Authors: Jeff Noon
“I’m still waiting, lady.”
“Okay, Boadicea is now coming to the phone. Are you ready?” Joanna gestures towards Boda. Boda takes the phone, and speaks into it…
“Wanita. This is Boadicea, late of the Xcabs Company. I’m being held against my—”
“Okay, okay! We’ve got a voice recognition. Stay right there, Boda. Gumbo, get over here. We’ve found the girl…”
“… Boadicea! Gumbo YaYa talking to you.”
“Gumbo, I’m innocent. Please, believe me—”
“Give me that phone!” Joanna grabs the phone off Boda. “Gumbo YaYa, this is Joanna talking. I’ve got the girl, and we can make a deal.”
“Certainly… five golden feathers, as agreed.”
“No, more than that. Are we on air now?”
“No.”
“I want to be on air, Gumbo. I want to sing on the radio. You see, I’m a Country and Northern singer.”
“I can’t just let you on air like that, Joanna. There are certain technical processes to sort out. Now if I should…”
“Gumbo, listen. This song is called Maverick Tendencies. It’s my most famous number. Maybe your listeners would like it. See what you think…”
Joanna starts to sing then, over the phone, the song that Boda had heard her singing earlier:
We were driving the cattle to another hick town,
My lover blaming me for the rain coming down.
As some good steer makes a run for open ground,
Joe makes a loop to pull that maverick down.
And I’ve got maverick tendencies in my heart,
Since the night you broke me apart.
Your love is gonna set me loose from the noose.
I’ve got maverick tendencies in my heart.
Joanna’s voice is crystal clear, riding the notes like the cowgirl she is singing about. Boda can’t take her eyes off the show; it looks like Joanna is singing for her life. There is a desperation hidden beneath the melody and the words. This, and the story the song is telling, really get to Boda. Jesus, this woman can actually sing: every note a flame. This is a real torch song…
As that good steer runs for wide open space,
Joe standing tall in the saddle, rain on his face,
He throws the lasso to catch the traces
Of a prey that won’t be branded or placed.
Boda picks up one of Joanna’s guitars. She plucks at the simple chords of the melody. Joanna closes her eyes and actually smiles at Boda, as they go into the chorus together.
I’ve got maverick tendencies in my heart,
Since the day you broke me apart.
Your love has set me loose from the noose.
I’ve got maverick tendencies in my heart.
Boda is bewitched by the song. Or is it the singer? There is something about Joanna that reminds her of Coyote. The singer and the taxi-dog share the same place in Boda’s newly born Shadow, that space reserved for the lonesome, the beauty of the remote.
The rope slips free from the horns of the steer,
That maverick beast runs on without fear
Into wide open fields. I won’t shed no tears,
Come the morning, Joe, I’ll be running clear.
Boda realises that she is being mesmerized. She has to pull back from the song, the situation. Charrie, let’s ride!
Shadow riding, and suddenly Boda is inside Charrie, working the controls so that he starts up, and then working the cab with her Shadow, speeding towards the neon cafe sign. Boda swings the guitar over her shoulder, ready to hit Joanna with it. Joanna’s eyes open, and she raises the gun, coolly, finger tight on the trigger, straight towards Boda’s head. Joanna carries on singing. Final chorus…
I’ve got maverick tendencies in my heart,
I’m gonna pull this old world of mine apart.
I’ve a heart that won’t be tamed, blamed or ashamed
I’ve got maverick tend—
An explosion from outside, lights at the window as Boda feels the jolt inside, as Charrie smashes into the neon sign. Joanna turns her head towards the sound. “What the fuck was that?” Boda completes the guitar swing and then brings it forward, a glancing blow against the singer’s head…
Echoes of a song drift through the body of the instrument, the snapped strings and the hollow bones of Joanna. The blond wig falls off, revealing an all over No. 2 crew cut. Joanna screams—a deep manly voice this time. The telephone falls. She tries to bring the gun back on target, but Boda has the advantage now. Boda grabs the gun and turns it on the singer.
“Sit down.”
“Please… don’t hurt me.” He’s crying in his woman’s voice now, swinging between male and female. “Please… no visible marks.”
“Sit down!”
Joanna sits.
“You’re Country Joe, aren’t you?” Boda asks. “You’re a transvestite.”
“I am not a transvestite. How dare you? I am a proper child. A child of Fecundity 10. That’s all. I’m special. Very, very special. You will pay for this, girl.”
