Bone Dance Read online

  I stood clouted with revelation amid the produce. I wanted knowledge. Sherrea claimed to call it up out of a seventy-eight-card deck. I didn’t believe in the cards, but I might, if pressed, admit to uncertainty about Sher. A little mind reading, with tarot as its rationalization — however she explained it to herself, she might locate my missing memories. If she was a mind reader, if the memories were there, if there was any help in them. But I had to try.

  The brown grandmotherly woman who sold the tomatillos was shooting ungrandmotherly narrow-eyed looks at me, so I turned to move on. But I missed my step and stumbled against one of her awning poles, rocking the whole canvas roof, and she shouted something about mi madre. That made me laugh. The sun hit me over the head with its hammer when I came out of the shade, and I stopped laughing.

  The Ravine forms the western edge of the Bank, only a few hundred yards from Seven Corners market. It’s full of the cracked pavement of an old interstate highway — still a perfectly good road, in an age that requires less of its road surface and has no use for the concept of “between states.” From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick and wood on the nearest structures, shading farther in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from its center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but wore the sky instead — relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin. If I’d reached them as quickly on foot as I have in the narrative, maybe I’d have no story to tell. Or maybe I would. Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and the pulleys.

  The bridge over the Ravine was scattered with vendors who hadn’t found a place in the market. Very few had awnings, or even stalls; they spread blankets on the scorching sidewalks, and kept their hats and shawls and parasols tilted against the sun. The heat rose with the force of an explosion from the road surface below, and the whole scene wiggled in a heat mirage. Near the center of the bridge, I stopped to press my hands over my eyes, trying to squeeze the aching out of my head, to replace it with a firm sense of up and down, forward and back. I shivered. Maybe the sweat was working, after all. Except that I didn’t seem to be sweating anymore.

  A warm wind brushed past me. No, it was the sudden breeze of people going by. So why didn’t they go! I opened my eyes. A skinny arm reached out, bony fingers slapped my shoulder and spun me around. Faces splashed with black and gray, stubbly scalps, a flurry of ragged clothing — I was at the eye of a storm of Jammers.

  I’ve heard them compared to rabbits in the spring. Maybe the people who do are afraid of rabbits. The Jammers were pale, thin as wire, and as they danced their arms and legs crisscrossed like a chainlink fence of skin and bone. They weren’t dressed for the heat, but I understand Jammers don’t feel it, or cold, or much of anything besides the passion of the drum in their veins.

  The nightbabies, who every sunset brought their parents’ money down from the tops of the towers or from the walled compounds of parkland at the City’s edge, would follow a cloud of Jammers like gulls after a trash wagon. They’d try to copy the steps. But that dance has no pattern, no repeats, and the caller is the defect or disease that makes the Jammer bloodbeat and the shared mind that goes with them. The hoodoos claimed the Jammers as kin, but I never heard that the Jammers noticed. The nightbabies pestered them for prophecies, for any words at all that they could repeat down in the clubs to give them a varnish of artful doom for a few hours, until something else went bang.

  But I didn’t open fortune cookies, or feed hard money to the Weight-and-Fate in the Galena de Juegos, or seek out prophecies from the Jammers. No one could prove to me that the future was already on record. And if it was — well, the future is best friends with the past, and my past and I were not on speaking terms. Prophecy was a faith for the ignorant and a diversion for the rich, and I was neither. The Jammers couldn’t know anything about me.

  “Infant creature,” sang one of the Jammers, “ancient thing, long way from home.”

  Lucky guesses didn’t count. I could be, when I wanted, as close to invisible as flesh and blood came. Nobody Particular in a street full of the same. It didn’t seem to be working now. “Blow off!” I shrieked.

  “Barely a step away from home,” piped another voice.

  “On one side.” A third Jammer.

  Fourth: “And on the other.”

  “Ain’t got no home at all.”

  “Have you no homes? Have you no families?”

  They all seemed to think that was hilarious. Given that they’re supposed to share a mind, it was the equivalent of laughing at one’s own joke.

