—Hooli?
—mmrruff.
—Does it bother you that God didn’t make us?
—uh-uh.
—But it means we don’t have souls.
—what is soul.
—Something that stays behind after we die. You know. A ghost. An angel that flies up to heaven.
He considers this, his tail twitching thoughtfully.
—our bones will speak.
—Like Magic Bird?
—uh-huh.
—I guess that’s almost as good.
Hooligan yawns.
—sleep now. don’t worry.
But Abby does worry, lying there deserted as the apehound snores. She worries that despite her best intentions she’ll leave the world more desolate than she found it. She worries that Duncan will forget her, that she and her kind will fall from man’s story without leaving a trace. She worries that her whole life has been a mistake, an experiment gone totally awry. Most of all, she worries that the Lady was right, all those years ago, when she told Abby that knowledge was a sin. If it is a sin, there is no undoing it now.
“Abracadabra,” she whispers in the dark.
31
QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
I have to sign off on a confession to get incancerserrated without a trial and as a full-blown MURDERER that doesn’t gibe with my lifestyle because I don’t follow rules not even the LAWS OF MAN but I don’t want to waste another minute in this stupid detayment kennel in this stupid police station so here goes get ready for a serious SHOCKING TRUE CONFESSION from yours truly
I Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, being of sound mind and body, killed the fuck out of former Fire Chief Paxton Trank, with an ax. And I’d do it again!!! I’d kill the fuck out of all you cops if you gave me a chance esp Gerald and Todd, you smell like sewers and its not because you work there, the smell is coming from your BUTTZ.
Love,
Duncan
It’s dusk when Ripple descends into Torchtown. The cops escort him to a guard tower at the top of the wall and lock him in a new, smaller detainment kennel, then attach it to a pulley system and lower it down. The way they handle him—rough, hurried, uncertain—reminds him of something his mother once said about the exotic snakes the live animal trainer brought in to entertain his sixth birthday party: They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.
He didn’t exactly expect the cops to be his best buds, not after he told them that he killed Paxton Trank with a hatchet on purpose—no self-defense about it, not in the version for the MPD—but there’s still something shitty about the fact he worked for these pros as a Junior Special Officer and now they’re treating him like some kind of monster. The police station where they fingerprinted and booked him was emptier than Ripple expected, but when he asked if they’d had their staff cut lately, Gerald just looked at him like he’d made an offensive ax-murderer pun and didn’t even answer. Then this big old bald pasty guy—the police chief, Ripple guesses—came lumbering out of one of the offices. “I want to see him,” he yelled, “I want to see the son of a bitch who did this to my friend.” For a second, Ripple thought the pro was going to beat him with a nightstick, or maybe even shoot him, but instead he took one look at Ripple and broke down crying. Not. Cool.
Because here’s the not-so-shocking true confession: Ripple still wants to be liked. Old habits die hard. And now, even if he makes it back out of Torchtown alive, he’s got a major uphill battle coming, seeing as how he’s signed his name to a homicide and expressed zero remorse. The lawyers can probably take care of that, he hopes, but can the publicists? Fucking his reputation to this degree isn’t just bad for his brand. It’s bad for his soul.
Swanny sure better appreciate it.
But none of that will even matter if he can’t make it through the next five minutes. Which, from Ripple’s perspective, suspended over the Torchtown street, in this creaking cage of wire mesh that knocks into the bricks alongside it from time to time, doesn’t exactly look like a given. Because even though he’s not actually a violent guy (and he’s not, he’s not, he knows in his heart that he’s not), the cops totally believe that he is—and this is where they put him.
Who’s down below? And what are they capable of?
A ragtag horde is gathering beneath him on the street, undeodorized and mostly under the age of fourteen. Torchies in their natural habitat. Their breeding ground.
“Shark cage incoming!” yells one.
“Fresh meat in the fryer!” yells another.
