Onion, carrots, celery, the quickly even whicking of the knife reducing each to the same small regular dice swept neatly into segregated piles, white, orange, green. The onions tipped into the smaller pot on the camp stove, crackle and pop in the hot oil coating the bottom, stir and sizzle. A single bubble breaks from the richly surface of the stew that brims the larger pot beside. “An but Lily,” says the old man, closely watching them at work, and none of the rest that mill about the warehouse floor, or the art-filled stalls. “Herself most powerful sad.” A bucket hat rumpled in his hands. “Missin your ways about’n house. The marvelous scent a yon pottage.” His eyes close beatifically. The Buggane with a shrug stirs softening onions. Powys dices the last of the celery.
“Lea this place,” says the old man. “Come home wi me.” Goggie, scattering a pinch of salt over the onions, timidly shakes her head. “Can’t,” says Powys, wiping down his knife.
“Can’t?” says the old man, with a flash of heat. “Yer nawt suchen fool, a course ye’n.”
“Can’t,” says Powys, eyeing the onions. “I never served your house.”
That hat’s dashed to the floor, “Nen matter!” the old man snaps, and then, relenting almost immediately, “Y’ars mended be done. Broths a simmer. Herself missen’em so, an all.” He makes no move to retrieve his hat. “Ye’n your portion, ever an always. Bonds’n bond.”
“We have our portion.” Powys lays a hand on Goggie’s, Goggie who’s trembling, eyes fixed on that hat. “The Queen herself has seen to that.”
“As unnatural! All yon standen about. An work needs done!”
“True, m’lord,” says Powys. The Buggane spills carrots into the pot with the onions, stirring, stirring. Goggie leaps to stoop for the hat, darts behind the old man to set it on his seething head, smooth the rumpled brim, “Thar,” he says, “good girl. We’s go.”
Goggie quickly shakes her downturned head.
“Ranh!” The old man shoves the smaller pot to topple off the camp stove spilling clatter and yellow, white and orange, oily splat at the Buggane’s shaggy feet. “Enow! Herself’s awaiten! Is’t a-comin home, and back wi’me, anow!” Seizing Goggie by an arm she tries to yank away with a shriek. Powys turns away. The Buggane drops the spoon. “Hey!” says someone, someone else.
Scrape and clank she steps from the crowd that’s gathered about, black motorcycle jacket over a flowery sundress, planting a scabbard the dull iron chape of it ringing on concrete, wood frame rising to a polished throat cuffed with felted wool, the mighty quillions of the greatsword within high and and wide enough she folds her elbows crooked to lean her weight on them. “We got a problem?” says the Huntsman, Melissa.
“Nar, ne problem,” mutters the old man, letting go of Goggie. “Y’en move along.”
“And who the hell are you, telling me to move along?”
“Gwenders are the Addition, miss,” he says, touching the brim of his hat.
“And what, Gwenders, is the not-problem that made this awful mess?” A gesture, for the carrots and onions spilled to the floor. The old man turns away with a dismissive wave. “That’s right,” says Melissa. “Move the fuck along.”
She hefts the scabbard up against her shoulder and, unsteady with the weight of it, makes her way on up the aisle, busy stalls to either side and a confusion of conversations, two and not three, herself with the veil in her, plum’s a best for sweet smoke and, totaled indeed, it fell true! it fell true! and somebody somewhere is taking another run at a jig on a tin whistle. Up ahead, the wooden tub out in the middle of it all shines softly golden in the daylight, and someone slips up for a pinch, smiling as they do, and behind and above it all the upraised stage, empty but for the greenly nubbled couch, unlit.
An eruption of shrieks and screams and whooping peals of laughter, there under the overhead door, Gloria Monday in the midst of an overlapping swarm of engulfing hugs from a swirl of girls in summery togs, pogoing in their excitement, “Oh my God!” she’s crying, as they break apart enough to turn about, “Oh my God!” Seizing the shoulder of one of them, tall and blond in a T-shirt that says Catholic School, Girls Rule, St. Mary’s Academy, she bellows, “Where’s your hall pass, young lady?” and the laughter climbs wildly higher. “You should be in your third period class!”
“Well, you should be in senior year!” shouts a girl in a magenta hijab.
“Basutāsōdo!” shouts a girl in overall shorts, pointing to Melissa there at the edge of them all, both hands clamped about the wooden frame of the scabbard leaned back against her shoulder.
“Big damn sword,” says the girl in the hijab, as if explaining something, and “Is this one of your cosplayers?” says the girl in the T-shirt.
“She’s the Huntsman,” says Gloria, with a wicked grin, and Melissa glares. “But what’s going on?” says Gloria, turning away, “What is this? Why’d you guys come here?”
