Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (66 page)

“Why?” I asked
again.

“Sometimes
customers drink a little more than they can handle and need somewhere within
falling distance to sleep it off.”

“Customers like
you?”

“Only once. It was
Jack’s fault. Bastard kept telling everyone that I have a weak stomach for
whiskey. What, was I supposed to
not
show him wrong?”

“Probably.”

“Well, be glad I
did, because if I’d ignored the boiler monkey, we’d be sleeping outdoors
tonight.”

So Gren’s
impulsiveness had at last yielded results. Good for him. I spoke no further
complaint and marched along until we arrived at the billiard parlor. As
promised, Gren was immediately welcomed by the staff, who happily agreed to let
us stay as long as necessary. I remember standing there alone in the front room
as Gren shuffled off into the distance with a few old acquaintances. Out of the
corner of my eye, I spotted the parlor’s barman looking me over.

“You a friend of
Spader’s?” he said to me.

“Yeah,” I replied,
not paying the man much mind.

“Well, get
comfortable. The place’s a wreck, but you look like the type to get along fine
in such accommodations.”

“What makes you
think that?”

“You just have one
of those bar-friendly faces.”

“So I look like a
drunk?”

“Not at all. But a
barman can tell the difference between a face passing through to his next drink
and a face hung up on something more. Those are the faces with the really great
stories.”

“Yeah, well, I
don’t tell stories.”

“Didn’t ask you
to.”

“Good.” I took a
deep breath and looked at the man. He started to turn away and something within
me told me to speak up. “Friend of mine’s a bartender,” I called out.

He glanced back
and smiled. “Yeah? What’s his name?”

“Alan Dandy. You
know him?”

“Dandy?” the man
said, cocking his head. “Yeah, of course! Great man, Dandy! One of the best!”

“Really?”

“No,” he said,
shrugging. “Never heard of him. Sorry.”

“Then why’d you
say that?”

“Because you
looked like you could really use a happy, little lie.”

The man was right.
About a few things, really. For instance, I did get quickly comfortable living
out of back of the parlor. Too comfortable. As my stay lengthened, I became
sculpture, a statue in memory of myself, unpolished and shaped upon the funeral
shrine that was my bed. I barely left the room given to me and spent my time
sketching meaningless, tiny drawings on the wrinkled parchment that I had
always kept on me. The pages that were to contain the ink of my vast, untold
tales.

“I don’t tell
stories,” I had told that man.

Not anymore.

I thought about
this one morning as I lay on top of my shrine, watching flakes of dust circle
my head like vultures.

In my left hand
was a quill, and in my right, more mottled paper. I drew a tall half-circle and
called it a tombstone. Over the scene, I scribbled an epitaph and blew the
vultures out of my face.

HERE LIES POCKET THE BARD

DROPPED HIS PEN FOR A PRETTY HAND

AND LOST BOTH

There was a
rapping at my door. I flicked the quill away and shoved the scrap under my
pillow.

“Breakfast,” Gren
said, entering with a tray filled with various-colored piles of mush. I tapped
my index finger against one to watch it jiggle. I shrugged and rolled over on
my side.

“Hmph,” Gren
snorted at my back. “You could at least show a little gratitude for a free
meal. I know you’re hungry.”

I shrugged.

“You want to tell
me how long this little vow of silence is going to last?”

“Who’s silent?” I
muttered.

“Just eat, damn
it.”

I shrugged.

“Listen,” Gren
said, “I’m about as miserable as you are right now, but starving yourself is
just childish.”

“So I’m childish,”
I replied.

“Childish and
hungry ain’t a good mix.”

“Who said I was
hungry?” I said. “You find my appetite, then sure, I’ll eat whatever flavorless
lump you bring me. Until then, no thanks.”

Gren took a moment
to grumble something angry to himself under his breath, and then gave civility
one last go.

“Come on, Pocket,”
he urged. “Hungry or not, you need your strength. And this stuff’s not
that
terrible.”

I shrugged.

“Then fine!” he
barked, loudly slapping the tray down on a nightstand. “You want to sit here
and rot your damn self away?!? Be my guest!”

