The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ the house.

      “Irene’s a photographer,” Hackbutt said. His tone said, I’m crazy about Irene.

      The photographs were all of Irene, taken by Irene. Irene’s left eye, Irene’s chin, Irene’s right knee, Irene’s vagina (oh, yes), Irene’s left breast in profile, full front, and close-up, emphasis on big nipple. Piat decided that the long dress wasn’t meant to hide her but to refer curiosity to the photos.

      “I’m doing an installation in Paris any time now.” Her voice had a hint of something foreign. “I just need to get my shit together and then it’s go any time I say so. Hackbutt’s gathering found objects for me.”

      Hackbutt smiled. “Irene’s going to be a household name.”

      “These are all, mm, you?” Piat said.

      “I don’t fuck around with false modesty. Yes, that’s my cunt, if that’s what you want to ask. The photos’ll be assembled on stuff we’ve found, mostly animal bones, to make a humanoid construction. I’m fastening the photos to the bones with barbed wire from an old fence he found.”

      “It’s called I Sing the Body Electric,” Hackbutt said.

      “Whitman,” she said.

      Piat thought of saying Whitman Who? but didn’t, aware that he didn’t like the woman at all, that she was going to be a problem, and at the same time finding a woman who took pictures of her own vagina perversely interesting. She also had a big, hearty, apparently healthy laugh, as if despite all the photos she was as sane as a stone and he ought to get to know her. For the sake of saying something, for the sake of having to put up with her, he said, “Are you going to cut the parts out of the photos when you, mm, barbed-wire them to the stuff?”

      “God, no, that would be so calculated!”

      That was just the central hall of the house, as far as they’d got at that point. There had been introductions, a pro forma question about something to drink—they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but they had water “from the hill” and juice, source not given—and then the photos, Hackbutt saying, as if they were the reason for the visit, “These are Irene’s photographs.”

      There was more of Irene throughout the house, Piat learned. Nobody picked up after him/herself, apparently, so parts of both of them were left where they fell: the living room, just to the left after you came in the front door, was thick with art magazines, falconry paraphernalia (Piat had bought a book in Glasgow, so he recognized the jesses, at least); batteries, probably used; a battery charger, plugged in but empty; a sizable number of animal bones; a plate that had held something oily. Four spindly plants in the windows, yearning for a sunnier climate. The kitchen, next behind the living room, was furnished mostly in dirty dishes, a camera, burned-down candles. Piat, himself scrupulously neat, wondered if he’d dare to eat anything that came out of it. On the right of the central hall were, first, a small bedroom (“You’re going to stay, aren’t you, Jack?”), then a closed door that led, he supposed, to their own bedroom, which he hoped they wouldn’t show him. He imagined dirty laundry in shoulder-high heaps. At the end of a corridor, another closed door hid what Hackbutt called “Irene’s studio.”

      Then it was out to see the birds, which were to Hackbutt as the photos were to Irene. They were hawks and falcons, different types that Piat couldn’t distinguish; hooded, silent, they sat on perches and occasionally turned their heads. Hackbutt insisted on feeding two of them for him to watch, and he demonstrated their training with one of them and an old sock that was supposed to represent a rabbit. Hackbutt almost had a glow around his head; his eyes were those of a fanatic. Partlow, he thought, had chosen well—if Hackbutt could be recruited.

      “I wish I’d known you were coming,” Irene said when she’d decided they had spent enough time on the birds. “We could have had lunch.”

      “I thought I might take you to lunch.”

      She laughed that big, healthy laugh. “Oh, Christ, you can’t do that in this godforsaken place! We don’t eat human food. We’re fucking vegans, nutcases. I go in a restaurant here and the smell makes me barf before I sit down!”

      “Maybe,” Hackbutt said, “maybe, honey, we could have a salad or something.”

      “I don’t think Jack is a salad type.” She looked Piat up and down. “He looks like a carnivore to me.”

      “Raw buffalo, mostly,” Piat said. He added no, no, he wouldn’t stay; no, thanks; no; but he had some things for them in the car he’d meant to bring in. Just sort of getting-reacquainted stuff.

      He hadn’t known why, but he’d thought Hackbutt would be poor. On a city street, Hackbutt could have passed for one of the homeless, but in his own context, he looked right, neither poor nor rich, certainly not needy. And Irene, no matter what she was now, had known money, he thought. The accent, a casual remark about “when I was at McGill,” a long-cultivated air of rebelliousness without penalty—no starving in garrets, please—told him she was doing a trapeze act over a very safe safety net. And the net, it turned out, was named Mother. “Oh, Mother sent that in her last Care package,” she said of a CD player. Said it with contempt, but then socked a CD into it and said she hoped he liked bluegrass. He didn’t, in fact, but knew it would do no good to say so.

      He brought in the plastic shopping bag he’d filled in a supermarket in Oban, feeling not like Santa Claus but like the guest who’s brought the wrong kind of wine. He’d been wrong about Hackbutt; he’d underestimated him. Now he’d pay with the embarrassment of the wrong gifts.

      “Oh, friend, this is so wrong for us,” Irene said as she took out a tin of pâté. And the crackers. “God, they’ve got animal fat in them!” And the Johnnie Walker black, which had always been his gift to Hackbutt in the old days. “Oh, Eddie doesn’t drink anymore, do you, sweetie? Ohmmmm—” Big wet kiss. Ditto the Polish ham, the smoked salmon, and the petits fours (white sugar and animal fat).

      “You think I’m a nut, I know you do,” she said. She ran her fingers through her long, untidy hair. “You’re right. I am. I’m a crank. I’ve turned Eddie into a crank. But we’re fucking healthy!” She grinned. “And I do mean fucking healthy.” Hackbutt looked shy.

      Piat decided things were awful and it wouldn’t work. Dumb Dave wouldn’t be able to run Hackbutt with Irene around; Irene would be running Dave in about twelve hours. But if it didn’t work, at least not to the point where Piat got Dave and Hackbutt together, he was going to lose half his ten thousand bucks.

      “Actually,” Piat said when Hackbutt went off to the john, “actually, Irene, you’ve thrown me a curve.”

      She smiled. Whoopee.

      “What I mean is, I have a sort of, um, business to talk to Hackbutt about.”

      “Oh, Jeez, I never would have guessed.” She gave that big laugh. “Sweetie, of course you’ve got business to talk to Eddie about! The first thing he said when he got your card was, ‘He’ll want something.’” She tipped her head, smiled with her eyes a little scrunched up as if he was giving off too much light, and played with her hair. “What kind of thing do you want?”

      “You his agent?”

      “I’m his damp crotch, and don’t you forget it. Look, Jack, Eddie’s a wonderful man, but he needs somebody to СКАЧАТЬ