  By that time I couldn’t tell if I’d heard any voice twice. “Get away from me,” I said, “or I’m going to hurt one of you.” The part of my mind that was doing my thinking, far away from the rest of me, was surprised by the screech in my voice. “Maybe two of you,” I added, just to prove I could.

  “You are the concept immaculate,” caroled a Jammer, shoving her/his hollow face up close to mine. The skin, between streaks of gray paint, was opaque and flaky-looking; the breath the words came out on was eerily sweet. “You are the flesh made word. Whatchoo gonna do about it?”

  “Which way you gonna step?”

  “This is the step, this is it, right here.”

  I folded my arms around my head, as if to protect it from angry birds. “Go away!” I screamed, and now even my thinking mind, cowering in its comer, didn’t care if every living soul on the bridge saw me, and knew I was afraid.

  “Step!” “Step!”

  I was closed in by a fence of bones singing in the voices of crows, and if I didn’t get out now it would club me to my knees with my own secrets. I shut my eyes and punched.

  They whooped, and it was a moment before I realized I hadn’t connected with anything. I opened my eyes. There was a gap in the circle, so I bolted through it, through the forest of pedestrians and parasols, and if I hadn’t stumbled over a blanket full of pots and pans and tripped on the curb, I wouldn’t be writing this. Or perhaps I would. Those levers, those pulleys… Amid the ringing of aluminum and cast iron, I hit the pavement on my backside, inches from the path of the tri-wheeler that was scattering foot traffic to either side. The driver honked, swerved, and slewed to a halt.

  The Jammers were yelling and — cheering? Who knows what Jammers cheer about? Had I just taken the going-home step, or the no-home-at-all step? Or did it mean anything?

  The trike carried full touring kit and weather shell, and had a mud-and-dust finish from someplace where there used to be roads. When the hatch popped, clots of dirt cracked away from the seam and fell to the blacktop, and the driver unfolded out of the opening with startling speed and economy. It was hard to tell what pronoun properly applied under the tinted goggles, the helmet, the crumpled coveralls, and the dust. She or he was squatting next to me before I had a chance to think of standing up.

  “Are you hit?” Quick, sharp-cut words, the middleweight voice cracking out of roughness into resonance. The skin on the angular jaw, under the dirt, had never needed shaving, and when the stained leather gauntlet came off the right hand, the battered fingers seemed relatively light-boned. I hazarded a “she.” Those fingers grabbed my chin before I could dodge them.

  Everything tilted forty-five degrees. My vision was clear, but for a moment I felt as if I were sitting on a slant with nothing to hold on to. Then the world snapped back to true. The driver’s dark goggles showed me two views of myself, slightly bug-eyed. What was this hangover from?

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t hit me.”

  She peeled off the goggles, snapped them closed, and dropped them into her breast pocket. Her eyes were black, and surrounded by clean tanned skin where the goggles had sealed out the dust that the tri-wheeler’s shell hadn’t. S
he was frowning, as if I’d confessed to something more offensive than not having been hit by the trike. Then bland and lazy good nature replaced the frown — no, was held up in front of it like a mask on a stick. “I could make another pass, I suppose,” she said thoughtfully. “No? But you seem so offended.”

  “Not by your aim, honest. Excuse me,” I said, and stood up. A bit too fast. She grabbed me around the rib cage.

  “Whoa, Paint, old girl. It’s that way that’s up. Put one foot there, and the other — that’s it.” She stepped back, and I swayed, but that was all. “Now, is there someone to carry you away, or are you doomed, like a public works project in cast cement, to grace this bridge forever?”

  It was true that nothing I’d said or done up to then had indicated I ought to be allowed out alone. “No. I’ll be fine, I’m just going into the Deeps.” Now there was a mindless utterance. Still, if I could reach the Deeps, I would be all right. Or at least, the burrowing instinct told me so. I looked around and realized that the Jammers were gone. I must have stopped being interesting.

