Welcome to Bordertown Page 19

  “You know that thing Rabbit said yesterday?” I ask.

  “Honey, she’s a little girl, not a prophet.”

  “Sometimes she’s right,” I say, looking through the door so I don’t have to catch her raised eyebrows.

  “So you went out to find a boy to have sex with?”

  “To fall in love,” I say to the table, blushing. “That’s what Rabbit said: ‘In thirteen days, you’ll lose your virginity and fall in love.’ ”

  “And sometimes that’s a thing you regret,” Grandmama says, with that weight in her voice that means she’s thinking of the World and the South and the misery of her own first love.

  My grandfather might have been a bad man, I want to say, but that doesn’t make you bad for not seeing the darkness inside him right away.

  “And what’s so wrong with just letting things happen, honey? Why force the issue?”

  If only Grandmama knew just how much I’m planning to force the issue. “It’s a chance, that’s all. Who doesn’t want to find love? And if Rabbit says it will happen in thirteen days, I have to try and find him. I want it to be someone good.” Someone I’ve always wanted.

  She gives me a sharp look. “And aren’t you my daughter’s daughter.”

  Mama’s been hung up on the same man for sixteen years, and not for any good reason, far as I can tell—never mind that the man is my father. But before I can tell her that I’d never wait so long for a man who doesn’t want me, Grandmama stands to take the biscuits out of the oven. She never uses a timer, but they’re perfect anyway. To an outsider, it might look like Rabbit is the only magic in our family, but I know better.

  She slides a biscuit on a plate and hands it to me. It’s an honor to eat Grandmama’s biscuits fresh from the oven. I handle it with due reverence.

  “Well?” she says, like always.

  “Delicious,” I say, like always.

  But Grandmama doesn’t smile. “You find your boy yet, Peya?”

  “I think so,” I say. “But he won’t talk to me.”

  * * *

  After that first unexpected conversation, the girl, Peya, returns. She talks, but she doesn’t hear. When she leaves, the sounds of the park scrape like sandpaper. The people in this Border city walk past him, speaking in voices too quiet or too loud, their sentences in cadences that rise at the end, that ask and ask, What is happening here? and When will it end? and What’s going on out in the World?

  Turns out the Way into the Borderlands has become a wall. No one’s come in and no one can get out. People joke about coffee getting scarce, but they mean something else, like always.

  The prince falls into the past again.

  The funeral of his beloved was held in the graveyard of the tiny local parish. “A terrible shame,” said the chambermaids who polished the silver. “I nearly fainted in the heat.”

  The summer of her death turned into the long winter of his mourning. Her clothes were given to charity, her precious plaster casts sold in bulk to an itinerant auctioneer from Milwaukee. The prince stayed behind his curtain; his soul withered like a fruit on a cut vine, but it refused to die. She and her baby boy rotted in the ground less than a mile away, and he could not touch her, could not hear her, would not see her ever again.

  Two years later, someone else’s hand pulled back his curtain; someone else’s face peered up at him.

  “Handsome devil, ain’t he?” said the man.

  “Barbaric,” said the second Mrs. Crenshaw. “His first wife had appalling taste.”

  “I take it this ain’t for the senator’s new place, then, ma’am?”

  “Throw it away. Please.”

  The man took the prince home. “Looks to me you’ll fetch a nice-enough price,” he said.

  No less than three dollars, thought the prince.

  * * *

  I’ve had a crush on Prince ever since Mama first took me busking with her in Fare-You-Well Park. We’d set up near the entrance to the green, Mama playing her beat-up acoustic guitar, sitting cross-legged on a blanket of Dutch-dyed fabric she claimed came straight from Africa. She’d play songs and I’d sing the descant harmony to her throaty melody. We drew crowds: the teenage runaway and her child with the swinging plaits. Never mind that my mother had run away with her mother—the story got the coins in the hat, while Grandmama schemed to find us something better.

