A ring charred neatly in the floor about the sword, thrust in the middle of it, upright, short and straight the blade, of the width of two fingers from those cinders up and up to the quillions heavy and plain, the hilt wrapped about in overlapping straps of white worn yellow with hard use, up and up to the plainly beaten round of the pommel, as heavy, and as solid. Otherwise, the room is empty. The hearth there, dark and cold, swept clean, the windows blankly dark against the dark without, and only dim lamps lit in elaborately fronded sconces. From somewhere deeper in the house, below, perhaps, a basement, a confidently off-tempo guitar, a piercing soprano, gonna put on the stereo, as loud as we can make it go, and then turn the record over, over and over again.
The first of them steps from the kitchen, a brighter room off that way, walls the color of toothpaste. His rich red hair flops from a high widow’s peak, his baggy ivory shirt open at the throat, his red check vest tightly buttoned, and his hands are warily empty. He starts at a creak above, but it’s the second of them, making her way down the stairs, tall enough she needs to stoop, white tank top and a heavy leather kilt, her fine long hair a watery green. She nods as the third of them steps from the hall beneath the stairs, shabby velvet frock coat over orange coveralls, he’s shrugging at them both, and applause smatters up from somewhere below.
The front door cracks open. The fourth of them tips in a grey-epauletted shoulder, followed by a quizzical scowl on a beefy face. The first of them nods, the third shrugs again, and the second steps off the stairs to yank the front door from his grasp, swinging it open to allow the last of them into the room, Chillicoathe, the Harper, who strides to the middle of it, his bulky sweater, his cargo shorts, his big yellow beard and his wide-eyed gaze, fixed only on that upthrust sword.
“Hey,” says the third of them, the Cinquedea Pwyll, but Chilli waves him off.
“Now or never,” says the second of them, Meg Greentooth, but the Kern Gradasso, the fourth, snaps up a hand, wsht!
“They’re finishing up down there,” says the first of them, the Stirrup Gaveston, but Chilli’s already shaking out his hands, clapping them together, pop! to reach out for that yellowed hilt.
“Do you really,” says someone, not any one of them, “want,” a small and slender man, all in black, “to do that,” there by the cold and empty hearth, delicate tulip of a cocktail coupe in his hand.
Chilli steps back from the sword as if stung, “Where,” Gradasso blusters, as Pwyll insists “I didn’t,” and Meg squeezes her enormous scale-knuckled hands into fists, opens them up again, pah! “Your pardon, Goodfellow,” says Gaveston, over the others, “we’d no intention of disrupting your revels.”
“I fear I’ve no pardon to give,” says Goodfellow, eyeing his glass, “for there’s none to be asked. This is a free house, Stirrup;” he lifts it for a sip, and then a gesture, liquor glinting in the light, “do what you will.”
Chilli’s eyes twitch, to this side, to the sword, to that. “And your will’s not to stop me?”
“I’d only suggest, Harper:” says Goodfellow, “take a moment to consider whether you’d want this role, in that tale. If so,” but Chilli’s taken hold of the hilt, and a shriek of wood, a thrum of steel, he draws the blade from the floor.
“Well,” says Goodfellow. “It’ll be nice to have the room again, for dancing.”
It’s a complicated intersection, and the truck idles there a moment, under a red stoplight. A Balanced Life Healthcare, says the sign on the wall of the building to the left. Vicente’s Pizza, over a florid red V, the sign on the corner of the building to the right. The main thoroughfare crosses before, and heads on down the hill, but here, here it’s opened out a bit, something of a plaza for the lanes of traffic limned in paint that needs some touching up. Ahead to the right the low blank wall of a convenience store, 7-Eleven, says the sign that’s bolted there, the brightest light about, and off to the left the dark bulk of an apartment building rises three storeys, four, The 20 on Hawthorne, says the unlit sign that swaddles the corner of it, Now Leasing, Units Available. Between them two more streets open up, one a dogleg off ahead, along the side of that apartment building, the other, there, cornering the convenience store, angled a diagonal rightward and down, into trees, among houses well-appointed. In the sharp slice of corner between them, the narrowed prow of an older building, painted a brown and darker brown gone almost black in the shadows, and not a window lit.
That truck idles through a full cycle of lights, green shone that way, then this, red lights this way, and that, and yellow on, then off, clicks of the switches audible over the muffled chug of the truck’s engine. A car passes, quick along the thoroughfare, ignoring options left and right, engine snarling as it races to beat a yellow. Red becomes green, and that’s when the truck lurches forward, but a blaring horn, a van there to the right, hooking about the convenience store, and the truck wrenches to avoid it, brakes screeching and rear wheels humping the curb as the van accelerates away. The truck wobbles on across the angled street to mount the lozenge of sidewalk lopped before the older brown building, coming to a gentle stop by a small young freshly planted tree, engine still a-rumble.
