Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (16 page)

“How can you
say
that?
”
This part never changes either, though in my waking mind I say a thousand other things. “Six years, how can you fucking
say
that?”

She just shakes her head. Her voice begins to break up, swallowed by the harsh buzz of a tattoo machine choking down; her image fragments, hair face eyes breasts tattoos spattering into bits of light, jabs of black and red. The tube is running out of ink. “That’s not what I mean. You just don’t get it, Ivy.
You
never happened.
You
. Never. Happened.”

Then I wake and the panic’s full-blown, like waking into a room where a bomb’s exploded. Only there’s no bomb. What’s exploded is all inside my head.

It was years before anyone figured out how it worked, this accretion of synaptic damage, neuronal misfirings, an overstimulated fight-or-flight response; the way one tiny event becomes trapped within a web of dendrites and interneurons and triggers a cascade of cortisol and epinephrine, which in turns wakes the immense black spider that rushes out and seizes me so that I see and feel only horror, only dread, the entire world poisoned by its bite. There is no antidote—the whole disorder is really just an accumulation of symptoms, accelerated pulse-rate, racing heartbeat, shallow breathing. There is no cure, only chemicals that lull the spider back to sleep. It may be that my repeated tattooing of my own skin has somehow oversensitized me, like bad acupuncture, caused an involuntary neurochemical reaction that only makes it worse.

No one knows
.
And it’s not something Walter Burden Fox ever covered in his books.

I stared at the illustrated cards in my hands. Fox had lived not far from here, in Tenants Harbor. My mother knew him years before I was born. He was much older than she was, but in those days—this was long before e-mail and cheap long distance servers—writers and artists would travel a good distance for the company of their own kind, and certainly a lot further than from Tenants Harbor to Aranbega Island. It was the first time I can remember being really impressed by my mother, the way other people always assumed I must be. She had found me curled up in the hammock, reading
Love Plucking Rowan Berries
.

“You’re reading Burdie’s book.
”
She stooped to pick up my empty
lemonade glass.

I corrected her primly. “It’s by Walter Burden Fox.”

“Oh, I know. Burdie, that’s what he liked to be called. His son was Walter too. Wally, they called him. I knew him.”

Now, behind me, St. Bruno’s bell rang the quarter-hour. Blakie would be up by now, waiting for my arrival. I carefully placed the two cards with their fellows inside the paisley scarf, put the bundle inside my bag, and headed for Penobscot Fields.

—

Blakie and Katherine were sitting at their dining nook when I let myself in. Yesterday’s
New York Times
was spread across the table, and the remains of breakfast.

“Well,” my mother asked, white brows raised above calm grey eyes as she looked at me. “Did you throw up?”

“Oh, hush, you,” said Katherine.

“Not this time.” I bent to kiss my mother, then turned to hug Katherine. “I went to the rummage sale at St. Bruno’s, that’s why I’m late.”

“Oh, I meant to give them my clothes!” Katherine stood to get me coffee. “I brought over a few boxes of things, but I forgot the clothes. I have a whole bag, some nice Hermes scarves, too.”

“You shouldn’t give those away.” Blakie patted the table, indicating
where I should sit beside her
.
“That consignment shop in Camden gives
us good credit for them. I got this sweater there.” She touched her collar, dove-grey knit, three pearl buttons. “It’s lamb’s wool. Bergdorf Goodman. They closed ages ago. Someone must have died.”

“Oh hush,” said Katherine. She handed me a coffee mug. “Like we need credit for
clothes
.”

“Look,” I said. “Speaking of scarves—”

I pulled the paisley packet from the purse, clearing a space amidst the breakfast dishes. For a fraction of a second Blakie looked surprised;
then she blinked, and along with Katherine leaned forward expec
tantly. As I undid the wrappings the slip of paper fell onto the table beside my mother’s hand. Her gnarled fingers scrabbled at the table, finally grabbed the scrap.

“I can’t read this,” she said, adjusting her glasses as she stared and scowled. I set the stack of cards on the scarf, then slid them all across the table. I had withheld the two cards that retained their color; now I slipped them into my back jeans pocket, carefully, so they wouldn’t get damaged. The others lay in a neat pile before my mother.

