Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (10 page)

M. Oller, the polecat, quite cannily proposed a solution: he offered me Niki’s services free of charge for one night, with the understanding that future nights would be paid at the full rate. I agreed, thinking myself clever because I held back my true intentions, but of course you already know about them, and I suspect M. Oller did too. I regret the fight we had about it, father, the more so because those were the last words that passed between us. I hope you may understand, the more I write, why I came to you with the request I did, and of course why I had no recourse but to take the actions I did thereafter.

He sits by himself in the changing room while the other dancers shed the uniforms of the cabaret. They talk easily of their night while he prepares his change of clothes.

“A good night, good crowd,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“How much did you get?”

“Fourteen.”

“Not bad, sister! I have twelve.”

“Any night we do better than ten is a good night. Marianne, what did you make?”

“She always makes at least twenty.”

“Tonight she should have twenty-five!”

“Twenty-four.” The graceful hare says it shyly. She is new, but there is no jealousy toward her. When a girl comes to the club who can dance the way Marianne can, she never stays for long, and the other girls cherish this proof of escape and encourage it.

With Jean’s twenty-one, Niki has made twenty-nine tonight, an unheard-of total. He fingers the blue and gold surface of the twenty-franc note he got from the young chamois. He has never held twenty francs in his paw all at once, not ever. The note feels flimsy, false, but he does not want to show it to anyone to ask if it is real. He thinks it must be, because the chamois is rich enough to ask for his company for a night, and it was more than just liquor-fueled desire; M. Oller talked to the young antelope afterwards, and told Niki the deal had been concluded. Niki never knows what price is set, because the money goes to M. Oller first. But last time, ten francs came back to Niki, and the other dancers say that at least that much also went to M. Oller.

M. Oller does not keep that much of all the dancers’ gratuities; when Niki gives him the nine one-franc notes, M. Oller will give him back eight francs and ten centimes of real money. But because the twenty-franc note is real, Niki does not need to exchange it with M. Oller, and so he will keep it all. More importantly, the other dancers will think he made only nine, and there will be no angry jealousy.

The ermine who came to the same box struts into the changing room, a sheaf of bills held up in her fingers. “Twenty-six, ladies. The predators always pay best.”

Unless you are a predator, Niki thinks, and sees the others in the room think the same thing, the wildcat, his friend Cireil the wolf, and the white wolf all flattening their ears, but saying nothing. There is a vixen who dances at the club, a real vixen, but she is not here tonight. The ermine has a predator’s teeth, but when she dances, it is with a mouse’s coquettish shyness, and she keeps her muzzle closed.

“But did you get a night off?” The other dancers crowd around the ermine. She has been here for three years, longer than almost any of them. For her to be requested for a night would mean that any of them might find a rich patron for one night, two nights, a lifetime.

“They will return tomorrow.” The ermine stuffs her money into a small purse and unashamedly strips her uniform off, standing naked in the room.

The girls don’t mind Niki seeing them naked, because they know he has no interest in them. They like to watch him, which makes him reluctant to let them. If only they would avert their eyes, he would feel much more at ease.

In any case, tonight he has another secret, and his nakedness does not seem as important next to concealing his money from jealous eyes. So he pulls his skirt down, ignores the lull in conversation, and pulls his pants up. When he changes out of his corset, he spends some time brushing the small false chest he wears on the floor, sliding his fingers along the thin strings that hold it in place over his shoulders and around his back.

“You must appear to be a lady,” M. Oller told Niki when he accepted him as a dancer. “Here is what the last boy wore; see if it will fit you.” And with some small modifications, it did. Niki supposes that any boys who want to dress as ladies and dance fit a similar physical type.

He has put on his loose shirt and taken the ribbons from his ears when the ermine, now wearing a simple blue dress, comes over to him. “Saw you with the goat,” she says.

“He’s a chamois.” Niki keeps his voice soft.

“Lucky you. How long has it been since a cu-cu came in here?”

“Besides Niki, you mean?” one of the other dancers calls, and there is some laughter.

