Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  I had never heard myself referred to as beautiful, not even as a possibility, and I could not stop the blood from rising in my face.

  “Enough perhaps to rival mamma,” he added, enjoying my blush.

  The other girls clucked at this last comment, but my mother’s eyes spat hot grease and they recoiled.

  “I’ve changed my mind, Volker,” my mother said. “She ain’t for the life.”

  “Only if I say so,” Volker said, relighting his failed cigar.

  So he wanted to make a whore of me. Had I known then that I would never know the company of a man, would I have complied?

  His lips curled but not into a smile. The subject was closed.

  My mother grabbed me roughly. I struggled out of her grasp, afraid.

  “You mind if I show her something?” he said. “Or do you want to keep frightening her?”

  He didn’t wait for a response but laid an arm over me and led me toward the back. We passed an enormous cabinet fixed to the wall with great brass brackets. It was flanked by two life-size women carved from pillars of boxwood. They were draped in mourning shrouds that revealed the red of their thimble-hard nipples. In the main cavity of the cabinet was a model of a medieval city. There were crenelated castles and twisted alders. Small rough roads with minutely carved bramble that led into dark holes laced throughout the diorama.

  To the side of the cabinet, sitting on a milking stool, sat a plump woman sucking a sausage through a slit in her upper lip. The slit was deep enough to separate her lip at the philtrum and with the ballast of her fleshy cheeks, the sides of her lip hung down like the flews of some great hound. She rose at Volker’s glance and bent to a brass crank at the base of the cabinet. There was a wheezing as if a bellows had taken a deep draw of air and then a rattling sound that finally released into a flood of tin and snare. A martial dirge came through dirty gauze.

  I watched transfixed as a small figure of death, complete with shroud and scythe, snaked out of one of the holes. From another set of holes a parade of wooden people—serfs, knights, maids, and tradesmen—wound their way upward, their stiff bodies bending with clockwork age as they approached the black figure. The specter raised his tiny scythe with four neat clicks, then descended upon the people, one by one, as they passed. Death clipped them neatly into halves that fell open at tiny hinges. They reassembled before passing once more into the dark.

  Volker watched my face, feeding on the horror and delight there, then pressed my arm and whispered close, the citrus of his bergamot tangled warmly with the sour wind of his words.

  “That’s not all I wanted to show you, love. That much about life you must already know. This is new.”

  He pulled me past a beaded curtain into a dark room. He sat me upon a beer barrel, wetted to keep it cool, and turned away with a grin. When he faced me again he held a small oak box with a brass flange at the top. He held the box to my face and nodded for me to press my eyes into the flange. Surely I would go blind or mad or worse. But the strange box pulled me toward it. I was powerless.

  Inside was a small fat woman. Naked, she was amply cushioned by the pillows of her breasts as she lay on a small couch. She wore a bemused smile, completely unconcerned that I, a giant by her reckoning, was staring down at her. Volker asked if I was ready. I did not know for what. He turned a small crank and the little woman jerked to life. In shudders. In blinks. In atoms of movement her limbs began to unspool beneath me. I watched as she reached behind her, producing a shiny brass trumpet, her smile spreading as she arched her plump bottom and placed the mouth of the instrument into the pleat of her ass. I swore I could hear it sound. Then, suddenly, the trumpet was gone and she was back to her original position, her knowing smile in mid blossom when the box went dark.

  “I bet you never saw the likes of that, my love.”

  I could only shake my head.

  “That is the future of delight, my child. The future of dreaming.”

  CHAPTER 3

  That night, in Volker’s apartment, I listened to their voices from my place on the ground. Volker had a flat above the bar, one room with a plank floor partitioned by a blanket behind which the bed was kept. This was the primary place of business and all efforts of civility had been funneled there. On my side was a sheet metal stove, a basin, a small work bench with smooth lengths of dovetailed oak still in the jaws of a vice. A coping saw and planes were mixed with a beaten kettle and a few chipped cups. I understood that he made the boxes where that cunning little woman with the trumpet lived. In the far corner was strung a dimpled canvas upon which someone had painted his best impression of an enchanted grove. Single-stroke trees with impossible flowers. In front of this was the couch I had seen in the box.

