Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  The girl gets up and comes around the counter, looks Cass in the eyes. Cass tries not to flinch. She is not accustomed to being examined so closely. The girl touches her palm to Cass’s forehead, whispers something, tilts her head as if listening, takes her hand away.

  “It’s not dreams you need protection from,” she says. “You are like me. Someone who lives in too many places. I can help you, but I can’t change what you are.”

  “Anything,” Cass says. “I’m scared to go to sleep.”

  “You have a gift.”

  “I don’t think I want it.”

  “You cannot choose to have it or not to have it. You can choose only how you will live with it.” The girl takes down jars of herbs, measures them into bags, piles the bags on the counter. She looks through some books, hums to herself, adds a tiny bottle of oil to the growing stack.

  “I don’t have much money,” Cass says. “Any money,” she amends.

  “Then you will be in my debt,” the girl says. Cass scowls, not sure if she likes the sound of that. The girl laughs at her expression. “You can come back,” she says. “Tomorrow, same time?”

  “Sure,” Cass says.

  “Take this now, and come back tomorrow. I’ll give you a way to earn your keep.” Cass stares at her, stricken, and the girl looks at her deadpan. “You can prepare the infants for sacrifice,” she says. “And after that, stock the shelves. I have a big shipment of books coming in tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Cass says.

  “Make this into a tea, and drink it at night before you go to sleep.” The girl pats the pile of herbs. “I’m giving you a book to start, and a tarot deck. And if you don’t come back tomorrow, I’ll hex you.”

  That night, the tea does not take away the dreams but it lessens the terror of them, weaves a barrier between Cass and the dead. When they reach for her they cannot touch her, and it is harder for her to hear the ghastly, jabbering chorus of their voices. In the morning she feels, if not well-rested, at least as though she’s slept, and she walks back downtown to the witch store with a lighter heart.

  The witch-store girl is named Raven—Cass doesn’t ask whether it’s a given name or a chosen one, though privately she finds it a little cheesy—and she knows more about what she knows best than any knowing person Cass has ever met. Every possible permutation of tarot deck. The nature and purpose of an encyclopedia’s worth of herbs, how to grow them and where to find them in the wild, how to decoct and decant and tincture and salve them, how to make spells with them and how to make them into tea. Runes in dead languages and living ones, the movements of the stars, the messages behind every pattern of wind and wave, the meanings of numbers and days and saints, the history of witches. It’s weeks before Cass can tell when Raven is cracking a joke, and even then she’s never really sure. A mean-mouthed tourist comes into the shop one afternoon, disorders the divination books and strews about the sage, asks a thousand pesky questions about all the essential oils, who grew them, where they are from, whether they were of a suitable quality or composed of inferior ingredients, which incenses were most likely to be non-allergenic. Raven responds with a stoic patience Cass finds astounding. When the woman leaves without buying a thing, Raven looks at Cass with a perfectly straight face. “Bring me the wormwood,” she says. “I’m going to give that bitch warts so far up her ass she’ll wish she could shit out her mouth,” and it’s long, long minutes before she laughs and Cass realizes she’s not serious.

  “Could you really do that?” Cass breathes.

  “Oh, sure,” Raven says, and this time she doesn’t laugh.

