Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (5 page)

The lower story of his house was dark when he opened the door, except for the kitchen; from the foyer, he saw the light around the corner of the doorway. He paused and lifted his nose. The only scent on the air was that of his mother, and the sweetness of lemon. The wall held the scents of his father and brother, too; he touched his nose to the stone and inhaled once before going into the kitchen.

His mother’s paws were deep in the soapy water of the sink. “Lemon bars smell good,” he said.

“They’re for the church sale Sunday.” She looked up at the window over the sink, at his reflection. He moved his eyes to the reflection of hers. In them, he saw the destruction of his fragile good mood before the words escaped her lips. “Sol, your father…”

“I don’t need the car.” He said it only to annoy her, as his eyes traveled down the front of the refrigerator, mapping the familiar pattern of travel magnets and notes. He played with a Rosy Arches State Park magnet that held up a meatloaf recipe, sliding a claw under the picture and then letting it snap back.

“He called Uncle Nolan. He asked if you could work in the cannery again this summer.”

The magnet clattered to the floor, the recipe drifting after it. Sol’s ears lay flat back. “I can’t do that! My fur gets all sticky, and it’s six days a week—and Uncle Nolan is—”

“I know. But Sol, if you could just see how much this means to your father…”

“What about what it means to me?”

She sighed, and turned on the water to rinse the bowl, holding her paws under it and watching the water course over her fur. “It’s only for another few months, and then the summer. Then you’ll be off to college like Natty is.” She stared down into the sink.

“It’s half a
year.
” The bravado of thinking he could endure anything had not taken into account the peach cannery. Christ. Sol stared into a vision of the hot, endless summer, trudging into the factory that was stifling even at six every morning, coming home at five in the heat of the day, the smell of peach so lodged in his nostrils that he couldn’t smell anything properly. At fifteen, he’d been enticed by the prospect of having two hundred dollars at the end of the summer. Now, he would pay all three hundred forty-one dollars and seventy-eight cents in his account to escape and go live in Millenport with Carcy for the summer.

Honestly, he’d pay it just to avoid having to talk to super-religious, homophobic Uncle Nolan. Sol’s cousin, the one who’d killed himself, had been Nolan’s son, and he’d slit his wrists in the bathtub after being told to pack his things and get out. Sol hadn’t found out that last part until Patty, Percy’s sister, had cried on his shoulder two Christmases ago.
Daddy shouldn’t have kicked him out of the house, even if he was…funny like that.
Sol hadn’t realized he himself was “funny like that” at the time; later, he’d tried to talk to Patty about it and she’d denied ever saying a word to him about it.

“If you’ll just work at the baseball. Is there another position you can play? What about outfield?”

Sol shook his head slowly. “They stick you in the outfield when all you can do is hit. There’s like five guys who hit better than I do.” Anticipating her objections, he said, “I can’t play first or third either. Maybe shortstop, but Todd is great and all the guys like him.”

“But if you practice…”

He wrapped his tail around his leg and resisted the urge to smack the magnet from Fire Beach. “I’ve been playing second base all my life, and I can’t do anything else, and Taric is just better than me! I don’t know what he wants from me. I’m doing the best I can.”

She picked up the bowl finally and ran it under the water. “Your father doesn’t want you to work in the cannery.”

“He shouldn’t be talking to Uncle Nolan. If he doesn’t want me to work there, I mean.”

His mother turned the water off and set the bowl on the counter. Water dripped from it, spreading across the stone countertop. Sol knew what she was thinking, could hear the words as though they were being broadcast from the future. His mother wrapped the dishcloth around her paws. “It’s just, after the soccer…”

“That was five years ago!” He picked at another of the magnets on the fridge. “Cor kept knocking me down. And those kids from Summervale never let me score.”

“Sweetie,” his mother said, “I know. I just think if you really put your mind to it, you can do anything you want.”

“I guess I can’t.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the kitchen. As he walked up the low staircase, he heard his mother picking up the magnets from the kitchen floor.

The light in the upstairs hallway was off, but a thin bright line glowed beneath his father’s door. He shouldered into his room and slammed the door behind him. The sound echoed satisfyingly in the silent house.

Sol put one paw on the wall near the light switch before turning it on and rested his muzzle against it, breathing in his scent and his brother’s. The number of times Natty had leaned against the wall here, talking to Sol, it was no wonder his scent had stuck, even if it had faded a bit over the last few months. If he stood right by the wall, it felt as though Natty were just outside the door. “I’ll kill myself before I go work in the cannery,” Sol muttered.

