Speak Easy

And all of the sudden it does smell like Canada, it smells like a border, pine and snow and the exhaust of whiskey trucks waiting on a steel bridge, woodsmoke and spilt gasoline. The mist whips by, tapping out a rhythm on the sled rails.

“Who are you?” Zelda whispers. Her stomach growls but she tells it to shut up.

“I told you. I’m Al. I’m the man with the plan. I came when the liquor dried up—I’m at my best in a wasteland, you know. It’s a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad. Take one thing away and another shows up to replace it. Drink is a mighty huge thing to run off with. I’m a mighty huge thing to run to. When I got here, people would sell their own bones for a gulp of something that smelled like a surgeon taking a shit, half wood alcohol, half mold scraped off a rooftop, with a little cyanide and a whack of ginger to give your seizure a nice flavor. What kinda way is that to live? My family, we’ve had doings with the sauce since before Charlemagne grew a mustache. We put the head on the beer, and we could take it off, too.” Al put his hand on his heart. “Oh Lord in Heaven, when I heard my brothers and sisters suffering, travailing, in need, crying out for thirst in this new terrible American desert? What kinda man would I be if I plugged up my ears?”

“Where did you come from?”

“My people are French, if that’s your meaning. Had a good old time in England, too. But we don’t stick in one place too long. Go where we’re needed. Our family crest is a bindle and a toadstool rampant. My man Slake let me set up shop here. He’s my kind of drunk: likes the best, turns mean after three drinks, in love with creation after five, and he’ll put a bullet in your face without blinking around the time most folks would start throwing up. When I think about it, which is not too often, as I don’t waste much oomph trying to get my head around what men have knocking around theirs, I imagine he invited me so this place could get nice and cozy and snail-y. Self-contained, see? If you don’t have to go out for booze or food or cunt or cock or even work, you can just carry your house with you. All one. That’s what Caspar Slake likes. A cuckoo clock ticking away, little dolls chasing each other round the pendulum, all the parts parting along and no one ever leaves.”

Zelda shivers. “And what do you like?”

“Me? Oh, I don’t give a fuck about the clock. I like time.”

The sled grinds up on the ice-sand shore, crunching and squealing and moosing in the night. There’s street lamps on this side. Ice-fishing huts. The dock has a hole in it and it needed new paint a century ago. A little creature comes jumping up to help Al out. He’s all rugged up in furs and boots, but Zelda can see his face. Long and blue and pointed, with gold eyes like wedding bands and hair like someone upturned a glass of rum on his head. Cheekbones for miles. He hardly comes up to her waist, but his hands hang down huge, bigger than he could need hands to be, dragging on the frozen beach. He’s not a person, not a person like her or the boy who caught her in the bathtub or Oleander Coy or Miss Georgie, but Zelda doesn’t want to say so.

“Don’t mind my buddy Vollstead.” Al booms. “He’s my right hand man. Had a vicious row with my old lady over him when he first came to town. Miss T took a shine to him—you never saw anyone so ass-over-the-moon for a mug like his! Good gravy, he looks like someone hit a monkey with a shovel! But if my girl wants something, I want it, too. I want it more than her. I want it harder than her. I want to take it away from her.”

“That’s a fine way to treat your wife!” cried Zelda.

“I’ll thank you to butt out of it! Your kind says I love you all kinds of stupid ways. By punching each other and building railroads and not letting half of you vote and making a million billion more of you and getting old and dying and sometimes by not even being anywhere near the carcass you love. Your crowd’s I love you is dumb as rocks if you ask me. So just shut your face about my I love you. My lady knows what it’s all about. Our love is like a sports match. There’s rules. There’s seventh inning stretches. Sometimes there’s bats and a net. She wants something? I get in there first and grab it. I want something? She steals it while I’m sleeping—which is why I don’t bother with sleeping. Besides, in this case, I was awfully sweet on him myself. Miss T sat on him for ages, but I got mine. Turned a senator into the spitting image of this old donkey-dicked goblin and off she ran to kiss him dead on the Capitol steps. I do love being married.”

Vollstead grins like a kid whose parents got divorced ages ago and it’s all rotten but boy, you do get double the birthday presents.. All the earrings in his lace-lettuce ears jingle like saints’ days and midnight come at last. He opens his coat like the ghost of Christmas Present only instead of hauling out a couple of Victorian orphans with a lifetime’s worth of eyeliner blacked on, he shows his legs: two shiny Tommy guns, their barrels kicking up a lindy. His blue chest is all plastered over with fancy writing like Mr. John Hancock put on the Constitution. He’s sporting a beefy-builder’s gut, the kind that used to be a wall of muscle, but hey, the championship’s not till fall and ice cream’s served year round.

