"Didn't that story have a different ending the last time you told it?" Benny asked.
Jack shrugged. "Maybe. But it's a true story. What you've got to remember is that Cody and Raven never had just the one go at each other. Things that happen between them happen over and over again. Sometimes the one of them's on top, sometimes the other."
"But how true are they?" Hank wanted to know.
Moth caught an odd note in Hank's voice, like the question was more important than he was letting on.
"True as I can tell them," Jack said.
Anita nodded. "Truth's important."
"But it's not the most important thing we can offer each other," Katy said.
Now Moth was intrigued. Katy never had much to say of an evening. She'd sit there, smiling, listening, quiet. Her voice had a husky quality, like she didn't use it often.
"And what would that be?" he asked.
Katy turned to him and Moth was struck all over again by the blue of her eyes. It was like a piece of the bluest summer sky had got caught in them and decided to stay.
"Playing fair," she said.
Moth could go with that. Sometimes the truth did nobody any good, but playing fair—that never hurt. Karma was the big recycler. Everything you put out came back again.
Benny stood up from his lawn chair and added a couple of pieces of an old wooden chair to the fire they had going in the oil drum. It was a good night. The moon was hanging low, like it was playing hide-and-seek with them, just the rounded top showing up from behind the roof of the abandoned factory that loomed over the back end of the junkyard. The sky was clear—not like last night. Moth had been out doing a couple of deliveries and for a while there he'd thought he might drown every time he had to leave the cab. The dogs were quiet. Nobody prowling around looking to get a piece of the fortune in cash that he didn't have but was still supposed to be stashed somewhere in the yard.
He did have a fortune here, but nobody who came looking for it ever recognized it for what it was. Family.
Jack told another story, one Moth hadn't heard before, then he and Katy headed off into the night, Jack making for his trailer, Katy walking with him across the rubble-strewn yard before cutting off on her own. Nobody knew where Katy slept and Moth had never tried to find out.
Benny was the next to leave. He had a room in the basement of a rooming house over on MacNeil this month. Moth had the feeling he wouldn't make his September rent. Benny'd never had the same address for more than a couple of months for as long as Moth had known him.
"You need me tomorrow?" Anita asked.
Moth shook his head.
"Think I'll visit my sister then. We were talking about taking the kids over to the island for the day, and here the summer's almost over."
Her sister wasn't blood family. She'd met Susie while she was still working at the diner, helped her out, got close in the way a crisis can bring people together. It was something neither of them had been looking for and maybe that was why they found it.
"You need any money?" Moth asked.
"Nah, I'm still flush."
She left, walking deeper into the junkyard to the old VW bus she'd been sleeping in all summer, and then there was only Moth and Hank and the dogs sitting out under the sky, smelling the night air, watching sparks from the fire jump over the rim of the oil drum to die in the dirt.
After a while Moth turned to Hank. "Terry said you asked him to run Eddie to the bank tonight."
"You don't mind?"
"Why should I?"
"No reason."
Hank picked up a pebble and tossed it against the side of the oil drum. The soft ping it made lifted all the dogs' heads.
"You ever wonder about Jack?" he asked, not looking at Moth. "Where he gets those stories of his? Why he tells them?"
Moth shook another smoke out of his pack, lit it. "Helps him make sense of things, I guess. Or maybe it's just something he's got to do. Like Benny has to take a bet."
"I think maybe there's more to it than that."
Moth remembered that question Hank had asked Jack earlier. He took a drag from his cigarette, watched the glow from the oil drum through the gray wreath the smoke made when he exhaled.
"How so?" he asked.
"I saw two of them last night. Bird girls. Like the people in his stories."
He'd known all day that something was bothering Hank, but Moth was never one to push. If Hank wanted advice, needed help, he'd ask. Moth had thought maybe Hank was trying to get some girl off the street again, or wanting to help somebody make bail. Something simple. Nothing like this.
"You want to run that by me again?" he said.
He sat and smoked while Hank told him about the woman he'd stopped to help last night, how he'd been shot, how these two girls came out of nowhere, killed the guy, healed up Hank's shoulder with nothing more than spit.
"The guy shot you," he said when Hank fell silent.
Hank nodded and started to lift his shirt.
"You don't have to do that," Moth told him. "I believe you."
But Hank already had his T-shirt off. Moth leaned closer and saw the white pucker of a scar on Hank's shoulder. They'd been moving scrap to the back of the junkyard yesterday, shirts off, sweating under the hot afternoon sun. Hank hadn't had that scar yesterday.
"Guy was a pro?" he said.
"It wasn't the first time he shot someone," Hank told him. "I could see it in his eyes when he was standing over me—just before the second girl killed him."
"Hard to kill someone like that—blade in the back. Usually takes a while to die."
"I thought about that—later."
Moth had to laugh. "Maybe she was using spit on the blade, too."
Hank smiled. He put his shirt on again and settled back in his chair.
"You ever hear of anything like this before?" he asked.
"Only in Jack's stories. Maybe you should talk to him."
