Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 52

Stewart gazed upward, his eyes trained on Vegas Vic: the famous neon cowboy who used to wave a greeting to visitors cruising into town in fin-tailed Cadillacs-relegated now to headliner status in the Neon Museum. He doesn't wave anymore: his hand stays upraised stiffly. I lifted mine in a like salute. "Howdy," I replied.

Stewart giggled. "At least they didn't blow him up."

"No," I said, looking down. "They blew the f.u.c.k out of Bugsy, though."

Bugsy was a California gangster who thought maybe halfway up the Los Angeles highway, where it crossed the Phoenix road, might be a good place for a joint designed to convert dirty money into clean. It so happened that there was already a little town with a light-skirt history huddled there, under the shade of tree-lined streets. A town with mild winters and abundant water. Las Vegas means the meadows in Spanish. In the middle of the harsh Mojave, the desert bloomed. And there's always been magic at a crossroads. It's where you go to sell your soul.

I s.h.i.+fted my eyepatch to get a look otherwise. Vic s.h.i.+mmered, a twist of expectation, disappointment, conditioned response. My right eye showed me the slot-machine zombies as a shuffling darkness, Stewart a blinding white light, a sword-wielding spectre. A demon of chance. The Suicide King, avatar of take-your-own-life Las Vegas with its record-holding rates of depression, violence, failure, homelessness, DUI. The Suicide King, who cannot ever die by his own hand.

"I can see why she feels at home here," Stewart said to Vic's neon feet.

"Vic's a he, Stewart. Unless that was a f.a.ggot 'she,' in which case I will send the ghosts of campiness-past present and future-to haunt your bed."

"She. G.o.ddess. She seems at home here."

"I don't want her at home in my city," I snapped as if it cramped my tongue. It felt petty. And good. "The b.i.t.c.h has her own city. And sucks enough f.u.c.king water out of my river."

He looked at me shyly through a fall of blond bangs. I thought about kissing him, and snorted instead. He grinned. "Vegas is nothing but a big f.u.c.king stage set wrapped around a series of strip malls, anymore. What could be more Hollywood?"

I lit a cigarette, because everybody still smokes in Vegas-as if to make up for California-and took a deep, acrid drag. When I blew smoke back out it tickled my nostrils. "I think that empty inscription is what locks us to L.A. "

Stewart laced his arm through mine again. "Maybe we'll get lucky and it will turn out to be the schedule for The Big One."

I pictured L.A. tumbling into the ocean, G.o.ddess and all, and grinned back. "I was hoping to get that a little sooner. So what say we go back to the Dam tonight and give it another try?"

"What the h.e.l.l do we have to lose?"

The trooper shone his light around the cab and the bed of the truck, but didn't make us get out despite three A.M. and no excuse to be out but stargazing at Willow Beach . Right after the terrorist attacks, it was soldiers armed with automatic weapons. I'm not sure if the Nevada State Police are an improvement, but this is the world we have to live in, even if it is under siege. Stewart, driving, smiled and showed ID, and then we pa.s.sed through winding gullies and out onto the Dam.

It was uncrowded in the breathless summer night. The ma.s.sive lights painting its facade washed the stars out of the desert sky. Las Vegas glowed in the pa.s.senger-side mirror from behind the mountains as Stewart parked the truck on the Arizona side. On an overcast night, the glow is greenish-the reflected lights of the MGM Grand. That night, clear skies, and it was the familiar city-glow pink, only brighter and split neatly by the ascending Luxor light like a beacon calling someone home.

I'd been chewing my thumb all evening. Stewart rattled my shoulder to get me to look up. "We're here. Bring your chisel?"

"Better," I said, and reached behind the seat to bring out the tire iron and a little eight-pound hammer. The sledge dropped neatly into the tool loop of my cargo pants. I tugged a black denim jacket on over the torn s.h.i.+rt and slid the iron into the left-hand sleeve. "Now I'm ready."

He disarmed the doors and struggled out of the leather jacket I'd told him was too hot to wear. "Why you always gotta break things you don't understand?"

