Need (23 page)

What had she been fearing all these years? Why fight so hard to stay blind? By the time she closed the Zoo for the day
she felt as though she’d run a marathon in concrete boots, she could hardly keep her head up or her seeing eyes open, she was lathered, dizzied, spent, and she couldn’t stop humming
Stuck on You
.

Don’t fall in love with suffering
. That had been sound advice, she should have minded it. When she locked herself inside her bedroom, and started to prepare herself for Wilfred’s lesson, she dug deep in her closet and brought out a Bird of Paradise. It wasn’t the same costume she’d worn for Charley Root, of course, she had outgrown that long ago. But Charley Root was not the only blade she’d stood to in her time. Years after his death, she had found herself back in Florida again, adrift in Sarasota, and she had met a knife named Eddie.

He wasn’t certified, only an apprentice, but he threw a nifty True-Bal bolo, 15-inch axe, handle-grip, you could see that he had potential.

And Kate had been negotiable. Since St. Martinville and the Acadia Motel she had been marking time. A year in England with Fred Root to get her health back, more or less, and ever since she’d been aimless. Working in fields and factories, knocking down pay checks, nothing more. She kept drudging up and down the Gulf Coast. Canning peas in Pensacola, shucking oysters in Mobile, flea-marketing in Bay St. Louis. Picking pepper out of flyshit. But she could find nowhere to settle and not a scrap of function. She had no skills, no value. No friends, and she wanted none. After Mary, all other girl-talk fell flat.

She took it for granted then that she would never see again. According to Monsignor Beebe, visions of the Virgin always came with an exclusive contract. You saw what you were given to see, for as long as you were found worthy. But once the engagement was over, the gift of sight withdrawn, you were retired for life.

It was an anticlimax. In Sarasota, when she wasn’t busy waitressing, Kate either got drunk or got laid. But she wasn’t much good at either. The cheap burn of alcohol that your body didn’t want. And the cheaper burn of sex, ditto. So she took to loitering without intent near St. Armand’s Circle, on the way to Lido Beach, and that was where she saw the sign.

The Sarasota School of Impalement
, it said, and when she stepped inside she found herself in a converted bowling alley, now operating as an academy for blades.

The walls were hung with portraits of the masters, past and present. Frank Dean and Paul LaCross, Sylvester Braun and the great Skeeter Vaughn. The Gibsons, who brought the first Wheel of Death to America. And Adolfo Rossi, the matchless Argentine, who used to split an apple or potato on the back of his wife’s neck with a customized machete. So far so promising, but the operation proved sloppy. Target boards hung crooked where the bowling lanes had been, and the students threw unmatched knives. There was no sawdust to keep the grips dry, no alum or brine or even horsepiss like Charley Root had used, in case of cuts.
Amateurs
, was Kate’s thought, and she was turning to leave when Eddie appeared.

He had good hands, nice and slow. Prehensile fingers, perfect balance, he had all the makings. They drank beer in a tavern on Orange Street, where the jukebox played Merle Haggard.
It’s Not Love
(
But It’s Not Bad
), the song was, and Kate always could take a hint.

He needed a partner, she needed exercise. So they had a new Bird of Paradise run up, and they started working a few shows locally, Nokomis and Gulfport, Zephyr Hills, even Tarpon Springs for sickness’ sake. Strictly small potatoes, but it beat working. Until that night in Dade City when Eddie threw a triple-time combo from behind his back,
zip, Zip, ZIP
, and in
the rush of blades Kate saw a cat on Main Street, not black but tabby, a tom, run over by a beer truck outside Sylvester’s Saloon.

So much for Monsignor Beebe. In the morning she had a new business card printed,
Your Future Is Your Fortune, Kate Root Sees All. Strict Confidentiality, Competitive Fees
, and the Bird of Paradise went feet-first into her closet.

It looked a little sickly now, a bird off its feed. All these years out of daylight had given it a jailhouse pallor, and a few of its feathers had moulted, but the main body had held intact. Not that she was planning to work in costume tonight. Live targets on a first lesson were not recommended, even with padded knives. Even so, she had a yen to try it on. Just to see if it still fitted. Whether or not it would do.

Paradise came in thirteen sections, two each for elbows, shoulders, hips, flanks, breasts and throat and one last for the topknot, but throwing knives below the waist had been illegal in Kate’s day, so the costume had no legs, only flesh-tan tights so riddled with ladders and bagged at the knees that she couldn’t use them, she had to leave her legs nude.

