If Angels Fight (10 page)
Authors: Richard Bowes
Today, Lady Wexford was being taken Upstream. Closer to the front. Closer to the point in Time where humanity, of which she was so astounding and complicated an example, ceased to exist.
Pulling up at the station, Linda took in the Ranger deployment. She also spotted George and Alice Stanley standing beside a couple of suitcases. Alice, she remembered, was going up to Rhode Island to be with a sister who had just had a baby girl.
Roy saw them at the same moment and cursed under his breath. A jump in the Stream would already be difficult with a novice like Olivia. George and Alice would want to talk. The other Rangers would have to act as a buffer.
A few days before, Linda would have felt a pang of sympathy. Even now, shared memories and a child, an immense secret and a common assignment, had a hold. She was about to say something.
Then Olivia, in the back seat, sang almost under her breath:
When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray
What charm can sooth her melancholy
What care can wash her guilt away?
It’s not her fall that she’s been singing about, Linda realized. It’s mine. She drove the Chevy right up to the station. They all got out and Roy went to the trunk for Olivia’s luggage. The man in the Buick gathered up his tennis rackets.
The train came into view. The Stanleys and the other passengers looked that way while the maid and the railway man watched them and everything else.
Linda and Olivia kissed. “It saddens my heart not to see Sally again,” the Englishwoman said. “Please give her this from me.”
The wristlet was a beautiful thing, silk roses and tiny pearls. And familiar. Linda remembered seeing Olivia Wexford wearing nothing else. She noticed that the design was a bit off kilter. Was that spot, perhaps, royal blood?
Linda took the memento and stuck it in a pocket of her slacks. “I’ll save it for when she’s old enough to understand.”
For the last couple of days Linda had not brought Sally back from Dorrie’s. Not even to say goodbye. Roy had the suitcases. He and Olivia had fucked in the rec room earlier that morning while Linda was out on errands. They hardly bothered to hide it.
“We caught the truck driver,” Linda said. “This morning.” She had both of their attention. “He was waiting when I left the house. I let him follow me. Mrs. Wood and I took what he knew.”
She watched their reactions. “It wasn’t much. He thought he was the look-out man in a kidnapping. That a rich grandfather would give a million dollars to ransom Sally.”
Roy’s eyes flashed with fury. Because Sally had been threatened. Because someone had tried to do this to HIS daughter. Because Linda was always right.
“The driver?” he asked.
“Done,” Linda said and he nodded. She’d wanted this to be none of his doing. But she’d had to make sure.
She couldn’t read Olivia’s face. Brushing the other’s mind, she caught a glimpse of a silk screen. On it, in the softest of colors, a nymph, covered by a flimsy drapery, glanced back at a pursuing Bacchus. And Linda, even in anger, could not violate what was reserved to a God.
The train pulled into the station. Linda caught Olivia in an embrace, turned her away from Roy and whispered, “You mentioned The Tale of the Ferryman’s Wife. Well we’re in that story now and she is a bitch with a long memory. If anything happens to Sally. No matter what, no matter when, I’ll find you and tear out your breath.”
“The wolf loves only the lamb,” Lady Wexford murmured, took a step backward, turned and went up to the platform between the man with the tennis rackets and Roy who carried her bags. Neither she nor Roy looked back.
Linda drove away from the station and watched the train depart in her rear view mirror. From then on, whenever she thought of Roy on the September morning when they met, she would also remember him hauling Lady Wexford’s luggage Upstream.
Roy would be back this evening and Sally would be there. He and Linda would wind up this operation quickly and go their separate ways. If he’d given even a hint of having sent that truck and driver to distract her, he would never have been allowed near their daughter again.
She drove not home but over to East Radley. On the way, she passed the spot where the crumpled black truck had run full speed into a concrete and steel overpass support. The body had been removed. The county police were waving traffic around the accident scene.
A few hours before, the man at the wheel, following Linda intently, had reached the outer fringe of Mrs. Wood’s awareness. The goddess revealed herself to him as he sped off the exit. Stunned and agape, he spiraled out of control. As he did, Linda laid open the vicious, stupid mind. He knew very little. Still it was too much. The truck crumpled, but he was already dead. Linda drove home to her husband and her guest.
On her second trip, she noticed flowers and Spring greenery adorning the statue of the Virgin in the Italians’ yard on the corner. She parked before the tall gray house with the swings and slide in the back yard.
“He always wanted action. He hated it here,” Linda said a while later. She sat in the kitchen drinking tea. The house was quiet. The other children, the ordinary children, were at home that day. Sally was back in the conservatory with Mrs. Wood. Dorrie listened, endlessly patient and kind.
