Dirty Wings (5 page)

“Ondine” is the story of a bitchy mermaid, trying to charm her human lover underwater even though she knows he'll drown.
Listen to my father whipping the water with the branch of a green alder tree, listen to my sisters caressing water lilies with their arms of foam,
she murmurs.
My palace is at the bottom of the lake, in a triangle of earth and fire and air. Put my ring on your finger and come with me to the depths.
When he tells her he loves a human woman instead, she dissolves into a scatter of weeping and rain, streaking across his window.
Here in a gown of watered silk, the mistress of the castle gazes from her balcony at the lovely night.
It's beautiful, but spooky. The lover is as bad as the mermaid, entranced by the sight of her transformed to tears. Maia wonders if Oscar is trying to tell her something about romance.

“Gloomy,” she says, handing the book back to her mother. Of course, her mother is the one who loves Euripides; murderous mermaids don't really register on the bloodbath scale when held up next to Greek tragedy.

“Well,” her mother says, “you know how I feel about the Romantics.” They both laugh, and for a second the ever-present tension between them lifts a little, and they are just two women, unalike, sharing a joke across the wall. Maia goes back downstairs to practice, leaving her mother staring at the bookshelves.

NOW: ARCATA

Cass's booted feet are propped on the dashboard, one arm dangling out the open window, cigarette between her fingers. Maia takes forever when she's in the grocery store. Reading the ingredients on every box and can. Wandering the bulk aisles, deliberating between long-grain and short-grain brown rice, rolled oats or quick oats, banana chips or roasted almonds. Picking up each apple and turning it over, checking for brown spots, testing for firmness, looking for some secret clue to its goodness beneath the slick pink skin. She's never wrong; you can bite into an apple Maia picks knowing the flesh will be crisp and sweet in your mouth every time.

They must be running out of money, but Cass hasn't asked and Maia hasn't offered. The Mercedes takes cheap diesel, and Cass has lived without money for so long that when she has it around it's more like a friendly surprise guest at a party than someone you need to see. Cass pulls her tarot deck out of the cargo pocket of her pants, shuffles the cards one-handed, flips through them. The Fool, the Lovers, Death. Not bad. One last drag of the cigarette. Tobacco out of her other pocket, rolling another with quick fingers. She doesn't light it, waits instead.

The light's dimming, sunset and another ordinary night in this tiny hippie town. Families cross the parking lot toward their cars: moms in long cotton dresses, bearded dads in overalls. Clean-scrubbed faces, roly-poly kids with haloes of blond fuzz.
Why are hippies always blond,
Cass wonders,
blond and blue-eyed like some distant branch of the Aryan Nations.
She touches her own salt-ratted hair; Maia dyed it blue last night in the bathroom of a campground. Where? Somewhere north of here. She loses track of days and miles. Oregon? They were in Oregon. Things have happened fast. Is it the end of July? Probably. She tugs one blue clump toward her mouth, chews it reflectively. Maia, working the dye in with her strong pianist's fingers, both of them watching each other in the dirty mirror. Not glass but a piece of polished steel. Their reflections were blurred, hard to pinpoint. Maia pushing her head under the faucet, careful not to get the water in her ears and eyes. Maia, always kind. Drops of blue water constellating in Cass's hair. Unable to stand it, she'd shaken her head like a dog, dye flying, Maia laughing, chasing Cass around the bathroom with handfuls of coarse paper towels. So warm that night they hadn't even put up the tent, just spread their sleeping bags out on the ground. Did they sleep last night? Cass can't remember. As long as they sleep sometimes it doesn't really matter.

Here's Maia at last, walking toward the car with a brown paper bag. Long legs in ragged shorts. Maia's body was Cass's own discovery; she'd suspected that under the pressed khakis and sweater sets lurked an angel waiting to be unearthed, and she'd been right, though it took her a while to prevail. Maia, like a princess imprisoned in a tower, just waiting for someone to come tell her to let her hair down. Cass has stolen plenty in her short life, but Maia is by far the greatest heist she's ever pulled.

“Hey,” Maia says, sliding into the driver's seat and twisting around to wedge the groceries in the back seat. There's plenty of room back there. Maia makes them keep the tent and their few clothes in the trunk, for tidiness's sake, and neither of them came to this adventure with much. Cass considers a spare T-shirt and a change of socks verging on excess. Maia wasn't too interested in bringing her loafers. Cass stole the tent before they skipped town. It was her contribution, since Maia stole the car.

