Zephyr I

by Warren Hately

  “Listen up,” she says, the hand on my chest lacking the strength to truly pin me down. “If you want to protect this miserable thing you call a life, you’ll start by showing me some respect.”

  “What, as the mother of my child?”

  Her gaze flickers for a moment and straight away I know it didn’t take, thank God.

  “Christ, that’s what you’re after,” I slowly ope. “You want another bang?”

  “Azzurro doesn’t know I can access his mainframe. That access could be two-way, if you wanted it, Zephyr. Think about that. Was there any way the Don wasn’t gonna try and get some leverage on you while he had you down by rights? No way. But I could erase it all. The whole file.”

  “You’d still know,” I say.

  “I can keep a secret.”

  “For a price.”

  Frost nods. Over her shoulder I see George checking the oven, Beth glancing at the wristwatch she bought herself on graduation from law school. Tessa stands with Maxine, a proprietary arm around the grand-daughter’s shoulders as they look at pictures on the mantel and it occurs to me the old dykes know when they’re with one of their own – meaning Tess’ dalliance probably isn’t a passing infatuation.

  “Let’s get this over and done with,” I reply.

  The one hand turns into two, and Frost grabs my face and kisses me quickly, sexy, but a little too much like a small eager dog for my liking. There’s something very wrong about how well the villainess knows her way around my costume’s upholstery, because she has me bare in her cold-gloved grasp quicker than I can say “shrinkage”. Perhaps she senses this is going to be a problem, and presumably going on past experience Frost has a fairly adequate way to rectify it. She goes down on her knees, facilitating a better view of the warm family scene yonder.

  You can imagine yes even I find it hard to reconcile standing outside my mothers’ house smashing a blowjob from someone who may or may not be a wanted criminal (note to self) in order to save my secret identity. As the villainess lubes me up with her mouth, making small appreciative noises as she does it, I can’t help ponder the looming deadline with Twilight that is meant to ameliorate this complex web of issues I’ve become entangled in by just being me. It is like fifteen years of playing dress-ups has had a cumulative and complicated effect on my life. I’m in Limbo with my wife and very likely facing years of struggle with my headstrong daughter, the ongoing charade with my two mothers, as if having two mothers isn’t worrying enough. The present situation just illustrates so well why I need resolution, but I am not sure I am prepared for the severity of the solution. Twilight’s own words bade ominously.

  “For God’s sake, I don’t even want any more children,” I say, hard not to moan the words.

  Frost disengages with a wet noise and stands, leathery fingers cupping my nuts, giving a gentle squeeze I know is rich with metaphor. I get the message. She needn’t say anything else, but she can’t help herself.

  “Having a hard enough time with the one you’ve got?” Frost strikes a sardonic pose. “Tell me I’m not the one who’s got to break it to you that your little girl’s queer?”

  “Frost, enough. Please.”

  The witch gives another squeeze and raises her bare inner thigh against my hip. Her mouth rests close to my ear, issuing instructions I am not game to follow until her words become more insistent.

  “Spill the seed, if you don’t want me spilling the beans.”

  “That’s blackmail, you bitch,” I comment unwisely. “Doesn’t it trouble you that you can’t get me to do this any other way?”

  “It’s very disappointing,” she replies. “I’ve been thinking about our last time together ever since. You were so good. So big inside me. Hard to believe that a tiny part of you wasn’t willing?”

  “It’s something about the cold. Don’t go getting any illusions, woman.”

  She turns around, her bare nape brushing against me as she fiddles with her costume. We’re both peering through the bushes like any average bored suburban couple experimenting in search of an evening’s thrills.

  “Nice family you’ve got there,” she laughs huskily.

  I feel her bare ass against me, a hand guiding me to work like the collared slave I am. The only difference between me and the fellas who died on the pyramids is the amount of lubricant. I glance down long enough to concede I’m not exactly flagging. For a chick who is more likely to be mistaken for the pole than the stripper climbing it, Frost has a comely tail and it’s hard not to appreciate the view. I feel my inner caveman taking charge.

