INT. FIRE CHIEF’S CHAMBERS—NIGHT
RIPPLE bends over TRANK’s motionless corpse. He closes the fire chief’s fake eyes, and they snap shut with a satisfying click.
RIPPLE (softly)
Now it’s your turn to ride the dragon…
Ripple backs into the parapet at the roof’s edge, twists to look down at the dizzying distance to the street below.
EXT. SKY—DAY
Early in the morning, the two DRAGONS fly through the mist over the sea. The GREEN DRAGON has something in its talons.
INT. COMMAND HEADQUARTERS—DAY
RIPPLE manipulates the controls on the command console, gazing out a picture window at the seascape beyond.
RIPPLE
Gotta see you off right, pro.
Ripple whirls around and swings his hatchet. It connects. Blood flecks back across Ripple’s face.
EXT. SKY—DAY
The GREEN DRAGON hurls its bundle sideways into the air, and the YELLOW DRAGON ignites it with a sustained surge of flame.
CLOSE on the bundle—revealed to be TRANK’s dead body—incinerating. The flesh and bones char and disintegrate, and even the titanium implants melt away to nothing: only the thinnest scattering of ashes drifts down to the waves below. The Slay Boat floats by, still mysteriously undestroyed.
Ripple’s ax head glides through the air. It’s easier swinging it the second time.
INT. THRONE ROOM—DAY
King RIPPLE, now middle-aged, sits in a big leather easy chair with the command console glowing on a stand by his right hand. He wears glasses and signs several long, scroll-like official documents on his lap desk.
The ax flies up and down almost on its own, again and again, spraying blood in its wake.
INT. THRONE ROOM—DAY
King RIPPLE looks up to the portrait of TRANK from the Fire Museum’s lobby. It appears to gaze back down at him benevolently.
RIPPLE
You taught me well, pro. Here’s to another decade of peace and prosperity in our city.
Ripple finally drops the hatchet. He is standing over the gory, steaming, chopped-up mess of what was once a man. Trank is no longer a single entity; he is a substance all over the roof. The most recognizable piece of him is the bloody, slashed-up Tarnhelm at Ripple’s feet.
TITLE CARD: The End.
27
KINGDOM OF THE SKY
“I wish you’d eat something,” Sharkey says, watching Swanny from across breakfast plates topped with tundra moose fatback (not easy to come by) and fried eggs. She warms her hands around a mug of coffee, staring into the steaming blackness. Daylight doesn’t do her any favors. Her black eye is a penumbra of swirling violet, blue, and green, on skin as pale as a page from an unread book.
“I…I just don’t have much of an appetite, I’m afraid. I’m just so terribly exhausted.”
“You slept a little.” He can still feel her, heavy and warm against his shoulder, her breath coming out in little delicate susurrations. Nice and easy. Since she came to, she’s been anything but.
“Please don’t make me eat,” she says, and bursts into tears.
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you so scared of me all of a sudden? I killed your ma before we ever met. Nothing’s changed. Stop crying. I am gonna kill you if you keep crying all the time.”
This outburst does nothing to staunch her tears, which hiccup and bubble out of her uncontrollably. Sharkey throws down his fork.
“I’m gonna go make some chaw.”
“No, please, Howie.” She wipes anxiously at her eyes with a napkin. “Don’t be angry at me.”
“I’m not angry. I just want you to knock it off.”
“Yes. ‘Pull myself together,’ as you put it earlier. I am. I will. Mother always said I was far too high strung. A touch hysterical, that’s what you get from too much nitrous oxide as a child. Of course, I am also exhausted. Will you be angry if I say I think I have a broken rib?”
When Sharkey was a kindling, a stray cat used to follow him around. An orange one. The cat was missing an eye, so he called her Winks. He fed her little bites of whatever he found scavenging on the street and when her socket got too oozy, he disinfected it by throwing hooch in her face. Winks seemed to understand, or maybe she just liked the hooch. But one time Sharkey woke Winks up too sudden and Winks jumped up scratching and Sharkey kicked her in the ribs. In Torchtown, when you don’t have family, you fight to kill; that’s the very first thing you learn. And back then Sharkey never took off his steel-toed boots. The dent of his shoe in Winks’s guts is one of the images he least likes to recall. He used to dream about it all the time, before he started seeing the future instead of the past.
