Welcome to Bordertown (46 page)

It had been a bad year, is all. My girlfriend at the time had just left me. Something about me being smothering. I’d had to put my nineteen-year-old dog down once his heart trouble was too far gone. Then Grandma died back home, and I couldn’t afford to fly down for the funeral. And the last straw: I’d been temporarily laid off yet again from my job at the forever precariously funded crisis center.

The Change happened slowly, in the weeks that followed. At some point it crossed my mind that the flashily overlit Honest Ed’s Discount Emporium seemed to have seamlessly metamorphosed into a store called Snappin’ Wizards Surplus and Salvage—More Bang for the Buck, More Spell for the Silver. Sure, the words on the sign had changed, but the place still sparkled with enough lights festooning its outside to illuminate half the city, and was still piled to the ceiling with everything from army parachutes to sex toys. And sure the Swiss Chalet chicken place across the street had been replaced by a club named Danceland, but that was construction in downtown Toronto for you; they were always bulldozing the old to replace it with something else. The little import
shop where I bought my favorite fair-trade dark chocolate ran out of it, and then chocolate was scarce everywhere. I didn’t drink coffee, so is not like I missed that.

And as to the presence in the city of fine-boned people with fancy hair, high style, and higher attitude? Toronto’d always had its share of those. By the time I had to accept that I was no longer in Toronto and those weren’t just tall, skinny white people with dye jobs and contact lenses, it didn’t seem so remarkable. People changed and grew apart. As you aged, your body altered and became a stranger to you, and one day you woke up and realized you were in a different country. It was just life. I hadn’t needed to travel to the Border; it’d come to me. I’d settled in, found a new job, started dating Gladstone. Life went on, if a little more oddly than before.

I got used to it: to dating a truly magical mulatress, to reading by candlelight when the power outed, to riding a bicycle everywhere, in any weather. I even rigged up a Trini-style peanut cart: a three-foot-cubed tinning box attached to the front of a bicycle, with a generator powered by the action of cycling. Or by a spellbox, when electricity wouldn’t manifest. Peanuts roasting inside it. The outlet chimney was a whistle, so the escaping steam would sing through the whistle as I rode. That and the smell of roasting peanuts would make people run come. Daddy Juju loved it. He painted the store name and address on the side of the tinning box, and I rode the streets of Bordertown and served out fresh roasted peanuts in little rolled cones of newspaper.

I made a good life here. Working at Juju Daddy’s was my job, true. But it wasn’t what I did. There was a reason I’d worked at a shelter in Toronto. A reason my Toronto ex had said I was smothering. I watched out for newbie baby dykes and shy hunter fairies (human or elf) as tough as nails and as brittle as glass; I kept an
eye on bruised halflings who didn’t realize they were already whole in and of themselves. I smoothed ruffled feathers and mediated lovers’ quarrels, and fed the ones who couldn’t feed themselves, and tried to keep the people I loved from hurting each other too much.

“Beti!” I shouted.

The street took a sharp turn, and when I rounded it, for an instant I had the crazy thought that Beti had somehow multiplied. I was in the middle of a crew of Betis, a proliferation of Betis. Cone-shaped masses of rags and tatters danced all around me, and jesters in motley, and hobo clowns in torn jackets and pants and crumpled top hats. A pitchy-patchy crew! No matter her fancy name for her costume, it was a plain old pitchy-patchy mas’. I laughed, relief making my voice a little too wild and hyenalike. The dancers didn’t have musicians, but were making their own music by singing:
We will give her a wedding ring, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

*   *   *

With a clomping of hooves, the camel bus drew to a halt at the crumbling curb. Gladstone’s face brightened. “She’s here!”

Through the windows of the bus, we saw Beti stand and take the hand of a pretty Trubie girl, tall and slim with big cat eyes and a complicated fall of silvery hair. Laughing, they headed for the bus’s exit. I didn’t have to look at Gladstone to know the change that had come over her face. The shocked shift from eager anticipation to self-protective sullenness. “Gladhand Girl, don’t jump to conclusions, okay?”

“You see? Like always calls to like. Why stay with the half-Blood when you can have another purebreed?”

“They may just be friends.”

“Friends. Right. I gotta go.”