The driver’s door pops open, and a cantering beat spills out under whirling, twirling guitars, a low voice chanting a beach for the waves of the world to crash on, you are the spilt wine, you are the spilt wine at the table of the gods, and a clap of drums. She slips from the seat, clings to the armrest on the door, and finding solid ground with her feet essays a step, but what she’s stood upon’s the curb of the low ramp from street to sidewalk, and the step she takes too heavy, too far down, and overbalancing, swung about, she topples to sit against the truck. What light there is gleams the blood that soaks the shoulder of her hoodie, blood slathered up her neck to the corner of her jaw, her cheek. There is a shining something, the voice is chanting, there is a shining something. Her head bobs with the effort of her breath, quick, quite shallow. Ellen Oh closes her eyes.
It’s quiet.
It’s quiet, and still, the music’s gone, and the engine’s chug. She opens her eyes to see a figure, bulky coat and wild white hair, stooped to squat beside her. “You’re a mess,” says Marfisa.
Ellen’s lips part, her brow creases, but Marfisa’s craning up, looking inside the cab of the truck, seat of it marred by a dark slick of blood. “Someone else will get this off the street,” she says. “You need to get yourself inside.” Lifting Ellen’s arm, ducking her white head beneath it, heedless of the bloodied hand she grips within her own. “Can you stand?”
“I,” says Ellen, gathering herself with a grimace, “I almost died.”
“You may yet,” says Marfisa, bracing herself. “Come.”
“The Song They Sang When Rome Fell,” written by Anaïs Mitchell, ©2002. 7-Eleven® is the registered trademark of 7-Eleven, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seven-Eleven Japan Co., Ltd., held by Kabushiki gaisha Sebun ando Ai Hōrudingusu. “Berlin,” written by Barry Andrews, among others, ©2000.
Her tattooed forest hidden now by blood, and the ruddy golden crumbs that cake her shoulder and her throat, gleaming under harsh fluorescence. She’s sat on the steps below the landing, bloodied hoodie a tangled stain on the floor, her T-shirt cut away, a sodden ruin in her lap. “You lied to me,” she says, through her teeth.
Marfisa on the steps beside her scoops more golden dust from a plastic baggie. “I did no such thing.” She presses it over the last visible edge of that ragged wound.
“You didn’t,” Ellen winces, “tell me the truth.”
“And if I had?” Marfisa smooths the dampening, darkening dust with a knuckle. “Would you have listened?” Sits back, eyeing the almost empty baggie. “This will have to do.”
“I need a shower.”
“In time. Let the owr do its work. How does it feel? Don’t touch.”
Ellen shifts her shoulder. The clumped dust, settling, fuses as she eyes it to a cleanly golden shell, gleaming without slough or crack or flake. “You aren’t human,” she says. “Are you.”
“No,” says Marfisa, getting to her feet. “Let’s get you upstairs.”
Ellen takes Marfisa’s hand to pull herself upright, working her shoulder back and up, forth and down, “That’s just weird,” she says.
“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa.
Up the steep stairs lofted from the landing, up and up to a plain brown door ajar at the top and into a brightly airy kitchen, “Can I at least get clean?” Ellen’s saying, as she tries to hold up the blood-soaked lop of her T-shirt with a bloodstained hand.
“Find her some clothing,” Marfisa says, curtly. “Did the truck get put away?”
There’s someone else, a small man in a collarless shirt of faded green, there on the three steps leading down to a dark room crowded with shadowy boxes. He sighs, with some little gravity. “The truck might be said to have been secured.”
“Is it clean,” says Marfisa. And then, “There’s clothing in the lobby. Destroy it. Clean the floor, and the steps as well.”
“It is possible, perhaps,” he says, “the lady misapprehends the particulars of a relationship with such a one as this.”
“You served the Devil,” says Marfisa, stepping away from Ellen, toward him. “Now you serve the Outlaw,” as the small man sets off with a sigh, past her, his muttered “This one did but clean photographs for the Devil,” trailing after him, “and not the scenes of crimes,” out through the door that he closes behind him.
Marfisa’s pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. She scoops her white hair back, gathered a moment in a single hank, then lets it go to spring back to its cumulonimbal crest. She opens a sparsely laden cabinet, takes down a blue-lipped drinking glass. Shoves aside with the sweep of an arm the litter on the counter, dirty dishes, tangled utensils, empty takeout cartons, wadded newspaper, an unsheathed sword, a couple-three fat little paperbacks, all to make room for the stainless steel bowl she hauls up.
“Is there a shower?” says Ellen, shivering.
