Blood & Flowers (2 page)

H
ome. I call the Outlaws home, which is actually funny in an ironic sort of way because they don't have one. Not if home is understood to mean a permanent space, or a stage that you can always come back to. We perform wherever—we're all over the city. Part of that is for safety because, political outlaws that we are, we're not always popular with authority figures. Part of that is because we work with Floss. That fey magic problem always looms large, with dangerous connotations. We all know it's Floss's magic, of course, and we know she'd never do anything during a show except use that magic to make things spectacular. But you can't always count
on people to make the right distinctions. For every show, we walk a thin line, somewhere between walloping them with magic and letting the script and the puppets do their work.

Mostly, though, we move around the city because we want everyone to get a chance to see us, money and social status never being a factor. All that movement is worth it, too, because it allows us to do what we want, say what we want, and comment on whatever pops into our heads. I believe that we have unparalleled freedom, and to me that's more dax than anything.

We use Tonio and Max's apartment to house paraphernalia, mostly because Tonio is Tonio, after all, and almost but not quite mostly because Max scored a huge apartment when his parents tried to buy him off so he'd quit being gay. He stayed gay, especially after he met Tonio, but he kept the apartment out of “spite, or maybe pure, cussed meanness,” as he likes to say.

It's good they have this place, Max and Tonio, because Lucia's got pretty much nothing, Nicholas still lives in the dorms, Floss sometimes blinks in and
out to see unnamed inhabitants of Faerie, and I, of course, escaped from my parents' drug-haven house. Max and Tonio provided for me, just as they provided for Floss and Lucia, and I'm eternally grateful.

It's also good because Max cooks like a dream, and he always makes enough food for at least a dozen people.

Lucia and I got out at the Ringley stop, turned right off of Conroy, and took Ringley four blocks to Max and Tonio's. Four grubby blocks, with squashy trash underfoot and papery trash flying overhead. Nice people, mostly, just not a lot of cash. Still, every once in a while you catch a dust deal going down, like a relic from another time. Usually by the time you turn to face it straight on, the deal's done and what's left is a shoe heel, or the tail of a coat disappearing around the side of a Dumpster. But you can catch remnants of what just happened hanging in the air. Things feel, for one long second, a little jittery, a bit jumpy. And you realize for that same long second that you're holding your breath.

All of this makes stepping onto the corner of
Barnard, a kind of upscale block in the middle of downscale, feel warm even when it's cold and rainy. Then you might step into Max and Tonio's, and the feeling changes all over again, because stepping into their place is like stepping into a circus.

When Lucia and I opened the door, Nicholas almost rammed us. “Sorry,” he said, his voice light and breathless. “Mushrooms.” And he clattered down the stairs, leaving a scent of lemon in the air.

I leaned over the railing to watch him slam out the front door. Nicholas. Preppy law student Nicholas, who loves lighting sets as much as he loves the law, is why I can just look at Lucia and never act. How can the drug droppers' kid be interested in an almost-lawyer? Who knows? The world's a mysterious place.

Lucia and I banged the door closed and I yelled, “We're here,” and Tonio yelled back, “How many flyers did you get up?”

Lucia said, “We ran out of paste.”

“But it's okay,” I said, “because we got pretty much everything blanketed between Paris and Milan.”

Floss floated into the dining room and bellowed,
“Waxed thread?” Floss's dandelion hair and almost see-through presence contrast strongly with her dock-worker voice. Some people say Floss is scary strong. When they describe her it's as if she's bigger than life, some mythological creature. I don't get that. To me, she's just Floss, sort of ethereal and solid at the same time. Still, Floss is not someone you want to upset.

“Oops,” said Lucia on a barely blown breath.

We stood there, looking guilty. Then Max walked into the room. “Where are the mushrooms?” The question was calm. As always, his voice had that lilt that made him sound Jamaican, even though he didn't have the dreads to go with it. Max shaved his head because “There's not that much to start with. And because it makes me look tough when I'm boxing.” I always thought he looked kind of like a semisweet chocolate Easter egg, but I kept this to myself.

“Mushrooms,” I said, because that one I could answer in a positive, responsible way. “Nicholas just left.”

Max sighed. “At least ten minutes, then. If Pekar's is open.”

