The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl Read online

  “You’ll feel better once you have a shower.”

  “You’ll feel better once I have a shower,” she said, with a touch of her old venom. “I like being muddy. It makes me feel strong. There was this bitch at the coffee shop—”

  “You went to the coffee shop?” Denis said. “Looking like this?”

  “This is the way I look. That’s the way it is.”

  Marvelous. So now other people knew Jane was crazy. Maybe no one had recognized her; she wasn’t exactly a regular at Genius Loci. Though, oddly, she seemed to be driving toward the coffee shop again, not slowing down for the turn to his house. Denis touched the steering wheel lightly. “Turn right here, Jane,” he said.

  She looked at him, blinking, then nodded and made the turn.

  Jane pulled into a parking space in front of his apartment. “We’ll get your car washed tomorrow, too,” Denis said, getting out.

  “I don’t know. I like having a mud chariot. A vehicle created by the patriarchy, but consecrated to the goddess.”

  “Okay, Jane.”

  She got out of the car and went to his door. Denis followed. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to jump into the shower first and clean off the traces of her touch, or let her clean up right away. They could always shower together, though that would mean watching the filth stream off her, turning the floor of the shower brown. . . . No, thank you. He could wait.

  In the light of the living room, Jane looked terrible, hardly human at all. Her face, which he’d thought merely pale, was actually covered in white clay, as if she were made up for some primitive death-festival.

  Jane went into the bathroom, then came out again. “I don’t want to use your towels,” she said, half smiling. “I know how you are about stains. And I’ll need clean clothes. I washed some things at the Laundromat, before I picked you up and we went into the hills. I remember that. The laundry bags are still in the car. I’ll get them.”

  “No, I’ll go,” Denis said. He suppressed a shudder at the thought of Jane touching clean laundry with her filthy hands.

  “We’ll both go.”

  Denis sighed. She never let him do anything for her, as if the very offer of assistance were an act of male oppression. “Fine.”

  They went out to the car. Jane swung the hatchback open and reached inside for a bag of laundry.

  Denis just stood, staring.

  There was a body in the back of Jane’s car. A woman’s body, naked, mud-streaked, and curled up, long hair hiding her face. Jane seemed completely unaware of the corpse’s presence as she grunted and tugged on the laundry bag. She couldn’t get the bag loose because the dead body was lying on top of it. With a final yank, Jane pulled the bag free, and the body rolled over.

  The corpse’s hair fell away, revealing the face.

  It was Jane, her features slack, her eyes blank and glazed.

  Denis drew breath to scream, but before he could, the other Jane, Mud-Jane, said, “Well, are you going to help or not? Grab the other bag. I don’t know which one has the towels.”

  Denis exhaled, counting to nine in his mind, calming down. This was Jane, too. He was sure of it—only Jane talked to him that way, looked at him that way. Her expression of half-amused annoyance was instantly recognizable, even through a mask of mud.

  Maybe Jane hadn’t gone crazy. Maybe Denis had. His guilt over leaving her trapped had conjured this corpse in the car to haunt him. It was just a hallucination, and would fade away. That was the only reasonable explanation.

  “Sometime this year, lover,” Mud-Jane said, shouldering the bag and walking to the apartment.

  Denis hauled out the other bag of laundry, then stood looking at the body and the inside of the car. There were muddy handprints on the windows. While Jane was trapped, she must have crawled from the passenger seat into the back, beaten on the glass. But why? Because there was more room to move back there? Because it was more comfortable to lie curled on a bag of laundry? Because there was nothing else to do, there in the suffocating dark?

  I have to get rid of the corpse, he thought. But he didn’t have to, not really, because there was no corpse. This was just something his mind was doing to him, a torment, a hallucination. He would wake up tomorrow, or later tonight, and everything would be fine again. Denis had a resilient mind. It would bounce back from this. It would.

  He closed the hatchback and hauled the laundry into his apartment. As he put down the laundry bag on the living room couch, he heard the water start running in the bathroom. She must have found the towels in the other bag. Denis sat down, legs shaking, and put his head in his hands. He had to think, calm down. He counted to nine, then to multiples of nine.

