darkest corner of Torchtown, the one crooked lane entirely unlit by the orange tongues of flame, Eisenhower Sharkey serves the Baroness Swan Lenore Ripple another cup of tea. Then he turns back to preparing their dinner on the stove. Tonight they’re eating hoofer chops on the bone, a fine cut of strangebeef from the deep freeze of a recent Wonland raid. Swanny likes her meat rare, and so does Sharkey. He transfers the chops from sizzling pan to plate as soon as they’re seared. Juicy. Like a ritual sacrifice, their meals always end in a smear of blood.
“Excuse me, I forgot what I was saying.” Swanny’s eyes are already half-mast, her red silk kimono open at the throat. On the nights she takes a break from her investigation, she dresses like a leading lady out of costume, a diva coming uncinched. Sharkey likes it when she gets a little loose. It means she feels at home.
“You were telling me about the burglary. What you remember.”
She sucks her forefinger absentmindedly, massages her gum. She’s got a smile like a predator’s, but it always seems to need coddling. The plight of an aristocratic mouth, he guesses. “Haven’t I related this in some detail previously?”
“Refresh me.”
“It’s my mother’s death, Howie. It’s not an anecdote.”
He didn’t tell her she could call him Howie, but once she started it, he didn’t tell her to stop either. It amuses him. It’s been a while since he met anybody so unafraid.
“C’mon. It’s like the police always say. Anything you recall might prove helpful.”
“Have you ever actually met the enforcement personnel? I’m beginning to wonder if they dispatch anyone at all, honestly. It’s quite lawless around here. For a prison.”
“I think of it more like a zoo.” He hands her a plate. She looks at it, aghast.
“Are we going to eat in here?”
“You’re already sitting at a table. What more do you want?”
“But it’s ever so much more civilized to dine in the dining room.”
“Fine. You carry the tea set.”
Sharkey loads a tray with the dinner plates, soup bowls, and the tureen of mushroom bisque, then follows Swanny as she totters to the conference table in the parlor. He never thought to eat in here before she came. He’s dragged enough corpses out these doors that supper isn’t the first thing he thinks of when he walks into the room. But she’s got class, and this is where she takes her chow. It’s interesting to him, how the other half lives. Outside.
“Happy now?” he asks, taking his seat, pouring her another cup of tea. He spits the chaw from his mouth into a second cup, then fills it, only half-full, for himself.
“Such a regrettable vice,” she opines. “So uncouth.”
“What? I like to mix ’em.”
“Spitting at the table and then drinking one’s own spit—must I explain it all again?”
“My chaw put that primesteak on your fuckin’ plate.”
“I don’t object to chaw as a business, it’s just as a habit”—she tops off her tea once again with icily flirtatious aplomb—“it’s rather common.”
Sharkey smirks. Swanny seems to prize her abstinence—she’s yet to taste the chaw, hasn’t so much as snuck a mouthful on the job, far as he can tell—but what she doesn’t realize is that chaw and his “tea” are mostly composed of the same active ingredients. Tea isn’t even that much weaker, not in the quantity she drinks it. It’s just different in its effects. Tea blurs the lines between past and present emotions. Current hurts and longings, no matter how taboo, get recollected in tranquility; old passions flare afresh. And new acquaintances take on the trustworthy patina of old friends. As a result, tea’s a disinhibitor. It eases up the tongue, if you know the right questions to ask, and only bosses can afford to speak their minds.
“So, you were saying?” He watches her carve her meat with some interest. The dame sure knows how to handle a knife. “About the burglary?”
“It wasn’t simply a burglary, Howie, it was an invasion.” She takes a bloody bite; her eyelids flutter with involuntary bliss. “They were all over the house.”
He suppresses a smile. There were four on that raid, and not even his best guys.
“What about the one that you saw up close? The one your ma shot, before you went upstairs?”
“He was half-naked with a chain saw. There haven’t been many gentlemen in my acquaintance fitting that description.”
“Shirt off, huh?” Sharkey takes a second to consider this. Why wouldn’t someone want cloth touching his skin? Answer: an open wound. He asks his next question extra-casual. “You get a look at his back?”
Swanny chews pensively. He can’t tell if it’s derision or suspicion tingeing her reply: “What possible information could a dead man’s back contain?”
Sharkey shrugs. “Maybe there was a message written there, just for you.”
Swanny snorts and tucks into her dinner.
Her revenge scheme, which he mostly found cute at first, is getting on his nerves. It’s the one off note in their evenings together. There’s only so many times you can hear a woman describe how she’ll sneak into your room and sink a nine-inch shard of broken glass into your jugular the moment she puts two and two together, before you start to believe her. Of course, he could always just kill her if she finds out. But he’d rather not have to.
He’d rather her not find out.
“You’re a real girl detective,” he says now. “I’m sure you can remember a clue.”
“A girl detective?” Swanny shakes her head, frowning as though she’s discovered a sliver of gristle in the marbled flesh of her meal.
