Four golden cards scattered over the nubbled green cushion, Bank of Trebizond, they say, Bank of Trebizond, Good thru, Good thru. Carol Harlib, says one, and John Wharfinger another, Otto Dogstongue, and the last one there, it can just be made out, The Blue Streak.
“Fun while it lasted,” says Otto, knelt behind that couch, arms folded along the back of it, chin on his crossed wrists.
“Lasted?” says John Wharfinger, perched on an arm of it, slim black guitar case at his feet. “I just got here.”
“They, they got my name right,” says Blue, sat on the couch by the little pile. “I mean, y’know, I could only ever use it when nobody was paying any attention. Or, or self-checkout. That worked.” Flicking a card with a fingertip. “But they got it right.”
“Have to pack it all up again,” mutters John Wharfinger.
“Cheat Death,” says Carol, stood at the edge of the stage, looking out over the cavernous warehouse, and only a few of the overhead doors rolled up even halfway for the dour morning light. Here and there this subdued knot or that contemplative clump of lares and hobs, urisks, losells and phenodderee, cleaning, some of them, tinkering, others, fidgeting, quietly talking, one to another, looking up and off to nothing much at all. “Come on,” she says, turning back to them all, quietly quizzical, “Dirty on Purpose? I played it for you. We were never as lucky as we’d like,” she sing-songs, “the miracles are through,” letting that last note linger as she theatrically lifts up her face, her hands, wryly smiling, her calico sundress, her tight white T-shirt, her skinny jeans.
“Lady Waters,” says John Wharfinger. “And the Hooded One.” His red hair tangled, a darkly iridescent vest crimping his voluminously white blouse. “Bit on the nose,” says Carol, and then up pipes the Blue Streak, “Goodbye, Mr. Ed,” he says, looking to John Wharfinger, “some tasty Gabrels noise you could munch on.” His long-sleeved T-shirt says The Telegenic Dead in white letters on black.
And then ruddily bald Otto is crooning, “Anything, to feel weightless, again,” his eyes closed, his fingers lifted to help carry the words. “I liked that one. Who was that by?”
“The Handsome Family,” says Carol, mildly exasperated.
“There’s a bed for me where’er I lie,” says John Wharfinger, “and I don’t pay no rent.”
“If it’s good enough for Nelson,” warbles Otto, beaming widely, “it’s quite good enough for me!”
“This was a Pizza Hut,” sings the Blue Streak, the fingers of one hand dancing, “now it’s all covered in daisies,” pointing out the notes of the tune in the air.
“What was that, that beautiful day song?” says Otto.
“What, U2?” says John Wharfinger.
“No,” says Otto, “no, it was, elbow? Yeah. The, ah – ”
“One Day Like This,” says Blue.
“Sure about that one? says Carol.
“One day like this a year’d see me right,” sings Otto then, loud enough that out there on the floor this face turns up toward them, and that.
“Okay,” says Carol, “but if we’re doing that, we’re doing A New England. Kirsty MacColl’s, because it is objectively better.”
“Oh, hey,” says Blue, pointing to Carol, “we could do, you could do Let My People Go.”
“What,” says Otto, frowning, “from that mole thing?”
“No, no,” says Blue, as Carol’s saying “That’s let my children live,” and “no,” says Blue, “the, the, like, Diamanda Galás. You know. You,” pointing to John Wharfinger, “do something simple, stark, you know, electric piano, and you,” back to Carol, “really stretch those cords, you know?”
But Carol’s frowning, and John Wharfinger shakes his head. “Too much like what we already did,” he says. “Nicodemus.” He looks away.
“Where is her blasted nabs, anyway,” says Otto, pushing up to his feet there behind the couch, and then, as they all turn to look at him, sternly, sadly, taken aback, “what,” he says, did I miss something? Are we not supposed to talk about her? What?”
