Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (22 page)

“Now, then, no need to talk like that,” he said.

“I didn't mean to be gauche,” she apologized. Miss Manners didn't cover these situations, nor Emily Post. How was she supposed to know what to say? She felt giddy and rather girlish. Maybe it was the punch.

Probably her situation was dangerous. Here she was, on her own, unknown in a strange city, having fallen in with vampires, werewolves and—whatever her dancing partner was. Why had they invited her to fall in with them, she wondered? Were they all going to fall on her and bite her neck at midnight or was she going to get offered immortality or what? Well—those choices were ones she would expect of the vampires.

She decided to fish a little, and really, now that she had found her voice, and the “old soldier” seemed to like it, she found it a pleasure to talk and be heard. “Have you known these people long?” she asked. “The rest of the Krewe of Melusine, I mean?”

“Oh, for ages and ages,” he said, with a smile that was appealingly bashful if a bit grotesque. “They're a fine bunch of characters.”

“Ummm,” she said. She decided not to press but go about sussing out the situation more indirectly. “Is the mermaid symbol the Melusine you are the Krewe of?”

“She's not exactly a mermaid,” he said. “In fact, a lot of the French nobility—and some of the folks here, claim descent from her. She was supposed to be half fairy and half human. Her father was what the social workers these days would call an abuser and Melusine managed to lock him up in a cave. Her mama punished her by makin' her a serpent from the waist down for part of every day. This didn't keep the girl from marryin' the Count of Poitiers and they were real happy and had a mess of kids until he broke his promise to her and peeked at her while she was takin' a bath. Our own Count DeBase' , that's Snow White to you, darlin', claims descent from her through his mother's line and Louis Garou, Red Ridin' Hood, is related to her from the wrong side of the blanket. She's sort of the patron ancestress for all of the—well, if you were bein' politically correct, you'd probably say differently gifted, breathing challenged, in touch with their inner beast, folks on the Krewe.”

She looked back at the emblem of the Krewe of Melusine and saw that the long mermaid's tail was indeed serpentine, and had no fishy fork at the end. She nodded and turned her mask back to her partner.

“And what's your story?” she asked.

“Me, I don't normally come to this kinda thing but the Count is bound and determined to improve our civic image. He even sent a couple of the boys over to get interviewed by a lady writer. Then he and Louie got this notion that we would become the Krewe of Melusine and enter into the festivities this year. Raise our profile. Only none of them, after all the years they've lived, has learned come'ere from sick'em about practical matters. Me, I've got a carpenter's hands and I'm good at buildin' things, so I decided, even though I thought I'd feel silly in fancy dress, to go along with it, help ‘em build the float and such.”

He did have carpenter's hands—rough and callused, though he had evidently tried to soften them with lotion, and there were more scars at the wrists. Was he maybe a bipolar personality and had become so depressed at one time that he had attempted suicide? She hoped not! His eyes were wonderful, soft and deep and humorous at the same time. They seemed wise. Plus he was tall and he liked her voice and for such a big fellow, he danced divinely. No doubt it was idiotic, but she felt safe in his long arms. She asked quickly, “And are you glad?”

“It's the smartest thing I've ever done,” he said. “I knew that the minute I saw you standin' in the front of the crowd, catchin' throws like a little girl.” His arms tightened, drawing her to him. “Nobody else was lookin' so I knew they either had to be blind or you were invisible. I followed you—I'm sorry, I know stalkin's got a bad name these days, but I didn't mean any harm. I just wanted to know who you were so I could get you invited here, meet you, get to know you so maybe you'd be—less alarmed, seein' us lookin' so ridiculous in our masks and costumes.”

Her breath left in a rush of belief. “Then it wasn't the vamp—the Count and the others who wanted me to come?”

“Not at first, darlin', no. They're kinda self-absorbed, if you know what I mean. But I bet when they're gonna be as impressed as I am once they take notice. I just love your gumption. Not many ladies when they turn invisible start havin' fun the way you do. And I can just tell you're not narrow minded or anything. You're still here, after all.” His close embrace graphically demonstrated just how interested he was. When she was twenty, this might have seemed coarse or gross and annoyed her. But maybe not from someone she liked. And she liked this big fellow, even if he was a little on the seamy side.

