In the Garden of Rusting Gods
Page 5
Staring down at the open drawer, a moan escaped his throat. Page after page of sheet music lay in disordered piles, smudged and smeared beyond readability. He rushed to his laptop, typed in his username, and hesitated.
To log in he needed the password, the same word he’d used for everything—all his notes, his music, his output for the past two years—and in his mind her memory burned in its place.
“No.” He tried a guess, something from his childhood. “No!” Another, the name of his first kiss. Her sad laughter mocked him, though real or imagined he couldn’t say. “No!”
He breathed in, then out, forcing calm, drawing from his own strength, the strength he hadn’t had to use in years. The memory came, and he typed, hit enter.
The first file wouldn’t open, corrupted beyond recovery. And the second, and the third. All of them. Hammering at the keys, he checked the cloud. Gone, every note, every lyric.
He threw the machine against the wall, shattering it to pieces.
Fingernails raked at his scalp beneath his hair. She’d taken everything. Not only everything they would have done but everything they had. Every note, every lyric, every spark of passion and energy he’d channeled over two years.
His own spark flickered, defiant against the darkness, and he gritted his teeth. He could do this, would do this, without her. Without anyone.
~
“Dominic!”
Ken’s voice reverberated through Dominic’s skull, an unwelcome reminder that consciousness exists.
He opened his eyes, ran his tongue across gritty teeth tasting of cheap beer and cheaper girls, one of whom slept next to him on her stomach, naked except for a Deathsmack T-shirt that didn’t quite hide the lumpy tramp stamp of “Cindy” in faded blue-black. She snored, her breath a fetid mix of rotting garbage and margarita, chest rising and falling over the mound of belly fat spilling out across his mattress.
“Dominic!”
Clambering over Cindy, he struggled on a pair of dirty boxer shorts and called up the stairs. “What, dude, what? Christ, you don’t have to yell!”
In a forced, calmer tone Ken continued. “I didn’t want to walk in on nothing, and you didn’t respond the first couple times.”
“All right, all right, I’m awake.” He shuffled up the stairs into the kitchen of their shared apartment, where faded linoleum and peeling paint served as a constant reminder that time consumes all things.
Ken leaned against the stove, a doobie hanging from his lips. “Put some clothes on, man, we got to go.”
The ember cherry flared as he sucked in a drag. Ashes tumbled out across his chest. He held it, then breathed out a long stream of smoke. “Gig starts in an hour and we still have to set up. I’m going, so meet us there in ten minutes.”
He still couldn’t believe how quickly it had all disappeared. He’d left Deathsmack to set out on a solo career, financing his own album over the objections of his agent and band-mates. On his own without Nia and her “gift.” Three years later, bankrupt and hitless, he begged them to take him back, to gig with them opening for newer, hotter bands. The look of pity—Pity!—on Ken’s face had enraged him, but here he was, the glamorous life of a single-album has-been.
Almost thirty years old, living with his band-mate, drunk every day, drunker every night, he couldn’t stomach another mall opening, hosting another Battle of the Bands, another out-of-town trip being some small-town bar’s “special feature.” But he had to eat, and Deathsmack paid his bills—he didn’t know how to do anything else.
His mother’s pastor’s brother owned a landscaping company, and their grand reopening just had to have the local flavor of Deathsmack to rile up the crowd of graying simpletons before they stormed the gates for discounted bags of mulch. Hate coursed through him for his mother, his town, his band, his life. For Nia, who’d blessed and cursed him with the same casual sociopathy with which she’d taken and left her lovers. She’d shown him heaven just to let him fall into hell.
The band unloaded their gear and set up on the sidewalk to the left of the main entrance, just under a bright red awning. After a quick sound check he ducked under the ribbon across the front doors and inside, working his way across gleaming tile and past perfect shelves toward the sign that said “Restroom.”
Mint and jasmine tickled his nose from the ajar door next to the men’s room, a slice of pure black void against the industrial plastic tile wall. The world sharpened, a twisting memory wound through his head and dragged him toward it. The doorknob shocked him, protesting with a squeak as he turned it and stepped through into near-total darkness.
She sat in shadows on the desk, legs crossed, bare feet bobbing over discarded black stilettos.
“Hello, Dominic. How’ve you been?”
Hot rage seared his skull. “You know how I’ve been.”
“I do, but it’s polite to ask.”
A growl escaped his throat. “You ruined me.”
“You had forty million fans at twenty-two. You ruined you when you rejected me.”
“I had no fans. You had fans.”
“You still have no fans, only now you have no money and no fame, frittered away on cocaine and beer and bar sluts unworthy of the old names that grace their lower backs.” She chuckled, then, as the lights in the hall flickered and dimmed. “Oh, the arrogance of mortals. Do you think you were the first to think you were different? Special? That your star would shine so bright without mine?”
She blazed, becoming a white inferno that scoured him to individual atoms, blasting him into plasma forged in a living sun. Her voice exploded around him; a wordless, godless, eternal reminder of the insignificance of man. The furnace of her existence raged through him, devoured him, forged and remade him, the quintessence of his every desire trapped in human flesh—and then it fell back to nothing but a glimpse, a promise, a lie. And then, a spoken truth.
