Breath and Bones (38 page)

Famke burst into paroxysms of coughing and tears at the same time. It seemed that even here, even now, when she most wanted the solace of her own thoughts, she was not to be spared some man's passionate description of his vocation.

“A number of sufferers have already arrived, even before the hospital can be finished, to take the cure in the village. I have great hopes—you see, the cure is based on the principles of water and elec—”

“Where is
Albert
?” Famke wailed, cutting Edouard short.

As if struck by a sudden inspiration, he pulled a black-bordered cloth from his vest and pressed it into her hand. Through the veil of her tears, she saw then that he was dressed entirely in black, as if mourning, though his skin was like the belly of a creature that never saw sunlight. So he, too, had lost someone.

“If I were you,” he said, not unkindly but most uncomfortably, “I would go to San Francisco. Every artist in the West ends there eventually. Your brother is probably there now, making more paintings such as this one.”

Famke blew her nose, which started her coughing again more violently.

Edouard hesitated, watching her. Now that he'd broken his silence, he could not prevent himself from speaking further: “But you should really think of staying on here, in Hygeia Springs. You clearly suffer from phthisis yourself. The Institute is not open officially yet, but—”

“I have no money,” Famke said, stuffing the sodden handkerchief into her tasseled purse without asking him to explain that strange word. “And no time. I must find Albert—everything will be right when I find him.”

“You cannot find him if you are dead,” Edouard pointed out.

Dead
. The word shot through Famke's brain and seemed to explode there. For a minute she couldn't think, could barely keep balanced on legs that suddenly seemed made of water.

Edouard, seeing this, poised to catch her. His arms anticipated that frail weight . . . But what would he do with her once he had her? He began looking around for a sofa he knew was not there.

“You are wrong about me,” Famke said when she could speak again. “I am perfectly well.” He thought she appeared to derive strength from the words themselves; perhaps that was how she had managed to come so far.

Edouard's arms dropped. “I did not mean—”

“You said what you meant. And I shall go to San Francisco, as you suggest.”

Edouard scarcely heard her. His eye had been caught by the reflection in the glass wall: There he saw his own white face and shirt collar, floating above the black suit; and behind him a blur of purple and red and white that was this woman, all gleaming in the wet glow of two blue eyes. He imagined those eyes closed and himself bent over her, administering his cure, watching the healthy color flow back into the waxen skin . . .

Famke thought her answer had struck him speechless: All to the good. While her host's head was turned, she staggered out into the hall and followed the gaslit path to the door and the crisp, clear air outside. By holding her breath, she even managed not to cough until she'd put the walls of glass and iron behind her.

Santa Fé [ . . . ] is one of the most comfortable residence cities in the world, as witness its growing popularity both as a summer residence for people from the South, and as a winter residence for people from the North, and as an all-the-year-round residence and sanitarium for people variously in search of health, comfort, pleasure and business
.

S
TANLEY
W
OOD
,
O
VER THE
R
ANGE TO THE
G
OLDEN
G
ATE

Harry Noble cursed himself for a slack-twisted fool. After waiting in the station until the 8:12 to Phoenix was long gone, followed by the 9:13 to Denver and the 10:46 to Las Cruces, he finally presented himself at Opal Cinque's salon, only to hear from Cracklin' Mag that the patient had disappeared early the night before. Then he knew exactly what Famke had done and where she'd gone, and he knew he should have thought better than to give her a purseful of money and leave her alone to spend it. He had no one to blame but himself; it was hardly worthwhile even to be angry with Famke.

The ingrained habit of the longtime correspondent made him ask, almost without thinking, “What was she wearing when she left?”