“And you can see me?” she asked. “Even without the costume?”

He gave her a cheerful leer. “You bet I can, sugar.”

“Well,” she said, more boldly than she had ever dared even at the pinnacle of her youth and beauty, since in those days the men had to make all the moves. “I am so glad you invited me. It's nice to be a part of things, when I'm such a stranger here—everywhere, actually. It was very sweet of you to take such pains to impress me. I admit, at one point, this would have all been a little too—unconventional for me. But I'm unconventional now myself.”

He gave her another little reassuring hug.

“The only thing is, I've had too much of crowds already and I'm not used to being stared at.” For she had begun to notice that all over the room, people were staring at them.

“That's not you, honey. It's just that everybody who isn't one of the Count's kind is admirin' their costumes in your costume.” Another leer. “You could just sorta slip out of it and into somethin' more comfortable and we could get outta here if you like.”

She laughed and put on a Miss Scarlett voice. “Why, Sir, what makes you think I'm that kinda girl?”

He put his finger to his lips, his eyes twinkling, and helped adjust her mirror so that it was once more in the front of her costume. Then, taking a step back from her, he plucked up the cloak he had been carrying over his arm and swung it over his shoulders, adjusting the hood. In the mirror, one moment he was there, the next moment he was gone.

“Now how did you do
that
?” she asked.

“Don't you remember your fairy tales, darlin'? When the old soldier took on the case of the disappearin' princesses, he first got him a cloak of invisibility so he could tail ‘em without bein' spotted. I do a little detective work myself, so I find this comes in real handy. It is also how I know what kinda girl you are.”

“Oops,” she said, then, again in the Miss Scarlett voice. “But that is so unfair. You have the advantage of me! I don't even know your name.”

“Names are not all that important among kindred spirits, darlin' Ms Vanessa,” he said, still smiling visibly—to her. “but you can call me Lamont.”

She gasped appreciatively. “ Lamont
Cranston
, the Shadow who used invisibility to fight crime?”

“Oh, no, darlin', he'd be way too old from you by now. My given name is actually Montmorte but close enough. And I –acquired—many of the original Shadow's traits after he disappeared last time. Includin' bein' able to make myself invisible with the help of this cape, which I got for savin' a poor old bag lady from a street gang, and a taste for to crime fightin'. Say now, you bein' invisible yourself and all, I don't suppose
you
would want to try your hand at crime fightin' too?” His big earnest scarred face looked down at her hopefully.

She thought of all of the violence she had fled from in the dark, glad that she could not be seen but feeling guilty for not helping the victims. “Could be. It's crossed my mind to tell you the truth, though so far all I've managed to do is keep out of trouble. Speaking of trouble, for an alleged good guy, don't you keep sort of questionable company?”

He smiled. “These folks took me in when I was barely a few days old, darlin, ' when even the folks who gave me life didn't want me. The Count and Louie and their friends may not be real conventional but less like friends and more like family to me. And surely you've read Carl Jung, darlin'? Even us shadows got ourselves a dark side,”

“Just how dark is that?” she asked, intrigued in spite of herself. Her heart was pounding. This was the kind of man she had longed for—powerful, intelligent, charming, complex, articulate—and a man of many parts.

He led her to one of the tall floor standing candlabras and helped her take off the mirror, mask, and wig. All around them the masked dancers swirled. He pulled up the folds of the voluminous cloak and gazed into her eyes. It was so nice that he was even gazing at the right place. “Let me put it this way, Vanessa, honey, while I am on the other side of of the crime-fightin' fence from the Count or Louie, I
do
have my little—kinks. You and me, I knew it the first time I saw you, we're two of a kind. And I just happen to know that our there under that big old cypress, right near that cool splashing fountain, there is a little patch of soft grass just big enough.”

It was an outrageous idea, something she would never have considered before, ever, even with football heroes or movie stars, had she ever known any. On the other hand, she was glad it wasn't just another career opportunity. The night was warm and perfumed, and the courtyard was cool and not
quite
as public as the ballroom. The music had begun in earnest, with a throbbing, primitive beat. And now, well, she was invisible. And he was too. No one would see, or know, but him. It was a uniquely intimate situation. And intensely erotic. Stealth, danger, romance. She felt as if she were seventeen again. Very much in the mood for some serious sexual harrassment as a prelude to her new line of work, she played with the buttons on his uniform shirt. “We-ell,” she said in the Miss Scarlett drawl, “I suppose if I'm going to help you fight crime, it's high time I reacquainted myself with the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.”