  Cass’s days in the witch store blur together, long pleasant winter afternoons that shade into twilight at four and full dark by five-thirty. Outside the shop’s windows the wind howls and flings spatters of rain at the glass in torrential gusts, but inside they are warm and cozy. Raven makes them tea and sets Cass to dusting, or sorting her Dead Can Dance records out from her Clan of Xymox, or tidying the tarot decks in their glass case, or filling little glassine bags of herbs and handing them over to Raven to be labeled in her painstaking, beautiful script. Cass watches as Raven makes up tinctures for people who come in with aches and pains or broken hearts or longings for other people’s lovers—“Be careful with those,” Raven says to Cass, when they can’t hear her, “no matter what you give them, it will end badly for someone”—or sorrows large and small, wishes for joys, hopes and dreams and fevers. Raven picks out tarot decks, finds the right sorts of oils to make the right sorts of smells, matches eager customers with the futures they hope for, the small magics that puzzle out into a larger pattern of light and care. For all her smart mouth and wicked tongue, Raven is a good witch, and good at being a witch; she knows without being told who wants to be told they are psychic or special or waiting to blossom into beauty or love, and who wants to be told nothing at all, handed discreetly a little bag of herbs or a spell written on a folded piece of paper. When there is nothing to do in the shop, which is not often, Raven teaches Cass how to make magic of her own. Cass works at the shop every day, except for one day of the week she waits with her friends on the Ave and pretends nonchalance until Maia walks past, improbable Maia, with her sylph’s face and yuppie’s clothes, Maia who’s bewitched Cass as surely as if she’s cast a spell herself. Maia stops and says hello, shyly at first and then with more confidence as the weeks progress, until she’s squatting on the sidewalk next to Cass, her brown eyes alight as she talks about Chopin or Bach or whatever she happens to be reading. They both love Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Edith Hamilton, but from there their tastes diverge wildly. Cass insists Maia must read Delany; Maia says she will if Cass tries Proust. Cass counters with Angela Carter. Maia insists on Hugo. In bantering about books, they piece together a friendship. If Raven guesses why Cass doesn’t show once a week, regular as a metronome, she doesn’t say.

  From Raven Cass learns the cycles of the moon, the best days of the month for making people fall in love with you, asking goddesses for favors, sowing crops. The crops are just for reference, though someday she would like to have a house of her own, a garden, a ring of herbs and flowers, vegetables growing in neat lines. She reads about tinctures and teas, cooks salves in a dirty pot on the Coleman camp stove they use at the squat. She steals crystals from the new age store on the Ave, soft leather and thread from the fabric store. Raven does not ask where she has procured her materials, but teaches her without comment to make amulets to ward off bad dreams, bad luck, and bad spirits. When Cass herself is so festooned with talismans she clanks when she walks, she begins to hand them out to her friends. It is not long before she has something of a reputation. She’s asked to interpret dreams, suggest prudent courses through difficult problems. She makes love spells and money spells—though even she will admit it’ll take a lot more than some herbs and a green candle to bring prosperity to her own house and its ragtag gaggle of urchins—and begins to specialize in astrological predictions. Cass has a lot of free time with which to apprehend her new craft, and she takes to it the same way she took to prescription pills washed down with cheap whisky.

  Felony and Mayhem are mostly amused by her new hobby, but Felony will take the bus downtown with her to the island ferry, cross the mountain-ringed Sound, hitch rides with pickup truck–driving loggers and back-to-the-landers out along the winding roads that crisscross the island like veins. Felony and Cass thrash through the wet woods, salal slapping at their knees, dripping branches smacking them in the face, while Cass digs for roots and stubborn winter-growing herbs. Felony is always pleased by adventure in any shape it chooses to take. Cass clambers over fallen trees, her muddy boots sinking through deep piles of moss and loamy soil, one eye out for the gold-brown flash of a startled deer leaping away through the trees, or the black dart of a crow winging between the branches. Cass is no woodswoman, but Felony spent a few years living in tree platforms and shackling herself to logging-road gates to stop timber sales. While her efforts did little to slow the increasing
tide of clear-cutting that scars the peninsula, she came away from her brief stint as a forest defender with an unerring sense of direction and an uncanny ability to find the road again no matter how many circles they wander in or how far into the woods they stray. As they tramp about, Felony regales her with tales of running away from federal agents, fornicating in the treetops with her revolutionary compatriots of various genders, and defecating in plastic buckets that had to be lowered daily from their platform homes and emptied by ground teams who kept the platforms supplied with anticapitalist good cheer, Dumpstered vegetables, and soy protein snacks. The winter’s too cold and wet for sleeping out, but Felony promises that when the weather changes they can come out to the woods with a tarp, set up a little camp under the trees.

  Cass feels, for the first time in a long time, as though she is doing something useful. Learning a craft, thrashing around in the woods, sweating some of the whisky and pills out of her system. She even quits drinking for a while, which Raven guesses, though Cass hasn’t told her. “It’s good for you,” she says, “to let go of what dulls you and puts a veil between you and the world.” I need that veil, Cass thinks. There are reasons she and Felony and Mayhem drink like they do, reasons that have as much to do with forgetting as celebrating. She’s never told Raven any of the secrets knitted into her skin, but Raven’s sharp eyes miss nothing.