They’re packed so densely, Ripple realizes he’s going to have to fight his way out through the crowd. Taking down one pro was almost impossible, and he had a weapon that time. He has no experience with anything like this outside of an immersive hand-to-hand combat simulation. You understand narrative constructs, virtual realms, that’s what his dad told him once. Meaning Ripple didn’t understand anything at all.
Ripple is so, so dead.
But wait a minute. He’s not dead yet. What if his dad was right, but wrong at the same time? What if Ripple actually did learn something, all those hours he imagined himself invincible and dauntless and turbocharged, alone in his room—all those hours of playthrough, when he gained his reflexes, learned to anticipate the payoffs and traps in a series of branching choices? What if that time wasn’t wasted, and that knowledge actually counts for something when he needs it most?
Just as this thought crystallizes in Ripple’s mind, the floor of the detainment kennel opens beneath his feet, and he’s plunging toward the sidewalk.
Down…
Down…
Down…
Ripple is bruised, bloodied, sweaty, nearly naked in his boxers, with chicken feathers stuck to the raw spots on his skin. The place is packed, standing room only, shoulder to shoulder. But weirdly, no one turns to look at him; no one hassles him; no one acknowledges him at all. All eyes are focused on the evening’s performer, a lone singer-klangflugelist, illuminated by a single candle on the makeshift stage. She wears a funereal peignoir, the black chiffon like a cape of shadows, and she bends over her instrument, rhythmically pressing the keys with alternating expressions of pain and ecstasy, taking dictation from the conflicting voices in her mind. The song is slow and sultry, and her voice is tormented, breathy, and orgasmic over the blue notes.
Love’s for the foolish, the weak and the poor,
The ones with naught to lose or gain.
Passion is messy, a tiresome chore
And heartbreak only brings you pain
But Mama knows
What you need
Mama knows
Why you bleed
Mama knows
What you need
Oh, Mama knows, oh, Mama knows
Oh, Mama knows, oh, Mama knows,
She’ll make everything all right.
Ripple blinks, then blinks again; the figure onstage remains. It’s Swanny, but—is it really Swanny? His Swanny? This woman is a gritty reboot of the girl he married. Her hair, for starters. He remembers her ringlets, doll hair almost, glossy and springy, parted sharply down the center, pinned back on the sides. Now the curls are everywhere, unkempt and tangled, falling carelessly over her face, tossed back with a passionate jerk of the head. Overgrown: like ivy on a manor, or a briar around a castle, a barrier alive and abandoned, saying, KEEP OUT, HAUNTED, SERIOUSLY. And is she still trying to cover that shiner Osmond mentioned? Maybe, nobody would ever know. Her eye shadow is as black as soot on a Torchtown windowsill. Her voice is a smoldering ruin.
She almost seems to belong here.
Ripple can’t take his eyes off her. Not because she looks good. No way. She looks like she’s made zero effort with her appearance, and as a consummate entertainer, he finds that pretty offensive. What, is it open mic night here in the Hooch Dungeon? Or did she go out planning to perform like this? That’s not the sign of a well mind. So he’s worried about her, obviously. That must be what’s going on.
And…has she lost weight? Because
, even though he can see more cheekbones and fewer chins, she looks, if anything, less healthy. Wasting away. Wasted. She used to be pink, rosy, like a piglet or an emoji heart. Now she’s pale, so pale. She looks like she never leaves the house, like she lounges around in bed all day, waiting for the night. Waiting for Somebody—or Something—to come and wake her up.
She ends her set and the room erupts into raucous applause. She ignores it. As she carefully repacks her klangflugel, Ripple is almost swept back onto the street in the tide of exiting bar patrons. Apparently they came just to hear her play.
He makes his way upstream through the exodus toward the stage. A DJ is setting up a gramophone on the sad little dance floor, attaching additional ear trumpets for amplification. One round booth, its upholstery more duct tape than vinyl, waits up front and to the side. Ripple recognizes the chinchilla coat draped across the seat. He slides in and watches Swanny shut and buckle her instrument case. She still can’t see him, he realizes. She’s blinded by the spotlight. He knows how that goes.
