Speak Easy

by Catherynne M. Valente

  She takes all three.

  B1

  Everybody knows a tree needs water to sink her roots in. The Artemisia gets her end wet in the chlorine paradise under her respectable floors. There’s beauty in that pool like chum in the sea. Nobody Zelda recognizes and the It Girl’s job description includes knowing everyone and their plus-ones. It looks like one of those flickies where all the girls swim at the same time and turn their heads at the same time and point their toes at the same time while they plunge their heads down under the water like they never needed to breathe in the first place.

  Except everybody’s kissing. Kissing’s like money down below. All you want to do is get some, all anybody wants from you is more. Zelda thinks about blushing good and hard. She’s one of those girls born without the natural ability to blush. She had to learn it and Zelda learned by slapping herself whenever she saw something she shouldn’t, or felt shamed. Slapped and slapped until her blood knew what to do when the time came. She knew now was a blushing time. So many boys in the water, all perfect and hard and soft and their eyes looked so warm, so warm! Boys laying half in and half out like mermaid, like nymphs, like girls, like Zelda did all the time, lying like you do when you know you’re gonna get watched. Lying for someone’s lust to land on. And the girls, not lying at all, but hollering and smoking cigars and swigging straight from kegs the size of bedrooms, burping and roaring and telling jokes so raw they sounded like meat. Zelda thinks she’s never seen hair shine like it does down there in the pool of wisdom at the bottom of the hotel that was the whole of the world, never seen water bead so perfect on such perfect skin.

  Al doesn’t indulge. He doesn’t sweat in the hot rainstorm funk of the place. The black pillars drip with water, the ceiling glitters wet as starlight. The big man puts out his hand.

  “Alberich Mero,” goes the chant he’s beat out a thousand thousand times, “Huon de Bordeaux, Auboin Charlot, Oberon the Ox of Athens, but you can call me Al, everyone calls me Al, it’s easy in the mouth and as true as anything ever is.”

  She knows who he is, and what she can call him. Everybody knows. Where’d you first hear the name? Beats me. It’s written on the walls, brother. Zelda’s shy. The nice thing about going to parties and not throwing them is you never have to meet the supply man. You never have to clean up after. Al smells like clover. And beer. And like the cave on the back forty where she danced for the Creepy-Crawlies way back when. But you can’t say that stuff to a man with a cut-up face and fists like Judgement Day. You just say something nice, like Zelda did, and this is what Miss Z said, she said:

  “You got a lotta names, mister.”

  “Sure do. I collect ’em. Some fellas like stamps, some go for moths from around the world, but me, I’m the man with the names. Pinned out nice in a case, plucked from the deepest forests this old dumb planet ever dreamed up.”

  “All I got’s Zelda Fair.”

  “Poor midge. You’re only little yet. Maybe if you’re good I’ll let you borrow one of mine.” His piggy eyes go squint. “But you’ve already been up to borrowing outta my pocket, haven’t you? You found my puppy. Naughty thing. Playing with what ain’t yours.”

  “I didn’t find any dog! Honest!”

  “My door, kid. I keep her on a tight leash, most times, but she does get free on the odd occasion. She loves me brutal. But wild animals gotta hunt. Can’t whip it out of them, breed it out, or kiss it out. They’ll still trot up to your doorstep, drop a carcass at your feet and expect to be praised.”

  “I’m not a carcass.”

  “Everybody’s a carcass,” Al snaps, and somehow he can snarl and smile at the same time and his teeth look so damn sharp when he does it! Zelda’s stomach does a trapeze act. If she could see where the elevator was hiding she’d run to beat the four minute mile. Instead, she talks, because even at the end of the whole world, Zelda Fair could talk the ear off an elephant. She laughs her patented oh-get-over-your-fine-self laugh and bolts on her good-time-girl smile.

  “Well, geez, Al, it was just an uppity old laundry chute! I coulda took the elevator if all I wanted was to go down to the basement. You don’t have to get fuzzy with me.”

  Al does the sorta laugh that’s not much more than a grown-up grunt. Sounds like a boar rooting in a rock. When he smiles again—Al’s smile is the best weapon he owns, better than any pistol or poison, and cheaper on the barrel—his teeth don’t look sharp anymore. They look smooth and clean and good, like white cliffs under the moon.