The weight of the evening’s events and threats came home to him all at once. He leaned against the wall and let his brother’s scent prop him up. Before he knew it, his phone was in his paw, and he’d called up Natty’s number. But then he thought about what he would say, and how everything would inevitably lead back to his brother asking the question, “why don’t you like baseball now?” And Sol couldn’t tell him, because Natty would see through anything he made up, and would mock him for the truth. He put the phone away and slammed his paw against the light switch.

Another switch turned on his iPod player. Heavy guitar filled the room and, he hoped, seeped out into the hallway to bother his father. But no stern knocks sounded at his door by the time he’d sent a text to Carcy, started up his computer and logged in.

Meg had updated the shared folder they were using for their project with the painting she’d shown him, plus three others in which washes of color formed dreamlike countrysides and cityscapes where light browns and blues surrounded arresting spots of bright red and yellow. He pulled up one that looked like a windmill, but it was not the mill atop the Moulin Rouge. Curious, he did a web search for paintings of the Moulin Rouge windmill and found one by an artist named Auguste Chabaud.

The night encroached on the mill around the edges, but its red paint and sails shone. Sol thought he could see what Jean had seen in it, the incongruity of the huge red windmill rising out of the old slate roofs and wood timbers. Below it, the words “MOULIN ROUGE,” spelled out in flickering points of light, were barely visible, and they did not need to be; the mill spoke for itself. Sol could almost see the crowd below the mill gazing up at it, though only a few people had been painted in the picture. He imagined he was looking at it through the window from a small painter’s room, the odor of oil paints and oil lamp filling his nose. That was the world their painter had lived in, and the Moulin Rouge was at the center of it.

He threw his shirt onto the pile near his closet, lay down, and opened his phone. Carcy still hadn’t responded. Sol wanted to send another text, but sometimes he felt like the ram was annoyed at him, and he couldn’t let that happen, not now with the car in jeopardy, when he might need to ask for even more from his boyfriend. He hadn’t told Meg about that one question that he hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask Carcy, and she hadn’t asked, probably because it was such a basic question that she couldn’t conceive that he would start making plans without having asked it. After all, she already knew she had a cousin she could stay with.

And it wasn’t that big a deal. Sol was pretty sure Carcy would be okay with him staying there. Once he asked.

He tossed those uneasy thoughts aside and flipped to the book on his phone again. Here, at least, was someone with worse problems than he had.

I will confess that when Thierry told me he wished to introduce me to the delights of the Moulin Rouge, I was more inclined to accept than I normally would have been. I had been spending a great deal of time with Minon, the son of Jacques Delamarche of the
Cie. Gle. Transatlantique
; perhaps you suspected that it was with Minon that I frequently sated my baser urges. In that safe harbor, I did not fear exposure or extortion.

However, Minon had just a few days previous confessed to me that his wife, whom he referred to as “an unholy beast with the eyes of an eagle and the disposition of an arctic cod,” had begun to suspect that the more-frequent bouts of happiness he was experiencing were in fact unrelated to the ever-larger bills she was presenting him with for her clothing and maidservants, and he feared the scandal should she leave him. As a consequence, he wished to completely remove all joy from his life by abstaining from any pleasant evenings with me.

I did not expect to find his replacement at the Moulin Rouge, but I hoped perhaps to find some companion whose beauty and grace might overcome the barrier of her gender. Indeed, my blood quickened as Thierry talked about the elegance of the dancers, the seduction in the music, and the heady aromas that awaited within from our private box. I am a slave to my body, and on that afternoon, it was my body that led me beneath the red windmill, and into the parlor that would prove my undoing.

If the street had been empty before, it was a mass of bodies by the time Thierry and I made our way down there. It was at the same time terrifying and exhilarating to be one with the crowd, where none would know who I was, that I could do anything they did, that I could have anything done to me. In the halls of the Senate, when I walk behind you, everyone knows who I am. There goes Jean, they say, the son of the great Austere de Giverne. It opens doors, but also closes them.

On that night at the Moulin Rouge, every door was open, and every door was crowded by the bohemian populace. Thierry took little notice of them; his bulk parts the crowd much as your esteemed presence does. Few people took notice of me, trailing behind him, or so I thought at the time. I would discover later that the small purse I carried was stolen from me, I presume in that crowd. At the time, I kept one hand on Thierry’s soft royal blue jacket, while my eyes scanned the people around me. There were wolves with their fur painted in midnight blue swirling patterns, foxes with teardrops and hoops of silver dangling from each ear, rams with their horns covered in every glittering color of the rainbow, black rats with eyes like starless night, and I even saw another chamois, scarves draped around her neck in a cloud of color that shifted with every movement she took. If anything, I stood out for being too plain in this mass of dyed fur, bangles, and bright clothing.

Grumbles followed us through the queue of people and to the door, where Thierry quickly slipped a twenty-franc note to the bear standing guard. The way opened before us as in one of the tales of the thousand and one nights, and into that magical world I entered.

