George’s, it says, in red and yellow letters in a curve across the big front window. Shoes Repaired. A worktable behind a counter’s mounded high with shoes of every shape and color. On a stool before it Frankie in a bulky green fleece pullover, dark hair washed and brushed and tied back, cheeks shadowed with soft black stubble. “Just a, just a second,” he’s saying, a blue and brown running shoe in one hand, a square-toed black Oxford in the other. “Gordon,” he says. “How’s this?” Strings and woodwinds cycle through a somberly repetitive phrase from the clock radio on the worktable by the pile of shoes. The old man in a pale green chamois shirt standing next to him takes the shoes in his hands and looks them over, tilting them this way, that. Nodding. “You’re starting to get the hang of this,” he says. The wall behind the worktable’s lined with wooden shelves partitioned into regular cubbyholes each just large enough for a pair of shoes. Running his hand along a shelf, tap-tapping, stopping to slip both shoes inside an empty slot.
“Okay,” says Frankie, turning back to the counter.
“The hell, Frankie,” says Jo.
“Yeah,” says Frankie, “been a weird few weeks, I guess.”
“Anyone like some tea?” says Gordon. Jo shakes her head without looking away from Frankie, who says, “No, thanks.”
“Something herbal?” says Ysabel, unzipping her parka.
“I’ll put a kettle on,” says Gordon, ducking through a curtained doorway. Two voices high and rich soar from the clock radio, di-ek eni awik kher ka-ek, shesepi su ankhi yemef. “So,” says Frankie, standing, leaning his elbows on the counter. “There’s this guy. He’s coming for you.”
“Who,” says Jo.
“One of the ones who grabbed me that time, for that crazy, thing? At the mall?”
“For the Duke,” says Jo.
“Which of them,” says Ysabel.
“He had,” says Frankie, “long black hair? And,” gesturing toward his face, “a patch now, like a pirate. And he was always wearing, it wasn’t like a kilt, it was like a skirt?”
“The Mooncalfe,” says Ysabel.
“And like he never wears shoes?”
“How did you,” says Jo, and then, “I told you to stay away from this shit.”
“He grabbed me,” says Frankie. “Again. Right out of Timmo’s fucking car. He had a sword.”
“What were you doing in Timmo’s,” Jo starts to say.
“He’s after you. He grabbed me to talk about you. He took me– you know that abandoned Burger King? On Burnside, right downtown? He, I guess he lives there? Anyway.” His hands scrubbing themselves, grimy thumbnail scraping at a patch of grime. “I wasn’t gonna. I mean it was, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of days, but it was more than a week?” Fingertips rubbing an old scrape along his knuckles. “It was weird.” His hands spring apart, clench into fists, one of them beats the countertop. “He had to get you before somebody else could, but when we left it was too late? It had already happened? It was like, after Hallowe’en, and it honestly I swear it was only a couple of days. And I wasn’t gonna tell him a motherfucking thing, but,” and he looks away.
“Frankie,” says Jo.
“I told him about Billy, Jo. That’s what, he liked that. He was gonna, he is gonna come after you somehow with Billy. I’m sorry.”
“He already did,” says Jo.
“I’m so fucking sorry–” Frankie looks up, blinking. “He already,” he says. “Shit.” Pounding the counter again. “I called,” he says. “I swear I called and called.”
“I got a new phone,” says Jo, as Ysabel says, “She got a new phone.”
“I even called where it was you worked and the guy there, whatsisname, told me you weren’t working there and I told him to tell you how to find me because it was important,” his hands come up, fingers splayed, to weigh that word in the air there between them, “and he said, you know, he’d do what he could, but.” Frankie shrugs, shakes his head, slumps away, looking toward the back of the little shop. “That’s when Gordon said he had people who could get a message to you, any time, anywhere. At least,” and he sits up, and he sighs, “at least I can do this much,” reaching into the pockets of his khaki pants as a stentorous fanfare unfolds itself from the clock radio. He drops with a rustle and a clatter some wadded-up bills, some coins, a couple of quarters, a dime, some pennies. He smoothes out the banknotes, a couple of tens, a five, a couple of ones. “Here,” he says, pushing it across the counter at Jo.
“This is all your money, isn’t it,” she says.
“I’m doing okay now,” he says. “I owe you fifty bucks. Now it’s, now it’s twenty-two and change. Please, Jo. You can take it. I’ll get you the rest.”
She slowly collects the bills, folds them together, scoops the coins off the counter into her hand. “You gonna go home now?” she says, and he shakes his head. “This is like,” he says, “this is like a step up, you know? Over the last few weeks. I got a place to sleep, and shower, I got some clothes, and I’m, I’m working for all this, you know?” Looking back at the mound of shoes on the worktable. “And I’m not seeing Timmo. He can’t get at me here.” Turning back to Jo and Ysabel. “Gordon rolls pretty fucking deep. You wouldn’t know it but I bet it’s almost as deep as you got, these days.”
“Deeper, I’m sure,” says Ysabel, as Jo leans over the counter toward Frankie, who lurches back, then, shaking his head a little leans in toward her. She kisses him, lightly, and then shaking her head when he tries to kiss her back she straightens, steps back from the counter. “Thank you,” she says.
“How did you end up here?” says Ysabel. “The Mooncalfe wouldn’t have left you with a rabbit, I’m sure.”
“He didn’t?” says Frankie. “He, I mean he, traded me. To Linesse? I mean, not to Linesse, to her, like her boss, for, for this–”
“For Billy,” says Ysabel.
“I guess?” says Frankie. “Yeah.”
“Linesse,” says Ysabel. “You’re sure?”
“Tall woman? Grey hair? She lives in this abandoned car by this abandoned gas station way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere by the airport.” Looking back at the curtained doorway, suddenly quiet, “I guess her and Gordon used to have a thing? Anyway. She left me here.”
“We should go,” says Ysabel to Jo.
“What about your tea?” says Frankie.
“He didn’t go to make tea,” says Ysabel. Jo’s hefting her duffel bag, the narrow box awkward in the little shop. “Sure he did,” says Frankie, as Ysabel’s saying, “He didn’t want to overhear business that doesn’t concern him.”
“Well you don’t have to,” says Frankie, as they turn toward the door, the window with its curve of letters. “You’ll come back, right? Any time. I mean twenty-two bucks, right?”
The bell rings as Jo opens the door. “Keep it,” she says.
A cramped kitchen, the sink and refrigerator and a bit of wood-topped counter beneath a window blank and black, a couple of gleaming ovens set in the wall beside them, a butcher’s block in the middle with a couple of gas burners set in the top. Jessie in a loose white men’s dress shirt and grey yoga pants slices a couple of red peppers into long thin strips, her blond hair pulled back in a knot held by a couple of red chopsticks. On the burner beside her chopped onions simmer in a cast-iron pan. One of the two doors swings open suddenly and a girl all knees and elbows bops into the kitchen to the beat of whatever’s playing through pink headphones printed with a mouthless cartoon cat. Jessie stops slicing the pepper to watch the girl dance around the butcher’s block in her cropped white tank top, her underwear festooned with rainbow-colored ponies. The girl opens the refrigerator, bends over, long straight dark hair swaying, Jessie staring over her shoulder expressionless at those ponies bouncing back and forth. “Son of a bitch,” says the Duke, limping through the other swinging door, “son of a goat-fucking bitch.” Tightening the belt of his striped robe of purples and browns and golds. The girl backs out of the fridge, knocks it shut with her hip, a tall purple and blue can in her hand. Four Loko, it says on the side. She presses up against the Duke, hiking up on her toes to kiss his cheek, takes a deep swig from the can, arm up, vamping and bopping back out the door through which she’d come. “Smells great, babe,” says the Duke.
Jessie starts slicing the pepper again. “Housewives,” she says, “had this trick: they’d take an onion just before their husbands got home from work and chop it and start it frying in some butter or just chuck the whole thing into a hot oven. Let it make the kitchen smell like she’d been cooking all day just for him, not lying around on the chaise eating bon-bons. Then she could tart up some canned tomato soup with a splash of sherry and some chives or something. Some Mrs. Dash. Like he’d know any better.” She scoops up the pepper strips and dumps them into the pan with the onions.
“I got people,” says the Duke, “there are restaurants,” as Jessie’s saying, “I like to cook,” and the Duke shrugs and leaning on the butcher’s block steps close to her, an arm settling about her waist as she stirs peppers and onions together. “So what is it you’re cooking?” he says.
“Chakchouka,” says Jessie. “It’s North African.” She reaches for a big yellow can that says Cento San Marzano.
“I got that thing with Song Wu in about an hour.”
“It’ll be ready in fifteen, twenty minutes,” says Jessie, clamping a can opener on the can. “You’ll eat it in five, tops.” Opening the can with savage twists of the key. “Does she have to stay here?”
“What, who, Lauren?” Stepping back from Jesse. “She can’t go to Seattle, babe. Jasmine’s not about to move here. What am I supposed to do, kick her out to the curb?”
“She could put on some clothes,” says Jessie, slopping tomatoes from the can onto the peppers and onions.
“You’re one to talk,” says the Duke. “Usually.”
“I get paid to do that,” says Jessie. “By you. Is she getting paid?”
“Okay,” says the Duke, “see, I know for a fact that this is deflection, and whatever it is hasn’t got a blasted thing to do with Lauren because the very idea is fucking ludicrous and we both recognize that fact, so maybe you put down the spatula and take a deep breath and tell me what’s the fucking problem.”
Jessie puts the spatula down, picks up a little yellow bottle with an iguana on the label, shakes out droplets of sauce over the tomatoes and peppers and onions. “Get me some eggs,” she says. “Bottom shelf.” And as the Duke turns and opens the fridge she says, “Who fucked the goat this time?”
“What?” he says. “Oh. Roland. The Chariot. Shows up unannounced, picks a fight with Gaveston, bulls his way up here. Has the cheek to demand I tell him everything I know about that attack on the Princess, where it happened, what I know, has the gall, the fucking gall,” shaking his head, “to use the Queen’s name. Comes this close,” holding up forefinger and thumb pinched together, “to accusing me outright of masterminding this thing I nearly popped him for. The Chariot, I wouldn’t call him subtle or sophisticated, not really in the job description, but this, this is taking density to a whole new cake. Jessie. Hey. Jessie.” She’s scooping little pockets in the simmering tomatoes and peppers and cracking an egg into each and she doesn’t look up at the Duke as she does so. “Whatever happens,” he says, “with me and the Gallowglas, I’m gonna be King come the turning of the year. Ysabel’s gonna be Queen. And her and me, you know, we ain’t exactly what you would call compatible. Now, you and me,” and Jessie looks up at that, the last egg uncracked in her hand, “you and me, we’ve got something, ups and downs, it’s, I think it’s pretty special.” She turns away, cracks open that last egg, lets it drop in the pan. “Maybe right now you’re in a place, you’d rather be with a girl than a guy, which is fine, I can definitely appreciate that, and nothing’s different because of that. Not a thing has to change. Whatever happens, the next month or so, the Princess likes you. A lot. She’s still gonna like you when she’s Queen.”
Jessie’s picked up a pot lid and now she looks at the Duke and, shaking her head slowly, blowing out a fluttery little laugh, she says, “Take my wife. Please.”
He turns away, rubbing his forehead. “I’m just saying,” he says. “Play your cards right.”
“There are no goddamn cards, Leo,” she says. “That’s the problem. Nobody else is playing.” She twists a knob, lowering the flame. “They have to poach for like ten minutes. Go put on a shirt or whatever it is you’re gonna do for Wu Song.”
“The Five-Oh?” says Gloria. “With the beef.”
“She’ll have the vegetable patty,” says Orlando.
“The hell I will,” says Gloria. “Five-Oh. Beef.”
“That is disgusting.”
“I’ll let you buy me dinner,” she says, “but you can’t tell me what I’m gonna eat.”
“She’ll have the vegetable patty,” says Orlando. He tugs a napkin from the neat stack under a burger-shaped paperweight. “I will also have the vegetable patty.”
“Sir,” says the burly guy behind the counter, his hairy forearms dark with blurred tattoos. “She doesn’t want it. I’m not about to make for her a burger she doesn’t want.”
“Besides, those things are totally foul,” says Gloria to Orlando. “Genetically modified industrial soy paste that’s been soaked in additives and preservatives.” He’s folding the napkin and again, closing it between palms pressed together. “Place like this,” she says, “the beef’s a much better choice.”
“Grass-fed, hormone-free,” says the burly guy. “We source it ourselves and hand-form the patties. What’ll it be?”
Orlando twists one hand against the other and holds up a crisply folded twenty. “I will have the totally foul vegetable patty. She will have,” and he sighs, and hands the bill to the burly guy, “whatever she wants.”
“Just a veggie burger? You want anything else on that?”
Orlando says, “Ketchup,” then, “Keep it,” as the burly guy starts to make change.
“I totally get the thing? The vegetarian thing?” says Gloria as they step back from the food cart, white-wrapped sandwiches in hand. Dead leaves crunch on the brick sidewalk beneath her thick-soled black boots, his bare feet. A line of food carts cheek by jowl down the block in the wanly dying afternoon light, and little knots of people here and there peering at signs and menu boards that say Sabria’s Arabic and Philly Cheesesteaks, La Jarochita, Bulkogi Fusion and Smokin’ Pig, Real Taste of India. People sitting on benches here and there, waiting for food, poking at clear plastic boxes and cardboard boxes with white plastic forks, peeling foil from wraps and slices of pizza. Orlando in his long blue skirt and a shapeless grey jacket sits abruptly on one of the benches by a sandwich board that says Dabtong Thupka, and a heavyset man in a tweed jacket stands suddenly at the other end of the bench, a paper cup of soup in one hand, chopsticks in the other, and shaking his head walks quickly away. “I was a vegetarian sophomore year,” says Gloria, sitting herself next to Orlando. “Vegan, actually, mostly. Except I could never stand soy milk, in my coffee?” Her hair done up in its two great hanks again over either shoulder, her lips once more painted carefully black, a long black coat with clear glass buttons over her black high-waisted gown. “I gained like ten pounds? Which, and I started reading about factory farming, and processed food, and exactly what is in those things,” pointing to his burger. Her hands in those black and white striped arm socks. “So even though I mean the guy had like a heart attack, or something, I have always,” and looking at her own burger she chews her lip around a laugh, “been about the excess, so I went total Atkins? Meat only, and lettuce sandwiches, and I lost like five pounds?” She takes a big bite. “But I missed bread,” she says, and swallows. “I missed the carbonara which, my dad makes it, with pancetta from the City Market? Up on Twenty-first?” She looks up then, at the lights coming on in the food carts, work lamps and heat lamps and strings of Christmas lights, at the deepening shadows blue and purple from the buildings that tower behind them. “It’s really Friday, isn’t it,” she says. “I was gone. I was gone from the world for two whole days, just–” She shakes her head. She takes another bite of her burger.
“That is disgusting,” says Orlando.
“This?” says Gloria.
“Blood, and death.”
“Have a taste,” she says, holding her hand up, fingertips smeared and shining. He draws back. “I’ve tasted blood,” he says.
“It isn’t blood,” she says. “You vampire. It’s pineapple juice and teriyaki sauce and meat juice and it’s very, very good. Okay.” Another big tearing bite of burger, chewing, swallowing, smacking her lips. Leaning close. “A taste.” And she kisses him, and shuddering he opens his mouth on hers and his hands come up to her shoulders and hold there for a moment as he kisses her back before suddenly pushing them both apart. He stands abruptly. Without looking he arcs his wadded white wrapper into the garbage can on the other side of the bench. “Come,” he says, taking her free hand.
“What,” she says, “where are we,” as he pulls her to her feet, “going?”
“The future,” he says.
“Act 2 Scene 2: Akhnaten and Nefertiti,” written by Philip Glass, copyright holder unknown. “Not Dying Today,” written by Tori Amos, copyright holder unknown. Hamburgers provided by Brunch Box, quenching PDX’s thirst for burgers since 2009.
