She’d never seen him smile before, she realized. It transformed his features.
“You’ve broken the curse,” he said.
“Say what?”
“You don’t know how long I’ve had to wait to find someone both selfless and willing to take me in as I was.”
“I don’t know about the selfless—”
He leaned forward and kissed her.
“Thank you,” he said.
And then he went whirling off across the lawn, spinning like a dervishing top. His squatness melted from him and he grew tall and lean, fluid as a willow sapling, dancing in the wind. From the far side of the lawn he waved at her. For a long moment, all she could do was stare, open-mouthed. When she finally lifted her hand to wave back, he winked out of existence, like a spark leaping from a fire, glowing brightly before it vanished into the darkness.
This time she knew he was gone for good.
“MY LIFE AS A BIRD”
MONA’S CLOSING MONOLOGUE FROM CHAPTER ELEVEN:
The weird thing is I actually miss him. Oh, not his crankiness, or his serious lack of personal hygiene. What I miss is the kindness that occasionally slipped through—the piece of him that survived the curse.
Jilly says that was why he was so bad-tempered and gross. He had to make himself unlikeable, or it wouldn’t have been so hard to find someone who would accept him for who he seemed to be. She says I stumbled into a fairy tale, which is pretty cool when you think about it, because how many people can say that?
Though I suppose if this really were a fairy tale, there’d be some kind of “happily ever after” wrap up, or I’d at least have come away with a fairy gift of one sort or another. That invisibility charm, say, or the ability to change into a bird or a cat.
But I don’t really need anything like that.
I’ve got The Girl Zone. I can be anything I want in its pages. Rockit Grrl, saving the day. Jupiter, who can’t seem to physically show up in her own life. Or just me.
I’ve got my dreams. I had a fun one last night. I was walking downtown and I was a birdwoman, spindly legs, beak where my nose should be, long wings hanging down from my shoulders like a ragged cloak. Or maybe I was just wearing a bird costume. Nobody recognized me, but they knew me all the same and thought it was way cool.
And I’ve touched a piece of real magic. Now, no matter how grey and bland and pointless the world might seem sometimes, I just have to remember that there really is more to everything than what we can see. Everything has a spirit that’s so much bigger and brighter than you think it could hold.
Everything has one.
Me, too.
China Doll
In theory there is free will, in practice everything is predetermined.
—Ramakrishna, nineteenth-century Bengali saint
The crows won’t shut up. It’s late, close on midnight. The junkyard’s more shadow than substance and the city’s asleep. The crows should be sleeping, too—roosting somewhere, doing whatever it is that crows do at night. Because you don’t normally see them like this, cawing at each other, hoarse voices tearing raggedly across the yard, the birds shifting, restless on their perches, flecks of rust falling in small red clouds every time they move.
They can’t sleep and they won’t shut up.
Coe can’t sleep either, but at least he’s got an excuse.
The dead don’t sleep.
He’s sitting there on the hood of a junked car, three nights dead. Watching the flames lick up above the rim of an old steel barrel where he’s got a trash fire burning. Waiting for China to show up. China with her weird tribal tags: the white mud dried on her face, eyes darkened with rings of soot, lips blackened with charcoal, cheeks marked with black hieroglyphic lines. He looks about the same. The two of them are like matched bookends in a chiaroscuro still life. Like they just stepped out of some old black and white movie, except for that red dress of hers.
He’s not exactly looking forward to seeing her. First thing you know, she’ll start in again on who they’re supposed to kill and why, and he’s no more interested in listening to her tonight than he was the day he came back.
He thinks of standing by the barrel, holding his hands up to the flames for warmth, but that’s a comfort he’s never going to know again. The cold’s lodged too deep inside him and it’s never going away, doesn’t matter what China says.
Killing’s not the answer. But neither’s this.
“Just shut up,” he tells the birds.
They don’t listen to him any more than they ever do, but China comes walking out of the shadows like his voice summoned her.
“Hey, Leon,” she says.
She jumps lightly up onto the hood of the car, stretches out her legs, leans back against the windshield. Her dress rides up her legs, but the sight of it doesn’t do anything for him. She’s too young. Hell, she could be his daughter.
Coe gives her a nod, waits for her to start in on him. She surprises him. She just sits there, quiet for a change, checking out the birds.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” she asks after awhile.
“You don’t know?”
Ever since they came back, it’s like she knows everything. Maybe she was like that before they died. He doesn’t know. First time he saw her she was in that tight red dress, running down a narrow alleyway, black combat boots clumping on the pavement. Came bursting out of the alley and ran right into him where he was just walking along, minding his own business. They fall in a tumble, and before they can get themselves untangled, there’s a couple of Oriental guys there, standing over them. One’s got a shotgun, the other a Uzi. For a moment, Coe thinks he’s back in the jungle.
He doesn’t get a chance to say a word.
The last thing he sees are the muzzles of their guns, flashing white. Last thing he hears is the sound of the shots. Last thing he feels are the bullets tearing into him. When he comes back, he’s lying in a junkyard—this junkyard—and China’s bending over him, wiping wet clay on his face. He starts to push her away, but she shakes her head.
