Trashlands, page 5
Thirsty man to water, Coral had thought.
But you did not correct Rattlesnake Master.
When her group first came to Trashlands, they came lured by the promise of a job—Mr. Fall’s job. An ad had been published in a newspaper that made its way to the warm weather camp where they had been staying, near an old casino.
Seeking a teacher for the many children of Trashlands.
It was a pricey thing, to place an ad—and a dangerous one. The dancer who had scrimped and saved for it, looking to help her children and more, the dancer who could read, was gone by the time Mr. Fall and the others arrived. But children were there, peeking out from behind the trailer windows and the busted fire engine. Their mothers could pay a bit. And the river was there.
Coral remembered the plastic bobbing in the river her very first glimpse of it, like white ducks lining up for her. There was a sheltered place to park the bus. Shanghai would have friends. The camp back at the casino had only a few children.
Coral did not know why yet. No one had told her.
Their first night at Trashlands, as they gathered kindling for a cookfire, Rattlesnake Master came out to greet them, and to explain the rules of his junkyard, the price they would pay for living there. Water cost and was limited. There was a cost to till the dusty land, and if they wanted to grow crops they would have to turn the harvest over to him so he could select what he wanted. There was a curfew for women.
“And when will you start working?” Rattlesnake Master had asked, turning to Coral. He had conducted the entire conversation about rules and rent with the men, speaking to Mr. Fall and Trillium only, as if Coral didn’t exist.
But now he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world. She filled his eyes and face with a kind of hunger, deep want mingled with contempt and an expectation that seemed inevitable. Of course he would have her.
She had difficulty reading his expression at first, and then it came to her. Smug. His lips turned up in a thin, nagging smirk, as if he was resisting laughing at her.
Coral tried not to glance at her backpack, full of the plastic she had already gathered that evening. Would this man try to take that from her too? “I’m already working.”
“Women do one job here,” he said. “You’ll see.”
It was not that Rattlesnake Master reminded her of Robert so much as he reminded Mr. Fall of him, as did many men. Those who stood too close to Coral in the river, who looked at her a little too long. What was different about this man, with his smirk and his way of licking his lips, was that Trillium too felt it. He and Mr. Fall promised they could keep Coral away from Trashlands, keep her safe from that man.
Inside the club, a spotlight lit a stage and pole. So Coral had been told. She had never actually been in the front way, below the neon sign. Only through the back. An office was back there, a dressing room, a kitchen where children sold rats at the door. Coral had been to the office exactly once. After that meeting by the fire, she had gone with Trillium to the club to collect some plastic. Trashlands had a scale, and they went to settle Foxglove’s first few debts.
Until Coral and Trillium were ushered into the office and left to wait, they thought they were meeting a lower associate, not Rattlesnake Master himself. Coral would never have come. Trillium would not have let her.
A velvet curtain, dyed a dull red, separated the backstage from the rest of the club. While Coral had waited, the men doing all the talking, she watched the dancers going in and out. When the curtain parted, it was like an alien creature walked in from the shadows, all skin and sparkles. Each time the curtain gaped, she caught a glimpse of the main club floor, heard a shout or two. The music grew louder for an instant. Then the curtain closed up. The music continued, but dull and distant, like a headache.
Rattlesnake Master had looked down at her, sitting on a couch in the corner. Real red? he had said. I’ve been wondering. But he wasn’t speaking to her, only about her.
Trillium hadn’t responded. He indicated the plastic, spread out on the desk. He accepted a price, which was lower than they had hoped. Coral knew it was to redirect the man called Rattlesnake Master.
Named for a root. From the parsley family.
* * *
The music pounded as she led Miami around the back of Trashlands, where the door was splintered wood. Everything was shabbier back here. No sign, only a busted porch where dancers would sit or smoke. A staircase led up the side of the building to the top floor, an exterior hallway of doors. These were the rooms rented to boarders, mostly men who were too drunk to find their way home—but not too drunk to find their wallet, or have it found for them—or men who didn’t want the night to end, to be left alone in it.
Miami stared up at the big, crooked building. “Are you sure there’s no hotel?”
Hobbled together with boards and metal siding, it looked like a giant shed from the back, Coral knew. It tilted slightly to the left, but the ground underneath was solid. Trashlands, like any building that had survived, had been built on a hill.
Higher ground, for when the floods came.
