Up with a hoarse shout thrashing, leaning forward, knees tenting the quilt arms about them and a slow deep breath hauled in, let out.
“That was a darn good burger, though. Wasn’t it.”
He lifts his head. The darkness about, thickly complete, nonetheless somehow suggests a shadow, small, sat at the foot of the bed.
“Last one I ever ate,” he says, and opens his eyes, head laid back against the one white pillow, blinking his way into the thin grey light of a morning much too early.
Cages sway, chains creak, a scatter of seedfall, feather-rustle and weight-shift clenching step, hunched shadows hulking in the sweeping light of the phone he holds up in one hand, brushing this one, that one, lingering over an empty cage a moment before finding a third, there, in the next to last row. One of the closer shadows leans precipitously and with a pinion-rattling shudder unclamps from about a wooden dowel those talons sharp-limned when they’re caught in the light, cruelly flexing, two above, two below, curled in a shivering fist, and there’s a winking gleam of brass, just there, but the light’s moved on, he’s turned away, ducking out through the door at the end of the porch.
There, under the flight of stairs bolted to the back of the old brick building, a couple of plain cardboard boxes stacked one atop the other, and he hurls up his hands to see them, tips up and back his head, cheekbones hunched to squeeze his eyes in a grimace of anguished frustration. The morning held at bay by watery air too wetly glistening heavy to be considered a fog or a mist but hung about so still, not falling, not even drifting, not a drizzle at all, and the soaked cuffs of his workpants flop about his ankles as he steps up under the stairs to seize the topmost box.
Clacker and pattle of parting beads, he shoulders through to set the one box heavily down atop the other, there to one side of a worktable ruthlessly cleared, among the other additional boxes stacked against the wall, beneath the counter, all of a size, plainly nondescript. He flips a switch, another, lights pop on, out in the main room, about the front window, George’s, say the letters reversed in red and yellow in an arc across the glass, Shoes Repaired. The floor of that main room’s covered with shoes, heaping mounds to the left, bulwarked against the wall, but laid out to the right in ordered rows, three deep, left by right but no two shoes of any pair of them alike, boot by pump, brogue by sneaker, nylon and velcro sandal-straps by glossy patent leather, and a narrow aisle down the middle of the room, stretched from door to counter. He’s wrenched up the flaps of one of those boxes, he’s pulling out more shoes, tossing them heedless onto the mounds, running shoe and hiking boot, slipper and espadrille, a seamless blucher he brushes against his workpants, knocking dried mud from the sole of it before it’s tossed, their impacts shifting, unsettling, remaking the haphazard ridgelines and headlands, subsiding, the next, though, a loafer dustily brown, a strap across the wrinkled vamp of it, and tucked there, worn too dark to gleam under this light, a single penny. He steps away from the box, shoe in hand, looking over those jumbled, scrambled mounds, “it was just,” he mutters, drops abruptly to his knees, shoving his free hand into a pile to stir it about, tumbling shoes in catastrophic avalanches until he tugs free an enormous basketball shoe, white and black and red and stiffly, shinily new, vastly overwhelming the loafer in his other hand, “but,” he says, getting to his feet, headed back along the serried ranks that line the other wall to stoop and set them side by side at the end of the outermost row.
“Hey, Biscuit,” he says, unlocking and pulling the front door open, “got away from me.”
“Beaumont,” says the man in brown coveralls, stepping within, followed by a short man, roundly heavyset, resplendent in pastoral beige, “This Miss Ida,” he says, as he stewards an older woman even more rotund, limpingly twisting from side to side through the doorway, “she’s come about your ridiculous stricture. She’s found what you demand.”
“Ain’t my rule, Reverend,” says Christian Beaumont, stepping solicitously back, “just a thing that gets done,” looking up to Biscuit, suddenly too close behind, “or, doesn’t,” he says, taking a step aside.
“Awful young,” says Miss Ida, peering up at him, not unkindly. “You George?”
“Ma’am, no ma’am, just looking after the place,” he says. “Name’s Christian. May I see it?”
“Beaumont’s acting as the Porter,” grumbles Biscuit, “since the Porter went over.” Ignoring him, Christian holds out his hand to Miss Ida. “May I see it?” he says, again.