“Why are we here?” says the girl in the hijab, as if offended by the very question.
“It’s the last Thursday in May!” says a girl in white boots and expertly shredded jeans.
“CityFair, bitches!” shouts the girl in the T-shirt.
•
May’s primly crouched over low stacks of magazines, head and shoulders swallowed by the lower cabinets of that terribly compact kitchenette, rooting around. Jo’s stood in some of the only cleared space available in the motorcoach, a marginal meander from the bed in its nook in the back past the booth here, across from the kitchenette, up to the front seats there, windshield curtained with plain dark burlap. “You must have,” she says, “just about every single one of these by now, huh.” Every otherwise available surface is covered stacked piled high with magazines, hundreds, thousands of them neatly bulwarked against the wall, collapsing in drifts across the table, a shepherd on a donkey, a hippo plashing open-mouthed in shallows, a handful of geese in flight before two identically great blocky skyscrapers, distantly indistinct in dawnlight, the lavishly painted face of a sarcophagus, and a black leather glove clamped over the mouth of it, Inside Animal Minds, Along Afghanistan’s War-torn Frontier, Puerto Rico’s Seven-League Bootstraps, and every cover, each image and slogan neatly contained within the same rigorous border of brightly jonquil yellow.
“Oh,” May’s saying, “not hardly. They’ve been around since, oh, eighteen eighty-something? There it is.” Backing out slowly, rickety, slither and thump of a glossy toppling stack. “Snake, it would’ve bit me.” Holding up a filthy plastic jug with a scored and peeling label that says Heinz All Natural Distilled White Vinegar.
“Thanks,” says Jo, taking it from her hand. “Not just for this, the vinegar, I mean, but. Everything, you know. Letting me stay. It’s been, ah, it helped. A lot.”
“Letting you stay?” May’s smile a vague little thing, eyes hidden away behind those dark black lenses. “Come and go as you like. Who am I, that I could tell you to leave.”
“Anyway,” says Jo.
“And you and Jack have hit it off so well.”
“I guess,” says Jo.
“Use what you need,” says May, and lays a hand on the jug. “Bring back the rest.”
“Okay,” says Jo.
•
Becker’s pen, still uncapped, wobbles, pinched between thumb and forefinger. He looks up. The kid across from him, blondly sallow, too small for that brick red tie wound about in an involuted knot, scratches dutifully away with his pen, and the woman to his left, the man beside her, his bowtie crooked, and the man at the foot of the conference table, black leather vest and three or four golden necklaces. Becker frowns at the paper before him. Employment Eligibility Verification, say the letters across the top. Department of Homeland Security.
“How is everything?” says Jimmy, looking in through the doorway. He’s pulled a long grey cardigan over that T-shirt, a freighted clipboard in his hand, he’s noting the nods and mumbled affirmations, and then Becker’s hapless shrug. Jimmy, with a half-grimaced smile, crooks the fingers of his free hand. “Walk with me, Mr. Becker.”
The hall without’s made narrow by redwelds laid up along the one wall, stuffed each of them with neatly reams of printed paper, and the office there across the way lit only by the blinking lights of servers stacked on wire shelves. “I just, I don’t know,” says Becker, low and quiet. “I was expecting more of an interview. What do you even do, here?”
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“It’s right there in the name of the company, Arnie. LST. Litigation Support Technologies.”
“But what does that mean.”
Jimmy looks away. “What do you know,” he says, “about pressboard siding.”
“What?”
“Hardboard siding? Composite siding? Take sawdust, scraps, whatever you sweep off the mill floor, and instead of throwing it away, mix it with glue, resin, pour it in a mold, stick it in a pressure-cooker, voila! A cheap plank in a variety of styles and colors you can hang on the side of a house. Siding.”
“Wonderful,” says Becker.
“We are in timber country, Arnie. Don’t scoff. The downside is, if any moisture’s trapped behind the siding when it’s installed – and, one must keep in mind, the only environment sufficiently desiccate to install the stuff might be found in certain craters on the Moon, well. It rots. It falls off the house. And thus: an insurance claim.”
“Those,” says Becker, looking to the redwelds on the floor.
“One hundred and twenty-five thousand thereof, so far. And each must be examined, capturing the essential information, claimant’s name, location of the house, date of the alleged product failure, under what conditions, manufacturer and brand, was it Choctaw, Miranda, et cetera, and of course, which insurer’s on the hook.” He tucks the clipboard under his arm, reaches out to adjust the knot and drape of Becker’s tie. “You have a pulse. You can read. There are twenty-seven keyboards on the coding floor here that have to be kept clicking for at least a month to get through all of this. There’ll be a more, shall we say, precise, training, in about ten minutes. You start at fourteen an hour.”