He wrapped her in the cloak and kissed her, saying “And women, dearheart. This shadow
knows
.”

by

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

I met my first unicorn, appropriately enough, when I stepped into an enchanting forest glade. It was enchanting for a couple of reasons.

The first reason was that it was out of shouting and phone distance from my place, where an unexpected visitor snoring in my bed reminded me never to wish for anything too much lest it come not only to pass but to remain for an indefinite stay.

The other reason was that I normally don't venture out in the morning too far from the house because I take blood pressure medicine. This medicine displaces the pressure on your heart by creating pressure on another bodily system. That morning, however, I had to go out or go nuts so even though I did think of it before I left home, I had a certain personal function to perform. The strategically placed trees surrounding the glade provided cover from the road as well as from the hiking trail.

It requires a little extra agility for a female wearing sweatpants to assume the position in semi-bondage without falling over, of course, but I'd had considerable practice while living in the woods in Alaska. With sufficient privacy, such a moment can be ideal for achieving a calm, earthy oneness with nature. However, the occasion is not, as I discovered, the ideal moment for a close encounter with a unicorn.

Up until recently, unicorns were never a problem. No one I knew had seen one except in the movies or in books. Then all at once, people started seeing unicorns. This was my first one. I wasn't crazy about its timing.

It lowered its head, its little goatee quivering and its long spiral horn aimed right at me. Before I could - er -point out to the beast that it was supposed to be mythical, extinct, or at the very least an endangered species and therefore should have better things to do than menace me, it charged. Fortunately it was a good few yards away - the enchanting forest glade was a largish one.

I stood, hastily rearranging my attire for maximum mobility, and did a bullfighter twist to one side at the last minute as the damned thing galloped past me.

Undeterred, it turned, gave me an annoyed look, and lowered its head to charge again.

Clasping my garments to my loins, not from modesty but practicality, since they weren't properly fastened and would hinder movement otherwise, I recalled my meagre store of woods lore and pondered my strategy.

With a mountain lion, you're supposed to make yourself big like an angry cat and back, not run, slowly away. This will make the lion think you're too big to swallow in one handy bite sized chunk. With a bear, you make a lot of noise and hope it really is as scared of you as you are of it (though it couldn't possibly be). If it's a mother bear, you don't interfere with cubs. If you're camping, you hide your food in a sack in a tree well away from where you sleep, praying the bear eats your food and ignores you, mummied in your sleeping bag. But what in the hell you were supposed to do in the event of a unicorn attack had never been covered in any literature I'd ever read.

The unicorn galloped forward again, an ornery look in its green eye. “Hey, you,” I said to it, side-stepping awkwardly. “You just cut that out. I didn't do a damned thing to you that you should go harassing me. Go find a virgin to impress!”

Shaking its head and emitting a snort that sent a cloud of steam rising from its nostrils, it turned to charge again. I ducked behind a tree long enough to fasten my pants, and prepared to duck again, but by this time the unicorn was pawing- or rather hoofing- at the place where I'd formerly positioned myself. It was covering my -er- scent, the way a cat would cover its scat.

“Prissy damn critter!” I muttered, and used its preoccupation to scoot away back to the road. I was not followed.

I definitely needed human company then and a latte. My guest would no doubt follow his life long custom and sleep till noon, so I headed down to Bagels and Begonias Bakery. It was Wednesday and on winter Wednesdays particularly, when the tourists were all back at work in their own towns, groups of friends met to gossip and pour over the Port Chetzemoka Listener, our town's weekly newspaper.

I grabbed my latte and a plain bagel and joined a table. Conversation was already in full swing but I broke in, which was okay etiquette for Wednesdays at the bakery. “You'll never guess what happened to me!” I said to the two people nearest me while Ramona Silver continued to regale everyone with the problems her friend Cindy had been having since her fifty something boyfriend had gone back to drinking. The AA group in Port Chet has a much larger and more prestigious membership than any of the lodges with animal names.