  “The Hanged Man,” she says one slow afternoon, as Cass refills the herb jars. “Beyerl tells us that he has lessons for us about letting go, release. We have already learned through our suffering; the time comes to contemplate the wisdom we have gained. To move from action to inaction. We must learn to be a vessel in order to allow ourselves to be transformed.”

  “I don’t need a lecture,” Cass says.

  “Sorrow can be a teacher,” Raven says, “but it can also be a trap. You’re a walking wound, Cass. You’ve been bleeding all over my floor since the first time you came in here. I can’t teach you any more until you learn to live with what you carry.”

  Cass is still, only the twitch of her jaw betraying her. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You’re full of poison. You’re strong, Cass, stronger than even you know, but it takes a new kind of strength to let yourself heal.”

  “You think what happened to me is my problem? You think I just need to get over it?”

  Raven raises one hand, her silver bracelets clinking. “Do not change my words into things they are not, Cassandra. I am not your monster. We all carry pain within us; it is how we bear it that makes us what we are.”

  Cass sets the bag of dried nettles down, stands up slowly. “I have to go,” she says.

  Raven sighs. “Oh, Cass. Who will you fight, when there is no one left around you? You are always welcome here.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Cass says, not looking at her. The light in the witch store is watery and grey. Fuck this, she thinks, but she cannot tell anymore whether she is furious with Raven or with herself.

  “Well met, Cass,” Raven says softly. “I will see you again in this life.”

  That night Cass dreams of the skeleton man. She is standing in front of the black palace, all its doors open to the dead world; he is next to her, his black coat flapping in the breezeless air. His bony hand is on her shoulder, his long fingers curled around her collarbone. You are keeping something that is precious to me, he says, his voice the dry flutter of moths’ wings in her mind. I will come for it soon, Cassandra. He is frightening, but there is something magnetic about those flat black eyes, the thin cruel curve of his mouth. What could she possibly have that he wants? An amulet, a pile of crystals? “Take me with you,” she says as he lets go her shoulder, “take me with you,” but he does not answer her as he walks away.

  She does not go to the witch store anymore, after that.

  NOW: BODEGA BAY

  Here is her body: long legs, long arms, long bony fingers. The ridge of her knuckles. The teeth of her spine. They got a motel room for twenty dollars, the kind of motel where the door doesn’t really lock and the people in the rooms on either side of them live here. Women with faces made desperate by hunger and the grief of watching their own lives leave them. Not all at once but in pieces. Grey-faced children with dark shadows under their eyes. The parking lot full of breaking-down cars stuffed with possessions: blankets, boxes, toys, groceries. The sheets on the motel-room bed are white and stiff, cheap fabric reeking of bleach. A flickering neon sign advertised FREE CA LE but the television is broken, switches on to channel after channel of static.

  This is the longest Maia has ever gone without playing the piano. When she sleeps she dreams of her hands on white keys. She dreams of mermaids drifting in the deep, their songs sweet and faint. She dreams of Rachmaninov’s Elégie in E Flat Minor, the arpeggiated left hand, the smooth sad chords counterpointing in the right, the melody singing between them both; a piece that makes her think of moors, of wandering in some dreaming misty world smeared with rain and love lost and melancholy. Her hands ache, remembering. The weight of what’s unsung threatening to drown her. All her life the only words she has spoken well are those spelled out in notes, black marks on the staves’ black lines, the only language she knows as her native tongue. The words are someone else’s but the song is hers, the longing, the rhythm of it moving in her body, her blood. For all the years and miles and lifetimes that separate her and those long-dead men, for all their whiteness and their polonaises, for all the ways in which they are nothing like her, what they have written lives in her, is made real in her hands, her heart, the muscles of her back and arms. Her own body, moving, her strong fingers poised above the keys. Sometimes when she plays she imagines them standing over her, a silent ghostly chorus, smiling.

