All Tomorrow's Parties

38. VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING

FONTAINE'S shop must be this narrow purple one with its high thin window caulked with enough silicone to frost a wedding cake. The whole front of the place had been painted the same flat purple, blistered now by sun and rain, and she had some faint memory of its earlier incarnation as something else, used clothing maybe. They'd put that purple over everything: over the droops and gobs of silicone, over the hardware on the old wooden door with its upper panels replaced with glass.

If this was Fontaine's place, he hadn't bothered naming it, but that was like him. And the few things displayed in the window, under the beam of an antique Tensor, were like him as well: a few old-fashioned watches with their dials going rusty, a bone-handled jackknife someone had polished till it shone, and some kind of huge ugly telephone, sheathed in ridged black rubber. Fontaine was crazy about old things, and sometimes, before, he'd bring different pieces over, show them to Skinner.

Sometimes she'd thought he'd just done that to get the old man started, and then Skinner's own Stories would come out. He hadn't been much for stories, Skinner, but turning some battered treasure of Fontaine's in his hands, he'd talk, and Fontaine would sit and listen, and nod sometimes, as though Skinner's stories confirmed some long-held suspicion.

Made privy to Skinner's past, Fontaine would then handle the objects himself with a new excitement, asking questions.

Fontaine lived in the world of things, it had seemed to her, the world of the things people made, and probably it was easier for him to approach them, people, through these things. If Skinner couldn't tell Fontaine a story about something, Fontaine would make up his own story, read function in the shape of something, read use in the way it was worn down. It seemed to comfort him.

Everything, to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he'd built Skinner's funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, when the old man's hip had gotten too bad to allow him to easily climb, Fontaine had had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner's room.

Now she stands there, looking into the window, at these watches with their foxed faces, their hands unmoving, and she fears history.

Fontaine will fit her to history in some different way, she knows, and it is a history she has avoided.

Through the thick pane of the door, thick enough to bend light, the way water in a glass does, she sees that the lights are on in a space behind the shop. Another door there, not quite closed.

CLOSED/CERRADO says the dog-eared cardboard sign hung inside the glass on a suction-cup shower hook.

She knocks.

Almost immediately the inner door is opened, a figure silhouetted there against brightness.

'Hey, Fontaine. Chevette. It's me.

The figure shuffles forward, and she sees that it is in fact him, this angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water. As he rounds the flat gleam of a glass-topped counter, she sees that he holds a gun, the old-fashioned kind with the cylinder that turns as the bullets are fired manually, one at a time. 'Fontaine? It's me.

He stops there, looking. Takes a step forward. Lowers the pistol. 'Chevette?

'Yeah?

'Hold on. He comes forward and peers at her, past her. 'You alone?

'Yes, she says, glancing to either side.

'Hold on- a rattling of locks, bolts undone, and at last the door opens, and he blinks at her, mystified. 'You back.

'How are you, Fontaine?

'Fine, he says, 'fine, and steps back. 'Come in.

She does. The place smells of machine oil, metal polish, burnt coffee. A thousand things gleam from the depths of Fontaine's history reef.

'Thought you were in LA, he says.

'I was. I'm back.

He closes the door and starts locking it, an elaborate process but one he can do in the dark, in his sleep perhaps. 'Old man's gone. You know?

'I know, she says. 'How?

'Just old, he says, tucking his pistol away now. 'Wouldn't get out of bed, finally. Curled up there like a baby. Clarisse she came to nurse him. She been a nurse, Clarisse. Says when they turn to face the wall, that means it's over soon.

Chevette wants so badly to say something, but it will not come.

'I like your hair, girl, Fontaine says, looking at her. 'Not so fierce now.

'It's changing, Fontaine says, meaning the bridge and how they live on it. He's told her about the tendency to build these shops, how most of them are built with nonresident money, the owners hiring people to live there and maintain possession. 'That Lucky Dragon, he says, cupping a white china mug of his bitter, silted coffee, 'that's there because someone decided the money was there for it to make. Tourists buying what they need to come out here. That wouldn't have happened, before.