“This is the way it’s got to be,” she says.
He doesn’t know what she’s talking about then. Now that he does, he wishes he didn’t. He looks at her, lounging on the car, and wonders, was she always so bloodthirsty, or did dying bring it out in her? Dying didn’t bring it out in him and it wouldn’t have had to dig far to find the capacity for violence in his soul.
She sits up, pulls her knees to her chin, gazes over them to where he’s sitting on the hood.
“Look,” she tells him, her voice almost apologetic. “I didn’t choose for things to work out the way they did.”
He doesn’t reply. There’s nothing to say.
“You never asked why those guys were chasing me,” she says.
Coe shrugs.
“Don’t you want to know why you died?”
“I know why I died,” he says. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, end of story.”
China shakes her head. “It’s way more complicated than that.”
It usually is, Coe thinks.
“You know anything about how the Tongs run their prostitution rings?” she goes on.
Coe nods. It’s an old story. The recruiters find their victims in Southeast Asia, “loaning” the girls the money they need to buy passage to North America, then make them work off the debt in brothels over here. The fact that none of their victims ever pays off that debt doesn’t seem to stop the new girls from buying into it. There’s always fresh blood. Some of those girls are so young they’ve barely hit puberty. The older ones—late teens, early twenties—make out like they’re preteens, because that’s where the big money is.
He gives China a considering look. Her name accentuates the Chinese cast to her features. Dark eyes the shape of almonds, black hair worn in a classic pageboy, bangs in front, the rest a sleek shoulder-length curve. He’d thought she was sixteen, seventeen. Now he’s not so sure anymore.
“That what happened to you?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “I never knew a thing about it until I ran into one of their girls. According to a card she was carrying, she was the property of the Blue Circle Boys Triad—at least the card had their chop on it. She was on the run and I took her in.”
“And the Tong found out.”
She shakes her head again. “She could barely speak a word of English, but a woman in the Thai grocery under my apartment was able to translate for us. That’s how I heard about what they’re doing to these girls.”
There’s a look in her eyes that Coe hasn’t seen there before, but he recognizes it. It’s like an old pain that won’t go away. He knows all about old pain.
“So what put the Tong onto you?” he asks, curious in spite of himself.
“I turned them in.”
Coe thinks he didn’t hear her right. “You what?”
“I turned them in. The cops raided their brothel and busted a couple of dozen of them. Don’t you read the papers?”
Coe shook his head. “I don’t—didn’t—need more bad news in my life.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve been there.”
Coe’s still working his head around what she did. Blowing the whistle on the Blue Circle Boys. She had to have known there’d be cops in their pocket, happy to let them know who was responsible. It was probably only dumb luck that the cop she’d taken her story to was a family man, walking the straight and narrow.
“And you didn’t think the Tong’d find out?’ he asks.
“I didn’t care,” she says. She’s quiet for a long moment, then adds, “I didn’t think I cared. Dying kind of changes your perspective on this kind of thing.”
Coe nods. “Yeah. Dying brings all kinds of changes.”
“So I was out clubbing—the night they were chasing me. Feeling righteous about what I’d done. Celebrating, I guess. I was heading for home, trying to flag down a cab, when they showed up. I didn’t know what to do, so I just took off and ran.”
“And we know how well that turned out,” Coe says.
“It wasn’t like I was trying to get you killed. I liked being alive myself.”
Coe shrugs. “I’m not blaming you. It’s like I said. I was just in the wrong place.”
“But our dying still means something. Doesn’t matter if there’s crooked cops, or that they rolled me over to the Tong. The brothel still got shut down and the Blue Circle Boys are hurting bad. And now those girls have a chance at a better life.”
“Sure. They’re going to do really well once they’re deported back to Thailand or Singapore or wherever they originally came from.”
Anger flares in her eyes. “What are you saying?”
“That nothing’s changed. The Tong’s had a bit of a setback, but give it a month or two and everything’ll be back to business as usual. That’s the way it works.”
“No,” she says. “This means something. Just like what we’ve got to do now means something.”
Coe shakes his head again. “Some things you can’t change. It’s like the government. The most you can do is vote in another set of monkeys, but it doesn’t change anything. It’s always business as usual.”
“Have you always been such a chickenshit?”
“I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe violence solves anything.”
“Same difference.”
Coe looks at her. He’s guessing now that she’s maybe twenty, twenty-two. At least half his age. When he was younger than she is now, the government gave him a gun and taught him how to kill. He was good at it, too. Did two tours, in country, came back all in one piece and with no other skills. So they hired him on. Same work, different jungle. There was always work for a guy like him who was good at what he did, good at doing what he was told. Good at keeping his mouth shut.
Until the day an op went bad and a little girl got caught in the crossfire. After that he couldn’t do it anymore. He looked at that dead kid and all he could do was put the gun down and disappear. Stopped living like a king, the best hotels, the best restaurants, limos when he wanted them, working only nine, ten times a year. He retired from it all, just like that. Vanished into the underground world of the homeless where he was just one more skell, nobody a citizen’d give a second look.