An apple peeled and cored and split into wedges on a plain white paper plate, the peel of it in one long ragged strand looped on the rug. A fat red candle slumped in on itself on another paper plate, guttering in a pool of melted wax. A black and silver matchbox that says Boxxes in angular slashes of letters about a stylized eye. Olive pits with bits of flesh still clinging, two cheese rinds black and pale red wax, a torn heel of crusty bread. Dregs of dark red wine in a couple of juice glasses, one printed with a cartoon bear in a spacesuit, one a frog in Lincoln scarlet, holding a bow. Over the scratchy hiss of needle on vinyl from some hidden corner a chorus of woodwinds lofts hauntingly simple notes atop gently giguing strings. By the candle a threadbare little rabbit on a leash of string noses a couple of empty yellowed gel caps. “An O?” says the woman sitting on the rug. She scoops the rabbit into her crazy-quilted lap, skirts lapping skirts in wool and watered silk and taffeta and corduroy, her legs in mismatched socks splayed among the paper plates and crumbs. “None for you, Jasper,” she says. Sitting back against a baroquely plump sofa, her hair rustling, her hair loose about her shoulders, tumbling in coils and curls down over her grubby orange rain shell, her hair pooling in slippery hanks along the rug and the bare floor. The woman curled in a corner of the sofa behind her says, “Q,” as she takes up handfuls of that hair in rhythmic, rolling strokes, and little puffs of light spark and eddy to settle again. She wears a baggy sweater the color of flour, and on the sofa beside her a floppy black hat beside a confetti-colored patchwork cap.
“Q?” The woman on the floor leans forward, tugging her hair free in a tumble of light. “There’s no little thingie.” Peering at the loop of apple peel. “Is that a descender? The little thingie?”
“O for whom?” says the woman on the sofa. “Oubliette? Outlaw?”
“Out of Outlaw.” The woman on the floor settles back against the sofa.
“But there is a Queen.” The woman on the sofa starts stroking that hair again. If her milky eyes are looking at anything, it’s the counter at the other end of the long and narrow room, the dim lamp, the beads of oil trickling regularly down the threaded curtain hanging from its shade.
“It might be a Q,” says the woman on the floor. “If everything’s otherwhich.”
“Isn’t it?” says the woman on the sofa. “Honey’s gone sour, sugar’s all but gone.”
“Don’t,” says the woman on the floor, shivering, heels kicking. “Say things like that. We’re not supposed to look at things like that.”
“What you mean we, kemo sabe,” says the woman on the sofa. She plunges her hands more deeply in that hair, and clouds of sparks light her dour moue. “It’s affecting business, yours and mine. Let’s see what can be seen. We don’t have to tell.” Up to the elbows in all that hair. The woman sitting on the floor begins to moan, her eyelids fluttering, rocking with the strokes, and her hands shape something in the air. “The dark,” she croons, “the dark of the year…”
“I’m not a rube,” mutters the woman on the sofa. Then as the moaning redoubles she pulls the woman on the floor closer. “But maybe you are?”
“Oak to oak and never a fig of holly,” says the woman on the floor, gasping, opening her eyes. “A summer and a summer,” she says flatly, “the glory and the fall. Hats.”
“That doesn’t make any,” says the woman on the sofa as rabbit spilling scrabbling from her lap the woman on the floor lurches for the confetti-colored cap. “Hats!” she says.
The sound of a gong as Orlando pushes the door open, holding it for Gloria in her long black coat twisting and turning to look at all the junk piled high in the foyer. “This way,” he says, leading her through the pinched doorway to the long and narrow room beyond, lit by a candle and a lamp and what light’s left to seep through tall and dusty windows. Two women side by side on a baroquely plump sofa under a gaudy tapestry, a dancer in veils and spangles who holds aloft a platter laden with a bearded head. “Your pardon, Ulyssa,” says Orlando. “We can come back.”
“No, no,” says the woman in the floppy black hat. “Just a little shop-talk. What can we, ah,” as the other woman in her confetti-colored cap leaps to her feet kicking over one of the juice glasses with a clink. “O for Orlando!” she cries, skipping over the rug past Gloria to circle about him, her hands over her mouth. “Oh of course of course of course of course of course!”
“You’ve met the Thrummy-cap,” says the woman on the sofa.
“You clear the path! You set the stage!”
“You have a question?” says the woman on the sofa, her smile a wry small thing under that floppy brim. “Ask her. She’s in a generous mood.”
“Gloria,” says Orlando, as the Thrummy-cap bounces before him, clapping her hands, looking from him to Gloria not quite saying something. “What,” says Orlando, “becomes of us, if she stays?”
The Thrummy-cap stops dead, hands clasped.
“Oh,” says Miss Cheney on the sofa.
“Such,” says the Thrummy-cap, “happiness,” a sprig of hair escaped from her cap and coiled along her cheek. “Such joy. Three days or a day, it’s hard to say, but then!” Stepping suddenly from him to her, gripping Gloria’s coat, the scarecrow colors of her skirts and cap stark against the sleek black bulk of it. “A best last night indeed,” she says, and “Get back!” shrieks Gloria, “you little,” pushing her away.
“And there’s the holly!” cries the Thrummy-cap. “Sprung where it’s not wanted to strangle the oak a-borning, and then it’s snow in every April ever after.”
“If,” says Orlando, “she stays.” His voice a husk.
“I’m right here,” says Gloria as the Thrummy-cap cocks her head, cap shifting with a slithery weight. “Don’t worry,” she says to Orlando, then turning to Miss Cheney, “don’t. My sweetie’s getting lunch today. It’s his turn! I forgot I set it all up weeks ago. It’s going to be okay!”
The city, spread over a table that dominates the conference room. A broad curl of blue river painted along one side, a little white boat between white foam core bridges. Blank white buildings jumble the bank of it, a tall cluster down at one end, lowering toward the middle, a low tower higher than the rest at the other end. A man half-bent over it, a thick shock of unruly white hair, a white sack suit and a shining white shirt and a wide white knit tie. He looks up as the glass door to the conference room swings shut, and his face is quite young under all that hair. The man by the door is short and thick, a scruff of grey beard about his chin, his white hair cropped close about the back of his head. A dark windowpane jacket over a heathery hoodie that says Oregon Ducks in green and yellow letters. “Rosie says I ought to talk to you,” he says.
“I have a proposition for you, Mr. Sogge,” says the man in the white suit.
“You’re gonna proposition me, call me Rudy. You work for Pinabel.” He stays there, by the door, and the man in the white suit folds his arms and says, “I’ve consulted for him, yes. But I’m not here in that capacity today. You don’t like to share, do you, Rudy.”
Rudy puts a hand on the back of one of the big brown leather chairs, wheels it away from the table. “Let’s assume,” he says as he sits, “I’m not gonna answer any rhetorical questions, so how about cutting them and any dramatic pauses and other bits of theatrical business out of the presentation, okay?” Closing his eyes.
“I-Óisqis and Iô’i,” says the man in the white suit. “Pah-to and Wy’east, La-wa-la-clough, the Loowit. Tanmahawis. You have no idea who they were, of course not, why would you. They were murdered long before your parents were born, before your great-grandfather ever thought to plat out Hoffmann’s Addition. These people were– gods is not too strong a word, I trust? The very mountains about us, the rivers, the salmon and the trees, who were yet people, that you might speak with as easily as I might speak with you.” Rudy snorts at that, his eyes still closed. The man in the white suit nods. “Oh, the names live on– there’s pizza parlors and blues bands named for some dim echo of one or the other of them. You might even speak with them yet, though their voices are quite dim now, hard to hear, and the effort requires years of study, and ruinous quantities of bourbon and pot.” Rudy his eyes still closed begins to frown at that. “A vacuum was left, is the important point, the takeaway, as I believe you put it. And nature abhors a vacuum.” The man in the white suit turns then, looking out over the city on the table. “She’s been abhorring this vacuum with a vengeance for decades, now. Half this state’s from somewhere else? Three-quarters of this city? And somewhere else is very, very wide. You’re thwarted, Mr. Sogge.”
Rudy opens his eyes at that.
“Your disastrous partnership with Pinabel in Southwest. The way he’s dragged his feet on that charming ærial tram,” gesturing toward a pylon at one end of the city, in the cluster of white towers there by the river. “The Perrys, in Northwest, preventing the destruction of the Lovejoy Ramp, stalling the Brewery Blocks,” gesturing toward high-rise blocks by one of the bridges at the other end of the table. “The Urban Restoration Squad, and Michael Lake, though of course you won’t remember him. The Fox Tower,” touching a high white block in the middle of downtown, and Rudy says, “That isn’t mine.”
“No,” says the man in the white suit, “but you’d still see the benefit if more than half its square footage were leased. Here, across this park that might yet one day be finished, your Park Avenue West,” and he lifts the next tower, a tall slim thing, entirely from the table, “have you done more yet than dig the basement? No?” He tosses the block to Rudy, who catches it deftly. “For more than a year. These impediments have all of them one thing in common: a person, a singular individual. A girl. In a few weeks I shall remove her from these various considerations.”
“Remove,” says Rudy. “You mean, you’re talking about–”
“Is that a deal-breaker?”
Rudy’s looking down at the blank white tower in his hands. He pushes himself out of the chair, leans over the city, carefully slots the tower back into place.
“There will then be a vacuum,” says the man in the white suit. “It will be abhorred. That abhorrence, Mr. Sogge, is something you might be positioned to capitalize upon.”
“Thought I told you to call me Rudy.”
The man in the white suit shrugs. “I feel it’s best we keep our relationship strictly professional, for now.”
Rudy says, “Okay then.” Leaning both hands on the river. “What is it you want.”
“I? Illimitable power, of course. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.” He reaches into his white suit coat and pulls out a mirror-bright lighter and a clear cellophane packet wrapped about cigarettes in plain white paper. “Immortality, there’s a no-brainer. But at the moment? At the moment, Mr. Sogge, I’m dying for a smoke.”
“Knock yourself out,” says Rudy.
“So that was a completely wasted day,” says Jo swaying, one hand hanging from the strap above, one holding tightly the duffel down by her feet, the narrow box awkward in the crowd. Ysabel pressed close, holding the same strap. “You made your peace with Erne,” she says.
“Only cost two hundred bucks,” says Jo.
“We now know who,” says Ysabel.
“And I have no idea what the fuck to do with that. The Mooncalfe?”
“I feel as if I’ve won a bet.” Ysabel swallows and closing her eyes lays her forehead against Jo’s shoulder. “I think I now see what it is you see in him,” she says.
“Him which?” says Jo. “You mean Frankie?”
Ysabel nods. “He’d be the Duke, if he could.”
“That,” says Jo, “that is so wrong I don’t know where to, I mean, that isn’t even wrong. Shit.” Something buzzes. Letting go of the duffel, leaning away from Ysabel swaying she pulls a glassy black phone from her jacket, stroking its surface with a thumb. “It’s that girl, with the place off Glisan? We could, we could probably catch a bus directly from the next stop–”
“Jo,” says Ysabel, wincing, clutching.
“Hey,” says Jo, tucking the phone away. “Hey.” A hand on Ysabel’s shoulder, Ysabel’s arm clung about her waist. “It’s just one more errand. We’ve got to find a new place. Hey.” Ysabel eyes squeezed shut lowers her head, pressing against Jo. “You’re tired,” says Jo, “we’re both–”
“I need,” says Ysabel thickly, “fresh air, I need to get off–”
“Yeah, okay,” says Jo, “okay.”
“Rose Garden,” says a loud recorded voice, and all about them people stirring, collecting bags and packages, resettling coats and scarves, hats, nudging each other, looking out the dark windows. “Doors to my left. Puertas a mi izquierda.”
A wide plaza brightly lit, a tangle of intersections, streets and rail lines, crosswalks, stoplights, off up a low rise that way past a scruff of immature trees the immensely spot-lit bulk of a coliseum and under its pointed curl of a roof a sign that says Rose Garden. There a low freeway overpass, the lights of trucks and cars at standstills yearning north and south, another MAX train at the stop under the overpass, a line of busses idling each with the same Cricket wireless minutes ad on the side. Across the street behind them a wall of silos lights flaring from the tops an enormous billboard plastered along it, hands in black and white reaching up and up, Rise with us, it says, Portland Trailblazers. Away behind that the unlit towers of a bridge over the river, looming against the red-black sky. Crowds flowing from the one MAX stop to the other, heading up along sidewalks to the coliseum, over that way to the busses, waiting at the corners here and there to cross this street or that. “Fresh air,” says Jo. “You want to wait here? Not that there’s anywhere here to hang out or anything. Walk home, over the Steel Bridge? How’s your–”
“Jo,” says Ysabel, pointing.
Looking back toward the other train small figures of people getting on and off it, the small figure of a man there among them, silver piping on his green tracksuit flashing in the streetlight under the overpass, bulbous headphones blue and white clamped over his white-blond hair. “I thought he wasn’t,” Jo starts to say.
“We have to go,” says Ysabel, and a bell rings, and with a rising, grinding hum the train beside them pulls away, clank-chunking over a rail junction. “Now. Please, Jo. Before he sees me.”
“What’s he doing here,” says Jo, looking back over her shoulder as she takes Ysabel’s hand. Away across the plaza Roland’s looking along his train, the platform, the crowds about him. “We could head down the other end, out of sight. Wait for the next train there.”
“Which is when?” says Ysabel, and then as Jo’s saying, “Ten? Fifteen minutes?” she says “We have to go,” and over away across the plaza Roland’s turning, heading toward them, but looking back, of to one side, at the line of busses.
“What the hell’s he,” Jo’s saying, and Ysabel’s saying, “I don’t want to talk to him right now,” and “Okay, yeah, okay,” says Jo, and hand in hand they’re headed for the crosswalk as the light changes. Ysabel starts across the street in and among the other with Jo dragged in her wake looking back and back, Roland, there’s Roland, away from the busses now, the crowds, the lights, on the grass that slopes dimly up toward the coliseum. “The hell’s he doing?” she mutters, slowing there in the middle of the street. “Jo!” cries Ysabel, pulling.
Roland looks up.
“Shit,” says Jo, half-laughing as they half-run the rest of the way across the street, the walk don’t walk sign counting down in orange numerals five, four, three, two. “Did he, did he see us,” says Ysabel on the corner as traffic grunts and snorts into motion behind them.
“I don’t know?” says Jo. “I can’t see him anymore. He didn’t wave or anything. What’s he–”
“Jo,” says Ysabel.
“Eastside,” says Jo. “The Lloyd Center. That’s where he was, shit. That night.”
“Jo, please,” says Ysabel.
“This is where that train finally stopped. Remember?” Jo points back to the MAX stop they’d left across the street. “That’s what he’s, why? Why would he, what’s he after?”
“I don’t care,” says Ysabel. “Let’s just. Go. Please.”
They set off across the next street as the numerals count down, four, three, two, one. Blocky yellow construction equipment behind a chain-link fence, a long banner hung there saying East Side Big Pipe– Working for Clean Rivers. The rush and roar of traffic beside them, the rumbling idle from the freeway overpass. Up a low rise and around a curve away from the coliseum, traffic thinning, a flock of bicycles clattering through the next intersection. The corner beyond a park, the ground sloping to a screen of trees and beyond the towers and lights of downtown, over across the river, and there before them the looming black shapes of trusses and girders and cables, red lights flashing from the tops of its towers. “We can lose him on the Esplanade,” says Jo, and hand in hand they cross the street and head into the park down one of the paths that loop away from the sidewalk toward the trees.
As they pass from sight, up and around the curve past that banner hung from the chain-link fence comes Roland at an easy lope, headphones down about his neck.
Symphony in E minor, op. 32, “The Gælic Symphony” (Second Movement, “alla siciliana allegro vivace”), written by Amy Beach, copyright holder unknown.
A long and narrow flight of stairs angles down from the grey pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks. A wide path heads off away along the riverbank, a branch of it there floating on pontoons, the snarling lanes of stalled traffic on the freeway overpass alongside it and above. Another path heads down to the dark bulk of the bridge, the bottom deck of it low over the water, railroad tracks and a footpath under an upper deck busy with cars, busses, a truck, a MAX train rumbling away toward the towers of downtown, lit up against the red-black sky. “Where do we,” says Ysabel, “Jo, how do we,” as they turn about at the base of those stairs. “How are we going to lose him?”
“I don’t know?” says Jo, shrugging the duffel back up on her shoulder. “I thought there’d be more people. There’s usually more people. If we,” pointing, “just head over the bridge–”
“He’d see us,” says Ysabel wincing, an arm about her belly. “All the way across he could see–”
“Are you okay?” says Jo, and Ysabel shakes her head quickly, and “What is it?” says Jo, and Ysabel shakes her head again. Jo takes her free hand. “It’s the most direct way home. You want to go back up and catch a bus or a train? It’d be no better,” pointing down the riverbank, “he could see us all the way along there, too, unless you want to squat under those bushes and hope he doesn’t come down looking. Hell, maybe he’s just on his way to Mississippi or something–”
“Princess!” cries Roland at the top of that flight of stairs, silver piping shining in the dusky streetlight.
