The Necromancer's House (2 page)

This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.

He says his piece when he has to.

He translates the God stuff in his head so it makes sense to him.

He tries very hard to let the new people know he's listening to them—he brightens his speech when he says “Hi, [new person]” and “Thanks, [new person],” and he does his best not to categorize them into will-be-back, won't-be-back, because that feels just a little too black-and-white, sheep-and-goats Manichean to him, and one thing Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is not about is black and white.

He is a calm-eyed icon of gray areas.

And if he does sometimes think,
That guy's just here because it's part of his DUI deal
or
That woman's going to drive into the parking lot of the Driftwood Bar and Grill and back out again three times tonight before she turns her car off and trots in with her head down
, he chides himself afterward.

Who are you to caricature them?

What do you really know, O wise seer?

If you saw someone like yourself walk in, would you know what you were? Could there be two of you within driving range of this rural Presbyterian church? And how did it feel to have them all look at you when you first came? And know that some of them were thinking,
Probably a faggot
, and some were thinking,
Belongs in the city with that hair
.

Not that new people come in so very often, or that they're really all that new. The woman who'll probably go to the Driftwood buys produce at the Orchards—he's seen her with her faintly electric bottle-red hair and the buzz-cut child who pulls at her sleeve and whines like he's two years younger than he looks. The DUI guy he doesn't know, but a Lexus pulled up and ejected him while Andrew smoked with his friends.

More about them in a minute.

DUI guy probably found the meeting online in Rochester and drove out to the sticks to make damned sure the Anonymous part of Alcoholics A stuck.

Looks like a real estate agent, maybe a high-end car salesman, some industry that's been whomped and he's one of the last ones standing, barely hanging on by his martini habit, which stretched from three after work to four and he thought he was just getting a speeding ticket when the young-enough-to-be-his-nephew cop said, “Have you been drinking, sir?” and his heart skipped a beat, make it two, and he peed just a little in his khakis and tried on his first pair of handcuffs. When we pass the basket he'll be all slick and fold his court-ordered attendance slip in a dollar bill, make it a five because he'll want to show us he's making it okay, and then the basket will come floating back with nothing in it but the signed slip and make its way to him like a homing pigeon and he'll sheepishly pluck it out and pocket it. So much for discretion. I prefer the DUI guys who drop their slip in like an ace-queen in blackjack, defiantly, BOOM, fuck everybody in the ROOM.

I'm doing it again.

Motor-minding, shitty-committee.

Knock it off, Blankenship.

So Andrew blinks his lazy icon eyes and listens to tonight's chairperson (Hi, Bob!) talking about humility, and just for fun (and exercise—the exercise never stops) he dims the good Presbyterian fluorescents above their yellowing Presbyterian screens, stopping before Bob notices, then brightens them again, stopping before any of them pop.

Chancho and Anneke both look at him.

Chancho the honcho and Anneke-Harmonica.

They of the smoking troika that watched the Lexus birth the DUI guy.

Chancho looks at him in a guilty Mexican Catholic stop-fucking-around way. Because this is
guero
God but still God's house and you're just lucky he doesn't strike you down for being a
brujo
in the first place.

Anneke, who wants to and will be a
bruja
because Andrew is teaching her, side-eyes him as if she's unsure whether he is the source of the phenomenon. His icon eyes reveal nothing. He casually reforks the samurai-style bun on top of his head, though, and she knows he's doing that to fool Chancho into thinking he's too distracted to fuck with the lights and to let her know that he's fucking with the lights.

She wishes he were a woman.

He wishes she liked men.

Chancho wishes the meeting were over so he could go home for another plate of his wife's
mole
enchiladas and an hour of UFC on Spike.

 • • • 

Andrew's only real complaint about this particular group is that they run a more-than-normally religious meeting. Stands to reason, out in the sticks like this. Still beats the darkly secular town chapter with its constant friction between doomsaying bleeding deacons and cigarette-mooching relapse punks.

During the hand-holding Lord's Prayer, only Anneke and Andrew are silent. That was what first made them notice one another, their shared agnosticism. And the fact that, except perhaps for Laura (Hi, Laura!), a runner-up for Miss New York in 1999, they are the two most empirically attractive people in the room, misaligned gender preferences (hers, not his) aside.

Andrew and Anneke drive to Dunkin Donuts and have coffee (his with cream, hers as black as a raven's beak), then farther into Oswego to shoot pool at the waterfront bar. They are both far enough along in their sobriety to be comfortable in a bar, and they both enjoy pool enough to tolerate the clientele. In the twenty years Andrew has made his home in nearby Dog Neck Harbor, he has come to Oswego periodically for those things one goes to town for when one lives in a hamlet, pool and bowling being two of them, but he has never understood Oswego's denizens.