“Yeah. Like from the storybooks.”
“Oh no, no, no. The girl detective is a cipher of lesser culture. If a book were written about a character like me, it would be an intense psychodrama about grief that stirs violence in a woman’s heart. About mothers and daughters, inheritance and torment. A love
affair with death.”
“Down here in Torchtown, we don’t know so much about culture.” He waxes poetical: “We just take whatever scraps flutter down from your heaven above.”
“I suppose that many poor creatures are just trying to survive.” Tea’s a soporific; heavy eating wears you out. Swanny now has the posture of a fallen soufflé. She stirs a finger in her teacup languidly. “But not you. You’re different. You’re…rich.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘powerful.’ ”
“It’s all the same. A simple question of hierarchy. If you’re lord of the sea, you’re still a lord.” She pours herself another splash of tea, then tips the spout farther. “Oh no, I’ve finished it off.”
He still hasn’t touched his. “It’s all right. You want soup?”
“Topsy-turvy, this life I lead, down below the grid. You’ve saved the soup for last. Soup of the evening.” Her words are a singsong. He slops bisque into her bowl.
“So in this storybook of your life—” he starts.
“Storybook: oh, Howie, you really are too much!” She bats at his arm playfully. “The proper term is fiction.”
“In this fiction of your life, what’s your character’s dark secret?”
“She doesn’t have a dark secret.”
“Sure she does. She’s gotta.”
“Why?”
Sharkey tastes his tea at last. Even with his tolerance, he can tell it’s strong tonight. “Makes her interesting.”
“I suppose,” says Swanny, gazing into the depthless opacity of the mushroom cream, “she wished her mother dead, and then the wish came true.”
Without further ado, Swanny face-plants into the soup. Sharkey grabs her by the hair and flips her backward before she can start the whole drowning process. He swabs her face with a napkin then, with a grunt, slings her over his shoulder.
There ain’t much he can’t lift.
He lights a candle when he gets up to the attic and stands over Swanny with it for a long time. The cascade of her curls, her soft body. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear. But fear he does, because beneath it all is what he glimpsed tonight, another dark secret even Swanny doesn’t yet know about herself, a secret he hopes she’ll never know.
He blows out the candle and descends through the trapdoor, to the world below. Even though he’s just going to his room on the second floor, he feels like he’s headed to a subterranean dungeon, a lightless, lifeless cell where he’s condemned to do his time in solitary, unless he can tempt another to descend.
Swanny’s secret is this: she can hurt him.
* * *
Corona uses the butcher knife to slice open a fresh-caught rabbit on the countertop. It’s like a pomegranate inside, only instead of ruby-red seeds, its viscera glistens with rows and rows of pearly white teeth.
“Oh, La Diabla,” Corona breathes, and dumps the body into the garbage, where it lands atop the potato peelings and last night’s bones. Little Swanny reaches out to stroke the silky ears, the brown tufted fur of the corpse, but Corona slaps her hand away. “No, gordita. It is sickly. Do not touch.”
“Will it bite me?”
Corona chuckles to herself, humorlessly. She wipes blood off the rusty metal jaws of the rabbit trap with an antiseptic towelette. “It just might.”
* * *
You can tell a lot about a community by its currency. Torchtown’s is entirely without standards—without any sane, agreed-upon norms. It’s a language consisting entirely of slang.
Swanny’s had half a dozen customers this morning, and she’s had to consult the barter chart for every last one. She’s grown tired of staring at it, scanning the list for whatever bizarre array of tender the most recent patron has just plunked down. And then the math: well, Swanny’s never much cared for arithmetic, it’s so clerical. Even Pippi Dahlberg, with her calculating mind, always used an adding machine.
Pippi’s adding machine, the rat-a-tat-tat of it above Swanny as she sat playing beneath the ballroom table. The rat-a-tat-tat above Swanny as she fled down the helical staircase of the Ripple mansion.
“Hold on one moment,” says Swanny, banishing the thought, scratching out numbers on a scrap of brown wrapping paper, eyeing the most recent offering, an assortment of salvaged screws (equivalent with nails, Sharkey’s told her), bottle caps, coins, and incongruously, a rabbit-foot keychain. The paw curls, prehensile, fur worn off in patches, but instantly recognizable: Swanny had similar playthings in Wonland County, where the proliferating cottontails accounted for most of the protein in one’s diet, as well as most of the crafting materials at one’s disposal. Corona acquired a knack for tanning the bunnies’ hides and restuffing them to serve as Swanny’s teatime companions. They wore aprons and waistcoats, doll clothes; her favorite boasted an old necktie of her father’s. But it’s not Mr. Archibald Long Ears she’s thinking of now. It’s last night’s dream. A dream with teeth in it.
Back to the task at hand: “I’m afraid I’ll have to consult with the management before I honor this keychain.” She reaches for the bell pull to the basement room where Sharkey’s making chaw.
“N-no need to do that,” stammers the chawhead in question, a moonfaced junior in a fraying burlap kilt. “Lady. Mam’selle.”
