Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (23 page)

His father looked levelly at him. “Really? If I called up your manager, would he tell me the same thing?”

Mr. Zerling, always diplomatic with parents, could say anything. But the flare of hope had already gone out. Sol licked the swelling where he’d bitten his lip. “He…he might. I could try for another position.”

“When I promised you the car, Sol, I thought you knew you had to earn it. Finish your classes, keep up your athletics as well. If you’d only slipped a bit, maybe in two weeks you could’ve shown some commitment to the team. You do that, your manager would be able to trust you to start again. He could always move the coyote to another spot, if he’s really that good.”

Sol’s paws ached, but he didn’t release his fists. How had he not earned the car? He’d stayed on the team for years, and just because he’d lost his starting spot, all that meant was that someone better had made the team. But deeper down, in the parts that squirmed below the surface of his thoughts, he knew: he hadn’t cultivated friendships on the team, he hadn’t gone out with the guys in…a year? More? Not since December, that was for sure. And he hadn’t worked out any harder than he needed to, and sometimes not even that much, in longer than that. “You were never going to give me a car,” he said.

His father’s frown deepened. “Of course we were. I didn’t help you pick one out for my own amusement.”

“Whatever.” Sol’s claws dug into his paw pads. “Sorry I couldn’t be perfect like Natty.”

“Don’t bring up your brother. This isn’t about him.”

“Yes it is! You want me to be like him, you wanted me to play football, and when I picked baseball—”

“When you lost your spot on the football team, you mean.”

“—you said it was
almost
as good, and you keep telling me I’m not doing everything I should! What else can I do?”

His father shook his head, slowly. “Graduate, keep your grades up, stay on the team. Then we’ll talk at the end of the summer. Your mother thinks you need a car for college. I’m not convinced. Yet.”

Sol lay back his ears, but refused to submit. The tears still felt dangerously close; he raised his voice to drive them back. “So, what? You want me to keep practicing until all hours of the night? You want me to magically make all the wolves on the team think I’m awesome?”

“Don’t raise your voice to me.” His father stepped forward, glaring down. “You know what you need to do. Just decide if it’s worth it to you to do it.”

Some of the girls had returned to the cabaret.
Sol opened his mouth and the words just came out. “Maybe I should suck Mr. Zerling’s dick. How about if I got back on the team that way?”

The room went silent. Sol held his father’s eyes, aware he’d gone too far. His father’s brow lowered, his ears flattened. He pointed at Sol. “You’re grounded for two weeks. You come right home after baseball practice. No going to your hippie friend’s house, no going anywhere.”

“But—”

“But what? You got something else to say?”

The cold fire in his father’s eyes matched his own. Sol lowered his ears. “No,” he said.

“Good.” His father stalked out of the room and slammed the door.

Sol sank down on the bed and unclenched his fists. For several minutes he lay there, trying to hear the angry music in his head again. Grounded for two weeks. A whole summer working in the peach cannery, with crazy homophobe Uncle Nolan, all with the lure of maybe, maybe a car at the end of it, which Sol would bet his phone, computer, and iPod (if he got it back) would not happen. And then college, where he would be a computer science major not because he wanted to, but because that’s where all the good jobs were and he was reasonably okay at it. The problem was that he didn’t love anything else enough to make an argument for not majoring in computer science.

He’d thought that at least he could play baseball in college, but it looked like even that was a pipe dream. All he really had to look forward to in his life was Carcy, and Carcy would come through for him. Wouldn’t he? The ram said he loved Sol, well, now Sol needed him, needed that love.

At least his father hadn’t taken the phone, like the last time a couple years ago. Though maybe he just hadn’t thought of it yet and was on his way up right now to take it. And Sol had a phone call he was going to have to make if that might happen.

He dialed Carcy quickly. The phone rang and rang, so long that when the ram did pick up, Sol thought for a moment it was a recording. Then Carcy said, “Solly, what’s up?”

“I got grounded.”

Carcy said, slowly, “For the whole summer?”

