“On whose authority, Duncan?”
“Uncle Osmond…”
“Osmond Ripple?” The one individual whose high opinion of her she’d like to maintain, the only true intellectual she’s ever known—her beloved officiant. She can see him now, his tasseled caftan, his hair like silver wires, his eyes trained on her behind a pair of opera glasses, judging her every lurid sin from an impossible distance. The humiliation is worse, so much worse than she could have ever imagined.
“He heard all about it from this loam hawker, Mart or somebody.”
“Mart?” Swanny remembers a preternaturally laid-back young man in a red fez, whom she found conferring with Sharkey in the dining room during small hours one morning. She wanted Sharkey to come back upstairs, rather badly, in fact, but he invited her to sit on his lap instead and watch as they weighed out the bricks of loam. She gamely blew on the scale weights for luck, as on a gambler’s dice. She enjoyed being shown off.
“Mart.” Sharkey cracks his knuckles thoughtfully, swills his hooch. “Huh.”
“But—wherever did they meet?”
“Down in the sewer. Osmond’s a gondolier now.”
“Whaaaa—” But Swanny doesn’t have the fortitude to pursue that line of inquiry at present. “What’s your point, Duncan? You thought you’d come here with these startling revelations, and I’d—what? What did you think I’d do?”
“I want to…save you?”
“Save me? You save me?” Her laugh comes out like a little scream. He always does this to her, always. “How dare you? How dare you come to my home, and—and—” The words won’t come, but the ashes do, falling down all around her. And not a moment too soon. She chews harder, wills the chemicals speedier passage into her blood. Soon, soon she’ll be released again. Before she loses herself completely, she throws her drink in Ripple’s face.
Sharkey’s hand is on his shoulder holster, as casual as reaching for a billfold to pay the check. She hears the safety click off. “So if we’re all finished here…?”
But right now she just wants away from them both. “Howie, please, just leave it, this is none of your affair. Excuse me, I think I’d better dance now.”
Sharkey slides out to let her leave the booth. Swanny makes for the dance floor, where a thin crowd of revelers bop unenthusiastically to the tinny stylings of the resident gramophonist. She kicks the chicken out of her way.
“I better make sure she’s OK,” Ripple says, still dripping chaw-infused hooch, starting out of his seat.
“Don’t. She wants to be alone.”
“She’s on drugs. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“Let me tell you something about your wife. When she’s on drugs, she knows exactly what she wants.”
You can’t argue with the voice of experience. Ripple stays where he is. Across the room, Swanny is moving with her eyes closed, letting impulse and gravity take turns with her limbs.
Ripple wonders what would have happened if there had been no HowFly crash, no Abby in his ball pit when Swanny first arrived. Would Swanny have climbed into the bed boat beside him, awkwardly toggled the joystick on his game controller? Let him steal a kiss before her mother burst in to chaperone? Would he and Swanny have held hands during that walk around the house, made fun of the portraits of his grandcestors and daydreamed themselves into the world behind the picture frames—inventing, in lieu of sweet nothings, a multitude of former lives, alternate histories in which they loved and betrayed and forgave each other before dying of old age, getting reborn, and doing it all over again? They were both only children—only children, without siblings, without pasts. It would have been so easy to become everything to each other.
“I wish I had a Rewind/Erase button,” Ripple says out loud. “Do you think she’ll always hate me?”
“Since we have this chance to talk, maybe I should make a few things clear,” says Sharkey. “I’m not your buddy. I’m not your dad. I don’t have any sympathy with you. I’d kill you soon as look at you. The only reason I don’t is for her. Everything I do, I do for her. I’m a big flashing neon sign from on high that says, ‘The world ain’t all about you.’ And you have to live with that. You’re on my streets now. Every day you stay alive, you thank God for her, because she’s the only thing between you and total annihilation. Am I making myself understood? You killed a man. That’s cute, it really is. What’d he do, put the weapon in your hands? Let me tell you a secret. That’s not how it works around here. Not for you. I’ll kill you with your pants down, trying to crap in a trash can. I’ll cut you open and leave you for the rats. I’ll throw acid in your face, then salt, then acid again, till your eyes drip out their sockets and your lips can’t form words, ’cause that’s where it hurts the most. Those top millimeters of skin. Me sitting here, having a civil conversation, it’s taking all kinds of considerable effort. So next time you talk to Swanny—which is never, by the way—tell her you saw me be nice.”