“It’ll be fine,” Coral said. “There’s a lock on the door, and nobody bothers a man alone.” And when he looked at her in a way that seemed to indicate it was different where he came from, she said: “Here a man is usually safe.”
A man blocked the back door. A big man. Tahiti stepped closer—he was nearsighted—then broke into a grin when he saw who it was. “Coral! Come to see your girl, Foxy?”
“Not tonight.” Coral had never visited Foxglove any night inside the club, but Tahiti always asked. “I’ve got business for you. A man who wants a room.”
“Does he have money?”
“Paper money.”
“Excellent. Boss will like that.” Tahiti stepped to the side, indicating the stairs.
“Are those safe?” Miami asked.
“Perfectly. I helped fix them up myself. Material called Ikea. Very structurally sound. Unless—” he tilted his head, exposing the scar on his neck “—would the gentleman like to visit the club first, before you get settled? Foxglove is dancing tonight. She’s got a space for your name.”
“He’s not here for the club, Tahiti,” Coral said. “He’s here to write a story. He works for a newspaper in the city.”
“A newspaper? That’s something! You’ve seen our ads? I wrote some of them myself. Are you here to write a review? That would sell your papers.”
“No, I—” Miami began, but Coral touched his arm. She was surprised to feel warmth.
“I’m sure Miami’s tired,” she said. “Could he just see a room?”
“Of course,” Tahiti said. “We can talk later.”
“I’ll leave you here, then,” Coral said to Miami. When she turned to face him, she realized they were almost the same height. To be looking eye to eye with a man was new. She had to crane her neck to look into Trillium’s eyes. She could not, she realized, remember the last time he had looked her in the eye.
“Can I hire you?” Miami said. “To be my guide through the junkyard?”
The request threw her off for a moment. “I have work.”
“Please.”
“I have a lot to do.”
“You know this place better than anyone. Please,” Miami said again.
It was not a word she was used to hearing. It was not a word it was easy to say no to.
“All right,” Coral said. “I’ll do what I can to help. But you can’t distract me. I still have my work.”
“Of course. I’ll meet you whenever you have time tomorrow. Maybe in the morning? I’ll be in room...” He looked to Tahiti for guidance.
“Two,” Tahiti said, making a decision.
“Perfect. My favorite number.”
* * *
By the time she began the long walk home, it was twilight. At night, the familiar structures of the junkyard took on other mysteries. The only lit path was the path to Trashlands. All the other, hidden ways depended on mercy and kerosene, juiced solar lamps or precious batteries. Most people didn’t have light to spare. They certainly didn’t have gas for a generator, which was a luxury only for rich men in cities.
And for Rattlesnake Master.
Coral knew the way. Long ago, she had memorized the paths. But she was not supposed to be out after dark. There was Rattlesnake Master’s curfew. If you broke one of the laws of his junkyard, you had to pay. He demanded plastic. Or you can work it off, he had told them—told her—that first day, in his joking manner, which was not a joke, with his smile, which was not friendly.
It had been a long time since Coral had strayed from the bus after sunset. She had forgotten how the small animals moved, how the rats and raccoons, which were kings of everything, could scurry, shifting the metal of the junkyard. She was ducking around a truck when she heard the creaking. For a moment, she was jarred out of place, thinking again of the whale.
There had been screeching from the birds on the beach that day. A single boat, tied to a dock, hung on by shreds. The boat squealed as it rocked. Something clanged against a pole—a mast, she thought it was called. The dock tilted into the water like a pile of old piano keys. The boat, she remembered, had a hole in its side, like so much of the plastic she pulled from the water.
In the junkyard, the pile next to her groaned. It was tilting, jarred loose with a sound like screaming. That day with the whale, Shanghai had kicked inside her for the first time. Mr. Fall had joked that it must have been the smell of the beach that had set him off.
A yard cat dashed out of sight, yowling. A hubcap rolled out from the dirt, spinning like a coin, and the column it had been underneath buckled. She turned too late as the junk fell: a broken pallet, metal barrels, strange arms of cranes collapsing, kicking up a spray. How had they ever thought that would hold? Coral was clipped by the falling metal. She landed in the dirt, surrounded by broken bits. Now they were more broken.
“What the fuck was that?” said a man’s voice.
Nobody came to see what the fuck it was.
She should have scrambled up immediately. Somebody might be coming. The wrong person might have heard and sent out muscle from Trashlands. The men were not all kind like Tahiti. She was out late, breaking the rules. But she couldn’t get up, couldn’t move fast at all.
