Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Theo hadn’t moved, either. His back was to the connecting door. Did he recognize—yes, he’d known Dusty as one of Tom Worecski’s henchmen. Theo’s eyes widened, and closed; his lips pressed tight, and his shoulders rose as he filled his lungs in a rush.

“God damn it,” Theo said, heated and drawling, still facing the bed, “I thought I told you to watch him!”

My teeth snapped closed, an involuntary motion. I knew that voice.

Dusty’s head turned, just a little, and he frowned. “Boss?”

Theo scowled over his shoulder. “What the fuck were you doin’? How long has he been like this?”

There was a little of the bad truck driver from Rainbow Express in it, and some of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. But it was mostly the voice of Tom Worecski. Monte Cristo, indeed, Theo. But it would only buy a few minutes, nothing else.

“Like what?” said Dusty. He took a step closer, and the gun barrel wavered.

“If he dies, I’m gonna have your ass for breakfast. Go call downstairs for a doctor.” Theo made a little business out of checking his father’s pulse. Careful, careful—the body language would be harder than doing the voice. But of course, that was why Theo hadn’t moved from the bedside.

Dusty was still frowning. “What happened upstairs? And who’s that with you?”

A muscle stood out in Theo’s jaw. “You gonna do what I tell you, or you gonna stay and chat?”

It wasn’t quite right, and I thought Theo knew it. Did Dusty?

He lowered the gun. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, and went out into the hall. Theo let his breath out.

From the hallway door, I heard Dusty say softly, “Hey, Sonnyboy!” and I turned and saw him framed in the doorposts, sighting down the gun at Theo. I had just enough time to take the step that put me in the line of fire.

I heard three shots as Theo knocked me down from behind. Dusty wavered in the doorway and dropped the gun. I saw his face, an interesting mix of bafflement and annoyance, before he fell into the hall and was still.

Myra Kincaid now stood at the door to the next room. She wore a raincoat loosely belted over, I suspected, nothing, and her dark cherry hair fell untidily in her eyes. She looked relaxed, half awake, and held a pistol in a negligent grip, settling as I watched to point at the floor. Santos , I thought, with an upwelling of hysteria, where were they finding all these damned handguns?

“My brother was a mad dog,” she said. “But I expect I’ll miss him, anyway.” She sounded appallingly like Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind. “Tom’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said before Theo could perjure himself. I slid out from under him, and he sat up with a lurch. I got to my feet and managed not to sway too much. The pain in my shoulder was like a blunt-ended hammer that shook my whole body, and it felt as if adrenaline had raised blisters on my nerve endings. But all the while, my eyes never left Myra. The gun made her master of the room; she didn’t behave as if she knew it. “I hope you don’t feel you have to avenge him.”

“If Tom couldn’t kill you, I surely couldn’t. Dusty, not being very bright, hadn’t figured that out.”

Innocuous voice, but something out of alignment in it, in the very air. I looked into her eyes and knew she was a good deal more than half awake. Why had she just killed her brother? What was I supposed to say? Here was a cobra, out of her basket. What could I possibly play to make her dance?

“Worecski’s gone,” I said at last, “and Albrecht’s finished. The market for bravos and assassins just dried up. Where will you go now?”

Her eyelids lifted a fraction. “You’ll let me go?”

Attitude, I thought, gathered mine around me, and replied, “I think you’d better.”

“I want safe conduct.”

Good grief, who did she think I was? What did she think was happening here? “Going fast will be just as effective. Never coming back will be even more so.”

Myra shook her head and smiled. “I’ll do that. Honey, you haven’t got a clue, have you?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked with an effort.

“That’s all right—it works anyway. But if I’d known you were one of hers, I wouldn’t have had shit to do with this. That was another thing Dusty wasn’t too bright about. ‘Course, neither was Tom. I wonder what would have happened if I’d let Dusty pull that trigger.”

I understood, at last. I was alive, and Tom was dead; so I must have killed him. If I could do that, I was too dangerous to challenge. Myra had given me her brother in exchange for her life, and was impressed by my mercy. I had a strong desire to go away and be sick. “You’d better leave now,” I said.

She nodded and dropped the gun in a pocket of the raincoat. For a moment she froze, her hand in the pocket. Then she lifted her head. Her face seemed harder and older, and her lips were twisted and pouting, even as they smiled. Her eyes were rolled back and showed nothing but white.

“Tell my fierce and virtuous sister,” said a dense, caressing contralto through Myra’s mouth, “that Pombagira sends her congratulations. And reminds her that she could not have done it without me.”

Myra Kincaid and the spirit that rode her walked to the door, stepped over her dead brother’s legs, and was gone.

“Sparrow?” said Theo shakily from his place on the floor. “If anything like this comes up again, let’s split town, okay?”

“That’s a great idea. I wish you’d had it sooner.”

“It wouldn’t have worked this time.”

“You’re right.” I stumbled back against the bed and slid to the floor beside Theo. “Go tell Josh that as soon as he can spare the time from Frances, your father needs him. Hurry.”

My eyes were closed, but I could feel him crouched beside me, looking into my face. “What about you?”

“And when he’s done with everybody else, I could probably use a little help, too.”

I heard him run down the hall. Good. The rush was for Albrecht, though; I could have told Theo that I was in no danger. The fierce and virtuous sister still had a use for me.

Tom Worecski has his revenge, and a kind of temporary immortality. It might have been different if there had been a body to stand over, dispose of, remember. And it might have been different if I hadn’t seen the endings of too many horror movies.

But in my sleep I wait for the sequel. In my dreams my loved ones come close and I touch them, and his smile stretches their mouths, his voice comes out. Over and over. And when, awake, I see my loved ones, try as I will, I can’t seem to separate love from terror. It’s the perfect revenge. He would have been delighted.

I don’t dream about flat white spaces and pictographic dancers. I don’t hear the voices of spirits. I don’t miss them. And I don’t fool myself into thinking they’re gone. I just haven’t fouled anything up badly enough to require their intervention, that’s all.

I’ve written this at Sherrea’s request. Or is it a request when someone drops twenty-five pounds of manual typewriter and a monstrous pile of paper beside your plate at dinner, then asks if you’d rather do it in longhand?

“Do what?” I said.

“Your version of what happened to the power monopoly,” she told me, as if I ought to have known.

It was, and is, a very large typewriter. Finally I asked, “Does it have to rhyme?”

She said she wants a record of it for the Engineers, but I think she also means it to be therapy for me. Or maybe she doesn’t. But I’ve treated it as if it was; I’ve tried to faithfully reproduce the person who woke up on the river flats, and understand, and forgive. I’ve made progress on the first two.