“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa, crossing to the sink, where she sets to filling the glass. “I’m not,” says Ellen, turning with her, but blinking, wide-eyed, “whoa,” she says, and sits, heavily, before the fridge. “Too fast.”
“Drink,” says Marfisa, squatting to offer the glass. And then, as Ellen, nodding, sips, “You struck your blow.”
“I went in through the basement deck, like you said.” She drinks off the rest in a gulp. “He was there, asleep, alone. I stabbed him,” lifting her bloodied hand to point, “here,” to the inked knob at the nape of her neck, “and,” a wincing shrug, “he was gone.”
“It wasn’t him.”
“She was there.”
“Your wizard,” says Marfisa, standing to take the bowl to the sink.
“Upchurch. She wanted me to go upstairs,” lifting her voice over the rush of the faucet. “There’s a woman, locked in a room full of moths?”
“Butterflies.”
“And she told me it wasn’t done. And then,” looking down, at the seamless red-sheened gold that plates her shoulder.
Marfisa returns, careful with the weight of the bowl, “How did you escape,” she says.
“I stabbed him in the skull.”
“The skull.”
“It was what I could reach,” says Ellen. Marfisa dunks a dishtowel in the bowl, wrings it out. Ellen reaches for her wrist. “I didn’t finish it,” she says. “He’s still there.”
A drip from the dishtowel into the bowl, plink. “There is truly nothing of Grandfather left,” says Marfisa. She leans in to daub the sticky blood from Ellen’s breast, gently but firmly lifting the stiffening panel of T-shirt out of her way. Ellen tips back her head, looks up, to the dull white popcorned ceiling, “He bit me,” she says.
“Yes,” says Marfisa, scrubbing, wiping, scrubbing again.
“So, will I,” Ellen rocks a little, absently, with the force of Marfisa’s ministrations, “do I turn into something like that?”
“No.” Marfisa dunks the dishtowel, staining the water in the bowl. Wrings it out again.
“Why did you let me go there by myself?”
“You,” says Marfisa, blotting blood from there, and there, “would not be stopped.”
“I had no idea what I was in for.”
“Now, you do.” Marfisa dunks the towel again. “Now we can make a plan.”
Ellen scoots back, out from Marfisa’s clasp, hard up against the fridge, her bloodstained hand between them. “If I hadn’t made it,” she says, her affect flat, her tone unchanged. “If I’d bled out in the house. Passed out and crashed, driving back.”
Marfisa shrugs in her sheepskin coat. “It would be a different plan. What do you want from this, Ellen?”
“Vengeance,” she says, almost immediately.
“And what will you do to get it?”
Ellen blinks. Lowers her hand. Marfisa leans in, to daub and wipe once more. “I should meet your wizard, next,” she says.
“I’ve got a phone number,” says Ellen.
“Does she answer?” There’s a knock at the door, three sharp raps. “It’s open,” calls Marfisa. “I don’t know,” Ellen’s saying, “I haven’t called it yet,” but Marfisa’s sitting back, looking up and over to the unopened door, “That hod,” she mutters, “will not–”
Three knocks, again, but slow, deliberate booms that rattle the door in its frame. Marfisa gets to her feet, frowning.
“It’s him,” says Ellen Oh. “Isn’t it.”
The door bursts open, splintering the jamb. Chilli takes a big step into the room, his boots, his shorts, his big yellow beard, the short plain sword in his hand angled to catch a flare of light the vicious chop at his head by the bat in Marfisa’s hand, “Ha!” Shifting her grip the bat twirls back around and up, a jab at his chest he thwarts with an awkward downward whack, the sound of bitten wood. He wrenches, levering the bat to spin it free of grip and blade to fly across the clattering fall to the floor, “Ho!” as he loops the point of his sword to hang in the air before her throat. “It’s steel must meet with steel,” he snarls. “Fetch my blasted sword.”
Marfisa’s focus flicks from blade-tip to countertop, the hilt there visible among the litter. “Go on!” he bellows. “Make a move. Make your move.”
“Harper!” calls someone else. The broken doorway’s crowded, Gaveston squeezing through past Pwyll into the kitchen, and Meg a-loom behind them. “There’s a gallowglas on the field,” says Gaveston, pointing to Ellen, but Chilli’s blade doesn’t waver. “There’s a gallowglas,” says Gaveston, “bleeding, on the field.”
“Changes nothing,” spits Chilli.
“It changes everything,” says Gaveston. “Put up. Step back. We’ll try again, some other day.”
“Yeah,” says Gradasso, even as Pwyll’s making shushing motions, “we ought to,” but “Shut up!” roars Chilli, fury shredded to the edge of a shriek, blade still aimed at Marfisa’s throat. “Pick,” he snaps. “Up. That. Sword.”
“No,” says Marfisa.
