Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.

I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.

“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”

I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Skinner’s jacket, and smiling Mick Skinner’s self-mocking smile, and I knew who he was. And what he was. The facts were assembled now, because the driver of the trike was not the only person who ought to be dead and wasn’t, and Myra Kincaid wasn’t the only person with a chunk missing from her memory. Mick Skinner knew what all my missing pieces were.

Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.

Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my body.

“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.

His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled— Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.

“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.

“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”

He puffed air out through his nose—a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”

“‘Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and manner now, blackened and smoking and too hot for safety.

He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”

“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”

“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”

“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”

Mick’s new mouth pressed closed, crookedly. Then he said, “We all did. There wasn’t one of us I’d trust to feed my dog for a weekend. But that was a long time ago.”

“As long as that?” Her smile was really only a baring of her teeth. “Heavens, Mick, did you think we’d evolve !”

It took him a moment to rally. “Learn, maybe? Change? People do.” But his voice was fainter, battered down by her manner.

“And lucky they are, too. But we’re not people. We’re sharks. It’s our nature. We can’t stand to see clear water without a little blood in it.”

“Fran, can’t you—”

“What are you doing here, Mick?”

“Pardon me,” I said, and I was as amazed to hear my voice as they seemed to be. “If neither of you minds, we could have this conversation in the next room just as well. And if you’re going to shoot him,” I added to the woman named Frances, “I wish you wouldn’t do it in here.”

She stared at me, then took in the room with a quick shift of her gaze. I think, until then, she hadn’t really seen it. “Bless my soul,” she said at last. “It’s the lost graveyard of the Sonys.”

“If it was only a graveyard, I wouldn’t care,” I replied, though I hated to do it. “They all work.”

She looked the room over again, this time with more attention. Then she looked at me. I could almost hear her thinking, though not well enough to know in what direction. “Lead the way,” she ordered. So I did. She gestured Mick Skinner out behind me.

I walked into the middle room. The teakettle was lying on the floor in a small puddle; most of the water seemed to have disappeared between the floorboards. That, and a black smudge on the ceiling, were all that were left to remind me of La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle. I took the kettle to the sink and started pumping water into it. There was a calm and reasoned dialogue going on in my head, something like:

This is a ridiculous thing to be doing.

The whole business is ridiculous. What should I be doing that would make more sense?

She might shoot me.

For making tea? I suppose she might. She might shoot me for not making tea.

In other words, I can’t fix things no matter what I do, so I might as well do anything at all.

I think I’m so scared I can’t feel it.

When I turned back to face my houseguests, Mick Skinner was standing by one felt-covered window, watching me, bemused and a little alarmed. And he was Mick Skinner; I was surprised at how easy it was to think of him that way, independent of his looks.

The woman, Frances, was perched lightly on the arm of the leather slingshot chair, the rifle comfortable in the crook of her right arm, its barrel tracking Mick Skinner. A casual sweep of that arm, and both he and I would be perforated at the waist.

She said, “I haven’t forgotten the subject before the committee, even if you have. What brought you here, Mick?”

“I came back for my jacket.”

“No, no, answer the exam questions fully; you’ve no idea what we’re testing for. This city, Skinner, you idiot, just now, for what God-damned purpose.”

He looked steadily at her, his face baffled and hurt, and resigned. “Do you still have purposes?” he asked. “I used mine up. I just move around, Fran.”

“Why move here?”

“I’d never been here, so I came. I had a notion to go on north and try to get into Canada.”

“A pitiful and profoundly moving story,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been hoping she’d believe him until I felt my spirits fall. “Let’s explore a promising side passage, shall we? What’s your connection to our chum here?” She tipped her head toward me.

Mick Skinner, inexplicably, was silent. “He rode me,” I told her, and stopped. The bald statement of it, out loud, sickened me; and it didn’t answer her questions, or mine.

“Oh, my downy chick, my sweet hatchling, I know that. I knew there was one of us here by the stink of it. When I laid hands on you, there on the bridge, I got the smell of Horseman in my nose so strong I thought I’d gag with it.

“Did you know that, Mick? That we leave a trail behind us, a spoor of possession? It’s related, I think, to the way we recognize each other in some other poor bastard’s body. And I thought, when I got a whiff of this one, that it was damned familiar.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Mick said. He sounded as if the words were being squeezed out of him. “I had… some bad rides. I didn’t know what happened the first time. I didn’t make the switch, it just—”

“Don’t, please, spare us the gory details,” Frances said pleasantly.

“The body I was on got hit by a car,” he said. I could tell—I thought I could tell—he hated doing it. “And suddenly I was three streets over, on Sparrow, being pushed out a door.” I had been in danger of being thrown through the door; if he had, by skill or fortune, spared me that, I owed him something. “I only stayed long enough to find another ho—another body.”