  “You’re not in the basement,” he says.

  “Sure I am!”

  “No, ma’am. This is the top floor. The penthouse. The show-room show-case show-floor. Why, just look! You can see the whole city from up here.”

  Zelda looks and sees the boys, she sees the girls, she sees the red silk tents and food like pastel jelly-sherbet-marzipan castles on room service carts the blue water like a chlorinated womb. She sees them swimming at the same time and turning their heads at the same time and pointing their toes at the same time and kissing and sometimes it’s boys kissing boys and sometimes it’s girls kissing boys but it seems like one way or another this is the place where a boy comes to get kissed. She sees the pills in her hand and the syringe and the matchstick. She sees Al. She sees her face in the pool breaking up into a million squiggly lines. She sees her bare feet, her unpainted toes. She sees the whole city.

  “So?” Al coughs. “You wanna see my house? Or you wanna give me back my dog and go upstairs and have some nice milk punch and a shimmy and go to bed at dawn like a good little girl?”

  Zelda pulls out her shallowheart gamine-guts I-ain’t-nothing-but-a-posy-in-your-pocket laugh. Down here, it sounds like a witch cackling up the toads. Everybody says the basement’s Sodom with a Smile On. Once you been there, you can’t go home again. You don’t even want to. No place for a lady.

  Good.

  “Gimme the Land of the Creepy-Crawlies,” Zelda says, and she says it in her real voice, which decided to show up for work for once. It tastes like bourbon sloshing in her throat.

  Al takes her hand all gentle-genteel. Leads her into the water like she’s Lillian Gish and there’s a new title card going up just as soon as this scene shuts. Al don’t get wet. The beautiful boys and the cigar-champing girls open up their arms and Al pulls her down and there’s something on the bottom of the pool but she can’t see what it is but it might be a mirror and she can see herself in it, the insides of her legs, the insides of her coming up to meet the rest, and he’s pulling so hard and Zelda thinks she’s gonna drown but she doesn’t.

  She just sinks.

  B2

  Oh, baby, it’s cold in here. You know that sound outside your window in the wintertime like a bone popping out of its socket, the one your Mama said not to worry about because it’s only ice settling? That’s the tune on the gramophone now and it never hops a groove. Listen, listen, prick up to the high-hat tsk-tsk-tsk of bare branches against the clouds, the long slow up-against-the-wall of the wind getting down and getting good, the stiff white piano riff of Duke December and his Frostbite Blues.

  There’s a frozen lake under the Artemisia Hotel. As big as Erie and twice as pissed off. Waves stuck in the middle of crashing, fish clapped up in ice, frozen just as they were about to do a double somersault out of the water and into the sun. Not that there’s a sun down here.

  A and Z are high-tailing it for the dock. They got a date with that sled there, sitting pretty on this iced cake of a lake in the dark. Hickory wood, curlicue rails, coupla moose ready to pull, black as eighth notes and antlers that could club you to death, lit up candelabra-style, hot fire shooting up from every prong. They are serious moose and no mistaking.

  Thursday is delivery day.

  Lickety-split and they’re off across the great frozen moon-back lake, the moose huffing and the flame spitting and Zelda still in her bathing costume, one giant goosepimple. Al puts a black fur on her shoulders but it’s not like when Tommy Germain does it. It’s not
hers now. It smells like Al and it belongs to Al and when whatever this is quits happening it’ll still be Al’s. She puts her loot in the pocket anyway, her pills and her needle and her stick.

  “Where we going, Al?” she whispers.

  “To get the good stuff, buttercup. To see the moonshine, grab onto liquid lightning, hear the hard pop do its hard popping and beat a tune on a barrelhead. Where’d you think booze came from? Can’t hit the shops like you used to. No more nice man pulling draughts like a gambler on the slot machines. Asking you how your day’s gone. Wiping the countertop like a movie of himself. Can’t call up France for a little nip of the good deep red. We gotta go get it. Gotta go to the source.”

  “Canada?”

  Al laughs and his echoes have echoes. The moose scream. Ever heard a moose scream? It’s like a pig getting ripped in half.

  “Hell yes! Call it Canada if you want. That’s a swell name.”

  And all of the sudden it does smell like Canada, it smells like a border, pine and snow and the exhaust of whiskey trucks waiting on a steel bridge, woodsmoke and spilt gasoline. The mist whips by, tapping out a rhythm on the sled rails.