Cireil comes over to stand beside Niki. “Leave him,” she says. “He’s a specialist, that’s all. More business for the rest of us.”

The ermine rolls her eyes, but says, “I shan’t dispute that,” and she leaves with her twenty-four.

Niki shoves his twenty-nine deep into the pocket of his pants. He looks into the eyes of Cireil, the kindly wolf who has been here nearly three years herself and knows that she will end up in the alleys, not in the parlor of a rich patron. “Do you think he might take you away?” she asks softly.

“Maybe.” Niki is reluctant to say it, because if he says it, then it means he believes it. But to say it is to share it with Cireil, and perhaps it will give her some pleasure. He would like that.

Her ears do perk up, and her eyes brighten. “I hope, for your sake.” She kisses his nose. “You deserve someone who will treat you well, and I fear there are not many.”

“I will accept whatever fate deals me.” Niki cannot bear to tell her what is in his heart. He will save that for later, for his dawn return to the only person he can honestly call “friend” in this whole town.

Henri Trounoir is a rat, his fur as black as night. In places, it is spattered with the paints he lives in from waking to sleeping, when he bothers to sleep. His apartment is papered with future masterpieces that slumber, awaiting only recognition to wake them so they may carry Henri to the places he knows he deserves. He sits by the single window in his studio on the foot of his bed, because he cannot afford any other furniture. He would not have oil for his lamp if Niki did not bring him some, siphoned from the lamps of the Moulin Rouge; even so, Henri does not burn the oil until the street lights go out.

The lamp is still burning, though dawn reaches rosy fingers into the room, onto the rat, onto the canvas. Henri paints with desperate fury, or else he stares gloomily at the canvas, brush hovering six inches from it. When Niki lets himself into the studio room, it is the latter state in which he finds Henri. The fox takes a seat quietly on the bed, casting a long shadow onto the floor. But the rising sun lights up his fur with a soft touch. The tip of his tail seems to glow.

Presently, Henri says, “This piece may be my greatest failure yet.”

Niki keeps his paws folded in his lap. He looks at the canvas and sees red and gold and white. “The colors look beautiful.”

“The colors are always there.” Henri heaves a sigh. “It is the art that goes missing.” He slashes the brush at the canvas, leaving a scar of red-black. His paws move with grace and ease, guiding the brush exactly as he wishes. To Niki, the strokes of the brush looked wild and random, at first. After more than a year, he has come to see the elegant precision behind them.

“There was a chamois tonight.” Niki sees the events unfold in his mind again as he relates them. “He likes…me.”

“First an elk, then a chamois. All the horned cu-cus in Lutèce will know about you soon enough.”

“The elk brought him.” Niki shifts his paws. “He gave me twenty francs.”

“Where did he put it?” Henri does not turn.

Niki stares at the painting, feeling again the thick fingers pressing the paper into his underthings, lingering there. He sees the leer on the chamois’s face as the fingers grope him. “Just my garter.”

“Liar.”

“He has money. He wants me for the night.” He hears the buzz of the chamois’s whisper in his ear again, the litany of things the young antelope wishes to do to Niki’s body, the wave of M. Oller’s paw summoning him over.

Henri slashes at the painting again. “And you will go with him.”

The crumpled twenty-franc note is light, insubstantial in Niki’s paws. He does not have to answer, does not have to speak a word.

Henri turns, then, finally. “You would give up your dancing for that? For money?”

“For freedom,” Niki says.

“You will not be free with him.”

“He could learn to love me.”

He feels the weight of Henri’s gaze. The rat exhales with a soft wheeze. “Liar.”

Niki stands and throws the twenty-franc note to the bed. “To call this ‘dance,’ what I do, it is like calling the chalkboard at the cafe ‘art.’ There is no dance for me, not any more. At least there may be love.”

“Love.” Henri sneers it. “Love is nothing more than our tragic attempt to justify the lust that animates us when we are young. Love is the name we give to the habits we have formed when we are old.”

