“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.
It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose—and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.
The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.
“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.
They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.
Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.
WOODEN FEATHERS
This is the story that the editor from Uncanny Magazine got. It came to me one morning and I had to write it right that minute, which, since it turned out to be about seven thousand words, left me with my brain feeling like a wrung-out sponge. Occasionally it happens like that. It’s a great time saver, but it does take bit of a physical toll.
The carving was going badly.
Sarah examined the duck decoy before her and sighed. The bill was shaped entirely wrong. It was supposed to be a mallard, but she hadn’t taken enough off before she began shaping and now the bill was half again as long as it should be.
I’ll flare the bill and make it a Northern Shoveler, she decided. Nobody has to know that it was supposed to be a mallard.
Two customers came in, so she set down the knife and put on her best customer service expression. “Hi, there!”
Two middle-aged women nodded to her. They gave the stall a professional once-over, looking for bargains or hidden treasure, then left again without speaking.
Give it up, ladies. The internet got rid of all that. Go bid on storage units or estate trunks or something if you’re hoping to strike it big.
Well, you didn’t say things like that aloud. Not to the customers, anyway. Sarah picked up the knife and turned the decoy around. The hind ends of many ducks looked alike. She wouldn’t have to change anything much to transform her mallard.
Rauf, who ran the stall across the way, waved to her. She liked Rauf. He sold popcorn and boiled peanuts and curry rub and never complained about sawdust getting tracked across the floor.
The sawdust got everywhere, but people liked to watch a carver work. On a good day they would come in and stare for long enough that they felt guilty and bought something small. She did a pretty good business in tiny duck keychains that way.
Given that there were three other woodworkers in the flea market, all of them better than she was, Sarah figured that she needed all the help she could get.
She didn’t talk to the other carvers much. The old-timers at the market wouldn’t talk to you until you’d been there at least a couple of years.
Another customer came in. She looked up and stifled a sigh.
“Hey, there,” she said. “Good to see you again.”
The old man nodded.
He was a repeat customer, but she’d never learned his name. He wore a dusty black suit with frayed bits at the cuffs. The only things that moved quickly about him were his hands. When he picked up one of her carvings, his face stayed old but his hands became young, gnarled but deft. He ran his thumbs over the carved edges of the feathers, traced a circle around the glass eye, and looked up at her inquiringly.
“Common Goldeneye,” she said. Which was true enough, and nobody needed to know that it had started life as a Long-Tailed Duck, but she’d knocked the tail off and then had to get creative.
He nodded. He set the duck down and his hands were old again. He slowly opened his wallet and began to pull out wrinkled bills. The wallet was even more frayed than the suit.
Sarah took the money. She could smell him on it—old man smell, Bengay and fabric washed so many times that it had lost any hope of getting clean.
He came in every week and bought the cheapest of her decoys. He paid cash and brought his own shopping bag over his arm. Sarah worried about him.
“There’s a fifteen percent discount,” she said, sliding the change back.
“There is?” His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear it over the sounds of the market.
“Yeah,” said Sarah, who had just made it up on the spot. “To celebrate—um—the new duck stamp coming out.” She waved her hand toward the wall, where she’d put up a poster just this morning. “It’s a Ruddy Duck.”
“Is it?” He looked at the poster thoughtfully. She sometimes thought, for a man who bought so many decoys, that he knew very little about ducks.
He took the change and put it very slowly away, then slipped the decoy into his bag. She had stopped offering to wrap them months ago. Then he made his slow way out of the stall and vanished into the crowd.
She slumped back on her stool. She needed the money, but she felt strange taking it from the old man. Why would anyone buy a carved duck decoy every single week?
On good days, she pretended that he was secretly a millionaire, one of the ones who lived cheap, but that he was overcome by admiration for her duck carvings and had to own them.
On most days, she figured that he had a shopping addiction.
Rauf came over, holding a bag of popcorn. “Here,” he said. “We’re about to start a new batch and you haven’t eaten all morning.”
“Thanks, Rauf.” She wiped her hands off and took a handful. “How’s it going?”
“Slow.” He shrugged. “August is always bad. Everybody’s spent all their vacation money and now they’re looking at back to school sales.”
Sarah nodded. Hand-carved ducks sold much worse than popcorn.
“I see old Jep came by.”
“Who?”
“Jep. Just now.” Rauf waved toward the gap in her line of carvings. “Comes in every week, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, him! Yeah. Didn’t know he had a name.” Jep. It seemed like a name for a mountain moonshiner, not an old, frayed man. Then again, maybe he’d been a moonshiner in his youth, who knew?
“He used to be a carver,” said Rauf, promptly dashing the moonshiner fantasy. “Had a stall over on the high-rent side. That was years ago, though.”
“He was?” Sarah blinked.
