Knaves

by Abbott, Alana Joli; Meadors, Melanie R. ;

  She kissed his forehead and whispered, “I name you Virtue.”

  The wizard shut her eyes and let her chin fall as all air left her lungs.

  Marcus lowered himself to one knee. “My life was lost, forfeit to the wizard until you, Maganhild the Strong, and Virtue restored me. Until my dying day, I will serve you both.”

  In the distance, thunder crackled. “I cannot remain much longer,” the wizard said. “Come to the cave beyond the garden and choose what piece of my treasure you would take with you as reward.” She stepped behind the throne and disappeared.

  Maganhild carried Virtue, and Marcus led Pitch as they followed the wizard and found a doorway to a lovely moonlit garden. Scanning across the distance, she spied the wizard nearing the mouth of a cave on the other side. The wizard flicked her fingers and light began to glow inside. She gestured for them to hurry.

  “I’ll stay with the horse,” Marcus said.

  “His name is Pitch,” Maganhild said softly.

  Marcus smiled warmly at her, and she returned it.

  The wizard pointed inside the cave at a vast space filled with gold and silver glinting in the light of a thousand candles. “Choose anything you like, but be quick. I would have you back in Tremain before the storm hits.”

  Maganhild nodded and carried Virtue into the room following a path that led among the treasures stacked so high. She saw chalices, crowns, and vases. Boxes of coins. Jewelry. Statues. Things she could not name. There was too much to choose from. Glancing back, she noted the wizard just outside, talking to Marcus.

  “Mama.” Virtue pushed against her, wanting down. “Mama. Dun.”

  “Yes. Perhaps you should pick.” She sat him down.

  He turned in a circle, mouth agape and eyes alight, then toddled off. She stayed close behind him, but her eyes caught on a sword with a huge emerald as the pommel. She paused to examine it.

  In that moment, Virtue slipped away.

  He found a narrow path that led to a room with a big bed, a chair, a desk, and three tables. One held jars with strange, squirming things inside them. On another rested a big, open book. On the last a large black horn balanced impossibly on its tip while curving to one side and widening to the open end from which sprang a beam of red light. As the horn slowly turned the light moved about the room.

  Virtue could not read the engraving on the stand: Horn of a Rodænym, the Quinary, Brotherhood of Five. All he knew was this air tasted strange and right here his skin felt like a warm wind blew all over him. He reached out to the horn. The closer his fingers came, the colder the air around it was. He pulled back, but grinned as he watched the light move. The curved side was coming around…

  “Virtue!”

  He did not recognize that Mama’s word meant to call him back to her. On tip toes, he reached again into the cooler air and the tip of one finger brushed the edge of the horn.

  “Boy, where are you?”

  This, he understood. Pulling away, he lowered onto his heels to go to her.

  He would never know that the goodness of him resonated on that horn like a violent storm. He would never know that, with the painstaking slowness of time running so that seconds became long minutes, the horn tipped from its stand. He would never know that the source of the red illumination dripped from inside of it and seared a hole in the stone floor that burned deep, deep into the mountain, and kept burning all the way to the Abyss.

  But the wizard knew.

  She watched Maganhild, Virtue, and Marcus leave together, assured at the wisdom in the warrior-woman’s choice of coins, as well as Marcus’s acceptance of her suggestion that they hurry far away from these lands. When they were out of sight, she faced the cave.

  For a thousand years, she had been bound to this place, sworn to service no evil, sworn to reward a wholly virtuous act. A millennium trickled by as she guarded the horn, and when Fate came to pass, the binding that kept her here flared, barring from her any words that might have halted the fruition of evil. But then, the darkest of prophecies always had a way of finding fulfillment, despite the best efforts of those in the light.

  As the storm neared, she stood in her chamber beside the great book on the table and read from the open page:

  As foretold, comes a twist of Fate

  When the hand of Virtue opens the gate

  And the world to its horror will embark

  Upon a new age of demons and dark.

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHNNY THE FOX

  Sabrina Vourvoulias

  I AM HERE TO tell you the truth about Johnny the Fox.