“Litigation Support Technologies,” says Becker.
“We build databases for lawsuits,” says Jimmy.
“And all this, this really helps the, ah, claimants? With, what, a class-action lawsuit or something?”
“Oh, sweet summer child,” says Jimmy, clapping Becker on the shoulder. “Plaintiffs can’t afford an operation like this. We work for the insurance companies. Mostly.”
•
“All this is yours?”
“One of the perks of running the joint,” says Gloria, trying the switch by the door to no effect. “I get a room for me, and a room for my stuff.” She pulls out a great rosy plaque of a phone and pokes the screen, switching on a white light she shines over boxes stacked on the floor, a duffel bag, a couple of suitcases, four or five enormous blank canvases, leaned against the wall. “Where are you staying, these days?”
Melissa shrugs. “Here, I guess.” Stood in the doorway, knee up, boot planted back against the jamb, enormous sword in its scabbard against her shoulder. “I haven’t been back to my place in,” watching Gloria pick her way across the unlit room, “uh, since,” that thin brightness swept about, “Cinco,” says Gloria.
“Really?” says Melissa. Her propped boot slipping to the floor. “Shit, I never even got any of my,” lurching to catch the unbalanced scabbard, “shit,” she says. “What are you after, anyway?”
“An outfit for tonight.” Gloria lowers the phone, swooping the room into darkness. “I just had it out. You’d think it would be hard to misplace a thing that big.”
“Just have somebody dig it out for you. Or make you something else! One of the, uh, sewing-people? Seamstress? Made me, like, a half-dozen of these?” Fingering the briefly skirt of her flowered sundress. “I guess this is, my look, now, or something.” Clatter and scrape as Gloria shoves something aside. “So,” says Melissa. “You’re going out? With those girls?”
“My friends, yeah,” says Gloria. “It’s something we do every year. First night of the Rose Festival, when they open the carnival in Waterfront Park.” Taking a broad unsteady step over something. “I mean, I haven’t gone out in,” shoving a box aside, “Jesus.”
“I have to go with you,” says Melissa, nudging a ring at the throat of the scabbard, clink.
“What?”
“Her majesty said. If you go out, I go with you. To keep you safe.”
“From what?”
Melissa shrugs.
“I swear,” says Gloria, throwing up her hands, the light a wildly flaring beacon, “she is such a fucking,” dragging the light back, shining it on something in the corner by the door. “Well, shit.”
“You’re, like, important, to all of this,” says Melissa, as Gloria struggles back across the room. “But also, she, you know,” as Gloria reaches a hunched shape in the corner, and the buzz of a zipper, “cares. About you. Whoa,” as light glimmers over the dark stuff within. “I am gonna be underdressed.”
•
Propped on the mantel a portrait in oils, a beagle, white, spotted with black and tan, stood proudly in a field. He eyes it, hands clasped behind his back, stiff dark jeans and a two-tone shirt, pale blue and cream, embroidered across the back with calligraphy that says Spare No One. Slick back hair tied back with a red scarf. His posture shifts at the footfall behind him, but he doesn’t look away from the painting. Trees lower in the distance, and clouds fill the sky of it with brushstrokes.
“Your pardon, sir,” says the man in the doorway, shoulders straining his blue T-shirt, mustaches long and thick, ends of them weighted with pewter beads. “I hadn’t known our host to’ve been previously engaged.”
The man by the mantel offers a gracious nod. “Your Viscount’s quite the busy man. Perhaps he seeks efficiency.”
“Then I must ask your pardon a second time – I am Pyrocles, Anvil of the court, but yourself I do not know at all.”
“Joaquin,” says the man by the mantel. “Late of Sacramento.”
“The Camellia Court?”
“That court is no more, sir.”
“I,” there, in the middle of the room, Pyrocles folds his hands together. “I see. Your, Queen, is she – ”
“It was quick,” says Joaquin, “though it had been coming for some time.”
“You’re here, then, at the Viscount’s invitation?” Rattle of china in the doorway, a glumly narrow man slips in to set a tray on the table low between wingback chairs, cups and saucers and a steaming clay pot, sugar bowl and tongs, dishes of cream and lemon slices. “What is it?” says Joaquin.
“His excellency,” says the narrow man, a rusty croak, “does crave your kind indulgence – ”
“The tea,” says Joaquin. “What is it.”
“Da Hong Pao,” says the narrow man, chin tucked behind a high white collar. “A Wuyi oolong, from a mother tree.” Nodding, he takes his leave.
“We’re to serve ourselves, it seems.” Joaquin tongs a couple of cubes of sugar into a cup.