“He once told me that riding herd on the Cold War, making sure that Ike gets two full terms and Krushev comes to power, is like near beer when you’re used to iced vodka. It could be a tabloid headline: TIME WARS BREAK UP MARRIAGE!” Linda started to laugh, but instead began to cry.
Dorrie was the perfect avatar. She was like a well. Linda wondered if she could ever learn to be like her. “My mother didn’t bring me to the Goddess until I was almost twelve,” Linda said. “Mrs. Wood looked to me like the most amazing black and silver movie publicity shot ever made. A face beautiful but impossible to pin down. Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds and everyone else all rolled into one. She touched me and I was Hers. It was that simple.”
That’s how it went for a while, Dorrie refilling the tea cup, nodding at a familiar tale, Linda alternating giggles and tears.
“That first day I met Roy. After we got intimately acquainted, I asked Mrs. Wood how long he’d be faithful. She said, ‘As long as he can be. And to no one as faithful as you.’ Because I was young that sounded like more than enough.”
Eventually, Linda breathed more calmly and all was silent in the kitchen. Then the door to the conservatory slammed open and Sally called, “Mommy! Mrs. Wood told my fortune!”
As her daughter came tripping down the hall, Linda caught the image. Gray and magic as TV, it showed Sally older. Seven at least. Wearing a robe of stars. Perhaps a school play. Maybe something more. The question was where and when?
“Can I have my cookie now?” Sally burst into the room, hugged Linda, then remembered and asked Dorrie, “Please?”
Dorrie smiled and drew the cloth off a still warm figure with a frosting dress and raisin eyes. She and Linda exchanged glances. The older woman nodded. Linda rose and went down the hall.
She remembered that her mother had waited too long to tell her the truth. About the Rangers. About the Time Stream. Linda had cried. Threatened to run away. Her mother had also delayed bringing her to Mrs. Wood until then.
Until today Linda had been able to see no reason for that. With puberty, her gift was apparent. The alliance of necessity between Rangers and Oracle was a long standing one. Shrines of the Goddess were within easy reach of any Ranger operative.
Now she knew more than she wanted to about alliances made Upstream. She had learned that the Gods could give the Rangers Lady Olivia. And, in return, the Rangers could give Lady Olivia Roy. She understood too her own mother’s reluctance. Mrs. Wood had opened Linda’s mind that first day and it had never again been entirely her own.
On that first occasion, Mrs. Wood had promised, You will know every mind but one. Ah, but the Oracle was deep. Or just slippery. Seven years after that, almost to the day, Linda had encountered Roy and imagined that his mind was that one. In the seven years that followed Linda encountered others whose thoughts she could not catch. Only now, thinking about it, did she realize that the one mind was her own.
At the conservatory door, Linda bowed slightly before the Presence then stepped forward into the warmth and sunlight. Here, where Chance and the Seasons merged, she would learn the nature of her new assignment.
4.
They talked for a time in Grove Hill about Roy and Linda Martin. Even in a nation founded on rootlessness, the speed with which they disappeared was remarkable. The Stanleys, George and Alice, often described their Saturday morning train trip with Roy and the exotic house guest.
“I knew,” she would say, “just by the way they avoided us.”
“At Grand Central,” he would add. “No sign of them.”
Olivia was never seen again. Roy returned but not for long. He was busy winding up his affairs. When pressed, he talked about taking over an uncle’s business in Seattle. Linda said something about going to stay with her family.
Divorce would, in a few years, be as common as babies were right then. But Roy and Linda Martin’s marriage was the first this circle had seen collapse. Marge Hacker, who lived right in back of them, described the distance she observed. “Not a smile. Not a touch. They talk to each other through the kid.”
Time passed and neighbors moved away from Grove Hill. But when Marge Hacker and Alice Stanley met by chance at a church rummage sale in Rye ten years later, it was the Martins they talked about. Rather than discuss their own marital woes, they recalled how quickly the house had been sold, how abruptly little Sally was taken out of school.
A decade further Upstream, as the protean nation of the West continued to change and transform itself, George Stanley and Frank Hacker met for lunch. Both were on their second marriages. George said, “Tried to get in touch with Roy once or twice, to maybe ask him about that British bimbo.”
And Frank smiled at his memory of Lady Olivia on an April evening and of a time and place gone by as fast as a lighted window seen at night from a speeding train.
One might think that in a genre devoted to the unknown and the unimaginable, surrealism and literary experimentation would be common modes. Not so. For a brief time (what’s been called the New Wave of the 1960s, early ’70s), Spec Fiction found a place, even a prominent place for experiment and the inexplicably strange.