  If you’ve heard the tale that he was born in Puerto Rico, to one human and one inhuman parent, that is true.

  Johnny’s mother is from the western port city of Mayagüez, where she lives to this day. His father is the northeasterly trade wind that regularly sweeps in and plays along Puerto Rico’s northernmost shore and outlying islands.

  Many years ago—but not so many that there aren’t some folks who still remember—the two met in Arecibo and fell grandly and recklessly in love. The product of their union loves this story, by the way. Johnny the Fox is fond of saying that if you dig under all the hard layers of his being, you’ll come to a core that is pure, molten romance. And, really, what could be more romantic than a wind that becomes human to woo its beloved?

  But a cynical wink is never far from any of Johnny the Fox’s tales, so remember: love has never been enough to permanently tame, or even reroute, the wind.

  If you’ve heard tales that Johnny the Fox is possessed of magic, the truth depends on the tale.

  I’ve heard it recounted that he collected all the dominoes ever made in Puerto Rico and used his spit to magically weld them together. With them, he constructed a bridge that spanned from Mayagüez to Philadelphia, and that is how he got here from there.

  That story, I regret to inform you, is pure fabrication. Johnny the Fox arrived in Philadelphia when he was ten—after a postal carrier hand-cancelled the $300 in stamps his mother had stuck on his shirt. He was loaded into the cargo hold of one of the daily mail flights with all the other parcels, and within days was delivered to distant relatives in the City of Brotherly Love.

  Anyway, that’s how Johnny the Fox tells the story. I leave it you to decide whether you believe him or not—but you can Google the history of children sent by parcel post if you think his tale is too tall.

  You may have heard the tale of how Johnny the Fox magically sang the snakes out of North Philly. That story is frequently told at a certain bodega in El Barrio—the click of dominoes, the smell of Florida Water and sweet cigars all around—where the teller is, invariably, one of Johnny’s compais. That is, one of his buddies. Possibly even an accomplice in one of his cons.

  Wasn’t it Johnny the Fox who taught Tatán Ortíz, the bodeguero, how to bilk the system by cashing out food stamps for folks who wanted some cigarettes or alcohol along with their government cheese? Tatán eventually got caught siphoning dollars and gave up Johnny in order to keep his bodega. But when the Fox sauntered out of the Big House, there was a table and a cafecito waiting for him, and no grudges were held.

  You can read all about the lethal reptiles (and Johnny’s part in extirpating them) elsewhere, but I can, indeed, verify that every successful scheme and plan of his making involves singing. Johnny’s magic, you see, has always been in his voice.

  As a child in Puerto Rico, Johnny sang his way into grades he didn’t deserve and awards he shouldn’t have gotten. His warbled incantations compelled schoolmates to give him their most prized possessions. When the wind blew and little Johnny sang, store proprietors fondly tut-tutted his shoplifting; teachers smiled at his disruptions; and truant officers looked the other way.

  His mother understood that as Johnny grew older, magic or no magic, people would come to resent his self-gratifying and self-aggrandizing choices. That’s when she sent him away, to a city where the powers given to any fairy-tale-begotten child are regularly muted by noise, and traf
fic, and hardscrabble barrio reality.

  But in Philadelphia as Puerto Rico, in adult as in child, magic is magic.

  It was Johnny the Fox who first sang “Despacito,” to compel domino enthusiast and singer Luis Fonsi into ridiculously slow and distracted play during a tournament of El Domino. Johnny had bet on Fonsi’s competitor, and he raked in lots of money that day—though perhaps Fonsi got the last laugh when he changed the lyrics and used Johnny’s magical melody for his crossover hit.

  Folklorists will tell you there is some confusion in the tales, and sometimes Johnny the Fox is renamed Johnny the Dog.

  There is an iron-faced preacher’s wife who is responsible for that muddle. When she is the storyteller, Johnny is every bit as sly, selfish, and greedy as usual—but she makes him out to be an indiscriminate mequetrefe and pervert, too. In her stories, he sniffs around every female he sees on the streets of El Barrio as he goes about the business of mischief.

