St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (15 page)

The Indoor Weather Manufacturer was ablaze with tiny lights, making its own manic music of beeps and adjustments. I ran my finger over the hot pointy bulbs. I picked up the headset and pushed the button marked
MAINTENANCE
. It rang four times before somebody answered.

“Lady Yeti?” My pops sounded sleepy, and far away. I could hear some dumb sitcom on our TV behind him. “That you?”

Snowflakes were erasing the headset, my left hand, the coiled black wires. I grinned into the receiver. The Blizzard whirled around me, but it didn’t matter now. All this time my pops had been asleep, at home.

“There some kind of malfunction? You need me to come out to the Palace?”

“Huh!” I did my best to imitate a Yeti bark. “No! Thanks!”

Then I hung up the phone.

You know, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have tried to Modulate the Snows on my own. It was an abominable technology, that control panel, full of riddles and switches. But I didn’t know then that the Blizzard was on a timer. If I’d known that we were only minutes away from the Meltdown, I would have waited it out.

Instead, I pushed the biggest, most luminous button. And I knew from the first iron shriek, the clang of unseen metal, that I’d made a mistake. Somewhere, the doors to the metal warrens flew open. The apes shook off their malaise. Within moments I saw orange shapes, blue feet flying in the Palace rafters high above me. Coppery twinkles went shooting through curtains of ice. The orangutans were brachiating around an invisible network of pipes. Every few moments, I’d catch a glimpse of their feet dangling and grasping above me. The indoor world had gone very wrong tonight. An ape fell shrieking into the snow.

Maybe the pipes had grown too cold for the apes to hold on to. Maybe Phil Collins’s percussion was shaking them loose. Whatever the trouble, they were falling all around me, the orangutans, in twos and threes. They made inadvertent snow angels where they fell. Their bodies flailed into one another; and when they tumbled up, you could see their wide simian wingspan, red hair in the white trenches.
Pffft!
spat one of the fallen orangutans. It was Cornelius. He looked the way I felt: the blue sag of his face in its wild red frame. Frost hung from his arms. He’d been too cold, for too long, too far from his jungle home. I was sorry I’d released him.

Now great sheets of sleet pelted the rink in waves, hard pellets clattering to the ice. Bodies were whistling all around me, behind the snow, and I could feel the dense atomic wake of them as they passed. They made their own music, a darker weather.

One woman was skating stark naked, her red hair flaming out behind her. Or possibly I was watching an escaped orangutan; inside the ice clouds, it was impossible to judge.

“Lady Yeti?”

I skated after her.

As I whipped around the rink, I got periodic jolts of color. A few of the orangutans were stirring in the safety snow. They stared at me from the melting heaps, looking battered, bright-eyed, alive. Snow spattered the males’ gray cheek pads. They slid forward in crazed ocher maneuvers, eager to return to their cages. A lucky few made it safely to the other side. Tang went skidding past me on all fours, clawing at the ice with her long spindle fingers.

Where was Lady Yeti? The Blizzard was getting louder and wilder. The music was getting louder, too, until I thought my sternum would burst with it. I forgot about Badger, his father, Lady Yeti, my failure at the control panel, every body but my own. Everything conspired to convince me that the storm was on the verge of swirling us somewhere better: the music rising and the music swelling, the deceptive up-tick of rhythm, the smooth give of the ice, a roaring white sound that made me think that the storm was breaking, that some crescendo was coming, a final mechanical gale that would white-out the entire Palace….

It never came. The vents sucked back the snow. The wind switched off. I couldn’t believe it: the Blizzard was over.

A neon sign blinked on the far wall:
MELTDOWN
!

When the fluorescent lights came back on, I saw Lady Yeti first. She was newly costumed, standing in the center of the ice. Glassy bits of factory snow winked down around her. One of the men was embracing Lady Yeti, the soft citadel of Lady Yeti, taking shelter behind her bulky silhouette. Her back was turned to me, and I could only see the man’s short, thick arms straining to close around her. His fists were lost in her fur. The knuckles looked familiar. Lady Yeti looked over her huge shoulder and saw my face.

“Don’t worry, baby, huh?” she said. “We’re just finishing up here.”

I skated around her to get a better look. Next to Lady Yeti, Badger’s father looked like a stout, wizened child. He was standing on his tiptoes, his face lost in the white curls of Lady Yeti’s chest. He fumbled for a zipper that he couldn’t find.

Lady Yeti was ticklish. She chuckled off gray clumps of snow. Her big shoulders shook in ripples, seamless, of luster and muscle. It amazed me that Lady Yeti had been able to shed her fur and rearmor so quickly. She moved as if her costume were sewn onto her skin with invisible stitches. Badger’s father tugged harder. His own workshirt was missing buttons, and I pictured Badger’s father skating with Lady Yeti, both of them flying naked and weightless over the ice. Behind me, I heard a new roaring begin.

