Speak Easy

The first face you see in the underworld is always the one you want most. It’s like that first hit of morphine—free of charge, baby. Just a taste.

“You can see me,” Frankie gasps.

“’Course I can, silly. I got 20/a million peepers these days. And I see you got something that’s mine,” Zelda says, and pulls the swimming cap off him, the chinstrap dangling free in her hand like a black noose. “You can’t have it.”

Frankie’s jaw unlocks. His brain starts to soften back into the good goo of grey and pink and thin

king. His bones quit doing their poison puppet act. He gets on with breathing and every time he manages it it’s less like choking on sour fire. He looks up and she’s there, bending over him, fastening the cap on her own head. She just looks at him, not even really smiling, but almost halfway to the county where smiling lives. Rubs her arms in the chill. Everything smells like pine and ice and starlight. Did you know starlight has a smell? Well, at least it does in Canada. Smells like vodka and lime and a splash of bitters, hand to God.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Frankie coughs. His spit freezes when it hits the ground.

“What doesn’t? But some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it’s like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home. I always wear this when I’m down here. How’d you get it?”

“I found it.”

And Zelda shrugs like it doesn’t matter. She looks up and off over a rise full of frozen real grass, not perfect silk golf grass, grass with big beardy crusts of cold all over. They’re on a lakeshore, Frankie realizes. A lakeshore in winter and even the sand is half ice. Zelda’s wearing fur, a black fur coat like a senator’s mistress only it’s hers, it’s so clearly hers, she’s so at home in it she looks naked even though he can only see the pale punctuation of her face at the top of the ruff. She doesn’t look like he remembers her, like the dog-eared faded bathtub memory he keeps under his heart. Frankie has a mad thought—she looks like architecture. Like some permanent, chiseled thing so deliberate and designed and lovingly hacked out of stone that tourists come to look at it and wish they lived somewhere they could look out of their kitchen window and see just one corner of it every day. She looks like one of Al’s people. Oh, not like Frankie. Not like Al’s errand boys and good time girls. One of his people. One of the odd ducks off in the shadows in long coats and long dresses and eyes that don’t shine in the dark, one of the ones always writing or counting or checking the time while Al does his softshoe workin’-for-me’s-like-working-for-springtime come hither pitch.

“Zelda, where have you been? What are you doing down here?”

Her eyes slip back toward his.

“Working,” she says, and her voice is so full of thrill at that word Frankie is sure she said something else for a minute. Winning, maybe, or wanting. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

She hauls him up the winter dunes. He turns up the collar on his bellhop uniform. The sky overhead is so clotted with stars, like they’re all in a hurry to get somewhere. To get here. Zelda walks like this is her own backyard, and pretty soon she’s gonna show him a rope swing she was too afraid to try till she was thirteen.

“Have you ever been to Canada before?” Zelda says instead. She’s different—less interested in him. Frankie hates it.

“No ma’am,” he starts to say before he understands that she don’t mean any place whose capital is Ottawa. But the answer is still no. “I just work for Al, up top. Keeping…keeping books.” He finds he doesn’t really want to say anything about the tubes. She might think it was wrong, that he’d seen things he shouldn’t, which of course he has. “I asked once. If I could see the basement. Always heard the parties there were like something out of the Bible. The good parts of the Bible, before God gets mad and raids the place. But he said it wasn’t for me. Not for a nice Minnesota boy with milk for blood. I insisted and he said…” Frankie winces. He remembers every word. “He said I’d just blab it all to everyone because that’s what good schoolboys who grow up writers do, and maybe when I was forty and had drunk down a dozen movies and saw despair in my own buttonholes, then I could be trusted.” Zelda doesn’t laugh at him. That’s something. “Do you like it here?” he ventures, pressing his luck.

“It’s the best place in the world,” she says, and she means it, he thinks, more than he’s ever heard anyone mean a thing. He’s jealous of this place all the sudden, she means it so hard. “So how come you’re here now, if he blew you off?”