“‘The Least Trumps.’” I pointed at the slip of paper. “That’s what it says.”

She looked at me sharply, then at the cards. “What do you mean? It’s a deck of cards.”

“What’s written on the paper. It says, ‘The Least Trumps.’ I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a scene in one of Fox’s books, the first one? The Least Trumps is what he calls a set of tarot cards that one of the characters uses.” I edged over beside her, and pointed at the bit of paper she held between thumb and forefinger. “I was curious if you could read that. Since you knew him? I was wondering if you recognized it. If it was his handwriting.”

“Burdie’s?” My mother shook her head, drew the paper to her face until it was just a few inches from her nose. It was the same pose she’d assumed when pretending to gaze at Wise Ant through a magnifying glass for
Life
magazine, only now it was my mother who looked puzzled, even disoriented. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

I felt a flash of dread, that now of all times would be when she started to lose it, to drift away from me and Katherine. But no. She turned to Katherine and said, “Where did we put those files? When
I was going through the letters from after the war. Do you remember?”

“Your room, I think. Do you want me to get them?”

“No, n
o
. . .
” Blakie waved me off as she stood and walked, keeping her balance by touching chair, countertop, wall on the way to her study.

Katherine looked after her, then at the innocuous shred of paper, then at me. “What is it?” She touched one unraveling corner of the scarf. “Where did you get them?”

“At the rummage sale. They were wrapped up in that, I didn’t know what they were till I got outside and opened it.”

“Pig in a poke.” Katherine winked at me. She still had her silvery hair done every Thursday, in the whipped-up spray-stiffened bouffant of her Dallas socialite days—not at the beauty parlor at the retirement center, either, but the most expensive salon in Camden. She had her nails done too, even though her hands were too twisted by arthritis to wear the bijoux rings she’d always favored, square-cut diamonds and aquamarines and the emerald my mother had given her when they first met. “I’m surprised you bought a pig in a poke, Ivy Bee.”

“Yeah. I’m surprised too.”

“Here we are.” My mother listed back into the room, settling with a thump in her chair. “Now we can see.”

She jabbed her finger at the table, where the scrap of paper fluttered like an injured moth, then handed me an envelope. “Open that, please, Ivy dear. My hands are so clumsy now.”

It was a white, letter-sized envelope, unsealed, tipsy typed address.

—

Miss Blakie Tun,

The Lonely House,

Aranbega Island, Maine.

—

Before Zip Codes, even, one faded blue four-cent stamp in one corner. The other corner with the typed return address. W
.
B. Fox, Sand Hill Road, T. Harbor, Maine.

“Look at it!” commanded Blakie.

Obediently I withdrew the letter, unfolded it, and scanned the handwritten lines, front and back, until I reached the end. Blue ink, mouse-tail flourish on the final
e
.
Very Fondly Yours, Burdie
.

“I think it’s the same writing.” I scrutinized the penmanship, while trying not to actually absorb its content. Which seemed dull in any case, something about a dog, and snow, and someone’s car getting stuck, and
Be glad when summer’s here, at least we can visit again
.

Least
. I picked up the scrap of paper to compare the two words.

“You know, they
are
the same,” I said. There was something else, too. I brought the letter to my face and sniffed it. “And you know what else? I can smell it. It smells like pipe tobacco. The scarf smells like it, too.”

“Borkum Riff.” My mother made a face. “Awful sweet stuff, I couldn’t stand it. So.”

She looked at me, grey eyes narrowed, not sly but thoughtful. “We were good friends, you know. Burdie. Very loveable man.”

Katherine nodded. “Fragile.”

“Fragile. He would have made a frail old man, wouldn’t he?” She glanced at Katherine—two strong old ladies—then at me. “I remember how much you liked his books. I’m sorry now we didn’t write to each other more, I could have given you his letters, Ivy. He always came to visit us, once or twice a year. In the summer.”

“But not after the boy died,” said Katherine.

