Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (11 page)

Jenny sinks her teeth, row after serrate row, into the tender meat of his shoulder, scrapes his smooth chest with the erect spurs of her nipples. 

And the voices are all around, bathypelagic echoes, as tangible as the sweet taste of his blood in her mouth. 

She has never felt this safe, has never felt half this whole. 

Their bodies twine, a living braid of glimmering scales and iridescent scaleless flesh, and together they roll over and over and down, until the only light is the yellowish photophore glow of anglerfish lures and jellyfish veils.

She wakes up again, stiff crammed into the dank cubby hole, more blind than in the last moment before she opened her eyes. There’s no sense of time anymore, only the vague certainty that she’s been wandering the tunnels for what must be days and days and days now, and the burning pain in her mouth and throat, Ariadne’s infection gift rotting its way into her skull. She is drowning, mind and body, in the tunnels’ incessant night tide and the sour fluids that drain from her wounded tongue.

Jenny Haniver coughs, fishhook barbs gouging her chest and throat, and spits something thick and hot into the dark. She tries to stand, braces herself, unsteady arms and shoulders against the slick tunnel wall, but the knifing spasms in her feet and legs and the fever’s vertigo force her to sit back down, quickly, before she falls.

The rats are still there, waiting with infinite carrion patience for her to die. She can hear their breath and the snick of their tiny claws on the stone floor. She doesn’t know why they haven’t taken her in her sleep; she no longer has a voice to shout at them, so kicks hard at the soft, flea-seething bodies when they come too close.

Because she cannot walk, she crawls.

Here, past the merciful failure of punky concrete and steel-rod reinforcements, where one forgotten tunnel has collapsed, tumbled into the void of one much older, she lies at the bottom of the wide rubble scree. Face down in the commingled cement debris and shattered work of Colonial stonemasons, and the sluggish river of waste and filth-glazed water moves along inches from her face. The rats and the muttering ghosts of Old Mama and Old Papa and her father will not follow her down; they wait like a jury, like ribsy vultures, like the living (which they are not) keeping deathbed vigil. 

There is wavering yellow-green light beneath the water, the gaudy drab light of things which will never see the sun and have learned to make their own. So much light that it hurts her eyes, and she has to squint. The ancient sewer vibrates with their voices, their siren songs of clicks and trills and throaty bellows, but she can’t answer, her ruined tongue so swollen that she can hardly even close her mouth or draw breath around it. Instead, she splashes weakly with the fingers of one straining, outstretched hand, smacking the surface with her palm.

Old Mama laughs again, and then her father and Old Papa try to call her back, and they promise her things she never had and never wanted. This only makes Old Mama laugh louder. Jenny ignores them, watches the long and sinuous shadows that move lazily across the vaulted ceiling. Something big brushes her fingertips, silky roughness and fins like lace, unimaginable strength in the lateral flex of those muscles, and she wants to cry but the fever scorch has sealed her tear ducts.

With both hands, she digs deep into the froth and sludge that mark the boundary between worlds, stone and water, and pulls herself the last few feet. Dragging her useless legs behind her, Jenny Haniver slides into the pisswarm river, and lets the familiar currents carry her down to the sea.

O that this too too solid flesh would melt…

 William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

Tears Seven Times Salt

A dry run for so very many stories since, my fevered punk-rock retelling of “The Little Mermaid.” You’ll see that, I think. Also, my first Manhattan story, because once in the subways I couldn’t stop thinking about what lay
below
the subways.

Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun

(Murder Ballad No. 1)

Out here on the tattered north rim of the Quarter, past sensible bricks to keep the living out and the dead inside, weathered-marble glimpses above the wall of St. Louis #1, and on past planned Iberville squalor and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Hours left till dawn, and the tall man in his long car turns another corner and glides down Burgundy. Almost dreaming, it’s been too long since he slept or ate, so long since he left Matamoros and the long Texas day before of sun and gulf-blind blue. All that fucking coke sewn up in the seats, white blocks snug in plastic wrap beneath his numb ass, and he checks the Lincoln’s rear-view mirror, watching, watching in case some Big Easy pig doesn’t like his looks. The fat veins in his eyes are almost the same shade of red as the little crimson pills that keep him awake, keep him moving. But there isn’t much of anything back there – silhouette and streetlight shadow of a crazy old black man in the street, and he’s pointing up at the sky and falls to his knees on the asphalt, but he’s nothing for Jimmy DeSade to worry about. He lights another Camel, breathes grey smoke, and there’s the House, just like every time before. Gaudy Victorian ruin, grotesquerie of sagging shutters and missing gingerbread shingles, the slow rot of time and Louisiana damp. Maybe it’s leaning into itself a little more than last time, and maybe there are a couple of new dog or gator skulls dangling in the big magnolia standing guard out front. Hard to tell in the dark, no streetlights here, no sodium-arc revelation, and every downstairs window painted black as mourning whores. Jimmy DeSade drives on by, checks his mirror one more time, and circles around to the alley.

