Part 105 (1/2)

”Pinky,” he said, and, ”Yale. Four point oh.”

I raised both eyebrows at Chris and pushed my gla.s.ses up my nose. The Las Vegas public defender's office doesn't get a lot of interest from Yale Law School grads, summa c.u.m laude. ”And you haven't hired him yet?”

”I wanted your opinion,” Chris said without a hint of apology. He glanced at Pinky and offered up a self-deprecating smile. ”Maria can spot guilty people. Every time. It's a gift. One of these days we're going to get her made a judge.”

”Really?” Pinky's lipless mouth warped itself into a grin, showing the gaps in his short, patchy beard. ”Am I guilty, then?”

The lights that followed him glittered, electric blue fireflies in the twilight he wore like a coat. He s.h.i.+fted his weight on his crutches, obviously uncomfortable at standing.

”And what am I guilty of?”

Not teasing, either, or flirtatious. Calm, and curious, as if he really thought maybe I could tell. I squinted at the lights that danced around him-will-o'-the-wisps, spirit lights. The aura itself was dark, but it wasn't the darkness of past violence or dishonesty. It was organic, intrinsic, and I wondered if it had to do with whatever had crippled him. And the firefly lights- Well, they were something else again. Just looking at them made my fingertips tingle.

”If there are any sins on your conscience,” I said carefully, ”I think you've made amends.”

He blinked again, and I wondered why I wanted to think blinked fis.h.i.+ly when fishes do not blink. And then he smiled at me, teeth like yellowed pegs in pale, blood-flushed gums. ”How on earth do you manage that?”

”I measure the distance between their eyes.”

A three-second pause, and then he started to laugh, while Christian, who had heard the joke before, stood aside and rolled his eyes. Pinky shrugged, rise and fall of bulldog shoulders, and I smiled hard, because I knew we were going to be friends.

In November of 1996, I lost my beloved seventeen-year-old cat to renal failure, and Pinky showed up at my door uninvited with a bottle of Maker's Mark and a box of Oreos. We were both half-trashed by the time I spread my cards out on the table between us, a modified Celtic cross. They s.h.i.+mmered when I looked at them; that was the alcohol. The s.h.i.+mmer around Pinky when he stretched his hand out-was not.

”Fear death by water,” I said, and touched the Hanged Man's foot, hoping he would know he was supposed to laugh.

His eyes sparkled like scales in the candlelight when he refilled my gla.s.s. ”It's supposed to be if you don t find the Hanged Man. In any case, I don't see a drowned sailor.”

”No,” I answered. I picked up my gla.s.s and bent to look closer. ”But there is the three of staves as the significator. Eliot called him the Fisher King.” I looked plainly at where his crutches leaned against the arm of his chair. ”Not a bad choice, don't you think?”

His face grayed a little, or perhaps that was the alcohol. Foxlights darted around him like startled minnows. ”What does he stand for?”

”Virtue tested by the sea.” And then I wondered why I'd put it that way. ”The sea symbolizes change, conflict, the deep unconscious, the monsters of the Id-”

”I know what the sea means,” he said bitterly. His hand darted out and overturned the card, showing the tan back with its key pattern in ivory. He jerked his chin at the spread. ”Do you believe in those?”

It had been foolish to pull them out. Foolish to show him, but there was a certain amount of grief and alcohol involved. ”It's a game,” I said, and swept them all into a pile. ”Just a child's game.” And then I hesitated, and looked down, and turned the three of staves back over, so it faced the same way as the rest. ”It's not the future I see.”

In 1997 I took him to bed. I don't know if it was the bottle and a half of s.h.i.+raz we celebrated one of our rare victories with, or the deep bittersweet richness of his voice finally eroding my limited virtue, but we were good in the dark. His arms and shoulders, it turned out, were beautiful, after all: powerful and lovely, all out of proportion with the rest of him.

I rolled over, after, and dropped the tissue-wrapped rubber on the nightstand, and heard him sigh. ”Thank you,” he said, and the awe in that perfect voice was sweeter than the s.e.x had been.

”My pleasure,” I said, and meant it, and curled up against him again, watching the firefly lights flicker around his blunt, broad hands as he spoke softly and gestured in the dark, trying to encompa.s.s some inexpressible emotion.