“I’m…I’m looking for someone.”

The schoolyard cigarette voice clicks back on like a light. “For me? That’s awfully sweet.”

“No,” he says, and feels sick because of course it’s her, who else but her? “For Pearl Slake. Y Candywhatever. I’m supposed to bring her home. Have you seen her?”

“Well, sure.”

“Is she well?”

“So well you could throw pennies in her. But I don’t think she’ll want to go home. I wouldn’t mention it, if I were you. She throws things when she’s mad.”

A grand set of mountains brushes up against the stars far ahead. Frankie can see a house—but you couldn’t all it a house. It’s huge, bigger than a castle, bigger than he imagines Versailles could ever hope to grow up to be. It has no walls. It’s bones against the dark. Glowing, glittering bones, ringed in by barrels like Greek temples. He tugs Zelda’s furry arm back. Before they get there, he has to ask. He has to know.

“Zelda, Zelda, wait. Wait.” She looks at him with a perfectly open, sunny face, the swimming cap that hurt him so covering her ears snug and cozy. “Do you like me?” he whispers. “I thought, that night in the tub, I thought you liked me. And when I bring the eggs round in the morning. I had the feeling that you liked me then, too. But I could be wrong, you can always be wrong, so before we get wherever we’re going, can’t you just tell me? Because I like you like fire.”

She laughs a little. Puts her hand to her windblown bob. Before she can say anything, a great white shape comes careening down the frozen meadow, down the mountains and the barrels and the house on the horizon. It lands next to her—a pelican with wings as wide as a giant’s arms. It takes Zelda’s fingers gently, so, so gently, in its beak. Standing between his girl and a boy who just needs to be seen so bad he’d turn on all the lights in hell.

“Mr. Puss-Boots!” she cries in delight. Mr. Puss-Boots does a little shuffling dance with his webbed feet. “Well, Frankie, I’ll tell you,” Zelda says cheerfully. “I do like you. I like you plenty. But I like a lot of things that are no good for me. Liking something doesn’t mean much, if you ask me. It’s not what matters. What matters is if you let the liking have its say. and I don’t. If I can help it.”

B3

Pearl de Agosti y Candela y Slake isn’t hard to find. She’s standing outside the great skeleton house. She’s got a man’s nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else’s tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king’s mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She’s got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she’s laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good. Frankie only ever saw her once before. She was all slicked back, not just her hair but her heart, her clothes and her way of talking, her hand on her son’s head, the way her eyes narrowed when she watched her husband cutting the ribbon for the new golfballroom. That was over now. Little Cass jumps and giggles beside her, with buttercups in his hair, and every once in awhile the little boy sings: my mummy she has blue, blue eyes! She’ll forget with a wink of the left, she’ll forget-you-not with a wink of the right, and if you bring me sweets she’ll spend the night! in his small trembling voice. Pearl sweeps him up in her arms and covers him with kisses and calls him her prince and presses her cheek to his and Frankie doesn’t know but I’ll spill—it’s the biggest love that boy will ever know, down there in Canada, in the dark. Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one’s looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that’s why we dug caves so much, way back when. Caspar gone for a moment and Little Cass turns into Little P, all her own, and isn’t he clever, isn’t he grand? He looks like himself down here, not like that pile of shit with the wedding ring on. And she just lets go

into her love. Turns out she’s got a bucketful. She always thought she’d gone dry.

Pearl puts her kidlet down and throws dice against the foot of the buttress. A ring of men cheer. She cheers. Her cheers sound like screaming. The dice explode against the wall into pages, pages and pages, landing on the snow like ash, covered in type, covered in good paragraphs, cutting, incisive, perfect paragraphs like her old Underwood could never bash out. She falls on them, holding them in clumps and sheafs to her heart, stuffing them in her shirt till they stick out like tits. But in a minute she’s up again, into the throng of the house without walls, into the heat of the place, the sound, the fury, the utter din of it.