There was pain. Pain in her jaw, pain in her leg. Miami was closer than home. Miami was in Room 2 of Trashlands. She could hear the music start up at her back, the whirl and scratch that meant the one song was beginning again.
But she couldn’t go there, that was reckless. To seek help from a man she’d just met?
She pressed her hand against her jaw, which pulsed. Her face had smacked the earth. It would feel better in a bit, with a compress of comfy, maybe. Another moment, and still no men rounded the corner with torches and clubs, to survey the fallen column, to drag her to Rattlesnake Master. Coral was not sure what the penalty was for breaking curfew. The punishments kept changing. They were different for women. Lately, women were pushed onstage, stripped, and shown to the crowd.
Coral couldn’t do that. She couldn’t. Two men had seen her body, only two, and the first had hurt her. It had been wrong. She had been wrong. She pulled her shirt tighter to her chest. She tried to listen for the sound of boots on dirt.
Trillium would have questions. Where had she been? Why was she out so late? She wouldn’t know how to answer them. Another moment, until she felt she was safe, then she bent under the truck and limped back.
6
Trillium
Trillium grandiflorum
This was an art that worked. That you could be paid for, and live on, and keep doing. To mix the colors, so visceral, so changeable. To improve the consistency of the ink, its staying power, its vibrancy. To make its poison not poison.
In this life, you were constantly innovating. Even the simplest tasks required imagination. Where would they live? How would they cook? How would they wash? How would they make love in the bus with Mr. Fall, Coral’s adoptive father, everywhere? They would figure it out.
They figured it out.
Tattooing was an art he fell into. He had always wanted to draw, was always scratching figures. Impractical, waste of time, his daddy said when Trillium had found a piece of relatively clean paper and used it to draw. It won’t keep us alive, his daddy said. Paper is for fuel. Paper is for messages.
Nothing is for art, his daddy said. Nothing.
When his paper was taken away, Trillium drew pictures in his head. He thought of a bird on top of a crooked pole. Once the pole had carried wires, his daddy said, which spread power and light and pictures from house to house. Pictures, he had said pictures—but then he quickly tried to cover it up by saying words. The lines had spread words.
What happened to the lines? Trillium had asked.
The same thing that had happened to air travel and the internet: not paying enough attention, then they were taken away. Pay fucking attention, his daddy said. He slapped the side of Trillium’s head by his ear.
That ear rang for a long time. One day it stopped or he just didn’t notice it anymore. Another day his daddy would hit him again, and the ringing would begin anew. Could he hear it now? Could he hear it still? Sometimes he felt the ringing was in him, in his bones, a vibration as resonant as the tuning fork Coral had scavenged once. She had a gift for finding objects that reminded him of old times. Or maybe he was just always thinking of back then.
Trillium and Coral were makers. This was mostly what bonded them. They belonged in this society of scrap, they could lose themselves in it. They spent hours finding materials, selling them, then refining that which they did not sell into something else.
Trillium dipped a needle. This was art that was alive. You could feel it under your fingers. The needle vibrated, hollow, bloodied with ink. Once it had belonged to a bird, the thin feather that became an instrument. Once Trillium had drawn in the dirt with a stick, on his own hand with the fingers of his other hand, tracing, trying to remember what he wanted to create.
Now he drew on the arm of a man.
The man had asked for a swan with his woman’s name tattooed beneath. He had come from Trashlands, Trillium could tell by his sour smell. Half of Trillium’s customers were dragged from the club by Foxglove, flashing her mile-long legs. But half were rueful, like this man. He had been drunk but he was sobering up quickly. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days, crimson as the ink Trillium made from red cabbage. The man’s clothes were rumpled. He had spent the night—maybe more than one night—in a chair, maybe hopped up on something one of the girls had sold him.
The man’s hands shook. He was sweating heavier than he should have been on an early evening in the rainbow bus. It was warm but cooler nights were coming. The bus had been parked in the shade.
“Almost done,” Trillium said. Ink came from the needle in careful dabs. Redness came from the man.
Coral joked that Trillium could coax blood from anyone, give him time. Maybe that was his daddy’s influence. His daddy could raise a knot, bloom a bruise from nothing, a slight that only he could hear or see, some kind of indecipherable shift in the atmosphere. The temperature one degree warmer, the air one droplet wetter could set him off. Crickets or the absence of crickets. The absence of food. The absence of liquor—there was never enough liquor in the world for his old man.