'Why do you think it is, that it's changing?

'It just is, he says. 'Things have a time, then they change.

'Skinner, she says, 'he lived out his life here, didn't he? I mean, when this was all what it was. He was here for all of that. Here when they built it.

'Not his whole life. Just the end of it. That jacket you're wearing, he got that in England, when he was younger. He lived there and rode motorcycles. Told me about it. Rode them up to Scotland, rode them all over. Real old ones.

'He told me a little about it, once, she says. 'Then he came back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty soon he was out here.

'Here, he says, 'I'll show you something. Opening a cabinet.

Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with copper abstracts. Draws it from the waxed brown saddle leather. Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns.

The knife of Chevette's memories, its grip scaled with belt-ground segments of phenolic circuit board.

'I saw that made, she says, leaning forward.

'Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent 'Black Lightning, 1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty years old too, then. Said there wasn't ever a bike to match it. Kept the chain till he found this maker. Passes the knife to her. Five inches of blade, five inches of handle. 'Like you to have it.

Chevette runs her finger along the flat of the blade, the crocodile pattern of light and dark steel that had been formed as the links were beaten out. 'I was thinking about this before, Fontaine. Today. How we went to where the smith worked. Burned coke in an old coffee can.

'Yes. I've seen it done. Hands her the sheath.

'But you need to sell this stuff. Tries to hand it back.

'It wasn't for sale, he says. 'I was keeping it for you.

FONTAINE has a strange boy in the shop's back room. Heavy, Hispanic, hair cut short. He sits the whole time, cross-legged, his head in an old eyephone rig that looks like it came out of some military robotics dump.

With a worn-out old notebook on his lap. Endlessly, steadily, clicking from one screen to the next.

'Who's this? she asks when they're back, Fontaine putting on a fresh pot of his terrible coffee. Thinking the boy can hear her.

'I don't know, Fontaine says, turning to regard the boy in the eye-phones. 'He was outside this morning, breathing on my window.

Chevette looks at Fontaine, not getting it.

'He likes watches, Fontaine says, lighting the butane ring with a spark gun like a toy pistol. 'Showed him how to hunt for watches this morning, hasn't done much since. Fontaine crosses to where the boy sits, looks down at him.

'I'm not sure how much he understands English, Fontaine says. 'Or he understands it but it gets through funny.

'Spanish maybe?

'I had big Carlos by here, Fontaine says. 'Didn't seem to make much difference.

'You live here now, Fontaine?

'Yeah, he says. 'Not getting along with Clarisse.

'How's your kids?

'They're okay. Hell, Tourmaline's okay too, by anybody's standards but her own. I mean, not to live with, understand, but her health's pretty good.

Chevette picks up the sheathed Damascus boot knife and tries it in the inner, zippered pocket of Skinner's jacket. It fit, if you zipped the pocket shut, as far as you could, to hold it upright. 'What's he doing with your notebook?

'He's hunting watches. I started him looking on the net auctions, but now he's looking everywhere. Gets places I don't understand how he does.

'He gonna live here?

Fontaine frowns. 'I hadn't planned on it.

Chevette stands up, stretches, seeing the old man, Skinner, in memory, sitting up in his bed in the room atop the cable tower. What dancer she'd gotten off Creedmore has long since worn off, leaving an edge of tiredness. Long day. Very long day. 'We're sleeping in a van down the foot of Folsom, she says.

'You and who?

'Tessa. Friend of mine.

'Know you're welcome here.

'No, she says, 'Tessa'll be worried. I'm glad I saw you, Fontaine. She zips the jacket. 'Thank you for keeping his knife. Whatever history it was she'd felt herself dodging, she hasn't found it. She just feels tired now; otherwise, she doesn't seem to feel.

'Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have it. Told me. Looking up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gently says: 'Asked us where you were, you know?

Her fit with history, and how that hurts.