Sharkey spits in his hooch. “Yeah. You better.”
But Ripple doesn’t leave, not right away. Because, as soon as he’s out of the booth, he finds his feet, like a sleepwalker’s, moving of their own accord not toward the door, the street, freedom, with all its possibilities and dangers, but toward the dance floor: certain death, where Swanny is still lost in her undulations. Her eyes are shut, but though he doesn’t touch her, doesn’t even try, she opens them when he steps into her orbit, and then they’re dancing together. One step forward, two steps back: he has to watch out for her flying hair, her jabbing nails, but he figures it out. Easier than dodging ax blades in a fight. Easier than ducking throwing stars. He’s even starting to enjoy himself when, finally, she grabs him by the wrist and pulls him to her, her thumb on his pulse, fire in her eyes, incandescent with sudden revelation. He feels like there’s so much she wants to say to him that he’s never going to be able to keep up, he’s never been the greatest listener, her vocab is out of control, but fuck it, he’s going to try. Whatever she’s thinking or feeling, though, she packs it all into a single syllable.
“Run,” she says.
* * *
Torchtown. Once you’ve been inside for a few hours, you’re either dead or they leave you alone. That’s what Ripple hopes, anyway. Since he left the Hooch Dungeon, nobody’s bothered him. He probably looks demoralized enough already. Plus he’s got nothing left worth stealing. Maybe he should’ve held on to that chicken. He’s starting to understand why Abby used to talk to animals. It’s better than being all alone.
Torchtown. It’s probably the only place where a video-game version would look subtle by comparison. In the last forty-five minutes, he’s witnessed two chain-saw duels, one defenestration, three dragon fires, and an orgy taking place in the middle of the street, which ended only when it was disrupted and swept along by a boisterous funeral procession. He’s seen little kids gnawing on rats, roasted with the heads and fur still on, little kids sucker-punching each other for these rats-on-a-stick. It’s occurred to him that it’ll only be a matter of time before he has to do something similar for dinner.
He really should have held on to that chicken.
At this point, Ripple is fairly certain he made a bad call, begging those cops to incarcerate him here, to dump him like garbage into the city’s biggest Human Nature Preserve. But he can’t complain. It was what he wanted. It was what he deserved.
Ripple doesn’t know where he’s headed, and even if he did, he’d have no idea how to arrive there. Torchtown may only be a couple of square miles, but the streets are crooked, gridless, intersecting every which way with each other and sometimes even with themselves. He’s ready to give up, huddle against a building and hope he doesn’t freeze to death, practically naked in the evening’s chill, when he notices a street sign, a little off kilter, pointing down one of the darker, narrower byways: Scullery Lane.
As in, the infamous chawmonger of Scullery Lane.
Compared to the rest of Torchtown, Scullery Lane is quiet this time of night, subdued: no squatters, no screaming, no murders obstructing traffic. Even in Torchtown, Swanny’s found the closest thing to a gated community. Ripple walks past a transaction involving the exchange of chaw packets for what appear to be human vertebrae—Sharkey’s goods, hot on the secondary market—and considers asking the kids involved for directions to the shop. But their eyes are so furtive, their mouths so full of drool, that it doesn’t strike him as the right time.
“You lost, tomcat?”
Ripple looks up. Perched on the second-floor windowsill of a nearby townhouse, a damsel is looking down at him. The building is a burnt-out husk, no roof, no floors; she must have climbed, feline, to where she sits. A bored and bony fem, all nose and elbows, with hair black as singe, shaved to stubble on one side. One eye gray, one green. Maybe she’ll show him around. Is this what happens next? Another garbage island, another girl he’ll never understand?
You need your wife.
“I’m good,” he says. He walks another lonely block.
It’s a squat building, three stories, homely and drab except for the relative luxury of structural integrity: door on its hinges, no broken windows, red brick discolored only by secondhand soot. SHARKEY’S CHAW SHOP. Solid-gold letters spell out the words. Printed in bling. Out front stands an alligator chained to a fire hydrant. Don’t let her play with gators.
Is this where he’s supposed to be? Or the one place on Earth he should most avoid? All signs point to “maybe.” Ripple decides to wait.
* * *
In the limo, after the show: usually Swanny’s favorite place and time. But tonight her breath fogs the window as she gazes out through tinted glass into the chilling, wanton streets.
“You want out?” Sharkey asks, watching her from the other end of the banquette.
“Pardon?”
“Maybe you’re tired of the limo. Maybe you’d rather get out and walk.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I remember when I first picked you up. ‘I’m waiting for my husband,’ you said. I wonder how long you’d’ve waited if I hadn’t come along.”
She doesn’t answer. She knows that he’s jealous, that she’s making it worse by sitting as far from him as possible, by keeping her hands so emphatically to herself, but she can’t withhold a secret from him to save her life. She’d never fool him for long anyway. He knows too many ways in—inside her body, inside her mind. Even now, his drugs look out through her eyes, coloring the dim backseat, forming the familiar aura around his body: dusky red, warm, inviting.
“What did that mean, ‘it’s none of my affair’?” he asks.
“What?”
“Back in the bar, when you said, ‘Leave it, leave it, it’s none of your affair.’ What’d you mean by that?”
“I didn’t want you to kill my husband, Howie.”
“Yeah, but, ‘it’s none of my affair’? How’m I supposed to take that?”
“It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
His eyes are so dark, staring into them sometimes feels more like looking down than looking in. He won’t let her drop his gaze, won’t let her escape back inside herself. His gravity pulls on her, almost too much to resist.
“It’s got everything to do with me.”
It’s a hypnotic suggestion. But Swanny shakes her head, loosens herself as best she can. “No, it’s between him and me, and it’s over and done, so I don’t understand why you’re making this fuss. Let’s just drop it, shall we?”
“He’s still alive because of me.” So are you. Sharkey doesn’t say it, but the statement is there, no less visible in its absence than her mother’s ghost.
“Isn’t that true of anyone who has the fortune to cross your path on a good day?”