  She dreams of Ravel, wandering in the dark world where ghosts speak in human tongues and tell human stories, where demons are real and sirens call to human lovers with no love, only malice. In her dreams the white keys of the piano turn to pale trees in a night forest, their branches reaching overhead into the looming dark, the ground cool beneath her bare feet. Her hair long again, spilling down her back; she is wearing a white dress like a bride’s that falls to her ankles and moves around her in drifts although there is no breeze. In front of her the ground splits open, revealing a stairway leading down into the dark, and she knows the man in the black coat is waiting for her at the bottom, patient as death. I’m coming, she tells him, I’m coming. Wait for me. I’m coming. The darkness knits through her, through and through, black thread on a silver needle flashing between her ribs, stitching silent her tongue, and when she reaches the bottom of the stairs his hands close around her like a cage. But when she wakes up she remembers only the piano, only the feel of her hands on the white keys, only the music in her ears.

  What was she thinking? That she could walk away? That speed and freedom would fill the emptiness of her heart, teach her how to love? In Cass she sees herself echoed. What’s unmatched in their bodies is twinned in their hearts: that same ache, that sorrow, that vast want. Until she opened her eyes to it Maia had no idea of the immensity of her own hunger. But without the piano she is nothing, no one, not even a girl you would remember. Without the piano she has no way to spell out what she’s asking for, no way to name a single thing, to give voice to the loss that follows her wherever she goes. She is her own worst curse. Cass was better off without Maia’s dead weight throwing her off-course. Before, Maia was a blank slate, a girl with no sense of her own yearning. She channeled the dead in her hands and made their dreams hers, played like she was possessed with a genius no less great for not being her own. But now she is cut adrift, lost between worlds, following Cass from basement show to club to basement show as though she’ll find the answer to herself in sweaty skin and the crash of noise, bodies wild against bodies in the dark. It’s a release, but it’s not the solution to any riddle. If she knew what she wanted, if she could put a name to it, would that set her free? Cass is so sure of herself, so clear, so relentless, but
there’s nothing about Cass that makes Maia think she is happy either. Both of them, lost in the loss of each other.

  They take turns in the shower. Cass first. Maia can’t remember the last time she was clean. Things like that used to matter to her. They’d met some people in Arcata, stayed for a while. Sleeping on floors. Or in beds. Not alone. A couple of nights in a hotel room down the coast some drummer from some band had rented for her and Cass and him and some other people whose names she can’t remember. Fat white lines of cocaine on a mirror and Cass’s big eyes looking straight at her; later, Cass had said she was sorry, and Maia said, “For what,” and Cass said, “I didn’t think I was this contagious.” A life can change so fast. Where is her mother now, and is she worried? Has she called the cops? Are they swarming the coast, even now, searching out a girl gone astray, or are runaways cheap currency on the I-5 corridor, not even worth the effort of a search until they turn up fish-eyed and clammy in some ditch, their underwear missing and their futures gone? Has Maia’s father even noticed she’s left? They’d swapped out the license plate on the Mercedes in a grocery-store parking lot in Vancouver, traded it for the plate off a truck festooned with American flag bumper stickers. Both of them had liked the almost-joke, though the extra step meant nothing if no one’s looking.

  But in between there are patches of joy. One night wild with speed and Cass’s hand in hers and this show was great, this show was brilliant, this show was better than all the other shows. This show was a woman with long black hair and a great throaty purr of a voice too big and too gorgeous for the dirty room, her hands sure on the guitar, each note true. I’ve been waiting for my life to start, she sang, and Cass and Maia’s eyes went wide, because here they were, waiting too, and sometimes all it takes is another voice to call out the words living unspoken in your chest. The kids around them felt it the same way they did, surging up against the battered stage with their arms outstretched, singing along to the chorus as soon as they recognized it well enough to repeat it. I’ve been waiting for my life to start, Maia and Cass howled with one voice. After the show Maia pulled her through a knotted throng to where the woman and her band were packing up instruments and amps. “Hi,” Maia said, her voice tiny, but the woman heard her. She was older than they thought, up close. Late twenties, maybe. Lines at the corners of her sad eyes where hard days had marked her, but her face was kind. “Hi,” she said.