Welcome to Bordertown Read online

  * * *

  Beti and Ron were still dancing their jig. They’d been joined by Sparks, Ron’s girlfriend. Briefly, I wondered whether Ron had dog breath. I used to give Glower those soft cakes of raw yeast for his. But I wasn’t really paying them too much mind, oui? I was busy keeping a watch out for Gladstone. Too besides, the turreted shape of Beti’s pitchy-patchy costume had finally jogged my memory. The song that the chorus of the road march was sampling was:

  In a fine castle, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  In a fine castle, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  So long I hadn’t played that game! Not since small girl days back home. We’d form two circles of children. The circles would haggle with each other in song:

  Ours is the prettiest, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  Ours is the prettiest, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  The response, a simple expression of longing that even when I was a child had struck me as endearing in its brave vulnerability:

  We want one of them, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  We want one of them, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  But suppose it hadn’t been a plea, but a threat? Give me one of your pretty ones, you hear me? Or else.

  Or else what? And was the first team’s reply an act of generosity, or a capitulation?

  Which one do you want, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  Which one do you want, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  No. Not Beti. They didn’t want our Beti, did they? All that talk about having to leave soon, not having much time. Beti was jumpy as a cricket in a chicken coop today. And where the hell had she gotten to? I’d lost her in the crowd.

  My left eye twitched. Oh god. Juju heading our way. That twitch in my eye; in the bad years, that’s how I’d learned to tell when Gladstone’s nature was running high. How to tell when to stay away from her.

  * * *

  Gladstone slouched casually against her bicycle and mine. We’d leaned them against the bus stop where we’d arranged to meet Beti. Mine was chained the usual way. Gladstone’s had only a piece of old rope looped around the fork, trailing untied to the ground. The way she put it was, if the bike believed it was tied up, nobody would be able to steal it. Seemed to work, too. In any case, no one had ever stolen her bespelled bike. I’d lost five bikes to thieves since I came to Bordertown. Gladdy and I were going to take Beti mudlarking along the banks of the Big Bloody. Sometimes you found cool trash to keep or trade.

  Gladstone looked up and down Chrystoble Street. “You see her yet?”

  I sighed. “No, girl. But I sure she going to come.”

  “I just want her to be safe, is all.”

  I nodded. If you didn’t have your own wheels in Bordertown, there was always what passed for a transit system; you found some simulacrum of a bus stop—this one was a dead tree still standing at the curb of Chrystoble Street, the length of its blackened trunk painted shakily in green with the words “The Bus Stops Here.” And you waited. There was no schedule, no official transit system. Anyone with any kind of vehicle could take it into their head to set up a route and charge whatever they pleased. You never knew what would show up. A rickshaw pulled by a wild-eyed youth with spiky red hair and the shakes from Mad River withdrawal. A donkey cart, complete with donkey. There was even a bus pulled by a unicorn that only let virgin passengers on.

  “I’m actually having a hard time keeping up with her,” said Gladstone. “Beti, I mean.”

  “Like I used to with you.”

  “She keeps wanting me to take her to all this stuff I’ve never heard of.”

  “Like what?”

  “She wants to see a movie about a guy wearing an iron suit. The second one, she says, ’cause she’s already seen the first and the third. She wants to try something called an ecsbox. She wants a Hello Kitty vibrator.” Gladstone blushed.

  Me, I thought my belly was going to bust from laughing. “You mean, Sir Gladhand’s flashing fingers not doing it for her? Like you slowing down in truth, gal! Oh, don’t be like that. You know is only joke I making.” Then it dawned on me. “Wait one second; those things she wants, they’re all from the World. Things from the time when the Way to Borderland was closed.”

  Gladstone was still sulking. “So?”

  “Why would a newbie come here for things she can get out in the World?”

  A bitter chuckle. “You still don’t believe she’s from across the Border?”

  “Do you?”

  She shrunk in on herself a little. “I’ve heard about … you know? That place she says she’s from?”