  She raised her eyebrows: delicate inquiry. “The D — oh, downtown.” She swiped at a trickle of sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist, then snatched impatiently at her helmet, yanked it off. The hair underneath was tangled, wet with perspiration, shoulder length, and very black. “I suppose your career as a caryatid will have to be cut short,” she said. “I’m going that way myself.” Glorious smile, hiding nothing, signifying nothing.

  I had a dirty shirt, a dirtier pair of jeans, and a pair of sneakers, none of which I intended to give up. I had a few useful things in my pockets, but none that would turn to gold in someone else’s fingers. So riding would entail racking up an obligation to a formidable stranger. But the thought of sitting down, closing my eyes, and effortlessly reaching the Deeps — no, I had no credit here. “No thank you,” I croaked. “It’s a lovely day for a walk.”

  Breath burst out between her lips. “Oh, Our Lady of Martyrs. I missed the odor of sanctity on you. Get in.”

  She meant it as one kind of blasphemy. It fell on my ears as different, and worse. Where were the lovely, familiar cadences of the Deal, the careful weighing of goods and considerations, the call-and-response of buying and selling? Hers was an alien and heretical language, for all that I knew the words. She propelled me to the trike, and I tried not to go. But I really did want to sit down under the shell of the tri-wheeler where the sun couldn’t get me, even if I paid with the rest of my life -

  She stuffed me onto the back seat as if I were her laundry, straddled the front seat, and slammed the hatch. In a moment I was surrounded by engine noise and the rattle of the weather shell.

  Well, one more for the debit side of the ledger. “I’ll pay you back,” I said as loud as I could, doubting it was loud enough.

  She turned in the saddle, passed a quick glance over me, and said mildly, “Good God, with what?”

  We crossed the Ravine. My silence was fulminating; I don’t know what hers was. She drove quickly through the hollow-hearted warehouses, briskly past the copper-roofed riverbank palace and surrounding defensible wasteland of the Whitney-Celestin families. Pedestrians and bicyclists kept out of her way, except for once, when someone belatedly driving a pair of goats toward the mall market claimed right-of-way. Her Creole was idiomatic, at least on the obscenities. I felt the back end buck and slide on the gravel as she braked. Something flickered on the surface of a gauge in front of her. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and whacked a button with her index finger.

  The trike was, by its nature, intensely valuable; but it wasn’t beautiful. There was a wealth of dust and dirt under the weather shell, and cracked rubber and scarred paint, but that was all. Everything in my field of vision had been repaired at least once, with varying degrees of success and duct tape. I let my head rest on the seat back and closed my eyes. The pain behind my eyebrows was dissolving my muscles.

  “Do you plan to tell me where I’m going?” came the honed and honeyed voice from the front. “Or do we drift like the Ancient Mariner? You don’t look like an albatross.”

  “Well, you haven’t shot me,” I said, alarming myself. “Yet, anyway.” I opened my eyes and saw through the roof window the hard, hot sky and the ruined exterior of the Washington Hotel. “Go past the last gerbil tube and turn left.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said with delight.

  “The pedestrian walkways over the streets. Gerbil tubes.”

  She gave a shout of laughter. “Christ, they still call ’em that. I haven’t—” She shifted down, and the trike whined like an eager dog. “Here?”

  “Yeah.” I had a moment of disorientation, watching the immense wet smile of the billboard boy on the front of the Power Authority Building sail by over my head. Conserve, by all that’s holy. You damn betcha.

  “So, what do you think of the quality of life here? Are all the women strong and all the men good-looking?”

  Ignoring the unnerving mixture of good humor and ferocity in her voice, I said, “I take it you’re new in town.”

  “You can damn well give it back, then. I grew up here. But I’ve been gone ten thousand miles or seven long years, whichever comes first. Give or take what you will.”

  For the first time it occurred to me that my chauffeur might not have all her outlets grounded. “I see. Stop when you get to the fence.”

  “I’d be a fool not to,” she said, and I realized she’d downshifted as I spoke. “Unless I wanted to end up coarse-ground.” I leaned forward for a view out the windshield, and found the red-rust chainlink edge of the Night Fair before us. Quiet now, it waited for sunset. “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the fence.

  I chose understatement. “A market. I can get out here.”

