Swanny removes the thicker of the two coils housed in the jar and uses her gilt-embellished shears to slice off a length. This chaw is fairly fresh; the molasses-sticky rope clings agreeably to her hands, and she resists the urge to lick her fingers. Even after Duluth’s words of warning, she doubts very much that the killing offenses apply to her. But she still doesn’t want to try anything stupid. In the fairy tales of her childhood, girls always did the one thing expressly forbade them—opened the box, cracked the golden egg, snipped a lover’s beard—and ruined everything. She’s a woman who abides by her contracts (her wedding night regrettably not excepted), and when she signed on for this job, she promised not to taste the retail.
Swanny puts the chaw on the shop’s scale, trims the end another fraction of an inch, and wraps the package in brown paper and twine. As she’s housing the proceeds of the sale in the cash register (which more closely resembles a junk drawer, considering the contents), the bell jingles, announcing the arrival of scarred and dreadlocked Keelhaul. Sharkey employs him as some type of handyman or freelancer—Swanny’s not quite clear on the details. “Swillers,” that’s the name Sharkey bestows on these odd-job fellows, who all seem uncomfortably puffed with muscle and scowly by default. The chawhead scurries around the newcomer and beelines out the door.
“Hey, Swan, gimme some razor blades and two lockpicks. I’m making a sauce run for Sharkey.”
Swanny rings up a NO SALE and opens the drawer again. “That vile hooch? I keep insisting he give it up, it’s revolting.”
“Yeah, he says it’s the only way he’ll ever get to sleep. ‘Rest easy’ was his words.” At least Keelhaul will speak to her. But today he seems preoccupied.
“It’s one thing to order it in a bar, when there’s nothing else available, but…good lord, is everything quite all right?” Swanny asks. Keelhaul, normally the most stoic of the bunch, is pressing his palms to his temples in the manner of a man beset. He shakes it off as she metes out the discretionary funds.
“Got a headache, is all. I kinda wish I hadn’t run into Sharkey on the street right now, he’s in a real bad mood. Think he fucked up a batch of chaw.”
“He has an artistic temperament, I suppose,” muses Swanny. She wonders if it’s true, if a person in Sharkey’s line of manufacture can in fact endow his creations with the living soul of genius. If a drug can give the user not just a high but a point of view, an inflected reading of the world. “Did he go back to the basement? Shall I ring down to see if he’s all right?”
“Don’t.”
“Keelhaul, you look quite unwell.”
“I don’t like getting snapped at, is all. Not by Sharkey.”
“Oh, you poor creature.” It’s like seeing Duluth with those little children; these roughnecks all seem so coarse on the outside, but their hearts are as soft as bruised fruit. “Sit down for a moment and nurse your migraine. I’ll run to the saucemart—it’s two blocks up?”
“You’d do that?”
“I’d be glad to, all this customer service is exhausting. Be a dear and sharpen my pencil while I’m gone.”
Late afternoon, outside: Swanny’s too often cooped up in the shop till past dark. Now she relishes the warmth of dying gold on her bare neck and shoulders, like a wrap to match the brocade frock she’s sporting. In the decadence of late fall, one might almost imagine such weather lasting forever, though the first frost is most likely any day now. Swanny sidesteps Sharkey’s gator, still hitched to the hydrant post like a dwarven Jurassic steed, and heads northward. The Chaw Shop is on a sleepy block, but as she turns onto Harbinger Place, she hits congestion, urchins and trulls and foot soldiers to God-knows-whom veering past her at every side.
“Hot rat tails! Hot rat tails!” calls a young man, using a pair of tongs to nudge the sizzling appendages around in a drum of heated oil. Hungry children cluster around him, angling for a pity scrap. Swanny thinks back on her breakfast of smoked boar chorizo with mingled gratitude and astonishment. What a tolerable life Sharkey’s made, here in this abyss.
Swanny’s been to the nearest saucemart just once before, on an evening’s investigation, right when it was closing. It bustles now, the fabled distillery a science experiment of funnels and fractionating columns and reflux towers dripping and gurgling behind the dispensary window of bulletproof glass. There, another shopgirl frantically computes change, more pressed for time with her equations than Swanny ever hopes to be. The establishment, housed in a former pawnshop, bears no sign; it doesn’t need one. The line of customers is out the door. Swanny counts the razor blades in her purse and wonders if they’ll be enough. She understands enough about the local economy to know that prices here rise simultaneous with demand. Two cocottes in cling-wrap dresses depart with their newly purchased jars, and the line shuffles forward an inch.
“Let’s go.” Sharkey’s hand is on her elbow before she notices him arrive, his callused fingers a vise. He isn’t wearing his hat, not even his zoot jacket; his undershirt is still stained with poison, the rust-hued blood of whatever monster he’s been invigorating down in that laboratory of drugs.
“Howie, honestly, it’s the least I can do. I don’t approve of your drinking this concoction, but we all have our vices, I suppose.”
“I need you back in the shop.” Sharkey’s keeping his voice low, but other people in the line are glancing back at them, murmuring amongst themselves. A pair of sparkers cut out, headed for the street without completing their purchase. A lady bouncer follows, moving fast.
“I’ll be waited upon momentarily—look, the line’s shorter already. And back home, Keelhaul’s attending to the register, I didn’t close up.”
“I need you. Now.”
“Please loosen your grip, you’re actually hurting—ow!”
Back out on the sidewalk: “I refuse to be manhandled like this, in a public place, no less. You owe me an apology.” Saucemart patrons are spilling out of the storefront behind them in droves, empty-handed.
“I don’t owe you zilch. Shut up and walk.”
Swanny gapes at Sharkey, who doesn’t return her gaze; his jaw muscles clench and unclench as he continues to steer her down the street. A path clears for them effortlessly through the foot traffic. “What’s come over you? I may be your employee, but that gives you no right to speak to me that way.”
“Don’t leave your post. I’m warning you once.”
“I was running an errand for you.” Swanny’s eyes smart with unspilled tears; his words sting like a scrawled C– at the top of an exam. “Keelhaul’s right, you are in an atrocious mood.”
They’re turning off of Harbinger Place, back onto Scullery Lane, when behind them the saucemart explodes. Swanny doesn’t even see the yellow dragon’s shadow before the fire pours down; the reptile is hocking death spitballs from way up in the stratosphere, but this one hits a bull’s-eye nevertheless. Swanny hears screams mixed with thundercrack alcoholic detonations; passersby stampede from the scene. Sharkey doesn’t slow down, look back, or drop her arm.
“My God!” Swanny flashes back to her last close call at the library. “I was just inside!”