George Martin - Deuces Down

“Do you actually have poisonous claws?”

“No.”

“Then no.” She shrugged. “I came closer to it, but I never actually said I had a gun, and I have friends in the Justice Department.” She walked over to him and looked up at the Club Chaos sign, the latest work of the Jokertown Redevelopment Agency. In place of the broken and blighted marquee of the long defunct Chaos Club, there now stood a fifty-foot tall neon version of the new club’s owner, veteran joker comedian, Chaos, back after many lucrative years in Vegas (and a split with his old partner, Cosmos), bringing some of the glitter and tinsel with him to mix with the city’s matching funds. He juggled spaceships and planets with his six arms, while below his feet, sporting considerably less neon, was a television van plastered with a twirling Mtv logo. A huge mass of teenage girls, most of them nats, were standing behind police barricades while a single, albeit large and brown-scaled, police officer attempted to keep them in line. The joke of it was, they were all dressed like Topper-top hats, tail coats, and more than half of them had figured out that fishnets were the way to complete the ensemble, even those who should have considered something else.

Topper stopped and did a double take. Then turned to Sam. “When did my outfit suddenly come into fashion?”

Sam felt a bit uneasy. “Um, it didn’t. I think my outfit came into fashion.”

“Come again?”

“Ever hear of The Jokertown Boys ?”

She paused. “They’re a gang, right? Like the Werewolves or the Egrets?”

“Um, no.” Sam reached to the back of his portfolio and pulled out a flier done in the Bauhaus style, with blocky Bremen lettering that had required cutting his thumbnails square. He passed it to Topper and let her read it:

8 PM, Saturday, October 27th

Club Chaos!

The Jokertown Boys

CD Release Party

‘Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails’

Wear Yours and Get in Free!

Below that was a pen-and-ink portrait of the five guys in formalwear from the bar, facing right and sporting canes and white gloves, the pose something Sam had modeled after one of the old posters for Grand Hotel.

Topper looked to Sam and blinked. “You’re in the band?”

“No, I just live with them. I sang backup on a couple tracks, that’s all.” Sam pointed to illustration. “People mistake us all the time, but that’s my brother, Roger.”

“So that wasn’t you by the bar?” Topper scrutinized the flyer, then bit her lip. “You know, except for the guy with the shoulders, they look awfully nat for Jokertown.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Sam brushed his tail in its swallow-tail sheath against Topper’s leg. “Trust me. They’re all jokers and they’re all from J-town.” He paused. “Well, Dirk there’s from the Village, and we’ve been renting the upstairs of his mom’s shop since we left the orphanage. But Village People ? Don’t think so.” He looked at the van, watching a guy in a wizard hat atop it working the crowd, and realized it was Carson Daly. “Since when did they hook up with Mtv ?”

There came a squeal from the line of girls and a louder one as he made the mistake of looking, and Sam came to a sudden grim realization: Once again, his fraternal resemblance had carried too far.

“It’s Roger!” screamed a girl in a domino mask, and her screams were picked up by the next teenybopper in line, and the next, like a chorus of howler monkeys at the zoo: “Roger!” “Roger!” “Roger, we love you!” The crowd pressed forward and the barricade overturned, the girls trampling the scaled police officer in their mad rush.

It wasn’t the Jokertown Riots, or the Wild Hunt from the Rox War, but it was the closest thing Sam had ever experienced to either. Screaming girls. Clawing girls. A huge slavering hound’s muzzle thrust in his face. “I’m not Roger, I’m his brother!” Sam protested, but the clawing and screaming and tearing at his clothes continued until Topper and the scaled police officer, who’d somehow crawled under the crowd, linked arms before him and held them back, bellowing things about the NYPD and federal agents.

Then autograph books were waved in his face past them. This, at least, was something he could deal with. Roger , he signed, and Roger!!! , and To my dearest fan , and then he was confronted by part of the hunger and madness of the Rox War made flesh, the drooling, panting muzzle of one of the Gabriel hounds, white fangs glistening, fierce and sharp. Except the hound had bows in its hair and was holding an autograph book, and Sam realized he was looking at a joker fangirl with the head of an afghan. He signed all five band members’ names in her book simultaneously, one with each digit: Roger, Jim, Alec, Dirk and Paul , each signature in the respective hand, then did a second line with their wild card manes: Ravenstone, Grimcrack, Alicorn, Atlas and Pretty Paulie , with extra hearts and smiley faces.

Then Topper was shoved aside by sheer bulk. “Sign my breasts!” screamed an obese nat girl who’d exceeded the recommended weight allowance of her halter top.

Sam did not want to scratch her-not that her fellow autograph-seekers had any such reservations when it came to him-but it was not as if these girls were jokerphobic anyway, so he flexed the toes of his left foot, letting his nails piss ink into his Doc Marten, then slipped his tail out of its sheath, dunked it into the impromptu inkwell, and whipped it up and around and through the flourishes of Japanese brushwork. Roger he wrote on the right breast and Ravenstone on the left.

“I’m going to have it tattooed in!” the girl squealed.

Her fellow fanatics howled for more, surging through the gap, then one grabbed his tail and two others grabbed his arms, wrestling him for his sketchbook, and a fourth clawed for his face, snatching off his hat. Then she gasped in shock. “His eyes are blue!” she screamed. “Both of them! And where are his cute little horns?”

“Where’s the raven?” demanded another.

“Wait a second,” said the girl behind him, “since when does Ravenstone have a tail? And wouldn’t it be a devil tail? This is a lion’s tail? What sort of rip is this?”

“I read about him in TeenBeat !” screamed a slightly more knowledgeable fangirl. “That’s Roger’s brother, Swish!”

“That’s Swash! ” Sam roared, snatching his hat back and jamming it on, wresting away his sketchbook, and jerking his tail free. The crowd fell back, the scaled police officer shouting for the girls to get their butts behind the barricade. Sam lashed his tail, splashing drops of ink, and stomped forward, his coat torn, his left boot squishy, his hatjammed down around his ears. He hoped Roger had brought spare socks.