Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Is it true,” Soldier asks, “that people started calling you Odd Willie ’cause someone caught you fucking a dead cat?”

  He laughs and makes a gun with his thumb and forefinger, then jabs it against his right temple. “Hell, I guess you done told me,” he mutters around his cigarette. “Bang, bang.”

  “Hey, I’m just saying, you hear shit, that’s all.”

  “And you heard that people started calling me Odd Willie ’cause I fucked a dead cat?”

  “Something like that,” she replies, looking out the window again. “At least, I think it was a cat. Might have been a dead raccoon.”

  “So, you’re sitting there telling me you ain’t never fucked nothing dead?” And he takes out the pink plastic comb he carries with him everywhere and runs it through his hair a few times.

  Soldier nods her head. “I suppose,” she says, “this is when you lose all respect for me, right? Alas, I have been forever diminished in your sight.”

  “Hey, baby, it ain’t nothing can’t be fixed.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” she says, sick of Odd Willie and sick of the bright daylight making her headache worse, just fucking sick, and she reconsiders punching him in the face.

  Odd Willie Lothrop shrugs, chews on the end of his cigarette, and puts the pink comb away. “Fine,” he says. “Whatever. I already knew you were a tight ass. So, what you got against Woonsocket, anyway?”

  “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” But Odd Willie just shakes his head and grins a big, stupid grin for her, flashing his silver incisor. Soldier rolls her eyes. “Well, it’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with napalm and bulldozers,” she tells him, “maybe a few well-placed exorcisms here and there.”

  “I see,” Odd Willie says and stops grinning. “Well, this’ll be my first time up that way, so what do I know?”

  And that’s news to Soldier, the sort of news she wishes someone would let her in on before it’s too late to make other, less suicidal arrangements. But this is how it’s been since that night at Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse. No one’s ever come right out and said that any of it was her fault, almost walking into a trap that way, not being absolutely shit-sure what was what before she set out for Ipswich. And no one’s ever blamed her for killing Sheldon, either, but there have been questions, questions she hasn’t been very good at answering. So she keeps drawing these crap runs with the likes of Odd Willie Lothrop, and she gets stuck making excuses for Saben White because there’s no way she’s gonna blow it again, and whenever the Bailiff so much as dreams she’s been at the bottle, it all gets a little bit worse.

  “So, when do you tell me what this gig’s about, anyway?” Willie asks. “I’ve never been much for drawing it out, savoring the razor’s edge of suspense and all that happy crap.”

  “When we’re on the road,” Soldier says and checks her watch. “When we’re moving, and when we’re not sitting in fucking Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  “You’re kind of paranoid, too,” he says and starts picking at the eviscerated remains of a Boston creme–filled doughnut lying on the napkin in front of him. The sight of it makes Soldier’s stomach lurch, so she goes back to watching squalid Warwick Avenue for some sign of Saben, waiting for the phone to ring again.

  “If you say so,” she tells him.

  “No, man, I’m serious,” Odd Willie replies, giving up on the doughnut again. “People overhear some weird shit and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’re not gonna believe a single word of it. See, it just sails right on over their heads.” He demonstrates by slicing the air above his greasy black hair with his left hand. “Someone hears us yakking about work, the kind of work we do, and you might as well be telling them the pope’s a goddamn yeti. All this paranoid cloak-and-dagger, secret-handshake shit, you ask me, it’s a total waste of resources.”

  “Like I said, if you say so. But I still don’t talk shop in fucking Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  “Maybe you’d be a little less ap-pre-hen-sive over at a Tim Hortons or a goddamn Krispy Kreme,” Odd Willie snorts, wringing apprehensive until every syllable is bled bone-dry.

  “Are you stoned?”

  “Now, now,” he says and grins, flashing that silver eyetooth for her, and he taps the windowpane hard with his knuckles. “Glass houses, Soldier. You always gotta remember about those glass houses.”