It’s a simple white tennis shoe, white rubber sole with a single black stripe pristine, the canvas upper scribbled over with intricate shapes, lightning bolts and thunderclouds, nested spirals and zig-zags, all worked out in felt-tip black and biro blue, “Oh!” says Christian, turning it over in his hands, “oh, I know this one. Came in a good long while ago.” He sets off down the aisle toward the cubbies that line the wall there by the counter, passing through and beyond the beaded curtain, each in turn with a mismatched pair of its own. “Before my time, anyway, I’m pretty sure,” he says, stooping, peering seizing, “here we go.” Stands back up holding three shoes, now, two low white tennies both scribbled over and a low brown boot, leather of it webbed with creasings from much wear. He offers up the reunited pair to Miss Ida, “Ah,” he says, cheekbones hunched with a touch of chagrin, “welcome to Portland,” he says.
“Boy,” says Miss Ida, “I have lived in this city since Mr. Kaiser opened his plants up full-bore, in nineteen and forty-two.”
“Just a thing that gets said, ma’am,” says Christian.
“What am I to do with those? Somebody went and wrote all over them.”
“As you like, ma’am,” says Christian.
“Certainly wasn’t me.”
“Of course not, ma’am.”
“What am I supposed to,” she says, an irritated flick of a shake of her head, “they never would’ve fit me. What is this about.”
Christian looks to the Reverend, imperturbable beside her. “It’s just, the other one, ma’am. Of the one you found. They’re yours. Put ’em on a shelf somewhere, give ’em away, heck, chuck ’em out. Your shoes, your call.”
“I’m sleeping in a drawer,” she says, with some distaste, “in a chest of drawers, inside of a public garage. I don’t know as I’d have room. What about that,” a lift of her head, pointing her nose toward the boot in his other hand.
“Goes back in the pile,” says Christian, “to, ah, try again.”
“Looks an awful lot like what Joe Tully would’ve worn,” she says.
“He another of your folks?” says Biscuit. “Came back that night?”
“A Mr. Joe Tully was not among the flock,” says the Reverend.
“I never said it was his,” says Miss Ida. “Just that it looked like,” and then, “what if you was to give it to me instead,” and, “Ma’am?” says Christian, still holding out those shoes she hasn’t taken, but “the boot,” she’s saying, “if you gave me the boot, instead.”
“The shoes are yours, ma’am. The boot goes back with the rest.”
“I don’t want the shoes,” she says, drawn up and back, lips pinched, “those are little-girl shoes. Teenager’s shoes.”
“Oh, just let her have it,” says the Reverend, then.
“Sir?” says Christian.
“What could it hurt, to let Miss Ida have the boot?”
“I don’t know,” says Christian.
“What could it hurt? It’s just an old boot nobody’s worn in years, from the look of it.”
“Well,” says Christian, lowering the tennis shoes, “one day, someday, when whoever it is who find the other one of this,” hefting the boot, “and brings it here, I, I don’t know what it would do if this wasn’t here to meet it.”
“You don’t know,” says the Reverend.
“It’s never happened before?” says Miss Ida.
“I don’t know,” says Christian.
“That someone’s never walked in here,” says the Reverend, “with a, a shoe,” looking about that room, and all those so many shoes, “and you couldn’t find the match.”
“I don’t think so,” says Christian, and Miss Ida snorts. “I’m not the one who, who’s supposed to do this,” he says, looking back and up to Biscuit, impassive. “Usually.”
“There’s not much you do know, is there, boy,” says the Reverend.
“Well, sir,” and Christian kneels, setting the two tennis shoes on the dusty floorboards, there before Miss Ida’s feet plumply sprouted from her straining yellowed pumps, “I guess that’s so.” Looking up to them both. “But at least I do know that.”
Cheap tinfoil trays of food laid on this unfolded table, pillowy pale pitas in rows leaned back against rows like shingled tiles, and the tub beside of ravaged hummus, what’s left of the surface dark with sprinkled za’atar, a sheaf of largely denuded kebabs, skewers laid over scattered remnants of roasted vegetables, blackened wedges of onion, dice of eggplant and potato, crisp browned coins of zucchini and squash, and there a collapsing mound of slick white rice, and beside it, “What is that?”
“Chicken.”
“Chicken?”
“I think it’s chicken.”
There’s a fork leaned in that tray, wooden handle at the end of a stem of braided wrought iron, two brutal tines stuck through the bared white flesh, the gold skin peeled back wetly rumpled, all the variegated pieces, breasts and thighs and here and there a loosened drumstick, a twisted wing, “Grass above and stars below, how did meat come to be on our table.”