My mother shook her head. “No, not after Wally died. Poor Burdie.”

“Poor Wally,” suggested Katherine.

It was why Fox had never completed th
e
las
t
boo
k
of th
e
quintet. His son had been killed in the Korean War. I knew that; it was one of the only really interesting, if tragic, facts about Walter Burden Fox. There had been one full-length biography, written in the 1970s, when his work achieved a minor cult status boosted by the success of Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, a brief vogue in those days for series books in uniform paperback editions.
The Alexandria Quartet
,
Children of Violence
,
A Dance to the Music of Time
.
Five Windows One Door
had never achieved that kind of popularity, of course, despite the affection for it held by figures like Anais Nin, Timothy Leary, and Virgil Thomson, themselves eclipsed now by brighter, younger lights.

Fox died in 1956. I hadn’t been born yet. I could never have met him.

Yet, in a funny way, he made me who I am—well, maybe not
me
exactly. But he certainly changed the way I thought about the world; made it seem at once unabashedly romantic and charged with a sense of imminence, as ripe with possibility as an autumn orchard is ripe with fruit. Julia and I were talking once about the 1960s—she was seven years older than me, and had lived through them as an adult, communes in Tennessee, drug dealing in Malibu, before she settled down in Rockland and opened her tattoo studio.

She said, “You want to know what the sixties were about, Ivy? The sixties were about
It could happen
.”

And that’s what Fox’s books were like
.
They gave me the sense
that there was someone leaning over my shoulder, someone whispering
It could happen
.

So I suppose you could say that Walter Burden Fox ruined the real world for me, when I didn’t find it as welcoming as the one inhabited by Mabel and Nola and the Sienno brothers. Could there ever have been a real city as marvelous as his imagined Newport? Who would ever choose to bear the weight of this world? Who would ever want to?

Still, that was my weakness, not his
.
The only thing I could really fault him for was his failure to finish that last volume. But, under the circumstances, who could blame him for that?

“So these are his cards? May I?” Katherine glanced at me. I nodded, and she picked up the deck tentatively, turned it over, and gave a little gasp. “Oh! They’re blank—”

She looked embarrassed and I laughed. “Katherine!
Now
look what you’ve done!”

“But were they like this when you got them?” She began turning the cards over, one by one, setting them out on the table as though playing an elaborate game of solitaire. “Look at this! They’re every single one of them blank. I’ve never seen such a thing.”

“All used up,” said Blakie. She folded the scarf and pushed it to one side. “You should wash that, Ivy
.
Who knows where it’s been.”

“Well, where
has
it been? Did he go to church there? St. Bruno’s?”

“I don’t remember.” Blakie’s face became a mask: as she had aged, Circe became the Sphinx. She was staring at the cards lying face-up on the table. Only of course there were no faces, just a grid of grey rectangles, some missing one or two corners or even three corners. My mother’s expression was watchful but wary; she glanced at me, then quickly looked away again. I thought of the two cards in my back pocket but said nothing. “His wife died young, he raised the boy alone. He wanted to be a writer too, you know. Probably they just ended up in someone’s barn.”

“The cards, you mean,” Katherine said mildly. Blakie looked annoyed
.
“There. That’s all of them.”

“How many are there?” I asked. Katherine began to count, but Blakie said, “Seventy-three.”

“Seventy-three?” I shook my head. “What kind of deck uses seventy-three cards?”

“Some are missing, then. There’s only seventy
.
” Katherine looked at Blakie. “Seventy-three? How do you know?”

“I just remember, that’s all,” my mother said irritably. She pointed at me.
“
You
should know
.
You read all his books.”

“Well.” I shrugged and stared at the bland pattern on the dining table, then reached for a card
.
The top right corner was missing; but how would you know it was the top? “They were only mentioned once
.
As far as I recall, anyway. Just in passing. Why do you think the corners are cut off?”

“To keep track of them.” Katherine began to collect them back into a pile. “That’s how card cheats work. Take off a little teeny bit, just enough so they can tell when they’re dealing ’em out. Which one’s an ace, which one’s a trey.”