Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  I opened my eyes. Gladstone’s face had gone ashen and completely still, as though someone had slapped it. Feeling like a shit, I continued, “Let me guess; you got drunk out of your mind again, you probably tried to get violent, and she’d finally had enough, and she left you. Same old story, doux-doux.” Okay, so that was the real reason I’d broken up with Gladstone. Same blasted reason everybody did. “She broke up with you, and she been hanging out with Nadine from since. The two of them happy like pigs in mud. She not coming back to you.”

  Gladstone sighed. “The pretty ones always leave.”

  “Yes, if we want to remain pretty.” I managed to pull my fingers back before they touched the jagged place on my chin.

  The tomboy girl was babbling into her cell phone. Unusual for the conversation to have lasted this long. I couldn’t place the language, but she looked upset. Her voice was getting louder.

  Gladstone muttered, “I give them my heart and they toss it back in my face and it just makes me crazy, you know?”

  The girl barked a panicked question into the cell phone. Agitated, she started arguing before she could have heard much of the answer.

  Gladstone wailed, “Lottie left, you left. They always leave.”

  I sighed. “Where’s Nelly with that blasted tea?”

  * * *

  Beti had stopped dancing for the moment. From the torque to her pitchy-patchy costume, I could tell that she was turning this way and that, trying to peer through the crowd. “Can you see … anyone?” she asked me. Jokey question, seeing as how the street was packed with people. But I didn’t laugh at her.

  “Not yet,” I answered.

  She seemed to shrink into her already-small self. I felt like a shit for the dance I was leading her on.

  Over there. Was that a nap of silver hair on a burly body? Yes, but it wasn’t Gladstone. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  I spied out Stick on the sidelines, leaning against a telephone pole, wearing his usual grim and faintly disapproving sour face. Wouldn’t hurt him to come and join the bacchanal. He was even dressed right for a jazz funeral: black jeans, black boots, black T-shirt. But for all his grace when beating people up in his self-appointed role as Bordertown’s helper of the helpless, I was sure that dicty negro couldn’t shake his groove thang if his life depended on it. His ferret, Lubin, was doing it for him, weaving around his ankles for joy of the music, and occasionally standing on her hind legs to do a little ferret jig. Lubin just loved to dance, oui?

  But wait—was Lubin wearing something? I squinted, but the blasted myopia wouldn’t let me see clearly. Trailing a swirling Beti, I casually chipped my way closer to Lubin and Stick. A troupe of man-bats blocked the view for a few seconds until, with a swish of their leathery outstretched wings, they moved past. Lubin stood up on her hind legs again and began to hop about. I busted out laughing.

  “What?” asked Beti, midpirouette.

  “Stick’s ferret. That guy, see? His pet is wearing a Carmen Miranda costume.” Lubin wore a tiny layered miniskirt, each layer a different color, and a little purple cotton halter that left her midriff bare. Each front leg sported a yellow armlet ruffle, high up. I couldn’t make out the details of the colorful hat secured under her chin with an elastic strap, but I’d bet it was a mini cornucopia of tropical fruit.

  Beti looked where I was pointing. “That man comes from across the river,” she said.

  “Who, Stick? I can believe he’s crossed the Big Bloody.”

  From the movement of the motley covering her top half, she must have shaken her head. “Not the Mad River. The one running through my town. He has a look to him like the people who live on the other bank.”

  Uh-oh. Tickle in my nose, and that sensation like my hair was lifting up off my scalp.

  From since I was a small girl back home—back home home, that is, not my second home of Toronto, Canada—I used to know when it was going to rain, even before the rainflies came out to fill the sky, to flit and dance in the air until the rain came down and washed their wings from their bodies so they could transform into adults. In Bordertown, I could sense magic weather as well as the regular kind, and right now, there was big magic heading our way. Gladstone on a tear could send a stormwash of the stuff on ahead of her like a shock wave. Only Gladstone’s juju could give me the kind of migraine that was suddenly a threatening whisper behind my left eye. When I’d seen her last night she’d muttered, “Bitch thinks she’s too good for me, huh? I’ll show her.” She hadn’t seemed to be particularly aware of who I was. She was just announcing her pique to the general air.

