Against the Day (68 page)

“ ‘
Problem’? It should be an
unhappy
ending?”
Bria puzzled. “Like those bloody horror shows they put on over there in Paris,
France?”

   
“Not
exactly. You already know about this stuff here.” Bringing out a small,

nearperfect crystal of Iceland spar. “Doubles the image, the
two overlap, with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate
them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it
becomes possible to saw somebody in half
optically,
and instead of two
different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking
around, who are identical in everyway,
capisci?
”

   
“Not
really. But. . .”

   
“What.”
Maybe a little defensive.

   
“Is
it a happy ending. Do they go back to being one person again?”

He stared at his shoes, and Bria
understood that she was maybe the only one in the house he could’ve counted on
to ask this question.

“No, and that’s been kind of a
running problem here. Nobody can figure out—”

   
“Oh,
Pop.”

“—how to reverse it. I’ve been
everywhere, asked everybody, college professors, people in the business, even
Harry Houdini himself, no dice. Meanwhile . . .”

   
“Don’t
tell me.”

   
“Yeah.”

   
“Well,
how many?”

   
“Maybe
. . .
two or three?”

“
Porca
miseria,
so that’s
four
or six,
right? You realize you could get sued for that?”

“It was an optical problem, I thought
it would be completely reversible. But according to Professor Vanderjuice up at
Yale, I forgot the element of time, it didn’t happen all at once, so there was
this short couple of seconds where time went on, irreversible processes of one
kind and another, this sort of gap opened up a little, and that was enough to
make it impossible to get back to exactly where we’d been.”

“And here I thought you were perfect.
Imagine my disappointment. So these subjects of yours are out there leading
double lives. They can’t be too happy with that.”

   
“Lawyers,
heckling at shows, threats of violence. The usual.”

   
“What
do we do?”

“There’s only one place in the world
that makes these units. The Isle of Mirrors in that Lagoon over in Venice,
might be only the name of some holding company by now, but they still do
produce and market the finest conjuror’s mirrors in the world. Somebody there
is bound to have an idea.”

“And we just happen to be booked in
to the Teatro Malibran in Venice in a couple of weeks.”

Yes, Luca Zombini had come home today
with the surprising news that the act was booked to tour Europe, and the whole
family, Dally included, were due to sail over on the liner S.S.
Stupendica,
only
two weeks from now! As if a valve in a distant part of the basement had just
been opened, the whole apartment was suddenly turbulent with preparation for
the journey.

When Dally had a minute to speak to Erlys
between chores, “Are you folks sure you need me along?”

“Dahlia.” Stopped just dead in her
tracks, a dustrag about to fall from her fingers.

   
“I
mean walking in like I did—”

“No
. . .
no, we were, fact is, I guess, counting on you. Dally, sakes, you
only just got here—and, well, what about the Chinese Gong Effect. . . ?”

“Oh, Bria can do that in her sleep.”

“Don’t know if you’d want to stay on
here, we’ll be subletting to those East Rumelian acrobats, it might not be
ideal company for you.”

“I’ll manage, someplace. Katie,
somebody.”

“Dahlia, now look at me.” Easier not
to have to, but the girl obliged. “I know you never meant to stay on. It
would’ve been too much to hope for. Either one of us.”

   
A
small shrug. “Never was that sure you’d even let me in.”

“But
you’re in the door, and maybe you’re, who knows,
supposed
to be with us?
somehow. . . ?”

A
silence, grave and unnatural, had crept over the lengthy apartment, as if to
suggest, without a Zombini in earshot, that this would be the perfect moment to
come out in a fierce and longheld whisper, “I was only a little baby— how
could you just leave like that?”

   
A
kind of smile, almost thankful. “Wondering when that’d come up.”

   
“I’m
not here lookin for anything.”

“Of
course not.” Was that a New York snap creeping into her voice? “Well. How much
did Merle tell you?”

   
“Nothing
bad against you. Only that you left us.”

   
“Bad
enough, I’d say.”

   
“He
knew I had to come back here. He never stopped me.”

   
“But
no message for me. No ‘the past is past,’ nothing like that.”

“If
there was anything like that, I never heard about it. Maybe . . .” She looked
up at Erlys, unsure.

   
“Maybe
he thought you should hear the story from me.”

   
“Well?
It means he trusts you to tell me the truth.”

Erlys remembered they were still
standing at opposite corners of a bedsheet. Graceful as ballroom stepping, they
moved toward each other, com

pleted the fold, redoubled the sheet, glided apart. “I’m not
sure how good a time this is to be getting into it all
. . . .
”

   
Dally
shrugged. “When’ll it be better?”

“All right.” A last look around
hoping for a smaller Zombini, any Zombini, to come in and delay
this—“When Merle and I met, I was already pregnant with you. So . . .”

There.
Dally found herself unexpectedly sitting on the davenport. Dust rose, cushions
wheezed, and underskirts sighed around her. Two or three possibilities for
snappy remarks drifted across her mind. “All right, then,” her mouth
unaccountably dry, “my real father—where is he?”