“They are,” Lucia said. “We came home that way.”

“Ah, good.” Max turned, and as he went back into the kitchen I heard him say, “Might as well start on the spinach, then,” and Tonio said, “Already done. Shall we work on the walnuts, instead?”

Floss was paying no attention to the kitchen conversation. She took measured steps toward us. She moved like a dancer. “No waxed thread? Not one spool?”

“Be right back,” I said, walking backward. I slid out the door and left Lucia to deal with Floss.

So Lucia dealt, and I went out for thread.

T
he rain had decided to be serious by the time I hit the street. And of course I didn't have an umbrella. My cotton sweater, the one that had felt so cozy when we were flyering, soon felt like a piece of chain mail.

But Floss needed thread, and it was truly my fault that I hadn't bought it before the rain decided to cover my world, so I kept squelching through puddles, some up to my ankles, until I got to Knobbe's Stationery shop.

I loved Knobbe's. It smelled of handmade paper and dust. There were rainbows of pens, little rubber stamps and multitone ink pads, book boards, and
bins full of spangles that you could mix and match in tiny brown paper bags and then buy by the ounce. There was no reason at all for this shop to be where it was except for the fact that a Knobbe started it when Max's apartment and all its neighbors, for blocks in each direction, were high-tone addresses. The store just didn't leave when everyone else did. People came to the shop from all over the city.

Knobbe III knew me. This was because I was there all the time, except of course when I was supposed to be—e.g., thread for Floss. For me, I just came to breathe the air and dream. I had all kinds of ideas. One day, I'd start making those accordion books and I'd sell them down at Pastimes Square during the weekly market. And Floss had said she knew something about Japanese bindings. I thought I could use those to make blank books. Or I could bind sections together with different colored threads and make memory books.

This time, though, it was waxed thread for the Outlaws.

“Hello, Knobbe Three,” I said as I squelched through the door. I wrung out the hem of my sweater,
which didn't help at all.

“Soggy,” said Knobbe. “Wet out.”

Knobbe is often a man of few words.

“Yep.” I am sometimes a woman of few words when I'm with him.

“Want something?” he asked.

“Waxed thread, please. Cherry red, sea blue, grass green, sunlight.”

Knobbe clicked the spools on his counter, tallied the total in his head, and named his price.

When I got my bag it was much bigger than it needed to be for four spools of thread. Inside there were two 3 x 4 book boards and silky cream paper, perfect for accordion folds.

“Knobbe,” I said, touched by the gift, but he waved me off.

“Stay dry” was all he said.

But dry was impossible. The rain was more like a high-pressure cold shower than the screen of water it had been before. I tucked Knobbe's bag under my T-shirt, which was only marginally drier than my sweater, and ran.

By the time I'd made it home, it was obvious that Nicholas and the mushrooms had arrived. The house smelled like a four-star Italian restaurant, and all the voices were coming from the kitchen.

“Wow. Are you wet,” Nicholas said when I walked in.

“Really? What a lawyerly observation. Was it the sock prints?”

Nicholas grinned.

I shook myself, feeling like a large dog, gave Floss her thread, and checked my boards and paper. Satisfied that they were intact, I said, “I'm just going to go get rid of these sixteen extra pounds of water,” and headed for the bathroom and soft, dry towels. Behind me, Tonio yelled, “If you hurry there might still be some food left.”

“Thanks,” I yelled back, teeth chattering. I knew he was telling me this because of my usual long, hot water–draining showers. Tonio kept trying tricks to break me of this habit. Telling me the food could run out was a good one. I didn't want to miss food, ever.

Showered, I went into the dining room wearing threadbare jeans and a T-shirt that read “Spotted
Dog Records—for the mutt in you.” My hair was still wet and tousled because I'd combed it by simply running my fingers through while my head was upside down. Floss, who is always the picture of perfect, sighed at me and shook her head. I smiled back because we both had known from day one that we'd never come even close to an agreement on forms of dress.

Nicholas passed me a beer (dark) and Lucia tossed me a napkin (blue with white elephants) and we all sat down at the stretchy table in Max's dining room. We ate pizza, and we talked, and that was when the trouble started.

