Blood & Flowers

by Penny Blubaugh

  “Nicholas,” I said distinctly, “before I was never corseted into a prom dress and expected to be cute.”

  He looked at me, his eyes flowing up and down my dress like a confused river, then he leaned in and kissed me on the nose. “You’re always cute,” he said as he walked away.

  “Hmm,” said Lucia. She stepped into my view frame and blocked Nicholas’s back. There was a wicked smile on her face. “Nicholas and Persia sitting in a tree…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Lucia. Grow up,” I muttered. I stomped away, but I have to admit that in spite of my nervousness, and the shyness that seemed to be a product of Lucia’s rhyme, I was grinning.

  Costume pieces came together. Props were gathered. Floss, stevedore voice in full swing, ordered everyone around, even Tonio. He behaved exactly as she wanted and never said one word. The clock ticked on. Max disappeared to take tickets. Floss made last-minute cloud adjustments. Lucia put on her chicken feet. Nicholas pulled down on the bill of his baseball cap and looked tough. Tonio cleared his throat and tapped lightly on his backstage mike, then went to check the speakers out front. And I pretended I was a socialite.

  Tonio flipped switches, the lights blinked, the curtain (one very large marshmallow cloud in Day-Glo pink) rose, and we were off.

  By the time we were done we’d survived a minor electrical fire and one broken mike, but those were the only stumbling blocks. Everything else went exactly as planned. Puppets walked, suns rose, even the silly fountain in act 2 sprayed water where and when it was supposed to. And the applause—oh, fury, the applause was loud and long and more than I’d ever heard for an Outlaw opening night.

  When the audience was gone, when the house lights were up, when we all looked at one another with pleased expressions—that was when Max swung his arm around Lucia’s shoulder and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Brilliant, kiddo. An Outlaw home.” He fanned out the night’s takings. “Good people. Good money.”

  Then he grabbed Tonio. “And to you—good call. You listened. You acted. You overcame. I love you.”

  Lucia grinned and bumped shoulders with Floss. I, emboldened by the night’s events, leaned over and kissed Nicholas on the ear. He looked confused, then swept me into a Bastardly embrace and squeezed. Happy Outlaws. The world seemed to be a perfect place.

  Three nights after the opening Nicholas skidded backstage and said, “The reporter from Nighttimes is here. Front row.” He looked like he’d arranged the appearance personally.

  Tonio stopped moving. “Major is here?”

  “I don’t know Major,” Nicholas said, “but I know it’s Nighttimes. I’ve seen him around before, always at new shows. It’s been awhile. But I know he’s from Nighttimes,” he added fairly, “because his bag has the logo on the side.”

  “Maybe he won the bag. Maybe it’s a fund-raising promo. Maybe he likes seeing new shows,” Max said, but he sounded a little desperate.

  “And maybe it’s Major,” Tonio said, his voice flat.

  Nicholas can pick up vibes like a champion. “This was supposed to be good news, you know?”

  But Floss shook her head. “Pretty much the exact opposite, I’d say.”

  I watched everyone. Lucia shrugged, Nicholas seemed confused, but Floss, Tonio, and Max looked like the hounds of hell were chomping on their heels.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Major is what’s going on,” said Tonio. His voice was dark and weary. “Major’s not a friend of mine.”

  “I thought he was gone,” Max said. “Didn’t you say he was gone?”

  “I did. I just never mentioned that he came back.” Tonio sighed. “I was hoping he’d turn out to be something we wouldn’t have to deal with.”

  “You knew?” Max sounded incredulous. Tonio shrugged, a bone-tired gesture.

  “Major,” Floss said. The word seemed bitter in her mouth. “He used to follow me like an acolyte, asking questions about magic, about Faerie. He even tried to follow me home once. To my Faerie home.” She stopped and her shoulders shivered. “Almost made it, too. Very scary. Mortals should not be able to just waltz into Faerie.”

  “That was his flirtatious side. And if he was trying to get into Faerie he couldn’t have been waltzing. He was probably running like hell.” Tonio almost smiled at what must have been a mental picture of Major doing that run.

  Floss snarled.