“Well, hell,” says Jo, as Ysabel tugging her hand heads for the bridge.
“Princess!” He’s taking those stairs two at a time.
“The hell,” says Jo, “are we running,” and a metal plate on the bridge’s footpath rings under their feet. “Please,” says Ysabel.
“Wait!” cries Roland, halfway down that long and angled flight. “Lady, wait!” At the bottom of those stairs. “We must speak!” Clanging over the metal plate, beating a tattoo against the brick-paved footpath. Jo looks quickly back to see Roland running from splash of light to splash of light the flare in his hand shining in the shadows and “Shit,” she says, letting go, turning, clawing the duffel from her shoulder, dropping to one knee, “Ysabel, run!” The box thumping and clattering as she fumbles at its flaps.
“No!” cries Roland, feet scraping to a stop, left foot forward in its spotlessly white outlandishly puffy shoe, left hand empty, the sword in his right hand held behind, pointed low, at the bricks. “I mean you no harm.”
“The hell with the sword, then,” says Jo, kneeling, her own blade still in its scabbard half out of the box. Ysabel behind her, leaning against gripping the railing low over the water.
“Draw, Gallowglas,” says Roland, gently. His legs bent just, a ready stance, under the low-hanging light. “We cross steel once, a single exchange, and then, unharmed, you lower your arm and walk away, your honor satisfied. I would take the office, and the Princess, from your hands.”
“You’re mad,” snaps Ysabel, before Jo can say anything at all.
“I would merely accept the offer she made before the court,” says Roland. “My own honor is as nothing to the danger facing you, Princess. Facing us all. I have been to see the Duke. He,” and Roland’s left hand squeezes into a fist, “he sent the monsters after you, that night, on the train. He means to frighten you, to drive you from any other solace, to bind the Bride more tightly to him, trusting only him–”
“You have proof?” says Ysabel, clear and cold.
His fist relaxes, his hand opening, closing again. “I would prove the merits of my quarrel with my body and my own right hand, lady. But say the word.”
“So you have no proof,” says Ysabel.
“You are in grave danger, Princess. You must return with me to your mother’s house. Should the Duke discover what’s been done to you,” and he’s straightened from his stance now, sword held loosely at his side, and kneeling still between them Jo looks from Roland back to Ysabel, who’s let go of the railing, who’s folded her arms tightly about herself, whose white parka’s gone yellow-pink in the bridgelight, who says, her voice flatly quiet, “What has been done to me, Chariot.”
“The, the line, lady,” he says. “The line’s been broken, in you. We broke it, that night, to save you from yourself.” Breathing heavily as he says it, swallowing when it’s done, and that and the lapping of the water are the only sounds about them. Nothing from the deck of the bridge above. Not a growl or rumble from the lights of the empty freeway behind him. “If he learns that you can never be Queen–”
“You are mad,” says Ysabel, each word a shard. Jo shoves the box from her sword still in its scabbard and stands, slowly, between them.
“Lady,” he says, and then, “Ysabel,” and she flinches at that. “It’s over,” he says. “There’s been no Apportionment, not since the, since before the Samani.”
“That is my mother’s problem, and none of mine,” says Ysabel, “and you forget yourself, Chariot.”
“Come with me, please,” says Roland, quietly. Holding out his empty hand. “Don’t you see? It’s over, it’s all over. You’re free. Just as you always– you could, you and I could go together–”
“I could what?” says Ysabel, and his mouth snaps shut at that. “You and I could what, knight? Grow old? Together? In a flower-draped cottage somewhere, no doubt, North Portland, maybe.” Her arms still clutched about herself, her voice tight and quiet and low. “But those low, low monthly payments– how would we afford them? If it’s all over, and our offices and titles gone, their prerogatives with them, all of it down to dust. Would you dig ditches, for so small a life? Would you sell, insurance? Or annuities? Would you go every day to sit at a computer for hours at a stretch, and speak with strangers on a telephone? You idiot,” snaps Ysabel, one hand leaping to grab the railing, and Jo her free hand starts to reach for her but stops. “In the few short weeks this mortal girl has been my champion she has,” clinging to the railing Ysabel looks now from Roland, his expression dumbstruck, to Jo, who’s blinking, shivering, whose hand about the throat of her scabbard’s steady and white-knuckled, “she has worked such wonders as you’d never dare. She brought me the tongue of Erymathos and you will hear me out,” and Roland does not take that step toward her, does not say what he’d been about to say, looks away from her, looks down at the bricks, his sword useless at his side. “She brought that monster’s tongue to me,” says Ysabel, “and I ate it, and saw what’s yet to come. I saw my banner over this city, Chariot. I saw myself in my mother’s house, my house, and I saw my gallowglas by my side. Tell me, then, oh prognosticator, oh chopper of logic, how all this might yet come to pass, if I cannot be Queen?”
Water laps beneath them. A buzzing whine, faint, from the bulb of the lamp over Roland’s head, his head that shakes, slowly. He says, “I do not know, my lady.” Looking up then. “But even I can see you are not well. Come with me, please– both of you! Come, with me, to your mother’s house. Let’s all make sure we know what’s happened to you. Or, or not.”
Ysabel straightens, lets go of herself. Lets go of the railing. “No,” she says. “No, we will both go home, to what is our house for now, and you, you will, go back, to skulking in the shadows. Go wait for someone else to notice how helpful you might be.”
“Lady,” he says, the word bent beneath a terrible weight.
Ysabel turns away from him and carefully walks away down the footpath. Jo stoops, her sword still in one hand, and begins to gather up the duffel and the box. She stops when the point of Roland’s sword presses against the bag before her, then lifts, slowly, toward her face. She lets go of the bag and stands, slowly, and his sword follows her up. “Princess,” he says. “I can still defeat your champion. Take up the keeping of you, once again.”
“You might try,” says Ysabel. “You’ll lose. I’ve seen it.”
“Do you think I’ll lose?” says Roland to Jo. “A month with even the notorious Erne is hardly enough to make you a creditable swordsman.”
Jo spares a glance over her shoulder for Ysabel in the shadows, then takes the hilt of her sword in her hand. Steps back, and back again. “All right,” says Roland, “a single pass, as I proposed,” as she yanks the scabbard from her blade and settles in a stance sidelong to him, the scabbard in her left hand held behind, her blade up and at an angle before. His left hand tucked against his chest leaning back just, his sword arm canted up the blade angled down a little and a little to the left and sliding his foot forward kicking the duffel to one side his sword-tip lazily swinging toward her when he flicks his wrist and it leaps up and over her blade a looping cut she catches with a jerk of a parry, clang. “There,” he says, and steps back, lowering his blade. “Put up.” Shaking out his left hand. “You’ve fought for her, and we can both agree I’ve won. Honor’s satisfied.” And then, “Gallowglas.”
Jo’s blade’s still there between them, up, and at an angle.
“I would not hurt you, Jo Maguire,” says Roland.
“You’re gonna have to,” says Jo. Her hand settling and resettling itself about the hilt.
“You can’t win,” says Roland. Lifting his sword somewhat. “Put up your blade.”
“If you were in my shoes,” says Jo, and she takes a deep breath, “would you?”
And behind her, in the darkness, leaning against the railing over the water, Ysabel is smiling.
Rattle and clack of cassette tapes in a shoebox. He holds one up, clear shell, black label, white scribble of handwriting. He kicks his wheeled office chair down the length of the table lost under haphazard stacks of books and piles of paper. Down by the painted-over window under a poster that says The White Divel, or, Vittoria Corombona, a Lady of Venice, he shoves a teetering stack away from a dusty black tape deck. Punching the eject button with the back of his hook he slots the cassette and twists a couple of large silver knobs. Punches play. Twiddles one of the knobs as big round rubbery bass notes tumble through the room, fluttering and thumping about. Sits back a moment, leans forward and twists another knob as those bass notes stumble into a quick-paced, strutting vamp. Pushes himself to the middle of that table where he works the cork from a bottle of sooty whiskey and pours a healthy dollop and then another into a coffee cup. Sits back in the chair as a tambourine begins to shake. A cymbal shimmies and off in the distance a trombone’s blowing a sinister fanfare and he closes his eyes, the coffee cup swaying in his hand to the beat. As more horns join in his eyes still closed he lifts the mug, swirling the whiskey, and then his hand jerks to a stop short of his lips.
“That’s the point,” he says, and pulls the cup toward himself, lifts it, takes a small brief sip. “Well if I thought we were gonna have an actual conversation and all I might just turn it down.” He sets the cup on the table. There’s a piano ringing in among the horns now, and the bass vamp has settled down with the drums. “Why!” he says, and then, “Why did you come all this way? What could you possibly have to say to me? It isn’t enough you send your daughter to me every– every fucking day, with her ridiculous girlfriend–
“Don’t, don’t give me that sister-daughter crap. Sister-self, goddammit! She is every inch as much yours as–”
He stands, suddenly, the chair rolling back a little away from him. “Why did you,” he says thickly, leaning his hand against the table, “what the fuck did you, what do we possibly have to say to each other about that! Why are you even–” His head droops, shoulders sag. “About him,” he says, quietly. His hand closes about the cup. He looks at his shoulder, then up a little, past it, a ghost of a smile framed in his salt-and-pepper Van Dyke. He frowns, a little. “Our?” he says, and then he nods, looks back to the table. “Oh. Ha. She–” looking at the cup in his hand, “is every gesture, every curl of hair, every sniff and smirk, she’s you, she’s very much you. On the night we first met.”
His chair rolls aside though he does not touch it. “You’ve grown into your beauty,” he says. A smoothing ripples the wrinkles down the back of his T-shirt, wrinkles that are suddenly pressed flat as he leans forward against the table and takes in a sharp deep breath. “Don’t,” he says, “Duenna, please. No.
“Well of course I’m thinking of him. Christ, I, every day, you have no idea.” His hook clacks. “I miss him, so much–
“Do I. Well. I am a selfish man.”
He lets go of the cup, pinches the corners of his eyes, wipes them with the heel of his hand. Steps back suddenly, to the side, a stack of papers tumbling in his wake. “Lymond,” he says, his voice worn thin and pale under the tumult of the horns and the bass and the drums. Blinking. “He means to try for the Throne,” and then his head snaps to one side and he lifts his hand to his cheek. “I’m going to ask you to leave if you–
“Well he picked a lousy fucking time– Unsettled? There’ll be war in the streets, the Count, the Duke, and the Bride out in the open with only a thoughtless slip of a–
“Duenna, she’s terrible. And you, you’ve gone and given her a sword. How could you– Duenna– Duenna?” Shivering, tipping his head back, eyes squeezed shut. A deep breath. He sways a moment, raggedly, not at all with the music, and then he lifts the cup.
“The King is dead,” says Vincent Erne. “Long live the King.” And he drinks the whiskey down.
“I know this building,” says Orlando.
They’re standing before a big pale yellow house that comes right up to the sidewalk. Red double doors in the middle of a skinny porch, great bays to either side rising to erratic clusters of gables and dormers dotting the steep black roof, the dark green trim gone black as well in the dim light. “It’s named for some old judge,” says Gloria. “With enormous muttonchops.” Her hands in their black and white striped arm socks fluffing to either side of her face. “There’s a picture in the lobby. But it used to be called the Lawn.”
Orlando nods at that, looking up at the windows above, some lit, some blank and black.
“Dad was, like, the third person to buy in, when it went condo? Been there for about, ten years. But it used to have, like twenty, thirty rooms for rent? And only two bathrooms. So it was hella cheap. Poets, and painters, and whole rock bands, and the Satyricon after-party like every other night, and when we moved in Dad told me that my closet? A junkie used to live there. And I had no idea what a junkie was. I kept imagining this monster, made of rusted pipes and old car parts, and a toilet bowl for a mouth. Scared the hell right out of me.” She grabs his hand then, both his hands, and pulls him close, and he leans his forehead down against hers as she swallows him in a hug. “Stay,” she says. He shakes his head. She kisses him, her arms about his neck, then her hands cupping the back of his head, kissing fiercely, both of them, his hands cupping her hips, her ass. “I can’t,” he says against her lips.
“Come upstairs. Now. Don’t think about it. Just follow me.”
“What would you tell your father.”
She laughs a sniffly little laugh. “Are you kidding? He’d give you a fucking medal. I’m fat and I dress funny and I never come home. I bring home a boy? Suddenly it’s like a problem he can deal with. You know?” Stroking his hair. “Though you are the strangest thing I think I’ve ever called a boy. Stay. Stay with me. You can live in my closet. My junkie lover.” She laughs. She’s crying. “My junk. They said,” she says, “they said I’d die if I stayed with you. That was what you asked. So stay with me instead.”
“You can’t,” he says, “have one, without the other.” Taking a step back, leaning back, until she grips his head again, pulls him close. “So fuck it,” she says. “Fuck it. You can’t, ethically you can’t force me to save my own life. If I want to, if I want to die, it’s my life. I can, I get to decide, whether it’s worth saving or not.”
“I can kill you now, if you like,” says Orlando.
She crumbles against him then, the whole of her sagging, staggering him back another step. “I want,” she says, a whisper in his ear, “what I want’s three days or just a day of what it was we did.”
He kisses her, gently, and then he says, “It’s not just you. If I stay, if you stay, if we are together, something happens to– everyone I know.”
“Snow in April,” she sniffs. “Christ, it barely snows in January.”
“If,” he says. “If, if, if. I never met a vision of the future but was couched with an if.” He wipes a tear from her cheek with the back of his hand. “Blast,” he says, “and rot all ifs. I will see you again.”
“Give me your hand,” she says.
“Where did you get that knife,” he says.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Give me your hand.” The blade of the knife is short and black as ash except the moon-bright edge of it, and the wood-grained handle’s stained with reds and yellows and purples. He opens his right hand there between them, and she lays the edge of the blade against his palm but before she can cut or even take a breath he snaps his fingers closed about it and hissing jerks his hand away down its length. His face creased with the pain of it he opens his fist there by her cheek, her lips, the long clean slash through the meat of his palm slowly weeping thick tears of yellow and white. She kisses his hand, and he hisses again as she licks it, once, pressing his hand to her cheek as he strokes her jangling hair. Then he pushes her away.
“I lied,” she says, as he walks away across the street. “My name. My name isn’t Gloria Monday.”
“But I know where you live,” he calls back to her.
He walks past a parking lot taking up a whole block behind a low stone wall, around the corner and down under big green highway signs that say 405, 26, Right Lane. Past Italianate townhouses, a great red brick apartment building, a low yellow building painted with cheerfully stylized flowers and a sign that says Antiquities and Oddities. He stops in the middle of the bridge over the freeway cut into a gully below and looks at the cut in his palm still slickly wet. He grabs the tail of his white dress shirt and with the long knife in his hand he slices at it, ripping off a long strip around the bottom all the way back around to the other side, and he wraps it over and over tightly about his palm. On the other side of the bridge, he raises that hand in a little salute as he passes a low red building that says Allen’s Radiator Shop in white script letters just below the flat roof. And as the rumble and growl of the freeway traffic fades away behind him, an odd sound can be heard ahead, growing louder– a rushing, clinking sound, the sound of glass on glass.
“Haitian Fight Song,” written by Charles Mingus, copyright holder unknown.
The sound of bottles clinking in the distance. Ysabel tips back her head the hood of her parka slumping. She doesn’t so much blow the smoke from her mouth as let it drift, tugged back as she walks on down the sidewalk. A little parking lot beside them before a pale building that says West Bearing & Parts over dark awnings. She hands the glowing cigarette to Jo, who says, “Feeling better?”
Ysabel shrugs, nods, blows the last of the smoke from her mouth. “How do you feel? Besting the Chariot, two for two?”
Looking down the empty street Jo takes a drag and shrugs. “Does that one even count?” she says, and they cross, against the light.
“You touched steel, this time,” says Ysabel. The corner before them blocked with flimsy orange fencing and a sign that says Construction Sidewalk Closed by City Permit, and up and up behind the fence a thicket of naked girders and beams. They jog across to the opposite corner as a red hand flashes, stop, stop, stop. Jo says, “Do you think he’s right, about the Duke?”