“Hey,” Cass says. Her voice is rough but steady in her own ears. She's definitely not high, then. Always good to double-check. Maybe it's time to remedy that. She digs around in her cigarette pocket for the bottle of pills.

“I got bread,” Maia says. “Peanut butter and jelly. You hungry?”

“All that time for a loaf of bread?”

“They had a bunch of kinds. I got some fruit, too.”

“I'm okay.”

“You should eat. We should eat.” They're silent for a moment, remembering the last time they ate. Which was. Cass frowns. Possibly a while ago.

“True.”

“Beach picnic?”

“Sure.”

Maia starts the car, drives them to a pullout off the highway that butts up against the ocean. The stars are coming out, one by one. Cass used to know the constellations better. That knowledge was a gift from her dad, the real one. But in trying to forget her own history she's forgotten her memory of the sky as well. Orion she remembers, and the Dippers, and Arcturus glittering bright off the Big Dipper's handle. They bypass a sandy roadside picnic table and take the bag of groceries to the beach proper, sit with their backs against a bleached hunk of driftwood. Cass hands Maia her knife; Maia spreads peanut butter and jam on slices of bread, wipes the knife carefully with a paper napkin before handing it back to Cass. Cass has learned a lot from watching the way Maia takes care of other people's things. The idea is new to her. Maia's not like the people she's used to, the family she was born into or the family she chose. She folds the knife and puts it back in her pocket.

The sandwich is good, better than peanut butter and jelly ought to be. Trust Maia to find the best kind of bread. Nutty and a little sweet, soft in her mouth. Hippie bread. She shifts her leg, hears the rattle of pills in their bottle. They can wait for once. The breeze off the ocean is cool. Breakers roll in, one after the other. The sky at the far end of the world is still molten at the edges, the last of the setting sun staining the night gold and purple. They could try for a sea voyage. If anyone could steal a boat, it's Cass; if anyone could teach herself how to sail, it's Maia.

“Where's this house?” Maia breaks the contemplative silence.

“I don't totally remember. But I think I can find it. This place Felony took me to a bunch of times. We could always ask around. Hang out in the park until we find someone.”

“You've spent a lot of time here?”

“Not really. I mean, it's easy here. Lots of kids come through. We stayed here for a few weeks one summer.” Last summer? It can't have been that many summers ago. Cass used to have an ordinary life, too, or at least a common one. She thinks, as she often does, of her second stepfather's hands, and then carefully stops thinking about anything at all.

“You okay?” Fucking psychic Maia.

“Just trying to remember where the house was.”

“You sure?”

“I'm
fine.
”

Even in the growing dark Cass can see Maia's frown, but she resolutely avoids Maia's concerned face until Maia looks away and takes another bite out of her sandwich.

“Anyway,” Cass says, “they have shows all the time.” Maia nods, her bleached hair swinging. Cass wonders if there's such a thing as glow-in-the-dark dye, if she could mark Maia somehow, so as to be always able to find her, no matter how heavy the night. Maia's soft hand in hers, that first day they'd met. Cass steals touches where she can, shy as a middle-schooler. Passing her drugs, palm to palm. One hand on Maia's bony back when she's sad. Combing her fingers through Maia's hair. Cass takes Maia's hand in the pit at shows, and Maia never lets go until the music stops. Cass finds the cigarette she'd rolled in the parking lot tucked behind her ear, lights it.

“You didn't finish your sandwich.”

“Not really hungry.”

Maia's sandwich, too, lies half-eaten on the sand. Speed will do that to you. Only Maia would still bother to shop for groceries, as orderly and rational in the midst of a coastal road-trip bender as she probably was practicing the piano twelve hours a day in her parents' house. They toss the sandwiches in the garbage on the way back to the car.

It takes some aimless driving and wrong turns before Cass sees a street that looks familiar. It's not hard to find your way in a town this small, although all things considered she's amazed she recognizes anything at all. Once they're on the right street, the house is hard to miss. Kids congregate on the rickety wooden porch. There's a threadbare couch in the front yard, more kids piled atop it, smoking. Forty-ounce bottles of beer and pint bottles in paper bags, dogs running amok, a few toddlers staggering from one clump of people to another, hoping one of these drunks will turn out to be a parent.