“Ranh!” Blade-tip leaps, settles, both his hands on the hilt held high. “Fine,” he says, and takes a step, sidelong, another, turning his way about the kitchen, his sword a spoke, Marfisa, motionless, the axle. “Fine,” he says again, his eyes still locked with hers. Reaching back for the counter with his off hand, sightlessly clumsy, fumbling about to close over the hilt. Drawing the second sword scrape against the counter, a blade in either hand now, and both of them pointed at her. “You’ve ceded the field. Take off the coat.”
“No,” says Marfisa.
“Take it off!” The blades shake in his hands. A step toward her, another, those points lowering just to touch the fleece of the coat’s wide collar, there, and there, at either end of her clavicle. “I will have my coat,” he says.
“You’ll poke two more holes in it,” says Marfisa. “Go on. Deny the Queen her Outlaw. Render me to bone.”
Gaveston swallows. Gradasso in the doorway raises, lowers an empty hand. Ellen looks from Marfisa, still, unmoving, to Chilli, settling and resettling his grips about the hilts of those two swords. Floorboards creak, as out there Meg steps back.
“I have your sword,” says Chilli.
“That?” says Marfisa, with a nod for the sword to her left, short and simply plain, his right hand clutching yellowed leather. “That I stuck in the floor of Goodfellow’s house for all to see, and anyone to take, who’d need of it.”
He presses forward, deepening the dimples in the fleece. She takes in a quick sharp breath through her nose. “You will,” he says. “Quit, these rooms.” Takes back a step. “Get yourself to that warehouse of clods and boobs, I don’t care. Take your books, your boxes, all your trash,” another step back, toward the door, blades in either hand still high, “but you will leave that blasted, rotten coat, you hear me?” Yellow beard stirred by his panting breath. “And if you ever show that horse’s head again, anywhere south and east of the Burnside Bridge, I’ll strike it from your shoulders to set before the Queen, gallowglas or no. Are we clear?”
Marfisa’s lips suggest the slightest smile.
“Gah!” Chilli stamps, whips both swords up and back, over either shoulder, pushes out between Pwyll and Gradasso, who duck to avoid the steel. Gaveston slips after. Meg leans in to swing the door shut with a massive, green-knuckled hand.
“That was,” says Ellen.
“Yes,” says Marfisa, stooping to pick up her bat.
“I lost that mask,” says Ellen.
“We’ll get more,” says Marfisa, thumbing the freshly rough-edged nick cut deeply in the barrel of the bat. “Don’t touch,” she says.
Ellen’s hand leaps away from the gold encasing her shoulder. The edges of it have gone lacey, darkly soft, crumbling here and there to pepper her breast and upper arm with flecks. “Marfisa?” she says, looking up. “What’s a gallowglas?”
That long and oval glass-topped table, covered over with the detritus of many hasty meals, crumpled paper napkins, plastic cups stacked and toppled, crushed, glass bottles that had once held soda, beer, kombucha, an unsteadily towering stack of emptied pizza boxes, and crumbs and dregs and half-dried spills. Bruno favors it all with a rueful smile. “It’s gotten a bit out of hand,” he says. “Cachaça?” Setting a burlapped bottle on a relatively uncluttered patch, and two squatly heavy glasses beside it.
“Sweetloaf could see to this, surely?” says Luys, pulling out a chair, as Bruno uncorks the bottle, sitting himself, as Bruno pours a glass, “Would this be the first call of an industrious morning for you,” he says, offering it up, “or the last stop of a long and wearisome night?” Luys shakes his head. Bruno shrugs, sets down the glass, and pours more in the second, the liquor clear and thin, the burble of it highly pitched. “So,” he says, and sits himself across from Luys, lifting the glass in a one-handed toast. “The meeting’s yours.”
Luys nods. His chamois shirt is rumpled, brown, unbuttoned at the throat, his black cap of hair discreetly tousled. “We ought,” he says, “begin to, discuss, what each we see as possible,” a breath, “roads,” he says, “to rapprochement.”
“But Mason,” says Bruno, smiling and frowning at once, “surely, you and I are friends.”
“Between her majesty,” says Luys, with a skeptically sour tang, “and his excellency,” and Bruno nods at that, mouthing a silent ah, “But why’s it we, who ought to do this thing?” he says, and takes a sip.
“Who else is there who might?” says Luys. “The Marquess, and the Soames, being at each other’s throat.”
“The Guisarme and the Glaive are brothers yet.”
“And doubtless seek roads of their own. Should our discussion bear fruit, we’ll no doubt share with them.”
“And vicey-versey, I suppose?” says Bruno. “The fruit of the roads we might glimpse,” he mutters, and swallows off what’s left.
“Your pardon?” says Luys.
Bruno leans out over the table to uncork the bottle. “What of our lady?” he says, and pours himself some more.