“It’s not too late, Dom. We can be again, and all that I am can be yours. Just let me in.”
He picked himself up from the floor, a line of drool trickling from his mouth, and met her gaze. In them, glory blazed. “I want that. I want to be what you can make me.”
“No barriers this time. I’ll be within you, and you’ll live as you always should have.”
He nodded, humbled, exalted. Ready.
“I will.”
She smiled, and faded to nothing.
He breathed in, out. “So that’s it, then? We’re ready?”
Her voice echoed within him. I’ve been ready a long time.
~
The priest looked up in alarm as Dominic shouldered the heavy wooden box through the door. His arm swept across the table to knock the tarot cards to the floor, spilling beeswax from black and red candles as they tumbled across the pentagram etched into the mahogany top. He sized Dominic up and down, then nodded to the chair under the crucifix, Christ’s eyes upturned to a Father that had forsaken him.
“I know you.”
Dominic nodded. “Everyone knows me, or knows of me. The price of fame.”
“How may I help you?”
He licked his lips, swallowed, and sat, setting the heavy box on his lap. “I have an entity in my body struggling to take over, and it’s become more difficult to control than I’d anticipated. I’ve been told you’re the man to get rid of it.”
“That may be. Explain your situation, please.”
“There’s nothing to explain. We’ve lived together three years, and it’s outgrown its usefulness. We’d had a deal, it misunderstood, and I’m tired of fighting. I just need it gone.”
The priest clucked his tongue. “I see. What is the entity? And do you know its name?”
She nodded Dominic’s head. “His name is Dominic, and he’s the human born to this body.”
The priest smiled. “Did they tell you my price?”
Domin
ic wailed, silent in the void, as he’d wailed for three endless years.
She lifted the lid with a grunt, tilting the box so the priest could see within. Inside slept a two-year-old, her tiny body curled into a fetal position. She’d said her name was Alice, and that she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but took the lollipop anyway. Now deep in slumber, she drooled around a limp thumb stuffed between her lips. Cindy’s child, Dominic’s daughter, sired and abandoned the day Nia had taken him; she’d never seen a penny of child support, never a glimpse of her father’s face except perhaps on posters or magazines.
The priest nodded, lust oozing from his eyes. “That will suffice. I’ll get my knives.”
~
Three hours later, the Star hopped aboard the tour bus, a grin splashed across its face to match those of its roadies and band-mates. “Time to make some music.”
WELL WORN
Shelly tutted and muttered as she worked, as she’d tutted and muttered for fifty-odd years; an endless routine for an endless job. Grousing never changed the gone and done, but it suppressed decades of raw fury to a simmer.
Arthritic hands burned as she picked at the stitches. Forcing the seam ripper under the “E” embroidered on the red college varsity letterman jacket, she tore out dingy white threads and identity with every wobbly jerk.
“Girl, are you sure you want to do this again?” The shop’s contents muffled her rheumy voice, tickled by a trace of Louisiana French that softened the consonants on the ends of her words. Shaky words, soft words, frailer with each autumn, but while the Pleiades ascended toward their highest point she knew her daughter could hear her.
Costumes smothered racks of old clothing and blocked most of her view, the other half of the store swallowed by masks and shoes and every kind of prop from plays and movies dating back a century and more. Shelly had sewn half the suits and nearly all the dresses on her grandmother’s Singer, jet black with chipped and faded gold paint that may once have been a scroll, its original glory made plain by the ravages of time. Family legend said Old Nana had bought it two years after Lincoln’s death with every penny she’d saved during twenty-four months of freedom, and brought it with her to New Orleans after the flood of 1882.
“It’s not his fault, you know. Whoever he is.”
Alice didn’t reply; she never did.
Shelly tore out the rest of the stitches, sewed a rampant stallion patch in its place, and held up the candy-apple red garment. “It isn’t maroon, cherie, but it’ll have to do.”
The brass bell on the door jangled as she put the jacket on the rack, where it hid in shadow to await the right customer.
~
Gail wrinkled her nose as the bell on the door faded to memory. Fluorescent bulbs in hanging cages bathed endless racks of vintage clothing in sickly, flickering light and added a sharp tang of overheated wiring to the off-putting aroma of mothballs and must. Shelly’s Costumes and Theater Supply smothered most of an out-of-business grocery store in aisle after aisle of vintage looks dating back more than a century.
Ball gowns of a bygone age hung on the back wall, pinks and blues and yellows protected from the ravages of sunlight by the blackened windows. Masks of every sort dominated the left-hand wall, classic movie monsters and smiling doll’s faces to the creepy, long-faced plague masks from darker times. A mannequin stood to the right of the door, her headless, naked body bedecked in hundreds of necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and belly chains, “Costume Jewelry Priced as Marked” written across her outstretched arms in black marker.
Gail wandered back in time through the women’s half of the room, past Cindi Lauper and Cher dresses, skipping pencil skirts and short-sleeve sweaters to pause at an emerald-green taffeta gown that screamed authentic Dior. A flapper’s dress with a matching, sequined headband drew her onward, to a pile of whalebone corsets and enormous, antebellum wigs dumped in a heap next to an empty rack. A wig might be fun to cover her short black curls, something like a one-day weave, but there was no way she’d survive a shift at the hospital squeezed into Victorian-era garb.