He marched out of
the room, slamming the door behind him. Once quiet had again returned to my
four walls, I despairingly turned over to face my meal in all of its lack of
splendor. I sighed and unenthusiastically stuck a spoon into a grey pile,
porridge or something. A few mouthfuls of that and I was nearly put off of food
forever.

Gren raised a
suspicious eye to me a little later that day as he caught me strolling through
the main room with my hat and coat on.

“You going
somewhere?” he spoke, feigning a tone of disinterest.

“Outside,” I
responded.

“What for?”

“What do you
care?”

“I care plenty
about getting spotted by one of our enemies, or did you forget—”

“I’ll be careful,”
I stated, tugging my coat sleeve down over my freshly bandaged arm.

“You’d better,”
Gren snarled as I began to walk away, “for
my
sake, Pocket!”

“I hear you.”

“Damn right, you
do!” he called after me. “Now go on! Get out of here before you give me another
headache! And by all means, take your time! Hell, I ought to thank you for the
breather! I was getting tired of dealing with your moping all day and night!”

I opened the front
door without looking back. “Then I guess it worked out for us both, Gren.”

I had no purpose,
despite my suspicious departure, in taking that walk. I think I just needed a
reason to move my parts. So I moved them, clomping along around the sleepy
village without direction. I eventually ended up at the nearby air dock and
spent a few hours leaning on a rail and watching a tourist blimp re-inflate. I
lost myself in daydreams as I eyed the long, ribbed hose fill the dirigible
with its lifting gas. Little pops and hisses made a song as they bled out and
escaped from the tip of the nozzle. The cloth of the balloon rippled and dipped
as it inflated, moving with the rhythm of an ocean beneath a great, black
storm. I kept seeing the Doll’s face or, more frequently, her shapely and
girlish figure in the shapes created by that shifting and expanding.
Eventually, the men working the hose began to notice my extended loitering, and
I decided to move along before I raised suspicion.

I ultimately ended
up on the outskirts of the village, sitting on a rusted-over, pockmarked bin,
one of those grand, self-regulating rubbish cans. It’s funny how a little
ruddiness can be the most noticeable bit of color sometimes. I sat for awhile,
too bored to wander any further but not bored enough to return to the billiard
parlor. I clacked my golden heels against each other.

And now we come to
the part of the story where our narrator finds himself completely alone. Not
only alone in the obvious sense, that's been nothing new. You, dear audience,
have seen him wander aimlessly, sleep uncomfortably, and drink excessively. But
this is the part when he accepts himself as creature absolutely on his own. If
I had been making up this story, I'd be in a lousy spot right now. I’ve never
contended that Will Pocket was the hero of this tale, but at this point, he's
the only one left on the stage, the only breathing body to fill that role.

I had thought
about this as I sat on that old bin. I thought about my role and what purpose
there was left in it. I had, in all realistic terms, nothing. My friends, or
whatever they considered themselves to me, were water vapor in the wind,
wafting away in the cold. I took a moment and tried to force myself into more
optimistic thinking. I told myself to begin with a mental list of what I still
had, what I could still fight for, but all I could come up with was a pile of
what I had known and lost.

I had no
direction, no point in giving meaning to words like “north” and “south.” I had
no source of movement apart from my two working feet. I'd lost the
Prospero
and
I'd lost, through Kitt, the Red Priest's shuttle. Every small point
of refuge I’ve enjoyed, from the Gaslight Tea House to the
Lucidia
to a
warm hospital bed to even that dingy, little rented room, had quickly been
separated from me, and here I was, running off from another.

I had no help.
Kitt left me and I’d just left Gren. The sky pirates were stuck in an ugly bit
of oil and the tea lady was somewhere in a forest behind a veil of fog. And the
only meaning I had left in all of this, the love for the Watchmaker's Doll,
seemed a drowning flea in the bottom of an overpowering ocean, for I scarcely
knew if the woman I loved would ever come to love me back, or even let her love
herself.

So what did I have
left? What did I ever have?

“’At's a right
fancy bottle ya 'ave there,” someone said to me.

A group of
unwashed vagrants were approaching. I remember the crunch of ice beneath their
boots and between the whiskers of their mottled beards.

