“State vee,” there’s a hesitation, “um, Isabella, Perry,” a voice lent stentorian depth by a hint of amplification, “your honor, line twelve, uh, page seventeen, line twelve, of the two PM docket,” as she’s ushered through one of the four identical doorways set in the wall of this utilitarian hall, past a burly man in pale blue coveralls, his arm gripped by a deputy dressed in mismatched kelly greens, gear weightily jangled from black webbed belts, much like the one who steers her into a booth, two waist-high walls a close tight corner, thick panes of plexiglass set atop them, up to the ceiling, and only a gap where they meet at the corner, a hand’s width at most, opened out into the broader room, “misdemeanor, ah,” that voice is saying, the amplification makes it difficult to determine who’s speaking, maybe the clerk there, on the other side of the dais, hidden behind a couple of flatscreen monitors, “misdemeanor trespass,” but “I’ve got it,” says the man at the top of the dais, dark beard neatly trimmed to a puff of curls at his chin, shoulders robed in black, peering at a kiltered monitor of his own, but “You’re here for an arraignment?” a woman’s murmuring, stepped close to the other side of the plexiglass, “on a count of misdemeanor trespass?” Tight brown weave and a rumpled grey jacket, warm brown eyes behind narrow, wire-rimmed glasses. “Sam McDonald?” she says, “with the MPD? Metro Public Defenders? I can’t be your attorney in this matter, but I am available to assist you through this process?”
“What?” says Ysabel. The door closed behind her, the deputy stood before it, implacable.
“Do you consent?”
“Your honor,” someone else is saying, another faintly amplified voice, maybe the man sat at the desk in the middle of the room, facing the dais, “there’s an issue, as it turns out, with identification,” but “Let’s hold our horses,” says the judge on the dais, and then, “Counselor?” somehow shifting his attention from him out in the middle of the room to her stood there by the booth without looking up or away from his monitor. She’s passing a sheet of paper through the gap in the plexiglass, “This is the information the DA’s prepared?” she murmurs, “officially setting out the basis of the charge?”
“What?” says Ysabel.
“Do you consent to our assistance?” She’s jiggling that paper, here, take it, her other hand on the shelf at the top of the low wall, there on the other side of the plexiglass, holding down a button on a small plastic housing there, a microphone sprouted from it, canted up toward the gap in the plexiglass between them. “I don’t know,” says Ysabel, but she takes the page, pulling it through.
“Counselor?” says the judge again.
She lifts her hand from the button, “Conferring, your honor,” she says, her words echoing faintly, redoubled by whatever hidden speakers, and she presses the button again. “It’s misdemeanor trespass?” she murmurs, close by the gap. “You should be, you ought to be released, shortly? We just need to get you arraigned, and set the next court date? Do you understand?”
CIRCUIT COURT, says the paper, and COUNTY OF MULTNOMAH, STATE OF OREGON, Plaintiff, The above named ISABELLA PERRY is accused by this information, COUNT 1: CRIMINAL TRESPASS IN THE FIRST DEGREE (A Misdemeanor, ORS 164.255).
“Where is my,” says Ysabel, looking up from the paper to the woman in grey, there on the other side of the glass. “What time is it,” she says, and then, “what day is it, I’ve been here, overnight, I think, you, I couldn’t, eat, you can’t, where is my, where’s my clothing,” leaned forward, blinking, black curls matted, dangled to either side of her face, tangled upon her shoulders in shapeless pale blue coveralls, shivering, short sleeves winged out over her bare arms unfolding from about her, hands pressed to the glass, “Ma’am,” says the deputy behind her, sharply, a jangling step, the woman in grey lifts a forestalling hand, wait, it’s all right, “Do you understand?” she says, again.
But green eyes wide Ysabel’s looking past her, past that desk out in the middle and the waist-high wall beyond it, bifurcating the room, and on the other side of it three or four rows of empty pews, almost empty, sat there in the corner a lone figure, looking down, away, face hidden by such a cloud of curls the color of clotted cream.
“Ms. Perry? do you understand?” that lilting murmur, “how do you want to plead?”
“I don’t know,” says Ysabel, lowering her hands from the glass.
“You should plead not guilty, then? You’ll be able to change your plea later, should it come to that?”
“I don’t know,” says Ysabel. “I don’t know.”
“Do you wish to enter a plea of not guilty? Then we can start to work on getting you released?”
“I don’t,” says Ysabel, but then, “yes,” she says, “yes. Yes. Get me out. Get me out.”
“Your honor,” the woman in grey is saying, echoing vaguely, her finger’s lifted from the button, “defendant acknowledges receipt of a copy of the charging instrument, truly named, and waives any further reading of the charges, and would enter a plea of not guilty.”
“Court has reviewed probable cause and find there is sufficient information to support the, ah, probable cause,” says the judge. “You understand, Ms. Perry, that, though Ms. McDonald is eminently capable, she is not your attorney for this matter. Ordinarily, the court would, at this time, appoint an attorney to represent you, but the truth of the matter is, one simply isn’t available at this, uh, time. And for that, this court does offer an apology.”
“Move to dismiss,” says Sam McDonald, “as this is a violation of the right to counsel under the constitutions of the United States and the State of Oregon.”
“State objects,” says the man at the desk out in the middle of the room, round spectacles glazed by the light from his monitors.
“And I’m gonna deny,” says the judge. “Does the State have anything to raise?”
“Your honor, State objects to anything, anything entailing release.”
“You want I should hold this woman on a misdemeanor trespass?”
“There’s a question of identification, your honor.”
“Sam?” says the judge, he’s looked up from his monitor to the booth in the corner, to them, the woman in grey rapidly sifting through papers in a manila jacket she’s balance on the shelf, “You, ah,” she says, stopping a loose page from slipping away with a sudden stab of a finger, but the words, the flutters echo faintly, she folds up papers and jacket in an awkward bundle, freeing up a hand to press the button on the microphone, “you didn’t have any ID, when you were arrested?” she murmurs, into the gap.
“I have a license,” says Ysabel.
“But when you were arrested, you didn’t have it?”
“I had to have one so I might get paid for my work. Which makes, little sense. It was very expensive.”
“I,” says Sam, letting go of the button so she might shuffle loudly through the papers once more, holding the bundle up, pressed to the plexiglass, pushing the button once more, “this is your residence?”
It’s a form, pale blue boxes filled with tiny typescript beneath tinier labels, PERRY, it says, ISABELLA, and 1020 SE BELMONT UNK. “I think so?” says Ysabel. “I stay there, sometimes. The apartment over the Monte Carlo, there on the corner,” but she’s looking out over that slumped grey shoulder, and Sam, turning to follow, the lone figure out in the gallery, “is that,” she says, “your roommate? Can she vouch for you? Fetch your ID?”
“Defendant did not present any identification upon arrest,” says the man at the desk in the middle of the room. “Claims to have a driver’s license, DMV has no matching record under the name provided. Refused to provide a date of birth.”
“Sam?” says the judge, again, she’s yanking the papers back, looking over the form, “What’s your birthday?” she says.
“That’s, difficult,” says Ysabel.
“What’s it say on your license?”
“I, I don’t remember,” and then, “I haven’t seen it in months!”
Sam McDonald closes her eyes behind those glasses. Lets go of the button. “Your honor,” she says, echoing faintly, “there are some irregularities, but, we do have a true named information, she’s given an address, there’s no allegation of deception, or history, of same – ”
“No criminal history,” says the judge, nearly brushing one of his monitors with a fingertip.
“Due respect, your honor,” says the man at the desk in the middle of the room. “We can’t say the defendant has no criminal history, when she doesn’t have a criminal history.” Looking up, the glare falling away from his lenses to reveal enormous eyes partaking of a long, slow blink. “She doesn’t have anything at all, that we’ve been able to find.”
“Because I’m not a criminal,” whispers Ysabel to Sam, who holds up her free hand.
“Welp,” says the judge, “that’s not enough to hold her.” Sam lowers her hand, and a lone, slight nod.
“The State, your honor, has very real concerns the defendant will not present herself on her own accord for any future court dates.”
“And, that turns out to be the case, this court will issue a warrant for her arrest.” Turning from his monitors, then, to look at Ysabel in the booth, and his smile is warm enough. “Do you understand, Ms. Perry? We’re gonna set the next court appearance, about a week from now, and at that point we should be able to appoint you an attorney. But if you do not show up for that next date, the police will be out looking for you, and you’ll have a failure to appear added to your trespassing charge.”
Ysabel looks to Sam, papers clutched close, looking expectantly back. “Yes, my lord,” she says, toward the bulb of the microphone, there in the gap. “I understand.”
“Your honor,” whispers Sam. “Whaddawe got, Jeanise?” says the judge.
“Friday the twenty-ninth, nine AM,” says another clerk, sat on this side of the dais.
“State moves for enhanced conditions,” says the man out there in the middle of the room.
“Thought you might,” says the judge. “PSA’s, what, zero? One?” A negatory waggle of that tufted chin. “Don’t think we need to bug Close Street with this.”
“State asks for a prohibition from the premises, within a hundred and fifty feet.”
“Appropriate enough, for trespassing,” says the judge.
“Your honor,” says Sam, “what are the premises, exactly? A hundred and fifty feet from what? The rail yards, in Northwest? Lovejoy Avenue? This is unnecessarily restrictive. A gross overreach.”
“We can limit it to the construction site, or the demolition site, rather,” says the judge. “I take it defense still objects?”
“We do, your honor.”
“Overruled, and print! You understand, Ms. Perry,” the judge looking down, again, to the booth, “if you’re found within a hundred and fifty feet of where they’re demolishing the Lovejoy Ramp, you’ll be in violation of the terms and conditions of your release, all right?”
“Yes, my lord,” says Ysabel, and “Your honor,” whispers Sam, into the gap. Ysabel looks to her, taken aback, but she’s turning away, out there a printer, two printers have whirred to life, one by the desk in the middle of the room, the other, tucked up here, on the other side of the plexiglass, where Sam’s snagging the pages it spits out. “We’ll see you back here, in JC3, in just about a week, Ms. Perry,” says the judge. “What’s next?”
