...I will.
BLACK BUSH
Oh, everyone will see, yes, and everyone will know
That boy, you reap what you sow.
—16 Horsepower
After a spell, I found myself on the road once more, tracing that wandering track up over the mountains towards Black Bush way. But the ruts were far too muddy and churned-up for thin-soled prison shoes to weather, so I stuck my thumb out and cocked my hip, waiting on a ride. one stopped soon enough, confirming I still had it.
“They call me Tad,” the driver told me, as I slid myself in. He was all done up in a flannel shirt and a cap that said Free Can of Whoop-Ass with Billy-Bob Teeth—maybe my age or older but hard-traveled, with a recreational user’s roster of barely suppressed tics and the same long build most everyone from the Bush tended to share, all hard muscle and sharp, mismatched teeth. Lot like looking in a mirror, come to think, give or take the dangly bits, which was a draw in itself.
I smiled sidelong, and cast him an upwards look through the long brown shadow of my hair. “Allfair Chatwin’s my name,” I said. “Alleycat, too, sometimes—or A-Cat, if you prefer.”
“Not Gley Chatwin’s gal, that was?”
“The same. Why—you happen to know my Momma? Plenty did.”
Careful: “Know how she was a...wise woman, sure ‘nough.”
“Why, ain’t you nice: What she was was a witch, mister—pure holler, born and bred.”
“Like yourself?”
“Wouldn’t be too likely to say outright, if I was—’less there was something in it for me to do so.”
He nodded once, sage as a judge, which didn’t surprise me as much as it might’ve. For they’re practical folk, thereabouts—and better yet, they do know how to keep their mouths shut.
“Heard you was locked up, is all,” he said, once another long moment had passed; I saw his eyes go wandering off, fingers twitching just a bit on the wheel, like he was trying not to think too long on a series of bad thoughts passing through his skull.
To which I simply shrugged, and replied: “Well, darlin’...I’m out now.”
—
Back in Mennenvale Women’s Penitentiary—M-vale, they call it—the other cons was always shoving all manner of contraband up inside ‘em, from condoms full of smack or pre-paid phone cards to all heinous manner of tools, keys and other potential sharps; a difficult proposition at the best of times, no matter how carefully you might wrap ‘em beforehand. Not me, though: get-back just wasn’t worth the put-out, in my never-anything-like humble opinion. ‘Sides which, and far more to the purpose, it never did seem to fool anyone for long; after all, once people know you come with a ready-made drop-bag stuck ‘tween your nethers, it really is always gonna be the first place anyone ever thinks to look.
Then again, I knew one gal, harder than most, who cut herself a flap and slid the razor-blade that’d made it underneath, like stuffing an envelope; let it heal up good and tight, then tattooed something extra-dark overtop. (Where? In one of those complicated feminine places the Inquisition used to search for witch-marks, and always find ‘em.) Give her but a minute to scratch, and it came sliding back out, quick as you please. I guess that was one situation where it really did help not to care ‘bout pain, or scarring—or much’ve anything else, for that matter, ‘cept making sure she always had a last-ditch exit plan socked away for the proverbial rainy day.
Couldn’t ever quite go there myself, in spite of M-vale’s fine capacity to spread suffering virulent as any clap-dose; guess I’m an optimist at heart, underneath it all. But if I was to make that same call, the only weapons I’d need were the ones I was born with: two kinds of bad mixed up and shook to make a new, all the more toxic for its alchemy. Full of poisons, my very blood, rheum and juices natural spell-ingredients, napalm-components kept separate for transport, yet all-too-easily mixed.
How I got into Mennenvale most know, ‘least ‘round these parts. How I got out’s a tale in itself, but never you mind—we’ll cover that later. Back to me and Tad.
—
The road ran out soon after, so we pulled over and parked awhile in under the lowest-slung trees, as a sudden rain begun to fall. His lap seemed a good place to wait the storm out, so I wound both my hands in his hair and gave myself over, sucking breath from him the way cats do from sleeping babies ‘til at last he gave out a choked cry and went silent, slumped sideways ‘gainst the driver’s side door.
We renew ourselves in our own special ways, I thought, according to our natures. And I shivered all over at the feel of his brief candle passing me by, night-bound—familiar but not, considering how long it’d been since I indulged myself in this particular way. It left me sated yet slightly sad, for he hadn’t seemed a bad sort, in his way. But then again, I’d seen a dark spot hovering over his face in the rearview, and a flat white one in either eye like the inverse shadow of two silver pennies waiting to touch down and seal his lids across: Bad tidings already on their way, and soonish. Perhaps I’d simply slid my way between this moment and that, bringing fate’s promise to full flower only a skootch or two before its due time.
Had him some fair-to-middling product still left in his glove compartment, though. So I took that, along with what little cash money his wallet held, and a gun so old it might’ve fought for Patton, and walked on up the trail that I knew lay hid behind that massy curtain of waterlogged leaves.
—
Now, here’s the thing. Holler witchery starts deep in the body, same’s everything else—life and death, fruit and filth, a constant push-pull of meat and bone versus energy and entropy; it’s fueled by spit and blood and juice, always swallowing something here to shit it forth somewhere else. Everything gained through this tradition is paid for, and the price is always the same—flesh, and plenty of it.
Which is why, my Momma used to claim, we are the true root and branch of all subsequent witchery, even the hoity Latinate hierarchical yammer my half-sister Samaire Cornish practiced—that tall, blonde rake of a gal, covered all over in arcane tattoos meant to guard ‘gainst the pull of her own demon heritage. Samaire, taught to hate everything she was and borne along in her other half-sister’s wake, playing the hunter’s game, spending out her life’s coin on fatal-hot pursuit of the same wicked things she ought to embrace as her truest kin. That’s if she knew what was best for her, which she all-too-obviously didn’t...
(Ah, but I aimed to change all that, eventually. If I possibly could.)