“I better go.”
Sharkey spits in his hooch. “Yeah. You better.”
But Ripple doesn’t leave, not right away. Because, as soon as he’s out of the booth, he finds his feet, like a sleepwalker’s, moving of their own accord not toward the door, the street, freedom, with all its possibilities and dangers, but toward the dance floor: certain death, where Swanny is still lost in her undulations. Her eyes are shut, but though he doesn’t touch her, doesn’t even try, she opens them when he steps into her orbit, and then they’re dancing together. One step forward, two steps back: he has to watch out for her flying hair, her jabbing nails, but he figures it out. Easier than dodging ax blades in a fight. Easier than ducking throwing stars. He’s even starting to enjoy himself when, finally, she grabs him by the wrist and pulls him to her, her thumb on his pulse, fire in her eyes, incandescent with sudden revelation. He feels like there’s so much she wants to say to him that he’s never going to be able to keep up, he’s never been the greatest listener, her vocab is out of control, but fuck it, he’s going to try. Whatever she’s thinking or feeling, though, she packs it all into a single syllable.
“Run,” she says.
* * *
Torchtown. Once you’ve been inside for a few hours, you’re either dead or they leave you alone. That’s what Ripple hopes, anyway. Since he left the Hooch Dungeon, nobody’s bothered him. He probably looks demoralized enough already. Plus he’s got nothing left worth stealing. Maybe he should’ve held on to that chicken. He’s starting to understand why Abby used to talk to animals. It’s better than being all alone.
Torchtown. It’s probably the only place where a video-game version would look subtle by comparison. In the last forty-five minutes, he’s witnessed two chain-saw duels, one defenestration, three dragon fires, and an orgy taking place in the middle of the street, which ended only when it was disrupted and swept along by a boisterous funeral procession. He’s seen little kids gnawing on rats, roasted with the heads and fur still on, little kids sucker-punching each other for these rats-on-a-stick. It’s occurred to him that it’ll only be a matter of time before he has to do something similar for dinner.
He really should have held on to that chicken.
At this point, Ripple is fairly certain he made a bad call, begging those cops to incarcerate him here, to dump him like garbage into the city’s biggest Human Nature Preserve. But he can’t complain. It was what he wanted. It was what he deserved.
Ripple doesn’t know where he’s headed, and even if he did, he’d have no idea how to arrive there. Torchtown may only be a couple of square miles, but the streets are crooked, gridless, intersecting every which way with each other and sometimes even with themselves. He’s ready to give up, huddle against a building and hope he doesn’t freeze to death, practically naked in the evening’s chill, when he notices a street sign, a little off kilter, pointing down one of the darker, narrower byways: Scullery Lane.
As in, the infamous chawmonger of Scullery Lane.
Compared to the rest of Torchto
wn, Scullery Lane is quiet this time of night, subdued: no squatters, no screaming, no murders obstructing traffic. Even in Torchtown, Swanny’s found the closest thing to a gated community. Ripple walks past a transaction involving the exchange of chaw packets for what appear to be human vertebrae—Sharkey’s goods, hot on the secondary market—and considers asking the kids involved for directions to the shop. But their eyes are so furtive, their mouths so full of drool, that it doesn’t strike him as the right time.
“You lost, tomcat?”
Ripple looks up. Perched on the second-floor windowsill of a nearby townhouse, a damsel is looking down at him. The building is a burnt-out husk, no roof, no floors; she must have climbed, feline, to where she sits. A bored and bony fem, all nose and elbows, with hair black as singe, shaved to stubble on one side. One eye gray, one green. Maybe she’ll show him around. Is this what happens next? Another garbage island, another girl he’ll never understand?
You need your wife.
