Sugarplum Karma

by S. Hutson Blount

 

Mel froze on her smile for her next customer. It was easy once she had gotten used to it. Easier than arguing with them, anyway. She just thought of each one of them as courtiers pleading their case before a throne.

“Will that be all, sir?” she asked.

“Two scratchers. No, not them. Those suck. Get me one of those hundred-thousand kind.”

“Fourteen twenty-two,” she said. “Good luck, and thank you for stopping at SonicStop!” Mel imagined, only briefly, things about poison needles.

The man looked at her suspiciously with rheumy eyes and took a handful of pennies from the dish to make up what he was short. He knept looking at her nervously as he left, scratching his uneven beard and muttering.

Mel kept smiling.

“I don’t like the look of that guy,” said Louis, the Assistant Night Manager. “Don’t like the way he was lookin’ at you. You okay to walk home?”

Mel stretched behind the register, glancing up past the smokes and energy drinks and novelty lighters and all the other convenience-store debris to check the clock. Quitting time already. “I carry a gun, remember.”

“I hate to see somethin’ happen to you, Mel.” Louis always looked bearlike in his too-small button-down shirt and too-short clip-on tie. “Only decent worker I got in here. You’re too little and too pretty to go wanderin’ around this neighborhood.”

Mel noticed he didn’t say “and too white” this time. She’d never said anything, but enough icy looks had gotten the message across. She drew her little .25 caliber from her waistband and showed it to him, to get another message across.

“Yeah, yeah. You carry a gun. That’s the sort of thing it’s best not to test if you don’t have to.”

“I’ve got your cell, Louis. I’ll call you and 911 if anything happens, we’ll see who gets to be first.”

- – -

Jute Hill wasn’t such an unpleasant place; Mel wasn’t sure why so many of the residents like the malign their home so. She guessed they’d probably never lived in a city that was all ruin, not just the unfashionable parts.

Mel lit up another Pall Mall and walked past the bus stop. They ran infrequently after midnight, and it was such a lovely moonlit night, anyway. The flickering neon of SonicStop’s sign faded behind her, and the street was painted in alternating palettes of moon silver and sodium-streetlight gold. The different lights caught her pink hair and purple lips in different ways, transforming her briefly into someone more exotic.

Over the mutter of the interstate, the night argued with itself in the voices of too-loud stereos and television sets. Distant popping noises marked an irrenconcilable disagreement; male and female shouting voices sketched out a nearer, and probably less permanent one. Even at midnight, Jute Hill bustled after its own fashion. No one noticed the lone punk rock girl in her crazy colors everyone thought were artificial.

The cement and painted iron steps up to her apartment didn’t register to Mel as she danced up to the third floor. She took a final drag on the cig before flicking it away and fishing for her keys.

Her door was unlocked.

The lock wasn’t forced; the peeling dark red paint wasn’t even disturbed. Mel knew it wasn’t a break-in. She drew her little automatic again anyway.

Hard moonlight through the dirty windows drew sharp lines through the clutter of the little efficiency. Mel stalked into her home, sneakers whispering on the linoleum.

“I know you’re in here,” she said in a singsong language that did not resemble English. “Whoever it is better show themselves right now.”

The refrigerator door cracked open, flooding the apartment with its feeble yellow light.

A tiny, gangly figure leapt out from the empty shelves, landing in a frenzy of stripes and bells and braids.

“My Majesty! I’ve found you at last! The little man was wild-eyed, and seemed to look in every direction at once. He played with the many plaited strands of his beard. “I had despaired to think that the Chancellor had sent me to the wrong place, this terrible, terrible place. I bear grave news, Queen Melyfwynth! Emergency! Swamp monsters at the borderlands!”

Mel wished she still had that cig. “Yes, yes. Come here and tell me all about it. Chancellor Yrwon must trust you greatly for this task, yes? What’s your name?” Mel didn’t want to know his name.

“Caernervan Magwyll Eth-“ the little man began to recite, bowing low with his slippered foot extended in the court style. He didn’t get past the third of his many names before Mel had placed the muzzle of the .25 against his skull and pulled the trigger twice.

“Yrwon already has my answer,” she said, switching back to English with the hint of an exotic accent no one in Jute Hill could place. She tore off some paper towels to wipe up the treacle and marzipan she’d blasted all over the kitchen corner.

Mel had to get up this mess before it attracted ants.