“Harris Dickerson,” says the clerk over on the other side of the dais, “page, thirteen, line eight of the two PM docket,” as “Sign this?” says Sam, jiggling another piece of paper through the gap.
“What’s happening?” says Ysabel. The door’s opening behind her, there’s movement, jangling, the deputy’s stepped up close, “Sign this?” Sam’s saying, “it’s the conditions of your release?”
“What’s happening,” Ysabel, her words, the squeak and jangle, the rustle amplified enough to echo faintly, as if it’s happening in a rather larger room, “You’re being released?” says Sam, but she’s pulling the paper back through the gap as Ysabel’s arm is seized, there beneath that too-short outflung sleeve, she flinches, rings thickly silver about two of the gripping fingers, “you just need to acknowledge these conditions? I’ll get this down to you?” That hand pulls, implacably, back, Ysabel steps, unwillingly, backwards under its impetus as someone new is ushered within, a slender man, quite tall, his pale blue coveralls a sack about him, “misdemeanor assault,” the clerk is saying, the echo falling away as Ysabel’s pulled back into the utilitarian hall, “What’s happening?” she says, once more, but quietly, and then the door’s swung shut.
Up with a hoarse shout thrashing, leaning forward, knees tenting the quilt arms about them and a slow deep breath hauled in, let out.
“That was a darn good burger, though. Wasn’t it.”
He lifts his head. The darkness about, thickly complete, nonetheless somehow suggests a shadow, small, sat at the foot of the bed.
“Last one I ever ate,” he says, and opens his eyes, head laid back against the one white pillow, blinking his way into the thin grey light of a morning much too early.
Cages sway, chains creak, a scatter of seedfall, feather-rustle and weight-shift clenching step, hunched shadows hulking in the sweeping light of the phone he holds up in one hand, brushing this one, that one, lingering over an empty cage a moment before finding a third, there, in the next to last row. One of the closer shadows leans precipitously and with a pinion-rattling shudder unclamps from about a wooden dowel those talons sharp-limned when they’re caught in the light, cruelly flexing, two above, two below, curled in a shivering fist, and there’s a winking gleam of brass, just there, but the light’s moved on, he’s turned away, ducking out through the door at the end of the porch.
There, under the flight of stairs bolted to the back of the old brick building, a couple of plain cardboard boxes stacked one atop the other, and he hurls up his hands to see them, tips up and back his head, cheekbones hunched to squeeze his eyes in a grimace of anguished frustration. The morning held at bay by watery air too wetly glistening heavy to be considered a fog or a mist but hung about so still, not falling, not even drifting, not a drizzle at all, and the soaked cuffs of his workpants flop about his ankles as he steps up under the stairs to seize the topmost box.
Clacker and pattle of parting beads, he shoulders through to set the one box heavily down atop the other, there to one side of a worktable ruthlessly cleared, among the other additional boxes stacked against the wall, beneath the counter, all of a size, plainly nondescript. He flips a switch, another, lights pop on, out in the main room, about the front window, George’s, say the letters reversed in red and yellow in an arc across the glass, Shoes Repaired. The floor of that main room’s covered with shoes, heaping mounds to the left, bulwarked against the wall, but laid out to the right in ordered rows, three deep, left by right but no two shoes of any pair of them alike, boot by pump, brogue by sneaker, nylon and velcro sandal-straps by glossy patent leather, and a narrow aisle down the middle of the room, stretched from door to counter. He’s wrenched up the flaps of one of those boxes, he’s pulling out more shoes, tossing them heedless onto the mounds, running shoe and hiking boot, slipper and espadrille, a seamless blucher he brushes against his workpants, knocking dried mud from the sole of it before it’s tossed, their impacts shifting, unsettling, remaking the haphazard ridgelines and headlands, subsiding, the next, though, a loafer dustily brown, a strap across the wrinkled vamp of it, and tucked there, worn too dark to gleam under this light, a single penny. He steps away from the box, shoe in hand, looking over those jumbled, scrambled mounds, “it was just,” he mutters, drops abruptly to his knees, shoving his free hand into a pile to stir it about, tumbling shoes in catastrophic avalanches until he tugs free an enormous basketball shoe, white and black and red and stiffly, shinily new, vastly overwhelming the loafer in his other hand, “but,” he says, getting to his feet, headed back along the serried ranks that line the other wall to stoop and set them side by side at the end of the outermost row.
“Hey, Biscuit,” he says, unlocking and pulling the front door open, “got away from me.”
“Beaumont,” says the man in brown coveralls, stepping within, followed by a short man, roundly heavyset, resplendent in pastoral beige, “This Miss Ida,” he says, as he stewards an older woman even more rotund, limpingly twisting from side to side through the doorway, “she’s come about your ridiculous stricture. She’s found what you demand.”
“Ain’t my rule, Reverend,” says Christian Beaumont, stepping solicitously back, “just a thing that gets done,” looking up to Biscuit, suddenly too close behind, “or, doesn’t,” he says, taking a step aside.
“Awful young,” says Miss Ida, peering up at him, not unkindly. “You George?”
“Ma’am, no ma’am, just looking after the place,” he says. “Name’s Christian. May I see it?”
“Beaumont’s acting as the Porter,” grumbles Biscuit, “since the Porter went over.” Ignoring him, Christian holds out his hand to Miss Ida. “May I see it?” he says, again.
It’s a simple white tennis shoe, white rubber sole with a single black stripe pristine, the canvas upper scribbled over with intricate shapes, lightning bolts and thunderclouds, nested spirals and zig-zags, all worked out in felt-tip black and biro blue, “Oh!” says Christian, turning it over in his hands, “oh, I know this one. Came in a good long while ago.” He sets off down the aisle toward the cubbies that line the wall there by the counter, passing through and beyond the beaded curtain, each in turn with a mismatched pair of its own. “Before my time, anyway, I’m pretty sure,” he says, stooping, peering seizing, “here we go.” Stands back up holding three shoes, now, two low white tennies both scribbled over and a low brown boot, leather of it webbed with creasings from much wear. He offers up the reunited pair to Miss Ida, “Ah,” he says, cheekbones hunched with a touch of chagrin, “welcome to Portland,” he says.
“Boy,” says Miss Ida, “I have lived in this city since Mr. Kaiser opened his plants up full-bore, in nineteen and forty-two.”
“Just a thing that gets said, ma’am,” says Christian.
“What am I to do with those? Somebody went and wrote all over them.”
“As you like, ma’am,” says Christian.
“Certainly wasn’t me.”
“Of course not, ma’am.”
“What am I supposed to,” she says, an irritated flick of a shake of her head, “they never would’ve fit me. What is this about.”
Christian looks to the Reverend, imperturbable beside her. “It’s just, the other one, ma’am. Of the one you found. They’re yours. Put ’em on a shelf somewhere, give ’em away, heck, chuck ’em out. Your shoes, your call.”
“I’m sleeping in a drawer,” she says, with some distaste, “in a chest of drawers, inside of a public garage. I don’t know as I’d have room. What about that,” a lift of her head, pointing her nose toward the boot in his other hand.
“Goes back in the pile,” says Christian, “to, ah, try again.”
“Looks an awful lot like what Joe Tully would’ve worn,” she says.
“He another of your folks?” says Biscuit. “Came back that night?”
“A Mr. Joe Tully was not among the flock,” says the Reverend.
“I never said it was his,” says Miss Ida. “Just that it looked like,” and then, “what if you was to give it to me instead,” and, “Ma’am?” says Christian, still holding out those shoes she hasn’t taken, but “the boot,” she’s saying, “if you gave me the boot, instead.”
“The shoes are yours, ma’am. The boot goes back with the rest.”
“I don’t want the shoes,” she says, drawn up and back, lips pinched, “those are little-girl shoes. Teenager’s shoes.”
“Oh, just let her have it,” says the Reverend, then.
“Sir?” says Christian.
“What could it hurt, to let Miss Ida have the boot?”
“I don’t know,” says Christian.
“What could it hurt? It’s just an old boot nobody’s worn in years, from the look of it.”
“Well,” says Christian, lowering the tennis shoes, “one day, someday, when whoever it is who find the other one of this,” hefting the boot, “and brings it here, I, I don’t know what it would do if this wasn’t here to meet it.”
“You don’t know,” says the Reverend.
“It’s never happened before?” says Miss Ida.
“I don’t know,” says Christian.
“That someone’s never walked in here,” says the Reverend, “with a, a shoe,” looking about that room, and all those so many shoes, “and you couldn’t find the match.”
“I don’t think so,” says Christian, and Miss Ida snorts. “I’m not the one who, who’s supposed to do this,” he says, looking back and up to Biscuit, impassive. “Usually.”
“There’s not much you do know, is there, boy,” says the Reverend.
“Well, sir,” and Christian kneels, setting the two tennis shoes on the dusty floorboards, there before Miss Ida’s feet plumply sprouted from her straining yellowed pumps, “I guess that’s so.” Looking up to them both. “But at least I do know that.”
Cheap tinfoil trays of food laid on this unfolded table, pillowy pale pitas in rows leaned back against rows like shingled tiles, and the tub beside of ravaged hummus, what’s left of the surface dark with sprinkled za’atar, a sheaf of largely denuded kebabs, skewers laid over scattered remnants of roasted vegetables, blackened wedges of onion, dice of eggplant and potato, crisp browned coins of zucchini and squash, and there a collapsing mound of slick white rice, and beside it, “What is that?”
“Chicken.”
“Chicken?”
“I think it’s chicken.”
There’s a fork leaned in that tray, wooden handle at the end of a stem of braided wrought iron, two brutal tines stuck through the bared white flesh, the gold skin peeled back wetly rumpled, all the variegated pieces, breasts and thighs and here and there a loosened drumstick, a twisted wing, “Grass above and stars below, how did meat come to be on our table.”