  And it is true that Johnny admires the curve of a waist, the rise of a breast, and the pert, round bottom that comes from wearing sky-high heels.

  But it’s also true that the preacher’s wife and her husband have been preying on vulnerable barrio residents for years—by setting up fake drug recovery houses where they’re paid for months of service by people they kick out the day after they’ve signed up. When he came out of the slammer, Johnny the Fox was sent to one of their recovery houses.

  Now, everyone knows Johnny the Fox’s moral compass is broken, but its needle does occasionally hover over a point where indignation and self-interest meet.

  So every time the preacher’s wife runs into Johnny, she is musically reminded to pay him to not drop a dime on her lucrative scam. On months when there is a flood of the drug-addicted at her door, she might end up hearing Johnny’s song three or four times a day. Or, as has happened with some frequency, she might run into him in the company of an inspector friend of his. Then she and her husband are compelled not only to pay the bribe, but to actually provide the services they’re supposed to—at least for the week or so after the surprise encounter when Johnny ratchets up noise about the inspector’s imminent return.

  The thing is, despite knowing she is the mark in his con, the preacher’s wife finds herself unable to despise Johnny the Fox. Every time they are in the same room together, she waggles her once-glorious-and-still-not-bad ass at him. No question, he enjoys the sight. But he’s got three fine women already—las girlfriends—BFFs who pass him around like a skin of wine that wants to be shared.

  Plus, since las girlfriends live in South Philly, whenever Johnny’s a suspect in some untoward thing that happens in North Philly in middle of the night, he’s got one, two, three alibis.

  If you are wondering whether you have seen Johnny the Fox on the streets of El Barrio, he is pretty easy to recognize. He would describe himself to you as a darker, juicier Antonio Banderas, but don’t believe that. The truth is, Johnny the Fox isn’t bad, but he isn’t all that either. He wears too much brilliantine in his copper-tipped hair, lets too much white show in the strap of his beard, and has developed a bit of a gut (which he can hide if he doesn’t tuck his shirt in—and who tucks in a guayabera?). His arms are full of New School ink, his eyes full of old-school savvy, and his mouth overflowing with tales told out of school.

  He is loved. And hated. And admired. And reviled. And always, he manages to be fully himself, who he is, despite all the ways society tells him not to be.

  And this is something you have to understand: even though he is possessed of magic and a grifter’s imagination about how to best use it, things don’t always end well for Johnny the Fox.

  One September day—as dawn struts onto El Barrio’s Golden Block with its best salsero vibe—it is revealed that Johnny the Fox is missing.

  Tatán Ortiz shuts down his bodega moments after opening it and puts together a posse to look for him in every lock-up in three counties. Johnny’s other compais scour all the hang-outs de mala muerte that they’ve frequented with him. And las girlfriends file one, two, three missing persons reports.

  Even the iron-faced preacher’s wife goes out on the street in her bathrobe and slippers when she hears, and looks for her beloved nemesis under the cardboard with which blitzed-out addicts cover themselves when they sleep beneath the bridges after a relapse.

  For months, everyone believes that Johnny the Fox has met the nefarious end reserved for those who’ve run a con on the wrong person in Philadelphia. All of them, at one time or another, will try to bribe-talk-cry their way into the morgue to check for his body.

  The Barrio is different without Johnny the Fox in it.

  The crooked politicians and unscrupulous operators are all still running their flim-flams on the folks in the neighborhood, but none of them have Johnny’s panache, nor his predilection for hitting first and hardest on those with power and money.

  Tatán still runs his bodega and its stop-and-go business on the borders of legal, but the stories told within it are ordinary, and nobody seems to have anything remotely fantastical happening in their lives.

  Las girlfriends drive their food truck from South Philly to North every day, but their pasteles are too salty and over-spiced now that Johnny’s not taste-testing them beforehand.

  And the preacher’s wife has started considering her husband’s proposal to move the business down to Orlando, where the Puerto Rican community is young, and may be less savvy to their ways.

  Then, six months to the day after he’s disappeared, Tatán Ortíz finds Johnny the Fox shivering, in shirtsleeves and barefoot, on the slushy sidewalk in front of his bodega.