“May I help you, child?”
“Oh!” Gail gasped, heart hammering as she turned to face the sudden voice. An old black woman smiled, thin lips cracking through a wall of wrinkles, her short afro a shock of dandelion fluff framing her walnut face. Hand flat against her chest, Gail forced a smile of her own. “You startled me. Sorry.”
The old woman looked up at the racks, two feet higher than her head, then back to Gail. “Well, I do tend to blend in.” Her eyes widened a smidge, which would have been welcoming if not for the bloody lines crackling across the edges of her sclera. “Theater or Halloween?”
Gail swallowed. “Neither, I guess.” She laughed, bright and loud. “Or both. A Halloween party, but I’ll be on my feet at work all day, a nurse, so nothing too …” She ran a finger across a corset, tracing across the butter yellow coutil to the whale bone under—
“Those were never for us, dearie, not back then.”
Train of thought shattered, she stepped back, confused. “Us?”
Withered, shaking fingers took hers. The dry, papery skin almost brittle under her touch, long, thick nails yellowed by the passage of years. Yin and Yang, light and dark, white and black.
The old woman squeezed her palms, fingernails pricking just enough to hurt before letting go. “No need to pass with old Shelly. I know my people.”
Gail felt a scowl forming and schooled her features to neutrality, her bedside face, her difficult patient face. “I’m not ‘passing,’ thank you. My mom was white, my dad is black. I don’t hide my heritage.”
Shelly smirked. “My husband was white. Quite the scandal in those days, even in New Orleans, a young man home from the war taking a seventeen-year-old French Quarter Negro to wife. But our daughter, see, she was a black girl. God rest them both.”
“I … I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” Shelly waved it off. “But that was a long time ago. What are you thinking for your costume?”
She set out down the row with a shrug. “I’m not sure. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.”
Behind her, Shelly’s voice rose, both louder and lighter. “Well, if you need something I’ll be around.”
“Thanks!”
Gail browsed, and laughed out loud at a knee-length poodle skirt, powder blue with a black and white dog rolled on its back. The felt whispered to her fingertips as she picked it up, held it to her waist. It came just to her knees, a few stray threads dangling farther but in otherwise excellent shape for a sixty-year-old garment.
She grabbed a jet black mock-turtleneck, sleeveless and sleek, and a black-and-white polka-dot scarf trimmed in the same blue as the skirt. Turning, she called out. “Do you have a dressing room?”
“Back left,” came the reply.
She changed, unable to suppress a manic grin at the sheer authenticity of the look, gave a twirl in front of the mirror, and stepped out.
Shelly put a shaking hand to her mouth. “Oh, how you look like her.”
Gail’s smile died in infancy. “Your daughter?”
Shelly nodded. “A beauty, right down to the green-flecked eyes.”
Stepping back, Gail looked in the mirror. Her light brown eyes did look a little green, but only a touch. Must have been the lighting.
“How much?”
The old woman’s eyes flicked from piece to piece. “Twenty dollars through Monday. No deposit, but ten a day after.”
“Can’t I just buy them?”
Shell’s sad smile tore at Gail’s heart. “Those were my Alice’s. I can’t let them go.”
Gail opened her mouth, closed it, tried again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”
“No, no, of course you didn’t. I wouldn’t have them out if I didn’t want people to wear them. They’re yours for the weekend, for your discomfort.”
The old woman’s smile brightened.
“Come now, cherie, she’d want you to. I know it.”
The feeling vanished, replaced by a sense of rightness, of purpose. The costume would give a mother peace … and it did look great on her.
“Then I’ll take them for twenty.”
In the end they settled for fifteen, Gail haggling up as the nonagenarian tried to undersell her own garments. She paid, changed back into her own clothes, and left the store.
Sunlight battered her down. Squinting, she walked to her car, skirting as far as she could get from the homeless white man drooling into his beard.
Passing. The shopkeeper’s words followed her out.
She’d done it in high school, but not since growing into her own. College had taught her pride, in herself and her history. The accusation turned to bile in her throat.
~
Shelly frowned as the young woman disappeared around the corner.
“I’m so sorry.” She looked up at nothing in particular. “Fifty years, cherie. Does it have to be fifty-one?”
Alice didn’t answer; she never did.
An hour later the skies had turned to gloom, and distant thunder shook the windows. A fair-haired man in a T-shirt and jeans ducked inside, soaking wet, chest heaving. In response, the red jacket quivered on the rack.
“Look at him,” she said. “Young, full of life and promise. That boy did nothing to you. You look at him and you tell me this is right.”
Alice didn’t answer; she never did.
Shelly closed her eyes, choking down a sob to replace it with a smile. She cleared her throat and raised her voice.
“Hello, young man! You look like you need something to keep the rain off.”
“Damn straight, lady.”
“Shelly, please.”
His grin brightened the store and shattered her heart. “Dave. Charmed.”