Alexander C. Irvine (8 page)

He looked around the massive trunk of the elm at the few lights still burning in the city. Had he spoken? The Rabbit alone knew, the Rabbit in the moon; the
huehueteotl,
Xiuhtecuhtli, had thrown the rabbit at the moon. It spoke with his voice.

A kaleidoscope of voices rattled in Diamond’s mind, a thousand visions of the world to come and as many memories of lives left behind.

Is he badly wounded?

This is a mortal wound, doctor.

Find Burr.

That voice, the Burr-voice, returned often, speaking to itself, gibbering about lost opportunity until stronger speech drowned it out:
Tlaloc, ima
c
pal iyoloco. He Who Makes Things Grow, he holds us
in the palm of his hand.

“I
macpal iyoloco,”
Diamond said aloud. “Sorry, Johnny.” He shook his head and began to dig.

Rain began to patter in the tree’s leaves as soon as the blade of the shovel bit into the soft earth. Diamond wished he could feel the downpour, but the canopy of leaves kept most of the rain off. Thin rivulets streamed from low-hanging branches as the rain fell harder, though, and soon Diamond was as wet as if he’d been standing atop the Second National Bank. The rain made him stronger, even as the growing mound of earth at the base of the elm turned into mud and slid back into the hole he was digging.

He kept doggedly at it, not even certain of what he was supposed to find. Lupita’s voice came frequently, but it was always faint and quavering, the words mostly lost among the myriad other voices that competed for Diamond’s attention. She had told him to dig here, that something was buried in the roots of the tree that Steen wanted very badly; that was good enough for him.

I
never wanted to be dead,
Diamond thought, chopping through a root.
And once I was dead, I damn sure didn’t want to come back, with no one but the moon to talk to.
He felt like Tecuciztecatl, standing before the hearth that would ignite the sun; he knew what he had to do, but was afraid to do it.

Steen had been right when he said that there were worse places than Tlalocan. But even leaving the paradise of afternoon would have been tolerable, Diamond thought, if he could have left it completely behind. As it was, he had been given a glimpse, and now the voices, the smells and colors of the place followed him.

It was all Steen’s fault. Why was he getting the mask for Steen?

But it hadn’t been his idea. Other voices were speaking for him, and he couldn’t always even move his own body.
Imacpal iyoloco.
Drowning him, Steen had turned him into a puppet.

“Damn Wide Hat to hell,” Diamond panted, then he stopped and stood up. Wide Hat? He knew he meant Steen, but he had never heard the wagoner referred to by that name.

“Sorry, Johnny,” he said bitterly. “No telling who’s in your head now.”

The root snapped under a last thrust and the shovel struck something with a sharp clank. All of the voices immediately fell silent, although Diamond could feel their intent focus.

He realized that he could see better at night than he used to; the scored corner of metal glinted despite the heavy rain and clouds, catching his attention before the rim of the hole collapsed and covered it again. He dropped to his knees, then flat onto his belly, digging in the mud until his arms were buried to the elbows. Water ran down Diamond’s neck and dripped off the tip of his nose as he worked one hand through the muck under the flat, heavy box. With the other, he scooped mud away behind him, finally exposing the lid.

He seized the corner, the weight of his body loosening the walls of the shallow hole. Grunting, he pulled the box halfway loose, but the earth under him finally gave way and he slid forward. His head went briefly underwater, and he paused there a moment to rest. It was too hard to be on land all the time.

Then he righted himself, got his feet under him, and jerked the box free. He pushed it up onto solid ground and hoisted himself out of the thigh-deep hole. It was rapidly filling with water, and he shoveled the rest of the mudpile back into it. The quagmire would be noticed in the morning, but Diamond planned to be far away by then.

The pelting rain had cut visibility to a few feet, drowning the scattered lights that still burned in the city. Diamond decided that was a good thing; a black man digging at the base of the Shackamaxon Elm, where William Perm himself had made peace with Tamanend, would be sure to rouse suspicion.

He laughed out loud suddenly. “What could they do to me? Sorry, Johnny—not much.” Diamond sat heavily at the base of the tree and inspected the box. Its lid was about twelve by eighteen inches and it measured maybe six inches deep, made of some kind ol lacquered wood. Beaten copper, green from long burial, reinforced the corners, and a pattern was carved into the lid. He held the box out into the rain until it was washed clean, then examined the picture.

It was an engraving of a beast that combined features of man and jaguar, adorned in cloak and headdress. Diamond looked closer; its tongue appeared to be forked, and if he wasn’t mistaken its eyebrows were upswept feathers, smaller and thinner than those that made up the cloak. It was depicted from the waist up, puzzling Diamond until he turned the box over and saw that its lower half was engraved there.

