Bone Dance

They whooped, and it was a moment before I realized I hadn’t co

The Jammers were yelling and — cheering? Who knows what Jammers cheer about? Had I just taken the going-home step, or the no-home-at-all step? Or did it mean anything?

The trike carried full touring kit and weather shell, and had a mud-and-dust finish from someplace where there used to be roads. When the hatch popped, clots of dirt cracked away from the seam and fell to the blacktop, and the driver unfolded out of the opening with startling speed and economy. It was hard to tell what pronoun properly applied under the tinted goggles, the helmet, the crumpled coveralls, and the dust. She or he was squatting next to me before I had a chance to think of standing up.

“Are you hit?” Quick, sharp-cut words, the middleweight voice cracking out of roughness into resonance. The skin on the angular jaw, under the dirt, had never needed shaving, and when the stained leather gauntlet came off the right hand, the battered fingers seemed relatively light-boned. I hazarded a “she.” Those fingers grabbed my chin before I could dodge them.

Everything tilted forty-five degrees. My vision was clear, but for a moment I felt as if I were sitting on a slant with nothing to hold on to. Then the world snapped back to true. The driver’s dark goggles showed me two views of myself, slightly bug-eyed. What was this hangover from?

“No,” I said. “You didn’t hit me.”

She peeled off the goggles, snapped them closed, and dropped them into her breast pocket. Her eyes were black, and surrounded by clean ta

“Not by your aim, honest. Excuse me,” I said, and stood up. A bit too fast. She grabbed me around the rib cage.

“Whoa, Paint, old girl. It’s that way that’s up. Put one foot there, and the other — that’s it.” She stepped back, and I swayed, but that was all. “Now, is there someone to carry you away, or are you doomed, like a public works project in cast cement, to grace this bridge forever?”

It was true that nothing I’d said or done up to then had indicated I ought to be allowed out alone. “No. I’ll be fine, I’m just going into the Deeps.” Now there was a mindless utterance. Still, if I could reach the Deeps, I would be all right. Or at least, the burrowing instinct told me so. I looked around and realized that the Jammers were gone. I must have stopped being interesting.

She raised her eyebrows: delicate inquiry. “The D — oh, downtown.” She swiped at a trickle of sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist, then snatched impatiently at her helmet, yanked it off. The hair underneath was tangled, wet with perspiration, shoulder length, and very black. “I suppose your career as a caryatid will have to be cut short,” she said. “I’m going that way myself.” Glorious smile, hiding nothing, signifying nothing.

I had a dirty shirt, a dirtier pair of jeans, and a pair of sneakers, none of which I intended to give up. I had a few useful things in my pockets, but none that would turn to gold in someone else’s fingers. So riding would entail racking up an obligation to a formidable stranger. But the thought of sitting down, closing my eyes, and effortlessly reaching the Deeps — no, I had no credit here. “No thank you,” I croaked. “It’s a lovely day for a walk.”

Breath burst out between her lips. “Oh, Our Lady of Martyrs. I missed the odor of sanctity on you. Get in.”

She meant it as one kind of blasphemy. It fell on my ears as different, and worse. Where were the lovely, familiar cadences of the Deal, the careful weighing of goods and considerations, the call-and-response of buying and selling? Hers was an alien and heretical language, for all that I knew the words. She propelled me to the trike, and I tried not to go. But I really did want to sit down under the shell of the tri-wheeler where the sun couldn’t get me, even if I paid with the rest of my life -

She stuffed me onto the back seat as if I were her laundry, straddled the front seat, and slammed the hatch. In a moment I was surrounded by engine noise and the rattle of the weather shell.

Well, one more for the debit side of the ledger. “I’ll pay you back,” I said as loud as I could, doubting it was loud enough.

She turned in the saddle, passed a quick glance over me, and said mildly, “Good God, with what?”

We crossed the Ravine. My silence was fulminating; I don’t know what hers was. She drove quickly through the hollow-hearted warehouses, briskly past the copper-roofed riverbank palace and surrounding defensible wasteland of the Whitney-Celestin families. Pedestrians and bicyclists kept out of her way, except for once, when someone belatedly driving a pair of goats toward the mall market claimed right-of-way. Her Creole was idiomatic, at least on the obscenities. I felt the back end buck and slide on the gravel as she braked. Something flickered on the surface of a gauge in front of her. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and whacked a button with her index finger.

The trike was, by its nature, intensely valuable; but it wasn’t beautiful. There was a wealth of dust and dirt under the weather shell, and cracked rubber and scarred paint, but that was all. Everything in my field of vision had been repaired at least once, with varying degrees of success and duct tape. I let my head rest on the seat back and closed my eyes. The pain behind my eyebrows was dissolving my muscles.

“Do you plan to tell me where I’m going?” came the honed and honeyed voice from the front. “Or do we drift like the Ancient Mariner? You don’t look like an albatross.”

“Well, you haven’t shot me,” I said, alarming myself. “Yet, anyway.” I opened my eyes and saw through the roof window the hard, hot sky and the ruined exterior of the Washington Hotel. “Go past the last gerbil tube and turn left.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said with delight.

“The pedestrian walkways over the streets. Gerbil tubes.”

She gave a shout of laughter. “Christ, they still call ’em that. I haven’t—” She shifted down, and the trike whined like an eager dog. “Here?”

“Yeah.” I had a moment of disorientation, watching the immense wet smile of the billboard boy on the front of the Power Authority Building sail by over my head. Conserve, by all that’s holy. You damn betcha.

“So, what do you think of the quality of life here? Are all the women strong and all the men good-looking?”

Ignoring the u

“You can damn well give it back, then. I grew up here. But I’ve been gone ten thousand miles or seven long years, whichever comes first. Give or take what you will.”

For the first time it occurred to me that my chauffeur might not have all her outlets grounded. “I see. Stop when you get to the fence.”

“I’d be a fool not to,” she said, and I realized she’d downshifted as I spoke. “Unless I wanted to end up coarse-ground.” I leaned forward for a view out the windshield, and found the red-rust chainlink edge of the Night Fair before us. Quiet now, it waited for sunset. “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the fence.