“It’s chicken,” says the woman in the beefy white T-shirt, “from the same conference leftovers,” reaching to pluck up a piece, “roasted with lemon and garlic and thyme,” licking the tip of her thumb, “delicious.”
“Appalling.”
“Disgraceful.”
“Impolitic?”
“People!” from the aisle down the middle of that great hall, loosely crowded with folks enough to lop into some of those stalls to either side, most with bowls or plates or napkins variously loaded in their hands, “Everyone!” She’s quite fat, the woman stood there, blousily loose pyjama pants and a tautly copious blue tank, black hair a long rope swaying, “Remember!” her pink bangs gone raggedly black at the roots, “Meat’s over there, for our guests, anyone who’d like; the tables on this side, the west side, as per usual, okay? Sunrise; sunset,” turning about, a shake of her head, muttering something, every goddamn, who do I have to, setting off through the crowd, someone draped in a blanket, a dilapidated cape, someone in nattily tailored windowpane, someone in camouflage trousers and a neon pink bandeau, a sleeveless hoodie and enormously belling cargo shorts, and so many others in more of those stiffly new oversized beefy white T-shirts, through and past them all toward the unlit stage at the head of the hall, the skeletal staircase that climbs to the balcony above, and painted high on the wall a giant curl of a question mark, exuberant with fronds and spots, over a much older sign, faded, worn, that once it can just be made out said Eastside Italian, and Market & Grocery. Just out of reach of the sunlight that’s sifted under the overhead door cranked halfway up, there’s a tall man, halely slender, his enormous beard lopped over a long loose open vest, khakis the color of sand, he’s shaking hands with another in a pale blue shirt and khakis a more sedately brown, stepping way now as she approaches, ducking himself under the overhead door, and “What was that about?” she says.
“Nothing to worry you, Gloria,” says the tall and slender man.
“And yet.”
He looks down at her, the shape and situation of that beard suggesting mirth as well as bonhomie, “Whatever has become of the carefree whimsy of youth?”
“I had to partner up with you,” she says. “Was he from the county?”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Gloria, I assure you.”
“And yet, Sinjin?” she says, turning away with a scowl, “I am not reassured.”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” he says, that beard setting cheer aside for something not quite either stern, or dour, but she’s headed for the staircase, a dismissive fillip flung over her shoulder, “Yeah,” she says, “well,” a foot on the first step, her hand on the pipe of a bannister, but it thrums as she grips it, and a snapping, measured clang, she looks up, “ah,” she says, to herself, “shit.”
A woman’s descending, flip-flops and a baggy grey T-shirt, her hair a turbulent cloud the color of clotted cream. Gloria steps aside with an elaborately deferential gesture the woman doesn’t bother to notice, serenely stepping from stair to floor and into the crowd, footfalls snapping in the silence that spreads about her as she makes her way toward one of the laden tables to the right, a half-dozen cardboard boxes set along the one side, each with a black plastic spigot poked out from the base of it, and sleeves of paper cups stacked about, and bundles of corrugated jackets, tumbled handfuls of foil-topped ramekins of creamer, paper packets of sweeteners and sugars, the man leaned over the other side of it, glowering weight of him braced on hands that clamp the tabletop, shoulders rounded in a soft blue overshirt, lowered head topped by a mighty round of tight black curls, “Outlaw,” he says, warmly gruff, as she unshoulders a stainless steel thermos with a lollop of lanyard, “how fares her majesty?”
“In need of coffee,” she says, opening a spigot to a gurgle that rises in pitch as the thermos fills. Looking up to see he’s set something on top of this particular cardboard box, a small glass jar with a chipped red lid, a half-inch or so of stuff within, slickly, thickly white, brushed with a hint of gold. “Porter,” she says, with a shake of her head. “She won’t take it.”
“They won’t stop bringing it,” he says.
She closes up the spigot, hauls up the thermos, steaming, full, caps it tightly. “There’s a new bond of toradh that would better serve.”
“Not if it doesn’t serve in turn,” he says.
“But she won’t take it.” She slings the thermos by its lanyard back over her shoulder. He holds the jar out to her and, after a moment, she takes it.
The next table down’s an assortment of largely emptied boxes of donuts and fritters and bear claws and danish. With a paper napkin she plucks up a jelly in a puff of powdered sugar, a pan Suisse with a crackle, and tucks them both away in a small net sack she’s unfurled from somewhere, along with that jar with the chipped red lid. She clips it all to the lanyard there by the thermos and turns away to start at the small man stood there, trousers of rumpled corduroy, his soft drab shirt without collar or tie. “Stop asking,” he says, quietly, pleasantly, firmly, his brown eyes mild.
“My lord Shrieve,” she says, with a nod. “Perhaps we ought to continue this elsewhere?”
“I’ve no intention of raising my voice.”
“The request comes from her majesty.”
“Has her majesty a portion?” he says.
“I hadn’t realized,” she says, “the desires of our Queen are but transactions, to be totted in a ledger.”
“I don’t speak of tit for tat,” he says. “I find I must remind my lady Outlaw of the limits of logistics. What you ask is – ”
“What her majesty requires,” she says, and then, her voice returning to its lower register, “should be but the snap of a couple of fingers.”
“And, a month ago? Would very well have been.” He takes a closer step. “Without a pinch,” he says, “a snap is but a snap.”
“You’ve none from across the river?” Her hand stills the jostle of thermos and sack. “Our allotment,” he says, “is itself not enough to cover the main streets of the fifth, much less what you would have of – ”
“Who is it you see for your dole, this week? The Flammard, still, or is it the Wulver once more?”
His lips purse with disappointed distaste. “Calidore sees to our interests at court,” he says.
“How good of him,” she says. “But he’s no Duke. Is he.”
“Stop asking, Marfisa,” says the Shrieve Bruno. “It cannot be done.”
Flip-flops snapping, she climbs back up the staircase and then, thermos and sack a-dangle from the lanyard, up and up the ladder there to the makeshift floor tucked under the rafters, laid with rugs that dustily puff at every stalking footfall, over and through the awkward frame of a truss to a lone crate there she steps up onto to reach up to unlatch a hatch, shoving it open to haul herself out into diffident daylight, featureless clouds stretched high above, and only the vaguest of shadows to indicate the position of the sun. Down the flat length of the roof, tents have been pitched on the yellowing grass, ridge tents in sturdy olive and a pale blue dome, pop-ups in a smattering of athletic colorways, red and grey, raincoat yellow, orange and blue, a dingy white canopy over wooden pallets, blue plastic tarps, and more folks all about, sat here or there, standing, looking out to the towers of downtown away across the river, dully staid in such thin light, but steam floats in wispy tatters over cups in hands, and there are donuts and pastries wrapped in napkins, and paper plates of rice and salad and fruit and chicken, and so many of them in such similar T-shirts, beefily oversized, crisply, pristinely white.
Marfisa turns away from it all, her cloud of hair flatly luminous, she’s headed toward the back brick walls that loom over this end of the swarded roof, those buildings raised up at this end of the block, one of the few windows that dot them left open, there, parted curtains a gauzy scrim over the darkened hall within. Lithely over sill, under sash, steadying thermos and sack, she stretches her shoulders out and back, works her head from side to side. The hall before her narrowed by books piled knee-high and hip-high along the walls with breaks for the two doors, left and right, one closed, one ajar. A hand on the jamb, she peers within, more books stacked and piled about a wide brass bed, sheets and covers tangled about a distinct emptiness. Dimly, the sound of falling water.
She opens the other door on the pattering plash of the shower, water to strike shoulders sloped, head bowed, black hair soaked to dangle limply low, leaning close to splayed hands pressed to the tiles, water to tumble down a bare brown back, water to bounce, spattering outside the tub, slicking the floor in the absence of curtain or door or mat, “I have,” she says, and then, pitched a little louder, “majesty, I have breakfast,” holding up by the lanyard the thermos, the sack, to no response. A sigh. She turns to go but is brought up short, the hem of her T-shirt snagged by a wet hand tugging, pulling her back, gathering heather-grey fabric in gripping fingers, that head has lifted, turned, wet black hair a heavy frame for a nut-brown face, for such green eyes, “Marfisa,” heavy and thick, a tug again, thump a shin against the tub.
“Majesty,” says Marfisa, her free hand taking hold of the wrist of the hand wound up in her rucked-up shirt, but not to pull away, or down, her hand lifted as that hand lifts, pulls, up, “let me,” says Marfisa, “put this away,” but “Marfisa,” the emphasis insistent, their hands, her shirt clutched up between her breasts, her belly bared, and then the slowly rolling kiss, forcefully gentle, pressing, pushing, pulling, pulling her leaning her over the rim of the tub, the timbre of the waterfall changing as it’s caught up in her cloud of hair, melting it in a collapse of runnelled locks, a slick white mantle to cling to her throat and her shoulders. Scowling, she pushes back, shaking water away, the showerfall between them now, louder, and more shrill. “My lady,” she says, “I must – ”
“Marfisa,” a playfully admonishing lilt, that hand still holding her by her sodden shirt. The net sack’s already dropped to the water-spotted floor, slither of lanyard through slackening fingers, thermos clank against the tile a-wobble to fall with a clink against that small glass jar, “Ysabel,” she says, and surrenders to another kiss.
Books, and more books, so many books on the mismatched shelves that line this room, and more besides, stacked and piled on the shabby carpet all about that overstuffed loveseat, books upon books against books, and the cardboard boxes and the plastic tub at her feet filled with rumpled pads of yellow paper, and more pads spread over her lap, she’s flipping through pages, each of them, every one covered with, crimped by lines of line after line of scrawled and scribbled ink, she sets one aside, the next, another, loosely draped in a smokey grey kimono, the curls returning to tangle her long black hair as it dries. Another pad tossed aside, the next, flipped through, into the tub below, but the next, flip flip flip, a blank page, flip, more blank pages, this one, she drops the others, shoves them from her lap a crumpling fluttering thump. From somewhere under herself she fishes out a pen, unscrews the cap, tests the nib, scribble-scratch, a loop, a strong blue line. She starts to write.
