The Bread We Eat in Dreams (16 page)

I think the world just broke.

Nobody’s fault. Things get old. They go funny. They get stuck like a pump or run backwards like a pocketwatch. You just try and use an old pistol that ain’t been looked after. It might click and whine and stick. It might blow you clean dead.

Gilly Spur says there didn’t used to be magic. That’s nice. I like to think the world had a childhood. A little while when it didn’t have to bother with none of this.

A Ring Don’t Make a Bride

I saw me a picture with Los Angeles in it once. When pictures still showed down at the piano hall on Main Street. I used to like to get up in a dress and watch all those fine people flickerin’ up there. It was an old one, and Los Angeles hunkered down in the background of some bar, glowering into his two fingers of whathaveyou, up to no good. When the fighting started, he shot a lady of low morals through the heart, and looked at the camera like he knew I’d be watching in twenty years’ time. Funny thing is, I knew the shot lady, too.

She was the Pharaoh of Nevada.

New York shot her for real and true in our barn about a year before she got to Florida. Used a big birch fork and divined the Pharaoh’s path like clean water. New York took the train she got from the Savings and Loan out of her pocket and laid it down on the yellowcake flats where it swelled up like one of them old black worm firecrackers. Rode it all the way through the plains without a stop, even though the Tsar of Kansas was an easy get. She couldn’t wait.

The Pharaoh didn’t like waiting either. She turned up at my window in the middle of the night. Brought me beef and cotton lace and a real lily, so fresh the stem still seeped green. Came to me like a proper suitor, offering something precious, asking something precious. I sucked the dew out of the lily and it tasted like growing up. The Pharaoh of Nevada lay down next to me in my skinny bed and kept real quiet so as not to wake Henry Tincup and Ashen. She was a real handsome lady, with red hair and wide black eyes, heavy, soft breasts and sharp brass-tipped bullets all round her bony waist.

Come on
, she whispered in the dark.
Don’t you like me? You don’t want to sit around here waiting for those rotters to punch themselves sick over you. I’m here, now, and I’m ever so much nicer than the pack of them. I made that blossom myself out of the air and half a memory. I’ll cover you with lilies. Eat up that brisket and tell me it don’t taste right as a spring robin.

The Pharaoh of Nevada liked kissing almost as much as I do. Her skin was all dusty and hot and sour and good. She was right; I did like her. She was much prettier than Blue Bob, and when she got her hands inside me I saw lights dancing and lilies bursting and the sun bagged up in a sack of lace. The Pharaoh put a steel ring on my finger still slippery with her and slept like a heap of bones.

Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don’t make it yours. You have to go through the ceremony and bother and blood. I’m the end of everything. There’s no shortcut. The Pharaoh thought it was all over and won right up until the Wizard of New York steamed into town with her whistle shrieking the blues, shattering the windows and rattling the earth.

Too late
, Nevada laughed.

But it wasn’t. New York walked into the barn where I was born with a big bone gun on her hip, a barrel half as long as her leg. Used to be the femur of the Marquis of New Orleans and the shoulder blade of the Obeah of the Carolinas. It’s that kind of style that makes her a favorite, among those still taking bets. New York’s right dapper and swish. Nevada strode out of my bed all gloat but New York shot her through the throat from behind our cow Ptolemy, and my Pharaoh fell flat before she could work out where she’d gone wrong.

A ring don’t make a bride, that’s all.

New York tipped her hat to me. Said:
See you soon
. Barreled off out of town to keep her date with Kansas.

Sometimes at night I can still hear Nevada telling me stories about the one time in her whole life that girl ever saw Las Vegas.

The Duke of Maine

I asked Cutter once what it felt like, when he got called up. Him being my uncle in a technical sort of way and all I felt familiar enough to ask.

Cutter took care of the Gnaw Hollow back then, looking after the stores and the glasses and the spirits. He poured himself some thin old cough syrup which is just about as good as whiskey for getting yourself fuzzy, if not tasting half so nice.

“I was born in Maine, don’t s’pose you know that being just a kid,” he told me. “That’s part of it. No Duke of Maine could be from away. Born there and our ma moved us out west when she were half-done baking Ashen in her on account of pa Henry finding some knob of earth where things still grew. Spoke a coupla licks of French back then, and that’s part of it too. But if you’re hoping I got struck by lightning I’ll disappoint you. Just woke up one morning and knew it like I knew my name. Down in my heart a big dark forest on a big bright sea just lay there saying:
come on now, do right by me.
I looked at you feeding the chickens and all the sudden you had a veil on I never saw before, and a dress of darkness. I could do things. Drown a man while he’s walking down the street breathing as fine as you like. Strike a stone and milk’d pour out. The forest in my heart said the Sultan of the Dakotas wanted killing, and I strangled him in the Black Hills. His skull turned into a rose. I wore it on my lapel. It told me things. That you’d lay down with me if I asked because the Bride is the generosity of the earth. When the frost’d passed and I could get on planting my mean old turnips. Where to find the Presbyter of Oklahoma—who has the blame of my lost leg, bristled fucking pig that he was.”

Cutter slugged back his cough syrup. “I won’t be your man, I know it. Didn’t even bother cutting off my name. I’m a hump for others to get over. But I hope to see Maine again before some other dark dog does me in.”

The Laird of Alaska froze him to death with a blink a couple of weeks later. I didn’t cry. You can’t get mixed up in crying this late in the game.