—

Morning brought its own noises: a more insistent volume from the interstate, talk shows instead of music being played too loud, and new arguments to replace the old ones. It brought the promise of oppressive heat, too. The Mississippi River was present though unseen beyond the buildings and trees, leaning on the city with unwelcome humidity.

“Hey, you okay Miss Mel?”

Mel turned from dragging the plastic trashcan towards the side of the street. “Morning, Tammyjean. I’m fine. How are you?”

Tammyjean Strunk was eight years old, and nearly Mel’s height. “Gramma says she heard noises from your place last night.”

“I saw a rat,” Mel said around her cig. “That’s what the shots were.” No one said “gunshots,” Mel had noticed a while ago. It was always “noises.”

“Ew!” Tammyjean said. “Did you get it?” She stood on her toes, as if to lift her bare mahogany-brown feet up from any rat-contamination.

“Yes. Tell Miz Strunk not to worry.”

“We’re your landlords, you know.”

“Oh yes,” Mel said. “Yes, I do know.”

“Whatcha got in there?” the little girl said, pointing at the can.

Mel noticed a curly-toed shoe with a striped-stocking leg still in it dangling out. “About a dozen leprechaun corpses. Ha, ha, just kidding. Just old Christmas decorations that got water damaged. Tell your grandmother I’m sorry about the noise.” She flicked the leg back inside and slammed the lid back down.

Tammyjean looked at Mel solemnly. “Gramma says guns are bad.”

Mel became aware of the bulge in the small of her back. She was pretty sure the little girl couldn’t see it. “Anything is bad if you use it the wrong way,” Mel said. “Look at me. Five-foot-nothing. I’m as big as I’m ever going to get. If I didn’t have a gun, anyone bigger and stronger than me could do whatever they wanted to me. But instead, we’re all even. Guns are like magic.”

Tammyjean looked thoughtful. “How come you don’t just go somewhere nobody will be mean to you?”

“I haven’t found a place like that yet.”

“Me neither.” Tammyjean shrugged and ran off into the developing Saturday.

Mel smiled at her infections freedom.

“Did you jusgt tell a second-grader she should get a gun?” The abandoned couch on the apartment’s common patio wasn’t abandoned this morning. Big Bell squinted at her, dressed in his usual coveralls.

“Yes, I did. If it makes you feel better, I didn’t give her mine.”

“Crazy white lady goin’ to get all of us killed,” Big Bell said, leaning back and reviewing the distant trees.

—

Louis had her working the midshift all weekend, which Mel didn’t mid. She preferred the kind of evening where the excitement came from watching teenagers daring each other to pick up porn magazines. It was a pleasant sensation to have no one depend on her for anything more than correct change.

The creepy guy from the previous night was back around closing time, buying bags of candy bars and giving Mel the fisheye before leaving. There weren’t any pennies for him to mooch this time, so instead he paid with a debit card and made the transaction take as long as possible.

“Thank you for stopping at SonicStop, Mister Sugarbaker,” Mel said, reading his name off the receipt.

RJ Sugarbaker looked alarmed at the mention of his name, and left in a hurry. Mel patted the steel lump in her waistband reassuringly.

“Mel, do you have a license for that thing?” Louis asked her after she put her pistol on the counter while mopping up. “I don’t wanna see you get in trouble for it.”

“If there were enough cops in Jute Hill that I could get in trouble for having a gun, I wouldn’t need the gun that much, would I?”

“You just be careful,” he said and wandered back to the storeroom.

It wasn’t as pleasant a walk home as last night, with clouds obscuring the moon and nothing to cut the yellow sodium glare. The off-colored light made things seem fevered and restless. Mel wondered if there was another leprechaun waiting for her, wanting its lost regent or the whereabouts of its predecessors.

The door was locked, which was a promising sign. There was a glow from behind the miniblinds in the windows, which was not.

The glow was not from Mel’s television, which she rarely turned on. Instead, a gentle green light played over her meager collection of secondhand furniture, shiny knickknacks, and dust. The green came from a young woman’s dress, the deep hue people who’d never seen an actual forest thought of as “forest green.” The intruder stood primly in the middle of the room, unconcerned by her long flowing trail getting grimy on the floor. Her skin was a familiar shade of violet, the sort of tone that hadn’t been blanched pale by hard work, gin, and cigarettes. Her skin glowed a little, too.