“Lady!” from up behind her, “you mustn’t!”
“It’s perfectly all right,” says Ysabel, “there’s nothing on these pages.”
“She’ll want to see everything as it is!” says Marfisa. “Was!” Stepping through the doorway in the corner, out from under the board above, stretched between shelves, bowed with the weight of ever more books, white hair slicked back in a ruthless queue, T-shirt dappled with water. “Books, and papers,” she’s looking about, in one hand a couple of steaming white cups, in the other a couple of saucers, each with its pastry, “papers most of all! Everything must be as she left it!”
“These were never used,” says Ysabel. “They’re empty. Clean. I checked both sides.” Shaking her head, she scratches out a previous line, jots something above, a considering tilt of her head. “What’s today’s date?”
”Æthelthryth’s Day,” says Marfisa, setting the saucers precariously down on a silvery paperback, “Saint John’s Eve,” she says, with her freed hand shifting a larger, hardbound book, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, it says on its purple jacket, clearing enough of the end-table’s surface to set down the cups. “June?” says Ysabel.
“The twenty-third,” says Marfisa, holding out a cup and a saucer, the one with the somewhat squashed jelly donut. “Breakfast,” she says. Ysabel’s inking something in the upper corner, an extravagantly doubled loop, a scribble, swoop, pinched curl. “Leave it,” she says, without looking up. “I’ll have some when I’m ready.”
Marfisa sets the jelly down, lifts the other saucer from its precarious perch on the paperback, revealing the title in dark blue letters, Floating Worlds, she straightens with her cup, and the crackle-crumbed pan, “They won’t build the lift,” she says.
“I told you.”
“I told them it was your wish! I told Bruno it was your wish!”
“And I told you they wouldn’t. I told you it wouldn’t matter.”
“She’s coming on Monday. It must be ready on Monday. Before Monday.”
“And if it isn’t?”
Marfisa looks down, to the delicate white cup in her hand, steaming black coffee within. She takes a careful sip, and then, still looking down, she says, “There’s another offering.”
The pen stops, lifts away from the paper. Moves to cross out a word. “Toss it, as with the rest,” says Ysabel, “before it sours.”
“Or,” says Marfisa, looking up from her cup, and taking a breath, but “Absolutely not,” says Ysabel.
“Even if it proves,” says Marfisa, “paltry, it still would be enough.”
“Not without Jo,” says Ysabel, sharply, looking up from her pen. “Jo isn’t here.”
“But you are Queen, majesty!”
“I am not, no more,” says Ysabel, looking back to the paper in her lap. “If ever I were.”
“But majesty,” says Marfisa, “you are.”
The pen is moving again, scratching across the paper, stroke and swoop of ink in its wake. “It was good of you,” says Ysabel, between one word, and the next, “to think of breakfast for me.”
“Your majesty is welcome,” mutters Marfisa, turning away under those books, saucer and cup in hand.
Shakespeare’s Last Plays, written by Frances A. Yates, ©1975. Floating Worlds, written by Cecelia Holland, ©1975.
Lips, pale, a touch too thick, his chin recessed, cheekbones softly demure, what’s left of his hair swept wetly back, his eyes, his eye, leaned close, hand up, fingertips pressed to tug down the lower lid, iris palely gingerly brown but shining flecked with gold, he sighs. His fingertips falling away arrested a moment by the stubble darkly roughening his cheek. He swipes his face away with a clang to reveal shallow shelves unobtrusively lit, jars and tubes of creams and oils, unguents and colognes, a tidy skein of dental floss by a rack of toothbrushes and picks of copper and silicone, an empty space he reaches past for a small blue plastic pillbox. Laid on the marble counter there’s a safety razor by a squat black-bristled brush and a small wooden bowl of soap already whipped to a froth. “Not, ah, not today,” he says. Pops open the pillbox, and those sparks in his eyes flare just for an instant as he looks within, a couple-three clear capsules each with its minuscule pinch of glimmering gold. He plucks up a pill, snaps the cover shut on the two that remain, and sets the pillbox back on the shelf, there by razor and brush and bowl wiped clean. He’s pressed the capsule to his lips, taken it between his teeth, a moment, over the bowl of the sink, seamlessly scooped from the marble. He closes his mouth. He swallows.
Nude, he pads around the jog of the hall out into the spotless kitchen, the room beyond, empty but for a low white leather couch, the great wide wall of window beyond, overflowing with clouded daylight, white shag yet brilliant beneath it all. A murmur of leave-taking, a footstep, the sound of a door, closing. The big man there, returning, on the other side of the kitchen-space, straining the shoulders of his white dress shirt, his jeans of dark stiff denim, hair the color of iron closely cropped, mustaches a-dangle to either side of lips contemplatively pursed. He holds up in one hand a spidery pair of half-moon spectacles, peering through them at the small glass bottle held up in his other hand, a splash within of something milkily viscous, those lips thinning, pressing skeptically flat, and he sets the bottle on the kitchen island beside four others, all of a size, none even close to a quarter full. “You’re awake,” he says.
Becker steps up to the other side of the island, hands on the countertop of it. “We’re,” he says, “down, to two. Capsules. Left. That’s, that’s all.”
“And you’ve taken today’s?” says Pyrocles. Becker nods. Pyrocles shrugs. “Soon enough,” he says, “there will be more.”
“This one’s gonna work?” and then, as Pyrocles looks up, frowning, “it’s only just, the last time? and the week before?”
“You mustn’t concern yourself.”
“I know, I know, the reserves,” Becker’s saying, “but I don’t want to, to take anything, from someone else who might,” blinking rapidly, “might need it,” as Pyrocles’ frown softens to something more considering, looking over Becker’s face. Becker lifts a hand from countertop to cheek, “I thought,” he says, “I’d try growing it out? The beard? Just to see,” lowering his hand, “what it, ah,” back to the top of the island.
“There’s court tonight,” says Pyrocles. “You might look a little rough. Shave today, perhaps, before we go, shave then, and start tomorrow,” Becker’s already turning away with half of a sort of a nod, “my love,” says Pyrocles, and Becker looks back, over his shoulder.
“I think I will like the look, when it grows in,” says Pyrocles.
Not especially tall, nor broad, but his prepossession’s enough to take up a great deal of the space about him, this empty stretch of lobby, the reception counter to one side, all polished, red-stained wood, parallel to the long low cushioned couch, bright brown, burnt orange, set beneath windows cranked open for daylight softly filtered through grey clouds, green leaves. He checks the watch on his wrist, a band of thick brown leather, face of it gold and cream, set with starkly simple numerals and two plain hands, pointed there between the one and two, and just shy of the six. He turns about, rumpled linen suit, shirt a brightly almost lurid green, opened a couple of buttons at his throat, face of him roughened by wind and ruddily tanned by a bit too much of the sun that bleached his rather full head of sandy hair. The lone receptionist behind that counter looks up, murmuring into the handset she holds to her ear, and he favors her with a lightly easy smile, already looking away, don’t mind me, nothing required here. Letters of ashy iron bolted to the red wood wall above her, the largest of them by far spell out FIDES, but other, smaller words discretely crowd about, HUMANITAS, PROVIDENTIA, INDUSTRIA, PIETAS, COMITAS.
Someone’s approaching, there through the green-glassed haze of the portico, shifting into focus as each door’s stepped through, not too tall, somewhat stout, all in shades of grey, a darker shirt, a self-striped tie that almost but doesn’t quite match the three-button jacket. He brightens to see the man in linen, and lifts one hand in greeting, a small leather satchel depended from the other, “Henry!” he says. “I’m not late, am I?”
“Reg,” says the man in linen, taking that hand for a single crisp shake, “what’s in the bag? Did you bring homework?”
“Some figures, spreadsheets,” says Reg, that brightness puzzled, “just in case?”
“You aren’t the one to bring paper to a meeting like this,” says Henry, quickly, quietly. “Any specifics you don’t know off the top of your head might be airily dismissed, to be penciled in later, and if you look anything up on your phone I will slap it out of your hand. Let me hold it,” he’s reaching for the satchel, “it goes better with my suit.”
“Grey and brown’s a perfectly respectable,” Reg is saying, as he lets Henry take the satchel, “combination,” but he falters, Henry’s looking down at Reg’s polished mahogany Oxfords, then back up to his deepening perplexion. “Whatever you do,” says Henry, “don’t unbutton your coat.”
“What?” says Reg. “What is it. What.”
“You wear a tie,” says Henry, deeply disappointed.
“You think I should not have a tie?” says Reg, reaching for the knot, but Henry gingerly takes his wrist, “I want you should not have been wearing a tie, but, that said: do not attempt to fix it.”
“Gentlemen!” booms a baritone, a man coming toward them down the length of the reception counter, grey trousers, blue jacket, thin brown hair, a smile that’s terribly pleased with itself. “Henry!” he says, hand up to be clasped. “You’re looking fantastic. Where was it this time, the Bahamas?”
Henry shakes his head, holding on for three vigorous pumps, “Vancouver Island,” he says, letting go.
“Victoria? Lovely city. And you managed to find some sun,” but Henry’s shaking his head, “A little town called Ucluelet, on the ocean side. Turns out, the coast thereabouts? The forests, the rocky islets, the, for want of a better word, fjords? Very reminiscent, in some respects, of ancient Japan – but that’s a story for another time. Bob, I’d like you to meet Reginald Davies; Reg, say hello to Robert Bethel, president of Fides.”
“Reg,” says Bob, with another vigorous handshake. “I hear good things about Maieutics,” and Reg, beaming, lets go, looks about, “It’s clear you have nothing to learn from the likes of us,” he says, “this is a beautiful space, clearly and resolutely fit to purpose.”
“Oh, any sort of room will do,” says Bob. The collar of his chambray shirt’s undone, a pink to match the opulently curled corners of the square tucked into his breast pocket. “It’s all just a space where ideas might flow, and that’s what’s key. Don’t sell yourself short, Reg! I’m sure you’d have insights we’d do well to consider.”
