Bone Dance

“No,” said Frances, “I expect you to fling yourself onto the back of my horse without so much as a clean handkerchief. Of course you may. Please do.”

“Oh, shit!” Theo wailed. “No towel!”

“No, no towel,” I agreed.

Frances shook her head at me. “You’re not a very nice person. I’ll get you a towel, Theo. In the meantime, pretend you’re a drip irrigation system.”

Theo pushed the streaming hair back from his face as Frances went in the back door. Wet-headed, without his glasses, he looked like a stranger. “She’s doing better, I think,” he said.

“Frances? Better at what?”

“That’s right, you were busy not noticing everything. She’d rattle off the speeches, but they were all bitter. And she wouldn’t fight back.”

“Wouldn’t fight back?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. I think she felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

I frowned.

“Well,” said Theo, “I know you can be stupid without anybody else’s help, but maybe she didn’t. Anyway, you were pretty much wired in series. You got better, she got better.”

I didn’t say anything, and it was just as well, because Frances came out with a towel and sailed it at Theo.

“LeRoy wants to know if you’d mind having corn fritters again,” she said to him.

Theo looked at Frances in disbelief. “Mind? I mean, do you?”

“That’s what I told him. But he wanted me to ask. Saints and angels, if there’s one thing people around here seem to know about, it’s food. The place must have been founded by an exiled cooking school.”

“You’re staying here, too?” I asked, surprised. “At LeRoy’s?”

“Attic. Why,” Frances said, aggrieved, “does everyone put me on the top floor, as if I were likely to have a nasty accident with a chemistry set?”

“Maybe they’re hoping the stair-climbing will cut into your natural vivacity.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been listening to me for too long?”

“Sparrow, is that you?” LeRoy’s voice preceded him to the screen door. He opened it and poked his long amber-brown face out. There was a streak of flour in the cropped black fleece of his hair. “Mags asked me if I’d dig out some old schoolbooks of mine for Paulo. If I can find ’em, will you take ’em back with you?”

“If you don’t mind them a little seasoned with machine lube.”

“Nah. Someone threw the physics book in a vat of Coca-Cola once, from the looks of it. Frances, is it okay if I look around in the attic?”

“It’s your attic. Can we help look?”

“I don’t know,” LeRoy said, a little desperately.

When we’d all tramped up to the attic, I could see why. Frances occupied one end of the floor space: a camp cot, a crate with a few books ranked neatly inside and a candle lamp on top, another crate used an open-fronted dresser and filled with folded clothes. It was spare and obsessively neat.

The rest of the attic contained what looked like the pasts of the last three generations of every family in town, in boxes, in overflowing trunks, in storage cabinets made from the crawl space under the rafters, and a two-door closet built into the end wall. “I thought this was a new building,” I said, rather faintly.

“I moved it all from the old one,” said LeRoy. “There wasn’t time to sort it.”

“Yes, there was,” Sherrea said as her head appeared on the landing. “If you hadn’t put it off until the day before we needed to tear the old place down. Santos, what are you all doing, up here?”

“Looking for a needle,” Frances said.

“Huh. I was going to invite myself to di

“Great!” said LeRoy. “As soon as we find these books.”

“We’ll starve,” Theo sighed.

The possibility seemed to send Sherrea into action. She pointed each of us at a box or cupboard, and took one for herself. I got the two-door closet.

The floor was stacked with magazines, and if they were sorted, it was into an organization that I didn’t understand. Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, Wigwag, The Utne Reader, Air and Space, Convolution Quarterly, something called Dirty Linen…

I felt as if I’d fallen, with a bad toothache, headfirst into a candy box. The urge to sit and read was unbearable.

Not that the magazines were the only things there. I pulled out a smelly wool quilt, three fluorescent tubes, an electric fan with a blade missing, a fat-bellied painted reed basket, a stack of stamped-tin ashtrays bearing the legend “Reynolds Radiator: A Good Place to Take a Leak,” and an enormous framed brown photograph of a beaming blond woman, from around the mid-19408. I sneezed and raised my eyes, daunted, to the closet shelf.

There were some books there, the bindings disguised by a barely arrested cascade of newspapers and an inverted pyramid of cardboard boxes that, if anything in that closet had seemed to be arranged by intent, I would have called a booby trap. I recognized that. I pointed it out to myself, almost in so many words, in mingled amusement and dismay. And still my hands went out to ruffle under the heap of newspapers, to try to draw the books from the very bottom of the stack.

Newsprint slid, one fold, then two. The boxes trembled and rocked. At last, inexorably, in the same style as avalanches filmed for documentaries, the boxes tipped forward and poured their contents and themselves over my head and shoulders. I think I yelled.

I stood finally at the end of a long drift of mixed paper, sneezing. The mess eddied gently around Frances’s knees, where she sat cross-legged in front of an open box. “Just think,” she said mildly. “It could have been paint… What’s that?”

Lying between us, face up, was a bent and battered postcard of a city by night. The buildings were illuminated and rich against a blue-black sky, lovely and unimaginable in their use of power. Once people had lit the outsides of skyscrapers, and turned them into sculpture and monuments when their insides were empty.

Then I recognized the pillar of glass in the middle, reflecting its sisters and the cool night sky on its flanks, crowned with a halo ring of little white lights. I was looking at my City.

No, I realized, after a glimpse of Frances’s face — I was looking at hers. The City as she’d left it, whenever she’d left it to do her nation’s bidding and ride the bodies of strangers. The city, maybe, that she’d been i

“But what’s the big gold one?” I asked aloud.

“Pardon?” she said, looking up blindly.

“The one with the top lit to a fare-thee-well. That’s almost as big as—”

I realized it as I said it, but Theo answered me anyway. “Cripes. It’s the Gilded West.”

Frances laughed, just a little. “The second-tallest building in town by popular fiat; did you know? My mother always claimed, when it was lighted, that it looked like an electric shaver.”

“No,” Sherrea said, peering over Frances’s shoulder. “It looks like a skull. See? From this side, anyway. Those shadows are the eyes—”

Theo had crouched in the multicolored reef of papers and was stirring through them. “Here’s another one — and another one. Look at this! The Tent Farm with the roof still on. Cool. And that building’s not there now.”

“The Multifoods Building. And City Center,” Frances told him, her voice steady. “Both desperately ugly. They will not be mourned.” But I could see her face. I wandered over, as if to look at the postcards, and touched my fingers lightly to her shoulder.

“Here’s another one of the Gilded West after dark,” said Theo. “It looks like a toad in this one.”

“It’s the other side,” Sherrea said. “Bullshit. Where’s the toad?”

“Right here. There’s the two front legs, and the body, and the two red lights on top are the eyes.”

“Santos. It does look like a toad.”

Frances tipped her head back and met my eyes. Her expression was an unstable mix of hilarity and distress. “Thank heaven,” she said, “the Norwest board of directors are no longer with us.”