Mel closed the door. No need for sound getting out.

“Majesty,” she began with a curtsy, and then Mel was firing.

Eight pops later, they were both still standing there looking at each other. Mel could see the divots she’d knocked into the painted cinderblock walls behind the young woman, who was faintly translucent.

“Well, crap. I guess Yrwon wised up. Make your pitch, honey. Looks like I can’t get rid of you this way. Who are you?” She tossed the empty gun on the sofa.

The insubstantial woman didn’t seem to mind English, and continued on with the same calm expression. “I cannot be killed, Majesty. I do not exist. I am a phantasm of the woman who would have been your daughter by Ylgamel the Bold.”

Mel had been pulling open a bag of marshmallows. She stopped. “Well, that’s novel. Yrwon must be getting desperate, thinking I’ll come running back to hop in the sack with the Swamp King and fix everything. So you’re a projection of the kid we would have had? What did I name you?”

The woman bowed her head. “I do not know. I was hoping to ask you.”

“I wouldn’t have had much of a choice – imagine that! – since the Queen’s name has to be one of the traditional ones. We haven’t had a Celyande in a while. For the sake of discussion, let’s say I would have picked that.”

Celyande smiled briefly. “You are correct, by the way. Chancellor Yrwon is desperate. Everyone is.”

“Yeah, yeah. Swamp monsters. Not my problem.” Mel grabbed a bottle of gin and her bag of marshmallows, and flounced down on the sofa next to her still-hot automatic.

There was a knock at the door. “You all right in there?” said a muffled voice.

“Fine!” Mel yelled. “Sorry!”

“It’s after goddamn midnight!” yelled whichever neighbor it was. They didn’t press their indictment further, not that Mel could hear.

“You woke the neighbors,” Mel said, downing a slug of gin. “So Yrwon needs me to come fix his problem and marry someone and fix their problem too, because he has just enough magic to pester me non-stop for three years and not enough to take care of it himself. Oh, and you have an additional motive so I’ll come back and get knocked up so you can be born. Does that cover everything?”

Celyande looked away, brushing aside a lock of her light brown hair. “I can never be born, now. King Ylgamel was killed when his castle was overrun. I am only a projection.”

“Waifamimit,” Mel tried to say around a mouthful of marshmallow, finally knocking it back with more gin. “The swamp monsters pulled down the entire Lowlands?”

“The border is in ruin,” Celyande said. “The Chancellor placed a great deal of importance on telling you this.”

“Go tell Yrwon he can go fuck himself,” Mel said, giving the glimmering phantasm the finger. She felt foolish immediately, realizing it was a gesture she’d picked up here.

“I cannot tell him anything,” the phantasm said. Her expression betrayed no special sadness, but her voice became more hollow. “I cannot travel anywhere but to you.”

“It’s not my fault,” Mel said. “It’s not fair I have to fix everything. Why do I have to decide who lives and who dies? Why can’t they do anything for themselves?”

“You are our Queen,” Celyande said. “You needn’t do anything if that is your wish. All our lives are yours to expend.”

Mel rubbed at her eyes, wiping away syrup. She didn’t need to cry, on top of everything else.

“You are Melyfwynth, and you are the Power and the Wisdom,” Celyande continued.

“I’m a gun,” Mel said. “I am a fucking gun.”

The glow faded, and with it the very last of Celyande.

—

“Miss Smith!” came a muffled voice and a very un-muffled knock. “Miss Smith, I have to talk to you!”

Mel snorted awake and wiped sugar from her eyes, briefly not understanding how she’d come to be hanging off the sofa. The empty gin bottle reminded her one painful eyeblink before the enxt flurry of knocks.

“Miss Smith, it’s an emergency!”

Mel staggered to the door, fumbling with the chain. “ ‘m sorry Miz Strunk,” she mumbled. “I’ll keep the noise down.”

Althea Raye Strunk was only slightly taller than Mel, a carefully composed raisin of a woman, whom age had shrunk but not stooped. In the magnesium-bright daylight blasting into mel’s eyes, she existed as a haloed figure in powder blue.

“It’s Tammyjean, Miss Smith! Have you seen her?”

As detail returned to Mel, she noticed a few odd things: her landlady was wearing one of her many church dresses, complete with matching pillbox hat, but only one shoe; Big Bell and some more of the residents were going through the dumpsters; and nowhere was there the usual commotion of playing children on a Sunday morning.