A bit of a stir out in the warehouse, someone’s come in under the main overhead door, a woman with a pink scarf about her neck and a floppy knit toque on her head, her jeans palimpsested with felt-tip graffiti, looking about, uncertain. “You never should have put that blasted Star Wars song on everybody’s phones,” John Wharfinger’s saying to Blue.
“Star Trek. And it got us that write-up, didn’t it?”
“After we split!” snaps Carol. “Fat lot of good that did.”
Someone beckons to that woman, Powys, and there’s Luchryman pointing, and others, gesturing, there, toward the great wooden tub out in the middle of it all, a dappling pool of sunlight faintly from a summer yet to come.
“No,” says Carol, “what I’m thinking,” as that woman makes her way toward the tub, “is maybe,” says Carol, “Peter Pumpkinhead. Let’s begin,” lifting a hand, but she doesn’t snap her fingers poised. The woman in the pink scarf has dipped a hand into the tub to pull it, shining, out.
“In sixteen forty-nine!” sings out John Wharfinger, and he’s up on his feet, “to Saint George’s Hill!” his voice quite loud and carrying clear, and startled, smiling, Carol’s slinks in over his, smoothing the edges, “a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will!” The Blue Streak leaning forward on the couch helps them punch the next line, “They defied the landlords!” and the thump of Otto’s big black boot on the boards of the stage. “They defied the laws!” thump! and everyone out there has turned to look up to them. “They were the dispossessed, reclaiming what was theirs!”
•
A breath ratchets up and up until it breaks a shuddering gasp and eyes pop open in blinking alarm, “No, no, don’t stop, keep going, go!”
“Are you all right?”
“God, yes – ”
“I could – ”
“No, don’t – ”
“I should – ”
“Yes, yes, like that – wait – your hair!”
A hand lifted from a buttock as hips still, and bellies, the shuff of skin on silk, breasts rise and fall, and shoulders, the labor of breathing. Fingers brush a dangling lock, the roots of it a yellow dulling quickly to a sandy buff, deepening to cinnamon, to auburn, through chestnut and wenge to glossy midnight tips.
“I’m,” blue eyes blink, to green, “distracted.”
“Look like her,” the imperative no less forceful for being whispered. Those eyes clench. Braced arms shudder. Sweat patters satin as that hair’s shook out so darkly black, so artfully tangled, “no,” the whisper, “no. Look like her. Look like her.”
Lifted up, all that hair is shoveled back, and again, back and away the shadowy bulk of it melting in the candlelight to reveal the corners and curves of the skull beneath, licked by the merest fuzz of gold, and that nose, and those eyes, now icy blue.
“Like this?”
“Like her.”
“Like you,” hiking up, falling forward, “like now,” weight caught on hands planted to either side of all that yellow hair, belly over belly, breasts against breasts, thighs spread about hips that hitch and settle, rise and fall with every stroke the sigh the breath the look that’s edging toward the everything to fall.
Sometime later she sits up alone among the wraps and rugs, the pillows and bolsters, the candles guttering about. Her hair a pile of tidy black curls, looking about, “Tina?” she says. And then, “Chris?”
“Up here.”
Sat tailor-fashion there, at the foot of that wide bed so neatly made, her yellow hair severely straight to her shoulders and past, eerily lit from below by something, her phone, in her hands, in her lap.
“Did she post again?” Drawing a shawl to herself, blue-black and glimmering silver about her shoulders. “Chrissie, did Ettie post again?”
“What?” Looking absently up from the phone. “No, it’s Gav. We can pick up a shift whenever we want. As the Sœurs. If you can hold it together.”
“You want to dance again?” she says, her hair now severely straight, slithering yellow down her back.
“Want,” she says, “is a strong word,” looking up, her face underlit. “But we need money, and I don’t think,” a click, the phone goes dark, “we’ll have much of a career in television,” and it’s a bitter twist, but there’s something of a smile there, in the shadows.