"Because they scare me." I didn't think he'd get it, but he was still sitting behind the wheel thinking when I walked around and opened his door. The alarm had rearmed; it wailed momentarily but he keyed it off in irritation and hopped down, tossing the jacket inside. "It's got to relate to how bad things have gotten. It's a shadow war, man. This Dam is for something."

"Of course it's for something." Walking beside me, he shot me that blue-eyed look that made me want to smack him and kiss him all at once. "You know what they used to say about the Colorado before they built it-too thick to drink, and too thin to plow. The Dam is there to screw up the breeding cycles of fish, make it possible for men to live where men shouldn't be living. Make a reservoir. Hydroelectric power. Let the mud settle out. It's there to hold the river back."

It's there to hold the river back. "I was thinking just that earlier," I said as we walked across the floodlit Dam. The same young girl from that afternoon leaned out over the railing, looking down into the yawning, floodlit chasm. I wondered if she was homeless and how she'd gotten all the way out here-and how she planned to get back.

She looked up as we walked past arm in arm, something reflected like city glow in her eyes.

The lure of innocence to decadence cuts both ways: cities and angels, vampires and victims. Sweet-eyed street kid with a heart like a knife. I didn't even need to flip up my eyepatch to know for sure. "What's your name?" I let the tire iron slip down in my sleeve where I could grab it. "G.o.ddess leave you behind?"

"G.o.ddess works for me," she said, and raised her right fist. A s.h.i.+ny little automatic glittered in it, all blued steel with a viper nose. It made a 40's movie tableau, even to the silhouetting spill of floodlights and the way the wind pinned the dress to her body. She smiled. Sweet, venomous. "And you can call me Angel. Drop the crowbar, kid."

"It's a tire iron," I answered, but I let it fall to the cement. It rang like the bell going off in my head, telling me everything made perfect sense. "What the h.e.l.l do you want with Las Vegas , Angel?" I thought I knew all the West-coast animae. She must be new.

She giggled prettily. "Look at you, cutie. Just as proud of your little shadow city as if it really existed."

I wished I still had the tire iron in my hand. I would have broken it across her face.

"What the f.u.c.k is that supposed to mean?" Stewart. Bless him. He jerked his thumb up at the light smirching the sky. "What do you call that?"

She shrugged. "A mirage s.h.i.+nes too, but you can't touch it. All you need to know is quit trying to break my Dam. You must be Jack, right? And this charming fellow here-" she took a step back so the pistol still covered both of us, even as Stewart dropped my hand and edged away. Stewart. "This must be the Suicide King. I'd like you both to work for me too."

The gun oscillated from Stewart's midsection to mine. Angel's hand wasn't shaking. Behind her, I saw G.o.ddess striding up the sidewalk, imperious in five-hundred dollar high-heeled shoes.

"I know what happens," I said. "All that darkness has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Everything trapped behind the Dam. All the little ways my city echoes yours, and the big ones too. And Nevada has a way of sucking things up without a trace.

"The Dam is a way to control it. It's a way to hold back that gummy river of blackness. And Las Vegas is the reservoir that lets you meter it out and use when you want it.

"Let me guess. You need somebody to watch over Hoover . And the magic built into it, which will be complete sometime after the concrete cures."

Stewart picked up the thread as G.o.ddess pulled a little pearl-handled gun out of her pocketbook as well. He didn't step forward, but I felt him interpose himself. Don't! Don't. "Let me guess," he said. "The early part of 2100? What happens then?"

"Only movie villains tell all in the final reel." G.o.ddess had arrived.

Angel cut her off. "Gloating is pa.s.se." She smiled. "L.A. is built on failure, baby. I'm a carnivore. All that pain has to go somewhere. Can't keep it inside: it would eat me up sure as I eat up dreams. Gotta have it for when I need it, to share with the world."

"The picture of Dorian Gray," Stewart said.

"Call it the picture of L.A." She studied my face for a long time before she smiled. All that innocence, and all that cool calculated savagery just under the surface of her eyes. "Smart boys. Imagine how much worse I would be without it. And it doesn't affect the local ecology all that much. As you noted, Jackie, Nevada 's got a way of making things be gone."