The New Wave passed fairly quickly; old ways and formats reasserted themselves. Things never returned to the stories-for-eleven-year-old-boys-of-all-ages that dominated the pulp magazines of the ’40s and ’50s, but there was no ready market for artistic innovation.
So it remained until the rise of the ’zines in the late 1990s. Kelly Link/Gavin Grant’s
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
was the first. The off-beat was the staple fare and the TOC was impressive. For a while after that it seemed as if every young writer also edited and published, often irregularly, a small, quirky magazine devoted to the odd angles of storytelling.
Like butterflies these ’zines appeared, wonderful in their color and variety, then mostly they were gone.
LCRW
survives and I was happy to discover recently that so does my own personal favorite, John Klima’s
Electric Velocipede
.
It was John and
EV
who published two stories by Mark Rich and me, including “Jacket Jackson.” I don’t collaborate much in my writing. But I prize the stories Mark Rich (poet, short story writer, critic) and I wrote together. Especially this one about a kid poet with a great old car loose in the US of the mid-’60s and in worlds and times beyond ours.
On my own I might have created some aspects of Chris Brown/Deware/Jackson. But not all aspects by any means and certainly not the poems. Like magic Mark produced them whenever we decided one was necessary (and even once or twice when I just wanted to see another one).
A lot of the American West seen in the story is Mark’s. Creating the Maxee was fun for us both.
What did I contribute?
Mainly the feel of driving at eighteen blasted out of your head at the wheel of your car and waking up barefoot and cuffed to the outside of a holding cell because of the benevolence of suburban county cops.
From each according to his abilities . . .
JACKET JACKSON
Richard Bowes and Mark Rich
I close my eyes and draw in
blue distances of smoky air
the coiling strands
of a City of No Time
City of Castoff Futures
—Jacket Jackson
1.
I
n a year of promise deep in the heart of the 20th century, Chris Brown hit the road. He was nineteen. His draft board had lost touch with him. His mother and step-father were just divorced, and he had flunked out of college back east. Driving a blue, beat-up 1954 Dodge Royale ragtop, Chris was as free as any American.
The man at the last gas stop on 66 had a boozed-up grin and see-nothing eyes.
No one sees anything, Chris thought. I walk in a dead land with an invisible city carried in the air over my head, and no one sees.
Chris wrote poetry.
The tank topped out at two dollars and thirty-five cents’ worth of gas.
As he pulled away with sixty-seven cents in change, he caught a flash of silver
—
something barreling down an ebony causeway . . .
2.
In Maxee, City of Lost History, a bike and rider swept along the otherwise deserted Esplanade of Silk Serpents. The hands and head of the biker were shiny aluminum. Blue liquid dribbled from its mouth. It wore jeans and boots. A leather jacket, unzipped, flapped in the wind.
“Ah, but this is bracing to observe,” said the Clockmaster to Tomkin of the Tomkins, his Flux-Agent. They stood in Maxee, City of a Dozen Suns, looking down from the terrace of the Pitch of Dreams. “Desperate fun.” His voice rang like chimes. “Jackson’s remarkable jacket has a new friend. All metal, and on a motorcycle.”
One sun rose while another set. Orange light bounced off the aluminum torso as the bike roared across Tangle Tongue Bridge, past the Graveyard of Unbearable Children and the centuries-wide Patio of Platitudes. The biker hung a left at the Tobacco Gardens.
“Remember the Summer of the Raggle Taggle Girl?” the Flux-Agent said, lips pursed in amusement. “We had ground Seth Jackson to dust. All but destroyed the memory of his existence. Yet he returned. A bit of him, anyway. That Girl. She dashed in here wearing Jackson’s jacket and left us with those Gardens.”
“Then I found her near the Hissing Stairs,” said the Clockmaster. “Creating something that involved an absinthe fountain and a carousel. The tinkle of the music was at the edge of my ear when I drilled the Raggle Taggle Girl full of the darts of Time.”
“Always deadly, that arm of yours,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins.
“Yet the jacket crawled off her back, and got away to some obscure solipse in the Outer Possibilities. Only to return with this chrome manikin.”
As the motorcycle roared past the Tobacco Gardens, the cigar trees all glowed at their tips and puffed clouds of welcome.
The Flux-Agent heard the Clockmaster tick a bit faster at that. Saw his lips twitch.
On a terrace elsewhere in Maxee City of Dreaming Spires, a small rubber ball bounced on the marble floor, once, twice, and went over the edge.
Far below them, Jackson’s jacket said, “Hard right. Go for the Barrows.”
Metal hands steered the bike toward a long marble ramp. On a terrace five levels down, red flashed on the couch where Pauline of the fiery hair stretched and turned in her mechanical boredom.