From the moment I set foot in the Moulin Rouge, the grumbles and growls of the outside world disappeared, to be replaced by lively music and the thump of dancing feet. Gone was the miasma of a hundred different scents; the club had filled its interiors with the sweet smells of sandalwood and frankincense, with a musky undercurrent that warmed my blood. Welcoming us from the walls as we entered, hung over the red and gold wallpaper, were portrait upon portrait of beautiful ladies of every species, clad only in the fur God gave them. For most, it was the surprising elegance of the artwork that drew my eye and quickened my blood; though I was unfamiliar with the artists, it was clear that they had poured all their passion and not-inconsiderable talent into the brushstrokes and colors that brought the ladies to life.

Thierry stopped me in front of the portrait of a young fox lady with a pure white pelt. Her eyes, a stunning blue, blazed out of the painting at us, and the snowy curves of her body, though not painted with detail, were rendered with sure, passionate strokes of the brush. Her tail curved elegantly behind her, suggestive without being unseemly, and both paws at her hips were presented outward and open toward us: a gesture of welcome, one might think, until one’s gaze was drawn back up to the blaze of those blue eyes, which warned that any welcome would be a negotiation with the proud spirit within.

“It’s masterful,” I said.

Without a word, Thierry pointed me to the signature at the base of the painting: Abrazzo. I could scarcely believe that the goat we had spent the afternoon with, whose work I had glanced at and found unremarkable, could have painted a work like this. Even though the subject was undeniably female, I could hardly bear to tear myself away from it.

The rough carpeting of the hallway gave way to a lush, fine rug, with interwoven patterns of honey gold on a background of blood red. Upon closer study, I saw that the patterns were the sails of a windmill, and the decorations on each of the sails were small figures: sheep, goats, foxes, wolves, rabbits, rats, tigers, wildcats, deer, boars, all climbing the sails in a glorious festival. Thierry had to push me along the corridor, as I was quite absorbed in studying the pattern and we were slowing the progress of a rabbit and badger behind us. I continued to look down until we emerged into the main hall of the club, and here my eyes rose to behold a wilder spectacle by far than had been painted even in my imagination.

The main room of the club stretched out half the length of the Great Hall of the Senate. Thierry led me onto a spacious floor below a ring of private balconies. Dozens of small tables stood before us, each surrounded by two or three wooden chairs. Hardly any of the chairs were occupied, though, for though the heavy red curtain remained drawn over the stage to my right, the band of musicians in the small pit in front of it was playing in full force.

I am of course most drawn to the lovely elegance of a symphony, or the delicate beauty of chamber music. But there was a fire, a passion to this music that I had not heard before from any instruments. They had no harpsichords, nor violins, but rather blew horns and rattled on piano keys. They pounded on snare drums and struck an instrument I had never seen, an assemblage of metal bars in a scale that trilled upon my ears behind the other sounds and brought a smile to my lips. I have since learned that it is called a “xylophone,” but at the time it was an exotic marvel. My feet tapped to the beat of the drum and the soaring melodies of the horn, but I was far from the only one.

I said that hardly any chairs were occupied, and that is not to say that the hall itself was empty. All the people lucky enough to have gained entrance to the club were crowding the spaces between the tables, dancing with each other or by themselves. Their eyes were closed in some cases, open and glittering with excitement in others. They twisted or shimmied in place, or jumped and hopped. They clasped hands in paws, spun each other around in tight circles. They wagged tails, tugged on tails, slapped tails against each other. Some of the dances, I will confess, were much more lewd than I had ever seen in a public place. But to my eyes at that time, there was nothing unsavory or grotesque about it. It was the freest expression of unfettered joy that I had yet seen, and God curse me for a weak thing, but I wished desperately to take part, to let my duties and cares be cast to the wind as so many of those below were doing. I wished to experience that carelessness, that giddy delight in simply being alive, that the music was drawing out of me. I wanted more than anything to share that joy with another.

Thierry, wise counselor and chaperone, would have none of it. He kept me close to his side as he handed another twenty-franc note to a uniformed polecat, and received in exchange a stack of paper notes. I saw the polecat changing coins for notes for other patrons, but when I asked what this peculiar service might mean, Thierry said only that I would find out in due course.

I followed his stately step upstairs to our private box, in which I was somewhat disappointed; we were not to have full privacy after all. Of the eight seats in the so-called “private” box, four had already been claimed by a party of what I believe were jackals, though their features and bodies were hidden beneath uniform golden cloaks with ebony trim and a glowing sheen that caught the light of the oil lamps and played it about our little box. We did not speak as we took our seats on the far side of the box. The last two seats remained vacant throughout the performance, serving as a discreet curtain respected on both sides. Only once or twice did they attract my attention by a flick of a tail, a casual adjustment of an ear. Not once did I see any of them look at us.