“There’s bandages in the bathroom,” he says, looking away. “You can tape yourself up.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me for every little thing.”
“Would it be all right if I took the day off?”
“I didn’t expect you to work today.” Maybe this’ll scab over. He’s more patient than he used to be. Gentler too. She trusted him before. He reaches over to take Swanny’s hand; her fingers are like ice. “Look. Maybe you feel like you’re in some kind of nightmare right now, but you’re a smart girl. You’ll get used to it.”
Swanny nods, blotchy and swollen. “I suppose I shouldn’t keep you from your work.”
“I got some errands to run around town, but I’ll be back for dinner.” Sharkey gets up, straps on his holster. “Be good.”
Swanny lingers in the kitchen long after he leaves, in front of the gelid fatback and gluey eggs. After almost an hour, she takes a bite. For all her life, Swanny’s mind has been aflow with ceaseless internal narration, an authorial monologue of assessment and commentary on her current state of affairs. Now the voice falls silent. Sharkey’s reference to a “nightmare” seems apt. She feels frozen in one of those panic scenarios in which one’s open mouth proves incapable of emitting a scream. She wonders if she really does have a broken rib, or a cracked one; it’s difficult to prod the bone through the thickness of her flesh. All she knows is that it pains her when she sobs, and if today so far is any indication, that will make for a major inconvenience.
“Swan?”
Swanny startles back, almost capsizing her chair, at the tap on the window. She pulls up the blind to reveal Duluth hulking on the fire escape outside.
“The shop was closed, so I came around,” he grunts, stooping to squint in through the pane. “You seen Grub and Morsel? They never came to the meat locker last night.” Swanny vaguely remembers that Duluth lives in some decommissioned freezer, the only extant part of a butcher shop long since dragon-burned to the ground. “Not for night scraps, not for bed.”
“Night scraps?”
“You know, the scraps I give ’em before they go to sleep.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“They’re my boys.” He shrugs, and for the first time Swanny realizes that the children aren’t orphans. They’re Duluth’s sons.
“Oh. No, I’m afraid I haven’t seen them.” But her mind flashes to the twins, huddled beneath the counter. Surely they couldn’t have stayed there all night. Surely they couldn’t still be there now.
“Swan?”
“Yes?”
“You all right?”
She touches her face self-consciously. “I…fell.”
Duluth knows better than to pursue this line of inquiry: “Well, lemme know if you see ’em.”
He thuds back down the fire escape; Swanny marvels that it can support his weight. She supposes it could support hers too, if she chose to escape. Did Grub and Morsel sneak out this back route in the aftermath of yesterday’s horror show? But then why didn’t they rush home to their father? Were they too traumatized by what they witnessed? Or—the thought persists—were they so paralyzed with fear that they never left at all?
Swanny gets up and sidles down the narrow hallway to the Chaw Shop showroom. She
flips on the electrolier. The scene is tidier than she left it. The bullet holes remain in the floor, like outsized cigarillo burns, but Sharkey’s already spackled the dent in the wall from the shot that grazed him, and bleached a couple of spots where one or both of them bled on the rug. She walks around to the other side of the counter. The bare floorboards here creak beneath her feet, as if this place has been sealed up a hundred years, not less than a single day. She peers beneath the counter. SLAKELESS, cobwebs, one of the twins’ slingshots, forgotten in a hurry. But not the boys themselves.
Swanny exhales, uncertain why she’s been holding her breath. Then she sees streaks, faint and rust-colored—drag marks from the space just under the register, leading toward the door. Parallel lines. Even if she isn’t a girl detective, she can still spot a clue.
But he didn’t kill me, she thinks. He must truly love me, if he didn’t kill me.
