Welcome to Bordertown (45 page)

“Ron!” I squealed. “Jou’vert, sweetheart!”

Ron the Wolfman sketched a deep bow at us, flourishing with his hat and mask. He bruised the air with another howl that just might have been the words,
“En bataille-là!”

Ti’Bet launched into a ululation of her own. Which only increased my horripilation. She started dancing around him. He grinned, reached to take her hands. She pulled hers back. I winced. Ron was really sensitive to people freaking out at his looks.

But then she clapped her hands onto his shoulders. He took her by the waist. Together, man-thing and mystery woman, they capered through the crowd, barreling into revelers, who greeted them with cries of
“Jou’vert!”
and
“En bataille-là!”

*   *   *

“Jeez, girl. Look at how all these colors fighting with each other, nah?” With thumb and forefinger, I sorted through the pile of discarded rags Beti and Gladstone had dumped on the kitchen floor of my squat. “You couldn’t find anything nicer than this?”

“They are from people who may be dead. That’s the theme, right? To celebrate your ancestor spirits?”

“I guess.”

“I will make an egungun, then. Spirit of the ancestors. It beats people with sticks to remind them to be good.”

“My granny used to threaten to do that to me. She never did, though.”

“The sticks are also to keep people away. To touch the egungun is
to die. Only Gladstone says I mustn’t beat anyone with sticks during the parade.”

I made a face. “Shit, no. That used to be the tradition centuries ago, back home. ‘En bataille’ means ‘Let’s rumble.’ ”

“I do not understand.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Nowadays the ‘en bataille’ is only pappyshow. No real fighting supposed to happen.” Sometimes she worked too hard at this being an elf thing. So did Gladstone, but she at least had a reason. She was half elf, after all. Half elf and all Bordertown. Beti was probably neither.

“You realize most of these clothes too mash up to mend?”

Beti grinned at me. “I’m going to, uh, mash them up even more.” She took a crumpled and stained linen dress shirt from me and began tearing it into long strips. Her hands were strong. “Today I walked through your marketplace, and I visited a place across the Mad River,” she said happily. “Lots of people brown like me and Gladstone. And I ate jerk chicken.”

“You were in Little Tooth, then. The Jamaican section.”

“Yes. Tonight, Gladstone is taking me dancing.”

“Like you trying to experience all of Bordertown at the same time!”

“I have to go soon.”

“After only a few days? School must be out for the summer by now.”

Beti hesitated. Then she said, “I would like to stay longer, but someone is coming to take me away.”

Damn. I’d been hoping a casual mention of school would get her to make a slip one way or the other about this elf business. I’d just have to keep trying to get the real story from her. I held one of the rags up against her. “This purple is good on you. Bordertown don’t let everybody in. This person who wants to take you away may be the wrong kind of person.”

For a second, hope lit her face. But the light went out. “This one, borders cannot stop him.”

“Who is he?”

“My brother. Do you really think he might not be able to come here?”

Gladstone whisked into the room, her arms full of more gaudy rags. “Who might not be able to come here?”

Beti turned to her. “My fiancé,” she said.

I chuckled. Wherever she was from, English was certainly not her first language. “Ti’Bet, you just told me he was your brother. He can’t be your fiancé, too.”

She went still, then gave a dismissive laugh. “Brother, betrothed—I always get them confused.”

Gladstone dumped her armful on top of the one I was already sorting. “So which one is he?” I could tell she was trying not to let her suspicion show.

“My brother. My blood, yes? He’s coming soon to be with me.”

Before I could ask her about the difference between “take me home” and “be with me,” she tackled Gladstone, knocked her down into the mound of rags on the floor. Giggling, they began to wrestle. Gladstone had Beti pinned in under a minute, but Beti laughed her growly teddy-bear laugh and somehow managed to twist her body and use her legs in a scissors hold around Gladstone’s waist. The wrestling turned into groping and the giggling was silenced by kisses. I watched them. Only for a little while. When buttons started being unbuttoned by eager fingers, I left the squat and went for a walk. It was high time I had a girlfriend again.