"I don't know," Hank said. "Jack's not much of a one for straight answers."
"Well, that kind of depends on whether you take him literally or not."
He finished his cigarette as Hank worked that through.
"Jesus," Hank said after a moment. "You're saying his stories are true?"
Moth shrugged. "They're true for him. He makes no secret about that. How that translates into things other folks can experience, I don't know."
"True for him," Hank repeated softly. "And now for me."
"Maybe you should call that woman, too."
Hank gave him a blank look.
"Think about it, kid," Moth said. "The guy was trying to kill her."
"Animal people."
"Say what?"
"She said she was out looking for animal people."
Moth sighed. He looked out across the junkyard. The moon was almost down now and the familiar shapes of the junked cars and scrap had taken on odd shapes and shadows in the starlight. He'd never taken Jack's stories at face value, but right at this moment, he didn't know what to think anymore.
"Sounds like she found them," he said finally.
Hank nodded thoughtfully. "Found something, anyway."
6.
After the events of the previous night, the last place Lily wanted to be was in the basement of some punk club taking pictures of kids half her age who had way too much attitude and too little sense of personal hygiene. She'd touched a piece of magic last night and this was anything but. The three members of Bitches in Heat made her feel like a tired and worn-out old woman, especially the lead singer/guitarist with her wasted junkie body and practiced sneer. She called herself Vulva de Ville.
This is not innovative, Lily wanted to tell her, having shot hundreds of bands and seen far too much attitude to be charmed by this same-old, same-old anymore. Billy Idol and Sid Vicious were there before the Bitches. And Elvis long before any of them.
The other two members of the band were merely surly, but they had the same emaciated bodies. Looking at the three of them throug
h her camera lens, all she saw was a clot of leather and denim, piercings and tattoos, stringy hair and wasted faces. They were either junkies, or trying too hard, and neither appealed to her. She didn't like capturing that kind of image on film. It felt too much as though she was pandering to the same asinine art directors who thought bruises on anorexic models would sell clothes or makeup. It was like using child abuse to sell product, and the concept repulsed her as much as equating heroin use with having a good time, the way bands like this did. You didn't romanticize those sorts of activities, she believed; you tried to eradicate them.
"Hey, this'll be cool," the lead singer said.
Lily had been focusing on the drummer, so she wasn't aware of what de Ville had been up to until she lifted her head from her viewfinder. De Ville had tied off one of her twig-thin arms with a piece of rubber tubing to make the veins pop up and was clowning around with a hypodermic needle.
Lily turned to Rory. "If she starts shooting up, I'm out of here."
"Christ," de Ville told her, the sneer having slid into caricature by this point. "Lighten up why dontcha?" But she tossed the needle onto the cardboard box that stood in front of the sofa and was serving as a table.
"You almost done?" Rory asked.
"A couple more shots," Lily told him. She looked at the band again. "If you could all get together on the sofa and maybe lean in a little toward each other …"
She immediately regretted the suggestion. The three women fell into a tumble on the battered sofa and began groping each other, hands going up T-shirts and cupping crotches, faces attempting lusty sexual expressions that only came off as pathetic leers. Lily sighed, returned her eye to her viewfinder and finished the roll.
"You owe me," she told Rory afterward as they climbed the stairs toward the smoke and noise of the club above.
"No, Spin does," he said, pausing in the stairwell so that they could hear each other talk.
Lily stopped beside him and adjusted the strap of her camera bag. She was carrying way too much stuff in there as usual. She doubted she'd used even half of the lenses she'd brought along.
"I'm not talking about a paycheck," she said.
"I know. And you're right—I do owe you for getting you into this. But I wanted the best and so, naturally, the first person I thought of was you."
Lily had to smile. "Flattery's good—but you still owe me."
"This is true."
Lily had known Rory Crowther for years. He was a freelance writer, forever working on the proverbial Great North American Novel, paying the bills with articles and the occasional short story, but mostly with the jewelry he made in his apartment on Stanton Street and sold through various craft stores and at fairs. They first met while working on a piece for In the City, Newford's entertainment weekly. Early on in their relationship they had explored a more romantic involvement than they shared now, but they soon realized that they got along better as friends. Ten years later, they were still loyal confidantes, getting together at least once or twice a week, maintaining their friendship through any number of ultimately unhappy relationships and, in Rory's case, a failed marriage.
They were here in Your Second Home for an article on the re-emergence of punk on the Newford music scene that Rory was writing for Spin magazine. The club was a blue-collar bar during the day, a music club at night.
When he came by in a cab to pick her up earlier in the evening, she'd told him about what had happened last night, but gave him only a bare-bones version, no more than she'd told Donna in an email she'd sent off this morning: She'd been mugged, but a cab driver had come by in time to help her. Yes, she was fine now, really, and she didn't want to talk about it anymore. She just wanted to put it behind her.
She had no idea why she was so reticent about sharing the details of her experience with her two best friends, yet had been willing to blurt out to Joey Bennett that she'd been out walking the streets looking for animal people. It wasn't that what had happened was so impossible, or at least it wasn't only that, but she found herself no more able to understand her reluctance than she was able to discuss what had happened in any more detail than she already had.
