Guises Page 6

  “My boy!” Belle shrieked or thought she did. Her voice was a rasp. She crawled over to him and tried to lift him into her arms. She had no strength. The tears on her cheeks were cold as snow.

  Wasn’t it strange how his eyes were open? She wondered what he was looking at. She followed his gaze to the desert and figured he was dreaming of flying across it in the body of a bird with yellow feathers.

  And then everything slipped again. She was in Doc Kearney’s back yard, facing hills lost in darkness. She’d missed sunset. She’d missed more than that but she had no idea what. She knew that she’d killed Marcus. Another dead man for the trance.

  “I’ve given her something for the pain. I’m surprised that fall didn’t kill her as well. She hit her head pretty hard. She ought to have broken her neck. But she’ll be out of things for a while yet,” the doctor told Sheriff Bonham.

  There were footsteps and someone chattered excitedly about the Wells Fargo being held up outside town.

  Something precious has been taken from the stage…she heard cryptically. Why was that familiar to her?

  “What about her?” asked the sheriff, jerking a thumb at Belle.

  “She’ll be all right by herself. She probably doesn’t even know we’re here so she won’t know we’re gone. My wife’ll keep an eye on her.” Doc Kearney replied.

  And then Belle was sitting alone outside with the night all around in an exquisite fog. When the stranger slipped up next to her, his warmth was amazing. The laudanum always made her feel cold. What must be behind his mask was a star, then. Or a comet. Were comets hot? No, they only looked hot. There was a sun behind his mask. It flared out of the eyeholes as he spoke to her, all in Shelley.

  “When I arose and saw the dawn, I sighed for thee…”

  He kissed each of her ruined fingers. He tilted her chin up and brushed strands of gray hair from her face. Even through the leather disguise, his lips were as soft as her own.

  But when he was gone she couldn’t understand it. She was disappointed. What had become of his promise to take her away?

  ««—»»

  Belle had terrible memories of a close white room, obviously removed from space. The walls were soft with a substance that sometimes seemed to be wool, and other times was a collection of spider webs, and others still would be just a cloud that covered her till she couldn’t scratch her way out of it. She yawned and nodded, weak until she knew she must have died with her soul unable to leave her rotting body. She ran amuck, doubled over from cramps, her heart beating until she saw this pale and withered muscle hurtle from her chest to splat against the wall. She sweated till she nearly drowned in it, sure it was tears. What else was perspiration in someone as sad as herself but the body sobbing out its grief?

  She could hear water beyond the walls. There were obscene waves of it that crashed and murmured horrors, things coming out of it to crawl over the building, trying to chew through the stones to get at her inside her little cloud. Dreadful, colorless creatures lived in the sea, which was itself without a proper form or foundation. There was no place in it to go but down.

  Her entire body wept as the noises from the ocean shattered it. Shapes moved around her when she was totally spent, putting her together again by wrapping her in iced-down sheets. They discussed her. Didn’t they realize she could hear them?

  There were three of them. Two of them said she was ready to go. The addiction had been defeated. But the third one argued.

  “There’s more to Mrs. Sedeen than laudanum addiction. I believe there is an underlying madness we haven’t cured at all. We haven’t even touched it. Don’t you see? The secret is in those dreams she babbles about,” said number three.

  “But there’s no crypto-moral failing,” said number two. “It is mere addiction, not Psychopathia Sexualis.”

  “The dark man and dead men are figments produced by the opiate,” said number one.

  The third one sighed. “The dead men…yes. But I’m not so sure about the dark man.”

  Belle was released over his objections.

  She emerged clean from the cloud.

  She understood as she rode in the stage that she wasn’t going to San Francisco at all. She coming from there, and from the sanitarium by the Pacific. Belle was going home to her painted desert. She was forty and had been gone from it too long.

  When the stage stopped at Yuma, Belle bought a bottle of laudanum.

  The land opened along dry creek beds. Desiccated pods of mesquite beans waved like dark skeletal fingers but they chattered in the salty wind like teeth. Like rattlesnakes that showed up long enough for one dark man to be introduced to one lonely girl.

  Withered cactus marched up the slopes of hills that boasted just these and agave. The only spots of color were the occasional magenta cholla blossom and the spiny leaves on a century plant as it began turning red to die. Tall saguaros were in too much shadow, no matter what part of the day it was. Belle couldn’t get a good look at them. Flying past on the rickety stage, they might have been gaunt spirits.

  The white man was doing much to ruin this beautiful place. There were ever so many more fence rails and rolls of cruel barbed wire. Great herds of cattle were changing the landscape more than the buffalo had. The coach rolled by a tangle of these metal coils with about a hundred slaughtered coyotes strung from them. Belle was deeply ashamed.

  Then the sun went behind a stray thunderhead boiling from the east. The land shifted in streaks of indigo and orange. The cliff sides burnished until she thought all the souls of the lost conquistadors were holding up their shields to flash messages at her. There were times out here when one could see the fabled cities of gold as they flowed in and out of reach.

  There was the Apache, riding closer to the stage.

  There was another rider on the opposite side of the coach.