Even in my chair, my feet continued to dance to the music, hidden from Thierry’s sight. My hands tapped the railing as I leaned over it, drinking in the activity below. The vantage of the balcony certainly afforded me a wider view, yet I regretted our separation from the dancing patrons. Thierry attempted to distract me by pointing out the beautifully rendered art on the ceiling, an enormous mural of clouds and old gods engaged in recreations of many classic stories we know from the classrooms of our youth. A row of oil lamps shed light on the art and also created a smoky black ring that ran like a frame around it. But I spared little attention to that, or to the gilding of the wood around our boxes, the simple wood craftsmanship with intricate designs delicately laid on top of it. I had eyes only for the musicians and the dancers.

And then the lights dimmed. I saw mice scurrying from one lamp to another, turning them down. The musicians ceased their playing, and the crowd’s dancing slowed. They poured into their seats with some shoving and wrestling, but all good-natured. In a matter of moments, the throng that had been dancing merrily was seated, perched on their seats as eagerly as I was, all of our eyes now turned to the only place in the hall where the oil lamps still burned brightly: the scarlet of the heavy velvet curtain.

We were holding our breaths. The musicians all faced the stage: the badger who had been pounding the drums, the slender red fox on the xylophone, the elk on the horn, and the pianist, whom I later learned was a ring-tailed lemur. Every face in the crowd was turned in the same direction; every set of eyes from every box strained to see the first parting in the curtain that would signal the start of the show.

The silence dragged on. At the time, I could have sworn that it went on for an hour or more. In the times I visited the Moulin since, however, I came to learn that the longest M. Oller allows the silence to go on is eight minutes, timed strictly according to an hourglass he keeps by his side in the manager’s box to the side of the stage. I have stood there with him, and have watched as he turns the hourglass on end, signaling to the musicians to cease their playing. M. Oller is a distinguished polecat, and his hourglass is crafted in the form of a female polecat, so that the sand trickles down through her waist to her legs when it is set right-side up. Before that last grain of sand drops into her thighs, M. Oller has received the signal from Mme. DuPont that the dancers are ready, and he lifts his paw to signal the parting of the curtain.

On my first visit, I gripped the railing with both hands as the two halves of the curtain split, biting my lip in my impatience to know what lay behind their mysterious folds. Thierry chuckled behind me, as well he might at my youthful impatience and enthusiasm. But at the time, I took no heed, staring only at the darkness behind the velvet cloth as it slowly retreated to either side of the stage.

My eyes saw nothing at first. Then I—and, I presume, the rest of the clientele—was blinded by the fierce glare of an electric light, like a bolt of lightning that went on and on. In its glow was revealed a shapely, buxom deer, standing with one hand behind her head and the other at her hip, one foot on the ground, the other resting on her knee with the leg bent to one side. She wore a large, thick petticoat and a tightly laced corset that must have been trimmed with gold for all that it sparkled in the electric glow. Her own coat was brushed so finely that it shimmered—at least, so I thought, until she made a slow movement and I saw thousands of tiny sparkles like fireflies hidden in her skin. Now I know that she brushed mica flakes into her fur; then, it was magical. The light revealed every hair, every layer of fur that covered her shoulders, arms, and lower legs, that conformed itself to the elegant curve of her muzzle and up the delicate cup of her ears, that hid in the shadows under her collarbone and blazed brightly along the top of her chest, down to the golden line of the corset.

She stood for a moment, letting us admire her and drink her in. Father, I have told you that I have no desire for the female form, but this dancer quickened my blood and made my lips dry. I wanted to see her move, wanted to watch the unfolding of those elegant limbs. I wanted to see where those deep brown eyes would wander in the crowd, and yes, I hoped they might catch mine.

Slowly, the music started, a quiet duet of piano and horn. Then she lifted her arms, stepped forward and turned, and the fireflies danced amidst her fur with every motion. She danced with the precision of clockwork, except that she moved with a fluidity and grace that no clockwork can ever hope to achieve. The circles described by her limbs flowed like water, the one into the other and into the next in a cascade as entrancing, as unpredictable as any forest waterfall.

The music quickened. Without any hitch or flaw, the dancer’s movements kept time as the piano rubbed sleep from its eyes, as the horn stretched and blared a liquid tripping of notes. The drum joined in so subtly that I did not notice it until the dancer’s foot tapped the stage in time. The xylophone, by contrast, announced itself with a ripple of sound. It became a sort of tuneful drum after that, as the deer stepped in time with the rest of the music. It was from that point on that the dancer began to lift her skirts, that the dance became the kind of dance that the Moulin Rouge is famous and infamous for.