“But I’m not here to sell, Bob,” says Reg. “I’m here to be sold to,” which prompts a booming chuckle from Bob, “Shrewd!” he says, clapping a hand to Reg’s shoulder.
“Maieutics is Reg’s day job,” says Henry, sparing a glance for the fourth member of their party, the man stood silently behind Bob, dark suit, sleek black hair in an asymmetrical round, one hand incongruously behind his back. “He’s also making moves in real estate,” says Henry, “he’s pretty well positioned in the Hoyt Yards project.”
A look, then, just a moment, barely an instant, between Bob, and Henry, before Bob says, “I don’t believe you’ve met our new CCO, Artie Yuan,” turning to draw in the fourth, “Artie, this is Henry Cornelius, who, well, continues to be of invaluable assistance to us, and of course, his good friend, Reg.”
“We’ve spoken on the phone,” says Henry. Artie nods. His necktie’s a hand-painted tapestry of translucent petals, tied in a flatly oblong knot.
“Well!” says Bob, with a thunderous clap of his hands. “Let’s withdraw to a more purposefully suited room, and see what the good Lord has in store for us today!”
The woman she carries, all spindly limbs and angled joints about her shoulders in a firefighter’s carry, her one hand up to steady hips draped in a floppy yellow shirt, her other up to brace a wiry brown arm a-dangle with bracelets of resin and wood that clack and clatter as they climb, that head a-bob by hers, dark hair an afro loosely weft against her own a cloud of milky white, tangled tufts and curly peaks as one slow and careful step after another she mounts the stairs, up from the foyer below to the balconied hall above, where most of the only light slips from a door left open, tinted a beckoning blue. “We mean to put in a lift,” she says.
“Oh?” says the woman about her shoulders.
“Yes,” she says, “to make it all,” step, and creak, “more accessible,” step, and clatter, and it’s not so much the burden, which she scarcely seems to notice, as the infinite care she takes, brace and steady, step after slowly deliberate step, “for your chair,” she says, turning at the top, heading rather a bit more quickly along the balcony toward that open door, “I’ll get you settled, then head back down to fetch it up. Although,” as she nudges the half-open door with a knee, “I’m not at all sure,” she says, looking about, the shelves, the books, the piles and stacks of books, the loveseat in the middle of it all, and the boxes about it, “where it might, fit,” the woman about her shoulders wincing with the swoop and sway, “Just,” she says, “set me down, anywhere, Marfisa, anywhere’s fine, the sofa,” a long step to the loveseat, and Marfisa drops to one knee before it, tipping to tilt and settle the woman from about her shoulders onto its cushions, “there,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll just,” straightening, standing, pushing her white flop of hair back out of her face, “I’ll be right back,” heading back out the door, “Thank you,” says the woman on the loveseat, again, absently, looking up, around, about at all the books. Her hands lift and settle her knees, her legs in heavy black tights, she leans without looking down to smooth a wrinkle along her shin. Her feet in black slippers over white socks.
“You’re the professor?”
The doorway in the corner, beneath the makeshift shelf, the woman leaned there, beefy white T-shirt and lacey underpants, olive arms and legs, black hair in sleep-tousled tangles, slowly blinking her green green eyes.
“Yadira,” says the woman on the loveseat, crinkling her nose. “Dini. I teach at PSU. Black studies.”
“Ysabel Perry.” She lifts a hand, a cigarette a-smolder between her fingers. “I once was Queen of this city. Black studies?” She takes a drag.
“Culture. History, in Oregon. Are you, Marfisa’s housemate? Roommate?”
“You’re here for the space books, though.”
“The,” looking about the shelves, “library, yes. Abby Tinker was, well, she was no Octavia Butler. But it’s about time SF made room in its history for more than one Black female author at a time.”
Another crackling inhalation. “Ess eff?”
“Science fiction. You didn’t know Abby, did you.”
“Never met her,” says Ysabel. “Marfisa’s the one into outer space. Thinks the stars should be a place we go to, not a light to shine.” Through the open door the clumping thumps of labored footsteps, climbing. Yadira’s shaking her head, “That’s not quite the point of science fiction,” she says. Marfisa’s working a low-slung chair half-folded through the doorway, setting it on its wheels on a bookless patch of carpet, “There,” she says. “We will get that lift put in, I swear. Now. Professor. Where should we,” but then, frowning, “majesty,” she says.
“Marfisa,” says Ysabel, that cigarette up by her cheek.
“Majesty, I’ve asked – ”
“Marfisa.”
“Ysabel,” and she closes her eyes, she takes in a breath. “I’ve asked you not to smoke in here.”
Ysabel looks to Yadira, there on the loveseat. “Is it really bad for books?”
Yadira, half shrugging, half nodding, says “Yes.”
“Well.” That cigarette angles toward her lips, but then she pulls it away, “I suppose I’ll take this outside,” turning away, “there’s more books out here,” she saying, “in the kitchen, and the bathroom, the bedroom,” as she heads away down the hall.
“The hell was that?”
“Artie, there’s no call for – ”
“Bob. Tell me that was not a complete waste of time.”
“Artie, Henry has a good eye for prospects, and he always has his reasons – good reasons! — for bringing the people he brings. Granted, that was an underwhelming performance on Mr. Davies’ part – ”
“Underwhelming!” A bitterly scoffing guffaw. “The man can’t make the buy on the basic product. I doubt he could raise the minimum ask for Caritas. What the hell could make anyone think he rates a sit-down with top brass?”
“Well, Henry?” says Bob, there at the head of that long, glossy table. “Artie’s concerns, and his question, though profane, are pertinent.”
Stood there halfway down the length of that table, he’s looking out the windows louvered open on a greyly green-soaked forestscape, and the faintest susurrus of rain, not quite falling. “Oregon Junes,” he says, with a shake of his head. “You’d never know summer kicked off last week. Oh, in a couple more weeks you certainly will, but for now?” A deep breath in, let out, Henry turns, “I’m afraid Mr. Yuan’s quite correct,” he says. “If you were considering Mr. Davies as a prospect for any of the multifarious branches of Fides, this meeting was a, complete? colossal? Complete. A complete, waste, of your time.” He’s pulled out the chair before him to sit there, halfway down the table. “Seeing as how he’s leveraged up to his eyeteeth, just to secure his position,” another gust of disdain from Artie, “in the Hoyt Yards project.”
“So why on earth,” says Artie, but Bob doesn’t so much raise a hand as lift his fingers and palm from the arm of his chair, and Artie, with a sour twist of his lips, falls silent. “Hoyt Yards,” says Bob.
“Indeed,” says Henry.
“The Perrys,” says Bob.
“Oh, indeed,” says Henry.
Artie looks from the one, to the other, and says nothing.
“I’d thought he was on sabbatical,” says Bob.
“He’s, out of town,” says Henry.
“The sister?”
“Intimately. Well.” Henry leans his chair back. “They were, the two of them, Mr. Davies, Ms. Perry, each dating half of a burlesque duo. Duet? Duo, at the same time. For a time. They’re in LA now, I think. The girls. Doesn’t matter. There’s a connection there. There’s leverage, there.”
Bob’s pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, his head’s started, slowly, to shake. “Tenuous,” he says.
“More than you had when you woke up this morning,” says Henry. “It’s the sister they’re interested in.”
Bob sits up at that, leans forward, elbows on the table, “I’d thought it was the mother.”
Henry shakes his head. “The sister. Mr. Davies’ somewhat business partner, and erstwhile rival in matters of the, ah, heart.”
Bob nods, his gaze slipped off to some thoughtful middle distance. Artie leans toward him and says, “They, who? Who’s interested?”
“San Jose,” says Bob. “Handled properly, this leads, Lord willing, to an seven-figure infusion.”
“Eight,” says Henry, and, startled, they both look to him, his rumpled linen, his hands, his face ruddied by some distant sun, his sandy hair like gold despite the rain-dimmed light. “You have more than one,” he says, smiling.
Set there, before that great wall of glass, an armchair, sturdy feet of stainless steel beneath oblong slabs of chocolate Naugahyde, a low wide back, cushion parsimoniously thin, narrowly angular armrests, and stood before it Luys King of the Court of Roses, his shirt of yellow chamois untucked, his hair an inky cap. He looks not to the chair or the light-struck glass or the darkening sky beyond, and a handful of expressions throng his threshold, but none with the momentum to push through. He turns about of a sudden and sits him down on the cushion, and on the armrests sets his hands, the one of them darker than the other, and a bit of leather tied about the wrist. “Court,” he says, but then, a discreet cough to clear his throat, “this court,” he says, his voice lifted, and full, “is open.”
“My lord!” and “Majesty!” and “My King!” and “Your majesty” and “My lord” all at once from the lot of them, turned from conversations abeyed, stood up from this or that portion of the sectional sofa out in the middle of that wide room, “Your majesty, what of her majesty?” and a gasp, “The Queen?” and a forceful “No!” and then, “The Perry,” and “The Perry!” and “her arrest, my lord” and he lifts up a hand, his right hand, the hand that is only as brown as his face, and silence, reluctantly, falls. “Her grace,” he says, “was arrested, Thursday of last week, a valid and a lawful arrest, by the appropriate authorities. Her grace did spend a night in the gaol downtown, which, I’m certain, was uncomfortable. It is a gaol.”
“But, majesty,” says the Wulver Hoseason, thick grey mane swept back from his craggy face, “her, her grace, was, our Queen, my lord.”
“And every day, we do honor what her grace has done for this our city – but of which, she is, in the end, a citizen, and as subject to the laws thereof, the rules, and regulations, much as are we all.”
“What law did she break,” asks the Shootist Joaquin, “that insists on such a penance?” His two-tone shirt of cornflower and peach, black hair bridled by a pink bandana. The King sits forward, elbows on knees, “Our counselor,” he says, “Welund, is, unfortunately, closeted with our Vicar, or we’d have him speak to that. But fortunately enough, we understand a newly minted associate of the firm is with us here this evening, and may, perhaps, have light to shed upon the subject.”