  “You’ve spent every dime I’ve earned building that shitty little box of yours,” my mother said.

  “And I’ll earn every penny of it back once we have the proper scenario, my love.”

  “She’s no actress. The plan won’t work. She doesn’t have the stuff.” (Had my arrival been some kind of audition? And had I already failed it?)

  “Then let me press the rosebud. She’ll have stuff enough.”

  “You touch that child I’ll kill you myself.”

  These weren’t threats, they were well-trod paths, and I soon lost interest. My attention strayed to a strange black box in the corner. It stood on three stalks, as thin as cricket legs with a wrinkled accordion snout and a drooping fisheye at the end. I got up from the floor and walked to it. I reached out, sure it would shudder at my touch, but the eye didn’t blink. It had a drape of cloth at the back. When I looked beneath it, I saw a weak pin of light in the darkness. There was the couch, the backdrop. But not as my eyes saw them. Through the skull of this thing, the image had been tipped upside down, reversed and somehow flattened. The image was hard, brittle to the tap of my nails. This was not enchantment. This was human cunning. Something far more terrifying than a devil’s fork.

  Near my feet was a slotted box full of glistening edges. I pulled one out of its pocket. It was cold and clear and heavy. A perfectly parceled square of air. I thought of the floating symbols I had seen in town and realized they had merely been larger expanses of the same substance. Conceivable. Manufactured. Something other than fear was elbowing into my brain, and I lifted the glass for closer inspection.

  A ghost grinned back at me.

  My fingers fumbled and the glass negative crashed to the floor. The voices stopped. I heard feet. Volker pulled me roughly from the shards. He wore a thin undershirt and I could see the angry russet of his breasts. He raised his hand to strike me. This I understood. Expected, even. But my mother’s grip was fast and stopped him. He spun around and the fist meant for me landed flat to the side of her face. Her head snapped, then righted. Her eyes were hard and clear.

  “You stay away!” my mother shouted as Volker calmly turned toward me.

  “Well,” Volker whispered, raising a silencing hand to my mother but keeping his hot gaze on me. “What have we here, girl? Damages,” he said, flicking his eyes to the broken glass negative on the floor. “Property lost.”

  “Volker, please,” my mother said. But it was not a plea for me. It was a warning to him.

  “I just want to be reasonable,” he purred. “Something of mine has broken. Now something of hers must break. Like value for like.” His smile was wet, his lips as red as washed cherries. He extended a hand toward me and I shied away, my terror rounded by a faint but sharp delight.

  “I can make it up to you, Volker,” my mother said evenly. “Leave her alone.”

  “We are discussing value, my dear. Not a stale redundancy. No, the responsibility is with the perpetrator. Unless you have some hidden spell on that dexterous tongue of yours that can make glass knit like flesh?” I watched my mother recoil as Volker turned back to me. He brought the tips of his forefinger and thumb to his face and let them gently trace the black sheen of his mustache. He approached. I could smell him then. The damp spice of his s
kin dulled with sleep, the tart fermented sugar of his breath.

  “Mother?” (Was that the first time I had called her that?) I saw movement, a blur of her as she darted toward something I could not see. He had his hands on me then, his hot slender fingers that seemed impossibly strong and somehow soothing. I tried to push him away but his pressure increased.

  “Struggle, child. Do. It only makes the rose sweeter.”

  “Volker!” My mother’s voice sounded like a muffled shot. He turned, amused by the ridiculous threat. Then his black eyes went wide as my mother leaned into him and then stepped back. In her hand she gripped a long shard of broken glass. I could see a ghostly half face, a length of neck and truncated shoulder at its triangular tip. It had color on it now. His hands went to her shoulders, settling hard there, an exhausted partner at an all-night waltz, and she plunged again, holding his sagging body with renewed vigor. She entered him again and again. She stepped back from the spurts of blood, a cat avoiding a spray of hot milk from a cow’s teat, then let his body crumble to the hard wood. She dropped the shard and looked at me.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  I boiled the water that washed her cuticles clean. I watched her strip from her spotted slip, toss it over the lifeless thing, dress in fresh linen, lace her low boots with small grunts. When she was ready, she lifted a cloth from a stump of black bread and cut two thick slices with the coping saw. One she handed to me.