“Georgia Aster,” Trillium repeated the name he was tattooing on the stranger’s skin. He wiped any blood away with a rag, and pressed the needle down at an angle, pricking the image out, dot by dot. It was the slowest kind of drawing, and it was an image that would live as long as the man did.
Who knew how long that would be.
“What a pretty name.”
“She’s my sweetie,” the man said, huffing through his teeth. Sweat rolled down his face. “She swore she’d never leave me, but...”
“Good to show her this.”
He didn’t like it when they talked.
“I made a mistake,” the man said.
Fuck. Here we go.
“It was only the one time. I mean, it was only one night. Maybe a couple of times. Maybe five or six.”
“Sure, five or six.”
“Eight or nine.”
Fuck this guy. Trillium bent closer to the swan named Georgia Aster. He doubted the man had seen the flower or a swan—Trillium only knew what the bird looked like because of Mr. Fall’s book—but the man had insisted: a swan with a long, graceful neck. That’s what she has, he had said. My love.
But now that the tattoo was almost done, the man was hedging. “One of them has it,” he said. “A long neck.”
Trillium paused with the needle posed above the man’s skin. “One of them?”
“One of the girls. Long neck. I remember that.”
“It’s fine. Lots of people have long necks. She’ll know in her heart this is for her.” Trillium finished the beak of the swan, tapered and delicate as its noodle neck, the neck that could have belonged to any girl. He preferred tattooing people like Foxglove, who just lay there, head down, eyes closed. Trillium didn’t have to hear Foxglove’s sad story.
He already knew it.
He heard the screech of the bus doors. The glass panels had been replaced with cardboard, but the vinyl material between them still folded and unfolded, mercifully. If you were inside the bus, you used the lever at the driver’s seat to unfold the doors. From the outside, you opened by pushing hard. This person wasn’t pushing hard enough. They were probably drunk.
Trillium looked away from the man. “Push harder,” he called.
The doors wheezed, but did not open all the way.
Trillium put down the needle. The man on the table shifted. “Don’t get up.” He raised his voice to the drunk, “Push—”
But you did not correct Rattlesnake Master.
When her group first came to Trashlands, they came lured by the promise of a job—Mr. Fall’s job. An ad had been published in a newspaper that made its way to the warm weather camp where they had been staying, near an old casino.
Seeking a teacher for the many children of Trashlands.
It was a pricey thing, to place an ad—and a dangerous one. The dancer who had scrimped and saved for it, looking to help her children and more, the dancer who could read, was gone by the time Mr. Fall and the others arrived. But children were there, peeking out from behind the trailer windows and the busted fire engine. Their mothers could pay a bit. And the river was there.
Coral remembered the plastic bobbing in the river her very first glimpse of it, like white ducks lining up for her. There was a sheltered place to park the bus. Shanghai would have friends. The camp back at the casino had only a few children.
Coral did not know why yet. No one had told her.
Their first night at Trashlands, as they gathered kindling for a cookfire, Rattlesnake Master came out to greet them, and to explain the rules of his junkyard, the price they would pay for living there. Water cost and was limited. There was a cost to till the dusty land, and if they wanted to grow crops they would have to turn the harvest over to him so he could select what he wanted. There was a curfew for women.
“And when will you start working?” Rattlesnake Master had asked, turning to Coral. He had conducted the entire conversation about rules and rent with the men, speaking to Mr. Fall and Trillium only, as if Coral didn’t exist.
But now he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world. She filled his eyes and face with a kind of hunger, deep want mingled with contempt and an expectation that seemed inevitable. Of course he would have her.
She had difficulty reading his expression at first, and then it came to her. Smug. His lips turned up in a thin, nagging smirk, as if he was resisting laughing at her.
Coral tried not to glance at her backpack, full of the plastic she had already gathered that evening. Would this man try to take that from her too? “I’m already working.”
“Women do one job here,” he said. “You’ll see.”
It was not that Rattlesnake Master reminded her of Robert so much as he reminded Mr. Fall of him, as did many men. Those who stood too close to Coral in the river, who looked at her a little too long. What was different about this man, with his smirk and his way of licking his lips, was that Trillium too felt it. He and Mr. Fall promised they could keep Coral away from Trashlands, keep her safe from that man.
