Welcome to Bordertown (24 page)

—
a true son of Samarkand, and I won’t go for less than three dollars, not even to that sweet-talking Mayor Crenshaw.

That’s what he says to me, the plaster man with his long embroidered cape and big-knuckled hands. I jump back, almost far enough to fall into the fountain, because no one warned me that the communication charm I found in the bargain bucket at the back of Snappin’ Wizards actually
worked.

I clear my throat. “Mister Statue Man,” I say, because I haven’t grown up on the Border without learning to be polite around magic. “Do you think you might have sex with me?”

*   *   *

After so many years in the park, the prince’s thoughts run slow and sticky; they burrow into the past like the moles beneath his pedestal burrow into the earth. He remembers the idyllic days with his beloved in the house by the lake; he remembers the mud-and-granite smell of mixing plaster, of the way it would smear her nose and hair when she was deep in her work, and then she would pause and turn and smile—a sudden, beneficent gesture—and say, “Well, what do you think, my prince? A good day’s work?”

He’s a century away from the World and the pain of all those years, but the soul his beloved gave him still stretches in answer:
Yes.

“Yes?” repeats the girl who is not his beloved.

The prince turns from the past. The girl is dark, like the illustrations of slaves in his beloved’s edition of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
He has never seen such skin up close before, and he wonders at how it resonates with him, at how it feels much like his own, though he knows himself to be no darker than a duck egg. No one has spoken to him in a very long time. On the Border, people tend to leave well enough alone. He has liked that.

Who are you?
he asks, not expecting her to understand. Not even his beloved understood his thoughts.

Somehow, this girl understands.

*   *   *

The statue said yes, but I don’t think he was answering my question, because a moment later the whirl of his thoughts pauses. It feels like he’s seeing me for the first time.

Who are you?
asks the statue. His voice comes to me truer now, though at first it faded in and out like a secondhand impression ball. His face is as expressionless as ever, but I can
feel
him behind the rigid, noble mask, like he’s trapped.

“I’m Peya … uh … daughter of Althea, daughter of Lillian, family name Windbreaker, though I’m pretty sure Grandmama made that up when she came here.”

Too many years
, he says, and I know his tone from the Mad River, or maybe just the rats who loiter nearby: desolation, like hope, has rotted inside him. He’s sadder than I thought he’d be, my plaster man.

“What’s your name?” I ask. I’m expecting something different from what we usually get down here in Soho, newbie runaways styling themselves Shadesong or Spartacus or whatever.

But he says,
She called me her prince.

I say, “Well, at least it’s fitting.”

How … talk to me …
He says this as a rush of something like water drowns his deep and formal voice in my head.

I didn’t expect the charm to work at all, so it’s no shock to me when he fades out. The city itself seems to speak in his place: In my head, I hear the laughter of a rat about to take his last drink of red, boys screaming, girls laughing, bricks cracking on pavement, bells tolling a hundred thousand funerals.

“Crap!” I say, and drop the charm in the fountain. It was a simple-enough trinket: a plastic azabache eye attached by a leather thong to a pair of windup chattering teeth. I laughed when I found it in the bin at Snappin’ Wizards Surplus and Salvage, but then I could have sworn that eye
blinked
at me and Rabbit (my sister—sort of) gave me that look of hers, the one that means
magic.

Rabbit’s never wrong about
magic.

The teeth chatter for a few seconds in the water, but the whole spell has guttered by the time I get the nerve to reach into the murky green-black depths of one of Fare-You-Well Park’s crumbling fountains. Why they still have water is one of Bordertown’s mysteries, I guess.

Like my plaster man.

“Why are you here?” I ask, knowing I can’t hear him without a working charm but wondering if he hears me. “Who would have given you away, Prince?”

Maybe the
she
who haunts him, like the
he
who haunts my mama?

On impulse, I reach out and touch his shoulder, though it’s covered in pigeon droppings, green with age. I always assumed the artist had made him naked beneath that proud throw of embroidered cloth, but I see now that he’s wearing a loose tunic
beneath it, and there’s a vein, stark beside his collar, where a bit of the stitching has started to come undone.

“I really want it to be you,” I whisper. “I’ll be back.”

*   *   *

Few know the moment of their own creation, but the prince recalls the morning his beloved named him better than he recalls his last hundred Sundays in Fare-You-Well Park. She told him of her ambitions, how he was surely her prince, her true creation, her best work with her stamp on the sole of his boot. She used quicklime plaster, that most ancient and sturdy of materials, favored by the Romans in buildings still standing. Inspired by a childhood love of the tales in
A Thousand and One Nights
, she had determined to create a prince of the Orient, a man so hale, so noble, with such a glint of intelligence implied in his plaster eyes that all who looked on him would love him as she did.

Her love had a kind of magic; the prince took on a kind of soul, and if it was not the most robust of such things, it wasn’t so weak as the garden gnome’s. But in the end, for the security of his position, she married a man she’d called a scoundrel and a liar: Seymour Crenshaw, mayor of Twin Falls, Pennsylvania. Crenshaw said, “He’s a bit … exotic to have in our living room, dear, don’t you think?” and put the prince in the back hall, behind a velvet drape. The prince did not see her very often after that. He resigned himself to the imperfection of his beloved.