When the cycle hit the ramp, thousands of tiny metal jacks, the kind kids grab at between ball-bounces, went scattering across the road. Piles of them broke and sprayed like gravel beneath the tires. They clicked and clattered, catching in the spokes. They rattled against the engine. The motorcycle coughed and skidded.
It smashed through a railing.
As it fell, the aluminum driver raised its hands from the handles. The jacket slipped off its arms and billowed open in the air. All akimbo, it floated within sight of the balcony where Pauline now stood at the railing, her eyes bright, her hair twining around her shoulders.
She reached for the jacket.
Like a bullet, the rubber ball ricocheted off a wall. It smacked into the jacket and drove it spinning away from Pauline’s outstretched arms. The jacket fell, turning over and over, growing smaller as it fell out of Maxee, City in the Pink Smoke Clouds.
Seth Jackson was dead. The jacket knew this. The Clockmaster, Prince Of Stasis, had pressed him into the dust that was ground ever finer by Maxee’s turning and writhing foundation.
Still, the aroma of those trees . . .
It remembered the factory workroom somewhere in a backwash town near the West End of Humankind, where the liquid fire first flowed from Jackson’s veins into the jacket-shaped webwork of carbon and steel, circuitry and leather. Life coursed into its fabric. It rippled, at its edges, just outside time.
Jackson had draped the jacket over a stool, then leaned back against a table, lighting a cigar. He stared at his creation. The jacket would stay shining and dark despite the dulling of months. Its fabric would ripple and turn after the hammering of years. Its shape would hold without tattering against the gales of the centuries it swept through.
Carbon and steel, circuitry and leather, and love and . . .
Jackson disliked a certain Prince of Stasis.
As the jacket fell, it called out to the dust of its creator.
“Where now?” it said.
“Find him . . .”
“There?” said the Jacket, seeing a sunbaked, hardened place within a cracked and broken stretch of time. “Listen; there must have been a million jackasses through the centuries who have breathed out one or two of the bubbles that expanded to become Maxee, City of Null Time. What makes you think I can find someone who’s any more important than anyone else?”
The jacket fell tumbling into the turbulence of the post-Bomb years, toward the backbone of a continent with not much more than gas engines crossing it.
At first the distant dust being ground beneath the turning city stayed silent.
Then, with leathery sensors the thin sharpness of glass, the jacket caught the words:
“This is where the dream is born, in the cracks of this torn-apart version of the world. Here are ones in whom the vision of Maxee, the City Out of Time, is deeply rooted.
“And here there is one to tear Maxee from the hands of the one who . . .”
3.
In the middle of the day under a hot Nebraska sun, on the old wooden bench behind the diner, Chris wrote carefully in the ledger, with his No. 2 Eagle. The ledger had to be as old as the town was, with leather library binding and green-edged paper. Cost almost nothing at the secondhand store.
Three weeks dishwashing at Jake’s, with his Dodge Royale slowly rusting back at the lot. Seemed a hell of a lot longer than three weeks.
He closed his eyes. He must not see. Must not think. Blank. Blank. Not think. He closed his eyes. Opened them. He started writing.
Red is the color of the sky
above a dozen sunsets. Red
when I close my eyes to her hair.
Red is red. Red is the glassy eye
burning the forest of my head.
The timeking laughs upon his chair:
the manikin falls from on high
onto the fossil riverbed
leaving red chrome everywhere
and a scattering of metal leaves.
Chris stared at the words. The image of a red-haired woman edged into his mind and out of it.
“Maxee, Number Twenty-Five,” he wrote at the top of the ledger page.
“What you doing, jackass?” said Weed, the cook.
“Numbering your good points.”
“Didn’t know you could count that high.”
“All the way to two.”
Weed counted to two, with one finger up from each hand. “Count of three, I’ll kick your ass, Chrissy.”
“Get the hell out of here, Weed,” said old Jay, standing in the door.
“I’ll kick his ass someday,” Weed said. “I’ll kick his ass.”
“Kicking your own if you do,” said Jay.
Later the sun cooled down enough, and enough time had passed, to let Chris think again.
Out of this town, he thought.
Out, but with the vision of the city carried with him, greater than even these twenty-five pages in an old ledger.
Still, they were good pages, so he took them with him.
4.
“You want the jacket because it’s so much better than you,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, Flux-Agent of the Clockmaster, Golden Peregrine to the Far Lands. He stood in his amber robe. Blue laurel twisted around his helmet’s beak, feathered crest, and glassy eyes. “The last creation of your precious Seth Jackson.”
“It is not better than me. But it is very good.”