  “Come on, Zephyr,” she moans. “Fill me.”

  She starts repeating it like a mantra, adding other obscenities that can’t help fuelling my arousal, pathetic, pre-programmed male that I am. I am inadvertently caught in what might otherwise be many men’s ultimate fantasy, which only underscores just how insane my private life has become. If she’d just ease off on reminding me we’ll make “beautiful, powerful children” and that “our children will be the gods of Atlantic City,” the going would be a little easier.

  I feel the air pressure swell. Somewhere in the aether, a baby thunderstorm brews. By the time I am laboring hard against Frost, her hands against the window-box, the first spats of rain are coming down. I finish inside her and immediately question my own compliance. All I can think is that come midnight, none of this may be relevant, though I think this without any real conviction and that’s when I know I have Twilight’s answer for sure.

  It’s a no – which makes this yet another in a long line of bad ideas.

  *

  FROST DOES HER lady stuff for a few moments. I leave her to it, noting only that as the warm rain come down in fat droplets they turn into lozenges around the villainess and hit the ground hard, like leakage from a slushy. I have my own confirmation she is not as cold within as she is without, so I don’t have to wonder how my prized tadpoles are faring.

  While I might have a few problems meeting the villainess’s eyes, Frost doesn’t have any of the same qualms. In fact her look is downright sultry. For a strange-looking woman she has a way about her. Now her hips see-saw back and forth as she clinches her hard vinyl costume back into place.

  “Tell me about the Mys-tech job,” I say quietly.

  “Why the hell should I?”

  “The Mob’s hiring lunatics like Infernus, now?”

  “He got the job done. Handed you your ass.”

  “Only because of that madwoman Raveness. You’ve heard her rep, I’m sure?”

  “I think the whole cannibalism thing is probably highly inflated,” Frost replies.

  I gag at the ease with which she dismisses the slight against her fellow predator. It’s a good reminder of the sort of crowd I’m messing with, I tell myself.

  “I don’t think the Feebs thought so,” I say.

  “The Feebs? Fuck them. When Don Azzurro wants their opinion, he gives it to ‘em.”

  I don’t reply, mulling over whether this is true or not. Hardly a question for my next run-in with Synergy and her prat offsider Vanguard.

  “Tell me about Mys-tech,” I say again. “What were they after?”

  “Retrieving the rightful property of one of the Don’s prized employees. Hardly anything illegal at all, actually,” she says.

  I recall the minidisc provided by Sal Doro and muse that perhaps I should view it some time.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing you need to know,” she says haughtily.

  “Those guards, what the hell kind of gear was that?”

  “I don’t know. I was on sentry duty. But Mys-tech are exploring the, uh, scientific dimensions of the paranormal, if I recall my briefing right.”

  “You were on guard, huh? Does that mean you saw me coming or did you just tip your pals off?”

  Frost comes back in close and strokes my cheek, which I am forced to endure if I want her answer, which for some reason I do. She knows she has me hooked and I resolve that this is the last fre
e ride the bitch is going to blackmail out of me.

  “What, set those animals on the father of my children?”

  I note she used the plural and grit my teeth as she laughs throatily once more, her signature, and starts to move off.

  “I trust you’ll do what you said you would with those Mafia files?”

  Frost only gives me her best doe-eyed smirk and skips across the rain-slick road to a waiting black Cadillac. I’m relieved to see there is no-one else inside. I mince further up the drive and seek refuge in the greenhouse, changing into civvies and stashing the costume in an old accustomed place, finding some stale cigarettes there and smoking one before it is time to go inside and continue this masquerade that offers no escape.

  Zephyr 2.12 “A Hollow Yellow Flame Erupts Into Being”

  IF THERE WAS frost on the windows outside, inside the temperature seems even chillier.

