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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“You're startin' to look a little ugly,” Pinky says.
I give her a grin. “Yeah? You should see the other guy.”
And that just sets us off again.
That night was when I first started in a-dreaming about wolves. This weren't no fancy New Age crap like got popular later on—you know, animal spirit guides and Indian totems and shit like that. I wasn't getting me no advice in these dreams as to how I could better my life. I was just
dreaming I was a wolf. Running wild out in the bush somewheres, ain't got me a care in the world, ain't got me any baggage. Life's just simple, is what it is. You hunt some, you sleep it off, hunt some more.
I tell Pinky 'bout it next morning when we get up and she just shakes her head and laughs.
“I don't know who you are sometimes,” she tells me.
I know it's peculiar, but I like them dreams. And the funny thing is, I know who I am in 'em. I mean, I know I'm Raylene Carter, asleep in my bed and a-dreaming, but at the same time I'm that wolf, too. It ain't the least bit confusing. All the stuff that makes my life such a complication, it's gone. And when I wake up, I'm feeling pure and refreshed.
Them dreams, they're the only time I ever feel so strong and free. Like I matter.
Pinky was nervous for a few days, but she oughtn‘ta worried. Sure, the cop's death made the papers big time and all, but they had nothing to go on, that was plain to see. They went into enough detail you coulda filled a book with it all, you were so inclined. I noticed there was no mention of his dick hanging out of his pants, but maybe that's 'cause
The Tyler Standard
's a family paper. The guy from the D.A.'s office that made all the official statements made him out to be some kinda hero cop, closing in on these big-time drug dealers. Hell, maybe they even believed it.
I guess it was 'cause they got them a ballistics report on the bullet what killed him and turns out it matched up with some other drug-related deaths over in Cooperstown and on the rez and such. That pissed me off. Fat Jack had swore to me that .38 was clean, but there ain't much you can do once the horse is outta the barn. Anywise, we got rid of that gun, wiped it down good, and buried it way back in the woods, deep in a holler. Same place we burned that wig and clothes I was wearing.
Things didn't change much for us 'cept we laid low and made plans to head on outta there. I figure we needed us a bigger city. Pinky was all set for L.A. and this movie career she figured was waiting on us out there, but I got her to settle on something closer by where we could build us up a decent stake first. I weren't gonna be one more deadbeat wanna-be arriving in L.A., looking for a handout, though I swear
Pinky sounded like she was looking forward to getting cozy with them movie men.
“I just like the sound of it,” she'd say. “You know. Casting couches. Admit it, Raylene. Don't that have a ring to your ear?”
Guess we was both peculiar in our own way.
We waited us a few months till the story got old, living off of the cop's dirty money, and keeping a low profile. But life went on.
That was a busy spring. Papa up and died in March, but I never went to the funeral. He didn't much notice me when he was alive, I didn't see things being any different now that he was dead.
Jimmy and Robbie had got in with a bad crowd 'bout then. Started dealing crack, till Jimmy picked a fight with one of the Dragon, right there on the Ramble and got himself killed for his trouble not two weeks after they put Papa in the ground. Robbie showed his true colors that day and run like a scared rabbit while that biker was beating his brother to death.
I didn't go to that funeral neither.
I lost track of Robbie by the time Pinky and I was looking to leave town. Somebody told me he'd took to working for the Morgans, up in Freakwater Holler, but I didn't buy that. What would they want with a loser like him? The story I liked was that he ended up in Boystown, blowing dicks to pay for the habit he picked up when he and Jimmie was these big-shot crack dealers.
More likely he's just dead, and that's still another funeral I wouldn'ta gone to if I'd knowed about it.
I woulda gone to Del's, just to make sure the sonovabitch was really dead, but he didn't have the good manners to die. He did go to prison for running down some poor little girl while he was blind drunk—the sentencing was in April, just a few days after we killed the cop. Reason he got so much time was he took off and left her to die in the ditch. Word was she coulda made it, if somebody'd got her to a hospital in time.
Knowing he was in prison made it all the sweeter for me when Pinky and me left town—him locked up and me running wild and free. I hoped he was learning what it felt like to be somebody's special midnight girlfriend.
I heard Mama moved outta the old house to a trailer park near the prison where I figure she divided her time between visiting with Del and making life miserable for anybody she happened to meet.
Just afore we took off for the city, I remember me and Pinky made a run out to that place where I growed up—guess that was in May. We just stood there looking at it for a whiles. Nobody's renting it since Mama moved out and it ain't no wonder. The wonder is it's still standing at all.
“What're you thinkin'?” Pinky asks.
I shrug. “Nothing much.”
But I'm thinking of my sister, what she done to me, leaving me behind. I'm thinking of Del and how I still got a score to settle with him and Mama. But that's all got to wait its turn.