Red Pauline’s dark dress mirrored lights of Maxee that extended far below and far above the black platform on which she and Tomkin of the Tomkins stood, in that rare moment when none of the suns of Maxee shone.
“And you,” she said, “want it because it has something on you.”
“It is something I want on me. It probably has something on everyone. But I would have something on poor, dead Jackson, wouldn’t I, if I had it on me?”
Red Pauline laughed.
“There must have been a good occasion,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, “to have generated such a laugh for you to recall now, in your cold years, for social purposes. How nice of you to revive it for me, out of your circuits.”
“How nice of you to unveil your unceasing cynicism. I appreciate nakedness in men.”
“Exactly the nakedness I would expect a machine to appreciate.”
She laughed again.
He smiled. “You realize you are engaging in crime,” he said, “encouraging the jacket to change things this way.”
“You and the Clockmaster destroyed Seth, and now have exiled his last creation from the Brightness to the Years of Shadow.”
“Where it will die, too,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, maintaining his smile. “Eventually. Already it is weaker.”
“You force my hand,” she said, “by rigging the Contingencies and tampering with the Time Streams from the Beginning of the Brightness, to hold Maxee, the Protean City, to its unchanging pattern.”
“You have been listening to that Simmoo’s wild surmises. The Clockmaster is capable. But not of that. He will find stopping you well within the range of the possible, however. The flow of the Streams is now quite steady, and any disruptive action against Maxee, City Out of Time, will be caught.”
“I am interested in actions for Maxee. But for a Maxee the Clockmaster will not let come into being.”
“As you will.”
The stage winked out of existence, leaving the figures hovering for a moment between the twisting spires of Maxee . . .
A humming of bees between radiant flowers . . .
The roar of a distant elevator between stars . . .
Then they, too, of the burning hair and of the watchful helmet, winked away.
5.
Chris carried an empty gas can down a twilit road a hundred miles from anywhere.
He saw his dream rising briefly against the sky, down another darkening road, and so turned that way.
How long since he left the Dodge by the road?
Every kid nineteen years old should be free as the breeze.
So he had thought with a full tank of gas.
Breeze, and sand, and stone . . .
And wind and the roar of a distant elevator between frozen stars.
Chris abruptly dropped the can and doubled over. He thought he would lose his lunch. The road spun below him, then above him, then below him again. A shimmering vastness passed before his eyes. He saw clearly. He had such moments.
“Seth Jackson sent me,” it said.
Just the wind.
“I cannot quite reach you,” it said.
Yet, after a time, it did.
The thing sent by Jackson fitted itself around the kid’s shoulders as he lay face-down, dry-mouthed and empty-headed on the cold sand in that Arizona night. A scorpion regarded him from a pile of black stones.
“You are too simply blood and nerve,” said the thing that had flapped out of the violet darkness. “Those spineless jelly things of Maxee: they are closer to me than you—but even they I cannot quite fit around, not as I should.” The thickness of the jacket pressed around Christopher. “But we will try this. We will do this, and we will succeed.”
“Maxee,” said the hollowed-out boy, seizing on the syllables. He felt fingers in his head.
“It is a where, and it is a when.” The words crept along behind the fingers. “The shadows, the lights, the waterfall of a million miles. The chiming thoughts of a century of bell-headed children.”
The tendrils of voice pulled away from the boy’s mind, and left in their place a vision of a city so immense it wrapped around the sky. The vision was, Christopher knew, an ideal, a fairy painting made as a collage from all the dim pictures in his mind.
After a moment he remembered to breathe again. He found himself remembering a box of crayons he had when he was five. He drew pictures in his head, and tore them up.
“And it is a nowhere, and a nowhen. It is a future, but not the Future,” said the thing on his back. “I’ll show you.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Christopher. “It’s real, isn’t it? It’s beautiful.”
“You’ll see it in more than just your mind.”
The thing from the future rose off the boy’s shoulders and spread itself as a gauze of black tissue against the stars. It searched and found what it wanted, on another dark highway: two minds with a touch of Maxee, Citadel of the Ice of Time, playing around their edges. It called them.
Hours later, two figures appeared over the rise of hard earth and stones.
One voice, a woman’s, said, “There!”
The figures saw a shadow standing among the shadows as they walked near.
“We heard there was a boy here, in a leather jacket,” said a man’s voice. “The boy who sees.”
The shadow vanished.
They saw in its place a form splayed unconscious on the sands. Radiant above the boy they saw the spirals of the City of Nets, turning through the stillness of a future with no past.
When the jacket told them of Maxee, they recognized their own dreams.
When it told them into what hands Maxee had fallen, they wept.