Rabbit opens his door a crack and watches the trick stagger away down the long hall, the fat man that stank like garlic and aftershave, fat man that tied Rabbit’s hands behind his back and bent him over the bed, pulled down his lacy panties and whacked his butt with a wooden hairbrush until he pretended to cry. Until he screamed stop, Daddy, stop, I’ll be a good little girl now. They still give him the creeps worst of all, the call-me-Daddy men. Rabbit eases the door shut again, whispering half a prayer there will be no more tonight, no more appetite and huffing desperation, and maybe he can have a little time alone before he fixes and falls asleep. 

Let’s not count on it,
he thinks and kicks off the black patent pumps, walks the familiar five steps back to the low stool in front of his dressing table, sits down and stares at himself in the mirror. Every minute of twenty-two years showing in his face tonight – and then some – a handful of hard age shining out mean from beneath powder and mascara smears. Rabbit finds his lighter, finds the stingy, skinny joint Arlo slipped him earlier in the evening, and the smoke doesn’t make it easier to face that reflection; the smoke makes it remotely possible. He pulls a scratchy tissue from the box, something cheap that comes apart in cold cream, and wipes away the magenta ghost of his lipstick, sucks another hit from the joint and holds the smoke until his ears begin to buzz, high electric sound like angry wasps or power lines, then breathes it out slow through his nostrils. And those grey-blue eyes squint sharply back at him through the haze – Dresden blue, his Momma used to say – pretty Dresden blue eyes a girl should have, and Rabbit licks thumb and forefinger, pinches out the fire and stashes the rest of the joint for later. Tucks it safely beneath one corner of a jewelry box; later he’ll need it more than he needs it now.

Rabbit restores the perfect bee-stung pout, Cupid’s-bow artifice, a clockwise twist and the lipstick stub pulls back inside its metal foreskin. No point in bothering with the eyes again this late, but he straightens his dress, Puritan-simple black as if in apology for all the rest. He also straightens the simpler strand of pearls at his throat, iridescent plastic to fool no one lying against his milk-in-coffee skin, skin not black, not white, and there he is like a parody of someone’s misconception of the mulatto whores of Old New Orleans. Bad romance, but
this
is real, this room that smells like the moldy plaster walls and the john’s cum drying on the sheets, cheap perfume and the ghosts of tobacco and marijuana smoke.

This is as real as it gets, and you can sell the rest of that shit to the tourists with their goose-necked hurricane glasses, Mardi Gras beads, “Red Beans and Anne Rice” T-shirts, and pennies for the tap-dancing nigger boys with Pepsi caps on the soles of their shoes. Rabbit closes his eyes and makes room in his head for nothing but the sweet kiss of the needle, as if anticipation alone could be rush, and he doesn’t move until someone knocks at the bedroom door.

Arlo works downstairs behind the bar, and he sweeps the floors and mops the floors, scrubs away the blood or puke and whatever else needs scrubbing away. He sees that the boys upstairs have whatever keeps them going, a baggie of this or that, a word of kindness or a handful of pills. Sees that the big motherfuckers downstairs at the tables have their drink. He empties ashtrays, takes away empty bottles, and washes whiskey glasses. Arlo isn’t even his name. His real name is Etienne, Etienne Duchamp, but no one likes that Cajun shit up here, and one time some mouthy, drunk bitch said his hair made him look like some old folk singer, some hippie fuck from the sixties.
You know, man, Alice’s Restaurant,
and
you can get anythang you waaaaaant
… and it stuck. Good as anything else in here, he supposes, and in here beats selling rock in the projects, watching for gang bangers and cops that haven’t been paid or conveniently might not remember they’ve been paid.