“Dahlia,”
nodding vigorously, as if not to relax into any easy distance, “he passed away.
Just a little before you were born. Streetcar accident in Cleveland. Quick as
that. His name was Bert Snidell. All that red hair of yours is from him. His
family basically threw me out. Merle gave us a home. And your ‘real’ father,
well that is Merle, more than the other would ever’ve been. That’s any help.”

   
Not
much. “Do you think this is what I want to hear? A home? Some home. You sure
skipped soon as
you
could, why not just leave me at the damn city dump
on your way out of town?” Where’d that come from? Not exactly from nowhere, but
from farther away than anything she’d felt up to now
. . . .

But
wouldn’t you know it, before she could work up much more of a head of steam,
the subgods of theatrical timing that seemed to rule this house decided about
then to put into the situation after all, and here came Nunzi and Cici in
matching white sharkskin suits, practicing Hindoo shuffles and French drops,
cheerfully oblivious to the fury and consternation in the room, and full of the
latest news about the sailing. And there Dally and Erlys would have to leave
things for a while. In fact, the chore level being what it was, till they were
on board the
Stupendica
and well out to sea.

he one time Mayva and Stray met, it was by pure accident,
over in Durango.

   
“You
two ain’t married, by any chance?”

   
“Funny
you should ask,” Reef began, but Stray spoke right up.

   
“Not
lately, M’z Traverse.”

Mayva laughed and took her hand. “I’d
like to tell you what a bargain you’d be gettin but I might need some time on
that.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t blame much of it on
you,” said Stray, “good upbringin can only go so far.”

“There was some Briggses in Ouray
County, that wouldn’t be your people, would it? Worked at the Camp Bird,
maybe?”

“Think there might’ve been cousins on
my Aunt Adelina’s side over by Lake City for a while
. . . .
” And Reef turned around just in time to see the two of
them disappear into some yardage place, jabbering away like a couple of birds
on a rooftop.

Next day Reef and Stray were on the
Denver & Rio Grande headed eventually for Arizona, together at first, soon
to be separate. Her friend Archie Dippie had a plan, not as desperately insane
as some, to go out and round up the camel herd imported years ago into Virginia
City, Nevada, to pack out salt, later delivered into Arizona for the usual
orerelated duties, eventually deemed unprofitable and set loose, by now
reverted to the wild state, spread out over thousands of square miles of
Sonoran Desert, where due to notwellunderstood factors of Nature they were said
to’ve reproduced with astonishing speed—“Even at let’s say a halfdollar a
head, it’ll be enough to retire on and go live forever as far back east as you
want—up in that Ritz Hotel, kids in cylindrical hats bringing you whatever
you desire day or night—” Reef need

act as no more than buncosteerer, all
the research chores and assumptions of risk to be borne by Archie as principal
party, “thankless tasks, all of them, but no risk, no reward, ain’t that how it
goes?”

“Ever thus in the world of affairs,”
Reef agreed, trying to look just quizzical enough to suggest the perils of
extravagance, yet not enough to offer provocation—these doubledomes being
in Reef’s experience never quite as retiring as they looked, some of them damned
touchy, as a matter of fact.

Whereas Reef’s “friends,” business
and personal, were mostly no strangers to trouble, nor that complicated to
understand, Stray’s, apt to keep more to the shadows, tended to be
practitioners of obliquity—as it quite often came down to, varieties of
pimp. Advance men, middlemen, if you liked, and not all men, of course. These
“friends” of hers, on the whole, kept getting Reef into way more trouble than
any of his “friends” had so far got her. And heaven forfend it should ever’ve
been as simple as pursuit by the law, or escape into a safer jurisdiction, no,
these strange faces bobbing up out of her past were determined to
bring him
in
as a partner on various schemes of enterprise, few of them hopeful.

During all the confabulating, she
would usually be there watching, standing by the railing up in some
gamblingsaloon loft, or gazing in through the etchedglass paneling of an office
door, as if only in girlish curiosity as to how these two separate figures in
her life might be hitting it off, though she was ready enough to claim a
commission, usually around 5 percent, on any of these deals that actually
yielded a crop. Macking for a mack, so to speak.

That was how for years, all through
that quarter of the continent, they had fought, fled, beckoned, resumed
. . . .
If you took a map and tried to
follow them over it, zigzagging town to town, back and forth, it might not have
been that easy to account for, even if you recalled how wild, how much better
than “wild” it’d been not all that many years ago, out here, even with the
workdays that had you longing for the comforts of territorial prison, yes hard
as that, when whatever was going to become yours—your land, your stock,
your family, your name, no matter, however much or little you had, you earned
it, with never no second thoughts as to just killing somebody, if it even
looked
like they might want to take it. Maybe a dog catching their scent coming
down the wind, or the way some trailhand might be wearing his waterproof, that
could be enough—didn’t matter, with everything brand new and the
soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you’d end it, cashing
’em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or
animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel
you into the beyond
. . .
why clearly
every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested
into it—Karl Marx