  “I’m sober,” she tells him and reaches for the lukewarm coffee. “I haven’t had a drink—”

  “—since you passed out last night,” Odd Willie says. “You’re so hungover your hair hurts.”

  “I’m just fine,” she lies, and Odd Willie nods his head and holds up what’s left of the doughnut, just a few inches from her nose.

  “Is that a fact? Wanna bite?”

  And then her cell phone starts ringing again, and he drops the doughnut and licks his fingers, sits back in the booth, and points at the phone.

  “Your turn,” he says.

  “One day we’re gonna dance,” she whispers, picking up the phone, speaking softly enough that there’s no chance anyone but Odd Willie will hear her. “Just me and you and something sharp.”

  “So, you can talk dirty,” he laughs, smug and dumb and entirely pleased with himself, laughs loudly and arches the prickly flesh where his eyebrows should be. “It’s a date, girlo. Just you and me and a couple of pigstickers, but right now, you better answer that thing.” And he points at the phone.

  But when she looks, the number coming up on the display isn’t one of the Bailiff’s after all; it’s Saben White’s, and Soldier takes a deep breath, feeling something faintly like relief, and tosses the phone to Odd Willie. “You tell her she’s got five minutes,” and Soldier holds up all the fingers on her right hand for emphasis. “Just five fucking minutes. Then she’s gonna have lots worse things to worry about than explaining this shit to the Bailiff.”

  Willie Lothrop nods, the humor in his face not quite draining completely away, and answers the phone.

  “Yo, little miss slowpoke. You know you’re screwed, right?” he chuckles, then waits while Saben White says whatever it is she has to say for herself.

  “Five minutes,” Soldier tells him again. “Not a goddamn second more.” There’s a fresh bottle of Dickel waiting for her out in the parking lot, wrapped in brown paper and tucked under the front seat of the old black Dodge Intrepid she’s been driving the last three weeks. She can taste the whiskey, sweet and strong, burning her throat and her belly, easing the pain behind her eyes and the storm in her gut.

  “No motherfucking way,” Willie says and smacks himself in the forehead. An old woman sitting at another booth turns and stares at them. She has faintly lavender hair and a very large mole on her chin; Soldier stares back at her until she mumbles something under her breath and looks away. “That’s fucked-up,” Willie giggles, the way he does when he’s nervous or scared.

  “Just hand me the phone,” Soldier says impatiently and holds out her hand.

  “Rocky Point,” Odd Willie says to Saben White, ignoring Soldier. “Right, yeah. Don’t you worry; we’ll find you. You just keep your ass put,” and then he hangs up.

  “What the hell was that?” Soldier demands, and Odd Willie smacks himself in the head again, even harder than before.

  “We got trouble,” he says, and before she can ask him what sort of trouble, the old woman with the lavender hair turns back around and glares at them. “What the fuck is your problem, lady?” Odd Willie asks her, and the old woman narrows her eyes like an angry cat and doesn’t say a word.

  “Are you going to tell me—” Soldier begins, but Willie interrupts her.

  “I swear to God, Soldier, if that old bat keeps staring at me like that, I’m gonna do her right here, in front of God and everyone.”

  “You’re very unpleasant,” the old woman croaks at him, and Soldier realizes that it’s not a mole on her chin, but a dab of chocolate icing. “This used to be a good neighborhood.”

  “Yeah?” Odd Willie asks. “And ju
st when the hell was that?”

  “Let it go,” Soldier says, her heart suddenly beating too fast, her palms gone cold and sweaty because she knows this is something bad, that it has to be something wicked bad to have Odd Willie losing his shit in public over a nosy old woman. “What did Saben say to you? Where the hell is she?”

  “She’s out at Rocky Point,” he replies, glaring furiously back at the old woman. “She says she’s got a fucking body in the trunk,” and he raises his voice and yells, “Yo, Grandma, did you hear that over there? I said, she’s got a fucking body in the trunk of her fucking car!”

  The old woman shakes her head. “You Mafia trash,” she sneers. “This used to be a decent neighborhood.”