“I’m good,” he says. He walks another lonely block.
It’s a squat building, three stories, homely and drab except for the relative luxury of structural integrity: door on its hinges, no broken windows, red brick discolored only by secondhand soot. SHARKEY’S CHAW SHOP. Solid-gold letters spell out the words. Printed in bling. Out front stands an alligator chained to a fire hydrant. Don’t let her play with gators.
Is this where he’s supposed to be? Or the one place on Earth he should most avoid? All signs point to “maybe.” Ripple decides to wait.
* * *
In the limo, after the show: usually Swanny’s favorite place and time. But tonight her breath fogs the window as she gazes out through tinted glass into the chilling, wanton streets.
“You want out?” Sharkey asks, watching her from the other end of the banquette.
“Pardon?”
“Maybe you’re tired of the limo. Maybe you’d rather get out and walk.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I remember when I first picked you up. ‘I’m waiting for my husband,’ you said. I wonder how long you’d’ve waited if I hadn’t come along.”
She doesn’t answer. She knows that he’s jealous, that she’s making it worse by sitting as far from him as possible, by keeping her hands so emphatically to herself, but she can’t withhold a secret from him to save her life. She’d never fool him for long anyway. He knows too many ways in—inside her body, inside her mind. Even now, his drugs look out through her eyes, coloring the dim backseat, forming the familiar aura around his body: dusky red, warm, inviting.
“What did that mean, ‘it’s none of my affair’?” he asks.
“What?”
“Back in the bar, when you said, ‘Leave it, leave it, it’s none of your affair.’ What’d you mean by that?”
“I didn’t want you to kill my husband, Howie.”
“Yeah, but, ‘it’s none of my affair’? How’m I supposed to take that?”
“It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
His eyes are so dark, staring into them sometimes feels more like looking down than looking in. He won’t let her drop his gaze, won’t let her escape back inside herself. His gravity pulls on her, almost too much to resist.
“It’s got everything to do with me.”
It’s a hypnotic suggestion. But Swanny shakes her head, loosens herself as best she can. “No, it’s between him and me, and it’s over and done, so I don’t understand why you’re making this fuss. Let’s just drop it, shall we?”
“He’s still alive because of me.” So are you. Sharkey doesn’t say it, but the statement is there, no less visible in its absence than her mother’s ghost.
“Isn’t that true of anyone who has the fortune to cross your path on a good day?”
“Yeah. Only I’m having a bad day tonight.”
Swanny senses danger. She hasn’t forgotten those bloody drag marks on the Chaw Shop floor, hasn’t forgotten what Sharkey is capable of. She keeps her tone light: “Then I am grateful for your restraint on this occasion.”
He glares at the empty banquette next to him. “If you’re so grateful, you sure have a funny way of showing it.”
“Excuse me?” Swanny feels her fear, her caution, slip perilously away. The car is filling up with smoke, bringing back what it took, but Swanny cannot surrender to those mists, not yet. How dare he. She folds her enormous arms with a resolve she doesn’t feel, her voice all at once the voice of the bride negotiating with her father-in-law on her wedding day, the voice of the daughter parrying arguments during homeschool. The voice of a baroness. The voice that exists still in the very core of her, if only to say, with uncommon vehemence: EAT SHIT & DIE. “What—exactly—do I owe you for tonight?”
Sharkey smolders, turns away. But she can’t let it go.
“What is it, Howie? What’s the daily rate for keeping me alive? What about my husband? Is it extra if I don’t want you to beat me? Are you charging for the chaw? You must forgive me, I’m just a simple country girl all alone in the big city. I have no business sense. I didn’t realize we were performing transactions here.”
“Knock it off.”
“But I have every right to know. I balance your books—how am I to balance my own if I don’t know my debts? So answer my question. What do I owe you for tonight?”
Swanny waits for the fireworks, but he drops the subject like a knife in a gun fight: “Nothing.”
* * *
Back at the Chaw Shop, Swanny tells Sharkey that she’s sleeping upstairs—in the attic, alone, not with him on the fold-out couch in his den, where they’ve spent every night together for the last month. She wants to fight now, she’s ready, but he goes into his room and shuts the door without another word.