Ramona stopped in mid-sentence and turned to me, “What?” she asked.

“I got attacked by a unicorn.”

“Where at?”

“Walking up the Peace Mile at Fort Gordon. It just came out of the woods and tried to gore me.” I didn't mention the circumstances. It didn't seem important then.

“Oh, well. The paper's full of that this morning,” Inez Suunderson said and directed me to the front page.

Local authorities, the Listener said, attributed the recent proliferation of unicorns in urban areas to the effects of deforestation and development.

“It's said that a unicorn won't even step on a living thing,” Atlanta, the real-estate saleslady turned psychic reader told us.

I snorted. “If that were true, they'd only walk on concrete. The one I saw walked on grass and was getting ready to walk all over me - after it shish ka bobbed me, that is. I think the only thing that kept me from panicking was that I couldn't believe it was real. I've been writing about unicorns for a long time now and I always thought they were make-believe.”

“Oh no,” Randy Williams said. “The Raven people have several legends in which the unicorn is an important transformative figure. Of course, they refer to unicorns as the One-Horned Dog.”

“Surely they're not
indigenous
?”

He shrugged. “The legends are pretty old. Of course, they might have been prophetic instead of historic, I guess. I don't speak the Raven tongue very well.”

“You mean the Indian legends maybe foretold that the unicorns would be here?” asked Ramona, a jeweller and artist who like every other artist in town works four minimum wage jobs to sustain herself. She twiddled the silk flower she always wore in her hair, an orange one today. She always twiddled when she was thinking particularly hard. Her “Wow” was so reverent I understood it to actually mean “Far out.”

Lance LaGuerre, our former Rainbow Warrior and present head of the Port Chetzemoka Environmental Council, said, “That doesn't necessarily mean the unicorns are indigenous or even a naturally occurring species. Some Indian legends also foretell such events as space travel and nuclear disasters, isn't that true, Randy?”

Randy just gave him a look. He doesn't like Lance very much. Lance is the kind of guy who would probably have grown up to be a religious-right wing industrialist if his father, whom he detested, hadn't been one first. So he brought all of his genetic judgmental Calvinistic uptightness over to the other side. Thus he was a liberal, except that he wasn't awfully liberal when it came to being empathetic or compassionate or even reasonable with anyone who didn't agree with all of his opinions. And he had an awful lot of opinions.

“I mean, now the forest service is acting as if they knew about the unicorns all along but up until now, who ever heard of them? I'll bet they're the result of a secret genetic engineering program the government's been conducting ...”

“Yeah,” Ramona said, “Or maybe mutants from toxic waste like the Ninja Turtles.”

Lance nodded encouragingly, if a bit patronizingly. I doubt the patronizing had anything to do with the Ninja Turtles. I don't think he knew who they were.

“Well, whatever they are,” said Inez Sunderson, “They've been stripping the bark from our trees, digging up my spring bulbs, and terrorising the dogs and I mean to plug the next one I catch in our yard.”

The men gently, supportively encouraged her to do so. Inez, you have to understand, gets that kind of response to everything she says. I think the reason is that she is one of those incredibly ethereally beautiful Scandinavian blondes who look really good in navy blue to match their eyes. She used to be a model, I know, and was almost as old as me, but she looked about twenty-five. She is also intelligent and well-read in the classics and has a good knowledge of music and only watches PBS when she deigns to watch TV and never sets foot in a mall. All that is fine but sometimes her practical, stoic Norski side makes her sound like Eyore.

I didn't say much more. I was still bemused - and amused, because by now the incident seemed funny to me - by my first meeting with a unicorn. I wasn't quite ready to go home and face my other problem though, so I hung out till everyone left, though Randy was over at another table talking with some of his other friends. He's lived in Port Chet for years and has all these close personal ties with the other folks who worked for the Sister Cities group, were with him in South America with Amnesty International, or used to live in school busses at the same time he did.

