Piper

Chapter One

At four o’ clock, Jolene watched a polka-dot sundress the burnt color of old orange peels walk into the county courthouse. It was too cold for above the knees clothing, but the girl inside the sundress wore it anyway because she knew how good it looked. She was holding hands with a boy - couldn't have been over twenty, either one of them - leading him down the long hallway. And she laughed as she walked, making sure to turn her head as she did, so that anyone watching was zapped with her clean, electric smile. And everyone was watching, by that point: the cloth-pile bums with lost-and-found eyes, the oil-slick criminals, melting against worn wooden benches as they waited to be called. The numb, shifty ones in a hierarchy of suits. And Jolene, of course, looking out of place propped up against the stainless steel water fountain.

Polka-dot glanced sideways at the motley crew lining the hall, categorizing as she passed. Those Unfortunates, check. Lowlife, check. And when she got to Jolene: A Character. Check.

Kids, Jolene thought, with the fond condescension that twenty-three years has for twenty. She saw the marriage license in the boy's hand, and gave them a year, tops. Tanner wasn’t likely to be done anytime soon - sexual harassment cases took time, more time than the sexual harassment - and meanwhile, Jolene was bored. She eased away from the water fountain, ambling towards the couple and slipping both hands into her back pockets. The boy was talking in a low voice and waving the slightly creased piece of paper, but he stopped when Jolene walked up to them. Polka-dot turned around, pressing her sulky lips - coconut scented, but Jolene carefully didn't even grin - together.

"Who are you?" she demanded, trying to tap a sandal in irritation. The delicate slapping sound drew stares, so she stopped.

Jolene raised both hands - give them the classic who, me? - and smiled disarmingly. "You two are getting married, right?"

"We were going to, but Tom-" she bit down, ruthlessly trimming a more affectionate 'Tommy.' "-forgot we needed witnesses."

Tommy forgot? Precious Tommy?

"Oh, sure," Jolene soothed. Look at me, a harmless, obliging Character. "Three is pretty standard."

Tommy patted Polka-dot's bare shoulders tentatively, his eyes searching out Jolene's. She knew the look - you saw it all the time at Mister L's, when the fresh customers would press their hands on the counter and lean forward with that look. It meant: I made a mess. Would you clean it up for me, kiss and make better or pull the sheet up over my head? And then they threw in the slapped baby boy act for luck, tucking in the corners of their mouths and lifting their eyebrows.

"We called all our friends! None of them can come, and we just have to get married today, just have to!" Polka-dot was the kind of girl who leaned too close to you and spoke so everyone could hear how upset she was. Thoughtful, sharing, you know the type. She had a 'poised to fall in love' look - and on her wedding day! - that reminded Jolene of Lexi, waiting in their apartment like a spider. A sensitive spider, who was majoring in psychology and wished that Jolene would discuss her feelings more openly. Even thinking about Lexi made Jolene tired.

Meanwhile, the boy amateured the Voice of Reason, kissing the girl's glossy, exotic shampoo hair. "Now, Connie..."

Ah. So she did have a name. But Connie and Tommy? Jolene revised her estimate to six months. Tops.

"Well," and she could play the Voice of Reason game as good as any, "some of these lovely people would be willing to help out, for a small fee." Her spread-hand, sweeping gesture almost hit Connie, who jumped. But Tommy was enthused, and turned to survey the options. He started walking towards the suit hierarchy, his eyes on a gabardine, and maybe the pin stripe, but Jolene headed him off. In return for a copy of the wedding photo, she led them to the other side of the courthouse.

"Kids, these three-" Junkie, Lowlife, Thief, "-will make the best witnesses you're going to find. Of course I'm sure." And she shrugged, spreading her palms like a magician at a kid's birthday party. Top hat entertainment, but, god, that's going to make a great picture.

Just then, Tanner appeared, stalking out from one of the anonymous doors into the hallway. He caught sight of Jolene, tipped his head towards the exit, and walked outside. She rolled her eyes, but quickly gave Polka-dot her address and followed him out.