“Do you think he’s right about me?” says Ysabel. A sleekly low-slung chair isolated under a spotlight in the store window behind her.
“I don’t know,” says Jo. “What’s with the cramps?”
“I just needed fresh air, and a walk. I told you. I feel so much better now.” As Jo glaring turns to walk on, Ysabel grabs her arm, pulls her back. “I did, I really did see what will be, Jo. I saw myself as Queen. I saw you and your sword at my side.”
“So, when? Next year? A couple years from now? Five or ten?”
“I don’t–”
“I mean, it changes a thing or two, you’ve got some kind of peephole to the future. Who’s King?” and as Ysabel’s saying “I don’t know” Jo says, “There’s usually a King in this sort of thing, right?”
“I don’t know,” says Ysabel again. “I didn’t see. But, Jo, you have to trust me. I did see us, together. It will be.”
Jo drops the cigarette butt to the sidewalk. “It’s not a question of,” she says, grinding it under her boot. Cocking her head.
“Not a question of, what? What is it?”
“That sound. The bottles.” Jo heads back to the corner. “The hell with the bottles?” Looking around down Twelfth instead of back up along Everett. “Ysabel, what the fuck?” The next block down a couple of blankly blocky buildings sheathed in corrugated white metal to either side and up between them crossing high over the street a slender conveyor belt, railed with metal, clanking empty green bottles from one open yellow-lit hatch to another. “The fucking brewery,” says Jo. Stepping out into the empty street. “It, they ripped this out. Tore it down. They’re putting up those,” and Ysabel’s saying “Jo” as Jo’s saying “condos, I don’t,” sniffing, “what the hell?”
“Jo,” says Ysabel, over the loudening clatter of glass, “Jo, it’s all, it’s all gone quiet–”
But Jo in the street’s standing stock-still. A dark shape a block or more away against the light splashed from those bottles, a jacket shapeless about the shoulders, a long skirt, long hair lofted in an aimless gust. “Of course,” calls Orlando, his voice quite clear. “Of course she couldn’t stay. Of course I had to take her home. Of course I had to be here, now, to meet you, one last time.”
“Why did you do this to me,” says Jo.
“Why?” He’s walking toward them slowly, his left hand on the hilt of the sword he’s pulling like a curl of light from the air. “I didn’t want to deny the Axe her satisfaction, but I had to do something. Sending you to your death as you lamented again the death of your son?” He whips the sword before him. “It might have been amusing, had I not been too late. Still. Couldn’t let all that work,” and another whip of a cut, his jacket snapping over the clink of glass, “go to waste.”
“Why me,” says Jo, the word caught in her throat.
“I don’t like you,” says Orlando, stopping there, less than half a block away. “If you try to run again,” and he points his sword at Ysabel, “I will cut her down, first.”
“Remember your duty, Mooncalfe,” says Ysabel at that, and his laughter’s high and wild. “Duty? Not a quarter of an hour’s passed, Princess, since I saved us all by saying no. I’ve done my duty for the night. I trust, Gallowglas, you’ve remembered your sword this time?”
Jo’s dropped the duffel, the box upright before her. She’s opening the flaps at the top. “Jo,” says Ysabel, her eyes wide.
“I know,” says Jo, and she shucks her leather jacket. Her satiny red blouse quite dark in the dim light. She reaches into the box and draws her sword.
“Mark this, Princess!” calls Orlando, holding up his right hand wrapped in white. “I’m down an eye, and a hand. Let no one say this was an unfair fight.” Slinging his sword up and back over his shoulder head down skirt flapping he’s running headlong at Jo who says “Shit” and leaning stepping left foot back she swings her sword her hilt high a parry catching his savage one-handed cut with a shrieking scrape turning just as he runs past pushing his sword and hers up and up and out as he plants his foot and stops suddenly juddering his arm his blade turning down, back, ducking under her arm recovering from that wild parry as he pushes back against her and the wedge-shaped tip of that blade–
Ysabel’s hands leap to her mouth.
Jo trembling lowers her arm, her sword as Orlando turns there to face her. She looks down stupefied at the rip in her red shirt fluttering about the blade of his sword stuck there through her belly. Looks along it to his hand there on the hilt. Looks up. Tries to look up. She can’t quite lift her head. With a grunt he yanks his blade free and her blood splatters to the pavement as he steps back, throws his arms up, “La!” he cries. Jo’s leg buckles under a step she wasn’t about to take and leaning back she topples to her knees. He’s slinging her blood from his sword with a whipping jerk. Ysabel her hands trembling violently tries to catch a scream that just won’t come. “This, this isn’t,” says Jo, falling back, her head clopping against the pavement.
“You’re mine now, aren’t you,” says Orlando. Rubbing his right hand with his left.
Wavering a little her hands still trembling Ysabel walks past him to stand over Jo, trying a couple of times to kneel there beside her without falling. “Quickly, quickly,” says Orlando, as she smooths Jo’s wine-red hair. Kisses Jo’s lips once. Stands, a scrape of metal as she turns, Jo’s sword in her hand.
“Really, Princess,” says Orlando.
“Mooncalfe,” says Ysabel thickly, “I would no more have you in my court.”
“Your court?” he says, and then, “She’s off the field of battle, that will no more hurt me–” and he steps to one side as she lunges at him, and snatches the blade with his wrapped right hand. Wrenches it from her grasp. Catching her hair in his left hand, hauling her back against him, and the sound of bottles has since stopped. An engine coughs to life, an orange car rumbling past, down Everett. “Let’s go,” says Orlando. He pushes Ysabel up onto the sidewalk, stepping after, Jo’s sword in his hand. “We’ll ask your mother what I’m to do with you.”
Standing there in the middle of the intersection a white paper sack in one hand his other shoving long dark hair a thin curtain from before his eyes frowning “Hey?” he says, soft and deep. A growl of engine an orange car lurid in the dim light swerves around him but he doesn’t look away after it. He doesn’t look up the street where it came from at the big man in a black suit walking at a fast clip up to the corner and around it. He’s looking along the other street, at the man in the long dark skirt, at the long straight sword in his hand, at the woman in the short white parka he’s pushing ahead of him. At the body they’ve left crumpled on the pavement. “Hey?” he says again. The man in the skirt, the woman in the parka, neither of them stopping or turning or noticing at all as grunting, sobbing, they make their way to the corner and around it and they’re gone.
“Jo?” says the man still standing there in the middle of the intersection. He’s wearing a black down vest over a black T-shirt. His arms are bare. The T-shirt says Ted Kord & Maude in white letters. The body crumpled on the pavement one leg kicked to one side asprawl the other folded up under one arm jackknifed to the side hand over belly fingers adangle the other upflung beside the canted head one eye staring whitely up at nothing. He steps closer, closer still, and a siren somewhere blocks away whoops up into stuttering bleeps and stops with a strangled blurt. The stoplight in the intersection behind him clicking and all the blood about the body’s lit up yellow and orange, gold. He stops short. “Jo?” he says, again. The stoplight clicks, clacks, the blood lost again in all the red and black.
A rustle, a plop, the paper sack drops to the pavement there by the body. He squats by the sack, one hand up over his mouth. His other hand not touching her shoulder, her face, rough-knuckled, black-nailed, glittering with silver rings, an ankh, a skull, a pair of dice, snake eyes. “Hey?” he says, looking up, about. “Anybody?”
The stoplight clacks. His dark hair’s splashed with green.
He folds his hand gently about hers there over her belly, turning it palm up as his other hand drifts down to settle over it pressing it between them over the rip in her shirt shining wetly skin and the blood those reds all smeared into one uncertain color by the light. He’s pressing his thumb along her wrist hands shaking and then “No,” he says, “no, no, not the thumb,” lifting his hand away, shaking it out, pressing his fingertips, forefinger and middle pressed together against her wrist as her head lolls a bubble of spittle bursting on her lips cords jumping in her throat and he’s rearing back, “oh,” he says, “oh, okay,” sitting back on his heels. Letting go, dropping her wrist. Rubbing his hands together. Looking about the dark block of the converted warehouse to one side, the unlit windows of the wine shop to the other, the silent construction sites past the empty intersections at either end. A duffel bag there by her foot, a long narrow cardboard box strapped to it. “I need,” he says, “to find, a phone?” A rumple of black there on the pavement behind her a leather jacket. He stands, a little unsteady. “You’ll be okay, right? Powell’s is just, Powell’s is right over there. Somebody’s still got to be there. Right?” Stooping to pick up the jacket. “I’ll, why am I even talking,” and then he freezes, looking down where the jacket had been, the jacket dangling from his hands. “Shit,” he says. He starts to lay it back down, and then he says “Fuck the evidence,” and shakes it out, steps back to Jo. “You’ll be okay,” he says. “I’ll just be a couple of, a few minutes. You won’t, bleed out. While I’m gone. Right?” Hefting the jacket in his hands. Frowning. Patting it down, reaching into the pocket on the side of it that’s dangling a bit lower. Pulling out a glassy black phone.
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Yeah.”
He thumbs a button, pokes the screen until he gets a keypad. Punches in nine, one, one. Stares at it there in his hand, no earpiece, no microphone.
“Nine one one emergency,” says a tinny little voice.
He yanks the phone to his ear. “Yeah,” he says, “hello, can you hear me?
“Yeah, I need to report a stabbing? Someone’s been stabbed. With a sword? I think?
“I don’t know, it isn’t, I think he took–
“Northwest Twelfth between, ah, Everett and what’s the, the, F? Foster? Flanders.
“Yes, she’s, yes, there’s a pulse, and, uh, but there’s a lot of blood. Shit.
“No, I mean, uh,” he picks up the white paper sack the bottom of it soaked through dark and wet, “I got, it’s all over the burritos. Ingrid’s gonna be furious.”
“So,” says the Duke. Looking out the window at the passing lights. “There nothing to be worried over.” His jacket brown with wide blue stripes, his shirt a creamy gold, buttoned up to the collar without a tie. “Ready?”
Beside him in the back seat she’s looking out the other window, at the traffic. Her hair cut quite short, wine red. A buff-colored bolero jacket spangled in red and pink and orange over a severely simple gown the color of old bone. Her arms folded in her lap.
“Jo,” says the Duke.
“What do I say?” says Jo Maguire. “How do you figure I’m ready for this?”
“We could go back,” says the Duke. “One word, this car stops. We get sandwiches from Eastside, we watch some television, we get out of these clothes–”
“You’re only saying that,” says Jo, “because you know I’ll say no.”
“You think?” says the Duke. A sign slides past out the window behind him as the car slows. Fred Meyer, it says. “I mean I’ve got a copy of that Canadian thing, about the guy. Wrote those plays?” The car stops, the click-clack of the turn signal. “But maybe another night, huh. Because you won’t say yes.” His hand on her knee, squeezing. “Anyway. Offer’s on record. Okay?”
Jo says nothing.
The car pulls into a right turn. The lights from traffic and shops give way to dark sidewalks, parked cars, windows lit here and there, a glimpse of books on shelves, a canvas on a wall a great slash of red and yellow dripped, a candle on a sill, someone face in shadow sipping something from a martini glass. Streetlights here and there blurry in a drifting mist of rain. They park by the side of a big brick apartment block, across the street from an old green house up behind a low stone wall, a neatly narrow garden, big white columns of its shallow porch in the glare of tasteful spotlights. Jessie shuts off the engine, sets the parking brake. Her grey chauffeur’s cap wrapped in clear plastic, a clear plastic raincoat over her grey chauffeur’s jacket. Climbing out the driver’s side door, levering the front seat forward, unfurling a clear plastic umbrella. Leaning in to offer a hand to Jo. In the palm of her hand a piece of paper folded and tucked into a triangle that says Is.
“Let’s go,” says the Duke behind Jo.
Jo looking up at Jessie nods and takes the triangle from Jessie as she climbs out of the car. “We’ll be, ah,” says the Duke, shifting along the back seat, planting his cane, taking Jessie’s hand. “A while, actually.” Settling a brown porkpie on his head. “I honestly don’t know. Go have a drink, go dancing.” Taking the umbrella. “Heck, go to Goodfellow’s. I wouldn’t even worry about starting to wait until after midnight, so–”
“I’ll call,” says Jo. The Duke frowns. “I have a phone?” she says.
“Oh,” says the Duke, “that, right,” and then Jessie steps between them, up against him, presses a brief kiss to his lips. “For luck,” she says.
“Not a factor,” he says, and he smiles his crooked little smile. “But I’d never turn it down.” He kisses her, a longer, softer kiss, and then, stepping back, looking over at Jo, holding the umbrella up as she steps next to him, as Jessie heads off away down the sidewalk. “What was that she gave you?” he murmurs in her ear. “A note?”
Jo nods.
“For the Princess?” says the Duke. “Good thing for her I’m not a jealous god. Well.” Tapping his cane against the pavement as rain patters on the umbrella above them. “Let’s get this done.”
They set out, across the street to the old green house behind its narrow garden, its low wall, its wrought iron gate.
One eye brown as a forest floor, one eye piercing cloudless blue, both blinking thickly, heavy-lidded. Pinkish orange hair crisply stiff crackles against the pillow as he looks to one side, then the other. Bars, a rack of equipment, digital numbers brightly fuzzy in the dim light. Tubing. A yellow catheter taped to the back his hand. More tubing up along his neck, his cheek, feeding into his nostrils. Beige sheets, a fuzzy blue blanket rumpled about his hips. “Hey,” says somebody, off over that way. “Limeade. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“What,” he says in a voice scratched thin. “Did you call me.” Smacking chapped lips, licking them.
“Oh, hey,” says a skinny man in pale pink scrubs, his hair a fuzzy bush of tightly kinked black curls. “Nickname. Wasn’t thinking.” Peering at the rack of equipment, checking the yellow catheter with sure and careful hands. Shaking out the blankets. “But what did you call me,” says the man in the bed.
“They brought you over from Hooper a bit ago. Said you were ranting and raving before you passed out, lime to the lemon, lemon to the lime, lime soda. You remember any of that?”
“Limeade,” says the man in the bed.
“Nickname,” says the nurse. “Like I say. Had to have something to call you.”
“Reynard,” says the man in the bed, “Reynardine. Raynaud. Reynolds. Raymond.”
“Pick one?” says the nurse.
“Ray,” says the man in the bed, struggling to sit up. “Raymond. Call me Ray. Something– I have to get out of here.”
“Hang on, hang on a minute, I’ll help you to the bathroom. You probably got a–”
“Out of here. I must leave.”
“Hold still, Ray.” The nurse gently pushes him back to the pillow. “You don’t just walk away from a coma. Patience. We gotta check you out, there’s these tests, and man.” He smiles. “You’re gonna love the paperwork we got picked out for you.”
“I need,” says Ray, “something to drink.”
“Water I can do.”
Ray shakes his head, pink hair crackling. “Wine,” he says. “Whiskey.”
“Whoa,” says the nurse, shaking his head. “Not here, man. Not in here.”
“I need to get out of here,” says Ray, fighting back up on his elbows. “If you won’t let me leave–”
“Calm, man.” Not raising that soothing voice but his hand firm on Ray’s chest, not letting him up. “It’s okay–”
“I’m stripped raw as if I had no,” says Ray, “someone’s coming that’s what woke me,” his hand flapping by his shock of hair, “like a pressure, a pressing on my–”
“Headache,” says the nurse, both hands on Ray’s shoulders now, steady, fixed. Ray’s breathing heavy, fierce. “Bet it’s a king-hell doozy–”
Ray claps the heel of his hand over one eye and roars, a deep rumble torn and echoing in the dim room, rattling the IV stand, the clear plastic tubing, the clanking safety bars up on either side of the bed, the nurse steps back, the lights flicker, those numbers blink and change, wink out, flash back in bursts of random nonsense.
And then Ray sinks back against the pillow with a ghost of a smile.
“What,” says the nurse, as loudspeakers crackle, “was that?” An Emergency Department lockdown is now in effect, says a tinny, staticky voice. Emergency Department lockdown, now in effect. “Ray. Talk to me, Ray. Tell me what just happened.”