  “Who are you?” Zelda whispers. Her stomach growls but she tells it to shut up.

  “I told you. I’m Al. I’m the man with the plan. I came when the liquor dried up—I’m at my best in a wasteland, you know. It’s a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad. Take one thing away and another shows up to replace it. Drink is a mighty huge thing to run off with. I’m a mighty huge thing to run to. When I got here, people would sell their own bones for a gulp of something that smelled like a surgeon taking a shit, half wood alcohol, half mold scraped off a rooftop, with a little cyanide and a whack of ginger to give your seizure a nice flavor. What kinda way is that to live? My family, we’ve had doings with the sauce since before Charlemagne grew a mustache. We put the head on the beer, and we could take it off, too.” Al put his hand on his heart. “Oh Lord in Heaven, when I heard my brothers and sisters suffering, travailing, in need, crying out for thirst in this new terrible American desert? What kinda man would I be if I plugged up my ears?”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “My people are French, if that’s your meaning. Had a good old time in England, too. But we don’t stick in one place too long. Go where we’re needed. Our family crest is a bindle and a toadstool rampant. My man Slake let me set up shop here. He’s my kind of drunk: likes the best, turns mean after three drinks, in love with creation after five, and he’ll put a bullet in your face without blinking around the time most folks would start throwing up. When I think about it, which is not too often, as I don’t waste much oomph trying to get my head around what men have knocking around theirs, I imagine he invited me so this place could get nice and cozy and snail-y. Self-contained, see? If you don’t have to go out for booze or food or cunt or cock or even work, you can just carry your house with you. All one. That’s what Caspar Slake likes. A cuckoo clock ticking away, little dolls chasing each other round the pendulum, all the parts parting along and no one ever leaves.”

  Zelda shivers. “And what do you like?”

  “Me? Oh, I don’t give a fuck about the clock. I like time.”

  The sled grinds up on the ice-sand shore, crunching and squealing and moosing in the night. There’s street lamps on this side. Ice-fishing huts. The dock has a hole in it and it needed new paint a century ago. A little creature comes jumping up to help Al out. He’s all rugged up in furs and boots, but Zelda can see his face. Long and blue and pointed, with gold eyes like wedding bands and hair like someone upturned a glass of rum on his head. Cheekbones for miles. He hardly comes up to her waist, but his hands hang down huge, bigger than he could need hands to be, dragging on the frozen beach. He’s not a person, not a person like her or the boy who caught her in the bathtub or Oleander Coy or Miss Georgie, but Zelda doesn’t want to say so.

  “Don’t mind my buddy Vollstead.” Al booms. “He’s my right hand man. Had a vicious row with my old lady over him when he first came to town. Miss T took a shine to him—you never saw anyone so ass-over-the-moon for a mug like his! Good gravy, he looks like someone hit a monkey with a shovel! But if my girl wants something, I want it, too. I want it more than her. I want it harder than her. I want to take it away from her.”

  “That’s a fine way to treat your wife!” cried Zelda.

  “I’ll thank you to butt out of it! Your kind says I love you all kinds of stupid ways. By punching each other and building railroads and not letting half of you vote and making a million billion more of you and getting old and dying and sometimes by not even being anywhere near the carcass you love. Your crowd’s I love you is dumb as rocks if you ask me. So just shut your face about my I love you. My lady knows what it’s all about. Our love is like a sports match. There’s rules. There’s seventh inning stretches. Sometimes there’s bats and a net. She wants something? I get in there first and grab it. I want something? She steals it while I’m sleeping—which is why I don’t bother with sleeping. Besides, in this case, I was awfully sweet on him myself. Miss T sat on him for ages, but I got mine. Turned a senator into the spitting image of this old donkey-dicked goblin and off she ran to kiss him dead on the Capitol steps. I do love being married.”

  Vollstead grins like a kid whose parents got divorced ages ago and it’s all rotten but boy, you do get double the birthday presents.. All the earrings in his lace-lettuce ears jingle like saints’ days and midnight come at last. He opens his coat like the ghost of Christmas Present only instead of hauling out a couple of Victorian orphans with a lifetime’s worth of eyeliner blacked on, he shows his legs: two shiny Tommy guns, their barrels kicking up a lindy. His blue chest is all plastered over with fancy writing like Mr. John Hancock put on the Constitution. He’s sporting a beefy-builder’s gut, the kind that used to be a wall of muscle, but hey, the championship’s not till fall and ice cream’s served year round.

