The Altonevers (12 page)

“
It’s never actually
between them, the interim themselves are their own Altos, but it
looks like a train. One that’s a little older, with wood and not
plastic,” he says.

On the train is a bubble with glasses
and a hat reading a newspaper, and groups of people, men and women
with peacock feathers as body hair and eyebrows. All dressed in
tuxedos and gowns and drinking from fancy glasses. Eyeing them
coldly is a penguin fiddling with a cob pipe in its beak, thinking
of them as distastefully taking his taste in clothing. A few rowdy
weather kids are taunting a drunk, who's wobbling at the knee while
watching the wallet of a hippo shaped man, watching the backside of
a girl with pearls around her neck that’s carved of wood. His hippo
shaped wife hits him on the head with her purse. The doors slide
open and the wino is gone with the breeze.

“
Did you see that?” Anna
asks, but he’s already laughing.

“
Yeah that chic in the
black skirt's carved pretty fine,” he says.

“
Anything in a skirt
huh.”

“
Look at the conifers on
that one, and I bet she’s Sappy too.”

“
Jerk,” she adds an elbow
to his ribs.

“
To see you smile, sure,”
he says smiling at her.

“
Where are all these people
from?” she asks.

“
I thought that too,
everywhere, anywhere. I don't know probably from where they look
like they're from,” he says.

Underfoot

The trains slows, then stops at a
leaky country station surrounded by fields shaded by crudely cut
stone pillars primitively painted with swirls and stars. The doors
chime and slide open to a wide dirt road cleaving gossamer spotted
emerald grass hills.

“
This is the
place?”

“
Yeah, but we're a ways
off,” he chuckles, pointing down the trodden path.

“
Don't you see
that?”

“
See what?”

“
The future before us?” he
says, and she looks thinking dumb of his attempt at charm, then she
does see what he meant. Down the long and winding road she can see
mud and wood huts gathered around bonfires. Further down is the
sight of wood steeples and mismatched stone cottages, later, even
further down the road is burgeoning into the makings of a small
city. After that into crowds of Victorian houses, lastly the
horizon huddling together and sprouting into a semblance of a city
skyline, and beyond.

“
Of this place anyway,” she
says, and the two disheveled and desperately hungry, fitting in
with passing paupers, saunter down the same path. Toward the
society that's rising, gradually progressing through the eras
around as they step forward. The rich but somber tones of
everything around them and the damp dreary atmosphere make her feel
as though she's roaming through an expressive picture painted by a
Romanticist. The streetlights are become gas lamps rather than
flaming pikes, seeing the makings of a modern city creeping closer
from the horizon, and storied brick buildings and outlines of
skyscrapers emerging with each step. Her mind is presently ablaze
with thoughts of what the future of this Alto will be, without even
thinking of her present.

“
When's the present in this
place?” she asks.

“
I don’t know. I don’t
think it’s like that here, so anywhere you are I guess.”

“
How far does it
go?”

“
Who knows?”

“
Where are we
going?”

“
Where? When? not much
difference.”

“
I need to bath,” she
says.

“
At the pub.”

“
Of course...at a pub,” she
sighs.

“
It’s a hotel
too.”

“
Like the last one?” she
isn't answered. The breeze is sipping up the smoke of chimneys and
smokestacks ahead of them. Cider struggles to light a smoke in the
wind, flicking his lighter in vain just before a downpour suddenly
falling and visibly draining the crowds of clouds above them.
Trekking through the mud in the chill and wind without umbrellas or
sight of shelter or firewood. Laughing on and giving up care of
being wet to enjoy the weather that’s coating the city's every
surface with a glazing sheen of slick. By the time they reach
evenly laid cobblestone they’re soaking, and she’s shivering off
the cold. Her ears are tickled by the drencher just ended,
streaming and trickling through every uneven surface of the city
hobbled together city. The whole Alto is hearing the sound rain
runoff no matter where you go.

She steps into a still puddle that's
perfectly reflecting the white blotted powdery blue sky above. She
watches the puddle ripple around her foot. The cobblestone streets
are wrought with them, filling every pothole and even slightest odd
leveling of incline with reflective puddles and pools. A place
where there are nearly as many puddles as there are smoking
chimneys sipped by the wind. There’s a bunch of both, and bowler
hats too.

“
Hey look, I stepped in the
sky on the ground,” she says.

“
Oh yeah,” he says smiling,
then leaps, stomping and splashing the nearest mirror from his feet
toward her.

“
It was a nice thought to
have,” she says.

“
What? oh, whatever with
your chic stuff,” he says, not stopping his childish
hopping.

“
Idiot,” she says, then
shoegazes to be sure not to miss a rippling of the sky under her
feet. Looking up and remembering they look like vagrant out of
towners wandering down a sidewalks. After a few minutes of walking,
the city around them ages a decade ahead of the last with each
step. Time and surrounding is a wavering blur from one point in
time and stopping at the time the next foot touches the ground.
Strolling down the same long road, of changing storefronts and
architectural styles, in scenes of time lapsed still frames that
she's immersed in, in the moments between steps. Slowing creeping
from a second a foot to a year a foot as they reach what Cider
considers to be civilized society. His only requirement being
indoor plumbing, and she agrees.

Their pace slows to a month a step
when they start passing the people’s from the particular times or
places. Through different neighborhoods of this Alto, walking
freely through the era shifting city streets, and intermingling as
the melting pot of this time mosaic metropolis. Full of mods and
motorcycles and the many, many Mohawks , and 68er's hanging hair
hanging out everywhere. Soccer hooligans and go-go dancers are
rubbing shoulders with knights and people on rocket boots though
never far from the town squares and their gallows for hanging.
Chimney sweep children with soot covered faces swim in every
shadow, like piranhas hungry for the pockets of the passing
pedestrians.