  I expected her to pop the hatch. Instead, she cast a leisurely eye over the neighborhood. I was close enough to see the shallow lines at the corners of her eyes, the dense black sweep of her eyelashes, the precise shape of her lips. Her earlobes were pierced, but she wore no earrings. No rings, no cosmetics, no ornaments at all; no personal touches, no sentiment. She reminded me of my apartments.

  As if she’d heard the thought, she asked, “You live here?”

  “No,” I said blithely.

  When it became clear that I wasn’t going to add to that, she killed the engine and looked over her shoulder again. I smiled at her. In defiance of logic, I felt worse now that the noise and vibration had quit. “My heavens,” she said at last, “a fount of information. Loose lips sink ships.” I heard the latch over my head open; she lifted the roof off us, swung out of the driver’s seat, and offered me a hand. “At least, come tell to me your name.”

  Likewise your occupation, and where and whence you came, I thought, my startled mind dropping the rest of the quote into place like a puzzle piece. Not mad — or at least, endowed with an interesting education, as well. I avoided her hand by pretending I needed both of mine to get out of the back seat. By the end of the process, it was true, and I leaned against the trike while my vision cleared. “Sparrow,” I said.

  “Come again?”

  “The name. And since you’ve had your will of me… ”

  “Hardly that,” she replied, laughing. But I thought I saw a flash of pleasure in her face, to find that I knew the beginning of her quote. “Besides, mine’s debased coin. One of sixty or so is hardly the same as one of a kind, an original, a work of art.”

  “Do you think I was born with a name like Sparrow?” I said, pretending mild offense.

  She swung her leg back over the front seat, her face good-humored and distant, and thumbed the starter. The tri-wheeler broke alcohol-scented wind, loudly, and came back to life. Then she looked up at me, her eyes half-lidded, her mouth half-smiling. “We’re all born nameless, aren’t we? And the name we end with has only peripherally to do with our family tree.”

  I turned to go.

  “Wait; I forgot,” she continued. “You were saying you’d pay me for this?”


  Well, of course she’d remember. Things could only get worse, after all. “That’s the Deal.”

  She took another up-and-down survey of me. “What’s that holding your hair back?”

  It was a braided leather thong with a few jet beads in it. I’d forgotten it in my first inventory, but it wouldn’t have mattered — it wasn’t fair coin for a ride from the Bank. “It has a lot of sentimental value,” I lied, reflexes kicking in anyway. “I couldn’t part with it.”

  “Yes, you could.” And she held out her hand, palm up.

  Once again she’d chopped through the rituals of the Deal with brutal simplicity, razored the pelt of civilization off an already dubious exchange. I felt mauled. I yanked the thong out of my hair and dropped it into her hand. Her fingers closed over it with disturbing finality, and she nodded. “Just so. I’ll treasure it always. Goodbye, Sparrow, and watch out for the cats.” With another vivid smile, she closed the hatch.

  I watched until she was out of sight, and even until the gravel dust had settled. Then I went carefully around the corner to Del Corazón, to cadge five minutes on the phone from Beano.

  1.1: A surfeit of transactions

  Del Corazón smelled of frangipani and leather and Fast Luck incense, and was suffocatingly warm. On any day but Friday, it would have been closed against the midday heat; but some business is best done when other people sleep. Del Corazón was open, if not precisely for me.

  Beano was an animated wax statue in the dim light of the shop, gleaming from a fine, even coating of perspiration. Sweat darkened the front of his tight red tank top like blood. I asked my boon.

  He laid both his clean white palms on the glass counter, between a tray of glow dermapaints and a rack of patent leather garters, and gave me a long pink look through ivory eyelashes. “Nothing’s free,” he said softly. Beano never raised his voice.

  I felt a sudden, incautious relief. I had escaped out from under the fairy hill and returned to the real world, safe at last. Nothing was free. Even Beano was a danger I was used to. I gathered my strength and flung myself into the fray. “Well, and five minutes on the phone is nothing. I’m doing you a favor, in fact. Beano, mi hermano, if I’m on it, it can’t ring.”