Blow (5 page)

The Black Forest of Bavaria was a dangerous place in those days, lots of baby stealing going on. If you were in the peppermint bricklaying or gingerbread siding business, you’d be making a killing. It was a good time to be a lumberjack, a terrible time to disobey your parents. Cats did well, mice not so much. Stepchildren could go either way.

And unless you had an invitation with the seal of the House of the Royal Family of Bavaria, you and I would be sharing a cab out of the forest. This was especially true when Prince Dimple Pimple turned eighteen and took over as Kaiser for his senile uncle Gustav, who would arrange flotillas of paper ships in the royal fountain and tromp in the water in full regalia shouting, “People of foldy town, the tax is axes on your axis!” I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s because he was senile.

The prince had a regular name, by the way; I just don’t really care what it is. I’ll give him one thing: he had spectacular dimples. He wore only white tapered shirts with overlong sleeves and red leather pants. His dirty blond hair had more highlights than a Rembrandt and spiked out like a palm tree or fell in his face like moody curtains.

As he swaggered through the halls of his castle, a troupe of musicians followed to provide a “hella-cool” soundtrack. When he’d enter a room, he’d stop and pose, first one profile, then the other. With each profile, a drummer and trumpeter would bang a sonic exclamation point, one for each of his dreamy dimples.

The guy could charm the scales off a gorgon. Also, he might have killed his parents.

Y
OU’D THINK OF
all people, I could tell you if Dimple Pimple’s parents were murdered. I should know these things, right? Why would I have anything better to remember than when and why that random old couple from someplaceville shoved off, right around the same time a billion others did it?

Why, for example, do I spend my evenings cutting up bok choy and placing bite-size pieces in a trail for my bunny to follow around the house, when I
could
be cataloging every sun that flickers out, every virus you ever fought off, every birch that slumps in a field somewhere under the gentle crush of snowfall?

I’ll tell you why. It’s a grave world, full of last rites, and ghosts are what we breathe. And at least for me, sometimes you feel like a Tut; sometimes you don’t. It gets tiring. Sometimes you do your job, and sometimes you hunt for nom-nom treasure with Mr. Bunnersworth.

I have no idea what happened to the king and queen of Bavaria. The prince showed up to his eighteenth birthday party by himself, and when people asked, he said, “My good father and mother have passed on, terribly, with a lot of screaming involved. Is this cake lemon?”

He was immediately made Prince Kaiser, no questions asked. The whispers at court were that the king’s and queen’s cessation of breaths was the work of Dimple Pimple’s second-in-command and bodyguard, Brutessa, the dwarf general always by his side.

They called her Brutessa the Brutest. She was captain of a gang of land pirates, who roamed the forest and pillaged travelers. I got to see a lot of their work firsthand. The thing about land pirates is that even though they don’t get as much media coverage as the seafaring variety, they’re much more . . . well, brutal. The most the two types have in common is that they both run the Jolly Roger, the black flag with that skull everyone says is my head (gives me the hibbly-jibblies).

Land pirates travel on carts that have been cobbled together from the pieces of other carts, pulled by wolves and wild dogs. They can gain on a four-horse carriage at full gallop. And instead of sending a boarding crew, they have keelhaulers, who’re basically dwarves who went crazy in the coal mines. They stand on the running dogs, and when they pull alongside a speeding carriage, they’ll curl themselves up into a ball and jump into the spokes. The wheels crunch on the dwarf, and wood goes splintering in every direction. The carriage goes flying over its own startled horses, all to the tune of the keelhauler going, “tee-hee” somewhere in the middle of the whirling smashup. They’re lunatics. Like, howl-at-moon, smoke-dirt-in-their-pipes, cartilage-eating types.

Land pirates think of sea pirates as the spoiled upper class, what with their “code,” and their noses not falling off, and all that sea water for their bubble baths.

Think about that. To the land pirates, Blackbeard was too professorial. One-Eyed Jane was a yacht-club princess to these people. You really have to have made a few wrong decisions along the way if you’ve gotten to a place where you’re thinking the infamous marauders of the Barbary Coast are
too
civilized.

The way Brutessa met Dimple Pimple is predictable enough. He was joyriding through the forest with half the tavern wenches in Bavaria, just about to start a bodice-ripping edition of the Alphabet Game, when all of a sudden his carriage went flying in the air and landed upside down in a ditch.

Fortunately for him, Dimple Pimple had just bought a vowel, if you know what I mean (like, you know, you
know
). It’s best to leave the details alone. He climbed over the dazed tavern babes and found himself face-to-face with Brutessa. He was still standing in the ditch, so the height thing worked out.

Dimple Pimple immediately recognized the pirate queen, and, like most greedy rich kids, he wanted her in his collection. He would need a pet assassin for his future plans, someone with both ears to the ground. Meanwhile, Brutessa had a sharp eye and immediately realized she had hit the mother lode. She had ambitions of her own and needed a corrupt princeling to manipulate.

And a few years after that, Babbo Giovanni and Giacomo came down the same road toward the crafts fair. The land pirates had changed career paths by then, to royal guards — well, a grubbier, less-regimented version, anyway, involving a lot more exposed innards than seems usual.