“Her grace?” says Luys. “She is where she is. We must steward her demesne, as best we can, till her return.”
“We,” says Bruno.
“Yes,” says Luys.
“You and I,” says Bruno.
Luys frowns. “If you would put it bluntly,” he says, his hand closing up on the tabletop. “But we do both have our help.”
“You’ve the men,” says Bruno, pointing with his glass, “I, the matériel,” drawing it back, “to put it bluntly.” He throws back the liquor in one quick gulp. “Too blunt?” he says, to answer the quizzical turn of Luys’s mien. Sets down the glass, clack. “North,” he says, tapping to one side of it. “Northeast,” the other, fingers and thumb pressed together. “Southwest,” he says, tapping to the one side again, “Northwest,” the other. “Mason,” he says, but this time does not tap, that hand resting over the empty glass, “and Shrieve.”
“You’d set us both at odds?”
“I was not the one to call this meeting,” says Bruno.
“A meeting to discuss!” cries Luys, throwing up his hands.
“Discussion,” says Bruno, “takes two. Two points of view. Two sides, as it were. Sat across a table. As for rapprochement, well: there must needs be a gap, between the two, to be rapproched.”
“You’d have us set at odds,” says Luys, shaking his head. “With all that’s happened, with all we have to face, between the Viscount, and the Queen, you want–”
“You’ve sat in privy council with his excellency.”
“And you the Queen!” Luys falls back in his chair. “That’s what best fits us to this task– our vantage, jointly, is ideal, to scout what ground they hold in common, and, with our counsel, bend their ears to bend their steps to seek it.”
“We’d bend?” says Bruno. “The Queen, the Viscount, you would have us bend?”
“Away from senseless dispute? Back toward stability? Peace? Prosperity?” Luys leans forward, both hands on the cluttered table. “Every day, Shrieve. Each and every day, you take two deals, two angles, hands, and play them, to the betterment of both. This is what you do. This is your duty.”
“My duty’s to the Queen,” says Bruno, simply.
“By which you mean to say that mine is not.”
A moment passes, during which Bruno neither nods, nor shakes his head. Then with a sudden savage swing of both his arms Luys sweeps boxes, napkins, bottles and cans tumble crashing spinning clatter from tabletop to floor. Scrape as he pushes back his chair. “It’s much too early in the morning for such nonsense.”
“No, Mason. It’s far too late to play at comity.”
Luys gets to his feet. “That’s it, then?”
Bruno does not look up, or back, as Luys stalks around the foot of the table and out the trapezoidal room. He leans forward, then, to take hold of the other glass, still full, and drinks it down. “That might have been a wee bit premature,” he says, to no one in particular. Eyes the glass in his hand, twisting it back and forth. Reaches for the bottle, but pushes it away. Something rings, somewhere out behind him. “Mason?” he says, and gets to his feet.
“Shopkeep!” bellows someone away out there, and Bruno closes up his eyes.
Out in the big front room, floor of it unpainted planks lined and aisled with overflowing bins of fittings and hardware sorted by type, past the file of unhung doors leaned one against another along the wall, there’s the counter laden with Mason jars filled with keys, where the Harper Chillicoathe bangs a service bell with his fist, “Shopkeep!” he roars again, through laughter, “we’d have our wares inspected!” Pwyll and Gradasso to either side, arms folded, akimboed, Meg there in the vestibule, hands up to brace her weight against the lintel, Gaveston leaning in to nudge, to point out Bruno in the angled doorway. Chilli turns, thrusts up a hand gripped tight about the yellowed leather hilt of a short straight sword, “See what I have brought!”
“A sword,” says Bruno, still in the doorway. “All of you it took, to bring a sword?”
“With this,” Chilli shakes it, once, “I went and got this back!” Thrusting up his other hand, his own sword with its heavy golden pommel. “I beat her, Bruno. The Outlaw’s been rebuked. She’ll leave the rooms on Hawthorne and, I swear, won’t ever try to raid our portion again.”
Bruno looks down, adjusts his cuff, the link a small coin, brassy with a silver center, Good For One Fare, say letters stamped about the rim. “And it took all of you,” he says, looking up again, “to bring this thing about.”
Chilli lowers both his swords. “It’s been done,” he says. “What does it matter–”
“Where is her grace?” says Bruno, simply.
“I,” says Chilli, “her grace, her grace is fine, I’m sure–”
“That’s not,” says Bruno, “what I asked.” Stepping into the room, past a bin of filigreed hinges, “Where,” he says, past a bin of coppery lock plates, “at this precise moment,” up the aisle toward Chilli, “might I go,” as Gradasso steps to one side, out of the way, “to find her grace,” as Pwyll ducks into the vestibule with Meg, “the Duchess of Southeast,” as Gaveston steps back, “Widow of the Hawk, Queen’s Favorite,” as Chill, blades criss-crossed before him, glowers, “where is Jo Gallowglas,” says Bruno, “and why, under all the stars above, are you not watching over her, right now?”