* * *
The morning after Swanny first tried chaw, she had her one and only bout of withdrawal. Her heart rattled the bars of its rib cage. Her gums bled and swelled, no longer numb. And light—light was needles in her eyes, pure silvery pain. She wanted to crawl into a coffin and never emerge. Sharkey was gentle with her then, bringing her breakfast in bed along with her next dose, as if her body were incubating his child in the form of this new addiction.
“You got it bad, huh?” he asked sympathetically. Though she didn’t have any basis for comparison beyond her own experience, she nodded. She couldn’t possibly imagine it being worse. They’d stayed in his den all night—postcoitus, he’d unfolded the couch so she could stretch out—but the room had changed around her. “It was rough for me my first time too. Old Jawbone used to say it rewrites your DNA. Leaves a big blank spot for cee, aitch, ay, ’n double-you.”
“Do you mean I’m going to have to chew all the time? Forever?” She was already doing just that, gnashing her teeth on the plugs of Widow’s Peak he’d brought her on a saucer, ignoring her bacon and eggs.
“You don’t have to do anything. But if you let it get outta your system, this’ll happen every time you use. And you’re gonna use it again.”
“You sound awfully certain of that.”
“I’m just being realistic.” He held out his I HATE MONDAYS mug—for her to spit in, she realized, and did. “You want to. And you’re used to getting what you want.”
It’s been a month since Sharkey first possessed Swanny, a month since he first entered her and first tainted her with his chaw. A month of countless intimacies, both erotic and otherwise. A month since she’s been sober. She has changed in that short time, she knows, yet the sight of her in the Chaw Shop, perched upon her stool, scribbling figures in a notebook, is still enough to stop his heart. Stop his heart. She’s never felt so powerful, or so powerless, in her life.
Swanny hefts her klangflugel, sealed in the blue velvet of its hard-shell carrying case. It isn’t the instrument she used that first night; that was lost in the fire, along with the rest of Nick’s. Sharkey gave her this one a few evenings later, when she was finally up to going out again. She doesn’t know where it came from, though she sometimes imagines, without meaning to, that it once belonged to another Wonland girl even unluckier than herself, a dutiful, diligent musician who spent her last hour practicing scales while outside, the raiders cut her gate chains. Swanny loves it, though: the mother-of-pearl keys, the blood-red bellows. She can’t help loving it.
Every day that she chews, the drug works faster, fades faster, and Swanny fades in and out with it. She wants Sharkey now, before this ache turns back to pain and she has to leave her body again. She steps down from the stage, floats into the darkness of the cabaret, toward the booth where she last saw him. But he isn’t there. Another man—shirtless, scraped up, cradling a live chicken, one of those awful inbred fowls the locals love to tend and devour—has taken his place.
“I got you a present,” he says, holding out the hen, who bawks and flusters, and it’s only then that she recognizes him.
“What…are…you…” Swanny’s voice, so entirely at her command just moments earlier, croaks and stutters away from her. “Duncan?”
“It’s great to see you too.”
The chicken flies up between them for an instant before succumbing to gravity. Feathers molt into the air. Swanny steps around the bird and takes a seat across from him in the booth.
Duncan Humphrey Ripple V. The very same, and yet…He looks to have lately submitted to a vast array of brutal muggings, but it isn’t just that. His face is more masculine, somehow, or at least more adult—the grin less dopey, the eyes less dreamy, the forehead contoured with telltale signs of worry, suffering, thought. A Duncan Ripple reduced to thinking and feeling like an actual human being. What sorrows have brought him to this pass?
“You must leave at once,” she says, regaining the capacity for intelligible speech. “For your safety, and for mine.”
“Listen, I know you’re mad, but I’ve changed. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore.”
“Duncan, you need to go back the way you came. Immediately.”
“No can do. I’m incarcerated.”
“What?”
“Life sentence, fem. I turned myself over to the authorities.” He takes her pale clean hand in both of his, which, she observes, are bloody, begrimed, and minus a wedding ring. (She’s never bothered removing hers; champagne diamonds are so very rare.) “Now I’m turning myself over to you.”