*   *   *

Beti and Ron were still dancing their jig. They’d been joined by Sparks, Ron’s girlfriend. Briefly, I wondered whether Ron had dog breath. I used to give Glower those soft cakes of raw yeast for his.
But I wasn’t really paying them too much mind, oui? I was busy keeping a watch out for Gladstone. Too besides, the turreted shape of Beti’s pitchy-patchy costume had finally jogged my memory. The song that the chorus of the road march was sampling was:

So long I hadn’t played that game! Not since small girl days back home. We’d form two circles of children. The circles would haggle with each other in song:

The response, a simple expression of longing that even when I was a child had struck me as endearing in its brave vulnerability:

But suppose it hadn’t been a plea, but a threat?
Give me one of your pretty ones, you hear me? Or else.

Or else what? And was the first team’s reply an act of generosity, or a capitulation?

No. Not Beti. They didn’t want our Beti, did they? All that talk about having to leave soon, not having much time. Beti was jumpy
as a cricket in a chicken coop today. And where the hell had she gotten to? I’d lost her in the crowd.

My left eye twitched. Oh god. Juju heading our way. That twitch in my eye; in the bad years, that’s how I’d learned to tell when Gladstone’s nature was running high. How to tell when to stay away from her.

*   *   *

Gladstone slouched casually against her bicycle and mine. We’d leaned them against the bus stop where we’d arranged to meet Beti. Mine was chained the usual way. Gladstone’s had only a piece of old rope looped around the fork, trailing untied to the ground. The way she put it was, if the bike believed it was tied up, nobody would be able to steal it. Seemed to work, too. In any case, no one had ever stolen her bespelled bike. I’d lost five bikes to thieves since I came to Bordertown. Gladdy and I were going to take Beti mudlarking along the banks of the Big Bloody. Sometimes you found cool trash to keep or trade.

Gladstone looked up and down Chrystoble Street. “You see her yet?”

I sighed. “No, girl. But I sure she going to come.”

“I just want her to be safe, is all.”

I nodded. If you didn’t have your own wheels in Bordertown, there was always what passed for a transit system; you found some simulacrum of a bus stop—this one was a dead tree still standing at the curb of Chrystoble Street, the length of its blackened trunk painted shakily in green with the words “The Bus Stops Here.” And you waited. There was no schedule, no official transit system. Anyone with any kind of vehicle could take it into their head to set up a route and charge whatever they pleased. You never knew what would show up. A rickshaw pulled by a wild-eyed youth with spiky red hair and the shakes from Mad River withdrawal. A donkey cart, complete with
donkey. There was even a bus pulled by a unicorn that only let virgin passengers on.

“I’m actually having a hard time keeping up with her,” said Gladstone. “Beti, I mean.”

“Like I used to with you.”

“She keeps wanting me to take her to all this stuff I’ve never heard of.”

“Like what?”

“She wants to see a movie about a guy wearing an iron suit. The second one, she says, ’cause she’s already seen the first and the third. She wants to try something called an ecsbox. She wants a Hello Kitty vibrator.” Gladstone blushed.

Me, I thought my belly was going to bust from laughing. “You mean, Sir Gladhand’s flashing fingers not doing it for her? Like you slowing down in truth, gal! Oh, don’t be like that. You know is only joke I making.” Then it dawned on me. “Wait one second; those things she wants, they’re all from the World. Things from the time when the Way to Borderland was closed.”

Gladstone was still sulking. “So?”

“Why would a newbie come here for things she can get out in the World?”

A bitter chuckle. “You still don’t believe she’s from across the Border?”

“Do you?”

She shrunk in on herself a little. “I’ve heard about … you know? That place she says she’s from?”

“It’s a real place?”