"That doesn't give you the right."

Angel shrugged, as if to say, What are rights? "All chiseling that date off would do is remove the reason for Las Vegas to exist. It would vanish like the corpse of a twenty-dollar streetwalker dumped in the high desert, and no one would mark its pa.s.sing. Boys, you're not real."

I felt Stewart swelling beside me, soul-deep offended. It was my city. His city. And not some va.s.sal state of Los Angeles . "You still haven't said what happens in a hundred years."

G.o.ddess started to say something, and Angel hushed her with the flat of her outstretched hand. "L.A.," she said, that gesture taking in everything behind her: Paris, New York, Venice, shadows of the world's great cities in a shadow city of its own-"Wins. The spell is set, and can't be broken. Work for me. You win too. What do you say to that, Jack?"

"Angel, honey. n.o.body really talks like that." I started to turn away, laying a hand on Stewart's arm to bring him with me. The sledgehammer nudged my leg.

"Boys," G.o.ddess said. Her tone was harsh with finality.

Stewart fumbled in his pocket. I knew he was reaching for his knife. "What are you going to do," he asked, tugging my hand, almost dragging me away. "Shoot me in the back?"

I took a step away from G.o.ddess, and from Angel. And the Stewart caught my eye with a wink, and-Stewart!-kept turning, and he dropped my hand....

The flat clap of a gunshot killed the last word he said. He pitched forward as if kicked, blood like burst berries across his midsection, front and back. I spun around as another bullet rang between my Docs. G.o.ddess skipped away as I lunged, shredding the seam of my pants as I yanked the sledgehammer out. It was up like a baseball bat before Stewart hit the ground. I hoped he had his knife in his hand. I hoped he had the strength to open a vein before the wound in his back killed him.

I didn't have time to hope anything else.

They shot like L.A. cops-police stance, wide-legged, braced and aiming to kill. I don't know how I got between the slugs. I felt them tug my clothing; one burned my face. But I'm One-Eyed Jack, and my luck was running. Cement chips stung my face as a bullet ricocheted off the wall and out over Lake Mead . Behind Angel and G.o.ddess, a light pulsed like Stewart's blood and a siren screamed.

Stewart wasn't making any sound now and I forced myself not turn and look back at him. Instead, I closed the distance, shouting something I don't recall. I think I split G.o.ddess' lovely skull open on the very first swing. I know I smashed Angel's arm, because her gun went flying before she ran. Ran like all that practice in the sands of Southern California came in handy, fit-no doubt-from rollerblading along the board walk. My lungs burned after three steps. The lights were coming.

Almost n.o.body runs in Las Vegas , except on a treadmill. It's too f.u.c.king hot. I staggered to a stop, dropped the hammer clanging as I stepped over G.o.ddess' s.h.i.+mmering body, and went back for Stewart.

His blood was a sticky puddle I had to walk through to get to him. He'd pushed himself over on his side, and I could hear the whimper in his breath, but the knife had fallen out of his hand. "Jack," he said. "Can't move my fingers."

I picked it up and opened it. "Love. Show me where."

"Sorry," he said. "Who the h.e.l.l knew they could shoot so f.u.c.king well?" It came up on his lips in a bubble of blood, and it had to be his hand. So I folded his fingers around the handle and guided the blade to his throat.

The sirens and lights throbbed in my head like a Monday-morning migraine. "Does it count if I'm pus.h.i.+ng?"

He giggled. It came out a kicked whimper. "I don't know," he said through the bubbles. "Try it and see."

I pushed. Distorted by a loudspeaker, the command to stop and drop might have made me jump another day, but Stewart's blood was sudden, hot and sticky-slick as tears across my hands. I let the knife fall and turned my back to the road. Down by my boots, Stewart started to s.h.i.+mmer. We were near where Angel had been leaning out to look down the face of the Dam. The Plexiglas barriers and the decorated tops of the elevator shafts started five feet on my right.