“Time to hit the distillery, boss? Yeah? Come on, I’m dying. I ain’t walked right for days. My toes is full of bullets and my knees is full of singing!”

“You got it, VS,” barks Al. Knuckles that goblin on the chin like a kid off to play ball.

“Al,” Zelda says, and her real voice is gone, run off to wherever it hides and licks its wounds every other day but this one. She hates this voice. It’s the wheedling, begging voice she learned on her Daddy, the Papa-please-can’t-I go-to-the-dance voice, the it’s-awfully-cold-mister-say-that’s-a-nice-jacket-you-got voice. “Al, I’m starving. Didn’t get my eggs this morning. Nor my lunch neither.”

“You didn’t eat before you got on a moose-sleigh?” Vollstead grimaces, as if he’s holding on to a memory of hunger knotted up inside him. “Girl, you gotta be prepared in these parts.”

Alberich Mero, the Ox of Athens, shrugs his mighty blueberry shoulders.

“You have food,” he snorts, and strides on up the hill through the huts and the lamps and the fog.

“I do not!” Zelda hollers after him. Does the sun ever show its face in Canada? she thinks, even though she knows it isn’t Canada really. If nothing else, they speak French in Canada. Mama Minerva and Daddy Rhado took her to Montreal when she was small. She had her first taste of coffee there. She remembers it like her first fuck, and she remembers that plenty well. Al doesn’t answer, in French or English or Greek or Scotch-fucking-Gaelic.

Zelda Fair shoves her hands in her furry pockets.

Oh. Oh. She does have food. She closes her hand around the pills. Uppers, downers, lefters, righters? Hell, she’s swallowed more mystery medicine than anybody’d care to count at this soiree and that. And what is this but a soiree? She’s squired and dressed and got her invitation engraved on a purple door.

Zelda swallows those pills dry. They taste like six warm eggs, like one of Opal’s green sequins that she found on her tongue one morning last July, like the pages of a book falling down into her gin-bath like firew

ork wrappers, like Montreal coffee, like a forest in Germany with her name on it, like Miss Georgie’s steaks, bloody and scorched at the same time.

B3

The sun does come up in Canada. It comes up like a drink at the bar.

Oh, you wouldn’t call it a sun. Maybe I wouldn’t. But a sun’s just a word, you know? A word for whatever makes a body warm and hot and green. What helps a body see past a hand in front of their nose and stretch out nice and wear something other than a whole walrus on their skin to keep from going full ice-cube. What tells the time. The sun in Canada looks like the bottom of an old glass. The light is the color of brandy seeping. It has a taste. Your skin tastes it, like you’re all over tongues. The taste is sugar-cane, slowly rotting, turning into the great god rum. It’s always that magic hour those film-boys love to shoot down here. Always gold.

And here it comes, that sticky, oily liquor-light, dripping down through trees. Trees! And not frozen, either. Trees of gold and silver and crystal, trees like a table setting, and the winter folds its cards as the lake gets further behind Zelda Fair, turns in its chips, gives up the pot. Leaves roll out; birds cough up springtime and summer close to bursting. She can hear sounds. She knows those sounds. Those sounds are her mother’s own voice whispering to a babe at the breast. Those sounds are the joints in her bones. Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne.

It’s a party, shaking down the dawn.

Zelda hobbles up over the hummocky hillocky moor-lumps. She’s wearing holes in her feet like a princess dancing too long. No shoes allowed in the swimming pool. No rough-housing. No lifeguard on duty. Her swimming cap still clings to her skull; that black rubber feels like her own skin. It hurts in a funny way. Like she’s the purple Hobart and Sons’ Fine Smokables sign below their window, the one that lights up Ollie’s face every morning like a violet sun as she tells another play to close up its curtains before she comes down there and gives the director a slap in the face. Humming. Hopping. Sizzling around her ears. Boiling, but it’s all right because she was meant to boil. Zelda’d take the thing off, but she doesn’t know the rules here. What if she needs it later?

And that thing up there? That thing that could be a castle or a villa or a ruin or a chalet or a rack of old dinosaur bones? It’s gotta be the distillery. There’s barrels like mountains all around it, closing it in, keeping it safe and snug. The taps stick out like proud boys’ pricks, bigger than the statues in Union Square, diamond and baleen, gargoyle-spigots tangled up with leaves and berries in their hair. The distillery is a palace without walls. A skeleton of a place. Up rise the arches and struts and buttresses and pillars and load-bearing studs. Up spiral staircases and doorframes to rooms with floors like trellises, floors full of holes and air. Windows float. Doors hinge to nothing. But it’s not empty, oh no. There’s people milling and swilling everywhere, wearing their Friday best, spangles in every color liquor comes in, black rum and white gin and green abinsthe and pink Hungarian palinka and brown brandy and ginger beer gold. Girls laugh. Their hair giggles down their backs.