Swanny rolls her eyes in exasperation. Out on the street, even in the saloons and open-air vacant-lot markets, these “sparkers” run feral, rabid, even, but inside it’s as if the shop itself doses them with an odorless gas of docility. If they speak it’s when spoken to, and then to apologize. Swanny wishes that every once in a while, one of the less unseemly young men would assert himself, look her in the eye. Work is a distraction, but it would be better with some repartee. Does she so scream respectability that she doesn’t even warrant a little idle flirtation? She’d die of loneliness if it weren’t for Howie. Sometimes, at the end of the day, when they sit side by side at the counter in the Chaw Shop, counting up the coins and beads and IOUs that make up the day’s returns, she feels the most unsettling impulse to rest her head on his shoulder and, as he instructed her that first afternoon in the shadowy town car, to shut her eyes. What a comfort it is to have someone to talk to—to know and to be known.
Perhaps tonight he’ll make her another pot of tea.
“Then that’ll take you to just under an ounce.” Swanny turns to the mason jars on the wall behind her. “What flavor did you say?”
“R&N. Please.”
Swanny takes down the jar labeled RESPITE & NEPENTHE and unpops the seal. A whiff of dried flowers and chalky earth greets her, funereal but enticing nevertheless. Sharkey is a poet of scent, she must admit: the chaw doesn’t just smell, it evokes. “One pennywidth or two pennywidth?”
“Double-P.”
Swanny removes the thicker of the two coils housed in the jar and uses her gilt-embellished shears to slice off a length. This chaw is fairly fresh; the molasses-sticky rope clings agreeably to her hands, and she resists the urge to lick her fingers. Even after Duluth’s words of warning, she doubts very much that the killing offenses apply to her. But she still doesn’t want to try anything stupid. In the fairy tales of her childhood, girls always did the one thing expressly forbade them—opened the box, cracked the golden egg, snipped a lover’s beard—and ruined everything. She’s a woman who abides by her contracts (her wedding night regrettably not excepted), and when she signed on for this job, she promised not to taste the retail.
Swanny puts the chaw on the shop’s scale, trims the end another fraction of an inch, and wraps the package in brown paper and twine. As she’s housing the proceeds of the sale in the cash register (which more closely resembles a junk drawer, considering the contents), the bell jingles, announcing the arrival of scarred and dreadlocked Keelhaul. Sharkey employs him as some type of handyman or freelancer—Swanny’s not quite clear on the details. “Swillers,” that’s the name Sharkey bestows on these odd-job fellows, who all seem uncomfortably puffed with muscle and scowly by default. The chawhead
scurries around the newcomer and beelines out the door.
“Hey, Swan, gimme some razor blades and two lockpicks. I’m making a sauce run for Sharkey.”
Swanny rings up a NO SALE and opens the drawer again. “That vile hooch? I keep insisting he give it up, it’s revolting.”
“Yeah, he says it’s the only way he’ll ever get to sleep. ‘Rest easy’ was his words.” At least Keelhaul will speak to her. But today he seems preoccupied.
“It’s one thing to order it in a bar, when there’s nothing else available, but…good lord, is everything quite all right?” Swanny asks. Keelhaul, normally the most stoic of the bunch, is pressing his palms to his temples in the manner of a man beset. He shakes it off as she metes out the discretionary funds.
“Got a headache, is all. I kinda wish I hadn’t run into Sharkey on the street right now, he’s in a real bad mood. Think he fucked up a batch of chaw.”
“He has an artistic temperament, I suppose,” muses Swanny. She wonders if it’s true, if a person in Sharkey’s line of manufacture can in fact endow his creations with the living soul of genius. If a drug can give the user not just a high but a point of view, an inflected reading of the world. “Did he go back to the basement? Shall I ring down to see if he’s all right?”
“Don’t.”
“Keelhaul, you look quite unwell.”
“I don’t like getting snapped at, is all. Not by Sharkey.”
“Oh, you poor creature.” It’s like seeing Duluth with those little children; these roughnecks all seem so coarse on the outside, but their hearts are as soft as bruised fruit. “Sit down for a moment and nurse your migraine. I’ll run to the saucemart—it’s two blocks up?”
“You’d do that?”
“I’d be glad to, all this customer service is exhausting. Be a dear and sharpen my pencil while I’m gone.”
Late afternoon, outside: Swanny’s too often cooped up in the shop till past dark. Now she relishes the warmth of dying gold on her bare neck and shoulders, like a wrap to match the brocade frock she’s sporting. In the decadence of late fall, one might almost imagine such weather lasting forever, though the first frost is most likely any day now. Swanny sidesteps Sharkey’s gator, still hitched to the hydrant post like a dwarven Jurassic steed, and heads northward. The Chaw Shop is on a sleepy block, but as she turns onto Harbinger Place, she hits congestion, urchins and trulls and foot soldiers to God-knows-whom veering past her at every side.
The Sky Is Yours Page 29