“I hate that phrase,” she says. “I loathe it,” and before Elgin can ask what she means, “Post-industrial,” she adds. “As if there’s nothing left now but the aftermath, like post-modern, as if there’s no way that we can possibly define ourselves except in relation to…Fuck, Jimmy, is that the only tape we own?”
“You said it didn’t matter,” Jimmy sighs, sullen voiced, returning to his chair. “And your hour’s up, Mr. Murray,” he adds. “It was up five minutes ago.”
“Yeah,” Elgin replies, and he checks his wristwatch. “Just a couple more questions, okay, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”
“I said, your hour is up,” and Jimmy is speaking deliberate and threatful now. He leans forward, leans towards Elgin, and his eyebrows rise slowly into dark arches above his black shades. “Mr. Murray, I won’t repeat myself again.”
Elgin looks to Salmagundi for support, but she’s laid her head on the dressing table, eyes closed, one hand resting on the antique candy box as if for comfort. Her damp hair hides most of her pretty face.
“You really should go now, Elgin,” she says, not unkindly. “You only asked for an hour.”
And so he closes his pad, has learned not to push these things; surely he has enough for the article. Jimmy stands and opens the door for him.
“Thanks,” Elgin says. “I really do appreciate your time.” He looks back once, just before the door closes and locks behind him, and he sees her face framed in the mirror, that porcelain face still stained by the Hudson Valley money it came from, watching him leave, and her gemstone eyes are bright and weary. Something tiny and white like a single living grain of rice falls from her forehead and lies wriggling on the dressing table by the Whitman’s tin.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
W. B. Yeats, “The Gyres” (1938)
Such things I hear, they don’t make sense.
I don’t see much evidence.
I don’t feel. I don’t feel. I don’t feel.
Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia, My Reflection” (1987)
* * *
Salmagundi
Peter Straub has called Salmagundi Desvernine “Caitlín’s avatar.” He called her that in 1999 or 2000, whenever he wrote his afterword for Tales of Pain and Wonder. I know it was true back then. She was, just as Jimmy DeSade was my shadow. In the nineties, I was seized by a longing for lost Victorian and Edwardian ages, but that soon faded and died. Salmagundi also faded and died, and, shortly thereafter, Jimmy DeSade was no more than ashes. New avatars have come and gone. I’ll not name them.
Postcards from the King of Tides
Here’s the scene: The three dark children, three souls past twenty, but still adrift in the jagged limbo of childhoods extended by chance and choice and circumstance, their clothes impeccable rags of night sewn with thread the color of ravens and anthracite; two of them fair, a boy and a girl and the stain of protracted innocence strongest on them; the third a mean scrap of girlflesh with a black-lipped smile and a heart to make holes in the resolve of the most jaded nihilist, but still as much a child as her companions. She sits behind the wheel of the old car, her sage-grey eyes staring straight ahead, matching their laughter with seething determination and annoyance, and there’s the bright, seething music, and the forest flowing around them, older times ten hundred than anything else alive.
The winding, long drive back from Seattle, almost two days now, and Highway 101 has become this narrow asphalt snake curving and recurving through the redwood wilderness, and they’re still not even as far as San Francisco. Probably won’t see the city before dark, Tam thinks, headachy behind the wheel and her black sunglasses because she doesn’t trust either of the twins to drive. Neither Lark nor Crispin have their licenses, and it’s not even Tam’s car; Magwitch’s piece-of-shit Chevrolet Impala, antique ’70s junk heap that might have been the murky green of cold pea soup a long, long time ago. Now it’s mostly rust and Bondo and one off-white door on the driver’s side. Countless bumper stickers to hold it all together.
“Oooh,” Lark whispers, awe-voiced, as she cranes her neck to see through the trees rushing past, the craggy coast visible in brief glimpses between the trunks and branches. Her head stuck out the window, the wind whipping at her fine, silk-white hair, and Tam thinks how she looks like a dog, a stupid, slobbering dog, just before Crispin says, “You look like a dog.” He tries hard to sound disgusted with that last word, but Tam suspects he’s just as giddy, just as enchanted by the Pacific rain forest, as his sister (if they truly are brother and sister; Tam doesn’t know, not for sure, doesn’t know that anyone else does either, for that matter).
“You’ll get bugs in your teeth,” Crispin says. “Bugs are gonna fly right straight down your throat and lay their eggs in your stomach.”
Lark’s response is nothing more or less than another chorus of ooohs and ahhhs as they round a tight bend, rush through a break in the treeline, and the world ends there, dropping suddenly away to the mercy of a silver-yellow-grey sea that seems to go on forever, blending at some far-off and indefinite point with the almost colorless sky. There’s a sun-bright smudge up there, but sinking slowly westward, and Tam looks at the clock on the dash again. It’s always twenty minutes fast, but still, it’ll be dark long before they reach San Francisco.