“Efficiency,” says Pyrocles.
Joaquin’s smile is faint as he pours the tea. “So,” he says, lifting his cup, “was it,” even as Pyrocles is saying, “The last few months,” and they both stop, interrupted.
“Difficult, but,” says Pyrocles.
“Of course,” says Joaquin.
“Gentlemen!” Agravante in shirtsleeves sweeps into the room, “excellent, excellent,” a hand for Pyrocles to shake, and Joaquin, “you’ve had some refreshment, and accomplished already what I’d hoped to achieve, acquainting yourselves each with the other.” His tie of pink and blue in a loose wide knot, and about his neck a bulky set of headphones, nestled under bobbing dreads.
“Joaquin tells us the Queen of Camellias has fallen, and the court there is no more,” says Pyrocles.
“Indeed,” says Agravante. “Bitter news. And of course our sympathies must be extended to them all – but from such generosity, opportunity does likewise grow.”
“My lord?” says Pyrocles. Joaquin sips his tea.
“Despite our late King’s efforts,” says Agravante, “we’re yet a number short of a court’s full complement.”
Pyrocles looks to Joaquin. “What office, sir, did you fulfill, in Sacramento?”
“Shootist,” says Joaquin.
“Every modern court must have one,” says Agravante. “But!” A gesture with the phone in his hand, cords lopping from it to the headset. “Acquaintanceship’s not friendship. There’s work yet to be done, if we’re to be friends,” a smile for Joaquin, “pleasant work, to be sure, but work nonetheless.” Turning to Pyrocles. “It would give us all great pleasure, good Sir Anvil, I am certain, were you but to entertain our guest this very night. Show him the city as you know it to be, and he in turn might show himself to you.”
“My lord,” says Pyrocles, “forgive me, but perhaps, another night?”
Agravante frowns. “He’s away tomorrow – quickly to return, no doubt,” another gesture with that phone, at once forestalling and magnanimous, to Joaquin, who says, “I’m next for the Saltwater Court.”
“They, too, wish to be modern?” says Pyrocles.
“I’m certain,” says Agravante, after a moment a touch too long, “our Anvil will show you the best the City of Roses has to offer. Indulge yourselves!” Reaching up to settle the headphones over his ears, opening the phone in his hand, he turns and leaves the room. Pyrocles sighs.
“Subtle,” says Joaquin, setting down his cup, empty but for a sludge of undissolved sugar.
•
A flatbed trailer, backed onto the grass, perpendicular to the river, parallel to the span of the bridge above, and a compressor kicks itself to chugging life. Squeal of an electric guitar, percussive keyboard riff, some handclaps all tinny from speakers mounted there, and there, on lofted poles all strung with lights, the wind blows hard against this mountainside, a soaring voice, across the sea into my soul, and roustabouts and teamsters hop onto the sides and tail of the trailer, looking over its hulking load, knocking this loose with a clang, shunting that home. Sigh and groan of pneumatics as two great girders red and yellow and green hoist themselves, hinged at the front end, up until they tower above the traffic passing back and forth along the bridge. Kyrie eleison, down the road that I must travel, kyrie eleison through the darkness of the night. Compressor-chug redoubles, another groaning sigh, and two more girders hinged at the tail end lift themselves and also the bulk of the trailer’s load, a great stack of rattling beams lashed to those girders, capped at their lifting ends with neat white circles faced out to either side, Funtastic, they say, in fading rounded letters, Traveling Amusements. They halt not straight upright but at an angle, and with an overwhelming hiss of air released the first two girders at the front relax, fall back from their upright stance until with a proper thunk the tips of them meet the capped tips of the others, and there’s an equilateral truss, hoisted up from the flatbed by the bridge.
Roustabouts busy themselves at the base of it, loosening the lashes of that bundle of beams until it sways depended from the apex of the truss, okay! Okay! Two of them seize the pair of beams on one side of the bundle and haul them swinging out toward the tail of the trailer, until there’s room enough for the struts at the bottom to drop, clang! into place, bracing those two beams at an angle out away from the bundle, and even as they do two others have done the same on the other side, swinging that first pair out, away, clang! toward the front. The compressor’s whine rises in pitch, chug of it now a flutter, and the whole assemblage seems to sigh, hup! shouts someone, and trembling the next pair of beams toward the tail end swing themselves out, away, as roustabouts yank down the struts, clang! and the next pair toward the front swing out, away, and so it goes, pair by pair erecting itself, segment by segment, wedge by slice, until the circle’s complete, those first two pairs meeting high above the apex of the truss at the top of what’s become a Ferris wheel. Another truck pulls up beside the trailer, and now the roustabouts leap to open the back of it, and begin unloading gondolas.