  “You’re alive,” Tatán says as he fumbles with the metal roll-down grate that covers the front of the store during off-hours. “But you won’t be long if you keep standing outside like that in this February weather.”

  Tatán uses the word “tiempo” for weather—a word that also means time—and maybe that’s what turns Johnny’s expression so haunted that the old man decides to cross himself several times before unlocking.

  Tatán makes Johnny sit at one of the tables set out for stop-andgo drinkers and domino players, and brings him a cafecito mixed with lots of sweetened condensed milk to thaw him out. As soon as Tatán’s youngest granddaughter, Araceli, shows up for her shift behind the register, he brings more coffee, and parks himself opposite Johnny.

  “I imagine there is a tale,” he says.

  Johnny the Fox nods, quiet except for the chattering of his teeth.

  They sit in silence for a long time. Araceli brings them more coffee. During a particularly slow spell around 10 a.m., when no one at all comes in to the store, she goes into the back room and finds an unopened package of cheap tube socks and her brother’s next-best pair of Timberlands. She brings them over to the table and waits as Johnny the Fox tries to get them on his frozen feet. Then she goes back behind the register and puts her earbuds in.

  “The young don’t want to hear the stories of the old,” Tatán says, after he turns back from watching her.

  “Don’t include me among the old,” Johnny answers, in what should have been a jokey mock-offended tone. But his words come out breathy, as if the effort to get them out has winded him, and there is no charm—magical or otherwise—in their scraped, wounded tone.

  Tatán’s eyes narrow. “What happened to your voice?”

  “I’ve been in Puerto Rico,” Johnny says with some difficulty.

  “Ah.” And perhaps Tatán has some small magic in his voice too, because anyone overhearing that one word could read a full narrative in it.

  I, in fact, do exactly that when I hear Tatán say it as I walk into the bodega to buy a shot of Old Grandad Bourbon (a little tradition of mine to celebrate when I finish grading papers). Araceli serves the drink from behind the plexi around the register, in what looks like one of the plastic measures packaged with cough syrup. I head with it to a table one over from Johnny and Tatán.

  Unlike many of Tatán’s stop-
and-go patrons, I buy my drinks here more for the company than the alcohol. I’ve sometimes lingered for hours over a couple of low-cost whiskeys, chatting with the barrio’s old codgers about their efforts to see Oscar López Rivera freed from prison. They can really wax eloquent about this icon of the militant Independence movement, and Puerto Rico’s most famous political prisoner. He might as well be a saint—Tatán has kept a candle burning for him on the store’s altar shelf for the past twenty years, and the recently announced pardon hasn’t changed that fact.

  When I sit at my table, the old man gives me a silent hello by touching two fingers to the tatty Basque beret he always wears, then turns his attention back to Johnny the Fox. “It’s okay to talk in front of this guy,” he says to him. “He may not look it, but he’s gente.”

  Johnny glances at me, nods, but takes at least half an hour to get the first word out in that pathetic new voice of his.

  So listen, this is my version of the tale he finally tells:

  Johnny the Fox, the son of this hemisphere’s northeasterly trade wind, has heard his father’s voice gusting in his ear every day of the forty-seven years he’s been given so far on this earth.

  On September 5th, his father bellows a name—Irma—and a directive—Go to her, son—and Johnny dutifully hops a plane to Puerto Rico.

  He disembarks moments before the Category 5 beauty (who has already torn through Florida on her grand tour of destruction) sets her eye on San Juan. Others hurry to claim their baggage, but Johnny the Fox stands on the airport tarmac, singing.

  He croons to the winds wrapping around the eye, those long arms of the most powerful of Taíno goddesses. He invokes her as divine storm; the righteous destroyer of walls and divisions created by man; the ultimate test-and-proof for human nature. Johnny’s magical melody tunes itself to the one tender spot in the goddess’s eye where preparation, prayer and good luck overlap. He spins a magnificent confidence game from that spot—one that propitiates even as it exploits, one that prevails with the mark’s own consent.