We went home and went to bed. When we woke up in the morning, we packed up all we had—and it wasn't much—and headed on down to the bus station in downtown Tyler. That's how a couple of hillbilly girls found themselves in Newford.
NEWFORD, END OF THE SUMMER, 1975
You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman. That's what Pinky says. Hell, she's got her a saying for every no-account thing we get into and every excuse we need to explain why we'd go and do some of the things we done.
That's as maybe, but we was a class act all the same. Me, I'm just a natural con, I guess, but it got so's Pinky was doing such a good job, I considered maybe she really could become an actress, and I don't mean in no porn flick, though I don't doubt she'd shine there, too, given the opportunity. She sure does have her an itch she likes to scratch when it comes to men.
There's quick and easy ways to make a little spending money, slower ones where you can make a whole lot more, and we pretty much done 'em all, without having to sell our asses, neither. City's so damn big, we coulda worked us every night of the week and still not worry about showing up in any one place often enough for it to be a problem.
Nobody much gives a damn about each other and that just makes our job easier.
But after a time we got us itchy feet. I've been working a big score on
this widower who lives down the street, been playing the old guy along for months now. I go over and I'm so sweet. He's what, eighty-five, but still horny as some old toad. I'm always bending over him with my blouse falling open, picking something up off of the floor or reaching to a top shelf in my little short skirts. I never touch him, he never touches me, but I could ask him for anything and he'd give it to me.
“I have to go,” I tell him one day. “The only thing that keeps me here is you, but things just aren't going well for me right now.”
“What do you need?” he asks.
I laugh. “Thirty thousand dollars,” I say, “and neither one of us has that kind of money.”
“What do you need it for, Susie?”
That's what he thinks my name is. Susie Davis.
I tell him how I'm going to lose my house because I'm three months behind on the mortgage. How my office's moved clean across town and I need a car if I'm going to get to work. How my mother's in the hospital, got no insurance, and I'm the only one can bail her out. I give him a list of trials and troubles that'd almost make me blush, but he's hearing me out, nodding, taking it all seriouslike.
“I can get you that money,” he says.
“Oh, please,” I tell him. “How could you possibly do that?”
But I already know. He's got ten times that stashed away in bonds and securities and crap. I been through his mail when he's sleeping, seen the statements that come every few months.
“You don't have to worry about that,” he says.
I give him a smile like honey fresh from the hive.
“That's really sweet of you,” I say, “but there's no way I could accept that much money from you.”
I talk nicer around him, like a city girl who could have a career, who could make something of herself, given half a chance.
“What do I need it for?” he says. “I could be dead tomorrow.”
“Don't even joke about that,” I tell him, sitting on the arm of his chair.
My skirt's already short and the movement hikes it up, grabbing and holding his gaze.
“Only thing that makes me happy is knowing you're alive and well,” I add.
“I want to do it,” he says, finally pulling his gaze up to my face.
But I shake my head again.
“Think of it as a loan, then.”
He's got no family. He's got no friends. He hires a woman to clean his house. Someone else comes in and makes his meals, unless I'm there to do it. He watches TV all day long when he's not playing with his stamp collection. The poor old sap. His only friend is Susie Davis, who don't even exist.
I let him wear me down.
The next time I come over, he's got the money. In cash. I told him I didn't have a bank account anymore since the bank cleaned it out for my mortgage arrears and took back all its credit cards.
I still act like I can't take it, but he presses it into my hands. Insists.
If I was Pinky, I'd give him a kiss 'bout now. A deep French kiss. Sit on his lap and give him a last thrill.
But I just give him a hug. Tell him I can't believe what a good friend he is.
When I walk out that door later, it's the last time he ever sees me.
Pinky and me, we buy plane tickets to L.A. and we're finally heading out west to meet fame and fortune, head-on, on our terms. The Hillbilly Holler gals do Hollywood. That was the summer of '75 when we got us there and let me tell ya, we had us a time.
But the high times never last. Truth of the matter is, all we ever were afore we come here was small-time crooks. We find that out after we're in L.A. awhiles. Everybody there's on the take or got their own con going. It takes a handful of years, but eventually all our tried-and-trues are worth squat and our money runs out so fast you'd think it was made of water.
So Pinky's dream finally comes true and she gets to be in the movies. You know the kind. Straight to video. They sell to the guys with the remote in one hand, their dick in the other.
I can't do it.
“Don't you worry, Raylene,” she tells me. “You carried us a long whiles and now it's my turn. 'Sides, it ain't like I don't like it or nothin'.”
Everything I try goes sour. It's like I used up all my luck and smarts in Tyler and Newford. Or maybe I was just never ready to play against the big guns. Maybe I never will be.