“You want it?” I
said to them.

The closest man
plucked it from my side and squinted into the glow.

“What is it?” he
asked, huffing on the glass.

“I don't know.”

“Says 'ere it's
faerie juice. What's 'at mean?”

“Just a joke.”

“Is it booze?”

“Maybe. I don't
know. Can't get it open. If you want it, it's yours.”

“Says 'ere it
costs five pence. I 'aven't five pence.”

“Just take it. I
don't care.”

“Oh. Oh, all
'ight, then.”

He shook the
bubbles around and showed them off to his companions. I got up and began to
walk away.

“Hey, gent!”
another vagabond shouted out to me. “Where'd ya get them fancy boots?”

I glanced back and
shrugged. “They were a gift.”

“Buy those in
town, can ya?”

“No,” I replied.
“They were, well, specially made, you could say.”

The men let out a
chorus of whistling.

“Lookie here,
blokes!” the man with the bottle laughed. “We got ourselves a regular modern
man among us! I salute you, modern man!” He made an elaborate bow. I couldn't
tell if it was meant to be sincere or mocking, but I didn't care either way.

“Hey there, modern
man!” another of the lot spoke. “What have you to say about this modern age?”

“What?”

“Yeah!” a third
guffawed. “Enlighten us on the ways of this world, this time of fancy, goldy
boots.”

“I don't have
anything to tell,” I said glumly. “I didn't make these boots. I just ended up
with my legs in them. Same as you ended up with that bottle.”

The one with the
faerie juice frowned, looked at his prize, and then back to me. “Ya mean ya
haven't any knowledge to share? Nothin' at all?”

“I don't.”

I would've turned
and moved away from this gathering right then, feeling numbed and worthless and
pitiful, had the vagrant not voiced the following question.

“What is it then
that you live for, gent?”

I looked into
their pack of glazed eyes, running noses, and spotted complexions. Without
anything grander to say, I spoke only a word.

“Love,” I said,
unsure if I still even meant it. The sound of it in my voice sounded instantly
hackneyed.

The group laughed
in an embarrassing register. A few slapped their knees.

“Is there
something funny about love?” I asked, not a challenge of their response but a
hollow confusion of its meaning.

“Just not very
modern now, is it, modern man?” one laughed.

“We all've lived
for love!” another chimed. “What insight is there in that?”

“I wasn't trying
to be insightful,” I responded. “Just answering your question.”

“Pah!” the one
with the bottle said. “You're too young and stupid! I'm not sure I want this
green juice if-in’ it came offa someone young an' stupid. See me, I'm old an'
stupid. That means I'm experienced. Been living with the old long enough to get
sick of it, long enough to want somethin' newer. Love's old, boy. Get to my age
and you'll see. I'm the more moderner here, lad, it seems!”

The others voiced
their agreement.

“Can you really
dismiss love so easily?” I had to ask.

“Lad, I loved
whiskey,” one said to me, “and look where it got me today!”

They broke into
another fit of laughter then began scurrying away.

“Come on!” the one
clutching the faerie juice said as they departed. “Let's find a way to break
into this thing.”

And I was left
standing there, another piece of myself lighter, with that silly word still
baking on my tongue.

“Love,” I
whispered to myself.

Love. The word itself
seemed an antiquity before it had finished passing through my lips. And I
suppose it was. Love in my day and age, I felt, was becoming obsolete, much as
the ink and paper I had so often written the word upon had become. I pulled a
folded piece of parchment from my coat and saw that the words of some poem or
prose I had scribbled forever ago were now too smeared to determine. I thought
suddenly of typewriters, another great advance that was quickly turning me and
my papers into relics. Convenience, that’s the flavor of this age. I remember
being a young boy of about seven or eight and learning from my parents of three
American men who were bringing the miracle of printed type to commercial
success. My father would read the headlines to me just after breakfast.

“Click! Tick!” the
papers used to say, printed in this very ink of revolution. “Oh, watch those
magic hammers go!” Tomorrow’s horizon was absolutely flying in on swinging,
inked hammers dropping in time, capturing words, thoughts, at the speed of their
conception.