  “Eat it now. I don’t know when we’ll eat again.”

  She cleaned the crumbs from the sawteeth and hung it back at its place on the wall. I was still chewing when she blew out the lamp.

  We stole unseen through the sleeping streets, passing the night in the forest, sleeping under piled hazel leaves in the root crotch of a red oak. The stars were hot above us and night birds called in fading halftones from night-steeped perches. I could hear my mother’s breathing grow deep and even. But I could not sleep. I wasn’t thinking of his raised fist. Or the peeled wonder of his eyes when the shard of glass first struck him. Or the man, once living, who my mother had bled. I was thinking of the magic box.

  MY MOTHER PROVIDED. WE SLEPT IN BARNS AND SPARE BEDS, HAYRICKS when no people were to be found. She would snare the eye of the men hacking wheat in the fields or working behind the counter in stores, disappear for an hour or less, and come back with all we needed. There were sausages and mutton joints, pails of fresh milk and beer. Once even a tiny cake of soap that smelled of ashes and jasmine. A few nights I woke up seeing Volker’s lifeless eyes, a red bubble of spit forming at his pretty mouth. My mother would only look at me harshly when I woke her.

  The old gods lost their grip. The fairies faded. For how could my mother have slept so many untroubled nights if their reach were real? She would laugh when I asked her, saying the truth was in our bodies, in the trials that didn’t kill us. Rules had reign only if we played by them. And her life was proof enough. It didn’t matter how hard the floor, how late the hour, or how poor the food and drink. Nothing could weaken the beauty that men saw in her. Her allure was structural. A thing as real and transporting as an iron bridge.

  We were in a café near the Austrian border when the war began. Overnight, men changed to marching songs above their steins of beer and grew pronged mustaches like the kaiser. There was a frenzy among them. The company of women held new value. We had not eaten for three days when a strange-looking man approached us. He was dark, tall, spider thin, with feverish brown eyes. We were sipping hot water from our cups, desperate to keep our table, for it was raining outside, when he stuttered something. My mother regarded him with her usual cool until he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a krone. She rose, assuming the offer, resigned to work. But he motioned for her to sit.

  “No, no,” he stammered. “I don’t want any of that. Draw you,” he said. “I want to draw you.”

  “Draw us?” she said. “That will still cost you.”

  He asked when last we ate. My mother did not answer. She simply summoned the waiter and ordered the entire left half of the menu.

  He wanted us both as models. Our lives took on the quality of new homeowners in an old house, discovering papered-over doors and following cloth-wrapped wires to cold ends or sudden fires. For us to begin work, it was necessary to accompany him to his studio in the Hauptstrasse in the remote Viennese district of Hietzing. He was adamant about this, saying he was soon to be married and needed to provide his would-be wife with certain assurances as to his marital fitness. He would refer to her as his wife, she to him as her husband, and it was how I would eventually know her. Apparently their living in sin begged for the ballast of certain bourgeois conventions.

  Following him meant crossing the Austrian border. As we had no papers this seemed an impossibility, but he seemed unconcerned. His father had worked as a railroad official in Tulln and he knew every man on the line. We briefly conversed with the conductor and told our place of birth, our general health. He seemed more impressed by our command of German than any answers we gave and showed us to a second-class cabin. The artist ordered hot tea and cream cakes. He made sure the blinds would remain drawn. Then he refused to ride with us. My mother saw this as an advantage, the easiest coin ever to grace her purse. But I was disappointed. He possessed a quality that enthralled me, a kind of detached concentration, a naive misanthropy too self-obsessed to be of any real harm but forbidding enough to be compelling. It was a quality I would encounter with other greats, other condemned. I ate the cakes and watched my mother doze against the gentle rhythms of the moving train. When I was convinced she slept, I rose, took a sip of cold tea, and left the compartment.