  But during the breaks, Mama didn’t mind if I explored. Prince was covered in pigeon shit, like most of everything in the park, and the dark canopy of oak leaves above him made it hard to see his face until I got close enough. He wasn’t white. What with elves running around Bordertown like sylvan gods, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are other kinds of beauty—not everyone has to aspire to their patrician noses and willowy bodies and silvery-pale skin. Which is funny, because my plaster man was the color of sour milk, and yet I knew that his skin was dusky, that his eyes were dark and his lashes thick. His nose was wide like mine, though his lips were smaller. He was different and he was beautiful.

  When Rabbit came in from the garden and told me I’d fall in love, Prince was the one who flashed in my mind. I’ve fantasized about him for so many years, wondering what he’d be like if he were a real man who loved me. And suddenly, the idea didn’t seem so crazy: the thing about Bordertown? Sometimes magic works.

  There’s new graffiti scrawled on the broken flagstones in front of my plaster man.

  “Bordertown LIVES”

  “No shit,” I say. I look up at Prince and sigh. “I wish taggers would at least get an artistic sensibility, you know? Maybe draw something?”

  But of course he doesn’t answer. Snappin’ Wizards doesn’t open until evening on Mondays. I’m waiting on Rabbit, ’cause if the magic worked the last time when I was with her, I don’t want to take any chances. She shows up twenty minutes late with two chorizo empanadas from Juliana’s and I could kiss her, so I do.

  Rabbit grins. “She baked them special.”

  “I’m sure she did,” I say, though Juliana never makes fresh empanadas after one in the afternoon. For Rabbit, people do a lot of special things. She’s technically my aunt, though she’s nearly six years younger. Grandmama had an affair with a halfie when I was ten or so. It didn’t end badly, but it ended. Grandmama spent the next few months baking a lot of biscuits and pickling a lot of beets, and eventually we got Rabbit. Everyone’s been pretty happy since.

  “You know he’s alive in there,” I say around a mouthful of spicy beef and flaky pastry.

  She shrugs. “Sure. He’s sad, too.”

  “You can hear him?”

  “Nah. Just feel him crying.”

  My eye catches on the red scrawl beneath him. Even without real graffiti art, the tagger’s handwriting hints at a certain flair.

  “You think you could conjure some paint?” I ask.

  Rabbit considers. “Wind feels nice today.” I’ve known Rabbit all her life, so I don’t worry about the non sequitur. She lifts her free hand. Her skin’s just a little lighter than mine, but it shines silver in the sun, a cat’s eye caught in the light. Suddenly, blue paint drips from her fingers. She takes another bite of her empanada. “What do you want to write?” she asks.

  “Uh …,” I say, ’cause even now, even for me, Rabbit can take some getting used to. “How about ‘learn to draw, genius’?”

  She writes: ¿how about learn to draw genus?

  “Perfect,” I say.

  She smiles, licks the paint from her fingers. I take her hand and we walk.

  * * *

  He sold for two dollars fifty-six cents at the flea market down by the harbor to an old Boston widow who had spent some time in the East in her youth. She declared his “uncanny resemblance to a certain native friend of my husband’s, before the Crimean,” and kept him in her drawing room. The company widows she invited to tea would sometimes admire him and laugh, after a few fingers of brandy, over the size of his hands.

  “Just feel him crying.”

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nbsp; New words, a new voice. He sees the girls for the first time, indistinct and blurred, like he imagines dreams must feel. Peya and a new one, younger and stranger.

  Crying? I cannot cry, thinks the prince. He blinks and they’re gone.

  He recalls the basement of a warehouse by a creek that smelled of ammonia and burned sugar. His companions were rats and dust and the occasional garter snake. Years passed there; he did not mark them.

  Here, in the now, now, fuck that, when can I get out of this goddamn city? What’s happened to the Way out of Borderland? the prince tastes salt on his tongue.

  * * *

  I buy all three communication charms left in that bucket and then ask Poplar if she has any more in back.

  Poplar takes the red and green sucker from her lips and considers. I’ve never been able to figure if Poplar changes her suckers to match her hair, or her hair to match her suckers. “You know they don’t work, right?” she says, a little pityingly. Elves tend to get that way when humans show an interest in magic.