*   *   *

And that was the last Beti and I had seen of Gladstone. At least, that’s what I was telling Beti. I hadn’t mentioned running into Gladstone last night.

The other girl had been just a friend in truth; someone Beti had met on that same bus that had picked them both up as they were wandering around the outskirts of Bordertown, trying to figure out the way in. Beti’d only wanted her new friend Lizzie to meet her new love Gladstone. And the real kicker? Beti told me that Lizzie wasn’t even a Trubie. Just one of the rare humans who kinda looked like one.

Someone spun me around. I recognized the particular configuration of strips of cloth. “Beti!”

She grabbed me around the waist, spun me so my back was against her front. We went into a classic dutty wine like the people all around us, hips gyrating together. She caught on fast, this one. She’d been watching how back home people danced to soca music. It was sexual, yes, but it didn’t have to mean sex. It was a pappyshow of sex, a masquerade. Sex is powerful and beautiful and dangerous. Is bigger than peeny humans. To wine up dutty with somebody else is like playing mas’ in corpse makeup. Is like saying, these things have power over us, but right now, we can laugh after them. First time Gladstone saw me dance like this with someone else, we’d had one big mako row. She’d been convinced I was about to lie down right there so on the floor of the club and start getting nasty with the fella I’d been wining with. With some fella who wasn’t her, never mind that he was a stranger I’d only clapped eyes on five minutes before, and a fella to boot!

That was the first time she’d given me blows. And like a fool, I’d gone back for more. Hadn’t protected myself, hadn’t insisted she find a way to stop trying to own me with her fists.
All those years in my previous life I’d worked to help battered wives, husbands, parents, children. But of course, when I was the one getting beat up by someone who loved me, I decided I didn’t need help. I was the expert, right? I could handle this all by myself. I could manage Gladstone, oui? Be her lover and her therapist.

Gladstone wasn’t the only one who needed to learn that control is something you might try to exercise over a runaway train, not over a lover.

The revelers started bellowing out the song about not giving a damn, ’cause they done dead already. So long I hadn’t heard that kaiso! From the big standard the two Frankenstein flag-bearers were dancing with, the crew was called the Jumbie Jamboree. Dead mas’ all around us. Vampires. Ghosts. Even
douen
mas’—small children dressed as the spirits of the unbaptized dead, wearing panama hats that hid their faces, and shoes that made it look as though their feet were turned backward. If you hear the sound of children laughing in the forest, don’t follow their footprints. Because they might be
douens
, luring you deeper into the forest when you think the footprints are leading you out.

I leaned back into Beti’s embrace. I turned my head toward her. “Why you disappeared like that?”

“I can hide with these people,” she said, her voice rough. Like she’d been crying? I turned and took her in my arms.

“Don’t worry, child. I won’t let Gladstone find you.”

She pulled back, pushed some of the motley away from her face. “Gladstone? You’re keeping Gladstone from me?”

Oh, shit. “She want to hurt you,” I blurted.

Beti reared back, startled. “Why?”

“She’s real mad at you for hanging with that girl from the bus. She thinks the two of you been cheating on her.”

She looked confused. “Cheating …” Light dawned. “You mean making sex with each other? But we haven’t.”

“Don’t matter. When Gladstone get like this, all she want to do is lash out. You have to stay away from her till she calm down. Believe me, girl, I know. Same thing she did to me.” I turned my face, showed her my scarred jaw.

The fear, the distress on Beti’s face tore my heart out. “She doesn’t realize,” she said. Through the prang-a-lang of the music, I thought the next words she said were, “She should be the one scared of me.”

“What?”

She smiled sadly, touched my arm. “Don’t worry. Things change.” Then she looked back behind us, crowded close to me. “What is that?” she cried.

Cold fear-sweat was crawling down my spine before I even turned to look. Whatever it was, I could feel it coming, feel it in my sinuses, in the savage change that had come upon colors.

Something parted the crowd like a wave, leaving me and Beti exposed in the middle of the road. The air had gone dark around us, damp and cold. I heard screams from the crowd. But the spectacle approaching us did so in silence. No sound from the pounding of the horses’ hooves, the baying of the dogs that weren’t dogs, the harsh, rasping breath of the quarry that they were chasing down the very middle of the Jou’vert parade, in what had been broad daylight a second ago. Beside me, Beti gasped. I hustled her over to the sidelines. We watched the Hunt approach. They were moving in slo-mo.