  “I’m telling you,” Odd Willie growls, “the bitch better stop looking at me.”

  And then Soldier sees one of the Hispanic girls behind the counter reaching for the telephone, and she grabs Odd Willie by one arm and hauls him up out of the booth. The old woman points a crooked finger at them, jabbing at the air like she means to poke it full of holes.

  “That’s right,” she says. “You get out of here. Both of you, go on. I bet you got people to kill. I bet you got drugs to sell.”

  “Suck my dick, you shriveled old cunt.”

  “Wop trash,” the old woman snaps back at him, then waves her finger about dramatically, like an incompetent magician finishing up a particularly difficult trick, before returning to her doughnuts.

  “We’re leaving,” Soldier says, speaking to Odd Willie and anyone else who’s listening. “We’re leaving right now.”

  “She’s calling the cops,” he says and motions at the girl behind the counter with the antenna of the cell phone. “You better tell her to stop, or I’ll have to shoot her. Hell, I’ll shoot everyone in this dump.”

  And it could go that way, Soldier thinks, remembering all the crazy shit she’s heard about Willie Lothrop. It could go that way, for sure, and maybe the Bailiff would be there to clean up the mess, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe they’d both die waiting to find out, or maybe they’d die a little farther along, but it’d be their asses, either way.

  She snatches her cell phone from Willie’s hand and leans close, speaking directly into his right ear. His hair smells like a medicine cabinet. “Listen, you psycho shit,” she hisses. “We’re walking out that door, and you’re not doing anything unless it’s something I’ve fucking told you to do.”

  And Odd Willie nods once, just once, but it’s enough that she lets herself start believing that maybe Saben White really is her biggest problem, and maybe she’s not going to die in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Warwick fucking Avenue.

  “It’s a priest,” Willie says and giggles again, still watching the girl behind the counter.

  “What? What’s a priest?”

  “The body locked in Saben’s trunk. She killed herself a fucking priest.”

  And Soldier takes him roughly by the arm then, and leads him out into the February cold, out into the unwelcoming sunlight, her hangover and Woonsocket and the new bottle of bourbon all forgotten. Odd Willie gets into the Dodge as soon as she unlocks the doors; he takes a 9mm from the holster on his ankle and checks the clip. “I’m cool,” he says. “I just can’t stand people staring at me, that’s all. It messes with my head.” Soldier doesn’t reply, doesn’t say another word to him, doesn’t even dare look over her shoulder until there are a couple of miles between the two of them and whatever is or isn’t happening on Warwick Avenue.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” he says, which is true, and Soldier turns around in the parking lot of a Shell station and heads for the old amusement park at Rocky Point.

  Soldier first met the Bailiff when she was only five years old. So much of her childhood is only a vague, uncertain blur, but that first sight of the Bailiff, that’s clear as moonlight through clean windows and un-cloudy skies, as Sheldon Vale used to say. One night, she’d been told to put on her good calico dress, cornflower blue with tiny rosebuds, and then allowed to leave the tunnels and go into the basement of the yellow house on Benefit Street, up the creaky basement stairs into the house itself, and she found the Bailiff in a musty room filled with books and curio cabinets and an enormous globe cast in bronze, the whole world borne on the shoulders of a kneeling giant. When she’d opened the library door, the Bailiff stopped reading the book lying open on the writing desk in front of him and stared at her.

  “Well now, child, exactly what would you be after?” he asked, and Soldier almost slammed the door, almost turned and ran back through the house, all the way back down to the safety of the tunnels. Instead, she squeezed the crystal doorknob and stared at the fat man, his smooth bald head and great gray beard, the biggest man she’d ever seen, and she imagined that he could hold the world on his shoulders, too, if it ever came to that. He was wearing a shabby navy blue seersucker suit and white tennis shoes, and he held a china teacup in his left hand, his pinkie finger extended like a small, plump sausage.

  “Well, child? Are you dumb? Are you deaf? Do you have a name yet, or shall I just call you whatever strikes my fancy?”