Caravanserai, written by Abby Tinker, ©1979.
It’s not a terribly thick folder she drops on the table, just a handful of freshly printed pages in a crisp blue jacket. Beside it she sets a spiral-bound stenographer’s pad and two ballpoint pens, clack, tack, and last, a short brown paper cup with the tags of a couple of teabags peeping from under its white plastic lid. Scrape as she pulls out a chrome-framed black-cushioned chair, creak as she settles her bulk in it. Her slacks a slickly brown, her half-zip pullover softly grey, her silver hair close-cropped. She opens the jacket, flips back the cover of the stenographer’s pad, takes up a pen, click-lick, click-lick, and squints at the woman across the battered table from her, younger, smaller, downright scrawny, wrists manacled to a bracket welded to the tabletop, arms bared and shoulders, shivering, dressed only in filthy jeans and a grey bralette, her hair-colored hair a matted, tangled curtain dropped before her face.
“Chilly?” says the silver-haired woman. Not even a clink of the cuffs in response.
“Okay!” Another click-lick of the pen. “This is Detective Sally Bauer, Bee Ay You Ee Are, on the Homicide Detail. Date is Friday, twenty-fifth May; time, oh-seven eighteen hours; case number,” and here she checks the first page of the file, “two seven two, four nine eight. We are currently in an interview room in the confines of the Portland Police Bureau, Eleven Eleven Southwest Second, on the thirteenth floor.” Turning a page. “State your name for the record.” Looking up. That curtain of hair not even stirred by a breath.
“This strong and silent schtick won’t get you anywhere, okay? We took your prints. You’re in the system? We’ll know who you are in not too much longer. You’re not? Though, I gotta tell you, to look at you, this is not your first rodeo. Folks who, it’s their first time? Never been through this before? Tend to be a little more,” a shrug, “agitated.”
A shiver strong enough to chime the manacles.
“You want a blanket?” Turning another page. “Cup of coffee?” Lifting the lid of the paper cup to hoist and dunk the teabags. Replacing the lid. “Give me a name. That way, when your people call, they can be told where you are, what’s going on. You do have people?”
Removing the lid, setting it upside down on the table, she lifts out the teabags, squeezes them with a wince, drops them on the lid. Licks her thumb clean. “Look, the facts so far, not many of them, but, as-is, they’re not bad for you. Play straight with me, everything checks out, you don’t blow off Recog, you could be out of here by two, three o’clock in the afternoon. Not every day someone comes in with a body can say that.” Turning another page. “Before we get any further in this, were you Mirandized? Because the form is here, but quelle surprise, it’s unsigned.” A heavy sigh. “So, out of an abundance of caution. You. Have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law; you have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” Shuff as she flicks the page across the table to fetch up by the bracket. “Here,” tugging another pen from a pocket of her pullover, chucking it wobble to land with a limply flop on the page. “Gotta use one of those to sign it.”
Not a twitch from the hands on the other side of the bracket, streaked with dirt about the knuckles, the yet-green smear of a grass stain.
“I get it. Shit happens, in those camps. They aren’t safe. Big guy like that jumps you, in the dark? And maybe, we find out who he is, we find out he was off his meds, or should’ve been on some in the first place. There’s a gun. It goes off. You walk away; he doesn’t. It’s self defense, straight up. Cut and dried. So help me get it over the line. Give me something. Tell me. Is that, how it, went down?”
Sitting back, with a creak, in her chair. Folding her arms. Waiting. Watching, until, click-lack, she leans forward, drags the piece of paper back to her side of the table. Marks an X at the bottom, scrawls the date beside it. Stacks it with the other pages, taps them into a neat bundle, slips them into the jacket. “Oh seven twenty-two,” she says. “My shift ends at eight, which means about nine, nine-thirty, I should be done enough to get out of here, get a Denver omelet in me, get home and sleep for not nearly enough.” Scrape of the chair she pushes back. “So if this is all it’s gonna be?” Getting to her feet, closing the cover of the unused stenographer’s pad. “I’d just as soon be getting that whole process jump-started. So.” Tucking away her pens. “Your only chance of getting back on the street anytime today is about to walk out the door.”
“I did,” says the woman then, and Bauer starts at that, but blinking keeps any surprise off her face, “whatever it was I did.” That head lifting, tilting, matted hair falling away from her face, those thin pale lips, that nose, the mud-colored eyes. “You’re telling me what’s gonna happen because of what I did, it depends on how I talk to you, right here, right now.”
“It tells me what kind of person you are,” she says, “which, yeah, goes a long way toward figuring out what needs to happen.”