“No, but my dad sometimes takes my phone, so…don’t text me ’til I tell you it’s okay, okay?”

“Sure, Solly. You okay?”

Sol breathed deeply. His father’s strong, furious scent still hung in the air. “I’m fine. I talked back to him is all. I’m not getting my car, that’s for sure.”

“Game didn’t go so well?”

“The game went fine, I just…I didn’t get my spot back.”

“Ah well. So…” The ram paused. “What’s going on with this summer?”

Sol bit his lip. “What’s going on is that I’m going to be stuck here working at the peach cannery and I’m going to smell like peaches and machine oil all summer.” His voice cracked a little on the last word, so he stopped, but then couldn’t keep quiet. “I can’t do that, Carce, I can’t, I can’t. I’ll kill myself.”

“Whoa, hey, calm down there, wolfy.”

Kill himself? That was way, way over the top. Grief and desperation returned in force, between the dream and the fight with his father. When he rubbed his eyes, his fingers came away damp. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t…wouldn’t even think of something like that.”

“Well, good.” Carcy talked slowly. “I’d be real upset if you did.”

Sol inhaled, trembling. He forced himself to say the words. “So, if I find another way to Millenport…can…I stay with you?”

Another long silence. Carcy’s breathing sounded slow and measured. “Here’s the deal. You could stay, but…” Pause. Slow exhale into the phone. “I have another roommate.”

The words “you could stay” had excited Sol so much that he almost didn’t hear the rest of what the ram said. “That’s okay! I can stay in your room. I won’t take up space and I’ll clean, and I’ll cook sometimes, and I won’t be any bother—”

“Solly.” Carcy cut him off firmly. “We only got the one bedroom.”

“Oh, well…” Now the implications of what the ram had said worked their way through his excited haze. A slow, creeping coldness prickled his fur. “Is he…your boyfriend?”

“Not…really. He’s just a friend.”

“With benefits?”

There was another pause, a short one. “Sometimes.”

The word came out defiant, like he was challenging Sol to call it off. And part of Sol was telling him to do just that, that same small squirming part that said the things he didn’t want to hear. But it was buried below the feel of peach syrup in his fur, the sickly sweet smell of fruit, the anger he still felt at his father. “I won’t get in the way,” Sol said. “I gotta get out of here, Carce. I’ll do anything.”

“I knew you were a good wolf, Solly. Bucky said you’d be a drama queen.”

“That’s his name? Bucky?”

“Uh-huh. He’s a good guy. You’ll like him when you get to know him.”

An uneasy thought surfaced. “Do, uh. Do I have to do stuff with him?”

Carcy laughed. “Nah. I mean, once you get to know him, if you wanna…”

“Okay. I just…I can’t wait to be with you.”

“Me too, wolfy.” The ram’s tender tone melted Sol’s doubts. After all, they were far apart, and if Carcy had a roommate, a bedmate, to save money…of course Sol would be imposing, but it would work out. And he’d be with his ram.

“So…do you think you could pick us up?”

“It’s a day trip, there and—wait, ‘us’?”

“Me and my friend Meg. She’s gonna stay with her cousin, but she needs a ride too.”

“How much stuff we talkin’ here? I only got a little car.”

“It won’t be much.” Sol looked around his room. “Two, three boxes and a couple bags.”

Carcy sighed. “I could get one of you no problem. I dunno about two.”

“Maybe we could just take her stuff and she could take the bus?”

“We’ll see. You work it out and let me know, and I’ll…yeah, I’ll see if I can free up a day to drive there and back.”

Warmth replaced the coldness in Sol’s chest. “Thanks,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love ya too. Hey, I gotta go. Bucky and I are running out to lunch. Send me an e-mail.”

Sol hung up the phone, which his father had not yet returned to confiscate, and just sat on the bed forcing himself to smile. It was going to be okay. He’d get a ride to the city, and he and Meg could hang out, and he and Carcy would grow closer and eventually Bucky would move out, of course. And he’d go to college or he wouldn’t, and Carcy would come with him if he did. It was all going to work out. It was going to work out fine.