“You should come down from there, Chris. You shouldn’t be up there.”
“What, on the bed?” Looking over, to the black shapes of clothing neatly laid out on the smooth white duvet. “She’s never coming down here.” To the white pillows neatly stacked, undimpled. “And her majesty won’t be back anytime soon. I mean, the game’s just about over, don’t you think?” Down to her, knelt there on the rugs, wrapped in that shawl. “If you need somewhere to stay,” she says.
“I have a place. I, should, have a place.” A breath, taken in, let out a sigh. “Ettie, won’t she, if she thinks I’m, replacing her? Won’t she be angry?”
“Ettie bought a one-way ticket.” Twisting about, her legs unfolding, a foot lowered to the bolsters below. “She knows how to get back. Come on,” holding out a hand, gesturing with her chin, toward the screen there, the pale frame of it, and the panels of plain linen. “Let’s go have one last spa day.”
•
On his wrist the golden watch, face of it crammed with three ticking dials set in an encompassing fourth, each quartered and marked by exquisitely tiny numerals, sigils, runes, each with its set of slenderly filigreed hands pointing this way, that, and set atop them all a single ornately majestic sweep hand. Fingertips roughly oblate. the nails of them cruelly cut short, pinch the innermost bezel of it, squeeze, twist, click. Every hand on the face of it falls slack, even the sweep, swinging loosely with gravity as he tilts it back and forth. He taps the crystal, brow furrowing over his frowning eyes, his sharp nose, his sharper chin. He twists the bezel back, tick-click.
Those hands immediately leap to resume their twitching, ticking, majestic sweeping, and she surges awake at his feet, sucks in a slobbering, overdue breath, “oh, Moody!” clutching his shins, “I saw her, she was real as anything, real as ever, as you,” and he yanks a foot free, “Christ, Ada, get up, you’re fucking disgusting.” Planting a boot against her shoulder, shoving her back against the louvered closet door, rattling the mirror hung from it, pasted over with stickers mostly black, some red, a few grey, printed with letters white and silver and black in shapes like electric shocks or shards of glass, or words found in the oldest Bibles, Free Men, they say, and Wewelsburg Summer, Sovereign, a blocky red capital L. “Hnánpa,” she’s muttering, “xhnánpa ála, inˀála, oh, Moody, you got no idea,” her black her dulled with grey, shining with grease.
“Pretty sure I do,” he mutters. Squatting beside her slumped there, folded in on herself all heavyset elbows and knees, beige bra-strap slipping from one wide shoulder, careworn hand curled a darker brown against the pale swell of her belly, grey-ridged slabs of her feet pinched by filthy green flip-flops, but her eyes, so wide, so liquidly wonderstruck, “Thank you,” she murmurs.
“Shut up,” he says, not unfondly. Looking to the ceiling close above. Off up that way, muffled voices, raised with an edge of stridency, “The hell?” he says.
“That damn game,” she says.
“That’s not,” he’s listening, stock still, “the game.”
A thump shakes the ceiling. He starts up, heads out, through the door, into the hall. “Moody?” she says, getting to her feet. “Moody?” One step, two, towards the door, stumbling at the sound of the first gunshot.
Loud, and flatly definite, an immensely crack however many rooms away, and then a second as irruptive, and she squeaks, then jumps at the third shot, higher, sharper, “Fuck!” she shouts, and then stuffs a fist in her mouth, cowering.
Silence, falling, spreads, seeping through the house until the scuff of her flip-flop against the carpet is unimaginably loud. She lifts her foot with elaborate care for her next step, and her next, through the doorway, into the unlit hall, the short flight of steps ahead, and daylight, however indirect. Two more gunshots in quick succession, back to those flat cracks, a third, a fourth, she crouches at the top of those stairs, the garbage piled beyond, the filth-streaked checkerboard floor, the daylit kitchen, empty.
“Moody?” she whispers.