Through a mouthful of pizza Lucia said, “While Persia and I were hanging the flyers, I read them.”

“Congratulations,” said Floss, but she smiled when she said it, which made it seem like a compliment.

Lucia took it just that way and smiled herself. “They should talk more about the wonders of the show,” she said. “Persia and I agree.”

Tonio glanced at me and I said, “Maybe something that doesn't scream magic. Stars and spangles.”

“And flying fish, this time,” Lucia added.

“I'll keep that in mind,” Tonio said. To Max he added, “Do we even have a fish graphic?”

Max shrugged and said, “We have everything.”

“So,” Lucia continued, “on the flyer, under ‘Place' it says ‘You'll know it when you find it.'”

Tonio nodded because he knew exactly what it said. He and Max were the flyer makers, after all. They used funky fonts and old, old computer programs that gave their work a very distinctive look. I could recognize an Outlaw flyer from a block away.

“And really…I think that's not so good,” Lucia finished in a rush.

Floss's voice was gentle and even when she asked, “And what exactly should it say, then?”

“The place. The actual name or the address or something.”

Nicholas glugged his beer. “Kind of defeats a certain purpose, doesn't it?”

“Obscurity?” Lucia asked, and I laughed.

Tonio looked at me again with those beautiful eyes of his, and I shrugged. “Sorry. It was funny.”

“It was,” he agreed. “But you know why we use those words.”

“People find us,” Max pointed out as he reached across the table for another piece of broccoli walnut pizza. “Word of mouth and all that.”

Lucia, like Nicholas and like me, knew some parts of Tonio and Max's history. By default this also meant we knew parts of the Outlaws' history. Mostly we knew that we kept a low profile because of “past events.” I think each of us knew different bits of those past events, but I wasn't positive because we'd never all sat down to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces together. We also knew that we worked with Floss and magic, and that not everyone made allowances for magic, no matter the context or the content.

Lucia agreed that, yes, people found us. But even though she could read undercurrents better than almost anyone, she walked right through them, went over to the other side of the river, and added, “But we'd do better if word of mouth didn't take so long.”

“We do just fine,” Tonio said, and there was a jaggy edge to his voice.

Nicholas, who had been watching and listening, made the decision to side with Lucia. “She's right, Tonio. I love the Outlaws, you know I do. I wouldn't be here otherwise. But money does grease the wheels. Lately ours have been grinding.”

This was Nicholas, remember. I love Nicholas, I think. I love Tonio, too, but it's a very different thing. And extra money would be nice. I admit it—I live hanging on to one end of a very skinny shoestring. It'd be nice to be holding on to a rope instead. So I went with what looked like the winning side. “It's not like money's a bad thing.”

Tonio stood up—stood up so fast that his chair scraped the floor and left a nasty scratch in its wake. He stood up with enough of a jerk that the table shimmied. Floss put her half-eaten slice of pizza down very gently and looked wary. But Lucia, even though she looked wretched, stuck to her original idea. “It'd just be nice,” she almost whispered, “to see a full house when we open instead of just before we close.”

“All right,” Tonio said, and his voice was calm. Too calm. Restrained. “Let me make sure that everyone
understands just what happens—now—and how it relates to what happened then.”

Max shifted in his seat, uneasy. He looked like there might be a fire under his chair.

“Now we put up flyers. Now people who want to find us do. Now word of mouth builds. More people come. By the time anyone who can cause trouble finds out where we are, we're gone. This all works because the troublemakers are slow.

“Then,” Tonio continued, in that same flat voice, “we named the place, the date, the time. Then we had bigger crowds. Then I got jailed for being a fey-loving rabble rouser and a magic user, a ‘friend of the enemy.'”

The silence in the room was almost loud enough to drown out the noise of the rain.

“I prefer now to then,” Tonio said at last, and he left, a half-eaten pizza slice still on his plate.

Max got up to follow him. “Not one of your best performances, everyone,” he said over his shoulder.

More silence. Then, “I still think—,” Lucia said in a tiny voice, but she was cut off by Floss.

“Don't. Don't think.” This was Floss in her stevedore voice. When she uses it she's never attempting kindness. Whoever else Floss sticks up for, Tonio is always at the top of her list. And since we all know she uses magic, comments about it, especially paired with the word “enemy,” make her understandably twitchy.