Arlo pulls another beer from the tap and sets it on the bar, sweaty glass on the dark and punished wood, reaches behind him for the piss-yellow bottle of Cuervo, and pours a double shot for the tall man across the bar. The man just passing through on his way back to New Jersey, the man with the delivery from Mexico City, the man whose eyes never come out from behind his shades. The man who looks sort of like a biker, but drives that rusty-guts land-yacht Lincoln. Jimmy DeSade (
Mr.
DeSade to Arlo and just about anyone else who wants to keep his teeth, who wants to keep his fucking balls), so pale he looks like something pulled out of the river after a good long float, his face so sharp, and lank blue-black hair growing out of his skull. 

“Busy night, Arlo?” he asks, icicle voice and accent that might be English and might be fake, and Arlo shrugs and nods. 

“Always busy ’round here, Mr. DeSade. Twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five.” And Jimmy DeSade doesn’t smile or laugh, just slowly nods his head and sips at the tequila.

Then a fat man comes shambling down the crimson-carpeted stairs opposite the bar, the man that’s had Rabbit from midnight till now, and Arlo sees right off that the man’s fly’s open, yellowed-cotton wrinkle peek-a-boo careless between zipper jaws. Stupid fat fuck, little eyes like stale venom almost lost in his shiny pink face. And Arlo thinks maybe he’ll check in on Rabbit, just a quick
You okay? You gonna
be
okay?
before the two o’clock client. He knows the fat man wouldn’t have dared do anything as stupid as put a mark on one of Jo Franklin’s mollies, nothing so honest or suicidal, so not that kind of concern. But this man moves like a bad place locked up in skin and Vitalis, and when he hustles over to the bar, ham-hock knuckles, sausage fingers spread out against the wood, Arlo smells sweat and his sour breath and the very faint hint of Rabbit’s vanilla perfume – Rabbit’s perfume, like something trapped.

“Beer,” grunts the fat man, and Arlo takes down a clean mug. “No, not that watered-down shit, boy. Give me a
real
beer, in a goddamned bottle.”

Not a word from Jimmy DeSade, and maybe he’s staring straight at the fat man, staring holes, and maybe he’s looking somewhere past him, up the stairs; there’s no way to know which from this side of those black sunglasses, and he sips his tequila.

“Jo knows that I’m waiting,” Jimmy DeSade says, doesn’t ask, not really, the words rumbling out between his thin lips, voice so deep and cold you can’t hear the bottom. Arlo says yes sir, he knows, he’ll be out directly, but Arlo’s mostly thinking about the smell of Rabbit leaking off the fat man, and he knows better, knows there’s nothing for him in this worry but the knot winding tight in his guts, this worry past his duty to Jo, past his job.

The fat man swallows half the dewy bottle in one gulp, wet and fleshy sound as the faint lump where his Adam’s apple might be rises and falls, rises and falls. He swipes the back of one hand across his mouth, and now there’s a dingy grin, crooked little teeth in there like antique cribbage pegs. “Jesus, sweet baby Jesus,” he says. “That boy-child is as sweet a piece of ass as I’ve ever had.” And then he half turns, his big head swiveling necklessly round on its shoulders, to look directly at Jimmy DeSade. “Mister, if you came lookin’ for a sweet piece of boy ass, well, you came to the right goddamn place. Yessiree.” 

Jimmy DeSade doesn’t say a word, mute black-leather gargoyle still staring at whatever the hell the eyes behind those shades are seeing, and the fat man shakes his head, talking again before Arlo can stop him. “That’s the God’s honest fucking truth,” he says. “Tight as the lid on a new jar of cucumber pickles – ”

“You done settled up with Rabbit? You square for the night?” Arlo asks quickly, the query injected like a vaccination, and the fat man grows suddenly suspicious, half-offended. 

“Have I ever tried to stiff Jo on a fuck? The little faggot’s got the money. You think I look like the sort’a cheap son of a bitch that’d try to steal a piece of ass?
Shit
,” and Arlo’s hands go out defensively, then.
No, man, that’s cool, just askin’, that’s all, just askin’.
The fat man drains the beer bottle, and Arlo has already popped the cap off another. “On the house,” he says.

Behind them, the felted tables, and one of the men lays down a double-six (no cards or dice, dominoes only in Jo Franklin’s place, and that’s not tradition, that’s the rule), and he crows triumphantly, is answered with a soft ring of grumbled irritation round the spread of wooden rectangles the color of old ivory, lost money and the black dots end-to-end like something for a witch to read.