Inside the club, a spotlight lit a stage and pole. So Coral had been told. She had never actually been in the front way, below the neon sign. Only through the back. An office was back there, a dressing room, a kitchen where children sold rats at the door. Coral had been to the office exactly once. After that meeting by the fire, she had gone with Trillium to the club to collect some plastic. Trashlands had a scale, and they went to settle Foxglove’s first few debts.
Until Coral and Trillium were ushered into the office and left to wait, they thought they were meeting a lower associate, not Rattlesnake Master himself. Coral would never have come. Trillium would not have let her.
A velvet curtain, dyed a dull red, separated the backstage from the rest of the club. While Coral had waited, the men doing all the talking, she watched the dancers going in and out. When the curtain parted, it was like an alien creature walked in from the shadows, all skin and sparkles. Each time the curtain gaped, she caught a glimpse of the main club floor, heard a shout or two. The music grew louder for an instant. Then the curtain closed up. The music continued, but dull and distant, like a headache.
Rattlesnake Master had looked down at her, sitting on a couch in the corner. Real red? he had said. I’ve been wondering. But he wasn’t speaking to her, only about her.
Trillium hadn’t responded. He indicated the plastic, spread out on the desk. He accepted a price, which was lower than they had hoped. Coral knew it was to redirect the man called Rattlesnake Master.
Named for a root. From the parsley family.
* * *
The music pounded as she led Miami around the back of Trashlands, where the door was splintered wood. Everything was shabbier back here. No sign, only a busted porch where dancers would sit or smoke. A staircase led up the side of the building to the top floor, an exterior hallway of doors. These were the rooms rented to boarders, mostly men who were too drunk to find their way home—but not too drunk to find their wallet, or have it found for them—or men who didn’t want the night to end, to be left alone in it.
Miami stared up at the big, crooked building. “Are you sure there’s no hotel?”
Hobbled together with boards and metal siding, it looked like a giant shed from the back, Coral knew. It tilted slightly to the left, but the ground underneath was solid. Trashlands, like any building that had survived, had been built on a hill.
Higher ground, for when the floods came.
“It’ll be fine,” Coral said. “There’s a lock on the door, and nobody bothers a man alone.” And when he looked at her in a way that seemed to indicate it was different where he came from, she said: “Here a man is usually safe.”
A man blocked the back door. A big man. Tahiti stepped closer—he was nearsighted—then broke into a grin when he saw who it was. “Coral! Come to see your girl, Foxy?”
“Not tonight.” Coral had never visited Foxglove any night inside the club, but Tahiti always asked. “I’ve got business for you. A man who wants a room.”
“Does he have money?”
“Paper money.”
“Excellent. Boss will like that.” Tahiti stepped to the side, indicating the stairs.
“Are those safe?” Miami asked.
“Perfectly. I helped fix them up myself. Material called Ikea. Very structurally sound. Unless—” he tilted his head, exposing the scar on his neck “—would the gentleman like to visit the club first, before you get settled? Foxglove is dancing tonight. She’s got a space for your name.”
“He’s not here for the club, Tahiti,” Coral said. “He’s here to write a story. He works for a newspaper in the city.”
“A newspaper? That’s something! You’ve seen our ads? I wrote some of them myself. Are you here to write a review? That would sell your papers.”
“No, I—” Miami began, but Coral touched his arm. She was surprised to feel warmth.
“I’m sure Miami’s tired,” she said. “Could he just see a room?”
“Of course,” Tahiti said. “We can talk later.”
“I’ll leave you here, then,” Coral said to Miami. When she turned to face him, she realized they were almost the same height. To be looking eye to eye with a man was new. She had to crane her neck to look into Trillium’s eyes. She could not, she realized, remember the last time he had looked her in the eye.
“Can I hire you?” Miami said. “To be my guide through the junkyard?”
The request threw her off for a moment. “I have work.”
“Please.”
“I have a lot to do.”
“You know this place better than anyone. Please,” Miami said again.
It was not a word she was used to hearing. It was not a word it was easy to say no to.
“All right,” Coral said. “I’ll do what I can to help. But you can’t distract me. I still have my work.”
“Of course. I’ll meet you whenever you have time tomorrow. Maybe in the morning? I’ll be in room...” He looked to Tahiti for guidance.
“Two,” Tahiti said, making a decision.
“Perfect. My favorite number.”
