“No,” I said, shaking the bottle at them and sending a few drops sizzling into the grass. “No. Haven’t you heard, darlings, I don’t have any secrets. None at all. That’s for better than the likes of me.”
“You’re a fool if you think you’ve no secrets worth sending away,” said a roan foal.
Before I could ask it what it meant, it fled across the paddock, taking most of the herd with it. I could see strange sparkling things kicked up as they ran, and imagined it was the glory of the Triple Crowns and Derbies in their future, flying up behind them before they met their ends with their long legs shattered on the field and a bullet between their eyes.
I made my way across the meadow to the garage which hadn’t been turned into a stable just yet. The door had a heavy-duty lock on it, but neither Daisy nor Tom could be bothered when they wanted to go for a quick drive so I found it unlocked as usual, and the keys to the cars kept there were halfway hidden in a turquoise pot high on a shelf at the back. I was shorter than Daisy or Tom, and I had to reach all the way up to hook my finger through the rim of the pot, pulling it down with my fingertips to shatter on the concrete floor with a terrible smash. The earthenware fragments went everywhere, and I had to pick out the keys I wanted from the dust and the shards. The keys to the coupe were missing, but I pulled out the keys to Daisy’s little blue roadster, a glittering platinum D hanging off the key chain to let the whole world know to whom the roadster belonged.
I took Daisy’s car out onto the road, roaring west as soon as I was clear of the drive. I took another bolt of the demoniac for luck, and I turned towards Willets Point and the ash yard.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was all over except for the shouting by the time I made it to Willets Point, and in truth, the shouting was just a long thin wail that came from the garage, the door still open and the thin light from a hurricane lamp spilling out. Every time George Wilson paused for breath, I could hear a lifetime of chewing tobacco in his throat. I parked the car crooked on the verge close to the gas station, behind the edge of the building so it would be out of sight.
While I was driving, the moon had risen, and I lifted the demoniac, almost half gone by now, to its pocked and imperfect face.
I wonder what the moon will look like in Tonkin. No, no, it’s Vietnam, I remembered. Bai had been quite down on me calling it Tonkin, and now I was mostly doing it to spite her memory in my head. The Manchester Act was going to pass, I realized in my haze, and Louisville or not, Baker or not, I had better decide what it might do to me and what I would do about it.
I hated the thought of leaving New York, not for a holiday or a retreat but because I had to, and I drank down another measure of the demoniac in protest. The taste had mellowed now, or I had managed to burn away the part of me that cared. I thought it was getting less effective the more I drank, but then a pair of men stumbled by, arm in arm, and I saw their skeletons underneath their clothes and their skin, grinning faces knocking together affectionately as they passed a bottle of something cheap back and forth between them.
Or not so very weak after all, I thought, and I got out of the car.
The moment I stepped out of the car, I was in some dark land, separate as Park Avenue was separate from Chinatown. The few city blocks of Willets Point was its own kingdom entire. With a solemn face, I wandered through the tall ash palaces where the towers and the wings were always drifting away, only to be replaced by the burning of New York itself.
Oh, I thought in sudden revelation, this is where New York goes when it is tired, when it is done.
I expected to see ghosts of all sorts, of gin baby socialites, of gangsters and bellhops and countermen and maids and grand dames and ambassadors, but I never did.
“C’mon, jelly bean,” said a Black man with a trumpet case walking by. He had a brilliant maroon suit with a narrow black pinstripe, and the ash blew away from him as if too shy to touch the hem of his sleeve. “You know better than that. New York’s ghosts are a discerning lot; there’s no way they would stay here to play in the ash.”