Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Where are you going?” they both asked.

“The fuck out of here,” Princess said, and Huff said, “Where she’s going.” They pulled each other again, and then Huff let go.

“Fucked-up crazy shit!” Princess said. Huff thought there was something poignant in her tone, as if she were saying, I want to go with you, but— she hurried down the path, which actually ran deeper, that way, into the park. Huff turned and followed the last of the little animals, telling himself that he had to see what the Mayor was up to, but also understanding that there was something very special about that lady besides her ax. He was slower than the squirrels but faster than the raccoons, who ambled and sniffed on their way. The lady’s armored head was shining under the moon; she was easy to follow even when the path twisted and turned and became overgrown with dark ferns.

It was a pleasant walk. Huff got used to things pretty quickly — it was a special talent, related to his tolerance for strangeness. It was good to be able to sleep anywhere, when you slept everywhere, and good to be an easily contented person (though not a person accepting of injustice), when your luck was bad and your life was hard. So Huff enjoyed the bright low-hanging moon and the wisps of fog and the noise and proximity of the animals as they went, and even the collapsing-pumpkin faces of the Mayor’s little old man and woman. But most of all he enjoyed the sight of the lady, who was lovely and rather awesome even from behind, and he enjoyed her odor, something he had not appreciated from on high.

They marched for a little while, longer than ought to have been possible, given the size of the park, unless they were going around in circles, which Huff thought they were not. That was all right in the same way that the purposeful bunnies all around him were all right, though he could not tolerate it when he came upon a raccoon in the road worrying a pair of boxer shorts with his teeth. Huff shooed him away, and put the shorts, which were blue, and printed with little red Scotty dogs, on his head. The farther Huff proceeded down the road, the more he knew just where he was going as well: after the lady. It didn’t matter if she was an agent of the Mayor or something else — possibly even more dangerous — he was still going to follow her and talk to her and figure her out.

The procession stopped at a rectangular clearing, the same size and shape as the tennis courts, and Huff thought it might actually have been the same place, since the trees that surrounded the clearing looked about the same as the ones that surrounded the tennis courts, even if there were no houses visible through the trees. The animals took up places at the edge of the field, giving a wide berth as they went to the figure standing in the middle. He was smiling hugely. Huff could see that even from yards and yards away, and it was that vain, shiteating smile as much as the malicious aura that radiated off the man that made him easy to recognize, despite the darkness and the distance. It was the Mayor.

“Milady,” he said. “I said I would eat you last. Would you prefer I do it now?”

“It’s time,” the lady said, “for us to fight again. Let’s make a noise, Puck.”

“Did you make walls out of the air?” he asked her. “I want ice cream and a little mortal blood, but my way is blocked.” The lady shrugged. “No matter,” he said. “I’ll be through by dawn.”

“Or bound again,” she said. “Or dead.” She swung her ax over her head and ran at him, and he laughed at her, which seemed unbearably disrespectful to Huff. He ran at him, too, though he wasn’t a violent person and had always been someone who fought with his wits and not with his fists. It was the very last straw, though, and worse somehow than feeding his constituents to his constituents, for this smirking asshole to be rude to someone who was obviously the most wonderful woman in the world.

The Mayor slapped the woman down with one blow — her ax went flying and stuck in a tree — and then he caught Huff by his neck and lifted him up and sniffed at him. “Milady,” he said, “did you bring me ice cream as well?” Huff had all sorts of things to say, now that he had an audience with the man, but he couldn’t breathe to speak. The Mayor sniffed at him and smiled even wider — Huff could see the whole panoply of animals and goons reflected behind him in the man’s teeth — and then his smile vanished. “What’s this?’ he asked. “Could this be?” He took a long draught off the underwear on Huff ’s head, and then he shook him. “Are you disguised, my friend?” he said, giving Huff a shake. “My old friend!” he said, taking another sniff. “My dear friend! Or is this a trick?”

“Maybe,” Huff tried to say, not sure what answer would distress the Mayor more. He plucked the underwear from Huff ’s head, then dropped him, and dragged him to where the lady was standing again, rubbing a bruise on her face.

“Maybe not,” he said, after smelling the underwear and smelling Huff again. “These do not belong to you. Milady, I wish I had time to torture you better before I eat you, but this will have to do. Obey your husband .” He took a ring from Huff ’s finger, tearing it away hard enough to hurt, and jammed it on her thumb. She was staring blankly at both of them, all the harshness drained from her face. Huff grabbed the Mayor by the arm. “I am making a citizen’s arrest,” he said. It was a giant arm, thickly muscled and as wide around as Huff’s leg, but he couldn’t seem to hold on to it.

“Abuse your wife,” the Mayor said, and ran off away into the trees.

Her parents always gave the new kids a tambourine and stuck them back with Molly, because it was easy to play the tambourine, though there were intricacies to it that nobody else understood or appreciated, and because she was nice, though she was actually only about half as nice as everyone supposed her to be. The new boy was not very different to look at than any of his predecessors, the black foster brothers and sisters who came and went and came and went, circulating one at a time through her actual family until they were inevitably ejected. She had barely learned to remember Jordan’s name before he was gone, trundled off to a Job Corps assignment in Houston, and now here was Paul, at thirteen years old a little younger than his unmet foster brother once removed, and just as bad with the tambourine. Molly stepped closer to him in the garage and tried to keep the beat in a way that was more obvious and easier to copy, but he didn’t catch on, and though he stayed in tune when he sang, he kept getting the words wrong. “I love you,” Molly sang, coming in with the rest of the family for the chorus. “I love you a lot. I love you more than you can know, but Jesus loves you more more more more! ” It wasn’t the hardest refrain to remember, but still he kept singing, “I love you so much” instead of “I love you a lot,” and “more than you can imagine” instead of “more than you can know.” It boded ill when they couldn’t get the refrain right on this song. It meant that nothing would be easy for them.

It was useless, though, to worry about them, even at this early stage, when you’d think something could be done to help them out, to make them fit in better, or to defuse the inevitable conflicts that would lead to their being sent back to the pound or shipped off to some other family, or to a trade school, or the Marines — or to any number of pseudo-opportunities that were the consolation prize for not actually becoming a member of the musical Archer family of Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Molly smiled at Paul, and he nodded coolly at her, which was something different. Usually, they just gave her a nervous smile on the first day, but he seemed to be appraising her somehow, looking her up and down with the nod. Then he turned, swinging his hips one way and his shoulders another, and he gave the same look to her sister Mary, where she stood tossing her hair back and forth at the keyboards, using one finger on each hand to play. He did one shake of the tambourine at her — it was off the beat — then turned around and did the same thing to her brother Colin, where he was playing the guitar, toward the front of the garage, near their parents. Colin was strumming and dipping from the waist, left and right and left, and hopping in place during the chorus. He was as pale as Molly and looked sickly all of a sudden, compared with the new boy. Molly held her breath and closed her eyes and with an effort — it was like squeezing something inside her head — she refrained from thinking something unpleasant about her actual brother.