  I put my hand on Beti’s back to urge her forward. “We gotta go.”

  “Very well. But I wanted to watch the small woman dance some more.”

  “Small woman?” I kept moving us through the crowd. Over there, was that a broad shoulder in a red plaid jacket with the sleeves cut away? Best as I could, I ducked us behind a very tall, thin girl wearing a very tall, thin cardboard box that had been decorated to look like a coffin.

  “The one you just showed me,” said Beti, sounding frustrated. “The tiny one in the plenty skirts. With the guy from over the river.”

  “Lubin?” I nearly tripped over my own bustle in surprise. “But Lubin isn’t a woman.”

  “She’s not a girl.”

  “She’s a ferret, Ti’Bet. An animal.”

  “A woman animal. Like you.”

  Weird kid. “Sure. I hear the Horn Dance has their own crew planned for today. Lewwe go see if we can find them.”

  * * *

  The Beneficent Miss Nell returned from the back-room kitchen, apron and cap abandoned so she could show off her ensemble to advantage. She was holding aloft two trays loaded with orders. And she was singing, in a booming, tuneful bass, the old calypso about Frenchmen and their predilections for cunnilingus. I thought I could see the browned crushed-baton shapes of fried green bananas on a saucer on one of those trays, and a saucer of golden rounds of batter-dipped fried ripe bananas. I sat to attention, hopeful. Sure enough, Nell began sweeping in our direction, and then it was like slow motion, like the way things happen when you’re in a car that’s about to collide with another, and you can see

  it

  happening, but

  it’s too late

  to stop, and you’re thinking, oh shit this is going to hurt, and then everything speeds up and the butch girl was striding toward Nell, out of her line of sight, but she was arguing on her cell phone, not looking where she was going, and before I could shout out a warning, bam! And then there were spilled bits of bananas and broken crockery everywhere, and Miss Nelly was down on the ground, petticoat askew, and the girl was looking shocked and dismayed at her and was shaking banana bits out of her short dreads, and Gladstone was already out of her seat and on the way over there.

  Gladstone asked them both, “Are you okay?” The girl turned those marsh-green eyes toward her, and I swear that Gladstone gasped. The girl smiled at her, and there it was; Gladstone get tabanca just so. Just like the last time, and the time before. A big believer in love at first sight, Gladstone was. So of course it happened to her all the time. It was the first step in her personal dance of self-destruction.

  The girl slid the cell phone back into her pocket. In the quick glimpse I got, it looked more like a shell than a cell—white and crenellated on the outside, pinkening to a deep rose center. When I left the World nineteen years ago, there were cell phones with superheroes on them and cell phones that lit up in the dark. Looked like there was a fad for organic now.

  Gladstone and her new crush helped Miss Nell to her feet, the girl apologizing the whole time in that accent I couldn’t place. She really was astonishingly striking. Small and sturdy and muscly, a one-person puppy pile of energy and enthusiasm. By the time Gladstone and the girl were done cleaning up the mess that Beti’s carelessness had made, the two of them were good, good friends, and Gladstone was introducing her to me (her full name was something un
pronounceable that apparently meant “a blessing on our house”—I made do with Beti, the part of it I could say) and offering to show her the best places to get a last-minute outfit to wear to the Jou’vert parade, since she was so new in town and Gladstone knew her way around. They scarcely noticed me paying both sets of bills. “Gladstone, man,” I complained when we left the Café Cubana, “I never got to taste my green banana.”

  Beti gasped. “I am so sorry,” she said. She touched my arm briefly. “This is my fault. We must go back and get you another meal.”

  Both gracious and graceful. “Nah, is all right, never mind that,” I said, smiling. “What I really want to know is how come you were getting reception on your cell phone.”

  “My cousin called me.”

  Gladstone’s lips twitched. “From the Other Side?”

  “Whoa, wait,” I said. “You’re from the Realm? A human from the Realm?”

  “She says she’s not human,” Gladstone replied. “Elvish.” She and I shared a covert, amused smile. New in town with a bad case of the elf wannabees. Most of them got over it. I had, and was still grateful for Gladstone’s patient indulgence in those years I’d swanned around in gauze skirts festooned with what I’d fancied to be Elvish runes.