Finally I get arrested on a soliciting charge—I hadn't got far enough into the con to make it armed robbery or extortion—and pull six months in county. That's in '81. It's also when Pinky starts her career.
When I get out, I can't seem to focus anymore. All I do is sit in this seedy little apartment we got in Westwood Village and watch crap TV and the free copies of Pinky's movies that she brings home. She looks to be having the time of her life in them—hell, she
tells
me, over and over, how she's having the goddamn time of her life—but it breaks my heart all the same.
I only ever feel all right at night. Late, late at night.
When I'm dreaming.
When I'm a wolf.
When I'm leading my pack.
Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for
The Crowsea Arts Review,
at Ms. Coppercorn's Yoors Street studio, on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.
Something I've always been curious about: why don't we see your work on the covers of fantasy books?
I did one once—but that was a long time ago. My friend Alan Grant put me in contact with this paperback publisher and I was very conscientious with that first job. I read the manuscript all the way through and made all kinds of notes before I went in for my meeting with the art director and that's when reality came up and gave me a bang on the ear. She loved my ideas, but said they weren't right, then talked about how she thought it should be, could I do it? I did a bunch of sketches in her office while we talked and she said, “That's it. That's perfect.”
So I went back to the studio I was sharing with Isabelle at the time and did the painting, dropped it off, and never looked for a job in that line of work again.
Because it compromised your artistic values?
Not at all. The concepts I came up with for that book were very true to what the author had intended to convey to her readers. They were my reaction to that—a response, as though we were having a conversation, which is what I think all good art does. It creates a
dialogue. It asks questions, but also answers them—which always opens one up to more questions.
But it's not the sort of art that will necessarily sell a book. I just don't think along those lines, I guess. And the one thing I didn't want to do was simply be a conduit for other people's ideas. The art director's ideas were exactly right for commercial purposes. It's my brain that's the round peg in the square hole.
And yet, you're best known for your fantasy paintings.
I don't paint anything that isn't real.
Literally?
Well, I'm painting what I see is there. But Faerie is so ephemeral, isn't it?
But …
Oh, I know what you mean. Still, I'm not simply posturing. Nobody likes to be categorized, but if you want to know the truth, in some ways I embrace the way I've become known as a “faerie painter.”
“
In person, Ms. Coppercorn is as enchanting and whimsical a gamine as the little creatures she chooses to paint. She could as easily inhabit one of her paintings, as render them.”
You've been doing your research. What was that in again?
The In the City review of your first solo show at the Green Man Gallery. That's the first mention I could find of you being described as “The Faerie Painter.”
But getting back to what you said a moment ago—
How I don't paint anything that isn't real?
Exactly. How can you say that? Surely you don't literally believe the city is overrun with diminutive faeries and such?
Why is it so preposterous?
You're kidding … aren't you?
Maybe. [Laughs.] But not entirely. I don't want to get all esoteric on you, but what do you know about quantum phenomenon?
Not a lot.
It's the idea that certain things don't happen unless they're observed by a conscious entity.
That sounds like that business about conceptual reality I've heard you discuss before, how everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.
The “World As It Is,” as my friend the professor would say.
Yes, the two go hand in hand. Faerie—mysterious phenomena in whatever jacket they happen to be wearing, really—have always fallen between the cracks of how most people expect the world to be. It takes a certain innocence of heart to remain open to the Otherworld, to the things that stray out of those lands that lie beyond the Fields We Know. And by that I don't mean naïveté so much as a lack of cynicism.
Have you believed this all your life?
It's not a matter of belief. More something I've come to understand and appreciate over time.
So you weren't a little girl chasing faeries at the bottom of the garden?
I was never a little girl. Or maybe a better way to put it would be that I had to grow up before I was finally able to become one.
You never talk about your family.
What do you mean? I talk about them all the time. Sophie, Wendy, the Riddell brothers, Sue, Isabelle, Mona …
You're speaking of your family of choice, if that's the correct way to put it.
Doesn't make them any less my family.
Of course not. But I meant the family you were born into, that you grew up in.
I never had that kind of a family.
So you had a troubled childhood?
Because of the things that happened to me I don't think I ever had a childhood. Until I grew up.
It seems that many people with an artistic bent—musicians, writers, as well as artists—have had a less than wonderful childhood. Any thoughts on that?
I can't speak for anybody else, but maybe it's because so many of us are outsiders. You know, we just don't conform well.
Have you ever thought of tackling these issues with your art?
It's funny you should ask. Normally when I paint, what I want to do is put some beauty back into the world. I'm not a big fan of confrontational art, though I certainly realize it has its place. But I've recently gotten together with some other women to prepare a show that deals with just that sort of thing.

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