"One-Eyed Jacks and Suicide Kings are wild," I muttered, and in two running steps I threw myself over the wall. h.e.l.l, you never know until you try it. A bullet gouged the walltop alongside the black streaks from the sole of my Doc.

The lights on the Dam face silvered it like a wedding cake. It didn't seem like such a long way to fall, and the river was down there somewhere. A gust of wind just might blow me wide enough to miss the blockhouse at the bottom.

If I got lucky.

From the outside northbound lane on the 95, I spotted the road: more of a track, by any reasonable standard. The white Ford pickup dragged across the rumble strip and halted amid scattering gravel. It had still had Stewart's jacket thrown across the front seat after I bribed impound. Sometimes corruption cuts in our favor. A flat hard shape patted my chest from inside the coat's checkbook pocket, and the alarm armed itself a moment after I got out.

Two tracks, wagon wheel wide, stretched through a forest of Joshua trees like p.r.i.c.kly old men hunched over in porcupine hats, ab.u.t.ted by sage and agave. The desert sky almost never gets so blue. It's usually a washed out-color: Mojave landscapes are best represented in turquoise and picture jasper.

A lot of people came through here-enough people to wear a road-and they must have thought they were going someplace better. California, probably. I pitched a rock at a toxic, endangered Gila monster painted in the animal gang colors of don't-mess-with-me and then I sat down on a dusty rock and waited. And waited. And waited, while the sun skipped down the flat horizon and the sky greyed periwinkle and then indigo. Lights rippled on across the valley floor, chasing the shadow of the mountain. From my vantage in the pa.s.s between the mountains, I made out the radioactive green s.h.i.+mmer of the MGM Grand, the laser-white beacon off the top of the Luxor, the lofted red-green-lavender Stratosphere. The Aladdin, the Venetian, the Paris. The amethyst and ruby arch of the Rio . New York , New York . And the Mirage. Worth a dry laugh, that.

Symbols of every land, drawing the black energy to Vegas. A darkness sink. Like a postcard. Like the skyline of a city on the back of a one-eyed jack in a poker deck with the knaves pulled out.

It glittered a lot, for a city in thrall.

There was a fifth of tequila in Stewart's coat. I poured a little libation on an agave, lifted up my eyepatch and splashed some in my otherwise eye. I took a deep breath and stared down on the valley. "Stewart," I said to my city. "I don't know if you're coming back. If anybody squeaks through on a technicality, man, it should be you. And I haven't seen your replacement yet. So I keep hoping." I hadn't seen Angel either. But I hadn't been down to the Dam.

Another slug of liquor. "Bugsy, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. You brought me here, didn't you? Me and Stew. You fixed the chains tight, the ones the Dam forged. And it didn't turn out quite the way you antic.i.p.ated. Because sometimes we're wild cards, and sometimes we're not, and what matters is how you call the game."

I drank a little tequila, poured a little on the ground. If you're going to talk to ghosts, it doesn't hurt to get them drunk. Ask a vodun if you don't believe me.

My glittering shadow city-all cheap wh.o.r.e in gaudy paint that makes her look older, much older, and much, much tireder than she is-she'll suck up all the darkness that b.i.t.c.h Angel can throw at her, and I swear someday the dam will burst and the desert will suck the City of Angels up too. Nevada has a way of eating things whole. Swallowing them without a trace. Civilizations, loved ones, fusion products.

There's a place to carve one more Great Event on the memoried surface of the Dam. And I mean to own that sucker, before Angel carves her city's black conquest in it. I've still got a hundred years or so to figure out how to do it.

Meanwhile, my city glitters like a mirage in the valley. Sin City . Just a shadow of something bigger. But a shadow can grow strangely real if you squint at it right, and sometimes a mirage hides real water.

This is my city, and I'm her Jack. I'm not going anywhere.

Cryptic Coloration Katie saw him first. The next-best thing to naked, in cutoff camouflage pants and high-top basketball sneakers and nothing else, except the thick black labyrinth of neo-tribal ink that covered his pale skin from collarbones to ankle-bones. He shone like piano keys, glossy-sleek with sweat in a sultry September afternoon.