Lucia never forgot coming here with Floss. That trip was her first point of entry into the Outlaws. She thought of Floss as her ally. When she heard that voice directed at her, she shriveled up like an unwatered plant.

I saw it happen. I saw Floss see it happen, too. Relationships have never seemed to be one of Floss's strong points. They fluster her. It makes me wonder just how things work in Faerie.

Floss looked at Lucia, growled under her breath, and flickered out of the room. Lucia gulped on what sounded like a sob, shoved her chair back so hard it toppled, and disappeared in her turn, although she just went around a wall and into the kitchen. I could hear her slamming pots into the sink.

Nicholas and I sat alone, the remains of the pizza mute witness to everything that had happened. We sat, and I, at least, listened to the rain.

 

When the sun comes out the whole world looks better. This is especially true after an evening of disorder and discontent. Unfortunately, it was still raining the next morning.

Max and Tonio were back though, crumbling muffins around the living room and drinking coffee the way they always did, with enough cream to cause a heart attack on the spot. Nicholas had gone back to his dorm room once we'd made something of an effort to clean up the dining room, and he hadn't yet shown up for the day. Lucia was nowhere to be seen, Floss was working, and I was aimless. Now that the flyers were up, and possibly pulp with all the moisture in the air, I was waiting for rehearsals to start. This wouldn't happen until Floss finished her latest creation, which involved lots of faux feathers and swearing and no magic at all.

“Coffee?” Max asked me when I wandered by. I
sighed like a drama queen and shook my head.

“Muffin?” Tonio tried, and I shook my head again.

“I'm bored,” I muttered. “Bored and looking for excitement.”

“Don't bother,” Tonio said, his voice dry and flat. “It's never as good as you think it'll be.”

“Probably not,” I agreed, “but neither is doing nothing.”

Floss came into the room. She looked like an enlarged bird. Yellow and blue and spring green feathers followed her like stray puppies. She was blowing air toward her forehead, but the feathers she seemed to be trying to dislodge fluttered prettily, then settled back into her hair and dangled.

“I think,” she said between breaths, “I'm through. Anyone want to take a look?”

“Me,” I said before Tonio or Max could think. “I want to take a look.”

Floss jerked her head back the way she'd come. Two feathers floated down, one catching on her eyebrow. “Damn,” she growled.

“Why don't you just pull them off?” I asked. “It
looks like they're driving you crazy.”

Floss held out the hands that had been tucked in the pockets of the scraggy green jacket she wore as her work smock. She looked like she was wearing feathered gloves.

“Oh,” I said, making a futile attempt to brush the things away. After three tries I said, “Did you glue them to yourself on purpose?”

Floss narrowed her eyes. “What do you think?”

“I think you're a mess,” I said as I shook feathers around the room.

It was probably the green feather in his coffee that made Tonio sigh and say, “Let's see the creature, Floss.”

We walked in a small parade accompanied by feather confetti. I found Lucia as soon as I turned the corner into Floss's workroom. She was modeling an egg-shaped, sassy chicken suit, as big around as three or four Lucias put together. Her legs, in green striped stockings, came out of the bottom, and her head, dressed in a fetching little blue feather cap, came out the top. She had big rubber-toed shoes on her feet,
and yellow rubber kitchen gloves on her hands. It was a charming and, at the same time, completely absurd bird.

“A spangled vest,” Tonio suggested.

“And long glitter eyelashes,” said Max.

“Eyelashes. Ugh,” said the Lucia-bird.

Floss stood there, arms crossed, feathers fluttering around her, and narrowed her eyes. “I like the vest idea,” she said at last. “In red, maybe, or is that too contrasty? But I'm not set on the eyelashes.”

“Good.” Obviously this was from Lucia.

Since I hadn't contributed much, I said, “If you do the red on the vest, make the spangles green and yellow,” which made Floss shudder and say, “Stick with book building, my dear.”

I laughed and said, “Just trying to do my part.”

Floss said, “Umph,” but I could tell her mind wasn't really on her response. She was off in creativity land. Getting her out of there was even harder than getting her to talk about Faerie.