The box had no lock and appeared to open lengthwise, with the carving split by an invisible hinge. If the box was opened, Diamond realized, the engraving would be made whole. And what would happen then?

It’s an engraving of the chacmool,
Lupita said. The other voices murmured a nervous assent.

“I know,” Diamond said aloud.

You know nothing,
Lupita said shrewishly.
No Mexica carved that box, no Toltec or Olmec.

“Lupita, if you’re going to rattle in my head, say something,” Diamond groused. He opened the box.

The darkness inside it leaped at him with a snarl. An agonizing cold weight pressed on his forehead, and he reeled back, dropping the box and crying out like a child.

Then, with a light push, the cold was gone. Diamond rolled in the mud, clutching his head until the pain subsided sufficiently for him to sit up and lean against the solid weight of the tree.

Have to get wet again, he thought. Been on land too long.

The rain had stopped. Diamond looked up and saw stars winking again through the elm’s dripping leaves, and he saw the Rabbit’s head peeking from the shadowed part of the moon. His teeth ached like they were all going to fall out.

Idiot,
Lupita said. Her voice was distant, quavering.
Get the mask and go before Maskansisil himself strings your guts around this tree.

I can go now, Diamond thought. Whatevet was in the box freed me, a little bit. I can do what I want.

And Riley Steen, that means you can go to hell.

Diamond looked for the box and saw only a canvas-wrapped bundle, lying amid leaves stripped from the tree by the pelting rain. Then he found the box where he’d dropped it on the filled-in hole. He nodded to himself; seemed like he owed old Wide Hat a bad turn or two, all things considered.

The bundle seemed heavier by itself than it had been in the box, and the canvas wrapping was rotting where ir touched his hands. He shouldn’t put it back in the box again, he knew that.

Diamond laughed again, thinking of how mad Steen would be when he didn’t show up in the morning with the mask. Then he thought of what he was going to have to do, and that wasn’t quite so funny.

“Never wanted nothing to do with no magic,” Diamond grumbled as he thrust the bundle and box separately under his sodden coat and made his way down to the river. “Sorry, Johnny.”

Aarchie Prescott awoke
to the sound of cannonfire. He sat up in bed and squinted blearily out the window, half convinced he’d heard the sound in a dream. The cannon fired again as he kicked at the pile of blankets and clothing he slept under in the unheated room. His feet caught in the tangle and Archie tumbled onto the rough wooden floor.

“Dammit,” he muttered, looking at his elbow. A thick splinter was buried half an inch or more under the skin. He picked at it, ink from his fingers rubbing off on the wood, then drew it loose. It caught for a moment, then slid free, and Archie shuddered as he flicked it into a corner. The feeling of it sliding out from under his skin, the idea of something actually inside him, made him violently nauseous.

The cannon fired a third time, and Archie remembered the occasion. The Croton Aqueduct was complete, and New York was cerlebrating. After two hundred years of uncertainty, the city finally had a dependable source of water. Archie untangled his feet from the bedding and dug his trousers out of the pile. He stepped into them as he moved to the window, hooking his braces over his shoulders.

He could see two blocks north, to the intersection of Leonard, where Orange slanted away to the right. It was just after dawn, but the street was already alive with wagon and foot traffic. Drunken laborers swayed out of basement grogshops, leering and shouting at the whores who jostled with newsboys for position on the corners. The paperboys thrust their sheets in front of everyone passing, even leaping onto the running boards of passing carts to harangue the drivers for a block or so before dropping off and returning at a trot. They hawked pamphlets and broadsides on temperance, abolition, the Oregon question, anything that would draw attention. And they waved copies of the
Weekly Register,
the
Courier and Enquirer,
and the
Herald.

Below the window, a group of boys had gotten up a game of town-ball, using shingles as bases and an unripe orange for a ball. As Archie watched, one of the boys connected solidly, splattering pulpy bits of citrus across the front of Emil Kornheiser’s grocery. The old shopkeeper ran out into the middle of the street, flailing a broom like one of the boys’ bats, and the teams scattered laughing into alleyways. There they would wait until Emil withdrew and they could steal another orange from his produce bin to start the game anew. Nothing ever changed in the Five Points; the beggars, the whores, the strange boy on the corner stroking his pet rabbit and watching the game of town-ball. They would all be there tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

Archie had other plans. He felt strangely rejuvenated by his experience at the abolitionist rally, the unexpected collision of Protestant and Catholic, native and Irish, rich and poor. The tension of it captivated him. The very air of New York seemed in ferment: Romantic writers, Transcendentalist philosophers, suffragettes and abolitionists, Millerites and Fourierists and Owenites, all churning out visions of utopia. Archie, after nearly seven years of malaise, had once again been infected with desire to live. Today he would join New York in its celebration. He did not intend to waste the rare holiday.