“I need,” says Ray, barely a whisper, “liquor, I need to go away, I can’t be here, not yet, not yet,” and then blinking, finding the nurse, “lucky,” he says. “Lucky. He isn’t going to, he isn’t coming here. He’s looking for something else. Someone. But he might,” sighing, closing his eyes again. “I must be dulled,” he says. “I need a bushel. Booze,” drawing out the word, savoring it, and then with a little laugh, “no more limeade–”
Huffing, puffing, “Make a hole,” she bellows, and the four or five men and women in purple and blue scrubs flatten against either side of the hallway as keys jangling, boots thumping she barrels through them and around the corner. Far end down there a couple men, three men holding, dragging a fourth, the only one in scrubs, green scrubs under a white lab coat bunched in the hand of the big man yellow shirt flapping open over a bare broad chest. She stops crouching a little reaching for the handle of the blocky plastic gun strapped to her belt–
“Wilberforce,” says the second man, the one in the tweed jacket, to the third, the tall one in the long black coat.
– the blocky plastic gun in her hand with its bulbous yellow snout coming up free hand cupping the butt of it finger tense against the trigger as that tall man spins coat swirling a loud slapping crack filling the hall her hand jerked up and back the blocky gun pinwheeling away. That long black coat settling, his arms crossed before him, black-gloved hands poised by his hips, over the pearly white handles of the revolvers holstered there. A puff of smoke floating before him curls of it tugged down toward the gun slung to his left. “Like to see it again, ma’am?” he says, a smile somewhere under his enormous grey mustache. “Stand down? Please?”
“Through there,” says the man in the white lab coat, and the man in the tweed jacket says “Luys, with me,” and pushes through a swinging set of double doors. The man in the yellow shirt lets go of that white coat and follows. The man in the long black coat lifts a gloved hand to the brim of his soft pale hat with an absurdly high crown, punched in on one side. “Sir,” he says, to the man in the lab coat, “ma’am,” to the security guard still staring at the broken plastic gun halfway down the hall, “just a minute or two more to get what we came for. Then we’re out of your hair.”
The room beyond is brightly lit. A cluster of people anonymous in blue and green scrubs and white surgical masks about the high table, and “Watch it” someone’s saying, muffled by a mask, and “There, right there” and “It’s dropping” and “God dammit” and “Crashing” and “Flanagan, Security, now.” The man in the tweed jacket holds up one hand burning, flaring like a torch too bright to look upon. “Ladies,” he says, “gentlemen.” In his other hand a clear plastic bag swollen with glittery dust. “The Hawk thanks you for your service and bids you take your leave.” Luys beside him, the tip of his longsword brushing the floor.
“We can’t, we can’t leave,” says one of the be-scrubbed people, and “Don’t, don’t” and “Still dropping” and “Another clamp, if you would.”
“Doctors!” he cries, stepping closer. “Nurses. You have done all you can and more besides and it will not be forgotten I assure you,” and one and then another steps back, falls back before him. “But this is what she needs,” his hand in all that searing light clenched in a fist, “and it’s not for you to see.” And he opens his mouth around a short sharp breath, then lets it out in a word, “Go,” and the passage of that word ruffles scrubs, aprons, flutters caps and masks, ripples the cloth spread over the body that’s been laid upon the table.
The Duke lays the plastic bag on a side table by a rack of stainless tools, a dish, neatly folded squares of gauze. With the hand that isn’t burning he whips sheets back, knocks aside a tented frame, exposes her there, pale, limp, naked, the red ruin of her belly peeled open, laid back. Yanking plastic tubes from his path a long needle from her arm heedless of the blood. “Shut that down,” he says as beeps and buzzes sound, and Luys shrugs and heads for the station behind the table where most of the alarms seem to be sounding. The Duke carefully pries a hissing mask from her face with his free hand, working it off over her wet red hair. “Jo,” he says, under the buzzing, the bleeps. “Please.” His other hand drips fire over her breast, her belly, white-gold light that sizzles against her skin.
By the wall Luys lifts his sword and brings it down in a shower of sparks and the bleeps squeal and shriek and stop and the buzzing dies.
The Duke dips his burning hand into the plastic bag and the whole room lights up, a sun shining there on that table. Squinting he drags it through the air over along her body and again and in its wake her pale skin blooms with color and with warmth. Again, and as that light passes over a third time her belly’s smooth, unmarred.
“Jo,” says the Duke, leaning over her, taking her head in his hands, that sun gone dim, just ripples now, the reflection of light on water somewhere licking at his fingers. “Come back,” he says, a whisper, and Luys looks away. “Jo,” says the Duke, “come back to me,” and he kisses her lips, and her chest rises with a breath, and then another.
As he wipes his eyes an unbuttoned green striped cuff falls away to reveal a watch, heavy and gold. “Thank you,” he says, his voice a rasp.
“Not at all,” says Mr. Leir, brushing cinders from his shirt too brightly white in the harsh glare of the arc light. “You earned it.”
“It’s, I just,” says the man in the green striped shirt. “Words. It’s, they’re inadequate.”
“Of course,” says Mr. Leir, pulling on his white jacket. “Your coat?”
As they leave the cavernous room, Mr. Keightlinger steps into the glare with a broom, sweeping ash from the unfinished wood floor. Mr. Charlock’s at the edge of that circle of light, one hand cupping his eyes, peering out into that darkly empty room, the shadowy suggestions of columns, glints from the glass of the windows lining the far walls. “You hear, like, a laugh?” says Mr. Charlock. “Weirdest damn thing.” Mr. Keightlinger shakes his head.
“What news of the Bride,” says Mr. Leir, in the doorway to the room.
“Unchanged,” says Mr. Keightlinger, stooping for the dustpan.
“Hadn’t left the house in days,” says Mr. Charlock, turning, squinting in the light. “We’re growing moss out there.”
“And tonight?” Mr. Leir’s frowning at the soot-streaked toe of one of his white bucks.
“Dinner,” says Mr. Keightlinger. “You called us in for this shindig,” says Mr. Charlock.
“You’d rather grow moss?” says Mr. Leir, tugging a handkerchief from his pocket. “Mr. Kerr,” bending over to rub at the toe of his shoe, “deserved his reward. Six months ago, Killian wasn’t going to run.” A last wipe at his gleaming shoe, he folds the handkerchief carefully and again. “Today, he’s the clear favorite over Beagle.”
“Well her mother’s got a big dinner party tonight, so hey, good timing on that reward.”
“And the new guardian?” says Mr. Leir.
Mr. Keightlinger, dustpan in hand, stumps over to a bulging garbage bag, empties the ashes into it. “What’s to know?” says Mr. Charlock. “He’s the worst possible choice.”
“Worse than the Chariot.”
“The Chariot was a machine,” says Mr. Charlock. “Predictable. This guy? He’s,” and he shrugs, hands wavering, looking for a word. “Nuts.”
“That’s an excuse?” says Mr. Leir.
“There’s a girl,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“A girl?”
“There might be a girl,” says Mr. Charlock. “That he’s, I don’t know. Seeing. We’re doing what we can.”
“Do more,” says Mr. Leir, turning away.
Mr. Charlock rubs his eyes, blinks, steps further into the shadows. “So you didn’t hear it, huh? High-pitched, like a giggle? A girl, I don’t know–”
“Mr. Charlock?” says Mr. Keightlinger, by the door. Away across that circle of light the little guy’s a hint of shoulders, a gleam struck from his bald head drooping, kneeling there in the shadows. “What is it?”
“Huh?” says Mr. Charlock. “Nothing.” In his hands a pair of underwear, bikini underpants with blue and white stripes. He wads them up, stuffs them in the pocket of his jacket, stands, turns, steps back into the light. “I’m hearing things. Let’s get back to it.”
The fireplace cold and dark, two wing-backed chairs drawn up before it empty, the reading lamp on the thin-legged table there unlit. On the bed pillowed in a deep down comforter Ysabel on her side wrapped in a short white robe, black hair heavily damp. Feet crossed at the ankles, white nail polish chipped and dingy, no rings on any toes. Calves shaded with delicate black hair. On a flowered saucer on the nightstand a cigarette wrapped in brown paper, burned down to a feathery twig of ash, a thread of smoke still tugging at its smothered cinder. “You will dress yourself for dinner,” says the woman standing at the foot of the bed in a simple black sheath and sheer black stockings. Her glasses narrow with black rims. Ysabel does not respond, or move, or even stir. “If you do not, don’t think you won’t be taken down in that.”
“Don’t encourage her,” says the old woman by the door.
“Goddammit, Ysabel,” says the woman at the foot of the bed, “don’t make me call the Mooncalfe,” and “Anna,” says the old woman by the door, quite stern, and then, quite softly sweet, “leave her to me, dearie. Guests will be arriving at any moment.”
Anna looks back at her, nods once, crisply, turns and takes her leave. The old woman flips a switch by the door and the fixture in the middle of the ceiling fills the room with too much light. Her hair is long and glossy white, hanks of it gathered in braids that wrap about her head like a crown and hang down before her shoulders to either side. Her plain grey dress blushes pinkly iridescent as she sits on the edge of that bed. “Well,” she says, with a heavy sigh. “A lot just keeps on happening, doesn’t it. And none of it due to you.”
Ysabel burrows more deeply into the pillows.
“Oh dear,” says the old woman, “oh dearie dear. Have you given up so,” and “Don’t dearie me,” says Ysabel, muffled by the folds of her robe. “So quickly,” says the old woman. “Did you think it would be easy?”
“Don’t ask rhetorical questions, either. I don’t need a lecture, Gammer.”
“What do you need, child.” She strokes Ysabel’s wet hair, her cheek, just visible. Ysabel lifts her head and looks the old woman in the eye. “A different dress,” she says.
The Gammer leans back on an elbow to look over her shoulder. Hanging from one of the half-open louvered doors there the other side of the bed a froth of white lace draped over a satiny ivory slip. “That will look lovely on you,” she says.
“It’ll look like a wedding dress,” says Ysabel.
“You are the Bride.”
“The King comes back tonight, then? During mother’s ridiculous dinner?”
The Gammer smiles. “Something’s lit your fire,” she says. “I’ve missed that, these past few days. Your mother’s many things, but I’d never say she was ridiculous. What’s got you so frightened, child?”
Tucking the folds of her robe under her chin, Ysabel says, “Am I broken, Gammer?”
“Broken?” says the Gammer. “And what’s put that idea into your head?” Sitting up. “Ysabel?”
From behind her fingers Ysabel says, “I tried a turning.”
“Did you,” says the Gammer, softly. “And how’d you go and do a thing like that? Without the King to hold your hand, and me still here in the world.”
“Wild queens once lived in the mountains,” says Ysabel, “and spun straw into gold the livelong day, and nary a king in sight.”
“The Soames told you some stories,” says the Gammer. Her lips pucker. “A jar of rabbit was it, then.”
“I drank it down,” says Ysabel, and “Ut,” says the Gammer, shaking her head. “I drank it,” says Ysabel, shifting on the comforter, sitting up, “and it did something, inside–”
“Dearie, don’t,” says the Gammer. Ysabel’s undoing the belt to her robe. “Jo found me,” she says, and “Never should have left you,” mutters the Gammer as Ysabel says, “Jo found me, lying, lying in my own, vomit,” and she opens the robe, “and Roland cut it out of me, and, and,” her words stumble over a sobbing breath.
“And not a mark on you,” says the Gammer, brushing Ysabel’s belly with the back of her hand.
“It hurts,” says Ysabel.
“Oh, it will,” says the Gammer. “But not because of any cut or spew.” She stands, steps over to the bay window, looks out into the street. “It’s not to be drunk, child.”
“Then how.”
“Wait for the King.”
“But why.”
“It’s what is done,” says the Gammer, pushing the curtain open a little more. “The Duke’s arrived.”
“The Duke,” says Ysabel. A cough, to clear her throat. “Who’s with him? The Mason? The Cater?” The Gammer shakes her head. “Who?” says Ysabel. “Not Greentooth, surely.”
“No,” says the Gammer. “Not Greentooth.”
Ysabel kicks her feet off the bed, hurries to the window, heedless of her open robe. Throws another curtain back. Her hand leaps to her mouth. There below in the rain under a clear umbrella the Duke in his brown and blue striped suit, and beside him Jo in a long straight gown the color of old bone, streetlight flashing from the spangles on her jacket, pink and orange and red.
“She’s come,” says Ysabel. “She’s come for me.”
A seamless sky grey-white floats over an ocean milky green like well-worn jade, the yellow white sand rippled, wind-swept, empty. The big picture window specked with dead raindrops. She sits in a recliner angled back, staring out at it all, legs wrapped in a rug made from rags in colors from old magazines. A cardigan buttoned up to her chin, her head leaned against the heavy shawl collar. Every now and then she closes her eyes as if she has finally fallen asleep, but sooner, later, they blink open again, she shifts a little in the recliner, folds her arms about herself more tightly, tucks her hands back under her elbows, or under the rug, stares out at the ocean through mud-colored eyes.
A huge figure of a man comes into the airy little room, soft blue denim shirt and a moleskin vest, his face a couple of dark eyes, a daub of forehead in an explosion of wiry hair all grey and peppery black and coiling sprigs and shoots of white. In one hand a thick yellow mug that he sets steaming on the tray table by the recliner. His other’s not a hand but a hand-shape, cast in bronze and beaten with whorls of puckered dots. Standing there a moment he watches her as she does not lift a hand for the tea, and then with something like a shrug he turns to walk away.
“Wish we could open the window,” she says.
He stops there by the low shelf buried under a great bouquet of chrysanthemums, heavy heads of yellow and gold and bronzey orange. “Yis builden,” he says, a roughly woven voice, “it’d fall. Yon light’s’ll can be mannered.” Over his shoulder a portrait of a jowled and scowling president from many years before.
“I can almost smell it,” she says, closing her eyes. “And the sound…”
“Ull, that,” he says, tching. “That’ll be, n’manner when nor where, and naught’s to lay by any’s name. Old as ever, it is.” And then that gap in his hair about his eyes narrowing he steps back up to her, lays his metalled hand on the back of the recliner. “Ut,” he says, and she opens her eyes.
Out there struggling against the wind a woman, her grey houppelande too heavy to billow, her hair hidden away in a wimple, both hands on the arm of a young man short and limping beside her, wrapped in a heavy bearskin, on his head a simple round cap of the sort favored by bankers. Bent under the weight of an iron bound chest he’s balanced on one shoulder, steadied with his free hand. Black padlocks clamp the face of it to either side.
“I’ll see to the kettle,” says the huge man, pushing away from the chair.
“Coffey!” cries the Duke, coming through the door in his camelhair coat. Behind him Jessie in her chauffeur’s jacket, a sack of groceries cradled in either arm. “Your grace,” says the huge man gruffly, directing Jessie with his metalled hand toward a swinging door at the other end of the room. The Duke coming around to kneel, wincing, his weight on the arm of the recliner. “Jo,” he says. “How are you?”
“Cold,” she says, the yellow mug steaming in her hands.
“You know, I think he likes you?” says the Duke. His chin resting on the back of the hand draped over the arm of the chair, his other hand wrapped about the stern hawk at the head of his cane. “They’re pretty much done at your place,” he says. “You might want to look it all over before it’s moved. Just in case. Not that there’s gonna be any problems. And, you’ve got time. Days if you need them. So you don’t have to, it’s not like I think you should be worried about any of it. Just– whatever you need, Jo.” She looks at him, then, his brown eyes sparked with green and gold. “For as long as you need. I’m gonna take care of you, Jo, I–” She’s turning away, thumping the mug down on the tray table. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Poor choice of words. I didn’t mean.”
“Let’s go,” she says. “Leo.” Lifting the rug from her lap. “Let’s go.”
In the little hallway kitchen cabinet doors left open drawers pulled out empty, all empty, the refrigerator door ajar and dark inside. A cardboard box full of garbage in the doorway to the bathroom, dust and shards of glass and crumpled paper towels. The window on the far wall of the main room of the apartment stripped bare, no curtains, no shade, outside the skinny white faux balcony weirdly sharp in the flat grey light. Folded as a couch the bare wooden frame of the futon, pillows stacked ungainly to one side. A steamer trunk on the bleach-stained carpet, a couple of wooden crates beside it, both of them nailed shut. The glass-topped café table with a couple of spindly wrought-iron chairs set legs up on top of it. In the corner the bulky blond wood armoire stands open, empty, a contraption of thin metal tubing hanging from one side that racks nothing at all.
“Not much, all packed up like that,” says Jo, her black leather reefer jacket buttoned and zipped to her chin.
“You want any of the furniture?” The Duke nudges the refrigerator closed.
“That was all,” Jo waves a hand at the armoire, the glass-topped table, “that came with her. Guess she didn’t want it.” Her hand coming to rest on an upturned chair leg. “The futon was mine, but it’s a piece of shit. I guess they chucked the mattress?”