Some Magic

I got some magic of my own.

I can turn a chicken inside out. I can make the moon come on in the daytime. I can fry an egg on my belly and I can defend myself—if I look at you funny your heart will split open in your chest. I tried it on the Kaiser of Pittsburgh who wasn’t half as nice as Nevada and didn’t bring me a damn thing and he toppled right over.

I didn’t wake up one morning knowing I was anything. I just always knew. Like how you know you’re a girl or that you have ten fingers. It’s just a part of you, and you can’t say why. After she put her ring on me the Pharaoh said:
what happens now?
I shrugged. I made the moon come on in the dawn for her.

We’re getting close now. To whatever is supposed to happen when I get a beau for true. I can feel the world winding down to Burnt Corn as if I’m a spring in it, losing my coils. Sometimes I wonder if this is going on in Europe or Africa too. If some poor kid like me is waiting in Budapest or something for the Tetrarch of Granada and the Wizard of London to get on with business. But something tells me I’m it. Besides, the Dragoon of Boston has to be Ireland-born, and she’s never said a thing about where she came from but that it was emptier than a gallon jar in the morning.

I spent a lot of years thinking on this. I think I know the shape of it and every day I feel surer. Where Cutter had a forest in the deep of him I’ve got a bed and its getting wider all the time.

Still. You don’t show your cards til they’re called.

The Nighthole

Gilly Spur says:
the day the world changed the sky went green and sick.
She says:
it didn’t have a lick on the look of the sky this morning.

Someone comes to town. They got shadows like wounds. One on a train, one on a horse. Ashen sets them a good breakfast and they talk like nothing’s gonna happen. Like they’re friends.

I wish I’da seen the Grand Canyon. After all this running around, you’d think I’da come across it. But no, you stove in the Saint and it closed up like a buttonhole.
The Wizard of Los Angeles shovels hot eggs into his mouth.

But you got the Rockies,
the Wizard of New York laughs over her chicory tea.
All six foot five of that sweet old Thaumaturge. I heard him go all the way out in Virginia. I heard you filled him up with pink fire and made rubies shoot out of his eyes.

Too bad we can’t jaw all day. I could get to like you.

Too bad.

Johnny Holler and Sally Rue water the mounts, a bowl of blood or a gascan full of coaldust, either way, hardly matters which gets which. They’re each glowing so bright they can’t even look at each other, silver and gold as the moon and the sun, before the moon went black and the sun went white.

And me? Well, I hide. Gilly taught me good and I go down under the bar at the Gnaw Hollow Saloon when the Loan Officer comes striding into town with contracts in his belt.
Everyone understands and consents to the action at hand, no arguments once the outcome is clear, yes, yes? Speak up, too late to be shy, what are the agreed-upon weapons? Guns, Blood, Poison, Time. Game, Set, Match. Sign on the dotted line, witnessed by Mr. Holler and Ms. Rue, and get me a bourbon, will you Johnny? That’s a good boy.

They walk it off. Their seconds open long blackwood cases and in them are the Chinese pistols, the long bone gun. There’s no sound in Burnt Corn but dust holding its breath. The clock tower bongs out the end of everything. I have time to be afraid before the first shot. I have time to consider I haven’t a notion about what I’ll do when its over. What I’m for. And then the New York’s femur-barrel blows its warm welcome, and a violet venomous ropy dripping
something
roars out and catches Miss Sally Rue in the glowing golden eyeball and puts her out as fast as hiccuping. Advantage New York.

It goes like a battle goes.
Boomboomquiet
.
Clickbanghush
. Los Angeles fires with both pistols, and a thousand sparrows stream out into a patch of starry night floating between them with the day just as fine as paint all around it. New York opens her mouth, wider, wider, until her jaw hits the dust and she can swallow the birds in one hitching breath. But one brown songbird, dragging six stars out of the nighthole behind it, claws through Johnny Holler’s chest and burns out his heart. One-one.

It’s like that, when Wizards fight. Half the time it looks like fighting and half the time it looks like theater, like an awful old puppet show, the paint peeling on the marionettes and the backdrop peeling, but the strings go jerking on. It’s happening and I can’t do anything, the bottles burst above me and the glass rain in my hair drifts infinitely slow, caught in a slow burp of time New York let sour up out of her palm. I squeeze my eyes; the Loan Officer gets a stream of liquid light to the eye and goes down heavy. The light goes dim in the sky like a picture house at intermission. Time to find your seats. The real show’s about to begin.

And Then

It’s over.

The glass hits my scalp. I taste scotch and blood and old, old wine.

There’s a hand on mine in the dark. I don’t know if it’s New York or Los Angeles. I guess it’s the Groom, whoever that turned out to be. I think about Gilly Spur and the daisies. I think about Nevada and her kisses. I think about Blue Bob, about Ashen and Cutter and the smell of the wind through Burnt Corn Ranch. I can hear my beau breathing; I can smell the magic on somebody’s breath. There ain’t nothing in the world but the world, running funny, running down, winding up, busting its springs and looking for its repair manual.

It’s black. Burnt Corn is gone and so is Gnaw Hollow. There’s a veil of glass and dripping booze over my eyes, and the Groom lifts it up. I know when she kisses me it’s the Wizard of New York, and when she kisses me she swallows me whole like she swallowed the sparrows. I’m a seed, I’m a wedded ring. I see the insides of her, and they are vast.