  “He had that huge, galloping crush on you. He was trying to show appreciation and admiration.” Now Tonio sounded like he was making a halfway effort to be conciliatory, but the effort didn’t work. Floss glared at him and inhaled heavily.

  “I know,” he said, and he shrugged. “I never said it was a good thing.”

  “Major,” Max repeated. “There was also that little incident when he tried to have me arrested for running a pixie dust gang.”

  “Because if he couldn’t have me, he wanted you, and you weren’t interested,” Tonio said, toneless now. “And also because he figured hurting you was a great way to get back at me. It was complete stupidity. It shows just how twisted his brain is. He didn’t have even half of one leg to stand on, and he knew it.”

  Max grunted.

  “I just said Nighttimes. I didn’t say Major anything,” Nicholas reminded anyone who was listening.

  “Didn’t have to. I know exactly who’s covering theater for Nighttimes. He’s just so anti-Outlaw that I didn’t think he’d bother to show up, even if we did go more or less mainstream. The only reason he ever checked out one of our productions was to make rude, suggestive comments about magic and to try to make it sound like we were consorting with the criminal element in Faerie. I guess I’d hoped he was over that.”

  “Wishful thinking. It hardly ever works,” Max said. He sounded apologetic.

  Tonio nodded. “But it’s nice to hope.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “And he didn’t get back till after we’d leased this building.”

  “Wait,” I said. “All the ‘You’ll Know It When You Find It’ stuff—you’ve been hiding from one guy? I mean, just one guy?”

  “He’s got a lot of pull for just one guy,” Max said, grim.

  “He’s amazingly vindictive,” Floss added.

  “He knows the right people, too,” Tonio said. “He knows how easy it is to get someone in trouble. He works loopholes like nobody I’ve ever met before.”

  Nicholas, Lucia, and I stood there like a group excluded from a party. We listened. And apparently not one of us knew what to say next because we clumped together like mimes looking for something to mime about.

  The timer we used as a ten-minute reminder binged. It sounded like it was a very long way away. Lucia jumped the smallest bit. Nicholas said, almost to himself, “I’m getting pretty good at loopholes,” but his voice was a low shadow of normal, and no one reacted to his comment.

  Floss sighed. “Ten minutes,” she said. “Make it count.”

  In spite of Major, in spite of the gloom-and-doom scenario that I still didn’t really understand, we put on a good show. The audience seemed to love us, which is at least half the reason for putting on a show, after all. (The other half, I guess, is the sheer giddiness of a good performance, and the ability to overcome all of those little niggling fears that hide in the sides of your mind.)

  Two productions ago we’d started an audience participation segment on the nights when it felt right. This consisted of opening up our secrets backstage and inviting in onlookers. Why Tonio decided that the night Major was there was a good one for this I still don’t understand. Apparently, Max didn’t understand either.

  “Not tonight. Really. Not tonight,” he said to Tonio.

  “He won’t come,” Tonio said in a voice edged with scorn.

  “And if he does?”

  “There is nothing,” Tonio responded, in hard, precise words, “he can do to me.”

  “That he hasn’t done before?” Max asked. It could have been a taunt, but his voice was too gentle for that. “Why court it?”
<
br />   “I know what I can and can’t do. What I should and shouldn’t do,” Tonio snapped. “I don’t need an over-the-hill boxer telling me how to handle my life.”

  The gasp by my ear came from Lucia. “Persia,” she whispered. “Do something. Make them stop.”

  I understood exactly what Lucia meant. Tonio saying something cruel to Max was unheard of. Ever since I’d known them they’d talked together, laughed together, even fought together, but I’d never before heard this kind of rudeness. And I’d certainly never heard purposefully hurtful words flung from one of them to the other.

  I glanced at Lucia. She looked beaten and cowed, as if someone were chasing her with a large stick.

  I said, “Lucia. Go find Nicholas. Bring him back here.”

  She looked at me with eyes as huge and shiny as new coins. “Lucia,” I said again, and this time I shook her shoulder. “Can you find Nicholas? Please?”

  She blinked twice, in pairs, and then ran off to stage right. I stood where I was and breathed slow, even breaths until Nicholas, still dressed in his lawn boy garb, came running back with Lucia. By this time Tonio had stalked off. After a moment Max turned 180 degrees and walked, tall and proud, in the opposite direction. I grabbed at Nicholas, my hands landing just above his wrists. “How much do you know about Tonio’s stint in prison?” I asked.