The thought is almost gratifying, and then the full import of it strikes her. Sharkey is evil, and she belongs to him now.
It should have been her. It should have been her.
Like a sleepwalker, Swanny drifts over to the wall of mason jars. She’s survived enough killing offenses, near misses, and diagnoses that she feels immortal. But anyone can die, if she puts her mind to it. Chaw brings you very close to death, that’s what Sharkey told her.
She reaches for the jar marked DEAD MAN’S CHEST, always one of their top sellers, and pops the lid. The scent of waterlogged cedar greets her. She picks up the shears and cuts off a sizable two-penny chunk of rope, then brashly inserts it in her mouth. Her tongue numbs almost immediately, yet somehow an awareness of the flavors asserts itself in her brain. Beneath the aromatic wood, she discerns sea salt and a delicate metallic taste, like filaments of gold. Ill-gotten treasure, the kind that dooms you in the end.
Swanny chews. And chews. And chews.
* * *
Sharkey gets back to the shop around nine. It was harder than he expected to fob off the corpses of the twin kindlings. Torchtown’s landlocked, a concrete cell, it’s not like you can just dig a hole. Plus he had to do this one careful; he doesn’t want Duluth finding out. If Duluth did find out, Sharkey’d have to kill him, hide his body, then find somebody else to trust with the limo. And it’s so hard to find somebody you can trust.
Sharkey washes the blood and lime off his hands at the hydrant outside his house and pats his gator on the head. Poor fucker hasn’t gotten a chance to sleep in the bathtub since Swanny came to live at the shop. The price you pay, he guesses, for a woman’s company.
Maybe she won’t kill him. But he’s never been wrong before.
He lets himself in the front. All the lights are out inside. She might be upstairs, in her bed. Or on his couch. He pictures her nestled under the afghan, paging through one of his books, sucking on her fingers while she teethes. Reading, and for pleasure. Most torchy girls don’t even know how. The luxury comes to her as natural as breathing. He doesn’t know why it stirs him, but it does.
He’s about to climb the steps to the second floor when he hears her singing in the showroom, a lullaby offered up to the dark, a disembodied voice trying to soothe itself to sleep. It’s a pretty tune. He steps inside and flips on the electrolier. Swanny is all balled up in the corner, hugging her knees.
“I committed suicide,” she whispers, her baby-doll eyes even wider and more vulnerable than usual, despite the shiner. “Oh my God. I’ve taken poison.”
“What did you take?” It’s a strain not to slap her in the face. “What did you take?”
“I—don’t remember…the pirate flavor, to start with…”
“Talk sense. I got antidotes upstairs, you’ve just gotta tell me exactly what you took.”
“And then there was the funeral home…and cherry cordial?”
Sharkey slowly looks at the floor around where she’s sitting. Gnawed-down plug ends litter the carpet around a weirdly fragrant spittoon.
“Golden Apple Jam, that one I recall for certain.”
Sharkey sighs, straightens his hat. “Put your face on. We’re going out.”
“Excuse me? I’m quite certain I overdosed. I’ve been chewing for hours.”
“Yeah, you overdosed all right, but on the wrong thing. Chaw can’t kill ya, you crazy broad. Where’d you even get an idea like that?”
“From you—you told me. ‘It brings you very close to death,’ you said.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean?”
“You’re gonna have an interesting night. Try not to puke in the car.”
Sharkey calls Duluth on the walkie-talkie and tells him to bring around the limo right away. He picks up his backpack from the showroom closet. Then he wraps Swanny in her chinchilla and leads her outside.
“Oh, how lovely, it’s snowing,” she murmurs, reaching her hand up skyward.
“These things you see, they’re not really there,” Sharkey informs her. “That’s important to remember.”
“You mean the snowflakes?”
“Yeah. And whatever comes after.”
He opens the car door for her, shields her head as he guides her in. Gets in himself and slams the door.