Oswego hurts his feelings a little, with its redbrick waterfront buildings still faintly overlettered with hundred-year-old advertisements (
Enjoy refreshing Coca-Cola! It still has cocaine!
) wasted on its aesthetically impaired youth; with just a little artistic
umph
, just a thimbleful of intellectual zeitgeist, just one really banging university, this town could have been a tiny Amsterdam, a waterfront Ithaca. Instead, it . . . well, isn't.

In the twenty years Andrew has been coming here, he has watched the town smother almost every good restaurant it birthed. French bistros, Indian buffets, from-scratch hippie bakeries, quirky greasy spoons. And the names . . . Casa Luna, The Coach House, Wahrendorf's Diner, the Little While. Oh, the closing of the Little While hurt. The seafood marinara fed three; it was so thick with garlic that slivers of it stuck to your fork, and so generous with seafood that you had to push aside the shrimp and fish to get to the mussels, then opened a mussel to find it packed in with more shrimp and fish.

And the pancakes at Wahrendorf's.

“Fucking Wahrendorf's,” he says, punching the last word to give his cue more
chi
as he breaks. Sinks a colored and a stripe.

“Fucking Wahrendorf's,” Anneke agrees.

A lad in droopy shorts, a wife beater, and a baseball cap (twenty years and the Oswegian wardrobe hasn't changed any more than the appetite for cheap fried food and sports bars) saunters over with three quarters in his hand, but Anneke stacks six quarters on the table and shoots him a look that makes him veer to the jukebox instead. Andrew ignores him and turns his icon eyes to the task of sinking two more solids.

The boy goes back to his friends, also wearing their regulation tank tops and baseball caps, and makes them whinny with laughter at something. Andrew looks too small and exotic to be worth punching, and Anneke looks like she might throw a good punch herself.

No glory there.

 • • • 

“I've been thinking about your middle name. Why Ranulf?”

He pauses, hip on table, just about to take a flashy behind-the-back stab at a tough corner-pocket shot, and thinks about his long-ago ancestor.

“I mean, from what you've told me about your parents, I don't see them pulling out some King-Arthury name like that.”

Andrew imagines Ranulf Blenkenshope, the first known proto-Blankenship, dodging piles of sheep pellets near the smoky Northumberland hovel in which a wife stirs the bland bubbling blankenfood that will keep them and their wan brood alive through another rainy thirteenth-century winter.

“It beats Randolph. I changed it when I was in college. For funsies.”

He misses his shot, his concentration bifurcate.

“And since when is an Anneke Zautke so ready to spar about names? It sounds like you should be wearing clogs.”

Suddenly curious about what she
is
wearing on her feet, Andrew glances at her Middle-Easternish sandals, sees the slightly chipped green toenail polish. Anneke has handsomely shaped feet. She has handsomely shaped everything. And she dresses well, not just well for a lesbian.

She hates that word.

“I hate that word,” she had said. “It sounds like something cold-blooded.”

“It is,” he had said, and she had frog-knuckle-punched him right between the scant muscles of his arm.

Hard.

That had been the night they first attempted to be lovers; the movie they had watched together was over, the bruschetta she had made all gone save for the sliver of basil and crust of cheese drying to the plate. She kissed him more out of loneliness than passion, finally taking him to bed for a self-conscious romp they both mostly laughed through, especially the application of the condom.

 • • • 

Now I Ranulf, king of the Britons, draw my weapon, sheathe it (lo, it droopeth) (a little help, please) (Ah! Excalibur!), and sheathe it again, as is my right.

Shut up and do this if you're going to.

Verily, Lady.

 • • • 

It was clear that her love for him was above the waist, and always would be, no matter how feminine his bone structure or how exotic the scents he wore in his long black hair. His deeper scent was masculine, his angles too hard, his tongue too big in her mouth.

He knew there were spells he might use to make her burn for him, but burn she would; the further the subject was from true desire, the more damage the incantation would do. Suicide, insanity, and illness were the long-term fruits of love's abuse, by magic or otherwise, as so many had written and so few believed.

Andrew believed.

He had seen what happened to those who loved him over the two decades since the witch's raven had left its peck in him.

Sarah.

Anneke would be safe from the raven's beak.

The curse that murdered those he loved who loved him back.