  “Not much.” He shook his head, but his eyes were serious, so I figured he knew something.

  “But what?” I pressed.

  “Tonio never talked about it,” Nicholas hedged.

  “Fine,” I growled. “What did Max say, then?”

  “Persia, really. I don’t want to say. Anything I think I know is put together with guesswork and glue.”

  Lucia chirped, a cross between a cry and a groan. Both Nicholas and I twisted around to look at her. Her eyes were back to that shiny coin shape and she looked like she wanted to run. I was glad Floss wasn’t nearby, because if she had been, I think Lucia might have grabbed her and tried to go to Faerie to get away from this anxiety that seemed to be holding all of us locked tight in its fist.

  “Lucia?” I asked.

  “Max said this one time that it was a political thing,” Lucia whispered. “That they were doing a protest kind of a play outside of some big meeting…”

  “A trade-versus-the-environment summit,” Nicholas said, and the words sounded like they were being pulled out of his throat. “That part I’m pretty positive about.”

  “Right. Okay,” said Lucia, her voice still so soft that I had to lean in to catch everything. “Anyway, someone called the police.”

  “Major,” said Floss. She must have flown in because I sure hadn’t heard her footsteps. And I didn’t even think she could fly. “Major called. Said we were disturbing the peace. Said we were antigovernment, anti-jobs, anti-rights-of-the-people. Said we were performing without a permit and that we were using fey magic in our permitless performance.”

  “In other words,” Max finished, embellishing Floss’s point—and I hadn’t heard him, either, which made me shake my head and try to clear my ears—“he said anything he could think of to get us, Tonio especially, in trouble. And he kind of yanked the whole concept of freedom of speech and the right to protest right out from under us at the same time.”

  I waited for more. When nothing came I tried to break things down into their respective parts. “Let me understand this,” I started. “First, the magic part. Wouldn’t that have put Floss in trouble too? Why was Tonio the only one to get hauled away?”

  “Thank you, Persia,” Floss muttered.

  “No, I’m just trying to understand,” I protested, but at the same time Max looked hard at me and said, “Who’s the artistic director? Who’s in charge? Who’s the one who allowed the ‘scourge from the other side’?”

  I winced and Floss looked deflated.

  Max saw both our reactions, but it was Floss he was talking to when he said, “I didn’t mean it. You do know that, right?”

  “Of course I do,” Floss said. “I was just remembering.”

  “And the permit?” I persisted. “Did you have one of those?”

  “Not that I recall,” Max said. “But then neither did any of the twenty or so other groups that were gathered outside the gates and protesting right along with us.”

  “What happened to them?” When Nicholas asked his question he had law in his voice.

  “Not one damn thing,” Max said, and his words held the bitterness of unsweetened chocolate.

  As if it were his fault, Nicholas said, “I’m sorry.” He sounded sad now, but Max just shrugged.

  “So the permit thing wasn’t really legitimate,” I said in clarification, “but they were right about the magic.”

  “They couldn’t prove the magic,” Max said, “so that just sort of faded away. But the permit thing—it took awhile to make a case showing that we were the only ones being strong-armed. And during that while, Tonio got to see exactly how the justice system worked from the prison side of things.”

  “And that was bad?” I guessed.

  “Spectacularly bad,” Max assured me. “Keep that in mind. Don’t ever do anything that could get you locked up.”

  I looked at him, looked at Floss and Tonio, too. “But aren’t we?” My voice was jittery. “Don’t we do that with our plays? I mean, there’s magic, and we’re sure beating up the government and government policies.”

  “Why do you think we’re usually on the move?”

  “We’re not exactly on the move right now,” I pointed out, and I knew I sounded upset.

  Max glanced toward Tonio, where he sat alone in a corner. “I hadn’t thought we needed to be. Not anymore. Most anti-fey stuff has been directed toward the pixie dust, and the pink and purple drinks, at least lately. We’re small. We’re mostly under the radar.” He hesitated, and added, “I didn’t know about Major.”