Boda picks up the telephone. “Gumbo? You still there?”
“What’s going on, Boda?” Gumbo answers.
“Get off my case, Gumbo.”
“I’m doing my public duty.”
“I am innocent. Innocent! And I will do all that I can to find out who killed Coyote. Tell that to your listeners, Mr Pirate Radio DJ. You hear?”
She slams down the phone.
“What you gonna do now, girl?” Country Joe asks.
Good question.
Boda picks up the bottle of Boomer, stuffs it into her shoulder bag. Then she spots the blond wig on the floor. This goes into the bag as well. “Okay, Joe,” she says. “You’ve got some nice clothes, I’ll bet?”
Up to Joe’s bedroom, gun-led. A palace of glitter, silk and sashes. More wigs, different shades. Boda chooses some of the more conservative items. “You got the key for this room?” she asks.
Country Joe’s eyes are wet with tears, mascara-smeared. He points to the key in the back of the door. “You’re not gonna hurt me, Boda, are you?”
“Well listen,” Boda replies. “Us mavericks… we look out for each other. Right?”
“Right.”
“Because who the hell else will?”
Country Joe collapses on to his furry bed.
“You’re a good man, Joe,” she says to him. “This is just a bad day on the ranch.”
Country Joe, his voice quivering, says, “I enjoyed singing with you, Boda. I really did…”
Locking the bedroom behind her, Boda makes her way downstairs and through to the bar area. The curtain of the Wonderwall is glimmering in the darkness, and some brute presence can be felt from the Zombie half of the room. But the door to the outside world is locked and barred, the bar is windowless. The presence behind the Wonderwall is calling to her, and when she looks deeply enough, Bonanza is there, yellow Stetson in place, his finger beckoning.
“Isn’t it dangerous?” she asks.
The greasy finger beckons.
Boda walks through the curtain of air.
The air breathes around her, like skin against skin, fingers of smoke dancing over her body. She feels dizzy, almost joyous. And stepping loose from the barrier, she feels something new opening up inside her. She feels like she is walking towards another part of herself.
A feeling of strength at last.
Bonanza leads her to another door, a Zombie door that opens on to the car park. As she runs across the car park, one of Country Joe’s dresses falls and is trampled into the mud. Chariot is there, entangled in the neon sign. Boda de-activates the defence systems, and then caresses the cab’s skin with a tender hand. You okay, Charrie? she transmits. NOTHING A TOUCH OF LOVING CARE WOULDN’T PUT RIGHT, he answers.
Bonanza is standing by her, smiling, rain dripping off his Stetson, his oily skin slick with drizzle. Boda shakes his hand. Shadow touching Zombie, girl to boy. “Thank you,” she says.
“No trouble,” he grunts. “Make a good journey.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“It’s not you I’m helping.”
Boda climbs into Charrie. WHAT NOW, DRIVER? Charrie asks.
“Let’s ride, Charrie.”
WHERE TO?
“Back to Manchester.”
Down to the root to find the killer and Boda thinks that Columbus himself would be a good place to start. Coyote himself had boasted to her about having visited Columbus but how do you go about finding such a nebulous creature, especially now that she’s off-map and Coyoteless?
Bonanza is a shivering figure in the rain as Boda backs Charrie away from the busted sign and out on to the road. She can see Country Joe emerging from the Zombie door. He stoops to pick up the mud-covered dress. He goes up to Bonanza and starts to hit that creature on the chest, again and again those tiny hands coming down on half-dead flesh. The Zombie just stands there and takes it, until the singer faints into his giant arms. The two figures merge into a single being as Boda drives Charrie away from the lights of the roadside cafe.
The second body was found that night, just before the old day shaded into morning: Tuesday, 11.49 p.m. A slab of earth in Alexandra Park surrounded by a radar of flies. They were eating their fill, these insects, buzzing crazy over the smell of dead flesh. Fat creatures, hundreds of them. We had to let off a sonic bomb before we could get our hands on the burial mound.
Some dogtramp had found it, snuffling for food through patches of mist, running scared from what he had stumbled across.
Midnight. Call the cops. Call up Sibyl Jones.