* * *
By the time she began the long walk home, it was twilight. At night, the familiar structures of the junkyard took on other mysteries. The only lit path was the path to Trashlands. All the other, hidden ways depended on mercy and kerosene, juiced solar lamps or precious batteries. Most people didn’t have light to spare. They certainly didn’t have gas for a generator, which was a luxury only for rich men in cities.
And for Rattlesnake Master.
Coral knew the way. Long ago, she had memorized the paths. But she was not supposed to be out after dark. There was Rattlesnake Master’s curfew. If you broke one of the laws of his junkyard, you had to pay. He demanded plastic. Or you can work it off, he had told them—told her—that first day, in his joking manner, which was not a joke, with his smile, which was not friendly.
It had been a long time since Coral had strayed from the bus after sunset. She had forgotten how the small animals moved, how the rats and raccoons, which were kings of everything, could scurry, shifting the metal of the junkyard. She was ducking around a truck when she heard the creaking. For a moment, she was jarred out of place, thinking again of the whale.
There had been screeching from the birds on the beach that day. A single boat, tied to a dock, hung on by shreds. The boat squealed as it rocked. Something clanged against a pole—a mast, she thought it was called. The dock tilted into the water like a pile of old piano keys. The boat, she remembered, had a hole in its side, like so much of the plastic she pulled from the water.
In the junkyard, the pile next to her groaned. It was tilting, jarred loose with a sound like screaming. That day with the whale, Shanghai had kicked inside her for the first time. Mr. Fall had joked that it must have been the smell of the beach that had set him off.
A yard cat dashed out of sight, yowling. A hubcap rolled out from the dirt, spinning like a coin, and the column it had been underneath buckled. She turned too late as the junk fell: a broken pallet, metal barrels, strange arms of cranes collapsing, kicking up a spray. How had they ever thought that would hold? Coral was clipped by the falling metal. She landed in the dirt, surrounded by broken bits. Now they were more broken.
“What the fuck was that?” said a man’s voice.
Nobody came to see what the fuck it was.
She should have scrambled up immediately. Somebody might be coming. The wrong person might have heard and sent out muscle from Trashlands. The men were not all kind like Tahiti. She was out late, breaking the rules. But she couldn’t get up, couldn’t move fast at all.
There was pain. Pain in her jaw, pain in her leg. Miami was closer than home. Miami was in Room 2 of Trashlands. She could hear the music start up at her back, the whirl and scratch that meant the one song was beginning again.
But she couldn’t go there, that was reckless. To seek help from a man she’d just met?
She pressed her hand against her jaw, which pulsed. Her face had smacked the earth. It would feel better in a bit, with a compress of comfy, maybe. Another moment, and still no men rounded the corner with torches and clubs, to survey the fallen column, to drag her to Rattlesnake Master. Coral was not sure what the penalty was for breaking curfew. The punishments kept changing. They were different for women. Lately, women were pushed onstage, stripped, and shown to the crowd.
Coral couldn’t do that. She couldn’t. Two men had seen her body, only two, and the first had hurt her. It had been wrong. She had been wrong. She pulled her shirt tighter to her chest. She tried to listen for the sound of boots on dirt.
Trillium would have questions. Where had she been? Why was she out so late? She wouldn’t know how to answer them. Another moment, until she felt she was safe, then she bent under the truck and limped back.
6
Trillium
Trillium grandiflorum
This was an art that worked. That you could be paid for, and live on, and keep doing. To mix the colors, so visceral, so changeable. To improve the consistency of the ink, its staying power, its vibrancy. To make its poison not poison.
In this life, you were constantly innovating. Even the simplest tasks required imagination. Where would they live? How would they cook? How would they wash? How would they make love in the bus with Mr. Fall, Coral’s adoptive father, everywhere? They would figure it out.
They figured it out.
Tattooing was an art he fell into. He had always wanted to draw, was always scratching figures. Impractical, waste of time, his daddy said when Trillium had found a piece of relatively clean paper and used it to draw. It won’t keep us alive, his daddy said. Paper is for fuel. Paper is for messages.
Nothing is for art, his daddy said. Nothing.
When his paper was taken away, Trillium drew pictures in his head. He thought of a bird on top of a crooked pole. Once the pole had carried wires, his daddy said, which spread power and light and pictures from house to house. Pictures, he had said pictures—but then he quickly tried to cover it up by saying words. The lines had spread words.