The avenues around them become a
mismatch of history, where one can see troglodyte steak houses and
enlightenment era ale houses right next to each other. Futuristic
retro club playing music a hundred years from now, not far from an
industrial age steel mill. Often having wood and stone gas lamp lit
slums and spherical structures of synthesized substances a stone’s
throw away from the another. Medieval castles and gunpowder forts
share the same streets as office buildings and sensory strip malls
and eco-urban city centers. Always though, overflowing with parlors
and pubs, nearly as many as there are puddles. They're everywhere,
on every floor and everyone is drunk and drinking. They pass an
antique peepshow and an eighteen fifties bath house then a patch of
farmland, and another pub, and another pub. No matter where they
are, the smell of rain and burning coals never leaving their
nostrils.

“
When will we get there?”
she asks.

“
Whenever it is,” he
answers. It's midday at a sun splashed intersection, and the Druids
are selling drugs on the street corners, to Cyberpunks on rocket
boots are sliding and gliding like sidewinders over traffic. The
Teddy's are patrolling their turf, snapping their switchblades and
staring people down. A hundred years down the avenue football
hooligans are flipping a double-decker bus, and tussling with the
fuzz. Gentlemen of powder and wig join the melee to fight both
sides, cracking skulls with gavels, and swiftly shiving people with
their quills. The two turn a corner two hundred years later, onto a
narrow lane and continuing for twenty years across. They come to a
rounded L shaped five story salmon colored building rounding the
corner of an intersection, across the crosswalk from the two. With
thick white curtains closed in the occupied rooms, every open
window is filled with catcalling call girls shouting at passing men
and making them blush, then flushing them of their cash.

“
I think this is
it?”

“
You think I want to sleep
in a whorehouse?”

“
There’s no place like
home,” he quips.

“
Fine, whatever, I just
want to sleep.”

“
Watch your step,” he says,
stepping over horse droppings slicked into the ground as they cross
the street. The spacious five floor creaky dive bar reeks of
vinegar. It's furnished with filth tinted table clothes carelessly
draped over worn wooden tables thrown about the pine walled
drinking hall that is the lobby. The place is brimming with shanty
speaking lads and lasses holding court in clusters across the room,
obnoxiously shouting as courting over the constant clinking of
their ale filled mugs. The two move to the bar tended by a
grimacing, bloody aproned bull of a woman with the build of a
school lunch lady who spends her days polishing mugs and bare
knuckle beating deadbeat patrons.

“
A drink sir?” she grunts
without consonants.

“
Bit old for chimney
sweeps,” she says.

“
We're not sweeps,” says
Anna.

“
Well your filthy,” she
leers at them both “and shady looking he is” the tender
states.

“
Oh and I’m not?” Anna
asks, feeling odd about feeling offended, and wondering why she
is.

“
Not really just, filthy,”
the barmaid says.

“
No, she's Carrots,” Cider
says.

“
Carrots that’s about
right, good for the eyes I see,” says the butch barmaid.

“
Anyway, you seen
Edward?”

“
No sir he's in a meeting.
He speaks of you often he does. Sir Edward will be happy to hear
you're here,” the barmaid says.

“
Good then let him know
then, will ya now,” he says.

“
He's in a meeting,” she
says sympathetically, “A pint, on me?”

“
Well not on you but sure.
Anna this is Maggy. She'll break a man in half, in any tavern in
town.”

“
And anywhere else,” Maggy
laughs.

“
A Pitcher,” says
Anna.

“
A pitcher? what will you
do with that? a little tart like you.” She bellows loudly in
laughter. She fills a pitcher for each and slams them sloppily,
spilling them onto the counter.

“
You know how long it will
be?” He asks.

“
Who knows, been real busy
since the strikes been startin'.”

“
Well a friend in need I
am,” Cider says.

“
Wise ass, is he, isn’t
he,” Maggy swipes at him with her bar rag, then smiles to Anna as a
handless handshake.

“
Well, We'll be staying
till we could see him.”

“
Oh will ya be?”

“
Yeah. Put it on his tab
will you.”

“
Yeah sure. Let me see if
we got a room,” Maggy says turning to a rotary phone and turning
its rotary dial slowly.

“
I need a room opened up. I
don’t care. Now!” she punches the phone to its rotary base. “We'll
have a place for you to put your pretty little head in a minute
dear.”

“
Can we have new sheets,”
she asks.

“
A fancy one she is eh? all
the girls lay on the sheets, why shouldn’t you dearie?” Maggy asks
throwing her rag over her shoulder and leaning over the
counter.

“
Well I'm not one of the
girls, and that's an insulting assumption,” she answers.

“
Oh she isn’t is she? a
dignified lady in a cat house. Then you best watch yourself, these
ones around here have sharp claws.”

“
I don't know about
dignified,” laughs Cider.

“
That’s right, you don't
know about dignified,” she cuts back.

“
Ha,” Maggy
laughs.

“
My name is
Anna.”

“
Alright. Fresh sheets for
Anna, the gentleman.”

“
AAHHH,” yells a man
falling from the third floor of the open atrium down through the
lobby. Shattering a table that splits in two and splits his spine,
and his body twitches and jerks under a dirty tablecloth. Muting
the pub for a few seconds, as though the record skipped, which then
resumes its track of boisterous banter.

“
There's your room,” Maggy
says, pointing to the napkin in the man’s hand.