“Doesn’t sound much like justice.”
Sally snorts. “Sister, all anybody ever can do is work the problem in front of them. Justice has to sort itself out in the wash. You said, it’s mine. What were you talking about?”
Those flat eyes look away.
“It’s the only thing in Dunbar’s report that you said, to anybody. First on the scene, that’s what you said to him: it’s mine. What did you mean? What’s yours?” A moment, a blink. “The gun?”
That head lowers, hair falling strands and hanks a curtain once again. Sally looks away, a grimace of chagrin. “All right,” she says. “Fine,” she says, and heads for the door. “The interview is over.” Knocks loudly, twice. “Someone will be along to take you back down to Holding, in a bit.” Somewhere without a bolt’s undone, a knob is turned. “I’ll see you again in a couple of days, I’m sure.”
Head down, hood lowered, a soft green mantle about his shoulders, hands stuffed in his pockets, his running shoes once blue that take relentlessly one step after another, he makes his way down the block, across the street, down the next, past trim little bungalows in unassuming colors, and parked on the street before them bantamweight SUVs and beefy hatchbacks, many with ski racks or bicycle racks or ærodynamic carryalls fixed to their roofs. The sidewalk ahead’s blocked by thrown-together panels of chain-link to fence off a construction site, hung about with signs that say Apartments Coming September, Crutchfield Evans, Anaphenics, No Parking This Space. He steps into the narrow walkway protected from the street by Jersey barricades in orange and white, down to the corner, across the next intersection, without looking up or back.
Past the construction, more estate cars and bungalows, but also minivans and older sedans, and here and there houses more recently built, flatter, the windows of them duller, yards meaner, and what trees they have are yet too small to settle down behind. Music wafts his way, echoing chime of piano chords over a crisply languid beat. Up ahead, across the street, a half-dozen or so young men, boys, talking and laughing, shoving, mac ’n’ cheese an a snotty nose, Motel 6, lame trappin an some shoddy hoes, somebody blows a cloud of smoke, somebody twirls away, dropping in a complicated tuck and stretch to a clap and a slap and an ah-ha, oh yeah. His shoulders hunch even higher to carry him on past, deliberately refusing to wince as the laughter redoubles, rising, joining, becoming a ragged revving chorus on the beat, unh-huh, unh-huh, ha-ha! and very much without looking like he’s looking up or around he eyes the street behind him. A delivery tricycle’s trundling up, big yellow box over the back two wheels behind the saddle, This trike eats hunger for breakfast, says the slogan on the side of it, Ask our rider about B-shares. The cyclist pedaling furiously, bright green helmet and a blue rainshell, “Go on!” one of the young men shouts, and “Fuck yeah, motorvate!” another, and “I think I can I think I can” over a couple of chorused chugga-chuggas that all dissolves in general hilarity. The cyclist’s left hand lifts, bent at an angle, and the trike wheels into a right turn.
Head down, he keeps on.
A block or so later he darts across the street to the corner, the cross street here narrow, a low rise closely lined with smaller houses, cars and trucks parked heel-by-nose to either side. He heads down the slender single lane that’s left between them, past here and there a tell-tale yellow envelope of a parking ticket tucked under the wipers, and pasted on a windshield there a faded green label, Tow Warning, it says, PBOT. One door, two doors, three doors down, and he comes to a stop, there in the middle of the street, his narrow cheekbones hunched much like his shoulders.
The house is small, pale green, the front of it mostly a shallow gable swooping to shelter a front door the color of cinnamon, and pushing up from the little porch before it to waddle down those concrete steps a portly brindle pit bull.
He squeezes sidelong between bumpers, around the blue garbage bin on the curb to kneel there, on the sidewalk, at the edge of the yard. “Goose?” he says, putting out his hand, and the dog’s tail wags hard enough to unbalance its mincing hastening. “How’d you get to be so old?” The dog leans into his proffered hand, tongue-lollingly beaming at the scritches.
“You know him?”
He takes a moment, and a breath, before looking up. “He’s just a good dog.”
She’s small, the woman on the porch, small enough her upswept bun of honey-silver hair seems too ponderous for the rest of her, draped in a shapeless purple sweater. “About the only person,” she says, “Gustav ever tolerated that from,” scratching her chin, “was my boy.” Folding up her arms.
His scritching’s shifted to stroking, a couple of pats. “That so.”
“Christian,” she says. And then, “Beaumont. My son, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. Such a beautiful boy. You know him?”
A careful shrug, without exactly nodding, or shaking his head. “Did, ah,” he says, eyes on the dog gazing blissfully up at him, “did something happen?”