Swanny wonders if the drugs are impinging on her ability to follow the conversation—if in fact this entire scene, husband, chicken, and all, is nothing but a hallucination. Her too-brief euphoria is dwindling with every word he says. “You’re an inmate? What on earth did you do?”
“Let’s not talk about the past, let’s talk about the future. You do know how to get back into the main city, right?”
The shadow of a tall hat falls across the table. “Is this man bothering you?”
Swanny yanks her hand away from Ripple’s. “Howie. This is my—husband. Duncan Humphrey Ripple the Fifth.”
“Hi, Howie.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Duncan,” she quickly adds, “this is my lover, Eisenhower Sharkey.”
“That little guy? He’s the chawmonger?”
Sharkey’s wordless chewing is worse than a threat. Swanny imagines the moment’s tableau immortalized in the form of a cautionary etching: D is for Duncan who was eaten by Sharks.
“Howie, please be nice,” she murmurs.
Sharkey slides into the booth next to her, setting their hooch jars on the table, draping his arm around her shoulders. She cuddles up to him gratefully. His zoot suit smells like fireworks and psychedelics, gunpowder and molasses, and for a second, as she shuts her eyes, as their mouths meet, they are alone at the table again, burning together, lost at the very bottom of the world.
“Look, if this is supposed to be payback time, you’re doing it wrong. I never made out with Abby right in front of you.”
“Duncan, why are you still here?”
“I thought we were having a conversation.”
“It seems to me that she ain’t in the mood for conversation.” Sharkey takes out his chaw wallet, removes a plug for himself, and offers some to Swanny. He’s packed her favorite flavors, LONELY MOUNTAIN’S HEART and QUEEN OF THE NIGHT. She takes a penny of each, chews up a juice, and spits it in her hooch glass. Chaw, teething blood, and alcohol mingle and swirl.
“Wow, that’s really gross.” Ripple seems almost impressed.
“I like to mix them.” Swanny sips, then offers him the jar. “Care for a taste?”
“Uh, I’m good.”
“What exactly brings you down to our realms below, Mr. Ripple?” Sharkey asks, returning the chaw wallet to his pocket. “Come to see the sights?”
“I need to talk to my wife.”
“Nah, you’re talking to me now.”
“She can speak for herself.”
“She did. She told you to get lost.”
“Pro, don’t fuck with me. I killed a man.”
Ripple tenses and for an instant, more than the spoiled heartthrob of his Holosnaps, he resembles that marble statue in the lobby of his mansion, the gladiator battling the Kraken, girded for battle in only a loincloth. Sharkey just chuckles, but Swanny is strangely moved.
“Whom did you kill?” she asks softly.
“Remember that guy with the gas mask?”
“The one who attached a shock collar to your neck and led you off like some kind of debased subhuman beast?”
“That’s the one. It was self-defense, pretty much.” He shrugs. “Killing him was the only way I could get free.”
“But now you’re imprisoned.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“This is really awkward, with your boyfriend sitting right there.”
Swanny chews. These chaws taste of stone and starlight, mist and night-blooming cactus. She knows them both by heart. “We have no secrets from each other.”
“Swanny, he’s your drug dealer, and your boss, and…he killed your mom. I mean, you know that, right?” Ripple glances at Sharkey, then back to Swanny again. “I assume that’s what ‘no secrets’ means.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Sharkey, each word punched into the air like a typewritten killing offense.
“Uh, sorry, pro, but I got this on pretty good authority, actually.”
Swanny is so shocked to hear the truth spoken out loud, she feels almost sober. It isn’t a secret, of course it isn’t. But it’s the one thing they never speak of—never, never—the one thought she forbids herself, even when she’s alone. Don’t go poking your head in where it doesn’t belong. Her cheeks flush. Behind her eyes, some ice is melting that these Torchtown fires never touch.
The Sky Is Yours Page 42