“They have babies here?” Maia still has the capacity to be shocked.

“Everybody has babies,” Cass says. Maia parks the car down the street, though there's plenty of space in front of the house. Cass hides a smile.

Inside, the house is a disaster. Even Cass would think twice about sleeping here. Maia wrinkles her nose at the torn and stained carpet, shrinking from the walls in rotting clumps. There's another couch, in worse shape than the tattered wreck on the lawn. Kids everywhere, black leather and torn black denim, dirty patches, Crass shirts, spikes, and filthy black baseball caps. The room smells of pee. Cass raises an eyebrow, grey eyes glinting. “You wanted real, princess,” she says, grinning. “This is really real.” Cass's palm against Maia's; it's their pill-passing grip. Maia gulps hers down, waits for the kick she knows now is coming.

The show is in the basement, which is at least cement. There's no carpet to hold stink and god knows what else. Cass is ginger on the wooden stairs, risers missing and some listing so badly it seems they'll be pitched headlong into the mass of bodies packed into the windowless room. There's space at the center, just enough for a drumkit and a couple of amps. A girl in torn fishnets and a stained white tank top and nothing else is tuning her guitar. Rings through her bottom lip, Cleopatra eyeliner, chain and padlock at her throat, big black boots. Her bandmates, both boys, are wearing more or less the same thing. Maia wonders if these people can tell, when they look at her, how new she is to these clothes, to this hair, to this life, if her past is like a stain coloring the air around her, the beige house leaving its indelible mark on her skin. People look at her twice, most places she goes now, truck stops and punk shows, grocery stores, state parks, gas stations, rest stops. But she doesn't know which piece of her otherness draws their eyes: dirty clothes, wild hair, brown skin, or the color of her mother's house hanging over her.

The fishnetted girl jumps in the air, hits the first chord hard as she lands, and as the bass and drums kick in with a roar the speed fires Maia's heart into overdrive and everything is so fast and so loud and so good and everyone is moving, moving, her sweat and Cass's sweat and their sweat, all these bodies, all this sound, all this skin. She shakes her head and howls and Cass hears her and grins big, crooked white teeth against her tan face, and howls back at her, and this time is bigger and better than the last time, faster, faster, faster. This time she can see joy sparkling at the edges of her vision, a glorious static of light.
More,
she thinks,
more, more, more.
Who was she before, that terrified girl, living through dead composers, living through the dreams of other people, who was she before and who is she now, this girl made alive and wild as the ocean outside, wild as the wind. All the girls she could be lodged in her heart, crying
pick me, pick me, pick me.
But none of it matters in this here, in this now, none of it matters with the speed running hard and sweet in her veins and Cass's hand in hers and blood and teeth and noise. This is what Oscar was telling her to seek, this is the place he wanted her to get to, and maybe she had to leave everything behind to find it but she is alive and on fire and this life is more real than any of her life has ever been until now. Just a little farther now and all the pieces will come together into a her that is something like a whole.

THEN

Cass's dreams have become unbearable since the day she met Maia. Every night the man in the black coat comes to her. He usually says nothing. He watches her, or sometimes he is walking away from her across the flat white plain, toward the many-doored palace. Sometimes her hands are bound with thorn-covered vines and her blood runs down her knuckles and pools at her feet. Sometimes the man in the black coat is leading an enormous, red-furred man with the head of a bull on thin gold chain. They are wandering through a series of tunnels underground, lit with torches that flicker and smoke, and Cass is running after them, calling “Wait! Wait!” But they never stop, and though they are not walking quickly Cass can never manage to catch them. Once she sees him with a beautiful girl, a girl her own age, with dark skin and long white hair that hangs down her back. They are standing side by side in an empty apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over a dark sea. His arm is around the strange girl's shoulders. “I wish you would tell me why you keep coming here,” Cass says, but he is silent. The air in the room is still and cold. Outside, the dark waves heave under a storm-blackened sky. “Tell me,” Cass says again. “Please tell me.” The words become dusty moths that flutter from her mouth. She puts her hands to her throat and her skin is as cool as death and the moths' wings beat around her, whirling and whirling, and she wakes up trying to scream, but nothing will come out of her open mouth.