"Come on," Rory was saying. He nodded his head back down the stairs where Bitches in Heat were probably shooting up now. "It wasn't so bad. Be honest. It was kind of like passing the scene of an accident, wasn't it? You don't really want to see what's going on, but you can't stop yourself from looking."
"I suppose. But you know what kept me shooting?"
Rory shook his head.
"The thought of how, ten or twenty years from now, they'll come across these pictures in a scrapbook or somewhere else and realize just how pathetic and foolish they really were."
"If they live that long."
That took Lily's smile away. "If they live that long," she agreed.
They continued up the stairs, a wall of sound hitting them when they reached the top. Helldogz were on stage—it was a canine theme night, Lily supposed, since the third band, who'd played in between the sets by this band and the opening act Bitches in Heat, had been a couple of rappers who called themselves Howl. Helldogz's lead singer reminded Lily of Henry Rollins—he had that same look of pumped-up muscles topped by a buzz cut, neither of which appealed to her—but she liked the raw honesty of his delivery and the band could really play. There was no posing, no pretense, just solid musicianship with something to say, albeit at an earsplitting, Spinal Tap/amps-set-to-eleven volume.
Rory tried to tell her something and she had to shake her head. He repeated it, leaning forward, mouth almost in her ear. "I said, do you want to take any more shots of them?"
She shook her head again. They waited until the song was over, stood through another, then finally went outside where the usual noise of Foxville's Lee Street seemed subdued in comparison.
"Share a cab home?" Rory asked. "Or should we walk?"
Lily knew a moment's nervousness, remembering where walking had got her last night, but she refused to let it take hold.
"Let's walk," she said.
"Okay. But let me be a chauvinist and carry your camera bag for a while."
"It's all right."
"Sure. That's why you've been fidgeting with it all night. If I know you, it weighs a ton."
Reluctantly, she handed it over. Rory pretended to stagger under its weight, almost dropping to his knees before he laboriously straightened up.
Lily smiled. "You know you've probably gone down at least thirty cool points so far as these kids are concerned."
The kids she referred to stood about like a tide of leather and denim and combat boots, washed up against the wall of the club, pooling in small clusters along the curb and down the pavement, hair spiked here, long there, dark smudges around the eyes of the women, lips bright, the men stony-eyed, looking tough. Some of them probably were, but for most it was a pose.
"Screw 'em," Rory said.
He headed south on Lee Street and Lily fell in step beside him. The farther they got from the club, the quieter the street became. There was still traffic, but the stores here were all closed and there were no clubs or restaurants until one reached the Kelly Street Bridge.
"So what do you know about gypsy cabs?" Lily asked after they'd been walking for a while.
Rory shrugged. "What's to know? The way the city's got everything regulated these days, it costs a fortune to get a cab license—that's just saying you can even get someone to sell one—so some people forgo the formalities and operate without the blessing of city council. From all I hear, it's been going on forever."
Lily nodded to show she was listening.
"Most of them are two-bit affairs," Rory went on. "Just some guy with a car cruising the club strips at closing time, maybe he's selling beer or liquor out of his trunk as well. You settle on a price and he takes you where you want to go. You and me, we never see them—or at least they don't stop for us—because we don't look right."
"How would we have to look?" Lily asked.
"I don't know. I guess it's not so much a look as an attitude. These people know each other, even if they've never met before—you know what I mean?"
Lily nodded. It was probably the same way she could always tell a serious photographer from someone who was just snapping a shot.
"Have you ever been in one?" she asked.
"No, but Christy has."
Rory had taken a fiction writing workshop with Christy Riddell a few years ago and they'd hit it off, becoming friends. They didn't write the same sort of thing at all—Christy specialized in collecting urban folklore, writing it up either as short stories or, more rarely, in a more traditional scholarly style—but they both seemed to suffer from the same block of not being able to write anything longer than a novella. Lily had met Christy a few times and liked him. She knew some people thought there was something a bit standoffish about him, as though he observed the world rather than let himself be engaged by it and the people in it, but she'd long since discovered it was only a front.
"I wonder if he'd know this Joey Bennett fellow who helped me out last night," she said. "I should ask him."
Rory gave her a considering look. "You know how in fairy tales the princess always falls into the arms of her rescuer?"
"It's not like that," Lily said. "I just didn't get a chance to thank him properly, that's all."
But Rory wouldn't let it go. "Are you okay with this?" he asked. She could hear the worry in his voice. "I mean, you're taking it all pretty well, but getting mugged—it's pretty serious business. I know I'd have the shakes for weeks."
Lily wanted to lie—it would make everything so much easier—but she couldn't. Not to him.
"I … I'm not entirely okay," she said. She stopped and turned to look at him. "But I'm not ready to talk about it yet. You understand, don't you?"
She could see him trying to hide the hurt that she wouldn't confide in him, but it didn't work. They knew each other too well.
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