“A single charge of trespassing, your majesty,” says Anna Nirdlinger, her trimly tailored skirt and jacket of houndstooth brown and cream, her russet hair a bob, “that will be dealt with at her next appearance, on Friday. We will, of course, provide her grace with representation.”
“There,” says the King, his one hand returned to the arm of his chair, the other, dark hand, laid in his lap. “All is well, and well in hand. What more other business, then, tonight, to be brought before this court?”
A moment, silent and still, before the Sequin Valentine says, “What of the Apportionment?”
“What of it?” says the King. “It will come, when it is due.”
“From the reserves, my lord?” says the Seax Ourson, there by Valentine.
Both his hands on the armrests, now, “When it is due, then it will come, in the manner, and amount,” and his lips then twitch, to take back what he’d next been about to say. “If that is all there is, to be discussed?” Gripping, pulling, levering himself up from the chair, and the audience deliquesces, becomes individuals looking about, to each other, to available seats, to glasses in hands, to his polished shoes on the polished floor, the footsteps about him in his charcoal trousers, to the hands, clasping other hands, hands on hips, hands making conversational points, “Majesty,” says a burred baritone behind him, “have you said hello to Arnold Becker?”
“Not yet this evening, no,” says more of a whiskied tenor, as Becker turns about, his charcoal jacket, his narrow blue tie too tightly knotted, his chin, his cheeks shaved clean, “Ah, hello,” he says, and “sir,” and then, with a nod, “Joaquin.”
Joaquin grins. “Our Anvil’s gallowglas,” says King Luys, gravity leavened with good humor. “We do not see you as often as we’d like. He husbands you most zealously.” Joaquin stifles a snort.
“I was supposed to meet him, here?” says Becker. “I guess he’s, ah, running late, his meeting. Sir.”
“Attending to important details with our Vicar,” says the King. “He provides us with good counsel, the Anvil, on which we do depend.”
“Thank you, sir,” says Becker, “he is, ah, wise. Your highness. Sorry, I, ah,” a chuckled breath, “I didn’t grow up in a world with, with kings and queens and stuff, the, the proper words, I just, I don’t know, your highness.”
“But surely,” says the King, looking to Joaquin, “there is a Queen in England?”
“The King of Sweden,” says Joaquin.
“A Queen in Denmark, the Kings of Jordan, and Bahrain…”
“The Muffler King, of Klamath Falls.”
“The Kansas City Royals!” says the King, with a laugh.
“But here we find ourselves in los Estados Unidos,” says Joaquin, “fruit of the first rebellion against royalty in this, our fallen world.”
“The first?” says the King.
“Certainly the most successful. Sin reyes, sin amos.”
“I mean,” says Becker, “I don’t have anything against kings, per se,” wincing a little even as he says it, but the King lays his hand on Becker’s shoulder, his right hand, the wrist of it bare, “Then I am certain,” he says, “we will all be fine.”
“You,” the Flammard jabs a finger across the table at the Gladius, “should never have allowed it to get this far!”
“Whatever led you to that conclusion?” snaps the Gladius.
“It’s only your fifth of the city,” sputters the Soames. “It’s only the blasted house of the Hive!”
“We all of us look to the Hive,” the Gladius mutters. The Guisarme sat at the foot of the table shifts forward, into the light, “And it’s your fifth,” he says, to the Flammard, “where her grace has set her palace, and her sights, these past seven months,” and the Flammard shoots back, “A fifth I’ve held for but two weeks!”
“if it could be said you hold it at all,” mutters the Gladius. The Flammard, frustrated, shouts, “A queen might go where she will!”
“They do not mean, they do not mean her majesty,” says the Baroness, put out, as the Soames declares, most forcefully, “Her grace is no more queen!”
“Excuse,” says the man sat across from the Baroness, at the right hand of the Guisarme, his emaciatedly knob-knuckled fingers ungainly with golden rings, “Excuse,” he says, again, but “Lords,” the Anvil’s saying, “Lady,” as “I will not” the Gladius protests, and “we must not” the Flammard insists, as “What does any of this have to do with,” the Baroness requests, and once more that painfully skinny man speaks up, “Excuse,” he says, a bit louder, but not, perhaps, loud enough, he slumps, frowning, hands in a glittering huddle.
A knuckle gloved in fawn raps the table once, and again. “The Emir has something to add,” says the Vicar, when it’s finally still.
“Excuse, the Viscount, yes,” says that painfully skinny man. “Where is Marquess. Where is Marquess? My neighbor, Linesse, Eastern Marches, Marquess? Is title, Marquess? Where?”
“The Helm is indisposed,” says the Vicar.
“She has stake, yes? In this? Or, is tonight to yell about whose fault, and some other night you figure what to do. And she is here then? Yes?” The Emir, looking about at the rest of them, and none look to him but the Vicar, who says, after a moment, “When is the next hearing in her grace’s legal matter?”
“Ah,” says the Guisarme, “Friday, my lord.”
“Of this week.”
The Guisarme nods. “We will represent her grace before the court, and secure her release; it is a routine — ”
“Don’t,” says the Vicar.
“My lord?” Rustles, as those to either side look from the one end, to the other, the Anvil, the Flammard, the Baroness, the Gladius, the Soames, though the Emir’s looking down, to his freighted fingers. “Do not,” says the Vicar, “represent her, before the court, on Friday.”
“But, my lord,” says the Guisarme, “we are on retainer.”
“Check your books, Welund,” the Vicar, leaning forward, lamplight crawling up his crisp blue shirt, his determined expression, the remnants of his white locks, closely shorn. “I think you’ll find the Perry’s in arrears, and has been for some time.”
“My lord,” says the Guisarme, “we cannot – ”
“You can, and you will. Leave her grace to her own devices, as she has left us to ours.”
“My lord Vicar,” says the Anvil, taken aback.
“Merely the consequences of her own actions,” says the Vicar.
“That might merely be resolved, my lord,” says the Guisarme, “by the retention of other counsel.”
“She has experience, her grace?” says the Vicar. “Securing the services of a lawright? Weighing their facility with the services they purport? Determining which might best fit the problem at hand?” Sitting back, the light slipping down, away. “A little quotidian friction might prove just the thing to slow the momentum of her movement.”
“Money enough,” says the Guisarme, “is more than enough of a lubricant.”
“Check your books,” says the Vicar, again. “Most exhaustively. My lord might well find more irregularities, and more grievous.” A rattle-tap of fawn-gloved fingers on the table, “All right!” he barks. “So much for old business. What new, to set before us next?”
Wavering down the sidewalk, stone balustrade to her right, and greenly rounded treetops, traffic creeping and lurching by to her left, along the downslope of the bridge, lowering them all back to street level on this side of the river. The sky behind an indigoly grey, but spread before her the lurid tatters of a sunset slipped away behind the hills, the billboard on the roof of a building ahead, swirling letters that say Portland, Oregon beneath a leaping stag all made of lights switched on against oncoming night, but difficult for now to make out against those ragged clouds stained orange and pink and such a brilliant magenta. She sketches a sardonic salute with her cigarette as she passes, her glossy négligée of a sort of pastel brown under a pale pink wrap, the hood of it up about her tangled black curls, and her legs and her feet are bare.
One block, two, down from the bridge, up ahead on the sidewalk a couple of tents pitched, a red wagon piled with belongings, a couple of milk crates, a cardboard box all before and around the corner storefront, Street Roots says the small black sign hung out over the windows, but she’s there by a much more anonymous door, darkly blank glass under high mullioned windows all curtained with thick white sheets, 281, says the hand-lettered sign hung above it. On the threshold a bright blue sleeping bag unzipped, shapelessly draped over someone reclined, she says something looking down, and then, gathering the skirts of her wrap she squats as a hand reaches out from under to take her proffered, half-smoked cigarette.
When she gets back up on her feet again, words are painted in those high mullioned windows, letters of gold limned red and green, WATCHES, CLOCKS, JEWELRY, but also READ, THINK, LEARN, the thick white curtains replaced with posters, broadsheets, newspapers pasted to the glass, and a great many handwritten notecards, Help Rid the World of the Leprosy of Hitlerism, Eleven Indictments of the BIBLE, SMIRCH the SILVER SHIRTS, Stand Against the Silk Stocking Mob! and the numerals printed on plaques above the door say 221. She steps through into a genteel cacophony of ticking and tocking in varying interleaved rhythms from the clocks of every type and shape and style hung on the walls. A display counter to one side, shelves crowded with wristwatches and pocket watches, a bookshelf there crammed with buckram volumes, spines inked with white letters, Stirner, Owen, Marx, Mackay, Kabe, Ruskin, Morris, Lending Library, says the sign along the top of it, and a rack beside stuffed with newspapers and pamphlets, and the sign there says Empty Your Pocketbook Into Your Brain. She’s headed for a low door at the back of the shop, 221B roughly carved in the lintel, and down and down a narrow stairwell to a basement rather a bit larger than that meagre room above.