“It’s chicken,” says the woman in the beefy white T-shirt, “from the same conference leftovers,” reaching to pluck up a piece, “roasted with lemon and garlic and thyme,” licking the tip of her thumb, “delicious.”
“Appalling.”
“Disgraceful.”
“Impolitic?”
“People!” from the aisle down the middle of that great hall, loosely crowded with folks enough to lop into some of those stalls to either side, most with bowls or plates or napkins variously loaded in their hands, “Everyone!” She’s quite fat, the woman stood there, blousily loose pyjama pants and a tautly copious blue tank, black hair a long rope swaying, “Remember!” her pink bangs gone raggedly black at the roots, “Meat’s over there, for our guests, anyone who’d like; the tables on this side, the west side, as per usual, okay? Sunrise; sunset,” turning about, a shake of her head, muttering something, every goddamn, who do I have to, setting off through the crowd, someone draped in a blanket, a dilapidated cape, someone in nattily tailored windowpane, someone in camouflage trousers and a neon pink bandeau, a sleeveless hoodie and enormously belling cargo shorts, and so many others in more of those stiffly new oversized beefy white T-shirts, through and past them all toward the unlit stage at the head of the hall, the skeletal staircase that climbs to the balcony above, and painted high on the wall a giant curl of a question mark, exuberant with fronds and spots, over a much older sign, faded, worn, that once it can just be made out said Eastside Italian, and Market & Grocery. Just out of reach of the sunlight that’s sifted under the overhead door cranked halfway up, there’s a tall man, halely slender, his enormous beard lopped over a long loose open vest, khakis the color of sand, he’s shaking hands with another in a pale blue shirt and khakis a more sedately brown, stepping way now as she approaches, ducking himself under the overhead door, and “What was that about?” she says.
“Nothing to worry you, Gloria,” says the tall and slender man.
“And yet.”
He looks down at her, the shape and situation of that beard suggesting mirth as well as bonhomie, “Whatever has become of the carefree whimsy of youth?”
“I had to partner up with you,” she says. “Was he from the county?”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Gloria, I assure you.”
“And yet, Sinjin?” she says, turning away with a scowl, “I am not reassured.”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” he says, that beard setting cheer aside for something not quite either stern, or dour, but she’s headed for the staircase, a dismissive fillip flung over her shoulder, “Yeah,” she says, “well,” a foot on the first step, her hand on the pipe of a bannister, but it thrums as she grips it, and a snapping, measured clang, she looks up, “ah,” she says, to herself, “shit.”
A woman’s descending, flip-flops and a baggy grey T-shirt, her hair a turbulent cloud the color of clotted cream. Gloria steps aside with an elaborately deferential gesture the woman doesn’t bother to notice, serenely stepping from stair to floor and into the crowd, footfalls snapping in the silence that spreads about her as she makes her way toward one of the laden tables to the right, a half-dozen cardboard boxes set along the one side, each with a black plastic spigot poked out from the base of it, and sleeves of paper cups stacked about, and bundles of corrugated jackets, tumbled handfuls of foil-topped ramekins of creamer, paper packets of sweeteners and sugars, the man leaned over the other side of it, glowering weight of him braced on hands that clamp the tabletop, shoulders rounded in a soft blue overshirt, lowered head topped by a mighty round of tight black curls, “Outlaw,” he says, warmly gruff, as she unshoulders a stainless steel thermos with a lollop of lanyard, “how fares her majesty?”
“In need of coffee,” she says, opening a spigot to a gurgle that rises in pitch as the thermos fills. Looking up to see he’s set something on top of this particular cardboard box, a small glass jar with a chipped red lid, a half-inch or so of stuff within, slickly, thickly white, brushed with a hint of gold. “Porter,” she says, with a shake of her head. “She won’t take it.”
“They won’t stop bringing it,” he says.
She closes up the spigot, hauls up the thermos, steaming, full, caps it tightly. “There’s a new bond of toradh that would better serve.”
“Not if it doesn’t serve in turn,” he says.
“But she won’t take it.” She slings the thermos by its lanyard back over her shoulder. He holds the jar out to her and, after a moment, she takes it.
The next table down’s an assortment of largely emptied boxes of donuts and fritters and bear claws and danish. With a paper napkin she plucks up a jelly in a puff of powdered sugar, a pan Suisse with a crackle, and tucks them both away in a small net sack she’s unfurled from somewhere, along with that jar with the chipped red lid. She clips it all to the lanyard there by the thermos and turns away to start at the small man stood there, trousers of rumpled corduroy, his soft drab shirt without collar or tie. “Stop asking,” he says, quietly, pleasantly, firmly, his brown eyes mild.