“He was always running off,” she says. “But he always came back. A wild boy, but not that wild. A few days, a week, at most.” He’s stopped stroking, but Gustav’s tail still wags. “Been gone all winter, though. Eight months, now, this time. He sure has taken a shine to you.”
He looks up again, blinking once, twice, to meet those pale grey eyes like water, like ice, faintly stern, vaguely suspicious. “I’m sure,” he says, and swallows, and starts again, “I’m sure, wherever he is, your son, he’s, he’s doing fine, just fine.”
“That so,” she says. “Well. I think, now, maybe, you best be about your business.”
“Yes ma’am,” he says, getting to his feet. The pit bull gathers himself for a single baritone bark. “Gustav!” she chides.
“It’s okay, Goose,” he says. “You stay. You be a good boy.”
She comes down a step or two, eyeing him as he heads past the garbage bin, away on down the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Gustav still there at the edge of the yard, tail flagging, musters up one more bark. “Gustav,” she calls, still watching. “Get on back here.”
He sits up of a sudden, in that big round bed in the middle of the room, legs tangled in linens crisply striped with indigo. Leans forward, head in his hands, hands the heels of them rub at his eyes, shift as he sits up, slide down his cheeks, the faint rasp of yesterday’s stubble, lifting to push back what’s left of his hair.
He swings down his feet from the edge of the bed, bare feet that nestle in white shag carpet. Elbows on knees, bare knees, his head hung low. Up and standing then, all at once, stepping away from the bed toward the sweeping wall of glass. The sun is somewhere behind this room, blazing with daylight the city below, houses and low buildings across the bright river, traffic busy lined and crossed in a grid half-swallowed by green unruly overgrowth, and along this bank the towers of downtown deceptively sharp, brittle façades that shuffle themselves until it’s difficult to pick out the shape entire of this brick ziggurat, that slit-windowed tower, and so many panes of cool rain-colored glass, and only the one lone tower of pinkly amber granite behind them all defiantly itself, windows of it struck to copper by the light.
Turning away.
The bed, in the middle of the room, striped sheets rucked and crumpled there, and the pillows where his head had lain, more pillows stacked beside them neatly, and the crease and drape of the sheets there undisturbed. Two small nightstands, one to either side, the tops of them both bare, and an empty stretch of thick white carpet, and the wall behind, a palely neutral blue that’s almost white, the door there, left ajar, the shadowed hall beyond.
That hall jogs round a corner past a couple of closed doors to open out into an empty kitchen, unlit, dim haven from the dazzle of more white shag beyond, another wall of glass too bright. He leans a hand against the bare kitchen island and watches the big man move through all that daylight, stepping into a long low lunge of a stretch, twisting his torso the one way, the other, as he lifts both his arms out and up to the height of those thickset shoulders, muscles rolling and sliding along his broad bare back as he quite slowly supinates the one hand, pronates the other, looking away off to that side, and then just as slowly turns them about as his head twists to look the other way. Lowering his hands, then, straightening to his considerable height, iron-colored hair close-cropped, mustaches lush and long, gathered to either side of his close-lipped mouth by rough-hewn beads of pewter, and only a pair of snug white briefs about his hips. They share a look for one long wordless moment, and then those mustaches spread in a simple, guileless smile. “You remember,” says the big man.
“I remember last night,” he says, “astonishing enough. I remember,” trailing off. He doesn’t pull his hand away when it’s taken gently in that larger, rougher hand. “I don’t know what happened to my clothes,” he says.
“Ah,” he says, still smiling. “They’re being found, retrieved, and seen to.”
“Found,” he says, looking away. “Is there any coffee?”
“There can be,” he says, “and we have the makings of simple omelets, if you’d like,” but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t pull away. They stand there, hands clasped, on either side of the corner of the island.
“I remember last night, and the carnival,” he says, “and I remember you swore. You swore you’d keep me safe.”
“And here you are,” he says, “and you are safe.”
“I remember forgetting you,” he says, looking up again, looking back to him again, until he looks down, away, those weighted mustaches swaying. “I remember,” he says, “how much I forgot,” blinking rapidly as he looks back up to him, but he doesn’t pull his hand away, he squeezes instead, and closes his eyes, and tips down his head. Lets him turn that hand over, lets a thickly grey-furred thumb stroke the back of it gently, once, twice.
“Well,” he says then, thickly. “I’ll have to make certain that never happens again.” And he lifts that hand, to press a kiss to the back of it. To squeeze it with his own, another kiss parting his lips about the knuckles, a step to the side as he steps to the side, the corner no longer between them, pressing close, arms folded hands clasped between them as their lips meet in a kiss.
“Troutdale,” written by Terrance Scott, copyright holder unknown. Motel 6® is a registered trademark of G6 Hospitality, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Blackstone Group. B-Line Urban Delivery is a B corporation, as certified by B Lab.