Perched on a slippery chair in Opal Cinque's parlor, where Spanish workers were adjusting the electric lights, Mag dabbed at swollen eyes. “My new silk dress, the one I was saving to visit my parents in. And my winter coat, my dark parasol—though what she'll do with that in December, I don't know—my tortoiseshell combs, a silk purse one of the girls netted me—”

“And you thought she was a sister to you,” Mrs. Cinque said in a scolding tone, from her pink plush throne. Already two bulbs had broken, and the Spanish workers had sworn colorfully, but she was as calm as a queen overseeing a ball. “More than a sister and less than a friend, I'd say.”

Even as sulky Mag spoke, Harry had transcribed her description into newspaper prose:
The fair but feverish damsel absconded in a frock of lustrous silk,
a Venetian lace parasol shading her visage from importunous stares
. . . “What color was the frock?” he asked now.

The question produced another angry swab at the eyes. “Purple. The loveliest plum color you ever saw—not puce—just what a lady would wear. All Chinese silk. There was ruffles round the hem and the hands, and the sleeves were lined with lace.”

Her raiment was the hue of amethyst, and its flounces fluttered in the breeze like so many moths . . . no, like butterfl—like so many
. . . “It sounds very pretty.”

“It was
brilliant
!” Mag wailed, falling prey to another spate of tears.

“What are you going to do, Mr. Noble?” Opal Cinque asked practically.

Noble pulled himself out of his picturesque thoughts and considered the facts. Ursula Summerfield, fugitive and thief. The sturdy little prostitute probably was lying about some of it, but he did not want the bother of an argument. “There is not much for me to do,” he said. “I am a mere acquaintance of Miss Summerfield; I had heard she was to be in town and, concerned about the state of health I knew to be hers, I went searching for her. She rejected my offers of help, and the results are as you see.” The last thing he wanted was to be held responsible for that dress, which sounded expensive—not to mention the other feminine accoutrements, which he did not pretend to understand.

“She left a twenty-piece on the bureau,” Mag reported, with a swelling of rage. “She didn't have that kind of money before you came.”

Noble spread his hands as wide as they would go. “My dear young lady, I myself have been robbed. It seems Miss Summerfield was not what I believed and hoped her to be, and now we have both suffered by it. We must move on to the rest of our lives.”

“Are you moving on, then, Mr. Noble?” Opal asked impassively, as a stout workman positioned his ladder directly behind her. “To chase the Dynamite Gang?”

Without knowing it, Harry sighed. Pursuing Famke had won him no rewards, and he was suddenly as disgusted with her, for being so elusive and unforthcoming, as he was with himself for chasing her. Damn her for leading him so far and telling him nothing. He felt tired, and the luxury that Famke had enjoyed in a Chinese cook's bed, with the ministrations of a houseful of tender doves, appealed to him mightily. He knew they were not for him, but he saw no harm in having a rest. He made a decision on the spot.

“No, I shall stay in Santa Fé for some weeks,” he said, with a tug of the side-whiskers. He felt a tingle in his fingers, as if he were about to start writing. “I have lately been much on the road, and I need some tranquility in which to work. I have a new kind of project in mind,” he added with a dawning sense that such a project had sprung full-fledged in his mind, “something that will require a deal of concentration to produce. Your capital city suits me as well as anyplace.”

“I hope we shall see something of you, then,” said Opal, with the same impersonal hospitality she offered all her guests.

Harry opened his lips to reply, but Mag burst into another storm of weeping, and instead he produced a bit of hard bright candy from his pocket and handed it to her. He gave Opal the cheroot from his vest just as the third light bulb shattered.

“Corruption!” Opal shrieked at last, rounding on the workman. Her chignon glittered with slivers of broken glass. “Are you trying to kill us all?”

Mag popped the candy into her mouth and smiled at Harry, dewy but radiant, as if all were peaceful around them.

We all discovered that it took a great deal of air to do a little breathing with
.

B
ENJ
. F. T
AYLOR
,
B
ETWEEN THE
G
ATES

There was an icy fog all around, uniform and black and heavy. It coiled around the body and chilled the bones; it sat on the chest like a panther and sucked out the breath.