“My lord Shrieve,” she says, with a nod. “Perhaps we ought to continue this elsewhere?”
“I’ve no intention of raising my voice.”
“The request comes from her majesty.”
“Has her majesty a portion?” he says.
“I hadn’t realized,” she says, “the desires of our Queen are but transactions, to be totted in a ledger.”
“I don’t speak of tit for tat,” he says. “I find I must remind my lady Outlaw of the limits of logistics. What you ask is – ”
“What her majesty requires,” she says, and then, her voice returning to its lower register, “should be but the snap of a couple of fingers.”
“And, a month ago? Would very well have been.” He takes a closer step. “Without a pinch,” he says, “a snap is but a snap.”
“You’ve none from across the river?” Her hand stills the jostle of thermos and sack. “Our allotment,” he says, “is itself not enough to cover the main streets of the fifth, much less what you would have of – ”
“Who is it you see for your dole, this week? The Flammard, still, or is it the Wulver once more?”
His lips purse with disappointed distaste. “Calidore sees to our interests at court,” he says.
“How good of him,” she says. “But he’s no Duke. Is he.”
“Stop asking, Marfisa,” says the Shrieve Bruno. “It cannot be done.”
Flip-flops snapping, she climbs back up the staircase and then, thermos and sack a-dangle from the lanyard, up and up the ladder there to the makeshift floor tucked under the rafters, laid with rugs that dustily puff at every stalking footfall, over and through the awkward frame of a truss to a lone crate there she steps up onto to reach up to unlatch a hatch, shoving it open to haul herself out into diffident daylight, featureless clouds stretched high above, and only the vaguest of shadows to indicate the position of the sun. Down the flat length of the roof, tents have been pitched on the yellowing grass, ridge tents in sturdy olive and a pale blue dome, pop-ups in a smattering of athletic colorways, red and grey, raincoat yellow, orange and blue, a dingy white canopy over wooden pallets, blue plastic tarps, and more folks all about, sat here or there, standing, looking out to the towers of downtown away across the river, dully staid in such thin light, but steam floats in wispy tatters over cups in hands, and there are donuts and pastries wrapped in napkins, and paper plates of rice and salad and fruit and chicken, and so many of them in such similar T-shirts, beefily oversized, crisply, pristinely white.
Marfisa turns away from it all, her cloud of hair flatly luminous, she’s headed toward the back brick walls that loom over this end of the swarded roof, those buildings raised up at this end of the block, one of the few windows that dot them left open, there, parted curtains a gauzy scrim over the darkened hall within. Lithely over sill, under sash, steadying thermos and sack, she stretches her shoulders out and back, works her head from side to side. The hall before her narrowed by books piled knee-high and hip-high along the walls with breaks for the two doors, left and right, one closed, one ajar. A hand on the jamb, she peers within, more books stacked and piled about a wide brass bed, sheets and covers tangled about a distinct emptiness. Dimly, the sound of falling water.
She opens the other door on the pattering plash of the shower, water to strike shoulders sloped, head bowed, black hair soaked to dangle limply low, leaning close to splayed hands pressed to the tiles, water to tumble down a bare brown back, water to bounce, spattering outside the tub, slicking the floor in the absence of curtain or door or mat, “I have,” she says, and then, pitched a little louder, “majesty, I have breakfast,” holding up by the lanyard the thermos, the sack, to no response. A sigh. She turns to go but is brought up short, the hem of her T-shirt snagged by a wet hand tugging, pulling her back, gathering heather-grey fabric in gripping fingers, that head has lifted, turned, wet black hair a heavy frame for a nut-brown face, for such green eyes, “Marfisa,” heavy and thick, a tug again, thump a shin against the tub.