Jolene caught up with Tanner a few blocks down the street, still grinning, and pulling on her jacket as she ran. He took long steps, grinding his heels against the cement and hunching his shoulders. At least anger would keep him warm, and him outside in that stupid t-shirt. She'd have to remember to tell him about Polka-dot some other time. In all the best film noir traditions, Tanner was obviously a guy with somethin' on his mind. You're good, you're very good. Jolene decided to ask, even though she could already tell what he would say.

"So, how'd it go? Fifteen to twenty?"

"It's not cricket," said Tanner, who could get away with saying things like that. After all, he was one hundred percent, genuine farm boy, who had put down the hayseed cliché in favor of a shitty little duplex and Vanessa the ex-wife.

"Hey, Tanner, stay with me here. What's not, um, 'cricket'?"

He grimaced. "It’s not right. The sons a' bitches actually still think I might have done it."

Jolene hooked one arm in his, to show that she could. Tanner didn't acknowledge the gesture, but she felt him relax slightly.

"So," she said lightly, her shoulder pressed against his. "How was she able to resist you in the first place?"

"I've barely even met the woman!"

Jolene nodded understandingly. "I suppose that would do it. Though..." and she stepped in front of him, leaning a hand on each of his shoulders, "...I've seen your kind come and go, and I have to admit, you do look the part." Which was a blatant lie. Tanner was a golden boy, grew up in overalls, one of the blond-and-blue. She used to kid him that he looked like a Hitler youth, but that wasn't really true either.

Tanner sighed, and almost smiled. "Well, anyway, she's not even sure that it was me she saw. She was kind of drunk." He paused, then looked over at Jolene with something even closer to his normal, sloppy grin. "You utter bastard," he growled, and they walked the rest of the way to Mister L's.

Mister L's, or Ell's, was not a restaurant & bar. It was not a club, didn't have a dance floor or strippers or a live band. It was simply where a lot of people came to get very drunk. Occasionally deals were made - and broken, those were the ones you read about in the papers - at the little round tables that sprouted up in the one-room bar. Bathrooms painted by genuine local no-talents. But mostly there was the sour stink of alcohol, and the glass-clink of the miserable burying their dead, if only for a few hours. It was not an overwhelmingly happy place.

Jolene and Tanner were both bartenders at Mister L's, along with Angela, John R., and Dutch. The owner called himself Ziggy. There were several theories as to who the L, featured in flickering orange neon on the roof, had been. Ziggy, who was always worried that the hand-me-down sign would snap off and hit a little kid with a lawyer-father, claimed that it stood for 'liability.' Angela thought that it was for 'lewdness,' and should serve as a warning to attractive bartenders. Angela was an attractive bartender.

"Look," Jolene had told her sternly, a few months ago. "You work at a bar. People get drunk, say things. There's no reason to overreact."

"That's fine for you," Angela had responded sourly, "They don't grab you."

Which was almost true. Jolene openly flirted the customers, swaying to whatever music Ziggy had playing - and it was always just a few beats more than rock, and a few beats shy of a porno - but there was something coffee about her face, to a drunk. Just try it. Make my day.

It was all an act, of course. She could have told Angela how to stop people touching any day. She didn't because Angela had told her once, in sacred, carpet party confidence, that she didn't really mind it. Not so much. But all you had to do was stop smiling. If you didn't shriek, fan at the hands, but instead just stared at them, they would dry up quick. True, you got the slapped boy more often, baby animal eyes on the liquor-slick face, but it still made the job a lot easier.

Jolene didn't have to guess what the L in Mister L's stood for. It stood for Lewie, the name of Mister L's original owner. She knew this because she'd been working at the bar since she was fifteen, back when Lewie was still alive to hire underage bartenders and smoke his squat, second-rate cigars.

That night, after she and Tanner arrived at the bar together from the county courthouse, things drifted along pretty slow until after ten o' clock. Tanner wiped down the bar, and Jolene scribbled on an unfolded bar napkin. She had to get a paragraph written by tomorrow, and there was no chance of writing once she got back to the apartment.