Katie already had Melissa's sleeve in her hand and was tugging her toward the crosswalk. Gina trailed three steps behind. "We have got to go watch this basketball game."

"What?" But then Melissa's line of sight intersected Katie's and she gasped. "Oh my f.u.c.k, look at all that ink. Do you think that counts as a s.h.i.+rt or a skin?" Melissa was from Boston, but mostly didn't talk like it.

"Never mind the ink," Katie said. "Look at his triceps."

Little shadowed dimples in the undersides of his arms, and all Katie could think of for a moment was that he wasn't terribly tall, and if she had been standing close enough when he raised his hands to take a pa.s.s she could have stood on tiptoe and licked them. The image dried her mouth, heated her face.

Melissa would have thought Katie silly for having shocked herself, though, so she didn't say anything.

Even without the ink, he had the best body on the basketball court. Hard all over, muscle swelling and valleying as he sprinted and side-stepped, chin-length blond hair swinging in his eyes. He skittered left like a boxer, turned, dribbled between his legs-quadriceps popping, calves like flexed cables-caught the ball as it came back up and leaped. Parabolic, sailing. Sweat shook from his elbows and chin as he released.

A three-point shot. A high geometric arch.

Denied when a tall black boy of eighteen or so tipped it off the edge of the basket, jangling the chain, and fired back to half court, but that didn't matter. Katie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Gina was following.

"G.o.d," Melissa purred. "I love New York."

Katie, mopping her gritty forehead with the inside of her T-s.h.i.+rt collar, couldn't have agreed more.

So it was mid-September and still too hot to think. So she was filthy just from walking through the city air.

You didn't get anything like the blond boy back home in Appleton.

Melissa was a tall freckled girl who wore her hair in red pigtails that looked like braided yarn. She had a tendency to bounce up on her toes that made her seem much taller, and she craned over the pedestrians as they stepped up onto the far curb. "There's some shade by the-oh, my G.o.d would you look at that?"

Katie bounced too, but couldn't see anything except s.h.i.+rts. "Mel!"

"Sorry."

Flanking Gina, two steps ahead of her, they moved on. Melissa was right about the shade; it was cooler and had a pretty good view. They made it there just as the blond was facing off with a white-s.h.i.+rted Latino in red Converse All-Stars that were frayed around the cuffs. "Jump ball," Gina said, and leaned forward between Katie and Melissa.

The men coiled and went up. Attenuated bodies, arching, b.u.mping, big hands splayed. Katie saw dark bands clasping every finger on the blond, and each thumb. More ink, or maybe rings, though wouldn't it hurt to play ball in them?

The Latino was taller; the blond beat him by inches. He tagged the ball with straining fingertips, lofted it to his team. And then he landed lightly, knees flexed, sucked in a deep breath while his elbows hovered back and up, and pivoted.

It wasn't a boy, unless a man in his early thirties counted.

"Holy c.r.a.p," said Gina, who only swore in Puerto Rican. "Girls, that's Doctor S."

Wednesday at noon, the three mismatched freshman girls who sat in the third row center of Matthew Szczegielniak's 220 were worse than usual. Normally, they belonged to the doe-eyed, insecure subspecies of first-year student, badly needing to be shocked back into a sense of humor and acceptance of their own fallibility. A lot of these young girls reminded Matthew of adolescent cats; trying so hard to look serene and dignified that they walked into walls.

And then got mad at you for noticing.

Really, that was even funnier.

Today, though, they were giggling and nudging and pa.s.sing notes until he was half-convinced he'd made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up teaching a high school cla.s.s. He caught the carrot-top mid-nudge while mid-sentence (Byron, Scott), about a third of the way through his introductory forty minutes on the Romantic poets, and fixed her with a glare through his spectacles that could have chipped enamel.

A red tide rose behind her freckles, brightening her sunburned nose. Her next giggle came out a squeak.

"Ms. Martinchek. You have a trenchant observation on the work of Joanna Baillie, perhaps?"