“Majesty,” says Marfisa, her free hand taking hold of the wrist of the hand wound up in her rucked-up shirt, but not to pull away, or down, her hand lifted as that hand lifts, pulls, up, “let me,” says Marfisa, “put this away,” but “Marfisa,” the emphasis insistent, their hands, her shirt clutched up between her breasts, her belly bared, and then the slowly rolling kiss, forcefully gentle, pressing, pushing, pulling, pulling her leaning her over the rim of the tub, the timbre of the waterfall changing as it’s caught up in her cloud of hair, melting it in a collapse of runnelled locks, a slick white mantle to cling to her throat and her shoulders. Scowling, she pushes back, shaking water away, the showerfall between them now, louder, and more shrill. “My lady,” she says, “I must – ”
“Marfisa,” a playfully admonishing lilt, that hand still holding her by her sodden shirt. The net sack’s already dropped to the water-spotted floor, slither of lanyard through slackening fingers, thermos clank against the tile a-wobble to fall with a clink against that small glass jar, “Ysabel,” she says, and surrenders to another kiss.
Books, and more books, so many books on the mismatched shelves that line this room, and more besides, stacked and piled on the shabby carpet all about that overstuffed loveseat, books upon books against books, and the cardboard boxes and the plastic tub at her feet filled with rumpled pads of yellow paper, and more pads spread over her lap, she’s flipping through pages, each of them, every one covered with, crimped by lines of line after line of scrawled and scribbled ink, she sets one aside, the next, another, loosely draped in a smokey grey kimono, the curls returning to tangle her long black hair as it dries. Another pad tossed aside, the next, flipped through, into the tub below, but the next, flip flip flip, a blank page, flip, more blank pages, this one, she drops the others, shoves them from her lap a crumpling fluttering thump. From somewhere under herself she fishes out a pen, unscrews the cap, tests the nib, scribble-scratch, a loop, a strong blue line. She starts to write.
“Lady!” from up behind her, “you mustn’t!”
“It’s perfectly all right,” says Ysabel, “there’s nothing on these pages.”
“She’ll want to see everything as it is!” says Marfisa. “Was!” Stepping through the doorway in the corner, out from under the board above, stretched between shelves, bowed with the weight of ever more books, white hair slicked back in a ruthless queue, T-shirt dappled with water. “Books, and papers,” she’s looking about, in one hand a couple of steaming white cups, in the other a couple of saucers, each with its pastry, “papers most of all! Everything must be as she left it!”
“These were never used,” says Ysabel. “They’re empty. Clean. I checked both sides.” Shaking her head, she scratches out a previous line, jots something above, a considering tilt of her head. “What’s today’s date?”
”Æthelthryth’s Day,” says Marfisa, setting the saucers precariously down on a silvery paperback, “Saint John’s Eve,” she says, with her freed hand shifting a larger, hardbound book, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, it says on its purple jacket, clearing enough of the end-table’s surface to set down the cups. “June?” says Ysabel.
“The twenty-third,” says Marfisa, holding out a cup and a saucer, the one with the somewhat squashed jelly donut. “Breakfast,” she says. Ysabel’s inking something in the upper corner, an extravagantly doubled loop, a scribble, swoop, pinched curl. “Leave it,” she says, without looking up. “I’ll have some when I’m ready.”
Marfisa sets the jelly down, lifts the other saucer from its precarious perch on the paperback, revealing the title in dark blue letters, Floating Worlds, she straightens with her cup, and the crackle-crumbed pan, “They won’t build the lift,” she says.
“I told you.”
“I told them it was your wish! I told Bruno it was your wish!”
“And I told you they wouldn’t. I told you it wouldn’t matter.”
“She’s coming on Monday. It must be ready on Monday. Before Monday.”
“And if it isn’t?”
Marfisa looks down, to the delicate white cup in her hand, steaming black coffee within. She takes a careful sip, and then, still looking down, she says, “There’s another offering.”
The pen stops, lifts away from the paper. Moves to cross out a word. “Toss it, as with the rest,” says Ysabel, “before it sours.”
“Or,” says Marfisa, looking up from her cup, and taking a breath, but “Absolutely not,” says Ysabel.
“Even if it proves,” says Marfisa, “paltry, it still would be enough.”
“Not without Jo,” says Ysabel, sharply, looking up from her pen. “Jo isn’t here.”
“But you are Queen, majesty!”
“I am not, no more,” says Ysabel, looking back to the paper in her lap. “If ever I were.”
“But majesty,” says Marfisa, “you are.”
The pen is moving again, scratching across the paper, stroke and swoop of ink in its wake. “It was good of you,” says Ysabel, between one word, and the next, “to think of breakfast for me.”
“Your majesty is welcome,” mutters Marfisa, turning away under those books, saucer and cup in hand.
Shakespeare’s Last Plays, written by Frances A. Yates, ©1975. Floating Worlds, written by Cecelia Holland, ©1975.
