Speak Easy

“All I got’s Zelda Fair.”

“Poor midge. You’re only little yet. Maybe if you’re good I’ll let you borrow one of mine.” His piggy eyes go squint. “But you’ve already been up to borrowing outta my pocket, haven’t you? You found my puppy. Naughty thing. Playing with what ain’t yours.”

“I didn’t find any dog! Honest!”

“My door, kid. I keep her on a tight leash, most times, but she does get free on the odd occasion. She loves me brutal. But wild animals gotta hunt. Can’t whip it out of them, breed it out, or kiss it out. They’ll still trot up to your doorstep, drop a carcass at your feet and expect to be praised.”

“I’m not a carcass.”

“Everybody’s a carcass,” Al snaps, and somehow he can snarl and smile at the same time and his teeth look so damn sharp when he does it! Zelda’s stomach does a trapeze act. If she could see where the elevator was hiding she’d run to beat the four minute mile. Instead, she talks, because even at the end of the whole world, Zelda Fair could talk the ear off an elephant. She laughs her patented oh-get-over-your-fine-self laugh and bolts on her good-time-girl smile.

“Well, geez, Al, it was just an uppity old laundry chute! I coulda took the elevator if all I wanted was to go down to the basement. You don’t have to get fuzzy with me.”

Al does the sorta laugh that’s not much more than a grown-up grunt. Sounds like a boar rooting in a rock. When he smiles again—Al’s smile is the best weapon he owns, better than any pistol or poison, and cheaper on the barrel—his teeth don’t look sharp anymore. They look smooth and clean and good, like white cliffs under the moon.

“You’re not in the basement,” he says.

“Sure I am!”

“No, ma’am. This is the top floor. The penthouse. The show-room show-case show-floor. Why, just look! You can see the whole city from up here.”

Zelda looks and sees the boys, she sees the girls, she sees the red silk tents and food like pastel jelly-sherbet-marzipan castles on room service carts the blue water like a chlorinated womb. She sees them swimming at the same time and turning their heads at the same time and pointing their toes at the same time and kissing and sometimes it’s boys kissing boys and sometimes it’s girls kissing boys but it seems like one way or another this is the place where a boy comes to get kissed. She sees the pills in her hand and the syringe and the matchstick. She sees Al. She sees her face in the pool breaking up into a million squiggly lines. She sees her bare feet, her unpainted toes. She sees the whole city.

“So?” Al coughs. “You wanna see my house? Or you wanna give me back my dog and go upstairs and have some nice milk punch and a shimmy and go to bed at dawn like a good little girl?”

Zelda pulls out her shallowheart gamine-guts I-ain’t-nothing-but-a-posy-in-your-pocket laugh. Down here, it sounds like a witch cackling up the toads. Everybody says the basement’s Sodom with a Smile On. Once you been there, you can’t go home again. You don’t even want to. No place for a lady.

Good.

“Gimme the Land of the Creepy-Crawlies,” Zelda says, and she says it in her real voice, which decided to show up for work for once. It tastes like bourbon sloshing in her throat.

Al takes her hand all gentle-genteel. Leads her into the water like she’s Lillian Gish and there’s a new title card going up just as soon as this scene shuts. Al don’t get wet. The beautiful boys and the cigar-champing girls open up their arms and Al pulls her down and there’s something on the bottom of the pool but she can’t see what it is but it might be a mirror and she can see herself in it, the insides of her legs, the insides of her coming up to meet the rest, and he’s pulling so hard and Zelda thinks she’s gonna drown but she doesn’t.

She just sinks.

B2

Oh, baby, it’s cold in here. You know that sound outside your window in the wintertime like a bone popping out of its socket, the one your Mama said not to worry about because it’s only ice settling? That’s the tune on the gramophone now and it never hops a groove. Listen, listen, prick up to the high-hat tsk-tsk-tsk of bare branches against the clouds, the long slow up-against-the-wall of the wind getting down and getting good, the stiff white piano riff of Duke December and his Frostbite Blues.

There’s a frozen lake under the Artemisia Hotel. As big as Erie and twice as pissed off. Waves stuck in the middle of crashing, fish clapped up in ice, frozen just as they were about to do a double somersault out of the water and into the sun. Not that there’s a sun down here.

A and Z are high-tailing it for the dock. They got a date with that sled there, sitting pretty on this iced cake of a lake in the dark. Hickory wood, curlicue rails, coupla moose ready to pull, black as eighth notes and antlers that could club you to death, lit up candelabra-style, hot fire shooting up from every prong. They are serious moose and no mistaking.

Thursday is delivery day.

Lickety-split and they’re off across the great frozen moon-back lake, the moose huffing and the flame spitting and Zelda still in her bathing costume, one giant goosepimple. Al puts a black fur on her shoulders but it’s not like when Tommy Germain does it. It’s not

hers now. It smells like Al and it belongs to Al and when whatever this is quits happening it’ll still be Al’s. She puts her loot in the pocket anyway, her pills and her needle and her stick.

“Where we going, Al?” she whispers.

“To get the good stuff, buttercup. To see the moonshine, grab onto liquid lightning, hear the hard pop do its hard popping and beat a tune on a barrelhead. Where’d you think booze came from? Can’t hit the shops like you used to. No more nice man pulling draughts like a gambler on the slot machines. Asking you how your day’s gone. Wiping the countertop like a movie of himself. Can’t call up France for a little nip of the good deep red. We gotta go get it. Gotta go to the source.”

“Canada?”

Al laughs and his echoes have echoes. The moose scream. Ever heard a moose scream? It’s like a pig getting ripped in half.

“Hell yes! Call it Canada if you want. That’s a swell name.”