“XO!” someone bellows, up at the front of the house. “Danny Moody! Come out and get what’s coming!”
Hunched over she scuttles into the kitchen, around toward the back door, but tumbles to a sudden flopping stop. Someone’s stood there, blocking the way to the garage, a little man with an outsized head, and seeing her, he unfurls a smile, his thin lips parting about far too many teeth. Ada Minthorn screams.
She screams, and there’s an immediate scuffle from the front of the house, heavy footsteps Dopplering toward the back the kitchen her, and the little man looks up to the awkward landing in the far corner, the man bursting onto it, baggy shorts, bulky sweater, his head a great bush of yellow, and in his hand, his hand is filled with, planted atop his hand a polished black cylinder set in a dulled silver frame that sprouts a long and slender barrel pointed this way, that, toward the hall behind, back to her, she’s looking right up into an empty black hole rimmed by a perfect round of grey that holds her, fixed, for an inscrutable moment before it jerks away. “Cearb,” he says, the name tearing itself from his heaving breath. “This isn’t,” he says, “what I asked for. This isn’t what I wanted!”
“Boon,” says the little man, lips pursed over those teeth, savoring the word’s taste. “Bane,” he says. “Bone.” A shake of that head. “It’s all in the shape of the mouth.”
“Please,” says Ada then, a squeak of a word. “Please.” Looking to the little man in the doorway to the garage, the armed man on the landing, the empty doorway back down to the basement. “Please.”
“Danny Moody hurt her grace,” says the Harper Chillicoathe. Lowering the gun to point at her again. “You all did.” His free hand, trembling, reaches across to press the heel of it against the revolver’s hammer. The click-tack as it’s cocked. “So. You all have to go.”
He pulls the trigger. The hammer springs forward as the cylinder lurches a widdershins notch. The empty click is barely audible.
Chilli blinks. Ada opens her eyes.
He cocks the gun again. Click. And again, click. “No,” he says, and “no,” he says, click, “no, he told me, he said, it wouldn’t do this, no!” Click. A sleeve of army-surplus green reaches around him, a hand clamps about the revolver to wrench it aside, twisting the fist, and Chilli hisses.
“Never dry-fire a piece of shit like this,” says Moody, the revolver now upside-down in his hand. “You’ll lock up the mechanism.”
“He said revolvers never jam!”
“It didn’t.” Moody shoves Chilli to stumble a step or two down. “You just can’t count.” He turns away, off toward the front of the house. “Moody!” shouts Chilli, starting back up after him. “Blast it, Moody!”
Ada, slowly, turns herself about in the suddenly empty kitchen, the door to the garage unblocked, the little man gone, and his teeth, the unlit stairs down to the basement, the pop and shuck of her flip-flops as she makes her way toward the steps up to the awkward landing, and the front of that little house.
The hiss of a signalless channel carried by patient speakers. An agent decked in tactical gear, frozen on an enormous television screen, an effortful rictus just discernible through a rectilinear blizzard of rainbow snow, and the cracks that radiate up the screen from a jagged hole blown through it, close by a corner. At one end of the couch a guy’s sitting, a kid, really, head tipped back at an alarming angle, both hands on the controller in the blood that puddles his lap, spilled from the hole punched through his chest. Another guy’s crumpled by the other end of the couch, “Christ,” says Moody, his knee on that guy’s chest, the heel of his hand clamped over that guy’s mouth, fingers pinching shut his nose, holding it there despite a weakly bucking struggle, knocking aside the flop of a bloodstained hand. “You can’t even make a mess properly.”
“What are you doing,” says Chilli, folding up his arms, leaning his back against the wall.
“What you couldn’t.” Moody tilts his head to one side, considering. That bloodstained hand’s fallen to the carpet, motionless there by the emptied revolver, laid to one side by a second gun, stubby black barrel set on a compact khaki grip. “This one got the teevee, huh? Trying to shoot back?” Getting to his feet, he scoops up the second gun. “Bet that scared the bejesus out of you.”