  Rabbit’s off playing with a bucket of live newts by the register, so I can’t turn to her for corroboration. Even Truebloods like Poplar tend to give Rabbit a hearing.

  “Why you selling ’em, then?”

  Poplar shrugs and sticks the sucker back in her mouth. “Trader came by with a basket of trinkets. I liked his look, and …” She trails off, lets the wrapped paper end hang loose. She tilts her head and stares into the distance, and for a moment she looks very Queen of the Hidden Lands, which is not at all her style.

  “He was an elf,” says Rabbit from beside me. I never saw her move, and maybe she didn’t. “But not from around here.”

  I think of Grandmama—she’s a little girl, not a prophet. But how much of that is denial?

  Poplar inclines her head and smiles a millimeter. “You see the trader, lovey?”

  “Just his shape. He glows like the Border.”

  “Funny thing,” Poplar says. “Seems like we got two Borders now.”

  “I heard no one can get out of the city past the Borderlands,” I say.

  Poplar nods. “I tried to get out myself—”

  “To the Realm?” I ask, surprised. Poplar doesn’t look like the type with elf parents to welcome her back for Beltane, but then you never know.

  “To go to the World,” she says, entirely without inflection. “Bounced back. Not like I hit a wall, just like … I forgot how to find it. I forgot my own name for a while, until I fetched up outside of Danceland.”

  “You have the rest of that box?” I ask, on impulse.

  Poplar takes a sharp bite of the sucker and observes its cracked-moon half while she chews. “What’s left should be in that bucket. He said the postcard had a transformation charm. And the pink wand with the streamers is some sort of conjure spell. I’ll give you three for one.”

  Rabbit and I dig around the bucket for another ten minutes, but we only find three: two holographic postcards of an oak tree and one pink wand.

  “Seriously?” I say, frowning at them.

  “Better put that wand in a bag, Peya,” Rabbit says.

  Okay, seriously.

  “Got another sucker?” Rabbit asks as Poplar rings us up.

  Poplar reaches under the desk and slides one across. Pink and yellow. “Every minute,” she says, and laughs to herself as we leave.

  * * *

  The Way might be closed forever and the World fallen away, but the prince doubts that anything can get rid of the pigeons. They keep him company at night and leave at dawn, like always. They remind him of the World and of his own crossing to this in-between city.

  He came to Bordertown the way they all do—with a bit of hope, a bit of need, a lot of luck. Unlike most of the runaways who fetch up in Fare-You-Well Park, the prince did not even know there was a Borderland to escape to. He merely longed for death, and yet he had never been alive enough to warrant it.

  “Someone loved you, old prince,” said the fey trader who came to see him in the auction house. “I can feel her in you still, all these years past.” And after he bought the prince, the man asked, “Where do you want to go? About time you had some say in the matter.”

  Away, thought the prince. Far away.

  The man considered. “I cannot say you shall like it there, my friend,” he said. “The city is strange to even those it allows. But at least it will be different. And no one will bother you but the pigeons.”

  His beloved had called them rock doves, and some mornings she would feed them alongside the ducks of their pond. So he does not mind their shit or their molted feathers. They coo in the mornings and come home at night, smelling of sunshine and earth and the musk of the red, red, river.

  * * *

  Mama catches me on my way out the next day. She’s smoking frankincense and sage in a hand-rolled cigarette, wearing last night’s sequined scarf with her morning kimono, and I think I won’t be getting off so easy.

  “Mom tells me you’ve found a boy.”

  I shrug. “Pretty much.”

  “Is he safe?” Mama asks.

  I know her list of forbidden fruit: river rats, halfies, Truebloods, gang members, anyone in a Soho squat, noobs, natives, anyone who smells even a little of magic. Basically, every interesting person in Bordertown.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s not your business.”

  Mama takes a resigned puff and blows it out toward the garden. “I did birth you,” she says, like a sigh.

  “Younger than I am now,” I say. “Give me some credit, Ma. I know what I’m about.”