Beti asked, “What are those?”

Beside her, someone in a Phantom of the Opera costume replied, “The Wild Hunt. Here. Not the band. The real thing.” His voice shook. “We’re all in some deep shit now.”

“Why?” asked Beti.

“Anyone who sees them dies.”

A deep voice cut in. “We are. We’re all going to die. Someday.”

I turned. It was Stick. Lubin was riding on his shoulder, all a-bristle as she stared at the spectacle approaching us.

The quarry didn’t seem to be really there. I mean, we could see her. But her feet didn’t exactly touch the ground as she ran. They either landed a little bit above it or a little bit beneath the surface. For all she was of the Blood, exhaustion had blanched her face even whiter. Her hair hung in sodden ropes of merely gray that swung in dead weight whenever she looked over her shoulder to see how close the hounds were. Sweat had glued her once-gorgeous flowing dress to her body, and its streaked color was more mildew now than the pale green it probably used to be.

“Linden,” muttered Stick. “So that was her punishment.”

I hoped I would never again see anything like the dogs that were chasing that woman. Black. Small, about the size of terriers. But their heads and snouts were ratlike, only with the dangling, eager tongues of dogs hanging out from between their fangs. Too many legs. They ran more like centipedes than dogs. They swarmed over the road, red eyes intent on their prey.

As she drew level with us, Linden stumbled. People in the crowd cried out. She put one hand down to break her fall. It didn’t quite touch the ground, but some invisible solid surface just a hairsbreadth above the disintegrating asphalt of Ho Street. There were rings of silver and sapphire on three of her outspread fingers. One of the hounds leapt, caught the hem of her dress, but she was up again. She bounded away, leaving the hound with a scrap of sodden silk in its mouth.

Behind the hounds came the hunters themselves. Leading them was a Trubie on a motorcycle, her beautiful face grim. The
rest were on horses, on goats, and I think I saw one riding a tapir. Silently, the whole mess of them bounded by. As the last few passed, the day grew bright again, and the wetness left the air. For a few seconds, we were all quiet. Some people were crying, some still just standing with their mouths hanging open, catching air. Stick muttered,
“Love wealth and glory more than life itself, and starve in splendor.”

Then someone in the crowd started clapping, followed by others. People began shouting “Jou’vert!” and
“En battaille-là!”
Pretty soon there were noisemakers going, and whistles. The Phantom of the Opera shouted, “Glamour! It was just a crew with a glamour!” The band began playing again. The Phantom put his arm around the waist of a chunky, purple-haired woman in a skeleton catsuit, and they careened into the steps of a jig.

Somewhere in the comess, Beti had lost her headpiece. “That was … pretend?” she asked.

Stick narrowed his eyes. “Could be.”

Me, I didn’t business with him and his constant suspicion. My headache was gone and my nose had stopped tingling. Real or make-believe, the Wild Hunt had been the source of the juju weather—not Gladstone, after all. Jubilant, I fumbled for Beti’s hand amongst her rags and patches, and we started dancing to the music again:

Bellowing out the verse, I swung the hoop of my skirt in a circle. It crashed against Gladstone’s leg. My two eyes made four with
hers. Hers were rimmed with red, her face blotchy. She narrowed her eyes. Heart thumping, I pushed Beti behind me, but I was too late. Beti squealed, “Gladstone!” She ducked around me and flung herself into Gladstone’s arms.

Blasted child was going to get herself a black eye this Jou’vert afternoon. “Gladstone, wait!” I yelled. I leapt toward the two of them to try to intervene.

Gladstone shoved me away. I landed hard on the ground, heard the balsa wood frame of my skirt crack. “Leave us alone!” she said. She enveloped Beti tenderly in her arms. Beti twined her legs around Gladstone’s middle. The two of them gripped each other’s shirt backs, held each other like they would never let go. They swayed like that for long seconds, to their own music, ignoring the driving beat all around them. My heart cracked open, just like my fragile costume. I stood up.