“Why are they still here,” says Chilli.
Wiping the grip and the barrel with a corner of his jacket, Moody steps over to the leather recliner, and Chad, the CO, laid back in it, brown robe sprawled about the bloody ruin of his naked chest, hands flopped over to either side hung low, one bare foot kicked out, quite still. “You know what?” says Moody. “I take it back. Six shots, four hits, center-mass, two kills, and he,” jerking a thumb back, “would’ve bled out before anybody got here. Not bad, for your first massacre.” He drops the pistol into the CO’s lap.
“What are you doing,” says Chilli, shaking that yellow head.
“Used to stage scenes like this all the time for the Gulf Clan, and the Norte boys.” Kneeling by the recliner, peering about, that body, this. “Give cops a simple story, easy to read,” getting back to his feet, “they won’t go looking for anything else.” Shoving back a ragged cuff to eye the golden watch about his wrist. “Ada!” he calls, stepping away from the recliner. “Ada, baby, time to go!”
The kid, at the far end of the sofa, his head recently shaved, the naked scalp unbearably pale, and whatever his T-shirt once said can no longer be made out. The guy crumpled at this end, the revolver there on the floor by his bloodstained hand. The CO’s head, right there, sightlessly staring up at the popcorned ceiling. Chilli, trembling, braces a hand gingerly on the back of the recliner to shuddering leaning reach, over the body, the flopped-open robe, the blood-sodden boxers, to take up that pistol, so small in his hand, two fingers curling naturally enough about the blocky brown grip, and his thumb, his index finger longer than the barrel of it, grimly flatly black.
Lurching out of the front room across the hall out onto the awkward landing, gripping the railing. Footsteps thumping up from the basement, there’s Moody, stepping into the kitchen, his broad-brimmed hat on his head, muttering to himself, “where did she,” but stopping as he looks up to see Chilli there, and what’s in his hand. “Well,” he says. “Would you look at that.”
So high, too sharp, a barrage of popping strikes at an immense snare drum too loud in that close space. When the pistol stops jerking, when the silence returns, almost as immense as what it displaces, Chilli opens his eyes to see
and sees
Jo Gallowglas, Jo Maguire, Hawk’s Widow and Queen’s Favorite, Duchess of Southeast, her trousers black and baggy, her black turtleneck sleeveless, both hands clutching her breast, “what,” she says, “the,” and drops to her knees as a feather sprouts from between her fingers, long, slender, vanes of a grey so iridescent it seems to contain every possible color paling to a clean white down about the quill, and another, another, “shit,” she says, as each of them glittering sheenly shining silvery erupts from her breast to tip, slip, drift away, shed even as they emerge to float to the checkerboard floor, and Chilli, shrieking, drops
the pistol, dropped into the CO’s lap.
“What are you,” says Chilli, but then his hands leap to cover his dumbstruck mouth.
“Setting the scene,” says Moody. “Remember?” Shoving back a ragged cuff to eye the golden watch about his wrist, grinning sharply, “Hot damn, I wasn’t sure that was going to work. I’m telling you, this thing,” looking up to Chilli, down to the pistol, the mirth leaking out of him, shoulders settling, grin dissolving. “Want to try again?” he says.
Chilli pitches forward, heaves up an eruction of white-gold fluid that splashes between his clutching fingers, spattering the carpet, his boots, the leather of the recliner, the body. An arm about himself, he groans.
“I’ll get my hat,” says Moody, stepping away. “Maybe go find Ada. This ain’t the kind of place you want to stick around.”
Stepping stumbling Chilli crashes back against the wall, blotting his beard with the back of his hand. The CO, his head just visible, staring gormlessly up at the ceiling. The kid at the end of the couch, somehow staring still at the color-drenched television. He’d recently shaved off all his hair, that kid. The naked scalp so unbearably pale.
