Part 97 (2/2)

I don't lose my s.h.i.+t, myself, until I'm on the transport. Until I'm safe in Ontario, getting off the bus, and then it's okay because Carlos thinks I'm crying over him and it never does any harm to let your fiance think you can't live without him.

Carlos has lousy feet and worse ankles. He works for the quartermaster. He's not going anywhere. From each according to his ability.

I get my orders for Pretoria. And the rest is history. I dear-john Carlos from the hospital, after burning half my f.u.c.king face off in South Africa. I never have the heart to find out if he makes it through the war.

Dwayne doesn't write. It's three months before I figure out that he'd been too proud to tell me he didn't know how.

I stick around Toronto for a little while after the funeral, until things are settled and the girls aren't constantly asking when Maman is coming home. I want to stay forever.

I... can't. Every time I look at Gabe now, I hear Geniveve telling me to marry him, and the h.e.l.l of it is, boy, it would make the kids happy. It would even make me happy, for a little, until the whole thing went pear-shaped. As you know it inevitably would. Love affairs forged in crisis, they're like trashfires. They burn out hot and leave a lot of stink behind.

He says he'll call. I tell him I'll come visit for Leah's birthday, which is May. It's only a five-hour drive from Hartford. There's a lot of rundown old dumps there, and I buy one. On the worst street in the worst neighborhood of town, but who's going to give me a hard time?

It's barely got electric.

They call that area the North End. It's the kind of place where men in bedroom slippers drink forties of malt liquor from paper bags on bus benches that haven't seen service since the war. It's full of immigrants and poor blacks and West Indians. Which is fine with me; you can never have too much Jamaican food.

It's exactly what I want. A hole I can crawl into and pull up snug.

That's a joke, isn't it? Vets going back where they fought, where they served. Marrying a brown native girl who only speaks horizontal English. Happens every day.

It's the peak experience, maybe. Or maybe the thing where we can't go home and we can't stay here. Wherever here might be. Maybe they ought to just shoot the warriors when we come home.

That way, it would be over quick.

Anyway. I'm standing on a street corner smoking my last cigarette when I see him. This gangster, and he's like a kick in the chest. Threat response, predator response, because he's the king of the street. Swaggering down Albany Ave in a black T-s.h.i.+rt, boots, jeans, and a black leather jacket zinging with chains. His shaved head's glossy in the sun. Pink proud flesh catches the sun on his crown; he taps knuckles with a skinny guy headed the other direction. He's huge; shoulders bulging the seams of his jacket. And he's flanked by two toughs that trail him like pilotfish after a shark.

I'm supposed to be impressed.

One falls back a half-step to have a word with the guy the big man deigned to notice, and that's when I catch a flash on the head man's shoulder. Red and white and gray, sewn to black leather.

It stops me in my tracks. I stare uncomprehendingly and take a step forward. That sharp pink scar, the heavy neck, the ma.s.sive hands, the swagger. The way he dips his head when he turns to his friend and half-nods.

The friend catches me staring and moves in. The big man turns, notices my face, recoils. I'm used to that, but it stings from him. If it is. Him.

The scars, of course. And I'm in mufti. I hope I can talk my way out of this before I get my head handed to me.

They move toward me, the big man and both his toughs, and the newcomer trailing like a remora hoping to attach itself to an apex predator. Four of them.

I can do it.

I can't promise to keep that many safe.

They pause three meters distant, the big one sizing up my scars and my face. His pistol's under his jacket, a hilt-down shoulder holster. I can tell through the hide.

I wear mine in plain sight, strapped to my thigh.

”There a problem?”

Right on script, but he reads it too softly. It could be an honest question.

I treat it that way. ”No problem. I was wondering if you knew a Dwayne MacDonald, grew up near here.” Pause. ”He'd be about your age.”

The silence stretches. He looks at me, into my eyes, at the shape of my shoulder and the angle of my nose. ”Beat it,” he says, finally, and he's not talking to me. I catch a glitter, steel teeth behind his lips. Some sort of cosmetic mod.

Not cheap.

Without protest, with a few unanswered promises to catch-you-later-man, the other three recuse themselves. Dwayne stands there looking at me, hulking behemoth with his hands shoved in his pockets. I think I could get a ting! out of the tendons on his neck if I flicked them with a thumbnail.

”What do you go by now?”

”Huh?” As if I've shattered his concentration. ”Oh. Razorface.” The sibilants hiss through his teeth. ”They call me Razorface. This my street.” A shrug over his shoulder. Sure. Lord of all he surveys. ”War's over, Casey.”

”Yeah.” We stand there staring at each other for a minute, grinning. People cross the street. ”Call me Maker. I live here now. Hey, you know what?”

”What?”

”You should come over some time. And watch a hockey game. In fact, can I buy you a drink?”

”It's ten in the morning, you f.u.c.king drunk,” he says, but he takes my elbow and turns me, like he expects me to need the support. ”f.u.c.k, you look like h.e.l.l.”

”Yeah,” I say, 'cause it's true.

But that's okay. Because on the other hand, he looks like he's doing... all right.

So that's something, after all.

Two Dreams on a Train The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience's left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn't bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist's bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the p.r.i.c.kle of tears.

Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a ma.s.sive s.p.a.celighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a s.p.a.ceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall s.h.a.ggy with peeling paint.

Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted-like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real-in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience's hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn't look down and she didn't close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist's, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor's.

The p.r.i.c.k and s.h.i.+ft of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.

A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, ”Thank you.”

She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he'd stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he'd been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.

”Won't be long before you'll have the whole hand done.” He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists-dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. ”You've earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time.”

”I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound,” Patience said, meeting the scarrist's eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. ”I don't want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did.” She smiled. ”I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there.”

The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. ”There's more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know.”

Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. ”Like this?”

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