Bennett, in a rare act of generosity, had given employees with more than five years’ service the day off to enjoy the festivities. Archie had been a pressman with the paper nearly seven years; his uiniversary would be in January, twenty days after the anniversary of the fire that had taken his family from him. Even now, thinking of it brought the meaty stink of charred flesh rushing up from his memory.

I survive it, though, he thought. Every day I survive.

For seven years, anesthetized by grief and liquor, Archie had spent his waking hours running presses and then slept tangled in the sheets of a rooming house scarcely two blocks from where his home had burned the night of the Great Fire. Bennett had asked him, in the weeks following the fire, to write an eyewitness account, and Archie had. Since then, though, nothing he’d written would phase the irascible Scot, and until the gang breakup of the American Anti-Slavery Society demonstration, Archie had moved through his toneless days animated only by memories and the fading ghost of ambition.

Like a dog returning to its own vomit, he thought from time to time. He was becoming the subject of a sermon somewhere. Old Man Miller probably published pamphlets about men like Archie. But Millerites were always littering the streets with broadsides and handbills. The last one Archie had seen offered Miller’s mathematical proof that the world would end in April.

Thinking of William Miller brought Archie’s mind around to Helen and Jane. It was only recently that Archie had been able to quarry his memories of them, chiseling aside grief to find veins of happiness. Lake Champlain was one he kept returning to, and the time Jane had looked at the moon and for no discernible reason said, “Rabbit,” in her awed little-girl voice.

“Where’s the rabbit?” Helen had said, and Jane had pointed in the full moon’s cratered face.

“Well, carrots don’t grow on the moon, and I don’t think rabbits eat cheese,” Archie had said. “He must get awfully hungry.”

They were still painful memories, even the ones—especially the ones—that had once been pleasant, but in seven years of looking for stories, Archie had found more than a few that matched his own for horror and pathos. If anything was to be had in New York, it was misfortune; fires, pox and cholera, starvation and murder. Archie sought it out, chasing funeral processions to gain perspective on his own loss. Part of him was convinced that if he saw enough, he might be able to believe that Helen and Jane were just two more corpses pulled from one more fire that rated a paragraph on the
Herald’s,
back page.

“Schadenfreude,”
Udo had clucked to himself the one time Archie had been drunkenly honest enough to admit his feelings. But Archie didn’t need any Teutonic aphorisms to justify himself. It was all very simple.

You’re a bastard, Prescott,
he thought,
chasing others’ misfortune to forget your own.
That small self-loathing usually disguised itself as ambition, keeping Archie far enough out of the bottle to hold his job.

Today, though, he felt different. He felt hopeful. Somewhere out there was the story that Bennett would not be able to turn down. Maybe something would happen at the Water Celebration, something Archie Prescott alone could suitably commit to paper. Whistling a popular tune whose name he couldn’t recall, Archie rummaged in his pockets to see how much money he had and to locate his key. On the street, a wagon loaded with barrels of beer forced its way through the crowd. The driver cracked his whip over the mules, the beggars who ran alongside the wagon, and the pedestrians who blocked his way. As he cursed a knot of women going to market, two men ran to the back of the wagon and made off with a cask. As soon as they had it free, the women strolled on and the driver, none the wiser, resumed his slow progress.

At the corner beneath Archie’s window, the troop of paper-sellers converged on the wagon, their high-pitched shouts carrying above the constant din of the intersection. He looked from one to the next until he found the only girl in the group, a pathetic wisp bundled in clothes far too large and a pair of men’s brogans, a battered cap pulled low over her face to hide her disfigurement. It was her, the poor lunatic girl who had for some reason fixated on Archie, following him around and calling herself his daughter. He was already dreading the confrontation he knew awaited him on the front steps.

He looked around the room, something nagging at the back of his mind. The tick mattress on its low frame, the battered writing desk and chair rescued from the garbage, the washstand with bowl and ewer; everything he owned was in its place. He had his coat, and his notebook and pencil were in his pocket; his hat hung on a nail by the door.

The knife, that was it. Archie took a short step in the direction of the bed, but he didn’t want to look at it and be reminded. Its blade was still streaked from the intense heat of the fire, even though he’d had it polished and sharpened. A new handle had been put on as well, but the blue-brown streaks on the blade could only be removed if it was completely reground.