Sometimes she would pull back the velvet drape. Sometimes she would look up at him on his pedestal and push back her hair and sigh. “We were good together, weren’t we, my prince?” she said late one night, her belly swollen past the point where garments could conceal it.

We could be again
, he thought, and knew it for a lie.

“I’ve asked Seymour if he might purchase quicklime and sand
from a distributor in Baltimore,” she said, and for a moment the
hope!
and the
joy!
was like unto life, and it seemed that his broad hands flexed, that his noble brow softened, that perhaps he even bent his neck toward her.

“Prince?” she said, her voice too high, too soft, too scared. “Lord, but this child has made me mad.” She rested her hands on her belly and spoke as though the baby inside could hear her. “How restless you’ve been this past week. I’ll be glad enough when I can see your face as well as feel you.”

Her smile was not for him, though it had once been.

“Prince?” she said again, surer this time. “It must be the moon.…”

And she stood, raised herself to her toes, and kissed his perfect plaster lips.

“Seymour says he can’t possibly consider it in my condition,” she whispered, mouth between his ear and cheekbone. “I’ll ask again after the baby is born.”

She died a week later.

*   *   *

“Sit down,” says Grandmama. “I have biscuits in the oven.”

In some parts of Soho, a half dozen of Grandmama’s buttermilk biscuits can fetch at least a pound of coffee. I’ve seen them raise a ghost on the Day of the Dead. Biscuit day is serious business.

I sit down.

Even if she didn’t tell me, I would have known: Grandmama’s biscuits smell of crackling lard and fresh-churned butter melting into dough, and a little of the myrrh she burns as she mixes it together with her wooden spoon. Sodium bicarbonate and buttermilk culture need help here on the Border. Sometimes just the incense will do it, and sometimes I’ve seen Grandmama go into a full-on spiritual “Oh Happy Day” or “Didn’t It Rain” just to conjure
a rise. She’s got a beautiful voice, but my grandmother doesn’t sing much otherwise. I’d never tell her, but I always like the taste of those biscuits best.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” she says, like someone else might say, “Don’t fuck up,” and she opens the oven door for exactly one second. She’s smiling when she sits across from me at our kitchen counter (a dark mahogany slab carved with ivy—formerly a door from some posh building from the place Parkside, our neighborhood, used to be before the Border). “It’s a good one,” she says. The tension has left her shoulders, which is the only thing that ever makes her look even a little old.

I’m not so shabby myself (and Rabbit’s too young), but I live with two of the most beautiful women in Bordertown, no lie. Both Mama and Grandmama have skin to match our kitchen counter, with big lips and big hair and cheekbones that could cut pastry. They came sixteen years ago from the World, when Mama was pregnant with me. They ran away from a bad man and a good man and a place they call the South.

I’m glad I live here.

“So what’d you do today, Peya?” Grandmama asks, one bare foot on the stool, the other dangling beneath.

“You know that thing Rabbit said yesterday?” I ask.

“Honey, she’s a little girl, not a prophet.”

“Sometimes she’s right,” I say, looking through the door so I don’t have to catch her raised eyebrows.

“So you went out to find a boy to have sex with?”

“To
fall in love
,” I say to the table, blushing. “That’s what Rabbit said: ‘In thirteen days, you’ll lose your virginity and fall in love.’ ”

“And sometimes that’s a thing you regret,” Grandmama says, with that weight in her voice that means she’s thinking of the World and the South and the misery of her own first love.

My grandfather might have been a bad man
, I want to say,
but that doesn’t make you bad for not seeing the darkness inside him right away.

“And what’s so wrong with just letting things happen, honey? Why force the issue?”

If only Grandmama knew just how much I’m planning to force the issue. “It’s a chance, that’s all. Who doesn’t want to find love? And if Rabbit says it will happen in thirteen days, I have to try and find him. I want it to be someone good.”
Someone I’ve always wanted.

She gives me a sharp look. “And aren’t you my daughter’s daughter.”

Mama’s been hung up on the same man for sixteen years, and not for any good reason, far as I can tell—never mind that the man is my father. But before I can tell her that I’d never wait so long for a man who doesn’t want me, Grandmama stands to take the biscuits out of the oven. She never uses a timer, but they’re perfect anyway. To an outsider, it might look like Rabbit is the only magic in our family, but I know better.

She slides a biscuit on a plate and hands it to me. It’s an honor to eat Grandmama’s biscuits fresh from the oven. I handle it with due reverence.

“Well?” she says, like always.

“Delicious,” I say, like always.

But Grandmama doesn’t smile. “You find your boy yet, Peya?”

“I think so,” I say. “But he won’t talk to me.”

*   *   *

After that first unexpected conversation, the girl, Peya, returns. She talks, but she doesn’t hear. When she leaves, the sounds of the park scrape like sandpaper. The people in this Border city walk past him, speaking in voices too quiet or too loud, their
sentences in cadences that rise at the end, that ask and ask,
What is happening here?
and
When will it end?
and
What’s going on out in the World?

Turns out the Way into the Borderlands has become a wall. No one’s come in and no one can get out. People joke about coffee getting scarce, but they mean something else, like always.

The prince falls into the past again.

The funeral of his beloved was held in the graveyard of the tiny local parish. “A terrible shame,” said the chambermaids who polished the silver. “I nearly fainted in the heat.”