A long table’s laid with oilcloth beneath a single bare bulb, the only light, too bright to look upon, but overwhelmed by shadows before it might reach the corners or even the walls, lost among suggestions of more shelves lined with even more books and papers. Along the one side there a rank of bunk beds crowded with folk laid out or sat close together, looking out over the dozens more stood about the table, dungarees and coveralls, denim and canvas and tweed and rough wool, all focused on the diminutive man stood up on the table, sleek grey trousers and a trim grey vest, black cravat about a wing collar, thick shock of brown hair and a walrus mustache, “that it is not at all surprising,” he’s saying, “how little things have changed, over the years. This is still,” winding himself up, and the crowd, “the rottenest city, of all the rotten cities,” striding the length of that table, “in these rotten United States!” and the hoots at that, the howls. She’s in the thick of them, head down, hood up, but those she slips past fall silent, and others turn to see what’s happening, a ripple spreading through that side of them all. “Those big mitt artists!” the diminutive man is shouting, “those bootlicking, penny a vote, dime a dozen councilors!” She’s reached a sagging sack of a sofa set between a couple of shelves, leaning over the arm of it toward a woman sat at that end, black suspenders over an open white shirt, black hair quite long in the front, glasses with thick black frames looking up to a kiss, and about her throat a black lace choker. “Maybe this is something that’s changed,” says the diminutive man, “maybe Southern Pacific ain’t so much the biggest, baddest bull on the block anymore,” those brows of his, thin between shock of hair and lustrous mustache, pinch a theatrical frown, “but what hasn’t changed?” and then, he roars, “A boss! is always! a boss!” and the crowd, unbalanced, roars along with him. “Comrades!” he shouts, over the ebullience. “Fellow humans!” His hands held high, for attention, for consideration. “We are rowdy,” he says, “we are riled! so give it up, give it up! for the one and only! Queen! Soi-disant! of this very city! who!” those hands flung at her, sat on the arm of that sofa, that woman’s arm about her hip, “just last week got herself arrested! last Thursday! for the very! first! time!”
Thunderous applause and raucous cheers to rattle the bricks, “As I’ve said!” she shouts in the teeth of it, “I am no more Queen, my lord the Mayor!” The woman in suspenders pulls her suddenly down to her lap. The diminutive man throws back his head with ribald laughter, as laughter fills the room, “And I have never been mayor! save in the columns of the Oregonian. But. But! But!” as the laughter rills away, “if this is what it takes. If this is all it takes! for a queen, to see the light! the plight! of the working class! If all it takes,” stalking the length of the table, “is being deposed, well!” flinging up his hands, a conductor summoning a crescendo, but his voice is suddenly hushed, “I could only wish,” he says, “a most peaceable deposition, for each and every queen, and king, every minister and president,” face shadowed by the light behind him, haloing his shock of hair, “every councilor and legislator, every judge and magistrate, each and every chief executive, and manager, every,” he says, “every,” and he takes in a deep breath, and then a mighty bellow, “godforsaken hell-bound boss!” and the tumult that ensues. Forgotten on the sofa, she’s reaching for the cheek above her, sitting up to meet dark-painted lips lowering for a kiss, her bare feet kicked up over the sagging arm of it, soles black with trampled filth, and the glistening edges of the grime, up about her ankles spottled, daubed, specked with milk-dust white. Another kiss, and as they part there, stepped from the crowd, it’s Sweetloaf, “My lady,” he says, under the hullaballoo.
Ysabel with a shriek hauls herself out of that lap, over the arm of the sofa, “You found her? Where is she?” but he’s pulling a plain white envelope from his bomber jacket, he’s holding it out to her, addressed with only two blue-inked letters, YS.
“She didn’t come,” she says, and takes it from him, slumping back to the arm of that sofa.
Naugahyde® is a registered trademark of Uniroyal Engineered Products, LLC. Muffler King of Klamath Falls owned by Stan Langdon. The Kansas City Royals are named for the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899. The White Stag sign, at 70 NW Couch Street, was designated a City of Portland historic landmark in 1977, and acquired by the City of Portland in September of 2010.
Ys—
I am sitting under an oak tree at least I think it’s an oak I don’t actually know for sure the leaves have lobes right and there are acorns I mean there are acorns so that is probably dispositive or whatever, it’s an oak, but the point is it’s an oak I’m sitting under as I write this, after I read what you wrote, I read that sitting on the bed in one of the rooms of my mother’s motel which is where Sweetloaf found me, how he does not know or will not say. It’s just the first place I looked he said when I asked him and he shrugged. First fucking place, actually. You know Sweetloaf.
My mother’s motel. She doesn’t own it. She manages it. I think she used to own it or part of it. I’m not really sure of the details but there was a deal a few years ago to sell whatever it was she had to cover some debt so now she just works here taking care of what she used to own and I think she’s even more in debt than she was.
My mother is difficult.
But there is a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in and breakfast in the morning and dinner before I sleep so it’s okay. I’m okay.
I can’t come back.
Please don’t ask me to come back.
It’s heavier for one thing. Heavier and darker and colder when I touch it or cooler at least to the touch I find myself I’ll press my palm against it in the shower even when it ought to be as hot or at least as warm as everything else with all the water but it’s cold, or cool, cooler, cool enough I find myself holding my hand over it my palm against it like I’m warming it taking care of it which is I mean it’s crazy
Right?
Which is a side effect maybe of how it’s maybe started doing things, the temperature I mean and not my reaction to it because it has begun to do things some really quite frightening I have to tell you. The colors of the motel keep changing. I mean the colors of the buildings but also the colors of the stupid uniform shirts the management company wants the custodial staff to wear not that it’s much of a crew but oh God it just occurred to me I have to check I didn’t think to check the colors of the sign change too but maybe also the name
I can’t remember the name of the damn motel
I mean it’s Sea Breeze or Summer Breeze or Sea Wind or Sea Air or Christ I don’t know. Something to do with air. I mean I’ve lived here for how many years and my mother and I couldn’t tell you what the fucking name of this fucking place is was is and if THIS THING is going to change it up I wouldn’t even be able to
Sea Breeze it’s SEA BREEZE I remember I wrote out the wifi password. I’ve had to write out the password which is of course based on the name of the motel to make it easier to remember
$3@BREEZE
remember to use at least one numeral and a special character
Only of course it’s possible this THING changed it so it’s always been called the Sea Breeze and that’s what I remember writing out even though maybe what I wrote out before was something completely different except it wasn’t it will always have been whatever it says it is
But then why do I notice when the colors change.
No one else does. Sweetloaf did. That’s weird. I don’t think anyone else does.
I’m sitting here writing this under an oak tree up on a low rise looking out over where it was I went to all three grades of middle school and then the high school which is like just a couple blocks away a whole damn lifetime it feels like squeezed into a half-dozen years and less than a square mile I’m pretty sure a world a whole damn world that’s all sealed up now falling away and going going gone the people that I knew the kids their names
Kirsten her name is Kirsten
Like my hand could forget how to write a name I wrote so many times on so many folded notes
Only maybe of course my hand just remembers what it’s been told to remember. What it remembers is now what had happened no matter how different it is than what happened before.
It’s been doing things yes changing things making things yes but also I think unmaking things like it did before like it did yes to you
I did something stupid last night but part I think of what I did that was stupid I think there were three of them. When I go to write it down my hand would say there were three of them three that I went home with well at first when I got there the two of them but then a third there was a third that came in but when I think about it when I try to remember it was Scott and it was Hobie and but then it stops there were three of them there were three but when I go to write it down there’s only the two that’s all there were. Not even an echo of a name. Not even a glimpse of a face or his hair or how tall he was or the faintest ghost of how he might have carried himself or an expression that could fit a face that’s completely utterly gone.
But he was he. Of course he was. If he was. Swallowed away without even leaving the hole he made in the world when he wasn’t here anymore.
When it came for you. You were gone. Everyone had forgotten you everyone never knew you were gone from the world but I did not I knew it drove me out of my mind but I did not forget and I went and brought you back. We brought each other back.
But if THIS THING now can shut me out of what it does. If it can take things so entirely that even I can’t remember that I don’t know it doesn’t matter whether I notice the colors changing and remember how it was before all the many times before it doesn’t matter if it gets a chance to take you again. If it can take you and all your beautiful glorious infuriating stupid impossible magic out of my life and the world like you never were and leave me with nothing at all then I’m sorry but I have to be selfish. I will not risk that. I can’t come back. Please don’t ask me to come back.
But write. Write to me again. But don’t use Sweetloaf I don’t want to risk Sweetloaf even though it was good to see him again though it surprised the hell out of me and also I think maybe he was followed? Use the post office. Get a post office box and then write to me at the Sea Breeze Motel
736 North Coast Highway
Newport, 97365
Tell me what your post office box is and I will write you there. Write to me and tell me what you’re doing to save the bridge. Tell me how Marfisa is doing and how things are going with her. Tell me how Luys is doing my God the King of Portland how did he even tell me that. Tell Bruno I miss his sad sorry self and then tell me what he says. Tell me about the castle in the sky tell me what you did there all day while I went out to do what it was I did. Tell me you love me
as much as because I do love you
God help me I do
I miss you
“Closed,” he calls, at the jingle of the bell, but he looks up to see her shutting the door on this side of it, so very small in a long tan coat, her wooly scruff of greyed hair loose, uncovered, leaning on the curled handle of an orthopædic cane, and slung from a shoulder a big brown scaley purse. “Young man,” she says, her voice incongruously large, and deep, “could you tell me if Gordon is available?”
“We’re closed, ma’am,” he says, there by the work table. “Just hadn’t managed to lock up yet.”
“Let him know H.D. is here.”
“I’m afraid he isn’t. I’ll let him know you were by.”
“He hasn’t been, for a couple weeks now, has he.” She’s looking about at all the shoes mounded to one side, lined up the other. “What was your name, young man?”
“Christian Beaumont, ma’am.”
“Well, I am Ms. H.D. Brown, of the Albina Community Bank. You are familiar with the work of the Albina Community Bank?” He shrugs noncommittally, head down, making his way from the counter between the shoes toward her, past her, to the door. “I have found it, from time to time,” she’s saying, “to be of some benefit to consult with Gordon when something untoward occurs. I must say, today, it would seem the most unusual and unsettling occurrence is that I come to find my old and good friend isn’t here, in this shop he’s kept for I couldn’t tell you how long.”
He’s turning about the sign against the glass from CLOSED to OPEN, he’s reaching for the handle of the door, “I’ll be sure to tell him you’re looking for him.” The bell jingles as he swings it wide, but she’s rooted to her cleared patch of floor, leaned on that sturdy cane. “How about yourself, young man?” she says. “Noticed any unusual occurrences, these last few days?”