“I wondercould you get out of my way, Reg?”

I turned and saw Badger sitting high astride the pink Zamboni. He wasn’t smiling, so I couldn’t tell which tooth was missing. Badger had black, snow-blind eyes and no hat. His face looked stung and frozen. Snow was melting down his hair, his cheeks. He was bearing down on his father.

The auger bit down on the ice with a fresh menace. A very large, very sharp blade, similar to those used in industrial paper cutters, shaved up the ruined surface of the rink. My fevered shouting
No!
and
Please!
and
Stop!
got swallowed in the Zamboni’s engine. Badger’s father never even saw him coming—he was still burying his face in Lady Yeti’s costume. At the last minute, Badger swerved. Blue light bounced off the metal blade. Then Badger drove the Zamboni in careful circles around the entire surface of the rink. Dirty ice and russet orangutan hair flew backwards into the Zamboni’s vacuum. Water sewed up the white cuts behind him. Badger filled in the gashes from so many skate blades, line by line, until the rink became a perfect mirror once again, frozen and blank.

The City of Shells

Barnaby is busy hosing down Paundra, that hoary old carapace, when he first hears the screaming. He tells himself that it’s just the wind. Barnaby has spent the whole day scrubbing seagull excrement with a Sisyphean fury, and now it looks like the storm is going to hit after all.

“Goddamn it,” he mutters to the smirking gulls. “Never fails. As soon as I suds up these bitches, it pours.”

The City of Shells closed to the visiting public over an hour ago. Now the boardwalk is deserted. Silent, except for the medleyed roar of the waves and the distant rumble of thunder. Gray, rain-bellied clouds are rolling in. Farther out, the sea is sluicing into night. There’s a hushed, tingly feeling in the air, as if the whole world is holding its breath. Only the silvery gulls dot the horizon. They peck at used condoms and empty Dorito bags with a salt-preened serenity.

Barnaby stares at the massive thunderheads, full of misgivings. Ever since closing time, he’s been on edge. He generally tries to punch out right at seven. You’ve probably heard the rumors, too: there are strange noises in the City after dusk. Legend has it—if you can use
legend
to describe the booze-fueled tales that get passed laterally within a janitorial staff of two—that the Giant Conchs are haunted. On stormy nights, they echo with the radular skitterclatter of their extinct inhabitants. The teenage kid who works this job on weekends, Raffy, gets all lyrical-hysterical on the subject. “This place turns into a motherfuckin’ ghost town after hours! The shells start
singing.
”

Raffy says that if you hear the ghost music, it earworms into your brain and infects you like an auditory virus. It plays at subliminal levels, alien and resonant as insect song. The boss dismisses Raffy’s reports as inner-ear dementia. “Had an uncle who suffered from musical hallucinations,” the boss once told Barnaby sadly. “Poor bastard. Spent the last decade of his life deaf to everything except the opening bars of ‘Who Can Be a Toucan? You Can!’” He shook his head. “I don’t envy that Raffy. Must be a tough row to hoe.”

The screaming is coming from inside Cornuta.
Not real,
Barnaby thinks. He leans on his broom and wonders, for a delicious, sky-tilting second of vertigo, if he might be going crazy. But this is no phantom music. This sound is scary in a different way. Too real, too human.

Cornuta is off-limits to guests, roped off on the other side of the park. She got banged up during Tropical Storm Vita and is currently under repair. The boss rented a crane and lowered her so that she’s lying sideways on the beach. Now she’s a bitch to clean, cracked at the tip of her nacreous dome and always filling up with trash and irascible crabs. For a Giant Conch, Cornuta is one of the island’s tiniest, forty-five feet from end to end, about the size of a small trailer. The overlapping whorls that lead into the shell never widen beyond the circumference of a sewer pipe. It’s not exactly the kind of rabbit hole you can tumble down by accident.

“Who goes there?” The ancient elocution bubbles up out of nowhere, making Barnaby blush. “I mean, is somebody in there?”

Abruptly, the screaming stops. Barnaby takes a shaky breath and peers inside the Giant Conch. All he can make out are two glittery eyes, blinking out of the preternatural darkness at the bottom of the shell.
It’s back,
he thinks, feeling foolish even as he grips the toilet brush like a weapon,
the thing that used to live in the shell is back.

“Excuse me!” a child’s voice honks miserably. “I’m stuck. Do you have any Band-Aids, or food?”