“Oh, yeah.” Rauf grinned. “He did a big carousel over in Nag’s Head. Had photos up in his stall. Horses and dolphins and seagulls big enough to ride.”
Sarah stared down into the bag of popcorn, wondering how she should feel about that.
“You said he used to be a carver…” she said.
“He stopped after his wife got sick,” said Rauf, the grin fading. “Closed up his stall. They sell custom hammocks or something in it now. I don’t know if he’s done anything since.”
“He must’ve,” said Sarah. She could not imagine not carving. Even when business was dreadful and she had to spend half the income from waitressing just to keep the stall open, it never occurred to her to quit.
She wouldn’t have lasted three days. She’d be sitting on the couch and her hands would start to itch for sandpaper and a knife. She’d end up carving the arm of the couch if she couldn’t get a wooden blank.
Rauf shrugged. “I don’t know. You could ask him.”
Sarah turned the regrettable mallard-turned-shoveler around. “Maybe I will.”
But when he came in the next week, she asked him a different question instead.
“Did you make these?”
Jep looked up at her. No emotion crossed the long, dragged lines of his face, but she thought that she’d surprised him.
She held out her phone, with the pictures of the carousel in Nag’s Head on it.
He did not take it, but he bent down to look at the screen. After a moment he said “Yes. Those were mine.”
He did not look like a man who was proud. He looked like a soldier
admitting that he had been to war. He bought the cheapest decoy, put it into his bag, and shuffled out of the shop.
Sarah stared after him, and then down at the photos of the carousel.
Many carousels were works of art. This was more. This was—she didn’t have the words—glory.
The horses were a riot of color, gilded and painted, their heads thrown back or bowed far forward under scarlet reins. Smiling dolphins leapt and cavorted between the horses. There was a gull with its beak open, laughing, and a narwhal with a golden horn and a pelican so large that a child could ride in the pouch.
Sarah’s favorite was a walrus. It was snow white, with a blue saddle, and its tusks were scrimshawed with starfish and ships. Its lumpy, bristly face was screwed up in a grin of delight. In the photo, a little girl had her arms as far around it as they could go, and she was grinning too.
A carousel like that must have cost a million dollars, she thought. He must have charged tons for it. I hope he’s rich. I hope.
She knew all too well how much artists undercut themselves. She was painting the shoveler this week, and if she made thirty dollars worth of profit on the accursed thing, she’d be happy.
The next week, when Jep came in, she asked him if he was still carving.
He shook his head, mutely. He bought the shoveler and went away again.
Sarah was beginning to feel as if she had struck some kind of fairy-tale bargain. One carving bought one question, no more.
The shoveler had barely been worth a headshake anyway. She sighed.
Her current project was a Ruddy Duck, like the one of the stamp. They were small, cheerful ducks, with jaunty tails. They also had a specific enough shape that she wasn’t going to be able to turn it into anything else if she screwed up.
When Jep came in this time, she paused before she took his money, and said “Why do you keep buying my carvings?”
He stared down at the floor.
The silence went on so long that she took his money and passed him his change, afraid that she had offended him somehow.
No—surely I didn’t. “Why are you buying this?” isn’t a weird question for an artist to ask!
Jep’s lips moved. She had to strain to hear him over the sound of Rauf’s popcorn maker.
He said “They’re the cheapest ones at the flea market.”
He looked up, once, before he left the stall. She hoped that his eyes were as old as the rest of him, because she knew how stricken she must look. Her face felt hot.
She went to the bathroom, full of shoppers complaining to each other about the price of discount socks and how crowded everything was, and splashed water on her face. She was not going to cry in front of the customers.
Well. What did you expect him to say? That he could see your potential? That those crappy ducks were signs of genius? That he wanted to collect them before you got famous and they sold for thousands of bucks apiece?
She wiped her face with a paper towel. Yes. She had wanted him to say those things. She had wanted to think that the man who had carved those carousel beasts had found something good in her work.
At least it’s better than “because I’m passionately in love with you.”
She choked back a laugh at that, or maybe it was a sob. One of the shoppers looked at her curiously, but didn’t ask.
She closed up shop early that day, told Rauf she had a headache, and went home.
When the next weekend rolled around, Sarah wondered if he’d even come back. He had to know he’d upset her.
Unless something’s gone wrong. Maybe he’s got dementia or something. Maybe he keeps buying ducks because he can’t help it.
She wondered what his house looked like. There had to be dozens of decoys by now. She pictured ducks on every available surface, rooms full of jumbled carvings.
Maybe she should stop selling them to him.
She wondered if that would stop him, or if he would just go to the next cheapest person in line.
He came in, and her stomach dropped.
Be professional. You’re a pro. Smile and nod. It doesn’t matter why he buys it, only that you can pay the rent on the stall.
He picked up the smallest carving. It was an older one, a mallard, and she had finally accepted that it was never going to sell and had dropped the price on it.