And memories were hardly the worst of it. Whenever he touched the knife Archie had the uneasy feeling that he was attracting … not attention exactly, but some kind of offhand regard. Of what he couldn’t say, but the feeling was there nonetheless. Every time he left his room without the knife, he was plagued by the sensation of having forgotten something. With an effort, Archie left it where it was under the bed and went out into the hall, carefully locking the door behind him.

The girl selling the
Herald
was waiting for him on the front stoop when Archie came out onto the porch. He had a few pennies fished from his pocket, hoping that for once he could just buy a paper without having to speak to her. Her addled conceit that she was his daughter brought certain memories a bit too close to the surface, and they were already bubbling dangerously high that morning. He took a deep breath, waiting for the gauntlet to begin.

“Morning, Father,” she said, pushing the stained cap up to her hairline. The pale, puckered welts that dominated the right side of her face flushed to an angry red as Archie looked at his feet, the chipped paint covering the porch, anything to avoid having to look back into her hatefully glittering eyes. “Can’t you see it’s me, Jane?”

She smiled, showing crooked gray teeth, the smile pulled into a leer by streaked ridges of scar tissue that disappeared under her cap. She had taken the cap off once, revealing the bald patches on her head and the twisted knot that had once been an ear; it had been weeks before Archie could sleep again.

“Can’t you see it’s me, you bastard?” He could see her shoes, toe to toe with his, but he still couldn’t look at her. He stood frozen in place on the slanting porch, holding out the handful of pennies and wondering for the thousandth time where she had heard that his daughter’s name had been Jane.

“In the circus Mr. Steen told me where to find you,” she said. He could smell the rancid tang of her anger, feel the tension as she trembled furiously in front of him. “In the circus they know lots of things, and when they tell you they beat you so’s you remember them right.”

Archie thought that if he had to look at her, he would simply go insane, join her in raving at passersby and accusing random workmen of being father or lover or long-lost cousin. He knew that in a few seconds, having exacted her tribute of him, she would slump and allow him to pass. As he stepped past her, careful not to brush up against the ragged cutoff overcoat she wore, she would begin to sob. By the time he reached the end of the block, she would be cursing him at the top of her lungs.

He’d written an article for Bennett about her and the multitude of others like her, demented by the savagery of their young lives, fixating on wishes and nurturing fantasies until they believed them to be true. Bennett had read it quickly while slurping oysters in his office, then set it aside. “Mad children are the project of the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society,” he’d said in his thick burr. “They don’t sell papers.”

Bennett might have been correct in his observation, but Archie wished fervently that the society would take this particular girl on as a project. She bedeviled him to the point where he could only banish the memories with gin.

Standing on the porch with his hand held out, eyes closed lest he see her ravaged face, Archie couldn’t remember what Helen had looked like. But his memory of Jane had never faded, chubby, laughing little dark-eyed Jane pointing at the moon over Lake Champlain; this wasted creature capering out of the gutter mocked her memory.

He heard her sniff, saw that as he’d expected, she was crying. She picked the pennies off his palm one by one. “The paper’s only a penny, but it’s always all right to accept a gift from your father, isn’t that right, Da?”

Archie didn’t answer. He took a paper, folding it under his arm as he walked off down the bustling street. By the time he turned down Worth toward Broadway, she was screeching like a Fury.

Broadway was full
of New York’s wealthy, promenading slowly north toward the new Croton Reservoir at Forty-second Street. Their carriages were freshly painted in vivid blues and stately black, their horses brushed to a shine and bedecked in bells and ribbons. Archie watched them as the omnibus he’d caught at City Hall Park jostled along, the driver shouting indecipherable Gaelic threats at coachmen, pedestrians, and pigs alike. A long line of similar vehicles streamed north along the thoroughfare, carrying those too poor to afford a carriage of their own. The edges of the street were jammed with families and strutting groups of young men, the men calling to the women who waved and flirted out the windows of the cabs. Serious-faced young children tried to carry themselves like the society folk across the way while avoiding the pigs that rooted in the gutters and dodged nimbly in and out of traffic. The activity was dizzying, too chaotic to be boiled down into prose. Archie leaned back against the hard wooden seat, closed his eyes, and tried again to come up with an angle on the holiday. Persistence was the key.

The omnibus cruised to a halt at the corner of Forty-second Street. This far north, Broadway was a wide dirt track, graded but not yet paved. Away to the north was farmland and the occasional sprawling manse, while to the south Archie could see the city gradually gather itself into the maelstrom of the Lower East Side and Wall Street. Bells rang as wagons moving south with produce or livestock tangled with those carrying dry goods or scrap iron north to the city’s growing outskirts. Drivers flung curses at each other and, not infrequently, exchanged lashes.