“Probably?” says the Duke. “There’s a, it’s like a queen-sized bed, it’s all–”
“No,” says Jo, “but the blankets, I mean, there’s this one blanket.” Toeing a bleached spot on the carpet with her big black boot.
“Probably in the crates. Want to check? Jo?” She looks up, over at him. “If there’s anything about this you don’t like,” he says.
“What else am I gonna do?” she says, with an unsteady laugh.
“Is it the loft?” says the Duke. He limps into the main room. “Is it too close? Too soon? I’m not, it doesn’t, it’s just a convenient,” and Jo’s saying “No, no,” as the Duke says, “Give me a couple of days. We’ll find you an apartment somewhere, a house, whatever. Or.” He pulls something from a pocket, an envelope, unsealed, fat with bills. “I was gonna give this to you anyway, but you could–”
“The hell’s that,” says Jo, her hands in her pockets.
“Walking-around money,” he says. “It was gonna be. Go on. Should be enough in there, you could call a cab. Get a hotel room. Call me in a week or two. If you want.”
“This is real?” she says, riffling through the bills.
“As any promissory note,” says the Duke. He’s smiling when she looks up sharply. “Every piece of paper in there passed through a printing press, if that’s what you mean. And did time on someone’s hip. Except maybe some of the fifties, those were pretty new.” His smile softens. “Anything you want, Jo. Anything you need.”
She steps away from the table, envelope in hand. “Anything,” she says, looking out the window, out over the little parking lot across the street, the gullied freeway off to the left, the towering arc of the great bridge far off over the rooftops ahead. The dark hills green and black, draped in gauzy shreds of cloud. “I need to talk to her.”
“That,” says the Duke, “that’s not going to happen.”
“Anything.”
“Within reason!”
“Christ, Leo,” she says, turning away from the window. “Does she even know I’m alive.”
He looks away at that. “No one’s,” he says, “I don’t, ah, she hasn’t left the house. Not since he took her. But there’s to be a dinner, for the court. Tomorrow night. I’ll see her then. I’ll tell her whatever–”
“I need to see her.”
“That’s not–”
“I could go with you.”
“Jo,” says the Duke, his cane-tip thumping the carpet. “You lost. Your office was forfeit and he took the keeping of her. He took your sword, Jo. You aren’t a knight,” and as Jo’s saying “That, that doesn’t” the Duke says, “You have no place. Without a weapon, you’re no more a knight.”
The envelope crinkles in her hand. “So that’s,” she says, and she turns toward the trunk, the crates. “That’s it, then. It’s all over.”
“You lost,” says the Duke again.
She turns back, tossing the envelope onto the table, between the chairs. “So that’s,” she says, “what, the payoff?”
The Duke, blinking, twitches his head as if shaking off a fly. “Excuse me?” he says.
“She said,” says Jo. “The Queen said. When she, when Ysabel tired of her dalliance. That would be the end of it. That I was out. That’s what this is.”
“Now why,” says the Duke, quietly, “would I pay anyone off for her majesty, when I could have saved myself a season’s worth of owr.”
And then he’s the first to look away. “No,” he says. “That was rude.”
“I was–”
“We were both rude,” he says, shoulders hunched, scuffing the carpet with an oxblood wingtip. “I could care less what the Queen said, or wants. What I want,” and those shoulders lift and relax as he straightens with a sigh, “I want you, with me. The Princess? Any fool could see she isn’t done with you. Let me, let me go to this dinner. Find out how things stand, before we,” and then he frowns. “Jo?” he says. “What’s that?”
Leaning against the bit of wall hiding the refrigerator a long black spear-haft angled, the head of it like a mirrored leaf resting the tip of it touching there the corner where the ceiling meets the walls.
“Shit,” says Jo. “We never could get it out of the way with all our stuff in here. Kept tripping over the damn thing. It’s, the Dagger’s spear,” she says. “From the hunt. Remember?”
“If it were the Dagger’s spear,” says the Duke, “it would have been destroyed with him. No, I gave it to you.” His smile’s gone slyly sidelong. “You still have a weapon. Come over here. Take it up.”
“What?”
“Just go take it in your hands,” says the Duke, and Jo heads around the table past him, puts a hand on the black spear-haft. “Go on,” he says.
“What are we doing here,” says Jo.
“Do you trust me?”
“About as far as I could throw you.”
He shrugs. “Okay. Fair enough. Offer it to me. Offer it now, before one of us realizes how monstrously stupid this is.”
Careful with the heavy thing, ducking under it, she turns and pushes it still angled between floor and ceiling at him, the head of it up there winking in the flat white light from the window. He grips the haft of it there between her hands. “Joliet Maguire,” he says. “Gallowglas.” His voice gone gentle now, and his smile is almost gone. “Do you swear before us all, to withstand oppressor’s power with arm and puissant hand? To recover right, for such as wrong did grieve? To battle guile, and malice, and despite? To kick ass and take names for me, your liege?”
And with a shake of her head, blinking, a laugh, “Sure,” says Jo, and then, “Yes. I do.”
“The Hawk,” says the Duke, letting go the haft, “welcomes the Squirrel.”
“The what?” says Jo, leaning the spear-tip against the wall again.
“The T-shirt? You were wearing? At the restaurant that night, when we were, never mind.” He scoops up the envelope from the table. “Welcome to my company.”
Clear plucked notes a chiming descant over spidery strumming all from a big-bellied guitar wrapped up in the arms of a kid with a blue streak dyed in his bleached white hair. “Weave a circle round him three times,” he’s singing in a rough high voice, “you have to plan your moves at these times. Our hearts are breaking; one more song to go.” Jessie in her grey chauffeur’s jacket, bottle of soda in her hand, clear glass that says Dry Rhubarb in a splotch of red, at the edge of a crowd in the low back room, wool and lycra, satin and fleece, painted cheeks, drooping feathers, a long cardigan vest and a T-shirt and shorts, a lurid sari glittering with colored glass and bits of mirror, sagging jeans and a dinner jacket. “We had some good machines,” the kid’s singing, “but they don’t work no more. I loved you once. Don’t love you anymore.”
She sees him as they’re all applauding politely, as the kid’s ducking his head over his guitar, as she’s lifting the soda for a swig. His face all cheekbones and nose and eyebrows jutting, a white watch cap rolled down over the tops of his ears. A tight ringer T-shirt with a flying contraption printed on the front, all bat-wings and spiraled screws. His bare arms strung with wiry muscles and veins. He smiles at her, nods, as the kid starts picking out a new song on the guitar. “You look,” says Jessie, leaning toward him, “familiar?”
“Sorry,” he says, shaking that head of juts and angles.
“Or not,” says Jessie, shrugging.
“Lough,” he says.
“Lough?”
“My name.”
“I’m Rain,” she says.
“How can it hatch,” the kid’s singing, “if it didn’t get laid. Well there’s Vera Lynn, on the violin, Elvis Costello, well he’s playing the cello…”
“A generous shot of heavy rum,” says the old man, “something fermented from the third boiling of the sugarcane, with a good Jamaican dunder.” Ivory hair like a wild crown about his pink head. “To that,” he thumps his four-footed cane against the rug, “a third again of Fernet– the Jelinek, if you have it– and the same of John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum.” His pale blue suit baggy over a pink shirt, a white tie loosely knotted. “A dash of bitters, Angostura if you must, stir with ice and let it sit, this is very important! Let it sit a half-minute before straining.”
“Very good sir,” says the tall man, his chin nodding behind the high white gateposts of his upturned collar.
“Soda water,” says the young man, a hand on the old man’s shoulder, “and a straw.” His pale pale hair just touched with gold hangs in tangled dreadlocks to his shoulders. “The same for me,” he says, “but with ice, and orgeat, and cream. No straw.”
“Indeed.” The tall man all in sombre black walks softly across the dark wood-paneled room, loomed over by enormous oil paintings of dour men in rich black suits. Here and there high-backed chairs with elaborately carved wooden frames and jewel-colored cushions, little tables with barely enough space for their nests of knick-knacks. On an ornate sofa the Duke slouches in his blue and brown striped suit at one end, Jo in her bone-colored gown stiffly upright at the other. “Negroni,” says the Duke.
“More of a summer’s drink, isn’t that, sir?” says the tall man.
“Is it?” says the Duke.
After a moment, the tall man turns to Jo. “Miss?” he says.
“I, oh,” she says, “water?”
“Just water?”
“Try the soda,” says the young man with the dreadlocks. “Water and fizz, cream, flavored syrup.” His suit’s a deep rich blue over a white shirt shimmering like silk. “No alcohol.”
“What he said,” says Jo.
“I am touched,” says the young man, helping the old man to sit in a comfortably overstuffed armchair, “to see someone so committed to the ideal of second chances.”
“Sorry?” says the Duke, leaning forward at that.
“Merely complimenting what must be your new knight, Hawk.”
“How’s your sister?” says the Duke. “Viscount.”
“Louder,” says the young man. “His hearing’s not what it was.”
“Pinabel!” calls the Duke, to the old man in the chair. “Hound! How goes the war?” and as the old man looks up and barks, “As expected!” the Duke lurches to his feet, says in a voice pitched low, “That’s twice you’ve presumed in as many words, Axehandle. In the Queen’s own parlor. Have a care; my second is a gallowglas.”
“We’ve forgiven what might be forgotten,” says the old man to the room, his head bobbing. The young man, smiling, murmurs “Threats, your grace?”
“That’s the best you’ve got?” says the Duke, still low, still fierce.
“And we’ve forgotten,” says the old man, faltering, “what we can forgive.”
“But Excellency,” says the Queen, in the doorway at the other end of the parlor. “That’s nothing.” A black high-waisted gown, her shoulders bare, her long black hair swept back. The Count smiles broadly, his bobbing head settling in a nod. The Duke steps back. Agravante’s dreadlocks rustle as he wryly shakes his head. “Gentlemen,” says the Queen. “How good of you to come.” Ice clinking as a man in a trim black uniform moves among them, offering drinks.
“Nonsense!” bellows the Count.
“Nonetheless,” says the Queen. Beside her a man whose sun-browned head’s quite bald, his cheeks grizzled with a dusting of white beard. The wide knot in his yellow tie at odds with his trim tuxedo. In his hands a delicate flute of some clear liquor, much the same as in the Queen’s, and he lifts it as she lifts hers in a toast. “We salute you,” she says, and all about the room their drinks are raised, then sipped. Jo looks at the thinly milky stuff in her glass, shrugs, downs some more. “That was bracing,” the Duke mutters.
“So who’s her escort?” says Jo, leaning close.
“He’s no escort,” says the Duke. “That’s Welund, the Guisarme. A shark.”
“Welund?” says Jo. “Where’s Roland?”
“Not the best time for questions. Just, keep up. You’re doing fine.” And then, looking past her, “Hello,” he says.
“Leo,” says Orlando, and Jo whips around, steps back, out from between them. A white shirt open at the throat, a dark blue sarong stippled with little white flowers. There’s no glass in his hands. “The Queen has sworn,” he says, his dark eye bearing down on Jo, “never again to have another gallowglas in her house.” She blinks but doesn’t look away.
“And she does not,” says the Duke. Over away behind him Agravante’s laughing at something Welund’s said. “She has me, and I’m the one has her.” Laying his hand on Jo’s spangled shoulder. Jo twitches. “A nicety, perhaps,” says the Duke, “but merely one such as the many we depend on every day. Captivity suits you, Orlando.”
Orlando’s expression doesn’t change as he shifts his gaze from Jo to the Duke. “I am my own man yet,” he says.
“Then be so good as to assert yourself!” says the Duke. “Call down your charge. Let’s launch whatever this is to be and steer it toward the table. I’m famished.”
“But one guest yet remains,” says Orlando, “though I think he’s just arrived.” Bare feet whispering over the rug he moves past them toward the Queen and Agravante and Welund, and Jo sags, closing her eyes, her breath gone deep and quick. “Drink some soda,” says the Duke, and she scowls at him. “Just three or four more hours to go,” he says, and then, “Well. I guess tonight is a night for bruising a few precedents.”
In the doorway to the parlor the Queen inclines her head, just, to a man in a charcoal-stripe three-piece suit gaping over a sunken chest. A polished silver torc clamped about his knobby neck, his bald head bare and streaked with old grime, his shoulders damp with rain. “We are pleased and honored,” says the Queen, “to welcome our sister’s ambassadour.”
“Forgive my graceless demeanor,” says the man with the torc, and “Chazz?” cries the Count still sitting in his chair, peering about the backs of the men before him. “The invitation came to my attention at the most penultimate of moments, and any resources of which I might avail myself to freshen, as it is said, up, are thin upon the ground.” He takes a heavy limp of a step. One foot’s bare, the nails of his toes quite long and jagged sharp. The other foot’s a wad of mud-soaked bandages, and the leg of his suit hangs in shredded tatters. “A bit of which, the ground I mean, I fear I’ve tracked across your lovely floors.”
“A passel of gimps,” mutters the Duke, and “What?” says Jo. “If that ain’t a metaphor,” he says.
“Gentlemen,” calls the Queen, then. Beside her a woman in a simple black sheath leans close to murmur something in her ear, and she nods. “If you would join me here in the hall to raise our glasses, once again.” And Jo looks down to see her hand in the Duke’s, looks up to see those brown eyes sparked with green and gold. He squeezes, once, and lets her go.
The Queen stands at the foot of a sweeping flight of stairs in marble, carpeted with a runner like a neatly trimmed waterfall of white and gold. “It gives me,” she says, raising her glass, and they all follow suit, Jo behind the Duke, her tall glass half drunk held up in her hand, “such pleasure as I cannot adequately express,” and there’s a rustle up there, a lick of white lace flashing past the bannisters above, a click of heels on marble, “to bid you welcome back once more,” and there she is, at the top of the stairs, in a long ivory slip under a draped and gathered froth of white lace, her black and tangled curls held back with a simple band, and she’s restlessly looking over all those bald heads looking up at her, smiling at the Duke’s flopping brown locks, and then at Jo wine-dark behind him, looking back at her. “My daughter, Ysabel,” says the Queen, and glasses are hoisted, lowered, sipped, as smiling the Princess takes one slow deliberate step after another down those stairs.
“Faded Flowers,” written by Shriekback, copyright holder unknown. Dry Soda® is a registered trademark used for Nonalchoholic Beverages, Namely, Carbonated Beverages, Drinking Water and Mineral Water and owned by Dry Beverage Inc. “Beginning,” written by Denis Jones, copyright holder unknown.
“Gentlemen!” bellows the Duke, and he pounds the hood of the car. The muted conversations, the laughter from the big man in the bulky sweater, all of it rumbles away to stillness. “Thanks,” he says. Maybe ten of them in the little parking lot to the side of the big brick temple, steaming cups in their hands, here and there foil-wrapped burritos, a paper boat loaded with quesadilla. Paper bags, ripped sauce packets, shreds of foil scattered over the hood of the reddish-brown car. “You all know Jo Maguire.” The Duke in his camelhair coat and a snap brim tan fedora, Jo beside him in her black leather reefer jacket, her wine-red hair bright in the thin-stretched morning light, a cigarette smoking wanly in her hand. “Jo, here’s, well, some of the boys. Anybody know where’s the Shrieve?”
“Milwaukie,” says the one in the peach and blue check jacket. The one in the long black coat says, “The Couve.” The Duke shrugs. “Busy man. The Cater,” pointing to the check jacket, “the Mason,” the big man in the sweater beside him. “Stirrup,” is the man in the brick-colored car coat, “the Kern,” a man in a black jumpsuit a-dangle with pouches and loops, “the Harper,” a big blond beard and a sheepskin jacket, “the Shootist,” the man in the long black coat, who tips his pale grey hat and says, “Pleasure to see you up and about, miss.” The Duke’s moved on to a man in a dark green work jacket. “The Axle,” he says, “and that’s the Spadone,” a man in a brown and black ski jacket, a grimy white apron stretched over his belly. “Don’t listen to a word he says–”
“Yeah, boss, fuck you too,” says the Spadone.