Swanny lights a candle, carries it upstairs. She’s in the lull between the smoke and the ghosts, the time in the chaw high when the world is most haunted, but before that haunting coalesces into specific presences. She imagines that this is the zone where Sharkey spends most of his days. Aroused but not euphoric. Attuned. In the attic, Sharkey’s treasure hoard—the punch bowl, the presidential bust, the candelabras—throw eldritch shadows on the walls, the branches of a black forest, grasping. She hasn’t been up here since the day she tried to kill him. She locates her diary and, in the flicker of the flame, begins setting down her thoughts.
Dear Diary,
There is so much I have neglected to report. I’ve grown two new teeth, abandoned my life’s one true mission, & fallen into something bottomless and terrible—I wonder if it’s love. And now my husband has returned to me.
Before she can dip her pen again to elaborate, she hears a noise at the windowpane, then another. Tap, tap. Tappity tap. Pebbles.
Swanny goes to the window with the candle, pushes up the sash, feels the icy evening air on her face and neck.
“Grub?” she calls in a low voice to the empty street below. Maybe she’s been mistaken all along. “Morsel?”
She waits a long moment—and then lets out a shriek. A man’s filthy hand reaches up to grasp the windowsill, clutches on for dear life.
“Swanny, help,” Ripple pants, flailing for her with his free arm.
She grabs him by the wrist, pulls him into the room, knocking over a partial suit of armor and a birdcage in the process. Breastplates and gauntlets clatter to the floor. She clamps her hand over his mouth.
“Shhh.”
They wait. “Do you think he heard us?”
“I find it hard to believe that he didn’t.”
“Do you think he’ll…”
“Come up here and kill you? I’d say that’s probable, yes. But I assume you knew that when you decided to invite yourself in. How on earth did you scale the building?”
“I held on to the little spaces between the bricks. It’s something I learned in fireman training.”
“Fireman training?”
“Yeah, I was a fireman there for a little while. Living the dream. Do you seriously think�
�”
“That he’s lying in wait at the bottom of the stairs with a dagger in his teeth? Just waiting for you to do something stupid, like kiss me?”
“Um…” Ripple doesn’t take the bait, but he doesn’t jump back out the window either. Their faces are close in the candlelight, and again Swanny registers how much he’s changed. Ripple was handsome before, princely or even cherubic, with his long-lashed eyes and sheepish smile, his tousled hair pillow-soft to the touch. But he had the arrogance of an angel too, his eyes always locked on a screen or searching for one. Now he’s bruised and dirty, the last of his feathers molted onto the floor. Entirely at her mercy. His gaze is frank and imploring; his muscles are tensed to survive. She’d be a liar if she didn’t admit she enjoys it.
Swanny rises from where they’ve landed, straightens the bric-a-brac. “So, what else did Osmond tell you about me?”
“A bunch of stuff.”
“Such as?” It’s surreal to be alone with Ripple again, here, after all this time. Even with her back to him, she can feel his presence, more unexpected than any ghost’s.
Ripple says it like a joke: “He said Sharkey spits in your mouth when he comes.”
Swanny whirls around. “How could Osmond possibly know that?”
Ripple reddens. “I kinda thought he was making it up, actually.”
Swanny changes the subject: “How is Osmond?”
“He’s good. He’s in the sewer.”
“You mentioned that.” She pauses, as she always does, before asking a question she doesn’t want the answer to. “Why?”
“Because the torchies burned down our house.”
“And your parents? How are they faring?” Ripple’s silence is enough, but Swanny has to know for certain. “How did they die?”
A cold breeze is blowing into the room. Duncan gets up from the floor, goes to the window, and shuts it. When he speaks, his downcast face reflects in the dark glass. “I guess they saw the fire on the panic-room monitors and figured they couldn’t make it out in time. Osmond made a run for it—a roll for it—but you know my dad. He’s…he was pretty risk averse.”
The Sky Is Yours Page 43