“You needn’t repeat that so often.” Niki folds his arms and looks up out the window, at the moon.

“So I thought.” Henri looks narrowly up at him. “But it seems there may be need after all. Come,
chéri
, sit. There is love, but not in the way you are thinking of it. Love is between friends, not between sexual partners.”

“Can the two never truly meet?” Niki looks down, remaining standing. He is aware of his long, bushy tail, which is warm even in the cool studio, which nearly brushes the floor as it swings back and forth.

“Never, Nikolai my friend. Now come, sit, and I will resume painting you.”

Henri takes the canvas from its easel and replaces it with another. Niki strips slowly out of his clothes and sits on the bed, wrapping his tail around in the position he remembered. Henri shifts his position minutely, adjusts the tail, and then sets to painting.

This does not feel as shameful as dancing obscenely in front of the money-waving throng. Niki is not the most popular dancer by any means, but he has felt many paws and hands, claws and callused pads, on his chest and his sides, on his tail and under it, on his thighs and higher up. Being nude and exposed like this for Henri, knowing the rat wants only to look and paint, is relaxing, uplifting. Niki remembers, at times like this, that there is more to the world than a dance in a cabaret. He notices a spot of red paint on his side, just by his chest, where Henri touched him. I will have to wash that off, he thinks.

Sol’s radio blared to life with some electronica pop song. He jerked awake and heard the thump of his phone on the carpet. He’d fallen asleep reading again. He stumbled out of bed and scanned the floor until he found the phone. Dead, of course. Sighing, he plugged it in and shuffled out the door to the shower.

The water warmed quickly, and he stepped in, still feeling a little of the dancer in him. His tail wasn’t as long, and when he tried to spin in the shower, he was painfully aware of how clumsy he was. No dancer, he, not like Niki. It was funny, that last section of the book being from the fox’s viewpoint. Sol must have been really tired, because he barely remembered reading it, but it sure had been intense. And parts of it—stripping clothes off, the image of the naked fox—had been pretty good. He grinned and rubbed a paw down his side, getting the fur wet as he imagined a dancer’s curves under his fingers.

A spot on his fur, just to the side of his chest, felt rough against his paw. He looked down and saw, reflected in the light, a patch of red on his side.

Against the black fur, it was barely visible, and it disappeared as soon as he moved his head. He rubbed again with his paw and thought he saw a sheen of red on the pad, but in the shower’s light, he wasn’t sure. There was definitely some red in the water on the floor; at least, it looked that way when he was standing, but by the time he crouched down to get a better look, the water had washed away any color that was there.

How could he have gotten red on his fur? It didn’t smell like blood, and he didn’t hurt anywhere that he could be bleeding from. He wiped his paw on the shower wall and saw a faint wash of pink, a bright pink.

What the hell?

The fur around the side of his chest felt slightly sticky. Or was he imagining that? He rubbed at it and the stickiness vanished beneath his paw pads. Had it ever really been there? And where had it come from?

When he got back to his room, towel wrapped around his waist, he rubbed at the bedsheets, but found no red stickiness. He turned his shirt inside out, but the white cotton was unmarred by any red. Then where—

His phone’s charging light winked at him from the nightstand. Right—the story. He grabbed the phone and opened the e-book. His claws flicked through the text, back and forth. There was Jean’s first glimpse of Niki, there was his negotiation with M. Oller, and then—on the next page, Jean was talking about being eager to return to the Moulin Rouge.

Had he flipped forward somehow? Sol skimmed the rest of the book. Nowhere did the book switch points of view that he could see. But that wasn’t right. It had to be in there. He called the search function and put in—what was the rat’s name? Henry Troonoowar?

His claws hesitated over the keys. It was something like that, something like “True-Nwar,” but he had no idea how to spell it. How could he have forgotten that? He must have read the word somewhere. How else did he know it? He didn’t forget words, not that quickly. So that meant…that meant that he had not actually read the word. He’d only thought it—or rather, Niki had thought it, in a dream, and Sol had
heard
him.