  The aisles were narrow and smelled of wet wool and furious tobacco. Young men loitered stiffly in their new uniforms. I burrowed through the milling bodies, over brass buttons and the butts of rifles, and slipped past the sleeping porter at premier class. Here the air was cool, almost refined. Compartments hummed like men’s clubs full of boyish officers buying boots and prop monocles. They toasted and saluted one another with wine flutes full of thick German beer. They wouldn’t drink champagne. They thought it was their duty to already hate the French.

  I found the artist alone in his compartment playing with his hands. His knees were tucked to his chest. His eyes were transfixed by his own fingers that splayed then grouped into steeples and cross-bridge supports and a hundred other dexterous variations. He whispered something under his breath, a charm against the dark, a snatch of nursery song, and I realized just how young he was. How happy he was in his solitude. I knew I could not disturb him.

  The train aisle burst with voices. Three drunk boys, their field grays stained with spilled beer and ashes, pushed past me, honking a whoring song. My eyes were nearly level with the crude eagles cast on their belt buckles. I saw Gott Mit Uns inscribed there above their untried sex, their Brandenburg cuffs falling loose off their pale boyish wrists. There was a gut-flutter in the air, a feeling of sudden Christmas in that narrow corridor. Boys ran as if with exposed knees. Ran toward hidden tree forts and secret creeks. Ran green broke away from their mothers’ calls. I was confused by the rush of hot bodies. More confused when I realized they were all flowing back into my own compartment.

  The show had begun. My mother was naked below the waist, the thatch of her exposed sex burning auburn above her translucent thighs. She held a pickelhaube over each breast. The shallows of the helmets were barely deep enough to contain her, and I thought how little imagination she must have. The compartment was stuffed to capacity. They were soaring now, these newly minted soldiers, borne up into the pink galleries of common lust and shame. I thought surely some railway official would break upon the scene. But there he was, the conductor, down on one knee in his blue uniform and gold fob, clapping as loud as the rest. But lust was not their only focus. Humiliation of the meek is the real pleasure of the mob.

  From among themselves, they had found their idiot, a muscular youth of incredible height with enormous hands and red
knuckles, a plowboy, perhaps, from the wilds of Württemberg. His blush fell like carrion among these buzzards. He had black hair with heavy wet bangs that shielded his ice-blue eyes. They pushed him to his feet, then pulled roughly at his belt and peeled his trousers to his knees. He stood there, buffeted by the jeers while my mother dropped the helmets and threaded her fingers into the loose fly of his worn drawers and pulled him free. There were cheers and sharp whistles. I watched a dense hatred clog the corners of his lips, but he said nothing, just swayed like a nearly felled tree while she pumped him with her hand. She frowned theatrically when he failed to respond. Ten other men were at the ready, their trousers puddled at the ankles. They rushed toward her, but she bristled, her eyes flashing like flints. But still they came toward her. And then she began to sing. It was an old song. The plowboy knew it or was quick to the tune, for he took it up. His voice was strong and clear and he held the song at a great height as it spread out over all the men, over all the boys and the countryside. Their lust cooled. This was her intention. Untried crowds could turn ugly and she was only looking for pocket money. The plowboy, still singing, lifted his trousers to his waist and refastened his belt. The windows spun into cream ribbons of gold and green. The fear and confusion left them, and the trenches toward which all were headed became mink-lined. The conductor dipped his gaze to his watch and was pulled back into crispness, into timetables and the language of lanterns, and he righted his cap, flipped my mother a coin and left the compartment soundlessly.

  The show was over. My mother pulled her camisole over her bare back as if she dressed by candlelight, alone. The men milled out beneath their corrected buckles and buttons, flipping coins and paper to the worn carpet as they left. She looked at me, knowing I had seen it all, but simple nakedness could never expose her. She patted the seat beside her. I sat. She pushed my head to her lap, still humming.