Big Red had been looking forward to this field trip all month. The City of Shells is touted as “A Merman’s Stonehenge!” They have to take the ferry to get there. It isn’t, technically, a city: it’s a megalithic formation of Precambrian Giant Conchs. The brochures make it look like some Neptunian version of Easter Island. The cover illustration shows a dozen of the Giant Conchs, arrayed in a weird half-moon formation along the beach. Each of the shells is a swirly, pearly licorne, some the height of a house. Gulls wheel in wicked circles around their marble parasols. Salt-bleached skyscrapers, the caption says, cast onto the shore by Cretaceous tsunamis, and set upright by our very own island progenitors! And there they are, in a photo inset: the ancestors. A small, furry people, their cheeks swollen like those of prudent rodents, lighting holy fires in the shadow of the giant shells.

Grades five through seven take a field trip there every August. The City of Shells is owned and operated by Laramie Uribe’s father, and he gives the kids paper conch hats and a special discount. Laramie sat next to Big Red on the bus ride over. She and Big Red are best friends by default. Although she is only two grades above Big Red, puberty has been inordinately kind to Laramie. Teachers refer to Laramie as “sophisticated” and “mature for her age,” but Big Red knows that Laramie is neither of these things. Laramie still snorts milk through her wide nostrils. She reads at a fourth-grade level. She defends herself against bathroom calumny by flicking snot berries at her detractors. What the teachers actually mean is that Laramie has huge boobs; that she smells like coconut oil and unfiltered Camels; and that she gives it up to high-school boys named Federico.

“Wait’ll we get there.” Laramie grinned slyly at Big Red. “I’ll give you a tour of all the shells where we did it.”

Big Red bit her lip and stared out the window. She had only a squeamy, abdominal sense of what “it” could be.

When they got there, Big Red pushed past Laramie and thundered off the bus. She raced down the beach, raced right into the sunlit center of the City, and then stopped short. She shielded her eyes and blinked up at the Giant Conchs, oblivious to the other children swarming around her. She thought:
What the heck is this?
These conchs were giant disappointments. The City had fallen into seedy disrepair. The pinky-white turrets were covered with seagull excrement; the interiors shimmered with grout. Mayo packets and pickle sticks slimed the axial ribs. Mr. Uribe had rigged the conchs with miniature speakers so that the tourists could hear the roar of the primordial seas—but the electricity was on the fritz. Tintinnabula was the only one working. She sounded like a giant refrigerator. If these shells had ever been the Fourteenth Wonder of the World, as touted on the tattered banners, they had definitely slipped in the rankings. Sweaty women took glamour shots in front of Sweet Venus. A froggy man rubbed his cigarette out on her speckled ventral side.

The kids yawned through a lecture on conchology. They ate a picnic lunch of corn dogs and strawberries. A hairless woman snapped their class photo in the City center—“Say chelicerae,” she rasped—below the barnacled awning of Possicle. They gathered their things to go.

“Wait a sec!” Big Red interjected, tugging at sleeves. “When do we get to go inside the shells?”

“Well, of course we’re not going inside them, Lillith.” Sister John patted her head affectionately, as if Big Red was a sainted retard. “Who promised you that we were going inside the shells?”

Big Red bit her lip. She couldn’t remember who had made her that promise, although she felt certain that someone had. Big Red felt a dull, cuckolded rage, but she wasn’t surprised. For her first nine years on the planet, Big Red had lived a life of compromise. She wanted to be beautiful, but she’d had to settle for being nice. She wanted to see the Aquanauts for her birthday, but she’d had to settle for the gimp lobsters at the Crab Shack. She wanted a father, but she’d had to settle for Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis smells like Just for Men peroxide dye and eucalyptus foot unguents. He has a face like a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing puckers inward, drooping with the memory of some dropped fly ball. Big Red’s mother has many epithets for Mr. Pappadakis: “our meal ticket,” “my sacrifice,” “vitamin P.” He is an obdurate man, a man of irritating, inveterate habits. He refuses to put down toilet seats, or quit sucking on pistachio shells, or die.

Laramie tells Big Red that she is lucky. Mr. Pappadakis doesn’t know when she’s home in the first place, so she never has to sneak around. Laramie sneaks out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. Laramie bragged to Big Red that she had personally defiled eight out of thirteen Giant Conchs.

“See that big ’un over there?” she whispered.

They’re all big, Laramie.

“That’s where I sucked off the chlorine vendor.” Her voice got low and slurry. “See that curly black hair stuck to your shoe? That’s his son Lyle’s—”

Laramie shut up abruptly. A second later, her father came striding down the boardwalk. At five feet three inches, with wrinkly skin and a bright, bald face, Mr. Uribe looked like an animate peanut. Too short, too fat, Big Red thought. He couldn’t even be the understudy for a TV dad. But at least he didn’t look like cadaverous Pappadakis.

“All right, kids,” he said, clapping his hands. “Tour’s over. Don’t forget to buy your plush conchs and conch accessories in the gift store. The ferry is waiting for you.” Most of the kids went stampeding towards the dock. Big Red hung back. She stared over the railing, sucking salt from her braid. Her orange hair was knotted with sand. Below her, the sun was drowsing on the surface of the water.