  After she’d been in the shower for about two minutes, Jane began to scream.

  Tarantula Juice

  * * *

  Marzi pushed her way through the throng standing around the bar at the Red Room, one of the most popular nightspots in Santa Cruz, until she reached the back corner, where Lindsay and Jonathan sat chatting. Jonathan nodded when he saw her, looking pleasantly buzzed and about as laid-back as it was possible to be while remaining somewhat vertical.

  “I’ve just been showing Jonathan how to get free drinks,” Lindsay said, almost shouting over the thumping music and crowd noise.

  Marzi took an unattended chair from another table and sat down. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Three different guys in one hour,” Jonathan said. “She goes up to the bar, talks to a guy, touches his elbow, and bang: She gets a drink.”

  “He didn’t even mention my smooth dismount,” Lindsay said, speaking in an overprecise way that Marzi knew from long experience meant she was more than a little drunk. “I left those boys flattered and wanting more.”

  Marzi smiled at Jonathan. “So she left you to entertain yourself while she worked her wiles?”

  “I have a rich inner life,” he said. “And I’ve been watching the crowd.”

  There were plenty of people to watch. The Red Room was one of the prime places to see and be seen in Santa Cruz, and it was thronged tonight by people wearing silk, velvet, black boots, short skirts, tight shirts, and shining smiles. The bartenders moved with the efficiency of Swiss clockwork figures behind the bar, dispensing drinks in an endless stream.

  “I tried to get him to pick up girls with me, but he wouldn’t.” Lindsay pouted.

  “Working with her would just highlight the inadequacy of my own meager skills,” Jonathan said, without cracking a smile.

  Marzi poked Lindsay in the side with her forefinger. “I ran into Alice tonight.”

  “Alice wouldn’t mind if I picked up girls,” Lindsay said. “So long as I shared.”

  Marzi opened her mouth to say more about Alice—to convey, at least in part, the gist of their peculiar conversation—but decided against it. This wasn’t the time or the place; it wasn’t a conversation that would work well when shouted to a drunk listener.

  “I’m for another drink,” Lindsay said, downing her gin and pushing back from the table. She went to the bar, squeezing in and leaning beside a man in a blue polyester shirt. She smiled at him with every watt of her considerable charm.

  “And Lindsay says she isn’t pretty,” Marzi said, shaking her head.

  Jonathan nodded. “She does. She told me she gets by on bluff. She dazzles them, so they don’t look too closely. I thinks she actually believes it.” He sipped his drink. “This is fun. I didn’t expect to be out on the town. I figured on spending the night—hell, the whole summer—holed up in my room, working, but Lindsay wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Lindsay’s good people,” Marzi said. “Being friends with her is like being friends with the whole town—she knows everybody.”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t be that social. I get tired just watching her.”

  Marzi nodded. “She’s got a gift. So. How’re you liking the Pigeonhole?”

  He looked blank for a moment, then grimaced. “Is that what you call it? My apartment?”
/>   “Yeah. Well, Hendrix calls it ‘the Pigeoncote,’ but he’s pretentious.”

  “When I talked to him about renting it, he called it ‘cozy.’ ”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “The shower’s like a coffin stood on end, and if you sit up in bed you hit your head on the slope of the ceiling. But I have to admit, I’ve lived in worse places. Never smaller places, but worse ones. And it’s cheap.”

  “Cheapest rent in downtown Santa Cruz,” Marzi said. “I think it’s the lack of a kitchen that keeps the price down.”

  “And the fact that the café is open until one in the morning.”

  “Also a factor.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. I’m a night owl. The café’s pretty quiet during the day, right?”

  “When Hendrix refrains from blasting Megadeth, yeah. His taste in music is loud and antediluvian. Still, I couldn’t live in the Pigeonhole. It would make for a shorter walk to work, but really. Too claustrophobic.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make it a permanent residence. But for now, it suits me. And it’s close to my work.”

  “You’re studying Garamond Ray, right?”

  Jonathan nodded. “The murals are some of his last works. They’re fascinating.”