Neither one of us was sleepy. He asked me what I saw in Las Vegas. I told him I was from Tucson, and I missed the desert when I was gone. He told me he was from Stonington. When the sun came up, I put my hand into his aura, chasing the flickering lights like a child trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue.

I asked him about the terrible scars low on the backs of his thighs that left his hamstrings weirdly lumped and writhed, unconnected to bone under the skin. I'd thought him crippled from birth. I'd been wrong about so many, many things.

”Gaffing hook,” he said. ”When I was seventeen. My family were fisherman. Always have been.”

”How come you never go home to Connecticut, Isaac?”

For once, he didn't correct me. ”Connecticut isn't home.”

”You don't have any family?”

Silence, but I saw the dull green denial stain his aura. I breathed in through my nose and tried again. ”Don't you ever miss the ocean?”

He laughed, warm huff of breath against my ear, stirring my hair. ”The desert will kill me just as fast as the ocean would, if I ever want it. What's to miss?”

”Why'd you come here?”

”Just felt drawn. It seemed like a safe place to be. Unchanging. I needed to get away from the coast, and Nevada sounded ... very dry. I have a skin condition. It's worse in wet climates. It's worse near the sea.

”But you came back to the ocean after all. Prehistoric seas. Nevada was all underwater once. There were ichthyosaurs-”

”Underwater. Huh.” He stretched against my back, cool and soft. ”I guess it's in the blood.”

That night I dreamed they chained my wrists with jeweled chains before they crippled me and left me alone in the salt marsh to die. The sun rose as they walked away singing, hunched inhuman shadows glimpsed through a splintered mist that glowed pale as the opals in my manacles.

The mist burned off to show gray earth and greeny brown water, agates and discolored aquamarine. The edges of coa.r.s.e gray cloth adhered in drying blood on the backs of my thighs, rumpled where they had pulled it up to hamstring me. The chains were cold against my cheeks when I raised my head away from the mud enough to pillow my face on the backs of my hands.

The marsh stank of rot and crushed vegetation, a green miasma so overwhelming the sticky copper of blood could not pierce it. The pain wasn't as much as it should have been; I was slipping into shock as softly as if I slipped under the unrippled water. I hadn't lost enough blood to kill me, but I rather thought I'd prefer a quick, cold sleep and never awakening to starving to death or lying in a pool of my own blood until the scent attracted the thing I had been left in propitiation of.

Somewhere, a frog croaked. It looked like a hot day coming.

I supposed I was going to find out.

His skin scaled in the heat. It was a dry heat, blistering, peeling, chapping lips and b.l.o.o.d.ying noses. He used to hang me with jewels, opals, tourmalines the color of moss and roses. ”Family money,” he told me. ”Family jewels.” He wasn't lying.

I would have seen a lie.

The Mojave hated him. He was chapped and chafed, cracked and dry. He never sweated enough, kept the air conditioner twisted as high as it would go. Skin burns in the heat, in the sun. Peels like a snake's. Aquamarine discolors like smoker's teeth. Pearls go brittle. Opals crack and lose their fire.

He used to go down to the Colorado river at night, across the dam to Willow Beach, on the Arizona side, and swim in the river in the dark. I told him it was crazy. I told him it was dangerous. How could he take care of himself in the Colorado when he couldn't walk without braces and crutches?

He kissed me on the nose and told me it helped his pain. I told him if he drowned, I would never forgive him. He said in the history of the entire world twice over, a Gilman had never once drowned. I called him a c.o.c.ky, insincere b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He stopped telling me where he was going when he went out at night.

When he came back and slept beside me, sometimes I lay against the pillow and watched the follow-me lights flicker around him. Sometimes I slept.

Sometimes I dreamed, also.

I awakened after sunset, when the cool stars p.r.i.c.kled out in the darkness. The front of my robe had dried, one long yellow-green stain, and now the fabric under my back and a.s.s was saturated, sticking to my skin. The mud seemed to have worked it loose from the gashes on my legs.

I wasn't dead yet, more's the pity, and now it hurt.

I wondered if I could resist the swamp water when thirst set in. Dehydration would kill me faster than hunger. On the other hand, the water might make me sick enough that I'd slip into the relief of fever and pa.s.s away, oblivious in delirium. If dysentery was a better way to die than gangrene. Or dehydration.

Or being eaten. If the father of frogs came to collect me as was intended, I wouldn't suffer long.

I whistled across my teeth. A fine dramatic gesture, except it split my cracked lips and I tasted blood.