What happened to the lines? Trillium had asked.
The same thing that had happened to air travel and the internet: not paying enough attention, then they were taken away. Pay fucking attention, his daddy said. He slapped the side of Trillium’s head by his ear.
That ear rang for a long time. One day it stopped or he just didn’t notice it anymore. Another day his daddy would hit him again, and the ringing would begin anew. Could he hear it now? Could he hear it still? Sometimes he felt the ringing was in him, in his bones, a vibration as resonant as the tuning fork Coral had scavenged once. She had a gift for finding objects that reminded him of old times. Or maybe he was just always thinking of back then.
Trillium and Coral were makers. This was mostly what bonded them. They belonged in this society of scrap, they could lose themselves in it. They spent hours finding materials, selling them, then refining that which they did not sell into something else.
Trillium dipped a needle. This was art that was alive. You could feel it under your fingers. The needle vibrated, hollow, bloodied with ink. Once it had belonged to a bird, the thin feather that became an instrument. Once Trillium had drawn in the dirt with a stick, on his own hand with the fingers of his other hand, tracing, trying to remember what he wanted to create.
Now he drew on the arm of a man.
The man had asked for a swan with his woman’s name tattooed beneath. He had come from Trashlands, Trillium could tell by his sour smell. Half of Trillium’s customers were dragged from the club by Foxglove, flashing her mile-long legs. But half were rueful, like this man. He had been drunk but he was sobering up quickly. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days, crimson as the ink Trillium made from red cabbage. The man’s clothes were rumpled. He had spent the night—maybe more than one night—in a chair, maybe hopped up on something one of the girls had sold him.
The man’s hands shook. He was sweating heavier than he should have been on an early evening in the rainbow bus. It was warm but cooler nights were coming. The bus had been parked in the shade.
“Almost done,” Trillium said. Ink came from the needle in careful dabs. Redness came from the man.
Coral joked that Trillium could coax blood from anyone, give him time. Maybe that was his daddy’s influence. His daddy could raise a knot, bloom a bruise from nothing, a slight that only he could hear or see, some kind of indecipherable shift in the atmosphere. The temperature one degree warmer, the air one droplet wetter could set him off. Crickets or the absence of crickets. The absence of food. The absence of liquor—there was never enough liquor in the world for his old man.
“Georgia Aster,” Trillium repeated the name he was tattooing on the stranger’s skin. He wiped any blood away with a rag, and pressed the needle down at an angle, pricking the image out, dot by dot. It was the slowest kind of drawing, and it was an image that would live as long as the man did.
Who knew how long that would be.
“What a pretty name.”
“She’s my sweetie,” the man said, huffing through his teeth. Sweat rolled down his face. “She swore she’d never leave me, but...”
“Good to show her this.”
He didn’t like it when they talked.
“I made a mistake,” the man said.
Fuck. Here we go.
“It was only the one time. I mean, it was only one night. Maybe a couple of times. Maybe five or six.”
“Sure, five or six.”
“Eight or nine.”
Fuck this guy. Trillium bent closer to the swan named Georgia Aster. He doubted the man had seen the flower or a swan—Trillium only knew what the bird looked like because of Mr. Fall’s book—but the man had insisted: a swan with a long, graceful neck. That’s what she has, he had said. My love.
But now that the tattoo was almost done, the man was hedging. “One of them has it,” he said. “A long neck.”
Trillium paused with the needle posed above the man’s skin. “One of them?”
“One of the girls. Long neck. I remember that.”
“It’s fine. Lots of people have long necks. She’ll know in her heart this is for her.” Trillium finished the beak of the swan, tapered and delicate as its noodle neck, the neck that could have belonged to any girl. He preferred tattooing people like Foxglove, who just lay there, head down, eyes closed. Trillium didn’t have to hear Foxglove’s sad story.
He already knew it.
He heard the screech of the bus doors. The glass panels had been replaced with cardboard, but the vinyl material between them still folded and unfolded, mercifully. If you were inside the bus, you used the lever at the driver’s seat to unfold the doors. From the outside, you opened by pushing hard. This person wasn’t pushing hard enough. They were probably drunk.
Trillium looked away from the man. “Push harder,” he called.
The doors wheezed, but did not open all the way.
Trillium put down the needle. The man on the table shifted. “Don’t get up.” He raised his voice to the drunk, “Push—”