She punches the cigarette lighter with one carefully-manicured index finger, nail the color of an oil slick, and turns up the music already blaring from the Impala’s tape deck. Lark interprets that as her cue to start singing, howling along to “Black Planet,” and the mostly bald tires squeal just a little as Tam takes the curve ten miles an hour above the speed limit. A moment in the cloud-filtered sun, blinding after the gloom, before the tree shadows swallow the car whole again. The cigarette lighter pops out, and Tam steals a glance at herself in the rearview mirror as she lights a Marlboro: yesterday’s eyeliner and she’s chewed off most of her lipstick, a black smear on her right cheek. Her eyes a little bleary, a little red with swollen capillaries, but the ephedrine tablets she took two hours ago, two crimson tablets from a bottle she bought at a truck stop back in Oregon, are still doing their job and she’s wider than awake.
“Will you sit the fuck down, Lark, before you make me have a goddamn wreck and kill us all? Please?” she says, smoky words from her faded lips. Lark stops singing, pulls her head back inside and Crispin sticks his tongue out at her, fleshpink flick of I-told-you-so reproach. Lark puts her pointy black boots on the dash, presses herself into the duct-taped upholstery, and doesn’t say a word.
They spent the night before in Eugene and then headed west, following the meandering river valleys all the way down to the sea before turning south towards home. Almost a week now since the three of them left Los Angeles, just Tam and the twins because Maggie couldn’t get off work, but he told them to go, anyway. She didn’t really want to go without him, knew that Lark and Crispin would drive her nuts without Magwitch around, but the tour wasn’t coming through LA or even San Francisco. So, she went without too much persuading, they went, and it worked out better than she’d expected, really, at least until today.
At least until Gold Beach, only thirty or forty miles north of the California state line, where Crispin spotted the swan neck of a Brachiosaurus towering above shaggy hemlock branches, and he immediately started begging her to stop, even promised that he wouldn’t ask her to play the PJ Harvey tape anymore if she’d Please Just Stop and let him see. So they lost an hour at the Prehistoric Gardens, actually paid money to get in, and then spent a whole fucking hour wandering around seventy acres of dripping, wet trees, listening to Crispin prattle on about the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and things like dinosaurs, tourist-trap monstrosities built sometime in the 1950s, skeletons of steel and wood hidden somewhere beneath sleek skins of wire mesh and cement.
“They don’t even look real,” Tam said, as Crispin vamped in front of a scowling stegosaur while Lark rummaged
around in her purse for her tiny Instamatic camera.
“Well, they look real enough to me,” he replied, and Lark just shrugged, a suspiciously complicit and not-at-all-helpful sort of shrug. Tam frowned a little harder, no bottom to a frown like hers. “You are really such a fucking geek, Crispy,” she said under her breath, but plenty loud enough the twins could hear.
“Don’t call him that,” Lark snapped, defensive sister voice, and then she found her camera somewhere in the vast blackbeaded bag and aimed it at the pretty boy and the unhappy-looking stegosaur. “A geeky name for a geeky boy,” Tam sneered, as Lark took his picture. Crispin winked at her, then, and he was off again, running fast to see the Pteranodon or the Ankylosaurus. Tam looked down at her wristwatch and up at the sky and, finding no solace in either, she followed zombie Hansel and zombie Gretel away through the trees.
After the Prehistoric Gardens, it was Lark’s turn, of course, her infallible logic that it wasn’t fair to stop for Crispin and then not stop for her, and, anyway, all she wanted was to have her picture taken beside one of the giant redwoods. Hardly even inside the national park, and she already had that shitty little camera out again, sneaky rectangle of woodgrain plastic and Hello Kitty stickers.
And because it was easier to just pull the fuck over than listen to her snivel and pout all the way to San Francisco, the car bounced off the highway into a small turn-around, rolled over a shallow ditch and across snapping twigs. Lark’s door was open before Tam even shifted the Impala into park, and Crispin piled out of the back seat after her. Then, insult to inconvenience, they made Tam take the photograph: the pair of them, arm in arm and wickedsmug grins on their matching faces, a mat of dry cinnamon-colored needles beneath their boots and the boles of the great sequoias rising up behind them, primeval frame of ferns and underbrush snarl all around.
Tam sighed loud and breathed in a mouthful of air so clean it hurt her Angeleno lungs, and she wished she had a cigarette. Just get it the fuck over with, she thought, stern and patient thought for herself. But she made sure to aim the camera just low enough to cut the tops off both their heads in the photo.
Halfway back to the car, a small squeal of surprise and delight from Lark. “What?” Crispin asked, “What is it?” Lark stooped and picked up something from the rough bed of redwood needles.
“Just get in the goddamned car, okay?” Tam begged, but Lark wasn’t listening, held her discovery out for Crispin to see, presented for his approval. He made a face that was equal parts disgust and alarm and took a step away from Lark and the pale yellow thing in her hands.
“Yuck,” he sneered. “Put it back down, Lark, before it bites you or stings you or something.”
“Oh, it’s only a banana slug, you big sissy,” she said and frowned like she was trying to impersonate Tam. “See? It can’t hurt you,” and she stuck it right under Crispin’s nose.