One glance in the mirror, and she saw that wouldn’t do. Her real flesh was too white and pink, much too torn to pass muster in any light. So she set to work with paint and brushes, powder and lotion, until she was sunset orange from ankle to crotch. Then she took a pair of eyebrow tweezers and plucked those long red hairs like weeds that were forever sprouting on the scar above her ankle. Though she knew it was a vanity. A little pathetic, really. Still, a girl had to be well-groomed.

Perhaps that would stop the itching, though nothing would stop the heat. Of all the broiling days in this killing field of a summer, today seemed the most brutal. The last day in creation that you’d choose to put on plumage. But then choice had nothing to do with this. It was an affair of honour.

Twenty pounds if not a ton the feathers seemed to weigh when she started to pin them in place. First an undercoat of dyed chicken and turkey, then blue jay and thrush at the hips, seagull in the flanks, and rising slowly, cardinal over the breasts, canary and greenfinch draped across the shoulders, peacock eyes of course for the headdress. And as the design took shape, the weight ceased to bother her. She no longer noticed the heat or the sweat rolling thick like sludge on her belly, down her spine. All that she felt was herself transformed. Age and hurt and damage wiped clean, and this high-flying bird in their place.

Orange-winged amazon at the elbows, white-eyed conure at the collarbones, and a spray of pied-pearl cockatiel, God forgive her, at the throat. Then she was completed, and she fluffed herself full, she flapped her wings, she took one look in the mirror.

She saw Mother Goose.

A stout party of undetermined sex, disguised as a woman with pantomime hips and a false bosom, disguised as an item of poultry.

Half an hour to get dressed, five seconds to strip. Birds flew helter-skelter through the bedroom, dashed themselves against the windows, such a fluttering and thrashing that the other birds downstairs in the Zoo took fright and started racketing again. The record player in Ferdousine’s room was playing
Tea for Two
, and the figure inside the mirror now was a plucked chicken, a Perdue oven-stuffer with a few stray feathers still clinging to its pelt, a bit of fluff wafting from one ear.

God grant her strength.

Or failing God, brandy. She helped herself to a tot of Ferdousine’s Courvoisier that she kept in an old bottle of Magie Noir for extremities. The burn of expensive alcohol didn’t feel much better to her than cheap, but it settled the stomach, it
was dynamite for gas. Fred Root had told her that, so it must be true.
Medicinal purposes
, she thought in his rusty voice, and she saw her horse Baloney Breath munching oats in his stall. His coat looked thick and glossy, his eyes were sharp. For an old hobbled nag, he looked in fine shape, she wouldn’t have minded a ride.

Nothing too violent, no showing-off. Just an easy lope through woods or beside a stream perhaps, that would have set her up a treat. But this was not the right moment, of course. She didn’t have any clothes on.

To work effectively with knives, she ought to be dressed, she needed to look like business. She brought out the green tweed skirt, the sensible shoes and starched blouse that she’d worn to poor Godwin’s funeral, they made her look like a schoolmistress, a woman who didn’t jangle. She popped a few Tums for safety. Left off her girdle. And crossed herself. When she went downstairs to the Zoo, transformed, none of the animals knew her. Or if they did, they gave no sign.

The boy Wilfred came dressed like a flamenco dancer in black matador pants with a silk sash, a frilly white shirt and black satin vest. “You’re late,” said Kate, though he wasn’t, and led him through the velvet curtain into the barbershop. “Let me see your hands,” she said.

As he held them straight out in front of him, palms down like a schoolboy being checked for dirty nails, Kate caught a whiff of Christian Brothers. Or Holy Martyrs, that was right. One of the sisters had big red hands, fit for a lumberjack. Which was more than you could say for these dainty items, hardly fit for a poodle-clipper. Slender girlish fingers, freshly manicured, and a pampered child’s span. Skeeter Vaughn he wasn’t. Not even Charley Root. “Are these the best you’ve got?” she asked, but he only goggled at her, he seemed to be struck dumb.

Now that she took him in whole, she saw a village idiot. The flash of his costume had fooled her at first, also the fading light in the Zoo. But here, by the spinning light of the barber’s pole, he looked a mess. The arrowhead on the bridge of his nose glowed livid; a nerve kept jumping at his temple. Bad posture and bloodshot eyes, dragging feet—he looked like a man on his way to get fried.