  “Good thing I convinced Hendrix not to paint over them, then.”

  Jonathan’s eyes widened, the first sign of strong emotion Marzi had seen in him—he hadn’t reacted that much even to Jane’s attack. “He wanted to paint over them?”

  Marzi leaned close, to speak near his ear. “Yeah, last year. Some little old ladies complained about Harlequin, said he was making them nervous, grinning there on the wall. And then some guy who called himself a color therapist told Hendrix that the Ocean Room was an unhealthy hue, and that Hendrix should paint everything pale green. Hendrix was really going to do it, too, but I got all the regulars to threaten to boycott the place if he did. Well, almost all the regulars—Denis told Hendrix he’d like to see the walls painted white and decorated with this ‘Abstract Prismatic’ series of paintings Denis did. A bunch of soulless paintings of crystal matrices. Hendrix actually gave that serious thought, too. I swear, the guy has a brain like Silly Putty, he’s so impressionable. But Hendrix pays attention to business first, so when the regulars complained, he left the murals alone.” Marzi thought the real kicker had probably been when she threatened to quit if he painted over the murals; Hendrix seemed to have an almost supernatural dread that Marzi would stop working there. Probably knew he’d never find another dependable assistant manager who’d work for such shit wages.

  Jonathan shook his head. “I can’t imagine. Those paintings are irreplaceable.”

  “I didn’t realize Garamond Ray was such a big deal,” Marzi said. No one would ever be so zealous about protecting her work.

  Jonathan shrugged. “He’s not well known, but he’s a fascinating figure. He did murals in New York in the seventies, and also did a lot of poster work, album covers for punk rock bands, stuff like that. Had a few shows, picked up a small cult following. He was quite a character, apparently, used to hang out in bars and hold court, tell stories, get in fistfights. He specialized in these sort of mock-cutesy images with a sinister overlay—sort of Norman Rockwell viewed through a mescaline trip, nightmarish Currier and Ives. Then Ray moved to California, doing more underground illustration, murals here and there. Genius Loci used to be a shared-house artists’ collective; lots of people moved in and out, but Ray lived there for years—he was the linchpin. In 1989, he disappeared. The murals in Genius Loci are his last works, as far as anyone knows.”

  Marzi hadn’t known that, about the café’s history. “Ray disappeared after the earthquake, right?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “During the earthquake. He was seen that morning, but once the quake hit, that was it. No more Garamond Ray. He’s not officially listed as one of the fatalities, because his body was never found. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him. He was a real hog for publicity and attention, though, and most people think that his being silent for so long means he’s definitely dead.”

  “And now you’re studying him.”

  Jonathan spread his hands. “I want to be the leading expert on the life and works of Garamond Ray. Beats ditchdigging. I had a little extra money, so I thought I’d come to Santa Cruz, live where Ray lived, surround myself with his work, and finish the writing here. The photos I’ve seen don’t do the murals justice. That one, of the street café, with the gods—”

  “The Teatime Room,” Marzi said, nodding. The mural in the Teatime Room featured a host of Egyptian gods seated at a Parisian-style sidewalk café. Thoth dipped his beak into a fluted glass, Anubis sipped from a porcelain cup brimming with blood, and Sekhmet held a tea-press that contained a human heart. “I love that painting. It should be creepy, but it’s somehow just . . . peaceful.”

  He looked interested again, and Marzi wondered if art was the only thing that cracked his cool. “All the rooms have names?” he asked.

  “Unofficial ones, sure. As far as I know, Ray never titled them.”

  “Still, it’s a useful shorthand I can use in my paper. What are the names?”

  Marzi counted on her fingers. “The Circus Room, the Ocean Room, the Teatime Room, and the Cloud Room. Then there’s the main room—if we called it anything, we’d call it the Space Room. And there are some mutant-looking sunflowers painted in the kitchen—they have stems segmented like crab legs—but we don’t have a special name for the kitchen.”