  Then Max switched voices so quickly I wondered why he never acted in any production. “And now,” he said, “we have visitors.”

  We all smiled, just like wound-up little mechanical men, and turned to face our audience. Under my breath I said, “Why am I the only one who didn’t know any of this?”

  Nicholas hissed, “Hush,” and we began a whole new performance.

  Floss showed off clouds and flying koi. Nicholas showed lighting effects. Lucia walked around in her chicken suit. I talked about the intricacies of making programs and I was pleased that people seemed impressed. (I only mention this because it seemed like the best thing that happened to me all night.)

  Max talked about riggings and puppets. And Tonio? Tonio sat in a corner, close to the wings, and waited. Max kept throwing worried glances into that corner, but Tonio dodged them all without even trying.

  People came and people went. The crowds thinned to a few, to a couple, to none. And then Major came in.

  I knew it was Major. Even without the Nighttimes logo on his bag I would have known because Nicholas muttered, “That’s him.”

  Somehow, in that huge backstage area that tiny sentence carried like it was miked.

  Major heard. He raised one eyebrow in our direction and said, quite clearly, “It is, indeed. Tonio around?” He sounded sort of jolly and not at all dangerous, and the fact that he was wearing a Mexican wedding shirt somehow made the encounter that much more surreal.

  Max coughed. Major walked over to him, held out his hand, and said, “Max. Nice to see you again. Especially since you haven’t been seen in the ring lately.”

  The jibe was said just right, with a concern that almost but not quite overshadowed the glee. Max stood completely still, looked at Major’s outstretched hand, made no move to take it, and said, “Hello, Major.”

  Major looked at his hand himself, shrugged, and dropped it down to his side. He cocked that eyebrow again and looked at all of us, one by one, measuring. When he got to Floss he said, “Beautiful as ever,” which made Floss snort and turn away. Major shrugged again. When his eyes landed on me he said
again, “Tonio around?”

  I was rooted to the floor, stuck right in the middle of the feelings tumbling around me. It was like being caught in an earthquake. No matter which way you turned, you’d lose your footing. I tried, and internally rejected, at least ten answers to that innocuous-sounding “Tonio around?” and then I heard Tonio himself. “Oh, for hell’s sake, Major. What?” His voice was like dry ice.

  “Tonio!” Jovial. Bouncy. Lying. It was way too easy to tell.

  “Were you very offended?” Tonio asked as he walked with precise steps across the backstage area that had, in my mind, grown to the size of two or three acres strung together. “Were we politically incorrect enough? Was there just the right amount of magic? Did we give you fodder for your twee little paper?”

  “I never thought you’d do it, you know,” Major said, ignoring Tonio’s questions. “Never thought I’d see you try to go legit. You’ll have to change the company name, won’t you?” He stopped. He pretended to think. “Ah, I have it. The Little Lawfuls!” And he laughed.

  “Thanks so much for coming,” Tonio said, with no sincerity at all. “Don’t let us keep you. Just leave the same way you came in.”

  Major took one step forward. “I’ll pan it, you know. Nobody will come. You’ll lose everything.”

  “I doubt you’ve got that much power.”

  “Put you in jail before, didn’t I?”

  Tonio winced, but he held his ground. “I’m not as inexperienced now as I was then.”

  Major drew breath to reply, but before he could say whatever it was that he was going to say, Max took three long strides and stopped in front of Major. He loomed over the other man. “Enough,” Max said. “I’m sick of the banter. Go, Major, and do whatever it is you’re going to do. It’ll either work or it won’t. Right now, I don’t care. Just go.”

  Major shot Max a look of pure snake-bite venom. “Protecting your little love. How sweet.”

  The air was so thick with anger it was hard to breathe. I saw Tonio’s hands clench, but other than that he didn’t move. Nicholas was bone still. Lucia looked like she was going to cry, and Floss just looked disgusted. Max said simply, “He can protect himself. I just like to be around in case he needs muscle to do more than protect.” He moved one step closer, which seemed to make him grow an additional two feet. From where I stood, glued to the floor, I saw Major shrink back, just the slightest bit. Then, as if it had been his idea all along, he turned on his heel and walked off without even one backward glance.