It had to be that way. The people he worked for didn’t exactly have a retirement plan for their employees. At least, not one that included your staying alive.
“You don’t know what I am,” he tells her.
He slides down from the hood of the car and starts walking.
“Leon!” she calls after him.
The crows lift up around the junkyard, filling the air with their raucous cries. It’s like they think he’s going to follow them, that he’s going to let them lead him back to where an eye for an eye makes sense again. But it isn’t going to happen. Dying hasn’t changed that. They want to take down the shooters who killed China and him, they can do it themselves.
“Leon!” China calls again.
He doesn’t turn, and she doesn’t follow.
* * *
He walks until he finds himself standing in front of a familiar building. Looks like any of the hundreds of other office buildings downtown, nothing special, except the people he’d worked for had a branch in it. There are lights up on the twelfth floor where they have their offices.
His gaze is drawn to the glass doors of the foyer, to the reflection he casts on their dark surfaces. He looks like he’s got himself made up for Halloween, like he’s wearing warpaint. Back when he was a grunt, there’d been an Indian in his platoon. Joey Keams, a Black Hills Lakota. Keams used to talk about his grandfather, how the same government they were fighting for had outlawed the Ghostdance and the Sun Dances, butchered his people by the thousands, but here he was anyway, fighting for them all the same.
Keams was a marvel. It was like he had a sixth sense, the way he could spot a sniper, a mine, an ambush. Handy guy to have around. Eight months into his tour, they were out on patrol and he stepped on a mine that his sixth sense hadn’t bothered to warn him about. There wasn’t enough left of him to ship home.
Coe glances around, but the birds are all gone. All that’s left is one dark shape sitting on a lamppost, watching him.
Funny the things you forget, he thinks. Because now he remembers that Keams talked about crows, too. How some people believed they carried the souls of the dead on to wherever we go when we die. How sometimes they carried them back when they had unfinished business. He’d have got along real well with China.
“I don’t have any unfinished business,” he tells the bird.
It cocks its head, stares right back at him like it’s listening.
Coe hasn’t had anything for a long time. Once he stopped killing, he went passive. Eating at soup kitchens, sleeping under overpasses, cadging spare change that he gave away to those who needed it more than he did. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t do drugs. Didn’t need anything that you couldn’t get as a handout.
He gives the building a last look, gaze locked on his reflection in the glass door. He looks like what he is: a bum, pushing fifty. Wearing raggedy clothes. No use to anyone. No danger to anyone. Not anymore.
The only thing that doesn’t fit is the face-painting job that China did on him. Pulling out his shirttails, he tries to wipe off the war paint, but all he does is smear the clay, make it worse. Screw it, he thinks. He turns away, heading up the street.
It’s close to dawn and except for the odd cab that wouldn’t stop for him anyway, he’s pretty much got the streets to himself. Even the whores are finally asleep.
The crow leaves its perch, flies overhead, lands on the next lamppost.
“So what are you?” he asks it. “My personal guide?”
The bird caws once. Coe pauses under the lamppost, puts his head back to look at it.
“Okay,” he says. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The crow flies off again and this time he follows. He’s st
ill not bought into any of it, but he can’t help being curious, now that he’s heard China’s story. And sure enough the bird leads him into Chinatown, up where it meets the no-man’s-land of the Tombs. As far as Coe can see, there’s nothing but abandoned tenements and broken-down factories and warehouses. He follows the crow across an empty lot, gravel and dirt crunching underfoot.
Used to be he could walk without a sound, like a ghost. Now that he is one, you can hear him a mile away.
He stops in the shadows of one of the factories. There are no streetlights down here. But dawn’s pinking the horizon and in its vague light he can make out the graffiti chops on the walls of the building across the street that mark it as Blue Circle Boys’ turf.
He hears footsteps coming up behind him, but he doesn’t look. His crow is perched on the roof of an abandoned car. A moment later, it’s joined by a second bird. Finally he turns around.
“You were in the trade, right?” he says to China.
She nods. “I guess you could say that. I was an exotic dancer.”
“China . . . ?”
“Was my stage name. China Doll. Cute, huh? My real name’s Susie Wong, but I can’t remember the last time I answered to it.”
“Why’d the cops listen to a stripper?”
“Dumb luck. Got a real family man, hungry for a righteous bust.”
“And now?” Coe asks.
“We have to take them out. The ones the cops didn’t pick up.”
Coe doesn’t say anything.
“The ones that killed us.”
“The crows tell you all that?” he asks. He lifted a hand to his cheek. “Like they told you about this warpaint?”
She nods.
He shakes his head. “They don’t say anything to me. All I hear is their damned cawing.”
“But you’ll help me?” China asks. “We died together, so we have to take them out together.”
More crow mumbo-jumbo, Coe supposes.
“I told you,” he says. “I won’t buy into this Old Testament crap.”
“I don’t want to argue with you.”
“No, you just want me to kill a few people so that we can have a happy ending and float off to our just reward.”