  It was Marcus on this second horse, calling to her. Belle looked from the frantic Indian to her son, both trying to tell her something.

  “What is it?” she called to them.

  Their mouths worked, full of roaring wind. Marcus’s reddish blond curls and the Apache’s black hair streamed behind them like flags and feathers. She strained to listen.

  “Ma!” Marcus shouted. The rest was unintelligible.

  The ceiling creaked as something on top shifted. Belle was startled as there was a flapping at the window. She saw a badly decomposed arm dangling. On the other side at the opposite end a body slumped, the head hanging down to turn a wormy face inward at her. A poached eye swirled in a socket.

  From their relative positions, it was obvious the arm and head didn’t come from the same corpse.

  How many were up there and why?

  The top creaked again and Belle fought to catch her breath. She grabbed at the buttons of her bodice and ripped it open, gasping.

  The riders drew closer to the windows of the stagecoach. If they were living men, they would be imperiling themselves by doing this. But Belle knew that neither of them was alive.

  “Ma!”

  “Woman!”

  “…stage!”

  “….off…!”

  “Get off the stage, Ma!”

  “Jump, woman!”

  Belle clasped the door handle as the riders pulled away, receding into the dust. She threw herself out and landed roughly. She rolled, hearing her dress tear, feeling herself scratched raw by the sand and the brush.

  She stopped tumbling and stared at the coach. The drunken driver wasn’t even able to sit straight, not even aware he was headed for the edge of a cliff. The stage went over, sacks of mail and baggage and a strongbox bouncing on the top—no corpses piled up there at all. The horses screamed as they found themselves plunging. Perhaps the driver did, too, finally.

  Belle searched for the Apache and her son. But they were gone, having appeared to give her this message, to save her for some reason. There was no way she could accept that they had been hallucinations. Her son had forgiven her and come to warn her.


  Why had the Apache come? Why would an Apache spirit care if a white woman was raced to her death at the bottom of a canyon?

  Because she loved the land. Because it filled every vision she had, taking her in wings across itself. Not very unlike what the tribes did in their ceremonies, dream-seeking to find answers.

  She could accept this. She managed to struggle to her feet, hunched over from a pain in her chest that wouldn’t let her take in enough air. The top of her dress had been opened further than when she had unbuttoned it earlier to ease her breathing. How shriveled her breasts were! She wheezed and tried to pull the material back together for modesty.

  She heard the horse and looked up. Or perhaps she saw the shadow of it first. Did it matter?

  The dark stranger was there, the tails of his black coat fluttering across the saddle. Organ pipes of cactus loomed around him.

  “What’s left?” she asked him.

  “I’ve come to take you away,” he replied, riding close and extending his hand. She took it and he pulled her up into his arms.

  Each time he appeared in her life had been when she might have died. There was the rattlesnake—the head of which hissed softly from his pocket, the Apache raid, striking her head on the wheel when thrown from the buckboard, barely missing going over a cliff on runaway coach. Had these been moments she should have perished?

  (“I’ve spared you,” was what he said that first time.)

  Belle gazed up at the lacquered mask, the delicate features handsome but unmoving. Now she knew what lay beneath the disguise but she didn’t care.

  There was a frightful pressure building in her lungs. Yet she managed to say, “Speak poetry? Shelley?”

  Or perhaps she only thought it. Yes, and he heard her anyway.

  He smiled through the visor and murmured, “Hark! whence that rushing sound? ’Tis like the wondrous strain that round a lonely ruin swells, which, wandering on the echoing shore, the enthusiast hears at evening: ’Tis softer than the west wind’s sigh…”

  | — | — |

  SPECIMENS

  1. Blind Attraction

  In the museum after everyone has left and the lights have been changed from frightening to soft, a clandestine fire is shared with no one you remember. It’s the warmth you recall.

  It’s the beauty of the despised. For the dead cannot really be said to be revered if their remains are periodically ransacked, dragged back into the world of the living to be gawked at. Only that which is freakish is laid out for such a shuddering inspection, as if their peace beyond this plain is of no worth. Revulsion is shared by those filing past the archeological catafalques upon which we have been placed. The sight of our cracking bones, packed with plaster and glossed with varnish, fills the tourists with studious horror. It drains all the color from our memory eyes until we see with moons. It is with these that we observe them at their gloating, you and I, in our separate cases.

  Specimens we have become; rising to a kind of consciousness in this preserve of history’s relics. I would scarcely call it waking.

  Worse than this indignation is the sorrow of graves torn from the world. Of dead no longer honored but exhibited, desecrated and alone in sepulchers of history. So much for whatever prayers might have set us to rest in our sacred ground. So much for benefices of extreme unction or exorcism or the simple but honestly applied shove toward some curative light.

  We believed that would be the end, our final address. From cradle to tomb…

  …to gallery. Where even the names of the gods we knew echo like desiccated statistics.

  Where am I? This is not where I laid myself down to die.

  And you, lady, is this the afterlife you expected when your fingers let go of that last rose and it fell, crushed, by your bedside? Did you hear the earth as it was piled above you and think, ahh! ahh! with each shovelful? Ahh! This is the sound of repose!