  Beti had the grace to look abashed. “Not from the Realm. From …”

  The syllables landed on my ears and slid away, like marbles rolling in oil. Gladstone’s face did something peculiar. Interested, hungry, and resentful, all at once. “Wow. Really? I’ve heard about you guys.”

  Beti simply nodded. “What’s that?” She was pointing above our heads.

  Gladstone replied, “What? Oh. That’s Jimmy.”

  I asked, “What’s that place allyuh talking about? That unpronounceable place?”

  Gladstone looked embarrassed for me. “A country across the Border.”

  “The Realm, you mean?”

  “No, a different country. There isn’t only the one, you know.”

  I hadn’t known.

  “Jimmy?” Beti reminded her.

  I answered this time. “The stone gargoyle. He lives there on top the Mock Avenue Church tower.”

  Gladstone cut in. “I could take you to see him. They say that if the bell ever strikes the right time, he’ll come to life. I could take you and show you. If you’d tell me more about …”

  I started herding us toward where Gladstone and I had chained our bikes. “A different country? Wow. Live and learn. Okay, but if cell phones don’t work in Borderland, they sure not going to work on the Other Side, either.” Why was Gladstone going along with Beti’s story?

  Beti said, “It’s kind of like texting, okay? Except with kola nuts. Though jumbie beads work just fine, unless you want to get all self-righteous and ancestral and shit.”

  The common-class stylings combined with her odd accent were cute as hell. “Kola nuts. Jumbie beads. Right.”

  Beti didn’t reply, just turned those mossy eyes on me with a sweet smile. For the next four days, that’s how she responded any time we bucked up against some mystery about her.

  That’s how it all started. Bordertown was a place of collisions that led people’s lives in new directions. For the four days before Jamboree, Gladstone wandered everywhere with Beti. The two of them were just totolbée over each other. They were holding hands within minutes of meeting, kissing within hours. Gladstone took her to see Jimmy, and to hang with her skateboarder friends at Tumbledown Park. Plus shopping for a Jou’vert costume. I bet if I had said “Lottie” to Gladstone them days, she would have replied, “Who?” She would have forgotten me, too, had it not been for Beti. Gladstone told me; every little trinket Beti found, every sight she saw, it was, “We must tell Damiana!” and she would drag Gladstone to come visit me at Juju Daddy’s.

  * * *

  Stick saw me looking at him and Lubin. He nodded gravely at me. I swear the man knew who I was even under my skull makeup and the big picture hat decorated with small gravestones and teeny crows. Stick gave me the creeps.

  Beti lifted some of the motley from her face and looked around. “When will Gladstone be here?”

  My heart ached for the poor kid. “I don’t know, Ti’Bet.”

  She frowned the way you frown when you’re trying not to cry. “But I want to see her before this is all over. I want to dance with her while I still can.”

  “Plenty of time, doux-doux. The last lap around the market isn’t till sunup tomorrow. Come, lewwe try and find some other Catrinas.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yes, like me.” She and I had given up trying to dance for now. Too many people. We kept pushing on through the thronging bodies, the laughter, the dancing. Through the musk-salt sweat of human bodies and the lavender-salt sweat of Trubie ones. Through the sense-memory of me lying with my head cradled on Gladstone’s chest, both of us damp from the exertion of fucking. My musk-salt sweat and her complicated lavender-musk-salt one. I wondered what Ti’Bet’s sweat smelled like: salt, or sweet? Or maybe both? What was she, really?

  A breeze tugged at my hat, horripilated the little hairs on my arms. Jumbie weather. Coming in on little cat feet, like those light sun showers of sweet rain that can turn in a flash into a full-out storm.

  For all the pushing and shoving and comess, I nearly jumped right out of my skin when a howl cut through the music, and a figure tumbled past us, throwing itself into a triple somersault. Whoever or whatever it was landed on its feet facing us. It was wearing a pallbearer’s suit, complete with top hat. A wolf skull peeked out from under the brim of the hat. I drew back. I swore I could see through the empty spaces amongst the bones of the skull to the paraders dancing on the other side of the person. Then he pulled the mask and hat off in one to reveal his own lupine head and furry snout. The mask was solid again. Juju weather, making me see things.