Her good intentions deserted her.
“It’s not very good,” she said.
He shook his head. The loose skin under his throat moved. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Sarah let out a single, frustrated sob. “Then why are you buying it? And what am I doing wrong?”
She put her face in her hands.
She heard Jep shift from foot to foot, and then he made his slow way up to the counter, and around it. He put one hand on her shoulder and squeezed, harder and heavier than she would have expected.
“You’re cutting too slow,” he said.
She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist. “W-what?”
He touched the half-carved ruddy, where it sat clamped in the vise. “You’re working too slow,” he said. He pointed to a wobbling line across a feather. “It slips and gouges here. You’re afraid to go faster, so the cuts aren’t clean.”
He took the carving knife from the bench and made a single unhurried cut, still faster than anything she had ever done. A curl of wood came up behind it, and then it was the edge of the duck’s wing, tucked against its body, and the line was long and clean and perfect.
“I can’t do that!” said Sarah. And then, so fast that she almost tripped over her own words, “Thank you.”
Jep looked at her. His immobile face cracked a little, and he said “Will you drive me home? I want to show you something.”
It was madness driving a strange man home, but she did it anyway. She had her cell phone and Rauf knew what was happening and anyway, Jep was so old that if he tried to kill her, he’d probably have a heart attack stabbing her. She opened the door of her battered truck and let him climb into the cab.
He lived only a few blocks from the flea market, down a shaded street. The lawns were by turns overgrown and painfully, shabbily tidy.
Jep’s house was one of the tidy ones. He led her down the walk and paused in front of the battered wrought iron down.
“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” he said. “It’s not…it’s nothing…”
He stopped, as if he had run out of words. Sarah said, “I won’t,” and hoped again that she wasn’t making a very stupid mistake.
He unlocked the door. Inside, it was very dim and she could hear a TV blaring somewhere in another room. The linoleum was a dreadful pattern from the Seventies and there was a little plaster crucifix on one wall, and a painting of sheep on the other. The sheep were fluffy and big-eyed and Sarah couldn’t imagine Jep buying such a thing.
He led her past the kitchen, to the back of the house and a short hallway and a plain wooden door. She could hear the TV through it. He unlocked that, too, and stepped through the doorway in front of her. She caught a glimpse of a room with a couch and a TV and debris littering the floor.
“Hello, old man,” said a creaking, clacking voice. “Come to feed me?”
Sarah’s first thought was that the light from the TV was casting some awful shadow on the person sitting on the couch.
Her second was that she wanted out of the house, and she wanted out of it now, and she would have run if she thought her legs could carry her.
There was a marionette on the couch.
It was the size of a human-being. It had a mouth like a nutcracker and its face was carved like a Roman god. Curls of gilded hair ringed its head.
Someone is working it—someone—there’s a puppeteer up on the ceiling or something—
It turned its head at her, and she saw its expression change. The wood moved.
She backed up so fast that her spine struck the wall opposite. She slid down it. She thought she might be sick.
It can’t be real wood. It’s
a person painted to look like a marionette. It’s a mask or a special effect or something.
It snickered. “I can’t eat her,” said the marionette. It clacked its hollow jaws at her. “Or I could try, but neither of us will enjoy it.”
“That’s enough,” said Jep.
The TV was showing some ridiculous daytime game show. The host gestured for an audience member to come down and try their luck.
Are you the lucky person who’s seen a horror and is going to walk away alive? Come on down!
“Enough,” said the marionette. Its voice was nothing like human. “Never enough. Hasn’t been enough since the old lady died.”
Jep reached in his bag and took out the carved mallard. He threw it toward the couch.
The marionette caught it neatly out of midair—it can’t be on strings, no puppeteer on earth could make a thing on strings do that—and grabbed the decoy’s neck. She could see the fingers, beautifully articulated, each ball joint perfect, ending in tapered points.
The duck carving came alive.
Sarah watched as her poor mangled mallard suddenly stretched out its wings. She caught a glimpse of carved wooden feathers, the bill opening, the legs—she hadn’t even carved legs! Where had they come from?—flailing.
It hung poised for a moment, as if in flight, and then the marionette wrung its neck.
The decoy collapsed. It was still wood, it could only be wood, but it was wood carved like a dead bird, the wings trailing down.
The marionette opened its mouth impossibly wide, showing a black, toothless opening that ran halfway down the thing’s throat, and bit into the mallard’s breast.
Wood splintered. The marionette chewed. Sawdust fell down around it, and a single wooden feather drifted to the floor.
It took another bite, and another, then wiped its mouth.
“Where’s my horse, old man?” asked the marionette.
The game show host on TV showed the contestants what they could win. Door after door opened, revealing new cars and shiny appliances, and the marionette turned away. It lowered its gaping mouth to the body of the duck and chewed as it watched.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 3