“Drive us to Nick’s,” Sharkey tells Duluth, then slides the privacy screen shut. Who the hell knows what might come out of Swanny’s mouth next; he’d rather keep the big guy deaf to it. Though right now, Swanny isn’t saying much of anything. She’s studying her hands like they have some special fascination for her.
“Do you read palms?” she inquires.
“Palms? Can’t say that I do.”
“I have a very short lifeline, you know.”
“Seems like that should be the least of your worries, if you’re so set on offing yourself.” He looks at her, snuggled in her fur, sonsy and ringlet-maned, that pillowy mouth in its eternal pout. So soft. She only shot him once. “Why’d you try a thing like that anyway? After everything I’ve done for you. You’re a real selfish girl.”
She reaches into her handbag and takes out her compact. “It was the only way I could escape you.”
“Escape me? I didn’t lock you up. I didn’t chain you to a radiator. I didn’t hang you upside down by your ankles. You could’ve escaped just fine.”
“No. No, I couldn’t have.” Powdering her eye.
“All those books you read, you’re too dumb to find the door?”
Her mirror clicks shut. “The only way to escape you is death.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I can’t live without you.” She says it sweetly.
Sharkey looks out the window. He’s boiling over inside. But not with rage, with nothing he’s used to. It’s like the way she says Howie. A name nobody ever called him before, but once she said it, it was his. I can’t live without you. The words are his now, she can’t take them back. He wants to hear them again, up close, hot in his ear. He wants to press her to him and stroke her and squeeze her until she can’t help but say ’em, over and over. I can’t live without you. Nobody ever loved him before. The feeling’s too big for his chest, for his limo, bigger than the Outer Walls of Torchtown. Big as all outdoors. He won’t look at her until it passes. Maybe it’ll pass.
“Why not live with me, then?” he asks huskily. “I can be nice.”
She shakes her head. She still isn’t afraid to contradict him. “No, you can’t.”
* * *
Nick’s is a former theater, its slide-lettered marquee out front still strung with stranded characters like an unfinished crossword puzzle: TH T REEP NY OPER L ST 3 PER RMANCES. They’re in a part of Torchtown Swanny scarcely recognizes, within sight of the northmost Outer Wall. Automated sniper turrets and a filigree of barbed wire assert themselves against the moon. Duluth parks at the curb and they disembark.
“Where are you taking me?” Swanny asks, as if there’s any doubt. Except for Nick’s, the rest of the block is burned to the ground, a sootscape of dumpster huts and cinder-block
forts, a graveyard of architecture haunted by the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low. She draws the chinchilla coat tighter around herself, watching for the dragons, but all is still. For now. Though the snow seems to have passed, she still feels its icy pinpricks on her skin.
“You oughta see this place while it’s still here. It’s a relic. Like me.”
Nick’s box office is illuminated; a dog-collared hostess waits in a cage of gold and glass. When she notices Sharkey, she immediately presses a button that releases the door for admittance, with a buzzing that sounds exactly like a dentist’s drill. Another building with electricity: Swanny thought the Chaw Shop was the only one. Sharkey holds the door open and gestures her inside.
The theater has been converted into a supper club of sorts; most of the seats have been unbolted and removed, to make space for dark-cloaked tables, each lit by a single candle, and mismatched chairs that wobble on the sloping floor. Down in the front, just before a stage shrouded in crimson velvet, is a mostly empty parquet dancing area, manned by a bucket drummer who’s keeping his rhythms to a steady pulse. This minimalist tableau is at jarring odds with the room that contains it, a cathedral to amusement, worked over with aureate embellishments and festoons rendered in plaster and domed, up top, with a ceiling mural of constellations, their dots connected with silvery spiderweb precision against the midnight blue.
“You like it?” Sharkey asks her. “I always used to come here when I was real chewed out.”
“It’s so…strange.” Swanny has never been out to a restaurant before, and it’s most curious to experience for the first time in her present condition. Colors have taken on a hazy, impressionistic quality. Waiters, clad in white coats like surgeons, rove among the tables, carrying off the bones of the eaten.
The Sky Is Yours Page 36