  “Ron!” I squealed. “Jou’vert, sweetheart!”

  Ron the Wolfman sketched a deep bow at us, flourishing with his hat and mask. He bruised the air with another howl that just might have been the words, “En bataille-là!”

  Ti’Bet launched into a ululation of her own. Which only increased my horripilation. She started dancing around him. He grinned, reached to take her hands. She pulled hers back. I winced. Ron was really sensitive to people freaking out at his looks.

  But then she clapped her hands onto his shoulders. He took her by the waist. Together, man-thing and mystery woman, they capered through the crowd, barreling into revelers, who greeted them with cries of “Jou’vert!” and “En bataille-là!”

  * * *

  “Jeez, girl. Look at how all these colors fighting with each other, nah?” With thumb and forefinger, I sorted through the pile of discarded rags Beti and Gladstone had dumped on the kitchen floor of my squat. “You couldn’t find anything nicer than this?”

  “They are from people who may be dead. That’s the theme, right? To celebrate your ancestor spirits?”

  “I guess.”

  “I will make an egungun, then. Spirit of the ancestors. It beats people with sticks to remind them to be good.”

  “My granny used to threaten to do that to me. She never did, though.”

  “The sticks are also to keep people away. To touch the egungun is to die. Only Gladstone says I mustn’t beat anyone with sticks during the parade.”

  I made a face. “Shit, no. That used to be the tradition centuries ago, back home. ‘En bataille’ means ‘Let’s rumble.’ ”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Nowadays the ‘en bataille’ is only pappyshow. No real fighting supposed to happen.” Sometimes she worked too hard at this being an elf thing. So did Gladstone, but she at least had a reason. She was half elf, after all. Half elf and all Bordertown. Beti was probably neither.

  “You realize most of these clothes too mash up to mend?”

  Beti grinned at me. “I’m going to, uh, mash them up even more.” She took a crumpled and stained linen dress shirt from me and began
tearing it into long strips. Her hands were strong. “Today I walked through your marketplace, and I visited a place across the Mad River,” she said happily. “Lots of people brown like me and Gladstone. And I ate jerk chicken.”

  “You were in Little Tooth, then. The Jamaican section.”

  “Yes. Tonight, Gladstone is taking me dancing.”

  “Like you trying to experience all of Bordertown at the same time!”

  “I have to go soon.”

  “After only a few days? School must be out for the summer by now.”

  Beti hesitated. Then she said, “I would like to stay longer, but someone is coming to take me away.”

  Damn. I’d been hoping a casual mention of school would get her to make a slip one way or the other about this elf business. I’d just have to keep trying to get the real story from her. I held one of the rags up against her. “This purple is good on you. Bordertown don’t let everybody in. This person who wants to take you away may be the wrong kind of person.”

  For a second, hope lit her face. But the light went out. “This one, borders cannot stop him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My brother. Do you really think he might not be able to come here?”

  Gladstone whisked into the room, her arms full of more gaudy rags. “Who might not be able to come here?”

  Beti turned to her. “My fiancé,” she said.

  I chuckled. Wherever she was from, English was certainly not her first language. “Ti’Bet, you just told me he was your brother. He can’t be your fiancé, too.”

  She went still, then gave a dismissive laugh. “Brother, betrothed—I always get them confused.”

  Gladstone dumped her armful on top of the one I was already sorting. “So which one is he?” I could tell she was trying not to let her suspicion show.

  “My brother. My blood, yes? He’s coming soon to be with me.”

  Before I could ask her about the difference between “take me home” and “be with me,” she tackled Gladstone, knocked her down into the mound of rags on the floor. Giggling, they began to wrestle. Gladstone had Beti pinned in under a minute, but Beti laughed her growly teddy-bear laugh and somehow managed to twist her body and use her legs in a scissors hold around Gladstone’s waist. The wrestling turned into groping and the giggling was silenced by kisses. I watched them. Only for a little while. When buttons started being unbuttoned by eager fingers, I left the squat and went for a walk. It was high time I had a girlfriend again.