  “So that’s six rooms, counting the kitchen. But aren’t there supposed to be seven rooms? That’s what I always heard. There’s supposed to be another—”

  Just then Lindsay came over, holding a drink in one hand and leading a boy with the other. Marzi felt strangely relieved by the interruption. She didn’t want to talk about the seventh room, the closed-up storage room behind the kitchen. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to avoid the subject—there was no big mystery, it wasn’t like Bluebeard’s guestroom or anything—but the aversion was unmistakable. She’d been inside that room only once, just a couple of weeks before she dropped out of college. Maybe she simply associated the seventh room with that bad time in her life, the medical withdrawal, the hospital . . .

  “This is Daniel,” Lindsay said. The boy—who Marzi guessed was at least a year too young to be in the Red Room legally—smiled. “He’s an art student.”

  “Aren’t they all,” Marzi said.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said, then turned back to Marzi. “Any-way, I heard there’s a seventh room, with a desert motif. I guess you’d call it the Desert Room—”

  The whole world lurched around Marzi. Her first thought was “Earthquake!” but this was a wholly internal shifting. She felt as if the bones in her skull were moving, as if doors she’d always kept closed had been jerked wide open—her head felt full, overfull, like a barrel spilling over in a heavy rain.

  The room . . . changed. Not physically, not fundamentally, but there was a sort of visual superimposition, as if the barely visible ghost of another place were occupying the same space as the Red Room.

  Marzi looked around, and mixed in among the hipsters and drunks she saw the dim forms of grizzled cowboys and worn-down women. The ghost of a honky-tonk piano stood in the far corner, played by a man with an absurd mustache and sleeve garters, and she could almost make out the strains of his jangly song. Marzi squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to banish the hallucination, but when she looked again, the ghostly forms were even more substantial, now sepia-toned like figures in old photographs.

  The Red Room was being overtaken, or replaced, or merged with another saloon, a place with a name like the Bucket of Blood, the Trail Blossom, the Saddle Sore. The carpet occasionally gave way to patches of plank flooring, and the real bar seemed to float atop another bar, one made of a splintery board laid across stacked crates. The young, efficient bartenders were joined by a hulking, slow-moving man polishing a beer glass with a filthy rag, an
d as Marzi watched the real bartenders passed through the sepia-tone phantom without any of them taking notice.

  This ghost saloon wasn’t quite like the ones you saw in movies—the floor was too dirty for that, the whores were too fat, and the men had rotten teeth. This was a scene from history—or from Marzi’s comic, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, somehow transformed from black ink on white paper into full-color reality.

  Jonathan, Lindsay, and Daniel were all still with her, sitting around the table, which now shared space with a ghostly table of pitted wood. Their clothes seemed to shift and change before her eyes, changing to shadowy period garb and back to normal again. At the moment, Jonathan wore a black shirt, black jeans, and a black hat, along with an onyx-and-silver bolo tie. Lindsay wore a red, ruffled Miss Kitty saloon-girl dress. Daniel was dressed like an Eastern dandy, a banker, maybe, who’d walked into entirely the wrong bar, and now sat stupidly with his back to the room, drawing glares from the other customers.

  If Marzi stared hard at any particular place in the Red Room, the ghostly saloon receded entirely, but still swarmed in her peripheral vision. She was . . . having an event. A stress reaction. Maybe even the beginnings of a seizure. But she held on to that oldest hope for health and happiness: If I ignore what’s wrong, maybe it will go away.

  “Daniel, tell them what you told me, about what happened in Dr. Maltin’s class,” Lindsay said, beaming in drunken benevolence. Her clothes shifted back to normal when Marzi looked at her.

  “Oh,” Daniel said, unaware of the grimy prospectors watching him, the cowboys spitting spectral tobacco juice toward his chair. “I came into class late, and—”

  The crowd of cowboys and miners suddenly began moving, clearing away from the middle of the bar, rushing toward the far walls. Worse yet, the real people were moving, too, more slowly and apparently unconsciously, just drifting aside to clear a path from the front door to Marzi’s table.

  Marzi moaned softly. Jonathan leaned closer. “You okay?”

  No. She wasn’t okay. She was cracking up, seeing things—this was even worse than her experiences from two years before.