Christian looks about, the discarded shoes mounded to one side behind her, the ranks of mismatched pairs to the other, and all the boxes back there, behind the counter, “No, ma’am,” he says, but then, “except maybe,” and he looks to her, “a couple-dozen folks nobody knew had been lost in the Vanport flood washed up in a hotel lobby in Old Town? But aside from that,” and he shrugs.
“Vanport,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You said Vanport.”
“The Vanport flood, yes ma’am. That was the sort of thing you’d, ah, consult, with Gordon, about?” He waits, patiently, his hand on the handle of the opened door, for quite a long moment before she says, “If that is supposed to be some sort of joke at my expense, it’s in terrible poor taste.”
He says nothing.
“I may not show my years,” she says, “but I was there. A little girl, but I was there. A terrifying day.” She lets go one hand from the cane to adjust the strap of that scaley purse, hauling it up to settle it back on her shoulder, an effort that threatens to topple her. “And a terribly strange thing to joke about,” she says, leaned once more on the handle of her cane.
“The Reverend Asa Lee,” he says. She frowns, how unexpected. “One of them that washed up. Though how a reverend gets misplaced, so nobody knew he went missing, that I couldn’t tell you.” Still frowning, she’s slowly started to shake her head. “How about Cora Bunch,” he says.
The shake of her head’s arrested. She looks up to him, that frown slipped away bit by bit to reveal a look of wonder, of uncertainty, of disbelief, of fear. “An older girl,” she says, her voice gone small. “Couple of blocks down from us. I never, I never thought – is she, has she come back?”
“I’ve seen her,” says Christian. “I saw her. A different night, though. Somewhere else. Not with them. I don’t know. But I saw her.”
“Well,” says H.D. “Ain’t this a hell of a thing.”
A movie’s playing over a rumpled curtain of a screen, hung high there in a corner of the bar, three stained-glass Gothic arches in undulating black and white as the camera follows a young woman down balustraded steps at an angle before them, dark coat and beret, valise in hand, pausing on a landing to listen to something that can’t be heard, there’s no sound, but whatever it is, she smiles, and continues on her way. Beneath that improvised screen a banquette, he’s sat there by one of the small tables before it, his rumpled linen suit, his green shirt dark in this light, on the table a long-stemmed coupe of something more golden than amber, topped with foamy white and a curl of lemon.
“Fancy.”
He looks up. A man’s leaned over the table, hand on the spindly chair across from him, glossy hair held back by a pink bandana, grinning as if at some joke that’s just been told. He shrugs, takes up the coupe, “I couldn’t tell you what it’s called on the menu,” he says, “but at heart, it’s a whiskey sour.” A demure sip. “Quite good.”
The man across the table looks over to the bar, out there in the center of the room, beneath a floating shelf racked with glittering bottles of liquor, “Your second most expensive Japanese whisky!” he calls, pulling out the spindly chair, “A double! Neat!” and sits himself down. “I assume our patrons are footing the bill?”
He shrugs again. “I suppose this is a business meeting.”
“And how is business?”
“I just got into town,” he says, and another sip. “You’ve been here, three weeks? Four? I should be asking you.”
“You’re the one with the connects.”
“Who will, since Sacramento, be expecting results on a more, aggressive, timetable.”
“I am already named Shootist of this court,” hisses the man across the table. “I have the confidence of their new King. I am ready to roll whenever you are.” Sitting back, in that chair.
“Shootist,” he says, eyeing the two-tone shirt of that man across from him, where it’s crimped by the leather strap of the holster tucked under an arm. “Is that why you’re walking around strapped in public?”
“If they ever could notice,” turning to look to the bar, “they’d be a little faster with the drinks.”
“Which one are you?”
“I mean, how long does it take to pour two fingers from a bottle?” Turning back, brow quirked. “What?”
“Which Joaquin? Murrieta? Carillo? Valenzuela? Ocomorenia? It’s just, there are so many stories, and so many danged Joaquins.”
“Yo soy Joaquin!” Thumping the table. “Late of the Court of Camellias! Shootist sworn to the Court of Roses! And you are Henderik Cornelius,” drawn out in a sneer, “investment advisor.”
“Eres Joaquin,” he says, “and you can read a business card. Good. They tell stories about me, too, you know. Nothing so colorful as,” he sips, again, “sneaking up behind someone, whispering my name in his ear, putting a bullet in his brainpan, but – ”
“I do not sneak.”
“Nonetheless. The one they tell about me the most often? It’s even on my Wikipedia page, well. I say, mine. It’s the family’s, but I am mentioned, and what is mentioned about me, it’s not the many millions, billions, really, I’ve made, for my clients: no. It’s that I was, once, married, to a Bond girl.”
Joaquin, frowning, sits, slowly, back.
“Oh, we were married. My third, her second, two years – well, a year and, ten months? Lovely girl. Still friendly, holiday cards, vacation tips, we’re in a group chat, and she was in a Bond film, one of the Brosnans, second, third, I can never remember. But to be a Bond girl, Joaquin, one has to have slept with Bond, and all she ever did was introduce him at a party, in Berlin, I believe. Shagging – snogging? Snogging the actor doesn’t count. You do know Bond, Joaquin? James Bond?”
Joaquin still frowns.
“So the story, as a story, isn’t, entirely, true. Its most particular point is, well, false. Yet it keeps getting told. Because, Joaquin, to say that I married a Bond girl – not slept with, though, trust me, we did, but married — one might make assumptions, based on that factoid, as to who I might know, where I might go, what I’d be able to do, when I got there; they’d bear out, more often than not. A shorthand, then. A compression: distorting, but nonetheless useful. And so, it keeps getting told. Now.” Henry drains the coupe in one long swallow, knuckles some foam from his lips. “As to what they say about – ”
“The woman I married,” says Joaquin, low and quick and guttural, “was raped by a posse of white men, settlers and miners who wanted to drive all us braceros and cheddars and chicali and chooks and chopas and fronchis out of the gold fields and out of our California!”
“That’s one of the things they say, yes, about you,” says Henry, affably enough. “But tell me, Joaquin, what they don’t say: what was she like? Your wife. Did she have sisters? Brothers? A favorite aunt? You must’ve met her parents, surely, unless she was an orphan. What was her name, Joaquin? Her favorite color? What song did she sing when she hung the laundry to dry? Did she make you wash up on the porch at the end of a long hard day, before letting you into the – ”
“Maria,” growls Joaquin.
“There,” says Henry. “Was that so hard?”
“If you ever,” but quickly, over him, “The difference is quite simple,” Henry’s saying, “I am a person, who does things, and to whom things happen, things that become stories, stories that may, elaborate? embellish? in the telling, but always end up pointed back to those very real things. You, and your ilk, on the other hand, are nothing but stories, wound from others and wrapped about, points of interest, strange attractors, done up in costumes, kitted out with,” a gesture, taking in and dismissing the man across the table, “props.”
“You ever disrespect me again, tarado, you’ll learn, I swear, my gun is no prop.”
“Neither,” says Henry, lifting something from the banquette, “is this,” setting it, thunk, on the table, a faint crinkle as he draws away the tissue paper that obscured it, a polished silver torc only as thick as a slender finger, but the width of it enough to fit neatly about a throat. “You know what that is.”
“It, is death,” says Joaquin.
“You’ll want to keep death close to hand,” says Henry, scooting himself out from behind the table, “ready to implement at a moment’s notice.” Pushes himself to his feet. Joaquin snatches his hand, “If I am caught with that,” he says.
“I’d recommend against it,” says Henry, tugging himself free. “Remember what it is they say, about fortune, and the bold.” He pats Joaquin on the shoulder, then steps out of the way of the man approaching to set down a thin paper napkin, and on the napkin a heavy-bottomed glass, puddled with golden whisky. “Anything else?” he asks, but Joaquin, hands laid flat on the table, doesn’t look up from the torc, and utters not a word.
Laughing through the doorway, tugging her giggling after, and no light switched on, fetched up instead of a sudden in a clench among all those shadowy books, and a greedy kiss, as consternation muffled becomes a gasp, a moan, returns in a word, “Wait,” and then “wait, what about,” but a hand to her cheek, fingers to her lips, those kisses slipping to chin, to the corner of her jaw, there beneath the sharply cut angle of her straight black hair, the lobe of her ear, her throat, there above the black lace choker, “what about, is she, should we, my lady,” whispers, in and among those kisses, kisses that pause so that “Ysabel,” Ysabel might say, and then kiss her mouth again, hands now on her shoulders to tug at those suspenders, work them loose and let them drop, “She isn’t here. She isn’t coming back.”
“My lady?”
“Ysabel,” says Ysabel, and with a shrug lets her filmy wrap drop to the floor. “Jo isn’t coming back. That’s what she said in her letter.” She reaches to undo what few buttons still hold that loose white shirt together, but then lets her hands slip within, take hold, pull close for another extravagant kiss.
“Jo?” she says, when she can, “Ysabel, no, I meant Marfisa,” barely so loud as a breath. “Isn’t this,” looking about, “isn’t this her place now?”
Drawing her in for one more lingering kiss. Ysabel lets go, steps back, gathers the hem of her négligée to lift it smoothly up and over her head and off to leave her darkly naked there in the shadows. “Don’t worry,” she says, quietly, but not in a whisper. “I want to try something, Petra, my lovely Petra B. Go, into the bathroom,” pointing back, over her shoulder, to the unlit doorway in the corner between the shelves, “draw us a nice, hot bath,” taking her hand, drawing her along, “and get yourself undressed.”
A door swings slowly, quietly open, into the book-stuffed bedroom. Ysabel, a shadow, leans through the shadowy darkness, a scuff, a rattle as she feels about for something on the nightstand, crinkle of plastic as she draws it up, a little bottle, a ragged white streak where its label has been peeled away. From behind a closed door behind her then the muffled gush of water, and she straightens back up into the hallway, pulling the door shut quietly after herself. The shape stretched down the length of the bed, just visible in this slantwise streetlight, under those wound-up sheets, hasn’t stirred at all.
The Seventh Victim, ©1943 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, written by John Rollin Ridge, within the public domain.