  “It’s a real place?”

  “It may only be stories. My da used to tell me them.” She looked at me, longing making her face vulnerable. “A country on the Other Side where people have both my skin and my magic.”

  Huh. Maybe Beti was telling the truth, then. I wasn’t convinced, though.

  A team of boys riding three tandem bikes pulled up to the stop, off-loaded two guys with backpacks and a woman carrying a live chicken by its bound legs. No Beti. The guys paid for their ride with smokes. The woman paid with the chicken. They wandered off in separate directions. The bikes moved on.

  “So you going to go there?” I asked. “To Unnameable?” I tried to keep my voice light, to prepare my heart for yet another loss.

  She stared at her shoes. “She won’t tell me anything about it. Nothing that counts, anyway. Just like all those other Bloods who think they’re better than us halfies.”

  “Girl, get real. I see how she looks at you. If she not telling you anything, maybe she can’t. Is you self tell me that people from beyond the Border are forbidden to talk certain things.”

  Gladstone scowled. “Yeah.”

  “Well, then.” She wasn’t going to leave me. Relief. Triumph. Guilt.

  “Damy, all that stuff she wants that I’ve never heard of, I can’t give it to her.” Shame burned deep in those silver eyes, banking to anger. Outcast in the World, outcast over the Border. Gladstone would probably live out her life in Bordertown, and she knew it. And even here, she had to steady battle closed doors and sniggers behind her back. “Beti can go wherever she wants, in the World and out of it. Comes here flaunting it, slumming with the halfie.”

  I sneezed. “Don’t go sour on this girl the way you do, okay? I like her.”

  Gladstone huffed and stared at the ground.

  * * *

  “Beti!” I called. I pushed between a scary clown wearing a T-shirt that read “Why So Serious?” and a near-naked Trubie. The Trubie was ancient as the hills and thrice as wrinkled. He had a boa constrictor draped over his arms. Age had blanched the two braids hanging down his back from silver to pure white. They were each nearly as thick around as the snake, and their tips tickled his dusty ankles. His eyes were an opaque fish-belly pale, but they followed me all the same.

  The snake charmer was suddenly blocking my road. Blasted Trubies could move quicker than thought. He leaned in toward me and croaked, “What will you give her, do you hear, my sissie-oh?”

  I sneezed. The man looked startled, as though someone had just shaken him out of a dream. He smiled at me. “Excuse me, cousin,” he said, his vowels liquid with the accent of the Realm. “I did not mean to bar your way.” He stepped aside.

  “Don’t fret,” I replied. My skin was still crawling with the surprise of the first thing he’d said to me.

  “Did I misspeak you, cousin?” he asked. “It seems to me I said something, though I don’t remember what.”

  “No. Nothing much, anyway. It was nothing.”

  I could lie with words, but never with my face. He studied the polite fib he saw written there, and probably my fear, too besides. He gave me a rueful smile. “There is a wild magic in the bloods of both our races, my friend. We must give it sport from time to time, yes? And sometimes the bacchanalia calls our spirits forth in ways we do not ken.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I needed to find Beti. I gave him the Jou’vert greet
ing, though my voice cracked midway.

  “To battle, then,” he replied. The response didn’t sound so lighthearted in translation. I shuddered. As I moved on, he was crooning at his snake, which had raised its head to his and was flickering its tongue over his lips, scenting his breath.

  “Beti! Where you dey? Beti!”

  Into my left ear, the juju breeze whispered something that sounded like: We will beat her with green twigs, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  I yelled, “That don’t suit her!” The general commotion swallowed up the sound of my voice. I muttered, “Do you hear that, my fucking sissie-oh?” I pressed on, calling out Beti’s name. And I found myself muttering under my breath, “You didn’t come to Bordertown for this, oui? Playing mother hen to baby dykes and sullen butches with substance abuse issues.” But is lie I was telling.