  “No, you don’t,” she says, “but I guess that’s what life is for. Just promise me you’ll use a condom, all right? And if he has any sores—”

  “I’ll make sure he’s clean,” I say hastily. Nothing worse than hearing your mom talk about VD. “And no way I’m getting pregnant, don’t worry.”

  Mama takes a last drag and stubs out the cigarette with a narrow stiletto heel. “You want to leave that one alone, huh?”

  I sigh. She’s so young, my mom, and needy like a little kid sometimes. “You and Grandmama are the best role models I could have.”

  “Sure, keep talking,” she says, with that laugh that brings in half the crowd during her nights at The Dancing Ferret.

  I give in and hug her. “I love you,” I say. I lay my head against her neck and breathe that sage and frankincense and honeysuckle smell that is so much my mother. She wraps her arms around me and rocks me back and forth like she has all my life.

  Mama has her adoring fans, but she never brings any home. As far as I know, Mama has been celibate since she had to leave my dad sixteen years ago. I think a part of her still hopes he’ll follow her, find the Way to Borderland. I think he’s married or dead or plain old forgotten all about us, because one thing’s for sure: He isn’t ever coming here. After all, he’s had my whole life to try.

  “I hope Rabbit’s right,” she says finally, pulling away. “I hope you do find love. There’s no better feeling. It’s what people live for.”

  What about you, Mama? I wonder, but the sun is getting higher, and I want as much time with my plaster man as possible. It’s not so safe around there after dark.

  “Rumor has it no one can find the Way to Bordertown,” she says, just as I’m about to leave.

  “What’s it matter to us?”

  Mama lights another cigarette with a shaking hand and looks away. “It’s just …” She takes a drag from the cigarette. “What do you think is happening out there, on the other side? What in the world would make the Way just close like that?”

  I don’t have an answer for her, so I say, “You want to sing for a bit in the park?”

  She starts to smile, and for a moment I’m sure she’ll agree—Mama lives to sing—but then she closes in on herself again and collapses into the hammock on our front porch.

  “I’m … tired, honey. Don’t worry about me. You go fall in love.”<
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  * * *

  The girl Peya can hear him again.

  “Will you have sex with me?” she asks for the second time.

  He feels surprise, for the first time. How?

  “Well,” she says, scrunching up her nose. “I’m working on it. Magic has gotten weirder than usual lately. Everyone’s saying Borderland’s closed in on itself: humans never could go to the Realm, and now we can’t go to the World, either, so we’re trapped here forever. I don’t know what they’re whining about, personally. I love this city.”

  I, too, love this city. This comes out unexpectedly.

  Peya grins, true and wide, and though it’s nothing like the smile of his beloved, the quality of delight reminds him of her regardless.

  “I knew we were perfect for each other!” Peya says. “Now all I have to do is free you from that pedestal.”

  I am a statue.

  “Yeah, yeah, but you don’t want to stay that way, right? I mean, you think! You have feelings! It can’t be fun to have birds shitting on you for a few decades.”

  If he could have smiled, he would have. Not so bad, he says.

  Peya frowns. “Don’t you want to be human, Prince?”

  Be human? In some ways, the idea appeals to him. If he were human, he could finally have a death. But if this Peya succeeded in changing him so utterly, would he still hold a piece of his beloved?

  I am as she made me, he thinks. I can’t bear to change.

  “But you can’t actually like being this way?”

  His answer is unhesitating: I hate it.

  “I don’t understand,” Peya says.

  I love her too much to let go.

  “In thirteen days, I’ll fall in love,” Peya says, like a girl mocking her own shadow.

  * * *

  There’s more graffiti on the flagstones.

  “Bordertown LIVES” again, only this time the letters have gotten blocky and more even, like a stencil. Some of “Bordertown” has been painted with tangled brambles.

  “Nice,” I say. “It’s a start.”

  Rabbit’s blue paint is still there, but faded and cracked, like it’s been through a dozen rainstorms. She drew it only a few days ago. But that’s magic, I guess.