  George is the real mummy-looking one of my parents, with her barbed-wire grey hair in a neat bun, chopsticks inserted, a loose-necked pullover with a nautical theme to insulate her against the day. Normally one of the kindest women I have ever met, just to be paradoxical, she now looks like I’ve devoured someone’s live young in front of her. Tessa is across the room, in the kitchen, and Beth holds a teacup like she has been caught in the act of secretly sipping her own pee. To complete the scene, Maxine walks in with her spiky, triple-toned ridiculousness of a ‘do and slides her arm through George’s and eyes me up and down and sniffs the air.

  “Hello Joseph. Have you taken up smoking?”

  “Bah, that’s a disgustin’ habit,” Georgia brogues. “After the first twenty years it’s really not worth it, Joe.”

  There’s no sanctimony like that of the reformed pariah.

  “It’s just the odd fag,” I reply. “Surely that’s nothing new in this family.”

  With silence thus established, I let myself further into the room.

  The house is trapped in the 60s, everything a perfect replica or a painstaking preservation. So we cross from faultless Formica and spotless linoleum up a wooden step into a shag-pile living room. There’s one of the energy-efficient heaters the powered suit Arsenal devised, mass produced for about a week-and-a-half in the early 90s until the GE lawyers got onto them, the machine sitting snug and lacking ambience in the fireplace. The mantelpiece has pictures mostly of my two mums and their dogs – dogs relegated to the back room for my appearance, my parents knowing how much I hate the damned things, the last few years of high school like a competition between me and them as I wrestled with the irreconcilable conviction my folks were anticipating my departure by replacing me with a more obedient pet. I’d score top marks in chemistry (OK, maybe civics) and the dogs, for managing not to crap all over the laundry for an hour, would get the reward. I ate half a pack of doggy treats once on the suspicion they were getting the better end of the deal.

  Suffice to say it wasn’t true.

  Around the time I got my powers, I became even more secretive than any teenage boy has the right to be. We bumbled along, Maxine, Georgia and I, but even with their high-octane educations they were at a loss how to deal with a teenage boy. The only thing we had in common was a tendency to ogle girls at the Shop-Rite, and society tends to place taboos on a mum and a son cruising together on a Saturday afternoon. Over the years of my adulthood, the situation has only marginally improved.

  There’s an awkward air not lessened by my appearance. I do the dutiful thing and cross to my wife, trying to take her elbow and ask how her day was. All I get is rugged defiance and a dearth of eye contact.

  “What’s up?” I whisper with freak loudness.

  Elisabeth shrugs me off, uncomfortable with the private moment in what’s a sometime gladiatorial space. After a scan of the room to make sure everyone’s fitfully engaged, I grab Beth’s elbow more serious and hiss, “What?” loudly.

  “They know,” she replies.

  “About what?”

  “About the girls,” Beth says.

  “Oh.”

  I should’ve guessed, but now I know, I really don’t know what to make of it.

  “Shit.”

  It was bound to happen, I want to explain, but the sterile rictus of Beth’s face brooks no comment.

  I turn and step into a stormfront. Max and George descend like a linguistic wrestling act so that Beth and I are on the ropes in an instant. I’ve never been caught in a conversation so terrifying I want to pee myself, but now I’d do almost anything to get out of this. They want to spring for the bill for Greenwood Alternative. Tessa’s sexuality is an expression of her genetic inheritance. We shouldn’t fight it, or make her feel ashamed. The two girls should be allowed to be together and sort it out themselves. Let the grandparents be the ambassadors for the family and smooth things over with Astrid’s folks.

  They only take pause long enough for deep breaths and that’s when I know I should be really afraid as their narrowed eyes turn on Elisabeth and they beg – without a trace of humility, empathy or concern – for Beth not to lock them out of Tessa’s life or discredit their viewpoints just because they happen to share the same orientation.

  “Our being queer doesn’t demerit our perspective,” as Maxine puts it.

  “We know you’ve never been comfortable with our lifestyle, but now those chickens are comin’ home to roost,” George says, even less clement.