My alma mater is a little different from that of most of my friends. I wasn't living in school busses and going to peace marches. I was nursing in Vietnam. So was Doc Holiday, whose real name is Jim, but since he was a medic in Nam, and has sort of a Sam-Elliot-gunfighter presence, everyone calls him Doc. It's appropriate. He's the local Vietnam vet counsellor, Amvet co-ordinator,
and
how-to-avoid-the-draft-should-it-come-back-into-fashion resource person. He's a Virgo, which Atlanta has explained means he's very service oriented.

He walked right past me and sat down at a table by himself.

I figured he didn't see me and I wanted to tell him about the unicorn, so I got up and walked over to his table and said. “Hey, Doc. How ya doin'?”

“Hey, Sue,” he said, shaking his head slowly. I could tell right then that he'd sat down where he was because he figured he was best off alone. He gets these depressions sometimes, but then, so does Randy. They belong to the half of the town that isn't already on Prozac. “Not so good, lady. I lost another one.”

“I'm sorry, Doc.” He was referring to clients. He told me once that more than twice as many Vietnam vets had died from suicide since the war as died in battle during. He still lost several more the same way every year.

“Can't win ‘em all, I guess,” he said with a deep sigh.

Randy wandered back our way just then. “Doc, hi. Sorry. I heard about Tremain.”

Doc shrugged. “Yeah, I'm sorry about your buddy too.”

I hadn't heard about that one. “Flynn?” I asked. They both nodded. “God. AIDS is so awful,” I said completely unnecessarily. But then, most things you say about how someone dies are unnecessary.

Randy's mouth quirked. “Well, hey, we never thought we'd live to thirty anyhow and look at us - old farts now. I guess it's just the time when your friends start dropping. But we never thought it would be us.”

“Too cool to die,” I said.“Old Boomers Never Die They Just - finish that sentence and win a free all expense paid trip to Disney World.”

They nodded. We all understood. The three of us were graying lone wolves. Armchair analysts would say we had each failed to bond due to post traumatic stress disorder - Doc's and mine from the war, Randy's from a number of things including the wars he observed with Amnesty. Actually, I think I'm in the club under false pretences - I bond only too well and stay bonded, whether it's a good idea or not. Doc and Randy didn't care, as long as I didn't try bonding with them in any significant way, but it was good having a woman in the group since they both felt they had a lot of shit to work out about women. So, okay, it's tokenism, but nobody ever asked me to make the coffee so I didn't care.

“Doc, you know what happened to me this morning? I got charged by a unicorn.”

He gave me a slow grin. Twenty, thirty years ago it would have made my heart flip flop. Fifteen years ago it would have sounded fire alarms that my feminist integrity was about to be breached. But now I just waited politely as he asked, “Oh, yeah? What was the offence? Did you get his badge number?”

“Very funny. I see my first unicorn after all these years of writing about them and all I get is cop jokes.”

Doc's known me for, what? seven or eight years now, but he still takes my joking kvetvching seriously.

“Sorry, Sue. I'd be more impressed except that our facility down by Port Padlock is about overrun with the critters. They're all over the place, and they fight constantly. It's sort of hard to teach people to be at peace with themselves when there's all these unicorns going at it cloven hoof and horn out in the back forty. Makes me want to get out my huntin' rifle again, but I swore off.”

“I think I'll go for a walk. See if I can spot any,” Randy said, and left. I followed reluctantly. I didn't want to go home.

Jess Shaw, my houseguest, was on his first cup of instant coffee when I returned. He had the remote control to my TV in his hand and was clicking restlessly between channels. The MUTE sign was on the screen. None of the cats were in sight. I think the smell drove them off. They're not used to people who reek of cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes, half masked by men's cologne. There was a time I couldn't get enough of that scent. Now I wanted to open a window, even though it had started to rain and the wind was whipping up the valley from the Strait. It wasn't that I didn't care about him any more, it was just that ever since my first youthful infatuation more than twenty-five years ago, the emotion I felt toward this man was something like unconditional ambivalence. It was requited.

After not bothering to pick up the telephone for the last couple of years, the man had just driven two thousand miles to see me. In the years I'd known him, he'd gone through several live-ins and marriages. Since my own divorce, I'd done a lot of thinking about who and what I was and who and what the man I'd married and the men I chose tended to be, with the result that I'd pretty much retreated into my own private nunnery. So I just said, “Is your own remote at home broken? Is that why you came to see me?”