“Gagh,” he moaned. “It’s huge,” and he headed for the car, climbed into the backseat and hid in the shadows.
“It’s only a banana slug,” Lark said again. “I’m gonna keep him for a pet and name him Chiquita.”
“You’re going to put down the worm and get back in the fucking car,” Tam said, standing at the rear fender and rattling Magwitch’s key ring in one hand like a particularly noisy pair of dice. “Either that, Lark, or I’m going to leave your skinny ass standing out here with the bears.”
“And the sasquatches!” Crispin shouted from inside the car. Tam silenced him with a glare through the rear windshield.
“Jesus, Tam. It’s not gonna hurt anything. Really. I’ll put it in my purse, okay? It’s not gonna hurt anything if it’s inside my purse, right?” But Tam narrowed her eyes and jabbed a finger at the ground, at the needle-littered space between herself and Lark.
“You’re going to put the motherfucking worm down, on the ground,” she growled, “and then you’re going to get back in the motherfucking car.”
Lark didn’t move, stared stubbornly down at the fat slug as it crawled cautiously over her right palm, leaving a wide trail of sparkling slime on her skin. “No,” she said.
“Now, Lark.”
“No,” Lark repeated, glancing up at Tam through the cascade of her white bangs. “It won’t hurt anything.”
Just two short, quick steps and Tam was on top of her, almost a head taller, anyway, and her teeth bared like all the grizzly bears and sasquatches in the world.
“Stop!” Lark screeched. “Crispin, make her stop!” She tried too late to turn and run away, but Tam already had what she wanted, had already snatched it squirming from Lark’s sticky hands, and Chiquita the banana slug went sailing off into the trees. It landed somewhere among the ferns and mossy, rotting logs with a very small but audible thump.
“Now,” Tam said, smiling and wiping slug slime off her hand onto the front of Lark’s black Switchblade Symphony T-shirt. “Get in the car. Pretty please.”
And for a moment, the time it took Tam to get behind the wheel and give the engine a couple of loud, warning revs, Lark stood, staring silently towards the spot in the woods where the slug had come down. She might have cried, if she hadn’t known that Tam really would leave her stranded there. The third rev brought a big puff of sooty exhaust from the Impala’s noisy muffler, and Lark was already opening the passenger-side door, already slipping in beside Tam.
She was quiet for a while, staring out at the forest and the stingy glimpses of rocky coastline, still close enough to tears that Tam could see the wet shimmer in the window-trapped reflection of her blue eyes.
So the highway carries them south, between the ocean and the weathered western slopes of the Klamath Mountains, over rocks from the time of Crispin’s dinosaurs, rocks laid down in warm and serpent-haunted seas; out of the protected cathedral stands of virgin redwood, into hills and gorges where the sequoias are forced to rub branches with less privileged trees, mere Douglas fir and hemlock and oak. And gradually their view of the narrow, dark beaches becomes more frequent, the sharp and towering headlands setting them one from another like sedimentary parentheses.
Tam driving fast, fast as she dares, not so much worried about cops and speeding tickets as losing control in one of the hairpin curves and plunging ass-over-tits into the fucking scenery, taking a dive off one of the narrow bridges and it’s two hundred feet straight down. She chain smokes and has started playing harder music, digging through the shoe box full of pirated cassettes for Nine Inch Nails and Front 242, Type-O Negative and Nitzer Ebb, all the stuff that Lark and Crispin would probably be whining like drowning kittens about if they didn’t know how pissed off she was already. And then the car starts making a sound like someone’s tossed a bucket of nails beneath the hood and the temp light flashes on. Screw you, Tam, here’s some more shit to fuck up your wonderful fucking afternoon by the fucking sea.
“It’s not supposed to do that, is it?” Crispin asks, backseat coy, and she really wants to turn around, stick a finger through one of his eyes until she hits brain.
“No, Einstein,” she says instead. “It’s not supposed to do that. Now shut up,” settling for such a weak little jab instead of fresh frontal lobe beneath her nails. The motor spits up a final, grinding cough and dies, leaves her coasting, drifting into the breakdown lane. Pavement traded for rough and pinging gravel. Tam lets the right fender scrape along the guardrail almost twenty feet before she stomps the brakes, the smallest possible fraction of her rage expressed in the squeal of metal against metal; when the Impala has finally stopped moving, she puts on the emergency brake and shifts into park, then turns on the hazard lights.
“We can’t just stop here,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here to stop at. And, before long, it’ll be getting dark – ”
“Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, baby cakes,” and Tam opens her door, slamming it closed behind her, and leaves th
e twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.
Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s jammed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches, and that’s not even space for the sharp angles of her waif’s bony shoulders. So, she slides across the faded green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over, and they spill in a loud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the backseat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood.
Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.
“She’d live, probably,” Lark says. “Yeah,” Crispin replies, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.
The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, hissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.
“He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully, but she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerine puddle of blossoms waving heavy calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.
“It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 15