  2. Spirits After Hours

  We invent lives for ourselves.

  We cull a series of vignettes from dreams and drama. This is the imagination of lovers determined to remain strangers because…of course…our times have come and gone. It isn’t fitting we do more than play the games of spirits in hours unreal from the remainder of existence.

  —ours isn’t existence but extinction—

  Our ghosts are from separate wings of the museum. During the day neither of us knows the other exists, slumbering in our sterile crates, numbered and classified in skull and dress of dust. The living ones pass by and stare, perhaps try to see us for what we once were. They leave their fingerprints on the glass, not imagining for even a second that their crypts will be torn open in the interests of some icy science of a future come grave robbing.

  Eventually the doors close and the lights dim. The stars revolve to click into the place of miracles in the night sky. The moon may rise. And then you and I gather bodies of breath to escape our exhibits. We drag clattering pieces of time like bits of broken pottery we might once have been buried with, when we were interred in Neolithic pits or in claustrophobic catacombs, in the splintered vaults of martyred saints, or launched out on paper boats across ivory seas. We go out into the halls searching for…something…a memory…or for someone.

  Did either of us see somebody in these halls before, after hours? Are you remembering me a little? Am I remembering you? Is this what we’ve come out for?

  No, it’s because we don’t know where we are. We seek points of reference in a time that appears to hold us prisoner.

  I see you coming from across the domed conservatory where the fabled dragons of thunder show their bones. Your hair seems to lay in striped shadows over your shoulders as you pass beneath the giant ribcage of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And every night it is as if you see me for the first time.

  I do the same, confused to find myself alive again—or almost alive—and mystified by the presence of another discarnate soul of such loveliness. Am I dreaming you, as I must be this bizarre collection of archetypes, samples arranged to imitate epochs? It is a queer arrangement for heaven or hell—to be a series of rooms heaped with the unburied and the spoils of ghouls.

  There are so many toys in a museum! So many exotic locations, entire rooms meticulously reproducing the eras.

  “Come play,” I say to you. “We have all night.”

  “It will seem as if we have forever if we go to enough of them,” you reply.

  All we need do is touch the relics there to become the people who once touched them, too. The dead have great sympathy for one another. They reach out for us as we reach in for them. 3. Under Piccadilly Lamps

  You slowly run your fingers across the patterns in a brass plaque. I can’t tell if you’re reading it or are simply fascinated with the swirls.

  1888

  Is fin de siecle London in this first room? We sojourn discreetly across Victorian hemispheres: bearing jars of dried hyacinth petals, lavender mouths mutant with midnight felony, mellowed on the annatto vintage we squeeze from our lacerated fingertips once the lace gloves are off. We don the clothes and the manners slip onto us quite naturally.

  I bow. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Jack.”

  You curtsy, flaunting only your proper dimples. “Liz.”

  “Care to waltz, Liz?” I ask, offering a gentlemanly hand.

  You smile, blushing only enough to flatter your cheeks. We somehow know the flawless steps. We perform a dance on the cobblestones, the hiss of gaslight overhead.

  “Sir, you move like a cloud,” you whisper.

  When we stop, I reach into a leather satchel I left sitting in a doorway.

  “Here, my dear,” I murmur. “I have written you a loveletter.”

  The stationery is wrapped around a kidney. There is blood on my hands. When I took off my gloves there didn’t seem to be a speck of it. But then it began to appear in spots which didn’t drip. I’m a fastidious killer.

  “Why look!” you cry with delight as you hold up your own hands. “There is blood upon mine as well
.”

  I kiss one of them upon the fingertips, adding, “In freckles and embroidery, in pulsepoints like dabs of cinnabar perfume.”

  We pretend a poignant scenario, based upon two paths which came close but which never actually crossed. Lizzie Borden did take a grand tour of Europe at about the same moment as the sensational ruckus in Whitechapel—a few years before her own fame was made.

  “Well, she might have met Dr. Ripper,” you say coyly, admiring the lace on your cuffs.

  I nod. “And he might have been looking for a real lady with a demure smile and a strong stomach.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been fate?”

  You lean toward me, anticipating a kiss as a shy little girl would. Wanting it but not wishing her beau to think she’s impure.

  I pull away, not cruelly aloof but severely withholding myself.

  “We mustn’t indulge ourselves. In this twisted time our passions have to be re-directed. There is a doxie strolling up the alley. Please don’t be jealous as I go to her,” I say.

  You tilt your head coquettishly, pursing your lips in surprise. Perhaps it is relief. You’re just too innocent to know what a sordid act it is you might have been opening yourself up for—had I been a different, more debauched, sort of man.

  My teeth flash in the gaslight.

  I withdraw down the alley, am quick with the knife. You can hear the cutting of the slattern’s cheap dress and soiled underslip. There are scarlet rainbows in the air, whistles in place of screams from the breeze I have created in the shadowy woman’s throat. From your vantage point as voyeur you can see the stratified canyon her jerked-apart legs reveal. You blush, never having seen your own private chamber before. Yet you don’t turn away. You gasp, fanning your glistening forehead with a theater program from the Drury Lane.