“The Buckler,” a man in grey sweats, a cup of coffee in either hand, “and the Cinquedea,” a man in safety orange coveralls and a long red coat puckered with intricate embroidery. “There will be a quiz,” says the Duke, looking over the litter on the hood of the car. “Didn’t I ask for donuts?” he asks the boy behind him, slouched against the brick wall in a brown bomber jacket. The boy shrugs. “Anyways,” says the Duke, turning back. “The Gallowglas has given up her banner and sworn fealty to ours. So give it up for the newest member of the crew. She’s getting the Helm’s streets,” he says, “full stop,” as eyes avert, heads duck, shoulders shrug, fingernails are closely examined, coffee’s sipped. “Chilli,” says the Duke to the big blond beard, “Medoro,” to the work jacket, “Astolfo,” the grey sweats, a coffee in either hand, “this is name only. Y’all keep up the rounds as you have been. Also! Tonight. The Queen’s dinner. Jo’s my companion, another full stop. Do we have a problem here, gentlemen?”
Not a word or gesture from anyone until the Shootist hikes up his belt, the butts of his pearl-handled revolvers twinkling. “Nossir,” he says.
“Hart and Hive, boys, can I get a fucking hello here?”
And “hello” and “hey” they say, and “hi,” and “Salud!” cries the Spadone, and there are nods, and paper cups of coffee hoisted. Jo looks down, drags on her cigarette.
“Anybody worried about change? Tradition?” says the Duke. “In about a month, this whole damn city changes. Get used to it. Okay,” clapping his hands a sharp pop in the little lot, “let’s settle up.” He heads around to the back of the car, prising a single key from the watch pocket of his brown jeans. Opening the trunk he leans in to wrestle a box to one side and drag another closer, to haul up a glass jug sloshing something viscous, white, frothed with a sheen of bubbles, a hint of warm yellow gold. Balancing it with one hand against the bumper he reaches up for the trunk and as it thunks home yelps, jumps back, catches the jug as it teeters over the pavement. Jo’s standing right there, her frown slipping quizzically from the trunk to him, huddled, clutching that jug. “Startled me,” he says, straightening.
“You don’t need me for this. Right?” she says. “I’ll just head back upstairs.”
“Put that out first,” he says, and rolling her eyes she flicks the half-smoked cigarette away. At the door, her hand on the knob, she turns, looks at them all watching her. “Thanks,” she says, to all of them. “I, ah, yeah. Thanks.” She opens the door, she steps inside.
The Duke leans over to the boy in the brown bomber jacket. “I thought I told you to–”
“You also said not to fucking let on. She stepped right the fuck up, I shoulda fucking tackled her?”
“Yeah,” says the Duke, sucking his teeth, “well.” Carrying the jug around to set it down before the car. “Okay, boys,” he says, unscrewing the cap, and they’re setting aside coffee cups, swallowing the last bit of burrito, producing bottles and jugs of their own, the Buckler cradling a plastic bag in his hands, quiveringly full of yellow-white frothy stuff. “One at a time,” says the Duke, “let’s go, let’s go,” and the first of them, the Mason, steps up to empty his bottle carefully, carefully into that big jug there on the pavement.
“Jo?” calls Jessie down the airy white room lined to her left the length of it with tall and narrow windows one after another. To her right in the corner a sofa bed’s unfolded, a nest of white sheets and tangled blankets below a big flatscreen television set. A girl asprawl on her belly all elbows and knees and knobby ankles kicked up in the air her big feet dangling, wearing underpants with a mouthless cartoon cat printed across the seat, a video game controller in her hands. On the screen a figure in a scanty purple cheerleader outfit swings a chainsaw in a roundhouse swoop at a shambled knot of zombies, grinding snarls and moans from little black speakers scattered about. She shoots an ugly look at Jessie and jerks her pigtailed head, further back, further in. The cheerleader’s running down a darkened hallway lined with lockers.
Past the sofa bed a long table under the windows, some high-backed chairs, four plates still set out bits of pasta and tomato sauce clinging here and there, an empty wine bottle, a couple of glasses. Past the table a red jacuzzi, over there a sink bolted to the wall opposite the windows by a white door paned with frosted glass half-open on a cramped bathroom. Well past that down a length of empty white plank flooring a queen-sized bed in a pool of soft light from the corner windows and beside it a ladder up to a dark corner of a loft under the high unfinished ceiling. At the foot of the ladder a steamer trunk, a couple of crates nailed shut, and leaning there by the ladder the black haft of a spear. “Jo?” says Jessie, peering up the ladder.
“Down here, sorry,” says Jo, from the floor over on the other side of the bed. On her back, hands folded over her belly, a white V-neck T-shirt and black jeans and her big black boots. A wineglass redly full by her hip. “I can get up,” she says, but she doesn’t.
Jessie in her dark brown cardigan sits on the bed all crisp white sheets and fluffy comforter, an orange God’s eye afghan neatly folded. “It’s okay,” she says. “How’s, how are you–”
“It hurts,” says Jo. “And I’m still getting,” she swallows, “nauseous like, in waves–”
“Nauseated,” says Jessie, and then, “No, don’t, nothing. Never mind. Did, did Leo tell you about–”
“What,” says Jo, flatly.
“Somebody, Karen, from this shop up the street, she’s coming by with some dresses for you to try on. For tonight. Not for a couple of hours. I’m telling you,” leaning forward, elbows on her knees, “I’m telling you this because Leo, he, he moves fast.” Jo snorts. “What I mean is, he decides something, like this, and then he’s, well, up and on to whatever’s next.”
“No followthrough,” says Jo, hands tightening on her belly.
“He’s got people for that,” says Jessie. “Me, mostly. Ever since, for the last couple months.”
“Okay,” says Jo, and grunting she sits up. “You told me.” Picking up the wineglass. “I got a couple hours? I’ll just head upstairs, maybe take a nap or maybe another shower–”
“Jo,” says Jessie, and Jo sets the wineglass back on the floor. A power cry from the other end of the room, the revving of a chainsaw, roars of pain. “I’m glad you’re here. I know this is kind of a, I mean it is a weird situation, but he really, he cares for you. A lot. So I’m glad you’re here.”
“Weird,” says Jo, “situation, what I don’t need, sorry, no offense, what I don’t need is the girlfriend telling me how cool he is.”
“I am not–”
“Let’s play this straight, okay? The two of us?” Jo’s knees up, her arms about them holding on. “I’m not here because I want to be. I’m here because this is all I’ve got.” She swallows again. “This is how I get her out of there. So that’s how far I trust him and absolutely no further. Okay?”
“I was never his girlfriend, okay?” says Jessie, as Jo climbs to her feet, scooping up the wineglass. “He’s my employer. I do a job for him, he pays me. This is me being straight with you, okay? He’s a good man.”
“I told you,” says Jo, headed for the ladder, “what I do not need–”
“Did you mean to kill Tommy Rawhead?”
Jo stops at that. “I didn’t kill–”
“No?” says Jessie.
“The fuck does this have to do with–”
“Intent,” says Jessie, leaning back on the bed, tucking a yellow lock behind her ear. “Did you mean to step out in the street when Roland struck him with the sword?”
“I didn’t know how it worked,” says Jo. “When that happened.”
“I was here that night,” says Jessie, “when they brought in, it was a bone, was all that was left. I saw the look on his face, Jo. I know what he’s forgiven you. He’s a good man. He didn’t do, what you said he did.”
“I didn’t mean to kill Tommy,” says Jo. She starts hauling herself one-handed up the ladder, careful of the full wineglass. “But still. He’s dead.”
He leans against the fender of the reddish-brown car, a black stripe down its side, parked across the street from an old green house up behind a low stone wall, a neatly narrow garden, columns brightly white in a tasteful glare. It’s raining harder now. He doesn’t seem to notice. He wears no hat or coat, just a track suit, green, with silver stripes, and darkly splotched with rain. Rain glistens in his close-cropped hair gone pinkly orange in the streetlight. He wears a pair of sunglasses the lenses like jagged pieces of green bottle-glass, and blue and white headphones cup his ears. His hands in fingerless bicycle gloves clasped before him. His face expressionless.
And after a time, though the rain falls much as before, he pushes himself up off the fender of that car, and shakes his head, and slowly walks away.
The soup’s brought out in a gilt tureen held up by a man and ladled out by a woman, both of them in trim black uniforms, and it’s smooth and thick, a brightly golden red in their wide white shallow bowls. Jo reaches for her spoon and the Duke beside her lays his hand on her wrist, barely shakes his head. Another man in a trim black uniform’s got a little cast iron skillet sizzling in his oven-mitted hand, and he scoops a couple-three croutons into each bowl, and the woman following him in her trim black uniform crushes a pinch of herbs over the croutons and sets a dry dead leaf, an oak or a maple, to float atop the soup. Jo reaches again and again the Duke shakes his head, more perceptibly. At the head of the table the Queen’s lifted her spoon. She tastes the soup.
“A passata de ceci, ma’am,” says the Majordomo standing behind her, his chin tucked behind his upturned collar. “A soup of chickpeas and tomatoes, flavored with fresh sage, peppers, saffron, and wild fiori di finocchio.”
“Delicious,” says the Queen, and up and down the table the clink of spoons taken up and dipped into the soup. “Dang,” says Jo, scooping up another spoonful, and then she picks up her glass, looks back for the attention of one of those black-suited figures, “Excuse me,” she says, quietly, as the Duke’s saying “Jo, just–”
“Is something not to your liking, Gallowglas?” says the Queen.
“No. Ma’am,” says Jo. “It’s really very good.”
“Another drink, perhaps?”
“Well, I, ah–”
“Speak up.”
All about her the clinks and discreet slurps of soup assiduously ladled up to mouths. “I was going to ask,” says Jo, “whether there was any maybe orange flavor? I mean, this is, this good, but with orange it would,” she sets her glass down. “It would taste like a creamsicle.”
“A creamsicle,” says the Queen. “Well, Majordomo? Might we fulfill her request?”
“There is a blood orange syrup flavor, ma’am.”
“Oh,” says the Queen, looking back with a smile at him, “do whip up a batch. One for everyone, that we all might sample this delicacy.” Looking down the length of the table now at Ysabel sitting at the foot of it, her hand on Jo’s, Jo staring tight-lipped at her soup. “Creamsicle,” says the Queen. “How marvelous. You must tell us, Hawk, how this trick was accomplished.”
“Without more context, ma’am,” says the Duke, leaning forward to catch her eye, “I’d have to fall back to my usual response.” The Queen’s still fixed on Jo.
“Which is?” says the Gammer sitting across from him.
“Clean living,” says the Duke.
“The last we’d heard the Gallowglas was dead,” says the Queen, and Jo looks up from her soup as Ysabel squeezes her hand.
“Left for dead,” says the Duke. “A fine enough distinction indeed, but there we are–”
“Won’t happen again,” says Orlando, sitting across from Jo.
“Mooncalfe,” says Welund, a warning, there on the Queen’s left. “Blood oranges?” says the Count, alarmed, to her right. “Hush, Grandfather,” says Agravante beside him.
“I had hoped,” says the Duke, opening the fists he’d clenched to either side of his bowl of soup, “not to broach the subject until later–”
“Yes, tell us, Hawk,” says the Queen. “Why have you brought a gallowglas in my house?”
“She is now a member of my company, ma’am, and she has been wronged, by someone you have let into your house.”
“Go on,” says Welund gruffly after a moment.
“He means me,” says Orlando.
“They all know whom I mean,” says the Duke, an aside. “Five nights ago he drew on her without warning or quarrel–”
“I have a quarrel,” snaps Orlando.
“Even if you had,” says the Duke, “even if he had, ma’am, it’s a quarrel long since settled by an earlier duel, a duel he lost, as his eye bears witness.”
Spoons jump. Orlando’s pounded the table. “I will not put up,” he says, and Welund says, “Let him finish.”
“This is absurd,” says Orlando.
“Any quarrel he might have is not with her,” says the Duke, “but me.” He picks up his drink, a finger or so of sticky red liquor clinging to melting ice, and he tosses it back, sets the glass down. “And before you all assembled, I say he is a coward for attacking her in my stead, and I demand the return of her sword, which he is not fit to bear.” Looking away from Orlando up the length of the table to the Queen with a sidelong smile. “Ma’am.”
A clink from Chazz there next to the Duke, chasing the last of his soup.
“That’s all?” says Welund. “The sword?”
“It’s all I ask of him,” says the Duke.
“This is tedious,” says the Queen, waving at Orlando. “Produce the weapon.”
“I am my own man,” says Orlando, quietly, his hands unmoving on the table before him. “No ties of toradh bind me.”
“You have the keeping of my daughter,” says the Queen, “and I’ll not risk your losing her to the likes of him in yet another blasted duel. Produce the weapon.”
His chair scrapes as he pushes it back, tossing a plain black scabbard to the table, with a throat and chape the color of thunderclouds. In his hand the bared sword long and straight, the guard of it a glittering basket of wiry strands that meet in thick round worked steel knots. “I don’t know why I bothered,” he says. “It’s not a terribly good sword.”
“The Anvil,” says Agravante, leaning back away from Orlando, “is the finest smith of this or any–”
“Oh, I know,” says Orlando, spinning, lunging, thrusting. “I mean,” he says, head cocked, “the design of it.” The man in the trim black uniform confused looks down at the blade piercing his jacket, pinning him to the wall behind. “Only good for poking things,” says Orlando, straightening, leaning close to the man to plant his hand on his chest. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe her heart’s not in it? No anger,” he says, absently, “no fear…”
Jo eyes wide her left hand fingers knotted with Ysabel’s pressed to the lace of Ysabel’s gown.
Orlando wrenches the sword free from the man’s chest. “You see,” he says, over his shoulder to the Duke, “it’s lousy at cutting–”
“No,” says Jo, working her hand free as the sword sweeps back. The man against the wall looks up from the hole in his trim black jacket in time for it to meet his neck in a clean quick cut straight through.
Agravante pushes his chair back and Jo leaps to her feet and as the man’s body slumps to the floor the man and woman waiting to either side of him step back along the wall to make room. The Queen her elbows on the table her face in her hands. Welund stepping away from the table, a cell phone to his ear. “Like chopping wood,” says Orlando, turning back to face the Duke. “Do you still want it?”
“Jo,” says the Duke. “Leave.” In one hand the stern hawk head of his cane, in the other the heavy pommel of his longsword.
“I’ll,” she says, shaking her head, “I can take care of–”
“Go,” says the Duke. “I’d not have the lesson I’m about to impart made permanent.”
“I,” says Jo, and then, “oh,” and then, “oh,” backing away from the table as the Duke lurches to his feet. “I’ll be along presently,” he says. “With your blade.”
Ysabel’s hand’s found hers. Jo looks at it, looks at Ysabel’s eyes shining, her hurried nod, and hand in hand they turn away. A woman in a trim black uniform holds the door open for them as they stumble out into the hallway to the sound of ringing blades and the Queen’s voice bellowing, “Enough!”
Lollipop Chainsaw ©2012 Kadokawa Games/Grasshopper Manufacture.
“Leo, dammit,” says Jessie, hands up, blocking his way, and “Oh for pity’s sake,” he says, “it’s my fucking office.” In his blue and brown striped pants and a shirt of creamy gold, open at the throat, a very pointed pair of Persian slippers on his feet.
“She isn’t done,” says Jessie. The room behind her empty but for a big flat wooden desk on four stout legs and a shoulder-high rack on casters hung with dresses in colors that come from flames and dawns, sunstruck bricks, and leaves, just before they fall. A song is playing softly, guitar and piano and a big rubbery bass, on the black Fellini sails, tattered rags that hangs on nails reminds me. A woman in a navy pantsuit’s bent over at an awkward angle, tugging at a zipper in the back of a severely simple gown the color of old bone. Jo’s wriggling her shoulders from the straps, letting the front of it peel away from her chest. “What’s to do?” says the Duke. “That looks fantastic. Like whatshername. With the hair.” He diddles his fingers in front of his face. Jo shoots a look at the Duke, an arm across her breasts. The song’s soaring into a chorus, she had one long pair of eyes, she had one long pair of eyes between her. “Real nineteen-thirties Hollywood glamor thing,” the Duke’s saying.
“There’s a jacket, a bolero jacket with that one,” says the woman in the pantsuit, tugging the gown over Jo’s hips.
“So why are we still talking about this?” says the Duke. “Karen, thanks, I’ll have Sweetloaf run the rest back in a bit, now, if you don’t mind? I need to talk to Jo here, alone.”
“Leo,” says Jessie, curtly, as Karen nods and heads for the door, and “What,” says the Duke. “Is that dress not fantastic?”