It was all, somehow, very fine. Mad little girls were a part of living in the Five Points, but New York had much else to divert the mind and engage the senses. Do not dwell, Archie told himself, on misery. Udo is right. Don’t go chasing sorrow.

Archie jumped over a wallowing sow to the margins of the torrential human flow, where people stood and meandered in small eddies instead of charging headlong into the current. A breeze came up, and a column of fallen leaves charged down the street until pedestrians crushed them underfoot. Archie walked for a short time among the crowd, getting a sense of them before arriving at the reservoir, where Mayor Morris would give his speech.

The cannonfire that had awakened him would have been the fanfare of the opening ceremonies near the northern end of Manhattan Island. That had been perhaps an hour ago; the parade would be arriving soon to make the situation even more of a mob scene than it already was. Best to find a place to sit and read the paper until the parade arrived. Reactions of the crowd to the mayor’s speech would be interesting, although hardly novel, as Bennett had no special affection for Morris and attacked him in the
Heralds
pages at every opportunity.

No surprise, Archie thought. Ever since Bennett had fallen out with Matty Van Buren, he had savaged Tammany Hall whenever he had the chance. It made little difference; Tammany owned the city, and during Old Kinderhook’s presidency, the Society had pulled America’s strings as well. Now that Van Buren was out of office, they had retreated from their ambitious national agenda, but within the city Tammany Hall had always run things fairly well the way it wanted. They were far too powerful and entrenched to be bothered by the accusations of a newspaper publisher whose audience was limited to those who could read.

Which by no means meant that they would not take measures to protect their reputation. Archie knew at least a dozen people who bore scars or a limp from having spoken the wrong way about a particular “brave” or “sachem,” as Tammany members called themselves. The terms made him snort; he didn’t think any Indian had ever been a member of the Society. Shaking his head, he unfolded the paper and found a bench to read it on.

His attention was immediately riveted by a headline below the obligatory blazing paean to the aqueduct.
tammany vote-fixing outrages r
e
vealed!
it read. Below it was the byline: Eye Peeled on Orange.

It was his byline, the one Helen used to tease him with when he dreamed of publishing his own paper some day. He had used it exactly once, when the
Herald
had run the back-page paragraph about the “other” fire of December 15, 1835.

What was Bennett thinking? Archie skimmed the story quickly—the usual collection of allegations that everyone knew to be true but nobody cared to prove, enlivened by Bennett’s bombastic editorial asides and eyewink.

Surely he had people covering Tammany Hall, and one of them had just as surely fed him the information in the article. But why publish it under Archie’s byline? Restive after Van Buren’s failed reelection bid, the Hall was inclined to return to the old days of running the city and throwing their weight around in Albany. Any attempt to shake their hold on the boroughs would bring a swift reprisal, and they doubtless had ways to find out who “Eye Peeled on Orange” was.

So Bennett was intentionally waving Archie in front of the Tammany Society, a red flag in the face of a bull already angered by the banderilla of Van Buren’s defeat. What in God’s name was in Bennett’s head? It was a situation that could get Archie killed.

Archie flinched as the paper was snatched from his hands. He looked up to see a long-legged young Irishman with a soap-locks haircut calmly fold the paper twice and slide it into the pocket of his coat. Following the motion, Archie saw red piping on the sides of the youth’s trousers. A Dead Rabbit. Tammany had found him already.

“I agree,” the Rabbit said, rubbing the few whiskers on his narrow jaw and looking around, ” ‘tis a fine day to be admirin’ yer handiwork, isn’t it? I’m a bit put out myself. All them names and I’m not mentioned once.”

Smirking, the b’hoy executed a graceful mock bow, his pale green eyes never leaving Archie’s face. “Royce McDougall, Mr. Prescott. I’ll thank you to remember that next time you take up your pen.”

He moved closer, shifting so the sun came directly over his shoulders. The blinding halo obscured the features of Royce’s face.

Archie looked away, blinking, and saw that the crowd was giving his bench a wide berth. Lounging near a pile of uprooted tree stumps were two more Rabbits, and Archie thought he saw another standing behind Royce.

“Archie?” Archie squinted back up at Royce. “I might advise you, though, in the spirit of human kindness, that there are some who might prefer that you direct your attentions elsewhere.” Royce stepped aside, and the sudden sunlight blinded Archie completely.

He ducked his head, grimacing in anticipation of the first blow, and flinched again when Royce whispered into his ear, “I’m sure a man of your perceptive qualities will take my meaning.”

When Archie could see again, the Rabbits were gone, melted into the milling crowd as a strident brass march announced the arrival of the parade.