He set the phone down, and sat on the bed, tail curling tightly around his hip. Had that last part of the story been nothing but a dream? The more he thought about it, the more the events felt less like an engrossing book and more as though he himself had experienced them. Sitting on the bed, sweeping his tail around a certain way…his didn’t reach as far along as Niki’s did, but he remembered the sensation. And the rat had touched him—Niki—right there, on the side of the chest.

Where the red in the shower had been.

Sol’s paws began shaking. He clasped them together and pressed them to his stomach. Even against his fur, they felt chilled. His ears flattened and his tail shivered. Either something really weird had happened, or he was hallucinating that something really weird had happened. He wasn’t sure which one was worse.

Hallucinations. Meg and her absinthe, the Green Fairy. There was an explanation, a reasonable one. Sol exhaled, relaxed. Meg would be pretty excited, and her vampire fox would be too, though Sol imagined him saying he’d known all along it would work.

He felt silly now, being so freaked out about it. It was probably just that paranoia he’d had all week. Still, it had been a creepy hallucination. The dream had been so real he’d believed it, but clearly he was just making up things about Jean’s book.

On the bed, the phone showed the part of the book in which Jean talked about how shy he was placing the money in Niki’s garter. In the dream, Niki’s memory of the feeling of Jean’s thick fingers had been vivid, not in the garter, not shy at all, and the twenty-franc note he said had been stolen had made its way into Niki’s paws. Where had those images come from? Sol had felt so connected to Jean during that last part. His heart beat faster when he read about touching the dancer’s thigh, finding out he was male…Sol had known he was going to have fantasies about that, but if he’d chosen to have dreams, they would have been considerably different. He would have felt shy and excited, like Jean had written, not bold and crude like the Jean Niki knew. Or that Sol had dreamed Niki knew.

He sat on the bed and closed his eyes, resting his head on his paws. Why had he had that dream in which the bright, wonderful world Jean had written about was sordid and sad? What twisted thing in him needed to turn his fantasies dark?

His mother called from downstairs to ask if he was ready. He jumped off the bed, sending his phone to the floor with another thump. Quickly, he dressed, grabbed his school bag and phone, and ran down to breakfast. Warm grits and sunshine eased his worries about his dreams. He’d had nightmares before, vivid ones in which bands of friends or soldiers were hunting him for being gay. This dream had just been a little more real than those because of the absinthe, that was all. Though the red in his fur had been weird, and still made his fur crawl when he thought about it.

On the bus, he kept rubbing at the spot on his side, tapping his paw until they got to Meg’s stop. When she got on, he waved at her and pointed at the empty seat next to him. She just rolled her eyes and kept walking. A small grey wolf sat with Sol instead.

Fine, Sol thought, if she was going to be that way, he wouldn’t talk to her until later. He kept pressing his fingers to his chest where the red had been, trying to make it look as though he were simply scratching under his shirt. This turned out not to be a good strategy when the wolf turned and said, “You got fleas or something?”

That snapped Sol’s paws back down to his lap for the rest of the ride. The last thing he needed was for someone to start telling the school he had fleas, on top of being a perv who was no longer even as good as a coyote. He stared out the window but did not see any of the houses as they rolled by. His eyes were back in a small artist’s studio in Montmartre, with a black rat and a red fox.

Most dreams faded with time. This one became more real the more he thought about it. He did not remember registering the smell of stale tobacco in the dream, but now he felt it in his nose. The textures of the clothing Niki had removed, the sag of the ancient bed under his weight, Sol felt those again overlaying the soft cotton of his own shirt, the firm bus seat.

Sitting in class, he was far too preoccupied with his dream to pay any attention to anything Tanny said. She gave up after a few minutes, leaving him staring at the red fox in front of him and wondering how similar he was to Niki.