  “Soldier,” she said and took one cautious step into the room.

  “Soldier,” the Bailiff replied, the way the word slipped from his lips making her think that perhaps he’d never heard it before and wasn’t sure what it meant. He set his teacup down on a stack of books. “What kind of name is that for a pretty little girl such as yourself?”

  “The name I chose,” she told him.

  “Then who am I to be asking questions? It’s a fine name, Soldier. And which boneyard did you steal it from?”

  She shrugged and eased the door shut behind her.

  “Don’t you even know?”

  “Are you God?” she asked, setting his question aside for later, then glanced at the globe again. The painted continents were drifting across its surface, colliding with one another, pushing up new mountain ranges, tearing deep rifts for new seas to fill.

  “Which one?” the Bailiff asked and sat up a little straighter in his chair.

  She thought a minute, not having expected that particular question, and then she said, “The god of men. The church god. The one who let his son die, so that the people he’d made wouldn’t go to hell.” It was something that she’d overheard some of the older children and pups talking about one day when they should have been asleep, and though none of it had made any sense to her, she thought that it might be the right answer to the fat man’s question. Or at least the sort of answer that would make her look like she knew about such things.

  “Ah,” the Bailiff said and rubbed thoughtfully at his beard. “And why would you ever think a thing like that, little Soldier, that I could be the god of man?”

  “You look like him,” she said, still watching the silent dance of continents and oceans over the circumference of the enormous globe.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes,” Soldier replied. One of the pups had said that the god of man lived in a great house in the sky, where he was held prisoner by all the creatures that he’d created, and that he had a beard.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” he told her. “Our eyes are great liars and even worse judges of divinity.”

  “That’s okay,” Soldier sighed, finally turning away from the globe and back towards the Bailiff. “I don’t think you’re anyone’s god. Not really.”

  “Well, I’m disposed to suspect you’re correct about that,” he told her and picked up his teacup again. “And don’t you think I’m not grateful for that one small mercy, either.”

  “Are you the Cuckoo?” she asked.

  “Why are you standing all the way over there?” he replied, watching Soldier over the rim of his cup. “Whatever I am, I don’t usually eat little girls. Especially not one so full of questions.”

  Soldier looked back at the closed door, hesitating a moment more. It wasn’t too late to leave, and she wasn’t sure she was supposed to be in this room with this man. Maybe he was one of the h
ouse’s secrets, and Madam Terpsichore had warned them all how dangerous secrets could be.

  “Questions invariably give me indigestion,” the Bailiff said and slurped his tea.

  “Well, are you?” Soldier asked again, taking another two or three steps nearer the Bailiff. “Are you it? Are you the Cuckoo?”

  “Not likely,” he replied, sniffing at the contents of his teacup. “Have you ever seen a cuckoo? Nasty little things. Members of the family Cuculidae. Never met one yet was worth so much as a plug nickel and the time of day.”

  “I was…I was looking for something,” she said, which Soldier thought was probably true. “They said I could come upstairs. They said—”

  “They say an awful lot of things, don’t they?”

  “They do,” she admitted reluctantly, hoping no one else was around to hear, trying to remember whatever it was she was supposed to be doing in the yellow house.

  “The hounds are indeed damned garrulous beasts, and they do dearly love the sound of their own flapping tongues,” the Bailiff muttered, half to himself, and held out the teacup to Soldier, who was now standing close enough to take it from him, if she wanted it. “Oh, it’s a smidgen bitter, I warn you,” he said, staring down into the cup and then back to Soldier. “Too much fenugreek in the mix, I suspect.”

  She took the cup from him and saw there was a little liquid left inside. It was very dark and smelled almost like turpentine.

  “One thing’s certain, though. We all got our burden of questions, little Soldier,” the Bailiff told her and took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, white linen embroidered with tiny blue flowers, and he wiped at his wide forehead. “They follow us into this world, and damn it, they follow us out.” Then he noticed that she wasn’t drinking and frowned. “Don’t you like tea?”