Emma Bull - Bone Dance

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 innocent in, blank tape herself.

“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.”

Sher had both postcards, skull and toad, in her hands and was studying them. “They’re both death symbols.”

“Oh, happy bankers,” Frances sighed. “No wonder the building’s standing empty now.”

“Noooo… Theo, hasn’t your family got it? Why’s it empty?” Sher tapped the edges of the cards and fanned them like her tarot pack, her brows drawn together.

“I’m not sure. Something about security, I think. And maybe just that they’re so close in size, and somebody didn’t like the competition. It’s not really empty. It’s got stuff stored in it.”

I sat on my heels next to Frances. “What kind of stuff?”

“Groovy stuff. I’d have gotten it all by now, except you can’t exactly take most of it out in your pockets. Uninterruptible power supplies, the four-hour ones; about three dozen heavy-duty storage batteries; some charge controllers; a whole pile of halogen floods—hey, they must be replacement bulbs for the outdoor lights. Take that look off your face. Just because the place isn’t lived in doesn’t mean it’s not guarded.”

I’d forgotten LeRoy, and was startled when he said, “Y’know, if we’re not going to find the books, we might as well have dinner.”

Sher said, “LeRoy, it’s your house, but don’t you think we oughta put this back in the boxes, at least?” She flourished the postcards. “Hey, can I hang on to these?”

I stood up and worked my way around the pile to the closet again. The books I’d tried to get at on the shelf were still there. I pulled them down. Modern English Grammar, 7th Ed. Windows on Western History. And, binding and page edges irregularly tan, Adventures in Physical Science. I stared at them, and at the pile of paper on the floor, and the postcards in Sher’s hand.

“If you want to send a message,” I said softly, frowning again at the books, “try Western Union.” But no telegrams were forthcoming.

I wound up delivering the textbooks to Paulo and coming back to LeRoy’s for dinner. Theo and Frances had been right about the corn fritters. Conversation was easy around the table during the meal; but as we finished, Frances leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I think I’d like to get embarrassingly drunk, in good company. Would you mind? And Theo and Sher, too, if they can stand it?”

Sher contributed a bottle of Iron Range malt whiskey. We climbed to the warm, barely sloping roof of one of the hay sheds and sprawled there, drinking from the bottle and watching the emerging stars and talking, erratically, about nothing particular. The whiskey was smoky and full on the tongue, and the roof slope faced south, away from the City.

The bottle had gone around a few times when I dropped my gaze from the sky to the roof. Sher, Frances, and Theo were picked out in monochrome by starlight and a half moon, the uneven rickrack lines of heads, shoulders, and knees dusted silver. The moody voice of a clarinet rose behind us, from somewhere in town, asking rhythm-and-blues questions that didn’t need an answer.

Frances held the bottle on her chest and said thoughtfully:

I said, “Who—”

“W. B. Yeats,” Frances sighed. “There’s nothing like the Irish for times like this.”

“Bottle,” said Theo, and Frances passed it.

I looked at them, and thought it was no wonder that I hadn’t subscribed to the concept of friendship. The silliest exercise I could imagine would be to squeeze these three profoundly dissimilar people under the umbrella of the single word “friend.”

But, it seemed, I’d been silly. “Bottle,” I said to Theo.

“But of course, my little chickadee.”

“‘Sparrow,’ you asshole. That’s a good Fields, though.” I held the bottle up to the moon. “To us,” I said, very softly, and drank.

The moon was high when we slid, graceless but undamaged, down from the roof. Frances was still collected and fluent, but I thought the whiskey had worked; the wild taint on her words since she’d seen the postcards was gone. It occurred to me, my own feelings rocking more freely than usual on the surface of the liquor, that I’d probably just attended a wake.

We walked Frances and Theo back to LeRoy’s house. I turned to the town circle, and the sight of the farmhouse and its wide front porch. Then I said, “Sher?”

“Well, don’t shout. I’m right next to you.”

She was, too; I’d thought she’d started toward her place, but she hadn’t moved. As if she’d known I was going to ask.

“Tell me about the town,” I said, feeling the twitch of fear in my stomach that goes with the beginning of any risky enterprise.

I had good night vision, but I longed suddenly for a full moon instead of a half. Something—the moon, a star, a last lit window in a house—reflected for a moment in Sherrea’s right eye and was gone. “Why?” she asked.