  In truth, I’d never planned to come to Bordertown at all, for any reason. People don’t believe me so I don’t talk it much, but I swear I didn’t leave Toronto. It left me.

  It had been a bad year, is all. My girlfriend at the time had just left me. Something about me being smothering. I’d had to put my nineteen-year-old dog down once his heart trouble was too far gone. Then Grandma died back home, and I couldn’t afford to fly down for the funeral. And the last straw: I’d been temporarily laid off yet again from my job at the forever precariously funded crisis center.

  The Change happened slowly, in the weeks that followed. At some point it crossed my mind that the flashily overlit Honest Ed’s Discount Emporium seemed to have seamlessly metamorphosed into a store called Snappin’ Wizards Surplus and Salvage—More Bang for the Buck, More Spell for the Silver. Sure, the words on the sign had changed, but the place still sparkled with enough lights festooning its outside to illuminate half the city, and was still piled to the ceiling with everything from army parachutes to sex toys. And sure the Swiss Chalet chicken place across the street had been replaced by a club named Danceland, but that was construction in downtown Toronto for you; they were always bulldozing the old to replace it with something else. The little import shop where I bought my favorite fair-trade dark chocolate ran out of it, and then chocolate was scarce everywhere. I didn’t drink coffee, so is not like I missed that.

  And as to the presence in the city of fine-boned people with fancy hair, high style, and higher attitude? Toronto’d always had its share of those. By the time I had to accept that I was no longer in Toronto and those weren’t just tall, skinny white people with dye jobs and contact lenses, it didn’t seem so remarkable. People changed and grew apart. As you aged, your body altered and became a stranger to you, and one day you woke up and realized you were in a different country. It was just life. I hadn’t needed to travel to the Border; it’d come to me. I’d settled in, found a new job, started dating Gladstone. Life went on, if a little more oddly than before.

  I got used to it: to dating a truly magical mulatress, to reading by candlelight when the power outed, to riding a bicycle everywhere, in any weather. I even rigged up a Trini-style peanut cart: a three-foot-cubed tinning box attached to the front of a bicycle, with a generator powered by the action of cycling. Or by a spellbox, when electricity wouldn’t manifest. Peanuts roasting inside it. The outlet chimney was a whistle, so the escaping steam would sing through the whistle as I rode. That and the smell of roasting peanuts would make people run come. Daddy Juju loved it. He painted the store name and address on the side of the tinning box, and I rode the streets of Bordertown and served out fresh roasted peanuts in little rolled cones of newspaper.

  I made a good life here. Working at Juju Daddy’s was my job, true. But it wasn’t what I did. There was a reason I’d worked at a shelter in Toronto. A reason my Toronto ex had said I was smothering. I watched out for newbie baby dykes and shy hunter fairies (human or elf) as tough as nails and as brittle as glass; I kept an eye on bruised halflings who didn’t realize they were already whole in and of themselves. I smoothed ruffled feathers and mediated lovers’ quarrels, and fed the ones who couldn’t feed themselves, and tried to keep the people I loved from hurting each other too much.

  “Beti!” I shouted.

  The street took a sharp turn, and when I rounded it, for an instant I had the crazy thought that Beti had somehow multiplied. I was in the middle of a crew of Betis, a proliferation of Betis. Cone-shaped masses of rags and tatters danced all around me, and jesters in motley, and hobo clowns in torn jackets and pants and crumpled top hats. A pitchy-patchy crew! No matter her fancy name for her costume, it was a plain old pitchy-patchy mas’. I laughed, relief making my voice a little too wild and hyenalike. The dancers didn’t have musicians, but were making their own music by singing: We will give her a wedding ring, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

  * * *

  With a clomping of hooves, the camel bus drew to a halt at the crumbling curb. Gladstone’s face brightened. “She’s here!”

  Through the windows of the bus, we saw Beti stand and take the hand of a pretty Trubie girl, tall and slim with big cat eyes and a complicated fall of silvery hair. Laughing, they headed for the bus’s exit. I didn’t have to look at Gladstone to know the change that had come over her face. The shocked shift from eager anticipation to self-protective sullenness. “Gladhand Girl, don’t jump to conclusions, okay?”