I
KNOW WHAT YOU’RE
thinking. You’re thinking this is a terrible love story, on account of the fact that the two lovers haven’t even met. Plus when Chloe took the terminal plunge, Giacomo didn’t even know about it. Maybe his own spirit — which had been fused to hers — should have been ripped from his chest and left nothing but human post-consumption waste, a love-shorn collection of bio-organic watch parts, a homunculus.

After all, that’s what
should
happen when our love leaves us. We turn into those secret experiments of alchemy.

Fair enough. Maybe a love story should have the lovers within a hundred-mile radius of each other at the beginning. But in my experience, it’s not so much the beginning as the ending that matters for most people. And endings are kinda my specialty. I mean, you can start anywhere if you think about it, but you’re gonna end up like everybody else someday, listening to Dora clacking on her typewriter till your name comes up next on her clipboard.

And the whole point is who you were up until then, what justifies you. What reason you got for door number one or door number two. I mean this seriously. There are only two doors in the room, and Dora keeps great files.

And I’ll tell you a secret about the two doors. You always get the one you walked in from. So really, every story’s different, and every story is the exact same.

As for Chloe and Giacomo, they finally met on the first day of the crafts fair. Around lunchtime they both wandered away from their father’s booths to peruse the tchotchke shops. In between the dream-catchers and the infused oils, merchants of mixed reputation sold turkey legs, mead, fried boar, grog, wine, cupcakes, and ale. The crowd was half fairyland, half anonymous alcoholics.

I will admit I was tempted by the bulletin board made out of wine corks arranged in a frame, with all the stamps of the different chateaux and vineyards on them. Classy, functional, would have looked great in a den, home office, or kitchen. Kicked myself that I didn’t have my wallet.

Anyway, like most instances of love, it was just an accident that Chloe and Giacomo ran into each other in the middle of the raucous crowd, with a loud Spanish baker yelling, “Churros! Get your churros. Hot churro. Not burro. They’re sticks you can eat!”

As Chloe and Giacomo strode through the medieval festival, they were unaware that their stars had almost completed the long and winding course across eons and would come crashing into each other right then, as they turned a corner. Chloe and Giacomo barely knocked into each other. The baker didn’t even notice as he peddled his pastries. But high above them, where no one could see it, two space rocks rammed into one another, tiny stars that simply refused to pass each other by.

Bam! Thunderclap! “All right, how about some funnel cake instead?” Love!

As a result of the slightest change in lunar gravity caused by the comets’ crash, a wave off the coast of Pago Pago poured over a thousand newborn tortoises and enfolded them back into the warm sea. A rock was wrested from its position by the faint concussive force and tumbled into a creek in the Americas, minutely altering the course of the stream, which poured over a slowly eroding cliff. A gentleman astronomer of Arabia saw the blast of two young stars in his telescope and fell from his stool backward, knocking his head, then called his assistants to his aid, including the assistant whose job it was to turn the dial each calendar day.

You might consider what I’m saying a bunch of overwrought lovey-dovey talk. You might think I’m being a sentimentalist, schmaltzy, or “grazing corn.” Yeah, yeah, you’re saying, that’s a story for moms to forward a dozen times on e-mail. Sell it to Hallmark, buddy. That kind of thing.

And you might be right, but then I’d say don’t push me, punk. I like this part, and I can schmaltz your face off. And more important, it’s not corny when it’s true. To some of you, it may be corny
because
it’s true, and that puts you beyond my help.

For the rest of us, I will say that when Chloe and Giacomo bumped into each other in the middle of the crowded fair, their sudden love set off fireworks in space. It ushered in life and the tide. It was earth-shattering. And in a way, even time stopped for a while (the assistant finally remembered around midnight and snuck back into the madrassa in his nightclothes to set the calendar right).

Chloe blushed. Giacomo smiled like a doofus. Her eyes had seen the tops of clouds and were blue. His neck could pull a plow through parched clay. She opened her lips and said,
“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”

He looked at her and said, “Huh? . . .
Mi dispiace — non capisco
.”

And thus came to light a slightly important detail: Giacomo couldn’t speak French, and Chloe didn’t have a lick of Italian.

At that same instant, both Babbo and Pierre spied their son and daughter fraternizing with exactly the last person on the planet they should be fraternizing with. The two of them interrupted their admirers and rushed toward the new lovers.

Also at that same moment, from his seat on the elevated stage, Prince Dimple Pimple noticed Chloe. He noted her darling freckles but didn’t fall in love. At any given time he had two dozen chicks on speed-beckon. He was constantly in that greedy state of wanting the next thing, so he thought of women like a spice rack — each one was good for a single flavor. Chloe was the darling freckle flavor.

I hope I’m not the first person to tell you that beauty is a little more complicated than the box-of-crayons approach.

Well, the Dimple Pimple didn’t know that, and he wasn’t in any kind of position to recognize that Chloe — just another hottie by his standards — was in fact the most beautiful woman alive. Too soft-spoken, perhaps, but a heart as shiny as the diamond as big as the Ritz. Real beauty is important in my industry, so I’m using the word as a technical term. She was actually the most interesting person to watch among you people. Best alive. My professional opinion.

So on the plus side, there was no sleazebag prince butting his head to steal our heroine away. But, on the other hand, Brutessa, who lurked behind the prince’s throne, had seen Giacomo, promptly developing her first-ever crush (which at first expressed itself as a gassy buildup and then a toady belch).