Best to take no notice, Kate thought. Just carry on with his lesson, as if nothing at all was amiss. She straightened his slumped shoulders, slapped at the bow of his spine. Then she pushed back the cowlick that drooped soft and glossy as a raven’s wing above his smeary eyes. “That hair’ll have to go,” she said.

Her fingers rubbed harshly at Wilfred’s scalp, roughing him up, while he suffered her. She’d never learned to cut hair properly, it was one of those courses she kept meaning to take but couldn’t ever be bothered quite. In any case, improper cutting was more fulfilling. It left her free to let the scissors snip and hack as they liked, and not be distracted from the skull beneath.

Wilfred’s was undersized but well-formed, deficient in Veneration, Sublimity, Mirthfulness and Conjugality, prodigal in Self-Esteem and Adhesiveness. No surprises there, but her true target like any phrenologist’s lay lower, more protected, in the shallows behind his ears.

The moment that she touched it, she saw him stretched on a brass bed surrounded by duck hunters, his skin blue and green like a fish seen underwater.

Odd way to carry on; a little disturbing somehow. But she had no time to ponder. That itchy spot on her ankle was giving her gyp again. Without a thought for modesty, she raised her leg and gave such a scratch that she almost drew blood. As she did so, she felt the boy shudder, and an odour like burnt Melba toast, or maybe it was scones, came to her.

Mysteries, she hated them, they stole your soul. In her perplexity she had no taste to test him further. His Alimentiveness and Continuity could remain between him and his manufacturer, she’d seen enough.

Admitted, the boy’s haircut was not her best work. One side had been cropped convict-short, while the other remained in tufts, carved seemingly at random. Better not to show him a mirror right off the bat, Kate judged, and laying down her scissors, she reached for the knives.

The shooting-gallery shape of the barbershop was ideal for the purpose. She had nailed the target to the far wall, with her spare mattress as a backdrop. In a perfected world, of course, the target would be custom-made by Crouch, something on the lines of Larry Cisewski’s Devil’s Doorway. But Crouch, as usual, was off gallivanting, so she’d had to make do with a toilet seat.

Consider it a horseshoe.

At least it was soft wood, absorbent. A worse problem was the spinning light, which created a whirlpool effect, a shifting pool of shadows. Still, this was only Lesson One. Subtleties of texture and lighting would keep. Right now, all that mattered was making a start.

Fifteen feet from the target, Kate placed the boy in throwing stance, the Address Position, with his left foot forward and his right drawn back, sunk into a half-crouch. Her hands moved briskly on his shoulders and spine, his butt, trying to set him correctly. But his body refused to be moulded. The harder she tugged and twisted him, the more he resisted her. Even gentleness failed to control him.

As a last resort, she gave her Introduction to Impalement speech. Back in Florida, when she used to give seminars, it had been considered a model of its kind. “Any determined sportsman who truly wants to become proficient in the ancient art
of impalement needs only to commence with the ability to throw a baseball, cast a fishing rod, crack a whip, or toss a playful dart,” she began. A few casual words that never failed to put novices at their ease. Only this time they failed utterly. The boy hardly even seemed to hear them. Just hung where she had placed him, tensed and rigid. Wound so tight that he couldn’t have thrown his own shadow, never mind a Harvey McBurnette.

Impatience flailed at her; whirled her into dizziness. To think that she’d passed this whole day and the endless night before in delirium, climbing walls and spitting nails. Been bombarded by pomegranate trees and peacocks, weeping yellow buttocks, women in chains, Rastamen with dreadlocks like flying kingsnakes. Debased and flogged herself, let herself be turned into Mother Goose. And all for what? This shivering, snivelling turd on toast.

This apology for a blade.

Still, she would not admit defeat, surrender wasn’t her style. “The science of knife-throwing is constructed and predicated on one elementary physical act,” she continued, and when this too failed to get a response, she grabbed the boy by his shoulder. “One elementary act,” she said, and gave him a shake. “To wit?”

“Don’t know.”

“Letting go,” said Kate.

I
n the morning Willie D had woken a healed man. As if he’d been sick with a fever and now the disease had left him. When the train pulled into his room at first light, it hadn’t rolled and tumbled him, or crushed him under its wheels like it had in his affliction, but raised him up refreshed. He’d only slept a few hours, but he felt made new.