She would not love him, and if he loved her, that was his blood to bleed.

I guess
Papillon
was the wrong movie to try to seduce you with.

Maybe not. You fuck like you've got money up your ass.

Wait a minute, I thought I was Papillon, not Dustin Hoffman.

You were Dustin Hoffman.

She had sculpted him twice.

The first time wearing his Japanese robe and sitting with his elbows on his thighs, head slightly bent and cocked to one side like a bohemian
The Thinker
, and she had kept that one.

It sat on the table by her smoking chair, the chair facing the lake, lording over the camel-bone ashtray her sailor father had gotten in Egypt. Sometimes she stuck incense sticks in the space between the statue's arm and thigh and burned them so they veiled his head in smoke, but mostly she just puffed her Camel Lights and watched sunsets or storms or waves lapping at the weird ice figures framing the beach in winter. He liked it that a smaller version of himself kept her company.

The second statue had been larger, life-sized, a nude, and it was so lifelike she sold it for four thousand dollars at an art show in Ithaca. She had barely had it a month but needed the money, and she would not sell it to Andrew because his offer felt like charity. She wanted to see what she could get from a stranger.

And so a man from Toronto took home her best statue, a statue of one of America's most powerful wizards buck naked in white clay, and put it in his basement near a red felt pool table.

It was titled
Nonchalance
, and the Canadian never lost another game of pool under Andrew's bored stone gaze, even against much better players, nor did he ever guess why.

Anneke is not made for interiors; there is something smaller, something caged and wrong about her in the bar, as there is whenever she finds herself beneath a roof.

She is too big for the space.

Andrew's mind's eye favors snapshots of Anneke outside, building something out of wood or sculpting it out of clay and slurry; her shag of dirty blond hair, just beginning to gray, has been woven to drink sunlight; if she carries a hammer, tan suede gloves cul-de-sac her strong, brown forearms; if she sculpts at her outside table, her jeans are crusted at the thighs where she wipes her hands on them, and she does not sit, but circles her creation counterclockwise as she coaxes its true shape and name from it.

Just walking across the lawn she has the air of a lioness whose mate had best not be sleeping in her favorite spot.

Andrew knew he loved her when he first saw sunlight on her.

That had been two years before.

He let himself love her because he knew she would not love him back.

Anneke Zautke has been out of prison for six years now, mostly sober for eight. She bought her odd, sloped little A-frame house by the lake so she could be close enough to visit her chronically ill father in the little town of Mexico,

 • • • 

Leukemia? Will you die?

Eventually.

It's not fair, Dad. You just . . . retired.

I sailed nuclear subs. Nobody made me do that. Nobody made me work at the plant. Shit happens.

 • • • 

but far enough away from Oswego and Syracuse not to see anyone she knew before.

She makes a decent living selling statues and earthenware mugs at art shows and Renaissance festivals, and her house, like Andrew's, is hard to find.

Anyone who makes a hobby of harassing sex offenders will have a long, winding drive to Anneke's property and back. Nobody has yet tried, but she has another twelve years to go before her name disappears from the registry.

Shelly Bertolucci had been sixteen.

Shelly had been so relieved to find someone else in Oswego who loved like she did that she didn't care about consequence.

Consequence can be lopsided, though.

Consequence was one thing for Shelly, and quite another for the pretty young art teacher fresh from Cornell who introduced her to cabernet, Rodin, Edith Piaf, and her first thirty orgasms.

Anneke Zautke got the maximum four-year sentence for statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This despite her lawyer's exhaustive coaching.

 • • • 

She was in braces when it started, right?

Yep.

Every time you think about sitting upright and tough, doing that Marlene Dietrich thing, remember they're going to show the jury pictures of a little girl in braces.

So, what, slouch?

Sit like someone who knows she had sex with a little girl in braces.

Show me what that looks like.

Will you be funny like that in maximum with girls who shot people?

 • • • 

Anneke had been unable to properly display remorse, because the truth was she felt none.

She wished
she
had had someone to light her way through the purgatory of a homosexual adolescence in west-central New York, and saw her willingness to do the same for Shelly as an act of personal valor.

Anneke had also been drinking a bottle and a half of wine a night and self-medicating, both with cocaine and with antidepressants she got online from India, so her ability to discern between empowerment and exploitation was . . .

Suspect.

 • • • 

When they're showing the braces pictures, are they going to show any of the sculptures Shelly made in class?

Why?

Because they're not bad. She really started . . . growing. Artistically.

What, because she was having sex with you?

. . .

Actually, yes.