Fireland

The thug raises his fist for round two and is startled to see his fingers—still encased in brass knuckles—fall to the pier with a clank. Looks up and sees Missy of the Spire’s Samurai Suite, using her silken sleeve to wipe a thin streak of blood from her katana. And here’s Fiona of the Sherwood Forest Experience, bowstring cocked. And Miki of the Igloo Room, whaling harpoon at the ready. And Emmerline of the Old Operating Theatre, scalpels tucked between each finger of her left hand, a hypodermic needle already stabbed into the neck of another heavy, and she is hissing in his ear, she is just waiting for him to give her an excuse to press the plunger, just give her one valid excuse. And behind her is Dana of Apollo 69, and Miss Hawtin, Headmistress of Discipline, and Belinda of the JFK Encounter, and Kimiko posing in her SS uniform.

// Sometimes I read over something I wrote and realize it reveals way too much about my secret proclivities. Look at this paragraph, for example: If there were a whore barge where each cabin had a different theme, à la The Madonna Inn, I would prefer if its themes included samurais, Robin Hood, eskimos, 19th Century surgeons, early NASA missions, straight-up BDSM, the JFK assassination, and Nazis. Ladies..?

Allison leans in and whispers: “Frank Muto chained my brother to a trunk and threw him overboard, right where we are now. This is really the only thing that concerns you. If you can find him and the trunk, you’ll get three thousand dollars.”

May says: “How long has he been down there?”

“I don’t know. A few days.”

“You know what a body looks like after being underwater for a few days?”

“No.”

“Why not just leave him there. Like a burial at sea.”

“Now you don’t want the money?”

“I want the money. I don’t want the headaches. When I go after bodies I always have to deal with a big scene when I come back up. Most people regret the whole thing.”

Allison tries not to hear the rhythmic thumping coming from the next cabin. She says: “I already regret the whole thing.”

“If there’s valuables in the trunk then that’s another story,” May says. “Maybe you’re the kind of girl who puts on a big show of crying for dead brothers but really just wants some sunken treasure.”

Allison says: “I don’t know what kind of girl I am. And I don’t know what’s in the trunk. But it was his, and I want it.”

May nods. She reaches up to touch Allison’s face and Allison jerks back. “Your nose needs to be re-set,” May says. “Let me pop it back in.”

“How much will that run me.”

“Twelve dollars.”

Allison sighs. “OK,” she says.

May pulls a flask from the hip pocket of her camouflage shorts. She says: “Drink as much of this as you can.”

Allison unscrews the cap and takes a long pull. The first alcohol she’s had since prom night, out behind the Ringley cafeteria, going dutch on a plastic bottle of amaretto liqueur. It goes down like water. She looks at nothing, then at the painting bolted to the wall of a spaceship soaring out of thick jungle foliage and into the heavens. May gently places her thumbs against the bridge of Allison’s nose. She says something but Allison doesn’t hear it, and then there’s a snap but Allison doesn’t feel it.

May says: “Better?”

Allison wipes away a fresh trail of blood streaming from her nose. “I won’t make a big scene,” she says.

May says: “Yeah, I know.”

// Chokeville

“Just thought maybe we could use a little pick-me-up to get us to five o’clock,” he says.

“Your kindness is genuine and uncalled for,” she says. It is late afternoon on a cool autumn day and her voice is like this day transformed into sound.

// Chokeville

Squint for a second at the front of that menu and see if you can make out the lusty, high-heeled logo for the restaurant. Run your eyes across her stirring cleavage and raise an appreciative eyebrow at her long bare legs. Her black hair is billowing and enormous and untamed — untamable! Her eyes shining green, skin airbrushed, frilly apron tied on as an afterthought, a plate held aloft carrying an unrealistically high stack of glistening flapjacks. This is an artist’s rendition of Cha-Cha, a woman Paulo professes to have loved back in Chile, a woman who “sneaked into [his] heart like a ninja and burgled [his] heart and manhood,” and even though she participated in the lotería del amor along with the other women of her village (an annual event where they break into the local penitentiary and let a randomly selected convict impregnate them, then sneak out without the warden ever knowing a thing!), and even though her only source of income was from volunteering for the local unlicensed surgeon (hence the experimental vagina biomecánica), and even though she was of the wrong faith, Paulo was smitten and stayed smitten long after he was forced to flee the country for “political reasonings,” her lush curves and carefree laugh forever seared into his mind. And every morning when he unlocks the door and enters the darkened sanctum of the restaurant which bears her name, it is like “returning to the icy embrace of her stainless steel coño.”

// Chokeville

The bullhorn squawks: “Folks I am not kidding around here.”

She says: “It’ll take him at least fifteen more minutes to ready that cannon.”

Sam glances at her. He says: “I need to have a conversation with this flunky and it needs to conclude in a particular fashion.”

“I know,” she says.

He realizes he’s still gripping her hand, lets it go. “I appreciate your backbone.”

“What do you think I am?” she asks. “New to cannonfire and conversations with particular conclusions? New to Wōkòu and their underage squires? To men who fancy themselves rogues?”

Sam fishes around an inner coat pocket and produces the veining knife he liberated from Deaf Chef Geoff. “I no longer think any of those things,” he says.

// Chokeville

May Petroski at the starboard plank, stretching hamstrings, smoking. She has to do a few things before a dive. The smoking’s one—right before she goes in she takes a big drag and holds it for the entire time she’s underwater. Something to do with keeping her lungs distracted. It’s seen as an affectation by her colleagues. Then there’s the thing where she finds a person nearby to hate—not difficult today, seeing as she’s surrounded by Spire* clientele—in order to disconnect herself emotionally from the Surface and think of her time Underwater as a return home. That little trick alone adds two minutes to her diving time, easy. Then she strips down to nothing, and the clientele admires the tattoo along the small of her back that says 37° 24.3’ N 124° 8.7’ W, which is where she hopes to have her ashes scattered. Last thing is she hums a little song, some kind of Bedouin ditty that the pearl divers sing during al-ghaws al-kabîr. It’s not very pretty, and is usually mistaken as hyperventilation by onlookers, but it occupies her mind and blots out the panic, and she keeps humming it long after she’s plunged into the depths.

*The Spire of Ice, a whaling ship turned pleasure barge.

// Chokeville

What begins as a joke with some unsavory character at The Embers* turns into a three-year contract at White Clinic** which leads to one bad night with an ambassador from Jordan and a frenzied attack with a hotel ballpoint pen and a cleanup job that turns out to be way more complicated than anyone predicted. And of course Feddema Global, cleanup expert and important business associate of the Clinic, is called in to handle the disposal and the press releases and the loose ends. And as part of the arrangement Maggie enters into their Enforced Loyalty program and is assigned to Sal’s Fish House*** where she must provide services for visiting dignitaries, all of whom have elaborate and non-standard requests. And so maybe she’d like a little moment to herself, OK, while she’s sitting here flushing disinfectant through her privates, just five minutes where she can cry quietly without, you know, without some new pervert sticking his head through a hole in the floor and looking at her in her one solitary moment of vulnerability? I mean is that too much to ask?****

*A pirate tavern.

**A corporate brothel.

***A front for illegal activities but also a legitimate purveyor of excellent seafood.

****I’m doing a sort of Sub-Zero “spine rip” fatality on my novel. I think the end result will be much more flexible, due to its lack of spine.