  “You see? Like always calls to like. Why stay with the half-Blood when you can have another purebreed?”

  “They may just be friends.”

  “Friends. Right. I gotta go.”

  * * *

  And that was the last Beti and I had seen of Gladstone. At least, that’s what I was telling Beti. I hadn’t mentioned running into Gladstone last night.

  The other girl had been just a friend in truth; someone Beti had met on that same bus that had picked them both up as they were wandering around the outskirts of Bordertown, trying to figure out the way in. Beti’d only wanted her new friend Lizzie to meet her new love Gladstone. And the real kicker? Beti told me that Lizzie wasn’t even a Trubie. Just one of the rare humans who kinda looked like one.

  Someone spun me around. I recognized the particular configuration of strips of cloth. “Beti!”

  She grabbed me around the waist, spun me so my back was against her front. We went into a classic dutty wine like the people all around us, hips gyrating together. She caught on fast, this one. She’d been watching how back home people danced to soca music. It was sexual, yes, but it didn’t have to mean sex. It was a pappyshow of sex, a masquerade. Sex is powerful and beautiful and dangerous. Is bigger than peeny humans. To wine up dutty with somebody else is like playing mas’ in corpse makeup. Is like saying, these things have power over us, but right now, we can laugh after them. First time Gladstone saw me dance like this with someone else, we’d had one big mako row. She’d been convinced I was about to lie down right there so on the floor of the club and start getting nasty with the fella I’d been wining with. With some fella who wasn’t her, never mind that he was a stranger I’d only clapped eyes on five minutes before, and a fella to boot!

  That was the first time she’d given me blows. And like a fool, I’d gone back for more. Hadn’t protected myself, hadn’t insisted she find a way to stop trying to own me with her fists. All those years in my previous life I’d worked to help battered wives, husbands, parents, children. But of course, when I was the one getting beat up by someone who loved me, I decided I didn’t need help. I was the expert, right? I could handle this all by myself. I could manage Gladstone, oui? Be her lover and her therapist.

  Gladstone wasn’t the only one who needed to learn that control is something you might try to exercise over a runaway train, not over a lover.

  The revelers started bellowing out the song about not giving a damn, ’cause they done dead already. So long I hadn’t heard that kaiso! From the big standard the two Frankenstein flag-bearers were dancing with, the crew was called the Jumbie Jamboree. Dead mas’ all around us. Vampires. Ghosts. Even douen mas’—small children dressed as the spir
its of the unbaptized dead, wearing panama hats that hid their faces, and shoes that made it look as though their feet were turned backward. If you hear the sound of children laughing in the forest, don’t follow their footprints. Because they might be douens, luring you deeper into the forest when you think the footprints are leading you out.

  I leaned back into Beti’s embrace. I turned my head toward her. “Why you disappeared like that?”

  “I can hide with these people,” she said, her voice rough. Like she’d been crying? I turned and took her in my arms.

  “Don’t worry, child. I won’t let Gladstone find you.”

  She pulled back, pushed some of the motley away from her face. “Gladstone? You’re keeping Gladstone from me?”

  Oh, shit. “She want to hurt you,” I blurted.

  Beti reared back, startled. “Why?”

  “She’s real mad at you for hanging with that girl from the bus. She thinks the two of you been cheating on her.”

  She looked confused. “Cheating …” Light dawned. “You mean making sex with each other? But we haven’t.”

  “Don’t matter. When Gladstone get like this, all she want to do is lash out. You have to stay away from her till she calm down. Believe me, girl, I know. Same thing she did to me.” I turned my face, showed her my scarred jaw.

  The fear, the distress on Beti’s face tore my heart out. “She doesn’t realize,” she said. Through the prang-a-lang of the music, I thought the next words she said were, “She should be the one scared of me.”