But it was not altogether a bad fog, for out of it there emerged a woman of astonishing beauty. She had hair the color of sunrise and eyes like a bright winter afternoon, and her skin seemed made of white cloud—until she touched the dreamer with hands that felt like ice itself. It was then that one knew this was a woman of ice, who had created that black fog. It seeped from her nostrils as she breathed; it plumed from the cauldron she was stirring, stirring, stirring.

And then she thrust her hands into the cauldron and brought them out scalded a leathery pink. Burning hot, she laid those hands about the helpless dreamer's body, on neck and wrists and breasts. She did this for hours, every day. Sometimes she treated the dreamer savagely, breaking bones so they'd fit in a narrow black box. Once the body was inside, she sealed the box with a plate of thin ice, under which one watched oneself slowly freezing white, only to be resurrected with another brush of those scorching hands.

But the strange woman could be gentle as well. She might squeeze a tube of liniment until a fat blue or green snake slithered out onto the dreamer's breasts and began tickling its way down her stomach to the notch of her legs, painting her like a meadow. Or she might bend over until one
could smell her soapy breath and feel it, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, upon one's lips. Her icy dark eyes stared until one could see nothing else; and then the eyes did not seem so icy anymore. At those moments the dreamer knew everything was going to turn out well, because she saw herself reflected in those eyes and knew that she looked just like the ice woman; and that woman was lovely. She knew also that her strange nurse was going to kiss her . . . But at that moment, invariably, the woman vanished.

It was on perhaps her tenth visit, perhaps her twelfth, that the ice woman put those hot pink hands into her patient's hair and wormed them in deep, next to the scalp. Once there she began to press and press, as if to crush the skull, to pop the eyes from their sockets, to push blood from the nose and mouth and ears. She bent close and whispered, “Pair of aces. Full house, spades. Royal flush, hearts, with three pretty portraits.”

As if those words were magic, another world came rushing in. The ice woman vanished; the patient's eyes fluttered, she looked into a darkness slightly less deep than that she was used to, and her ears heard several voices at once:

“Raise you ten.”

“. . . bluffing.”

“Call!”

She tried to call, she did. But her lips were still frozen. She heard a slap-slap sound, as of wings, and there was a smell of sweet smoke that reminded her of a room brimming over with light; a faraway room in which she had been naked and cold, but not as cold as now.

“Sham!”

“Bastard!”

There was laughter, and the sound of wings again. She wondered if she were in some kind of heaven, or perhaps purgatory, with the angels laughing over her. But how could she have found heaven when she was naked? And who would have thought heaven could be so cold? She tried to sit up and look at the angels, but her limbs were too heavy. Arms, legs, and waist were oppressed with heavy bonds, and all she could move were her eyelids. She wanted water badly, but she could not draw the breath to ask for it; and since she was also sleepy, she let her eyelids droop again.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Something coughed.”

“Some
one
, you mean?”

“It wasn't me.”

“Wasn't m—”

“One of
them
, must be . . .”

“Tarnation!”

“Which one?”

This was interesting enough to make one fight to stay awake. And it was the fluttering eyelids that eventually drew the voices, and the hot hands—many of them—about her body.

“She's alive!”

“I knew she—”

“Untie her.”

The hands unknotted some bonds, and a pair helped her sit halfway up. Weak yellow light shone all around; she caught glimpses of faces—hairy, plain, masculine faces—and someone held a glass to her lips and let the water run into her mouth and over her chin. Despite the cold, her fingertips burned as if she'd been playing with hot coals. She discovered she was not naked after all but wearing a thin white shift.

She coughed, a good long cough, and someone held a handkerchief before her lips.

“Where am I?” she whispered. It was a strange pleasure to hear her own voice.

“What did she say?”

“Was that English?”

She realized she'd misspoken, that there were words these ugly angels would understand and words they wouldn't. With the effort she might use to push open a heavy door, she thought hard and came up with the right ones: “Where am I?”