In her spare time, to keep the creditors fed, Jolene wrote clever weekly gibberish for a small-time rag that was currently calling itself The Slice. People liked her pieces because they didn't mean anything, while appearing to mean everything. And dashes. She used a lot of dashes. That was the first thing Harold Rainey, editor of The Slice, had noticed a year ago when she brought him a sample. "Very clever," he had said, scratching the little soft strip of skin just below his mustache and staring at the letter in his hand. "Nice use of dashes."

She had stood in his office, or what he called his office, stuffy windowless closet that it was, and explained to a dubious Harold why it would work.

"The trick is just to let people think they know what's going on, and they'll find something to agree with. See, everyone thinks they're right, and so they make whatever they read fit into that worldview."

She first noticed this as a kid, watching her mother agree with every viewpoint that drifted past in the form of neighbors and friends. Mama just Mmm'd or Ah, yes'd everyone, and they drew their own conclusions. It was magic spice, extract of Egotism, that people sprinkled liberally before consumption.

The piece that she finally had brought to The Slice, and Harold Rainey, was another one she had scribbled on a napkin on one of those slow, aimless night at Mister L's:

"But a little closet girl screamed to the thigh-doughnuts, back away from baby blue! Beautiful baby blue, with a cherry on his cheek and great, galloping white night-lights. He's afraid of the dark, of the sky, of cellophane and cell phones and baby books with price tags. Long, wallet-halls with their open gaping gray-metal mouths. A little girl with news-at-nine hair and old hands, she held up her old, sold hands to protect the blue baby. She sunk hot nails into linoleum, into newly old jeans with careful fraying holes, bit in with her dog-teeth and hung on for powdered baby blue. They had to close the mall for a week."

She had gotten some fan mail a few days after Harold decided to publish that first one. Two of those letters she kept, tacked side-by-side on the square of corkboard on her kitchen wall. In one, a woman was fervently praising Jolene's 'sharp assessment of American materialism.' And in the second, Jolene was informed that her last piece, 'a sharp, touching description of child prostitution,' had actually made someone named Martha weep. As thrilling as that was, Jolene really only kept them around because she appreciated the irony.

"What I really like," she would sometimes tell visitors, when they noticed the letters, "is how they both used the word 'sharp.'"

But in his office a year ago, Harold wasn't convinced. "Dashes aren't everything, Ms.-" he stumbled, glancing down at the sheet in his hand, "Ms. Tarrow. This is very nearly incoherent."

"Ah, but you do think that it's clever, right?"

"Possibly." He had staring at her with those closed, no sale eyes.

"And why do you think that it's clever?" Jolene was thinking about her apartment, about the fact that Charlie, dear Charlie, hadn't helped with the rent for three months now. And Lexi was still Lexi. Last month, she had presented the landlord with her newest painting - gaudy pina colada fingers stroking a grayscale American flag - in place of her share of the rent money.

"Why don't you just offer him your body for a night?" Jolene had asked Lexi, fingering six crisp, green hours at Mister L's in one hand.

"You can't make her leave," Charlie said later that night. "Don't you remember being a starving college student?"

"I never went to college," Jolene lied, rolling away from him in the little bed they shared.

"Look, she'll get her act together next month. She told you so." And when she didn't answer, "So will I. Promise."

Feminism, belly up to the bar, because Jolene was still supporting that hot, month-older little nerve center family of three. She had struggled to keep herself in Harold Rainey's office.

"Why." It wasn't exactly a question, but Jolene, trying not to drift apart, had answered him anyway.

"It isn't clever. It's well-worded bullshit. But you think it's clever because you almost understand it." She had wondered for a moment if the 'you' was a bit too personal. Editors were a touchy breed, she'd heard. But Harold hadn't seemed to notice.

While he ruminated, Jolene had tried to stop herself from counting the liver spots spattered across his hands, below the rolled-up flannel shirtsleeves.

"Alright, Ms. Tarrow."

One, two...

"I'm going to give this a shot. I'll run this one in next week's issue."

Four...

"Bring me another one on Friday afternoon, sharp."

Five...

Jolene had nodded with the overstated, funeral solemnity. "Will do." And then, because she was thinking about her new co-worker at Mister L's, a country-to-city story named Tanner, she had added, "That's cricket." Harold Rainey had stared after her - what the blazes? - as she strolled out of the cramped little office.