I was still awake when the call came through, charged up by what I had learned from listening to Gumbo YaYa’s station, and from what I had read in Coyote’s diary. Outpourings of love towards Boda in every line of the last few pages, and a scrap of paper lodged there: a love poem to the taxi-dog signed in Boda’s firm hand. Will he push me again up the shaky path, this is how it started. Will he push me again up the shaky path I crave, and pull me down in the waving grass to drown. The writing was familiar. Also, a ticket for next Thursday’s Vurtball game at Manchester City, slipped between pages. According to the diary, Coyote had invited her to the match. Something in the diary’s tale of love got to me; a sense of being desired.
I was naked from the waist up after reading it, kneeling over the cot in Belinda’s old bedroom. My stomach was lodged against the cot’s rim, so that my breasts were lowered toward the baby. My left nipple was being sucked at. There was no milk, of course, I was long past that juiciness. Still, my Jewel, my secret son, was feeding on something. He had started to sneeze rather badly during the night. I applied a wet flannel to his eyes and his nose. He gargled some words at me. I could only trust they were words of love, because there was no translation available. My Jewel had a dead tongue. Over the Shadow I found some scraps of love. I comforted Jewel for a while, resting his mis-shapen head in my arms, and then letting him suck once more. The telephone called me from this motherly job. Which made what we found in the park even harder to take.
The ride to Alexandra was a ride through a spring garden; tiny shoots were breaking through the tarmac of the roads, and the passing shops and houses were soft-edged with greenery. News was coming from the experts that we were heading for the worst hayfever of all time, even worse than during Fecundity 10. In the park, we found a bulbous sculpture of soil, twisted flowers rising from the earth, a fetid stench. Zombie found and accounted for. That creature had hiked his last car home; a final drop-off in unsanctified ground. A resting place in the petals. His body formed out of dirt, totally transformed.
Zero was waiting for me there. “Know what, Smokey? It saddens me to find the perp like this. Because I had one great urge to put this Zombie down. That would really make Kracker smile. And when the master smiles, I smile. But now the bastard Zombie has gotten himself killed, and I’m left with nothing.”
“You want to put Zombies down? We used to do that to dogs.”
“Save the weeping, Smokey. Zombies aren’t human.”
“They’re partly human.” I knelt down beside the body.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“My job.”
“We don’t need a fucking Shadow-search, Jones.”
“I’ll decide that.”
“Christ, if you stepped on a cockroach, you’d Shadow-search that, wouldn’t you? The case is closed. Get out of there.”
“Too late, dogcop.”
I was already dropping down into dead thoughts, with fingers of smoke drifting through to the mind of a Zombie corpse…
Blackness… no flickerings… no signs of life… half-life… any kind of last life… fruitless… my shadows drifting through the layers of darkness… deeper yet… the darkness growing… so cold… layers of death unfolding… and then enfolding me… the need to pull free… back to life… and then… a sparkle of light in the hidden depths… bursting… the world… bursting the world with greenness… too much colour to be taking… large sucking flowers at my shadow throat… fronds of love… flowers on fire… dancing… dancing…
Pull out…
I was fighting back to the everyday life, the living life, needing it so much.
I expected Zero to at least show some interest, but when I came back to earth, his eyes were full of disgust at my shadowy processes. With total disregard, he twisted the cop feather into his mouth, calling off the Zombie alert. “Master Kracker, we found that monster. No more worries.” Something like that, I guess. He pulled out the feather and then shifted his wet eyes over towards me. “One less worry, Smokey,” he said. “Dog-killer down and nullified. Shit! Aaaaachhhooosssshhhhh!” He couldn’t stop sneezing. “These flowers are getting to me.”
“Okay,” I said, “who killed the Zombie?”
“Like who the fuck cares? Jesus-Dog! Zombies don’t count.”
“He was killed by the flowers, Zero. Just like Coyote. I found the same presence in both of their minds. The explosion. It’s some kind of garden.”
“Kracker says that we bury the taxi-dog tomorrow. Kracker wants to announce to the press that the Zombie killed Coyote, and that we took the Zombie out with cop-fire. What do you reckon, Smokey? Is that a good business plan? Would that stop a riot?”
“And Gumbo YaYa will go along with this lie?”
“Gumbo’s not running the force, Smokey.”
“Isn’t he? You been listening to him, lately?” Zero nodded. “You’ll know then that he’s put out an all-points bulletin on some Xcabber called Boadicea. She broke free of the ranks yesterday, some hours after the murder. She was also known as Boda. Ring any doggy-bells, Zero?”