Bone Dance

Card 6: Ahead

Seven of Wands

Waite: Discussion, wordy strife, negotiations, war of trade.

Gearhart: The individual against the community; one against many. Unequal odds.

6.0: The house of the spirit

“The nights are getting shorter,” I shouted over Frances’s shoulder as we rode. “Mind the east.” The sky there was a dense and velvet cobalt, over solid rooftops and shattered ones, over the feeble lamps and torches of the Fair.

“Very nice,” said Frances.

“That means the gates close in an hour or so.”

“It does?”

Well, there; that was one thing I knew that she didn’t. “That’s why they call it the Night Fair.”

“What happens after that?”

“Nothing. Lively as a mausoleum. The hours are shorter in the summer, but it beats staying out in the sun.”

We were threading a narrow, noisy, busy strip of pavement bordered with vendors’ stalls. She braked as a huge, hairy gray dog shot out from between two of them and hurtled across the path, its bony joints rolling. A smooth, loam-black face topped with a brilliantly colored cylinder of a hat thrust itself in front of the windshield. “Las bujias, senora,” it said, showing small white teeth and a raised hand full of spark plugs. “Para todas las máquinas, senora, y muy baratas—” Frances growled with the throttle, and the face disappeared as we lunged forward. I peered back through the weather shell, and couldn’t find a sign of the bright hat.

“Not to be critical,” I told her, “but if we’d gone to the gate we came in by, we’d have missed the crowds.”

There was a pause before she said, “I was hoping we might find Mick.”

“The place is a warren. We could pass him a dozen times in the next ten minutes and never know it.”

“Ah, but he would,” said Frances harshly. There was a fierce, fruitless rev from the throttle. “Have you noticed many of these here tonight?”

“What if he’s gotten into trouble?”

“In other words, what if he hasn’t come to us because he can’t?” She turned the trike into the mouth of an alley and, to my surprise, killed the engine. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. Finally she said, “We do all want to survive. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in difficult circumstances, and I’ve done it by suspecting everyone unfailingly. I’m afraid it’s a habit now.”

Her habits didn’t account for why we’d stopped here. “Does that mean that you don’t think Mick Ski

She twisted to look at me. Her eyes didn’t look focused. “Of course I do. I told you, it’s a habit.” She turned away again.

After a moment I said, “If you’ll open the shell, I’ll get some food. The stall’s right there; I’ll be in sight the whole time.”

She didn’t answer, but she groped for and pulled the lever that popped the shell. I scrambled out past her as best I could.

The smell and sound and sight of chicken frying was a swooning sensual overload; I wondered, for an instant, if that was how a caress seemed to most people. I was suddenly vague and giddy with hunger. I had always worked that way: not needing to eat all day, until I needed it desperately, like an engine that runs smoothly through a tank of alcohol and stops without warning when it’s gone. What string of adjectives had Frances hung on me, earlier? Strong, resistant to disease and poisons… She could have added cheap to operate, and rarely needs refueling. I bought chicken (“Picante,” the old woman warned, her hands fluttering, her accent terrible, “picante”) and fried potatoes and okra and buttermilk biscuits and two long bottles of homemade pear nectar. I tucked the bottles under my arm and juggled the hot paper-wrapped parcels back to the trike.

Frances sat where I’d left her, but her wrists were crossed over the instrument panel, and her forehead was pillowed on them. Her hair had fallen forward to sweep and scatter across her near forearm. Relaxed, that arm looked surprisingly thin, and the pointed bones in her elbow seemed frail and vulnerable. Out of character.

Sometimes wisdom arrives first in the pit of your stomach. That was where I felt it then, a little slippery twist. Of course it was out of character. That wasn’t Frances’s arm.

I already knew that this body didn’t belong to Frances; but now I really knew it, all the many-sided shape of it. There was no relation here between the shell and the spirit, no way to judge from outside, except by the crude language of action and expression, what the person inside was. The body I was looking at was the life story, in fading ink, of a person I’d never met.

Who was she? Would she approve of this vendetta she was being ridden on? I’d awakened, over and over, in strange places with bits of my past gone, and it had nearly driven me crazy. How long had Frances ridden this woman? Would she wake up in a new city, maybe years since her last memory, and do any better than I had? Would she get the chance to wake up at all?

The exhaustion belonged to the stranger’s body. The driving passion, the mind under the lash, belonged to Frances. Both needed to eat and rest. Both would suffer if they didn’t. Whoever was entitled to judge between them, it wasn’t me.

I said, a little loudly, “Well, if you didn’t like spicy chicken, you should have said so.”

“I love spicy chicken,” she said, and sat up. Her face was composed, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to notice, or at least to comment on, the weariness in it.

So I said, “At the Underbridge, there’s a place where you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”

“I’ll be fine once I eat. Now, can we eat?”

“You’re welcome,” I replied, and began to set bundles on all the flat surfaces. There weren’t a lot of these, on or in the trike, but I ate leaning against the outside, which left her the passenger’s seat as a table. “Eat the okra first,” I warned. “It’s terrible cold.”

And that was the last conversation for a few minutes. Except for the rattle of the paper, we were a speck of silence in the Night Fair’s tapestry of noise. I stopped chewing to listen to it. I felt like an alien object in the world-body, something it had encysted because it couldn’t cast it out. Or was it Frances who had been isolated, and I was simply standing within the radius of the effect?

“Wish I had some coffee,” Frances said at last, around a bite of biscuit.

I stared at her. “Nothing easier. Give me ten bucks, and I’ll be back sometime tomorrow with about twelve green coffee beans. If someone, somewhere in town, has managed to lay hands on a sackful.”

She smiled, wry and surprisingly genuine. “I know. I think that’s the rest of my penance. To get to where coffee grows, it’s a thousand miles over bad roads full of unpleasant people. I hear there’s a slope near Taos where they’ve discovered it does pretty well, but strangers within half a mile can expect to be shot at.”

“Is coffee worth shooting people for?” I asked.

“Or getting shot at for? Have you never had it?”

“No.”

An indecipherable expression crossed her face at high speed. “In that case, I suppose not. But I wish I had some, all the same.”

Headlights appeared and bobbed in front of us, blinding, as a car turned into the other end of the alley. “Bother,” Frances said, and began to clear wrapping paper away from the ignition.

“Stay where you are, please,” said an air-filled whistling ruin of a voice behind me.

I was drinking the last of the pear nectar. As I lowered the bottle, I reversed my grip on the neck, smacked the glass against a sign post as I turned, and ended crouched in front of Mr. Lyle with a broken bottle in my hand. I was probably more surprised than he was.

He was smiling, in fact, way up at the top of his great height. I’d forgotten how unreasonably large he was. “Teakettles, bottles — do you always fight with your drinkables?” he asked. And: “You should turn round and have a look before you use that. There are things you don’t know.”