She must have been dead.
At least for the past 10 years.
This sets up a mystery.
A faint dust rose out her mouth when she spoke like breath in the cold.
She did not ask them, “Did you receive the notice from the sheriff?” We are in the silver-star west.
The dead is still alive, you’d think.
Apparently, she’s living quite well in the past. It’s hard to tear her away from him. The Past is so charming, illustrious, and debonair. You can make him up so well.
She did say, “I seek you,” with that strange dust rising up out of her mouth as from decaying furniture. The little boys in the town said her lungs were made of the dust and that when it’s all puffed out, she’ll die. This is why she smokes: the tar holds all that dust together. That’s what the boys says.
I think her name was Amber. But there’s a disconnect these days. Her eyes of emerald green were filmy orbs merely held out to bemuse the cinders strewn about in stillness. She remembers the fire that that the electric blanket started. Her leg is still scarred. That was okay because she was able to kill her parents, and her scar was her reminder of that brave, August night when the heliotrope chose to bloom.
Some say that the dust is the ash of that fire—it is the ash of her parents, specifically, as if it infected her. She was the trenchant cat-lady but she didn’t have any cats… just the past. No one in the West was clever enough to car her the trenchant past-lady.
As said, she smoked a lot to hide the dust. She would draw it long into her lungs of ash, yellowing her left index and middle fingers before the War, then right index and middle fingers. She could not change teeth until she got dentures that she washed nightly. She found the sensation of smoking without teeth liberating.
“I did not murder them,” she said, 50 years earlier, at 20, as she tapped ash into the clear ash tray in the middle of the Spartan table in the middle of the apartment on the second floor of the decrepit wooden building in the middle of town. We are in the middle of the universe.
At the time, days after the fire, her injury was bandaged enough to hinder her walking. She would need a cane until it healed as much as it could.
The sheriff—brown shirt, silver star and all—subsequently heavy-stepped around the kitchen, as if his boots were made of lead. “You may say that, Ms. Amber, but we’ll find out the truth about you. About the dust. You know now, and we’ll know soon.” He was trying to impede upon her as she sat on the tweed couch among the rented pieces of someone else’s life. He was leaning down towards her so as to make his words stronger, as from above.
“That is well.” He could not instill fear, she looked up at him with a steely green view from below.
“Very well.” He replaced his Stetson and left down the rickety stairs, each one bending under the weight.
When the creaking and the moaning of the stairs ceased, she sighed. Smoke and dust.
Eight days late she was arrested on evidence that had nothing to do with the fire. She was released two days afterwards.
The truth was that no one but her would know. It was the scar that threw them off. It was so bad she almost lost her leg, and murderers don’t hurt themselves. And women don’t even murder. Especially at the age of 15! It had to be accident. It had to be.
It was the scar and it was also her lack of guilt.
This sets up a mystery.
It’s not like she was ugly, neither. The dust softened her lines, made her complete and deceiving, like the stars of Old Hollywood. Curious boys would sneak over on summer nights to see her change, to see her naked, to see her scar, to see her body—the most beautiful body in all of Babylon. They would see her pleasure through the window, her writhing and her toes clenching among screams alone.
She never wondered why there was a patch of grass that never grew. It was under her window and she understood. Though she knew (or thought, at least) that no one would lover her, she took solace in the fact that all the boys in town would want her. Society would say no, but the spot from which nothing could grow spoke more volumes than any city’s unwritten decree. This spot from where they watched, within her knowledge, said that all the boys in town had loved her and spilled for her. Everyone at least once.
She liked knowing this. She lived through the open window and got even more excited when she heard an escaped yelp and subsequent shuffling feet and jingling belt buckles as they ran away, erect and fearful.
…But then she got older and they stopped coming. They stopped coming and the grass grew back and she was alone again.
At this, she sighed. Smoke and dust.
At 35, the man of light appeared. His uvula was lit as if from bulbs within him. He came when she was 35. He was 37. She would cough, he’d open his mouth and they’d watch the dust settle unto love. He was Irish-descended, as from something great and Joycean, flaming lanky with red hair, eyebrows, and beard in the winter. He was wearing a Kelly green shirt and khakis when he laid her down for the first time. Everyone was watching. Her screams of painful pleasure rang through the city. I’ve never seen so much dust and light. They made love with the lights turned out so that we could follow by only what filtered through his teeth, guiding we the voyeurs to the parts of her body which he enjoyed the most.
The boys came back for a time, the grass stopped growing again. They liked to see the light along her scarring like nodes of direction along a canyon.
The scar consumed her left thigh and looked cavernous because it was deeply cut. It was as if she had reverse-varicose-veins that were sucked inward instead of pushed outward. It looked like roots to within her thighs or a roadmap upwards toward the grassy knoll that you could lay your head upon during a cooling day in October’s orange sickness. It was always so goddam beckoning. I stood on that grass with my hands in my pockets every week, looking up at her, wondering about her.
I wanted her but I was 20 years younger. She would never look at me. So, one night when the Human Torch was away, I snuck up to her room and took her for myself, pushing her back, rubbing the scar, coughing among the dust. She looked into my eyes, her orbs of emerald green, glowing with more passion than I’ve ever seen. She pushed me off and I looked at her like a chastised puppy. I was fearful and ready to run. I realized my lust and was ready to run away from it.
Despite seeing this she stated, “If you’re to going to take me like this, at least do it right!” She pushed my head toward the canyons and caverns.
I committed.
I ran my fingers along the roads to Babylon. The scar was erogenous. I should have known this after all those years. She screamed and clasped and writhed and scratched and coughed and covered everything. She was with the past again, in heat and in passion.
She was scratching my back from mid-spine down toward my kidneys, digging and digging and digging into my flesh. I bled everywhere among her dust that speckled it all.
When I felt the warmth starting to well up within me, I rolled over into the sheets and bit them, tasting my Type A. They were stained; they could never be slept in again. I had dyed them crimson with her help.
I stumbled out, tired and woozy from excitement and blood loss. My shirt clung to my back, the blood trying to get at anything as it cried, “Make it stop!”
As I left, the boys on the grass stared at me. I looked at them and smiled—I laughed a little in triumph. They knew that what they had seen was her youth once more. And never again.
They never returned.
And I suppose that the Human Torch saw the speckled, bloody, sheets and subsequently knew what had happened. He cried for vengeance at his hands, up and down the city streets.
But nobody really cared, I think, because they knew, from the stories that the little boys told, that she hadn’t been happier in years.
This settles up the mystery.
She would die a year later, to the date, as if her remembrance broke her closely to the bone.
I didn’t go to the funeral, I left town after that night. Clamoring west to the Ocean Away with nothing but my scars. I never knew what caused all that dust.
The Human Torch was doused two weeks later. He hung himself in the basement of their house. No one found him until a small boy of about seven (I think he was the Hendrickson boy, come to think of it) walked by the empty house and heard the decayed thud of the neck breaking apart. The boy peeked into the opaque window atop the basement and saw the heap of decay next to the head finally liberated below the noose that acted as liberator. This is diplomacy. I believe in you.
It’s been long enough to tell you. I’ve spent long enough in these lands with a name that translates roughly to “The Rooted Back,” and I have rooted you back to these incidents that happened so long away, so far away from this land among the grey clouds and forests and small houses and rickety shanties.
I hope that you can therefore understand. I followed the road to Babylon and am rooted from there, for 10 years odd… And so it is now I travel back and become uprooted.