  Beth looks like she’s just taken a mild psychoactive. I’m reeling. There’s something in the series of announcements that must be like what it’s like to have policemen knock on your door following a fatal car crash, only no-one’s died, there’s no cops, and there’s no one to blame except to shoot the messenger. And this is just what Beth does.

  I stagger into the kitchen like a refugee from the Somme and bust Tessa standing tucked into the corner between the retro stove and the kitchen bin, hands to her face, nails digging without punishment into her youthful cheeks.

  “Are you alright?” I ask.

  She nods, half says something. I don’t know what.

  “You told them?”

  “They knew, dad,” she replies. “They know everything.”

  “Everything?”

  I blink, because we’ve turned a page and no-one told me we’d switched books. There’s a brief flashback, second grade, I think, me desperately leafing through a book on cavemen trying to catch up to where it mentions the agrarian revolution.

  Tessa nods sans hope and you can’t quite describe her gesture as rolling her eyes. It’s more like they fall away, indicative of absent tears, the expression rare as a flightless bird and more precious.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  The question hangs in the air like a dropped vase, just hovering for a moment before the inevitable pandemonium.

  “Oh Jesus, dad. Come on. Everyone’s known for years.”

  The shouting match just behind me strikes fever pitch and I turn, expecting to intervene in a two-on-one. Instead, Georgia watches me from within the cyclonic eye of that tumult with a hand to her greying coiffure. She just nods.

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” I say again eventually to Tess.

  I try to laugh to keep it light.

  “Dad, it’s OK,” my little darling says. “You’re Zephyr.”

  She elbows her tears away and comes out from under the alcove, no taller than my shoulder and with strands of her rich coppery hair caught in the fabric of her sweater, the interstices of the woolen pattern rendered as tiny sheep, I strangely notice in the still of the moment. I’m staring at the sheep, falling right into them, as a breeze ruffles through the kitchen and blows open some notes from one of the manila folders perched on the green tile ledge above the oven-filled antique fireplace.

  I glance around for the open window, but there’s none.

  “It’s OK, dad,” Tessa says again.

  I check her face and there’s a brave smile. The other voices have stopped. Beth judders into the room and comes to a com
plete halt as the papers arrayed across the floor continue in a dance with a life of their own, swirling into a papery dust devil that scoots around and past each of us until it skirts the back door, swans across the face of the fridge and scatters in a hundred sheets above and around my daughter. The papers form a living fountain. Tessa has her hands splayed and her hair’s dancing like the singer of an 80s hard pop band. A weird glow lights her face I know only from newsreel footage of my own exultations.

  “Shit.”

  “Joseph, what’s this?” Beth demands.

  I’m speechless. The papers divest themselves of motion and fall as if from an upper floor window. Tessa gives a retching sob, although she appears to grin, and George passes me in her haste to get alongside the girl and clinch her, arm around the shoulder.

  “That’s very brave of you, love, coming out like that,” she says.

  Tessa beams through the emotions.

  “I couldn’t’ve done it without you, grandma.”

  Beth cocks her head like something feline, animatronic.

  “You . . . you can do this too?” She looks at Georgia aghast. “And you told her?”

  “It’s OK, mom.”

  Tessa looks up into George’s slightly elevated face, a clear inquiry inscribed thereupon. The older woman curtly nods, fluorescent light catching off her European frames.

  “It’s OK, mom,” Tessa says again. “It’s all in the family.”

  I’m horrified myself, though for different reasons.

  “What are you saying?” I hiss.

  George has many smiles. Most I have seen many times. But it’s not often I’ve seen the one she reserves for the revelation of wicked secrets. Still with one woolly sleeve around my daughter’s shoulders, my birth mother opens her other palm and her fingers splay open like a time-lapse flower in decline. There’s a spark and suddenly a hollow yellow flame erupts into being.

  “I’m sorry, Joseph. For a long time I had to keep it secret. We were hiding.”

  And she smiles – and there’s that look again.

  “You would have known me as Catchfire.”