“Look!” Big Red breathed. She pointed at the marina. Manatees were pushing their bovine wings through the water, emerging in ones and twos from under the pier. They swirled through motor oil in slow, graceful circles. “How beautiful…”

“They look like giant turds!” Rogelio squealed. “Giant turds, giant turds!” The other children sniggered.

Infidels! Big Red thought. She had just learned this word in social studies, and liked to walk around thinking it with religious furor. Sometimes, she fantasized about a great pyre, where she burned all of her heathen classmates. Manatees are God’s creatures, not turds! she would roar. And my…name…is LILLITH!

“Get it, Big Red?” Rogelio elbowed her.

“Ha-ha,” Big Red laughed. “Turds.”

She followed the others into the store. Much more excitement was generated by the Giant Conch sea-salt shakers than by the shells themselves. Big Red didn’t even have to wait until the coast was clear; nobody was looking. She slunk back down the dock to where the toppled shell was hunched on its side. She took a darting look around, then slipped under the yellow
CAUTION
ropes. Big Red crouched on her hands and knees and inched forward along the crimson outer wing that spun into the shell. Cornuta’s inner chamber seemed to pulse with light, purpling inward to some effulgent, unreachable end point. Down below, the scooped-out hollow looked irresistibly snug.

Sucking in her stomach, knowing better, Big Red pushed her way inside. She slid down the canal and
oomph
ed onto the floor. It was a much bigger drop-off than she had expected. Inside, the shell had a clean, blue smell, like the memory of salt. It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the twinkly dark. The shell body bowled out to the size of a walk-in closet. Big Red wished that it was even smaller, the width of a cabinet, a cupboard. She pressed both hands to the parabolic sides of the shell. She closed her eyes and smiled—it felt like being parenthesized. When Big Red looked down at her palms, she saw that they were covered with beach grit: sand and cigarette butts, wet gull feathers. Someone had covered the white, harp-shaped ledges with graffiti. Nasty words, bad words. It was a language that Big Red recognized without understanding. She mouthed the words to herself:——————. They made her feel too many things all at once, hot-faced and dizzy and scared and ashamed. She didn’t draw a total blank; instead, the words smudged Big Red’s mind with fleshy blurs. Something opaque and darkly familiar, like two bodies moving behind steamed-up shower glass. On the far wall, she noticed more scrawled graffiti:
LARAMIE
♥
RAFFY 4EVA
!

Big Red stared up at the opalescent canopy above her. The spines radiated outwards, pink to puce to a speckled orange. She could see tiny perforations in the walls. Good. Big Red pressed her cheek to the cool floor of the shell with a martyred glee. I hope the Giant Conch has one million gajillion cracks and fills up with rainwater and I drown. Then they’ll be sorry. It gave her a smug satisfaction to picture beating Mr. Pappadakis, the come-from-behind victor in a race to the grave.

Ever since they moved into Mr. Pappadakis’s cavernous house, Big Red has sought out tiny spaces. She climbs into the clothes hamper and pulls the lid on behind her. She sits for hours under the sink, eyes closed, listening to the gurgling of the pipes. Some nights she crawls into the neighbor’s dog house and holds Mr. Beagle’s tight, squirmy body until she can feel all of its bones. And sometimes, if she sits long enough, it happens. Beneath the hum of her own blood, beneath the hum of the world itself, she thinks she can hear the faint strains of another song. It’s a red spark of sound, just enough to cast acoustic shadows of the older song that she has forgotten. It sounds like this:

When Big Red opens her eyes, long-jawed shadows have overtaken the shell. Outside, the tide is coming in. The foamy rush of unseen water laps at her ears. Big Red shimmies to the back of the conch and holds her eye up to the fist-sized opening like a telescope. The visible sky is purple and clobbered with stars. Lightning licks the palm fronds. The whole conch hums with the promise of rain.

At first, Big Red is just pretending to be trapped. It isn’t until she tries to get out of the Giant Conch that she realizes she really is stuck. She can belly-crawl back down the spine of the shell, no problemo. But when she tries to pull herself onto the calcite ledge that angles up and out of the siphon, she keeps sliding back down. The opening of the Giant Conch seems to have narrowed, somehow, and Big Red can’t find purchase on the slippery shell walls. She tries to backtrack, but she can’t wedge her pudgy body through the crack in the tip of the shell. Oh God, she thinks, how embarrassing. Please just leave me here to die.

But as the minutes tick by, she starts to feel increasingly uneasy. The fear of being found, of the sisters’ wimpled censure and Rogelio’s fat jokes, melts into a new fear: What if nobody is looking for her at all?