Not at all, really. Niki was a dancer, tall and slender, with powerful legs. The red fox in front of him was not overweight, but he wasn’t really slender. His tail tip could not properly be called “pure white,” either; it had picked up traces from the various grounds it had been dragged across until it was, perhaps, like one of Henri’s abstract paintings: a mixture of grey and brown dirt with red clay and highlights of green.

Sol squeezed his eyes shut, but that only brought back the artist’s studio, vividly. He pulled out his phone to text Carcy, damn the rules about texting in class, but his phone’s weak charge had already run out. He threw the phone into his bag and, with no alternative left to him, focused on the classwork.

By lunchtime, the visions of his dream had lessened, and he chased the remaining fragments away with his new lunchtime problem of how to eat vegetarian at the school cafeteria. When he dressed for practice at the end of the day, they had gone, but not the troubling emotions they’d left behind. Taric snarled at him when he came into the locker room, but Sol barely heard the words on his way to his locker. Only when he undressed, when he glanced down at his bare chest again, did he remember the red spot. He could still feel it even after he’d pulled his shirt on, even though he tried to ignore it.

The fierce determination to not think about the red spot on his fur gave him a desperate focus on the ball. To the surprise of both his coaches and himself, this improved his play. “Nice hustle out there, Sol,” Mr. Zerling said as Sol leapt to his side to spear a ground ball.

In the batting cage, the extra focus did not pay off as much, but at least this time Taric was on the other side of the cages and not right next to Sol, so he only intruded on the black wolf’s awareness with the occasional crack of a well-hit ball. Sol shut out the rest of the world, focusing only on the ball and his swing, and was surprised to look up after what he thought was only a few minutes to see that everyone but Taric was gone. His muscles were sore, so he shut down his machine and went in, ignoring the coyote as effectively as he’d ignored his dream.

At dinner, his father asked again if he’d stayed later than Taric, but didn’t press the issue when Sol said no. There was chicken for dinner, but there was also a large side of red beans and rice, and Sol’s father pretended not to notice when Sol didn’t take any chicken. After dinner, his mother asked him if that had all been good, and whether he was still hungry.

“I was looking up protein sources on the Internet,” Sol said. “I’ll send you links.”

“But are you still hungry now?”

He shook his head. “I’m full, I feel fine.”

“All right.” She chewed her lip. “There’s cake for dessert. It has butter in it…”

“I can eat butter, Mom.” Sol smiled. “I’m not vegan. Anyway, you made the beans and rice with butter, right?”

She shook her head slowly. “Olive oil. I didn’t know…the Finches don’t eat butter or cheese.”

Did Carcy? Sol had never really asked. He just knew the ram didn’t eat meat. Adding butter and cheese to his list of forbidden foods would create a whole new set of puzzles at lunchtime. He’d had cheese on a sandwich just today. “No, I think that’s fine. I’m going to do homework now.”

“You’re not going over to Meg’s?”

He paused, his tail curling and uncurling. “I…not tonight. I have a lot of stuff to do.”

“Did you two fight?”

“No.” He shook his head fast. “I just, I have a lot of reading to do on my own. She gave me books.”

The first thing he did when he got upstairs was check his plugged-in phone. There were no messages, not from Carcy nor from Meg, so he texted Carcy to ask if the ram ate butter or cheese. Then he pulled up Meg’s number, composing and discarding messages to her in his head. If he told her he’d had a dream and it had freaked him out, she would laugh. If he told her about the red spot, she would tell him he was imagining things. And while he wanted to believe that, he didn’t think he could convey how eerie it had been in just a text message. He would tell her about the dream next time he went over, he decided.

So he might as well do some research. He flopped down on the bed and pulled up his e-reader. His claw hesitated over “Confession.” Echoes of the dream swirled in his head. He chose one of the free books Meg had suggested and opened that. Reading about the trends in the art world at the time van Gogh was painting was not nearly as thrilling as reading about Jean’s visit to the Moulin Rouge, but Sol wasn’t worried it would give him crazy dreams.

It wasn’t until he was yawning and putting the phone aside to go brush his teeth that he realized that Carcy had never texted him back.