Jolene always signed the pieces 'A Character', in memory of the girl in the polka-dot dress. Rest in Peace, Mrs. divorcée-by-now. Still, you never knew, and when Jolene thought about Charlie she felt like the worst kind of hypocrite.

At ten o' clock, drawn back to Mister L's from her musing, Jolene noticed that Tanner was acting strange. He had been sipping all night, and was now staring moodily at an empty barstool. Sipping was when an employee finished off a deserted drink; unsanitary, but not too much so, and common. The customer had already paid, of course, so Ziggy generally looked the other way. Tanner never looked healthy when he drank, said it didn't come natural to him. His skin took on a low pearl sheen, and he began to sweat. Worse, he had started smiling, a faint, sloppy spreading of lips, and gesturing with the scar-shiny, accidental half-finger. It looked eerie in the bad light of the bar, and several customers had gotten a nasty shock looking up into his pothole eyes.

Frankie Landers, one of the bar's too-regulars, leaned forward and crooked a finger at Jolene. She sauntered over with the half-empty bottle of spiced rum that he had been trying to polish off for the better part of an hour.

"Help you, Kid?"

"That's one of the privileges," she had told Charlie, back when she first knew him. "You get to call everyone 'Kid.' I don't care if they're eighty-nine, with spotty skulls and Parkinson's, they're all Kid after a drink or two."

Frankie coughed thoughtfully, then spoke in his frayed, shabby voice. "Your, hmm, your friend doesn't look so good."

"Tanner? Oh, he's fine." But she was thinking, I almost called Tanner a kid.

"You have the most amaz... amaze-ing face." Frankie took another sip of the color of honey, choking as it smoldered all the way down his throat.

"You want me to top it off?"

"Naaah. I have a wife. Pretty wife too, green." And he began to laugh, the awful slow-death sound that Jolene had learned to recognize. "She's not green," he said, speaking through that chuckling mouth gash. "Not green!"

And then he was crying, the way they sometimes were.

Jolene got off work at midnight. She left Tanner curled up on a little couch in the back room, and told Angela to keep an eye on him. He had been talking in his sleep, or not quite talking but making soft little child crying sounds that were almost words.

"What's up with him?" Angela asked, popping her gum. Lately she had taken to chewing bubblegum constantly - something she saw in a movie, no doubt - and the back room stank of that sugary, manufactured, cough syrup smell of grapes. Jolene made a mental note to buy some breath mints, tic-tacs maybe, and leave them in Angela's coat pocket.

"He had a hard day," she said, gesturing to Tanner's prone form. "Be nice."

"So is it true he raped that girl?"

"It wasn't rape, it was sexual harassment," Jolene said, patiently. "Someone asked her to take her pants off, and so she's suing for mental anguish. They aren't sure if it was Tanner or not." And then, seeing the eager thrill of fear on Angela's face, she added in a low voice, "But apparently when they searched his room, they found your name written on the walls, like, a thousand times. They told me to warn you. I wouldn't say anything Tanner because, I mean, you never know."

Well, at the very least, it would keep Angela away from him. And the look on the girl's face was downright tasty.

Jolene's apartment was only a few blocks away from Mister L's, so she usually walked. The gritty orange streetlights splashed down on her in time-stop flashes, glittering on a film of oil on the sidewalk. The city was pulsing, breathing all around her, and the ticking of her shoes melted into the jitterbug urban heartbeat.

She was walking slowly, taking a breather in between rounds, when something stapled to a telephone post drew her gaze. It caught at her, snagged in her mind and then slowly, smoothly reeled her in. It was a simple theater poster, classy black and white with a frozen, blooming orange explosion in the center. There were only a few words on the poster; the play was Piper, and auditions would be held on Monday. Nomadic Theaters - named by George and Jerry Nome, and Jolene suspected that it was the brothers' best joke - on Magnolia Street.

Jolene pressed her thumb against the chilled metal of the staple as she tore the poster off. Then, folding it twice, she tucked both hands back in her pockets and walked the last few blocks to the apartment.

>>Any and all comments welcome. I'm posting the first two chapter now, so if you can't see the second one than just refresh. Thanks for reading!