“That’s not–”
“And is five-fifteen not allotted in my schedule for helping Jo to see the light? And am I not already running ten minutes late?”
“Twenty,” mutters Jessie, and “All right then,” says the Duke, gesturing toward the door.
“Actually,” says Jo. “Jessie. If you could stay.” In her black boxer briefs, tugging down her white V-neck T-shirt. Her feet bare.
“I, ah,” says Jessie, and the Duke’s saying “You didn’t, but, okay, sure. Why not. Fine.”
“So this light,” says Jo, and Jessie rolls her eyes, shoving her fists in the pockets of her cardigan, stretching it down and down.
“The light,” says the Duke, sucking his teeth. “Okay. Tonight ain’t what you think it is.”
“What is it I think it is?” says Jo.
“The night you walk out of that house with a Princess on your arm.”
“That’s not,” says Jo, “I wasn’t,” and “Come on,” says the Duke, “tell me. Look me in the eye and tell me. If she takes your hand, if she kisses your cheek and she says to you, Jo, she says Jo, take me with you– what are you gonna do?”
Jo one hand gripping the rack of dresses face hot says, “I made a promise.”
“And so it will be kept,” says the Duke, gently. “Safe and sound, warm and hale. Jo.” A shuffling limp, leaning heavily on his cane, and she looks down. “Jo, look at me.” His hand on her chin, hesitantly, gently tipping it back up. “I could just,” he says, and she lifts her head away with a little jerk and he lets his hand drop, “I could tell you it suits my purposes for you to go, and expect you to put on that dress without another word.” Jessie snorts at that, and the Duke favors her with a sour, sidelong glare. “But I am doing you the signal honor,” he says to Jo, “of explaining myself, a courtesy I rarely ever extend. If she were to walk out of that house with you, tonight. If,” he takes a deep breath, “if the last bond between the Bride and the Queen were broken, and no King were there to take her hand.”
“You’re talking about the coup,” says Jo, and Jessie looks up at that.
“No, no coup. Far worse,” says the Duke, and “Yeah, but, but the stuff,” says Jo, “the turning, the, the,” waving her hand, looking for the word, “the owr. It stops.”
“It’s stopped already,” says the Duke. “We squeeze ourselves dry week after week and nothing but dust comes back. No, I’m talking about it ending. Forever. No more Hive, nor Hawk, nor Hound.” He looks away, a bad taste in his mouth. “It’s started already. I have, Jo, with you, I have nineteen knights gathered beneath my mighty wings. How many came with their bottles to this morning’s Muster?”
“I, ah, so, the King,” says Jo, letting go of the rack, looking over at Jessie, who’s shaking her head. “When does he come back?”
“Once I have sat upon the Throne,” says the Duke, “and stood back up again.”
“Well, okay, so this Throne then,” says Jo. “We have to go find it?”
“It’s not like that,” says Jessie.
“It’s not time,” says the Duke.
“When, when is it gonna be–”
“I’ve sworn that by the turning of the year I will be King.”
“So that’s, what, a month? A month and a half?”
“Sooner, perhaps.”
“Well what is it we’re waiting for?” says Jo. “What has to happen?”
“Jo,” says Jessie, “just, don’t,” as the Duke says “I will know it when it’s time.”
“It. What it. What are you talking about here–”
He pounds his cane-tip against the floor. “I’m not ready, Gallowglas.”
“Leo, we’d better,” says Jessie, but Jo’s saying, “You’re not,” as she makes her way down the rack of dresses away from him, one hand brushing their shoulders, straps, hangers clink-clinking against the rail, each other. “Ready.” She stoops, picks up her black jeans, looks at them a moment in her hands. “All of this,” she says, “All, the stoppage. The squeezing. Her being,” shaking out the jeans, “cooped up with her mother, this, all of this, because, Christ.” Looking up at him now with those mud-colored eyes. “You’d better get ready.”
“I swore an oath,” he says. “Before the turning of the–”
“Your oath!” she cries. “Her wish! Her, vision, or whatever. Herself as Queen. We know it’s going to happen. Why are you even bothering with, she’s– Leo, shit, let’s go. Get it over with. Tonight.”
“Herself as Queen, and you by her side. Is that what she told you? Is that why you flung yourself against the Mooncalfe? You thought for sure you wouldn’t lose? Because of that?”
“I’m here,” says Jo. “I survived.”
“Let’s go, downstairs,” says the Duke. “You jump out in front of a bus. I want to see how her vision saves you then. If we go, tonight, to get it over with, best bring a broom with you, to sweep what’s left of me from the seat for the next candidate.”
“Who’s next?” says Jo, and he laughs. “How quickly I’m thrown over,” he says to Jessie, spreading his arms wide, the cane jaunty in one hand. “Do you see– anyone– else!” he bellows, and drives the cane down to crack against the floor. “Put down those pants, Gallowglas. Take a shower. Have Jessie do something with your hair and your face. Put on that dress. Do these things because it suits my purposes. We leave in an hour and a half.” And he turns away and limps toward the door.
“How?” says Jo, and he stops. “How does it, why risk it? Me?”
“I think you’ll make a decent catalyst,” he says, “provoking and, clarifying, certain actions and reactions. We’ll see how the Queen might back her daughter’s new champion.” His hand on the doorknob. “And I will keep a promise that I made to you: that you might see the Bride, and speak with her.” He opens the door, he nods, he steps through, and pulls it shut behind him.
Jo lets out a sudden blast of breath, shaking her head. “Arrogant,” she says. “Son of a bitch.”
“He’s a Duke, Jo,” says Jessie, scooping back her yellow hair. “What did you expect?”
“Still,” says Jo.
“Where’s the car,” says Ysabel, heading for the front door in a rustle of lace, a clatter of heels, and “Wait,” says Jo, padding after in her slippers, a glitter of spangles, grabbing Ysabel’s arm. “Wait.”
“We’re just going to walk home?” says Ysabel, turning, her hand on Jo’s elbow, her hip, pulling her close, Jo’s hand still on her elbow, her other arm awkward behind Ysabel’s back as Ysabel hugs her tightly, cheek to cheek, her eyes squeezed shut, “Oh, Jo,” she says, then leaning back a little and blinking quickly “They didn’t, they didn’t tell me,” and then as Jo’s saying “I didn’t think so” Ysabel kisses her, quickly, firmly, and then, her hands coming up, Jo’s awkward arm about her waist, she’s stroking Jo’s hair, her forehead against Jo’s, her cheeks wet, she says, “I missed you so much.”
“Yeah,” says Jo.
“You look so, so lovely tonight,” says Ysabel.
“Ysabel, we need to,” says Jo, and Ysabel says “Yes of course” and turns stepping out of the embrace toward the door again, and again Jo catches her hand, “No,” she says, “wait.”
“We should go, now, while they’re distracted,” says Ysabel.
“They’re, they’re done fighting, I think,” says Jo. A muffled bellow from somewhere down the hall behind them. “With the swords, anyway. There’s nowhere to go, Ysabel. I took the Duke up on his offer. I’m staying in his loft, until, I don’t know. Haven’t thought that out.”
“I can stay with you–”
“Ysabel,” says Jo. “Tell me. All of this. It was about becoming Queen, wasn’t it.”
Ysabel takes in a short sharp breath, then letting it out she smiles just a little and says, “Not at first.”
“Who was gonna be the King?” says Jo, looking down at her hand in Ysabel’s. Their fingers twined. “It wasn’t the Duke.” She doesn’t see Ysabel’s frown, the look she darts sideways, her swallow just before she says, “No one. I don’t need a King.”
“You don’t. But–”
“There hasn’t been a King for years.”
Jo lets go of Ysabel’s hand. “Yeah, but,” she says. “They seem to think you do.”
“I seem to think they’re wrong. Jo.” She grabs Jo’s hand in both of hers. “All I need, Jo, is a bit of medhu to turn. Once I’ve done it, that’s it, it’s done, and all of mine, and none of hers. We could walk out that door and find some, tonight. Jo, we could try it tonight!”
“I don’t know,” says Jo, “if I could go through that again. If it didn’t work.”
Ysabel pulls her close. “I will be Queen, Jo. I’ve seen it.”
Jo closes her eyes and lays her forehead against Ysabel’s. “Maybe,” she says, “maybe me saying no, maybe waiting for the King to come back, maybe that’s how it is you get to be Queen.”
Ysabel’s grip tightens on Jo’s hand pressed there between them. “You wouldn’t. You’ve just come back to me. You wouldn’t leave me.”
“I don’t know,” says Jo, and Ysabel says “Don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe me?”
Jo’s nose brushing Ysabel’s she opens her mouth to say something, but she doesn’t, she presses it instead against Ysabel’s in a briefly single kiss. “I believe that you believe,” she says, “with all your heart.” Leaning back, stepping back. Letting go. “But you could be wrong.”
“So could they,” says Ysabel.
“I can’t,” says Jo, stepping back again, “I can’t make this decision.”
“You have. You already have.”
“Ysabel,” says Jo, as heels click-clacking Ysabel heads past her down that hall toward the stairs. Jo reaches for her, her sleeve, and Ysabel stops, and turns, her eyes so green, so cold and dry. “Let me go,” she says.
“Here,” says Jo, holding up a piece of paper folded and tucked into a triangle that says Is.
“Is?” says Ysabel, taking it from her.
“It’s from Jessie,” says Jo. “I don’t think she knows how you spell your name.”
“So it’s my consolation prize?” says Ysabel, as she unfolds it, reading it, and her hand starts to wave the note, shake it at Jo, and she says, “She loves me, for what that’s worth. That whatever I want, whatever I decide,” and Ysabel lets the creased note fall to the floor. “She won’t stand in my way,” she says.
“Fuck,” says Jo under her breath as Ysabel walks away, and then, “For what it’s worth,” she says, taking a step after those click-clacking heels, “I’m gonna do, everything I can, anything, to get him on that Throne as soon as fucking possible. I’m gonna–”
“Imagine my gratitude,” says Ysabel, trudging up the stairs.
“I really don’t want to talk to you,” says Jo around the cigarette in her mouth. She’s sitting tailor-fashion on a little fire-escape balcony high above an empty street, a susurrating patter of gentle wind-blown rain on the awning above her. Across the street a big tan building, windows dark, only the red letters saying Fred Meyer lit up on the sign that hangs down the front of it. She leans forward to tap ash onto the sidewalk below. Wrapped in a puffy white comforter, one foot still in a sequined slipper peeking out there by the railing. Laid beside her on the grated balcony floor a sword in a plain black scabbard to the table, with a throat and chape the color of thunderclouds.
“Mostly I wanted to make sure they got this put in while we were out,” says the Duke, leaning against the sill of the open window behind her, in his dressing gown crowded with paisleys of purple and maroon and gold and brown.
“So this is new,” says Jo.
“Can’t have you traipsing all the way down through this pile to the parking lot every time you want a damn cigarette,” he says. “You really should quit those.”
“Yeah? Anything else I can do, to suit your purposes?”
He’s rubbing his forehead under a flopping lock of brown hair, looking away, down through the grated balcony at the street below. “You could,” he says, “accept an apology.”
Jo shudders then, under the comforter, closing her eyes. “Fuck that,” she says. “I made the decision I made. I’m not about to blame you for it.”
“Was it rough?”
“She hates me now,” says Jo. “I told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you mind?” says the Duke, one foot in a sheepskin slipper up on the low sill, and Jo shrugs, scoots over, “It’s your place,” she says, pulling the comforter more tightly about herself, careful of the cigarette.
“Yours too, now,” he says, climbing out the window, folding himself grimacing to sit beside her, rubbing his thigh. “What I meant was,” he says, after a moment, “I did a stupid and a foolish thing, to you. I,” and he takes a deep breath, “presumed, upon a trust we didn’t have, a trust that, because of what I’ve done, we may never have.” Looking at his hand, wrapped around the railing before him. “And I’m terribly very sorry for that.”
After, after a gentle pattering moment, Jo leans over to let the half-smoked cigarette fall from her fingers. Tucks her hand under the comforter. “All right,” she says. “Yes. I accept.”
He nods, once. He says, “She’ll get over it.” He looks out at the drifting scrim of rain, looks at her beside him, huddled under the comforter. Wincing, he hauls himself to his feet. “I like it out here,” he says, stepping over the sill, back inside.
“Hey,” says Jo, and he stops there in the window. “One thing. Coffey’s place. Why’d you take me there? How’d you know that’s what I needed?”
He’s smiling his crooked, sidelong smile. “Who doesn’t find sea air restorative?” he says. “Goodnight, Jo.”
“One Long Pair of Eyes,” written by Robyn Hitchcock, copyright holder unknown.
Muffled voices on the other side of a door or a wall and she opens her eyes slowly, a richly periwinkle that almost seems to cast a bluish light upon the sheets. Only a weird words that I couldn’t no idea what she was. Stoned out of her mind on something. Gorgeously model tall like a different language, one of the Russians? He’s gonna fucking usually sell it, or living beneath this? With the stuff from the truck.
She sits up. And immediately puts a hand to the side of her head, there under the spill of clotted yellow-white curls. Both hands to her face now pulling it, stretching, breathing heavily through her nose. Frowning. A generic little room, beige walls, two queen-sized beds side-by-side, the one over there mounded high with, with stuff, duffel bags and paper shopping bags and nylon drawstring sacks stuffed full, balls, soccer balls and footballs wrapped in clear plastic, tubes of tennis balls, on the floor before the chest of drawers with a television on top a ziggurat of shoeboxes. Quickly but carefully on hands and knees she moves to the foot of her bed, there the ruins of a brief red dress, torn, mud-stained, wet. She lowers a filthy bare foot to the carpeted floor, follows it down in a crouch. In there, says the one voice, crisp and clear.
Yeah, says the other, high and wobbly. From behind not the main door up the short dark hall that way but the flimsy communicating door, flat in the wall by the television set, the panel on her side propped open with a doorstop that stretching across the floor she reaches for but a click, a clatter, someone’s hand on the knob on the other panel in the other room swinging open.
“Why did you even put her in here,” says the guy pushing this room’s panel open into the room, a tangle of blond hair and a big blond beard and a sheepskin jacket hanging open, and “There was room on the bed,” says the other guy, and “No, I mean in here at all,” says the first guy, frowning, stepping into the room. “You put her where?”
“Shit,” says the second guy, swarming into the room, his hair black and spiky, his jacket grey with lots of little pockets and straps and and the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Heading around to the far side of the bed. “I swear she was in here, I swear.”
“Maybe she’s in the bathroom?” says the guy with the big blond beard, and as he’s turning there’s a squeak and a clack and the door to the room’s pushed shut. She’s standing there so tall, curly hair wildly white in the light, one shoulder back against the wall, one hand up, trembling, those bright blue eyes blinking rapidly. “Porth?” she says, or something like, and the second guy, the one in the grey jacket, he comes back around the bed, “There she is,” he’s saying, “hey, baby, it’s okay–”
“You mother-defiling moron,” says the guy with the big blond beard. “That’s the Axe.”
The eyes harden, fix, the trembling melts away as the shoulder comes off the wall her hand there lifting from behind her leg the wooden baseball bat she’s holding choked up high in a vicious short swing that catches the second guy in the side of the head and as he’s struck there wobbling, blinking, loops around to thunk against his chest and send him crashing to the floor. “Not. Anymore,” she says, her voice rough.
“Forgive me,” he says, “this far east, news of the court sometimes doesn’t–”
“You’re,” she says, and she coughs, “Harper. The Duke. Took me.”
“No, no, absolutely not. This little turd,” kicking the guy on the floor, “took you. Found you asleep by the dumpsters out back. He thought you had– potential. You can kill him, if you like.”
“Yes,” she says, shaking her shaggy hair out of her face. “Draw.”
“I will do no such thing,” he says. “Southeast knew nothing of this. I swear it.”
“Draw,” she says.
“No,” he says, and she shrugs, and swings the bat again.
Slumped at the foot of the bed he shudders as she’s pulling off his jacket and he opens his eyes. Watches her as crouching there she pulls the jacket on, buttons the top two buttons, one hand on the bat, her eyes on him, all the while. Patting her way through the pockets she stops, suddenly, softens a little, maybe a smile as she lifts out a little plastic baggie twisted shut around a thumb-sized wodge of golden dust.
“This,” he says, thickly, licking something milky from his lips, “this the Duke will hear of.”
“Fine,” she says, and she kisses the little baggie once, and tucks it away again. “Your pants.”