“It may only be stories. My da used to tell me them.” She looked at me, longing making her face vulnerable. “A country on the Other Side where people have both my skin and my magic.”

Huh. Maybe Beti was telling the truth, then. I wasn’t convinced, though.

A team of boys riding three tandem bikes pulled up to the stop, off-loaded two guys with backpacks and a woman carrying a live chicken by its bound legs. No Beti. The guys paid for their ride with smokes. The woman paid with the chicken. They wandered off in separate directions. The bikes moved on.

“So you going to go there?” I asked. “To Unnameable?” I tried to keep my voice light, to prepare my heart for yet another loss.

She stared at her shoes. “She won’t tell me anything about it. Nothing that counts, anyway. Just like all those other Bloods who think they’re better than us halfies.”

“Girl, get real. I see how she looks at you. If she not telling you anything, maybe she can’t. Is you self tell me that people from beyond the Border are forbidden to talk certain things.”

Gladstone scowled. “Yeah.”

“Well, then.” She wasn’t going to leave me. Relief. Triumph. Guilt.

“Damy, all that stuff she wants that I’ve never heard of, I can’t give it to her.” Shame burned deep in those silver eyes, banking to anger. Outcast in the World, outcast over the Border. Gladstone would probably live out her life in Bordertown, and she knew it. And even here, she had to steady battle closed doors and sniggers behind her back. “Beti can go wherever she wants, in the World and out of it. Comes here flaunting it, slumming with the halfie.”

I sneezed. “Don’t go sour on this girl the way you do, okay? I like her.”

Gladstone huffed and stared at the ground.

*   *   *

“Beti!” I called. I pushed between a scary clown wearing a T-shirt that read “Why So Serious?” and a near-naked Trubie. The Trubie was ancient as the hills and thrice as wrinkled. He had a boa constrictor draped over his arms. Age had blanched the two braids
hanging down his back from silver to pure white. They were each nearly as thick around as the snake, and their tips tickled his dusty ankles. His eyes were an opaque fish-belly pale, but they followed me all the same.

The snake charmer was suddenly blocking my road. Blasted Trubies could move quicker than thought. He leaned in toward me and croaked, “What will you give her, do you hear, my sissie-oh?”

I sneezed. The man looked startled, as though someone had just shaken him out of a dream. He smiled at me. “Excuse me, cousin,” he said, his vowels liquid with the accent of the Realm. “I did not mean to bar your way.” He stepped aside.

“Don’t fret,” I replied. My skin was still crawling with the surprise of the first thing he’d said to me.

“Did I misspeak you, cousin?” he asked. “It seems to me I said something, though I don’t remember what.”

“No. Nothing much, anyway. It was nothing.”

I could lie with words, but never with my face. He studied the polite fib he saw written there, and probably my fear, too besides. He gave me a rueful smile. “There is a wild magic in the bloods of both our races, my friend. We must give it sport from time to time, yes? And sometimes the bacchanalia calls our spirits forth in ways we do not ken.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I needed to find Beti. I gave him the Jou’vert greeting, though my voice cracked midway.

“To battle, then,” he replied. The response didn’t sound so lighthearted in translation. I shuddered. As I moved on, he was crooning at his snake, which had raised its head to his and was flickering its tongue over his lips, scenting his breath.

“Beti! Where you dey? Beti!”

Into my left ear, the juju breeze whispered something that
sounded like:
We will beat her with green twigs, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

I yelled, “That don’t suit her!” The general commotion swallowed up the sound of my voice. I muttered, “Do you hear that, my fucking sissie-oh?” I pressed on, calling out Beti’s name. And I found myself muttering under my breath, “You didn’t come to Bordertown for this, oui? Playing mother hen to baby dykes and sullen butches with substance abuse issues.” But is lie I was telling.

In truth, I’d never planned to come to Bordertown at all, for any reason. People don’t believe me so I don’t talk it much, but I swear I didn’t leave Toronto. It left me.