  “Time to hit the distillery, boss? Yeah? Come on, I’m dying. I ain’t walked right for days. My toes is full of bullets and my knees is full of singing!”

  “You got it, VS,” barks Al. Knuckles that goblin on the chin like a kid off to play ball.

  “Al,” Zelda says, and her real voice is gone, run off to wherever it hides and licks its wounds every other day but this one. She hates this voice. It’s the wheedling, begging voice she learned on her Daddy, the Papa-please-can’t-I go-to-the-dance voice, the it’s-awfully-cold-mister-say-that’s-a-nice-jacket-you-got voice. “Al, I’m starving. Didn’t get my eggs this morning. Nor my lunch neither.”

  “You didn’t eat before you got on a moose-sleigh?” Vollstead grimaces, as if he’s holding on to a memory of hunger knotted up inside him. “Girl, you gotta be prepared in these parts.”

  Alberich Mero, the Ox of Athens, shrugs his mighty blueberry shoulders.

  “You have food,” he snorts, and strides on up the hill through the huts and the lamps and the fog.

  “I do not!” Zelda hollers after him. Does the sun ever show its face in Canada? she thinks, even though she knows it isn’t Canada really. If nothing else, they speak French in Canada. Mama Minerva and Daddy Rhado took her to Montreal when she was small. She had her first taste of coffee there. She remembers it like her first fuck, and she remembers that plenty well. Al doesn’t answer, in French or English or Greek or Scotch-fucking-Gaelic.

  Zelda Fair shoves her hands in her furry pockets.

  Oh. Oh. She does have food. She closes her hand around the pills. Uppers, downers, lefters, righters? Hell, she’s swallowed more mystery medicine than anybody’d care to count at this soiree and that. And what is this but a soiree? She’s squired and dressed and got her invitation engraved on a purple door.

  Zelda swallows those pills dry. They taste like six warm eggs, like one of Opal’s green sequins that she found on her tongue one morning last July, like the pages of a book falling down into her gin-bath like firew
ork wrappers, like Montreal coffee, like a forest in Germany with her name on it, like Miss Georgie’s steaks, bloody and scorched at the same time.

  B3

  The sun does come up in Canada. It comes up like a drink at the bar.

  Oh, you wouldn’t call it a sun. Maybe I wouldn’t. But a sun’s just a word, you know? A word for whatever makes a body warm and hot and green. What helps a body see past a hand in front of their nose and stretch out nice and wear something other than a whole walrus on their skin to keep from going full ice-cube. What tells the time. The sun in Canada looks like the bottom of an old glass. The light is the color of brandy seeping. It has a taste. Your skin tastes it, like you’re all over tongues. The taste is sugar-cane, slowly rotting, turning into the great god rum. It’s always that magic hour those film-boys love to shoot down here. Always gold.

  And here it comes, that sticky, oily liquor-light, dripping down through trees. Trees! And not frozen, either. Trees of gold and silver and crystal, trees like a table setting, and the winter folds its cards as the lake gets further behind Zelda Fair, turns in its chips, gives up the pot. Leaves roll out; birds cough up springtime and summer close to bursting. She can hear sounds. She knows those sounds. Those sounds are her mother’s own voice whispering to a babe at the breast. Those sounds are the joints in her bones. Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne.

  It’s a party, shaking down the dawn.

  Zelda hobbles up over the hummocky hillocky moor-lumps. She’s wearing holes in her feet like a princess dancing too long. No shoes allowed in the swimming pool. No rough-housing. No lifeguard on duty. Her swimming cap still clings to her skull; that black rubber feels like her own skin. It hurts in a funny way. Like she’s the purple Hobart and Sons’ Fine Smokables sign below their window, the one that lights up Ollie’s face every morning like a violet sun as she tells another play to close up its curtains before she comes down there and gives the director a slap in the face. Humming. Hopping. Sizzling around her ears. Boiling, but it’s all right because she was meant to boil. Zelda’d take the thing off, but she doesn’t know the rules here. What if she needs it later?