He called Natty next, just to complain. “I didn’t make it back to the starting lineup in two weeks. Like anyone could do that.”

Natty, who had been eleven the last time he hadn’t started a game in high school, said, “What happened with you, anyway? Spend too much time in school?”

“It was just…” Sol sighed, tail curled around his hips. “Taric’s better, that’s all.”

“Dad should understand that.”

“He’s talking to Xavy’s dad and he thinks the whole vegetarian thing had something to do with it.”

“Sure. I mean, why wouldn’t you eat meat? How you getting protein?”

Sol felt the conversation eroding under his feet. He stood up, walked to the door frame where he could smell the faint trace of his brother. “It’s not—I feel fine. I feel great. Anyway, he’s not getting me a car and then I mouthed off at him and now I’m grounded.”

“Why are you not eating meat, again?”

“Look, it’s—” Sol paced back and forth. “It’s not important, it’s just a thing.”

“Just hang in there,” Natty said. “It gets so much better in college. And have a burger.” And then he had to go, to lunch or practice or something, Sol didn’t really catch it because he was too busy thinking about how Natty just didn’t
get
it.

He texted Meg to let her know he couldn’t come over for two weeks and to ask her what he could do for the project, and she asked if he wanted her to bring him anything at school. At first he said no, and then he brushed the sore spot on his lip again and texted her:
Absinthe?

Meg didn’t reply, and Sol didn’t feel like chatting much more anyhow. Doing homework now would have felt too responsible, so he just brought up some torrent sites to look for TV shows and movies. But his teeth scraped the bitten part of his lip again, and a burst of grief accompanied the small pain. He scratched his paw and pulled up a search site to look up, “absinthe hallucinations.”

He got a lot of links to people eager to debunk absinthe hallucinations, found an article about the poet Meg had talked about, and read about the banning and re-legalization of absinthe. So he tried searching on dreams, and on vivid dreams, and on hallucinations, and on hallucinations following dreams brought on by absinthe, and got nothing more interesting. Nobody had experienced the sort of waking hallucinations he had, or at least, nobody who then felt compelled to record it on the Internet in some form.

Then again, he thought, he hadn’t recorded it at all either. Where would he write it? People would say he was crazy. So quite possibly there were other people out there who’d had these sorts of things happen to them, who just wanted to live quiet, normal lives. Maybe that’s what he should do.

But he had to know if Cireil was real, if he should be mourning her death or just forgetting it. He had no idea how to spell her name, and he couldn’t find a list of Moulin Rouge dancers from the turn of the century anyway. He tried to look up “murders in Lutèce,” but he didn’t know the year, nor even the time of year other than that it wasn’t cold enough to be the dead of winter, nor hot enough to be the summer. And “murdered Moulin Rouge dancer” didn’t yield any useful results either.

The dull ache of frustration had set in when he came up with another idea. Henri, the artist, was the other recurring character in his dream who had a name but had not appeared in Jean’s book. An artist, a black rat who’d painted alongside some of the artists Meg was studying: that he could look up. He just had to figure out how to spell the name.

“Noir” was easy enough. After sounding it out in his head, he typed “Henri Trunoir” into the search engine.

No results came up. But the search engine helpfully asked,
Did you mean
Henri Trounoir
?

Sol clicked on the link, fingers trembling.

A short page of links came back, along with some image results. He clicked on the Wikipedia page.

Henri Trounoir (?-1901?) was a painter in the Montmartre area toward the end of the 19th century. Very little is known about him. Three paintings survive, one dated 1889, the other two dated 1901, along with a portfolio of sketches. His preferred subjects were nudes in front of colorful, intricate backgrounds, like the more famous examples of Auguste Renoir, although Trounoir’s style is more reminiscent of van Gogh. He may have been a student of Fernand Cormon’s with van Gogh in the late 1880s, according to some records from Cormon’s studio which show an apprentice painter named “Trounoir” working there for three years. However, at van Gogh’s Lutèce exhibition on the Blvd. de Clichy, no Trounoir is listed as participating.