Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Rajandra Das tried to charm the wheel back onto the wingtip, but it was beyond his power or even the power of Rael Mandella’s welding torch to make the airplane airworthy again. What was most galling of all to the sole survivor of the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar was that Rael Mandella’s welding torch ran on nothing less than hundred percent, pure, unadulterated aviation-grade liquid hydrogen.

So Dr. Alimantando found Persis Tatterdemalion a home and a garden so that she would not starve, but she could not be happy because the sky was in her eyes. She saw the lean desert birds gather on the aerials of the relay tower and grew bitter because her wings had been broken by foolish people. She stood on the edge of the bluffs and watched the birds ride the thermals up the evening and wondered how wide she would have to spread her arms to rise like them and be drawn up the spiral of air until she vanished from view.

One night Mikal Margolis made her two propositions and because she knew that only by losing herself in them could she forget the sky, she accepted them both. That night, and for twenty successive nights, the peace of the citizens was disturbed by strange noises from the Margolis dwelling. Some of them were the howls and mauls of intercourse. The others sounded like interior decoration.

When the sign appeared, everything became obvious.

It read:

“Is no son of mine,” declared the outraged Babooshka. “Ignoring his dear mother to take up with some cheap, foreign woman, and filling the peaceful nights with sounds the like of which I will not describe; such shame he is bringing! And now, this den of sin and sodomy! B.A.R./Hotel, hah! As if his dear mother does not know what it meant! Thinking his dear mother cannot spell, eh? Haran,” she said to her husband-to-be, “not one foot will I ever set in that place. From now on, he is no son of mine. I disown him.” She spat demurely on the ground before the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. That night Persis Tatterdemalion and Mikal Margolis threw a grand opening party, with as much maize beer as anyone could drink, which was not very much, as there were only five guests. Even Dr. Alimantando was persuaded to leave his studies for an evening to celebrate. Grandfather Haran and the Babooshka remained to mind little Limaal and Taasmin. Grandfather Haran would have loved to have gone and earned himself reproaching glances every time the Babooshka caught him glancing wistfully out toward the light and the noise. Her total ban on crossing the B.A.R.’s threshold necessarily extended to her husband.

The day after the party Persis Tatterdemalion took Rajandra Das, Mr. Jericho and Rael Mandella over the railroad lines and the three men dismantled the sand-scarred stunt plane and packed it into fifteen tea chests. Persis Tatterdemalion said nothing during the dismantling operation. She locked the pieces of her airplane in the deepest darkest cave in the B.A.R./Hotel and put the key in a jar. She could never quite bring herself to forget where that jar was.

One morning at two minutes of two she rolled on top of Mikal Margolis and whispered into his ear, “Do you know what we need, darling? What we really need to make everything perfect?” Mikal Margolis held his breath, expecting wedding rings, children, little perversions with leather and rubber. “A snooker table.”

There were three Gallacelli brothers: Ed, Louie and Umberto. No one knew which was Ed, which was Louie, and which was Umberto, because they were triplets and as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison. They grew up in the farming community of Burma Shave, where the citizens held three common opinions about them. The first ws that they had been found abandoned in a cardboard box on the edge of Giovann’ Gallacelli’s maize field. The second was that they were something more than triplets, though what that something might be no one was prepared to say for fear of offending the saintly Mrs. Gallacelli. The third was that the Gallacelli boys had swapped identity. at least once since infancy so that Louie had grown up to be either Ed or Umberto, Umberto Louie or Ed, and Ed Umberto or Louie, and all possible successive permutations of further swaps. Not even the boys themselves were certain which was Ed, which was Louie, which was Umberto, but it was certain among the folk of Burma Shave that they had never seen such identical triplets ("clones,” oh, dear, that’s it said, it just popped out, you know, that word you’re not meant to mention in front of their parents): or such devilishly handsome ones.

Agneta Gallacelli was a squat toad of a woman with a heart of warm milk chocolate. Giovann’ Gallacelli was tall, thin and spare as a rake. Ed, Louie and Umberto were dark-eyed, curly-haired laughing love gods. And knew it. And so did every girl in Burma Shave. Which was how the Gallacelli brothers came to depart from Burma Shave in the small hours of a Tuesday morning on a motorized railcar they had adapted themselves from a farm delivery truck.

There was this girl. She was called Magdala, Mags for short. There is always a girl like her, the kind who flirts and plays and messes around and leaves no doubt that she is one of the boys until the boys are boys, when they, and she, realize that she isn’t one of the boys at all, not at all. For Mags her moment of realization came two weeks after her trip round the more out-ofthe-way fields in the back of the Gallacellis’ delivery truck. For Ed, Louie and Umberto it came when the truck was peppered with bird shot as they drew up outside the Mayaguez homestead to inquire why Mags hadn’t been to see them for so long.

Fraternal solidarity was the polestar of the Gallacelli brothers’ lives. It did not waver when confronted by a resigned father and a furious neighbour. They refused to say which of them had impregnated Magdala Mayaguez. It was entirely possible they did not know themselves.

“Either one of youse says, or ye all marry,” said Sonny Mayaguez. His wife gave weight to his demand with a shotgun.

“Well, what’ll it be? Talk, or marry.”

The Gallacelli brothers chose neither.

Anywhere else in the world no one would have lost one wink of sleep over a silly little girl like Mags Mayaguez. In nearby Belladonna there were counted on Tombolova Street alone eighty-five abortion parlours and twelve transplant-fostering bureaus for silly little girls in just her situation. Belladonna, however, was Belladonna, and Burma Shave was Burma Shave, which was why the Gallacelli brothers chose Belladonna over Burma Shave. There they earned ten-dollar diplomas in farm science, law and mechanical engineering from a hole-in-the-wall universuum. They would have lived there contentedly for the rest of their lives but for a sad misunderstanding with a knife, a drunk shuttle loader and a girl in a bar on Primavera Street. So they ran away again, for there was still some law in Belladonna where the next best thing to a totally honest police force is a totally corrupt one.

They were drawn down the network of shining steel rails that covered the world like a spider’s web: the farmer, the lawyer, the mechanic. Ed was the mechanic, Louie the lawyer, Umberto the farmer. With such qualifications they could have made it anywhere in the world because the world was still young enough for there to be more than enough work for every hand. But the place they actually made it to was Desolation Road.

They bounced off their railcar grimly sweaty but still devilishly handsome and swung into he Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. They banged on the service bell one after the other. Heads turned to look at them. The Gallacelli brothers smiled and waved.