“Why isn’t she with you? You two always go off to the church on – “

“She’s gone!” Althea held a lace-edged handkerchief to her eyes. “Freddy Tumpkins said he’d seen someone giving out candy to all the children, and I hoped it was you!”

Mel’s hangover faded faster than she’d imagined possible. “Oh, no,” she said. Candy. Candy bars. Sugarbaker. “Oh, no.”

She had no real proof to suspect the man, but reason had just succumbed to the wholesale assault of intuition.

“Do you have a phone, ma’am?” Mel asked.

“Oh, we can’t call the police out here!” the elder Strunk wailed. “They don’t care a thing for Jute Hill.”

“I’m not going to call the police,” Mel said, eyes distant. “You are. And you’re going to give them a name, R.J. Sugarbaker. And you’re going to tell them that he’s about five-ten, skinny, curly beard, and big bugged-out eyes. And that he drives a green piece of shit old Chrysler. And when they don’t listen to you, you’re going to keep after them, Miz Strunk. You’re going to make them do their jobs. You’re going to keep bugging them until they make everything right.”

Althea Raye Strunk stood there looking at her, mouth open, lacy hankie stuck in mid-daub.

“It’s someone with a gun that has to fix things, sometimes,” Mel said, and took the old woman’s phone from her.”

“C’mon, Louis,” she said to the phone, listening to the rings. “Hello, Louis? Oh, hi Lakeesha. It’s Mel. Never mind that, I need the receipts from last night. All of them, yeah. I’m going to be right there.”

She threw a gym bag on the counter, and stuffed in a dress that looked like it was made of gauze and leaves, then added a knurled twig she fished out of the kitchen drawer. Mel gave the wand a few experimental waves, knowing it didn’t do much on this side. After a moment’s consideration, she tossed in her .25, a box of ammunition, and the last of her carton of smokes.

She had to do this one thing, even if there were some things that were more urgent. Mel crossed the patch of floor where Celyande had stood the night before, breathed deeply a couple of times, and kept going.

Her landlady was still in the doorway.

“C’mon,” Mel said. “I think I know how to find her.”

The Strunk family vehicle matched Althea’s dress in both color and vintage. She’d never seen the old woman drive the big Lincoln faster than twenty-five miles an hour before, but it was getting light on its wheels as it tried to fly on the way to SonicStop. Mel didn’t look at the speedometer out of fear for her sanity.

Then they were squealing and shuddering to a stop across three parking spaces and scrambling into the shop like escapees in their hurry.

“Lakeesha! Receipts!”

The day clerk held up a paper-clipped bundle in her elaborate manicure. “There money missing?”

Mel didn’t answer, paging rapidly through the flimsy sheets until she found the name: RJ SUGARBAKER.

And then the address: 1 MOONLIGHT CIRCLE, MYRILON MY 00001-0001.

“Myrilon,” Althea said after she took it from Mel’s shaking hand. “Oh, that’s not in-state, is it?”

“No,” Mel said. Moonlight Circle was the name of the royal garden that lay before Myrilon Castle, which in turn housed her abandoned throne. “But that’s not important right now.”

She fished the wand out of her bag, and wrapped the receipt around it. Sugarbaker had touched it. Others had too, but she knew she could find him.

The wand was balky over here, slow to wake and weak when it did so. Mel blew gently on it as Althea looked on, lost but trusting, and Kaneesha raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“He’s close,” Mel whispered. “Like a couple of blocks.”

“All I know is, you better be on shift tonight,” Kaneesha said as they left.

“Should we drive, or –“Althea began.

“No. Stay here.” Mel held the wand and its paper streamer carefully, hand cupped around it as if to preserve a flame from going out. She started to walk, then jog, then was loping low to the ground, following the wand.

It led her downhill, towards the river.

Jute Hill was all warehouses by the time Mel reached the waterfront, a city propped upon relics of better times. Mel looked around past broken glass, coils of concertina wire, and rusting signs.

And fresh tire tracks. Sugarbaker, or whatever its real name was, made no effort to hide its lair. Mel walked in to the open warehouse, wand tucked into her belt and automatic in hand.

Tammyjean was standing in the middle of the large empty space, holding half a candy bar in its wrapper and staring vacantly at a single naked light bulb. Mel knew better than to disturb her.

Besides her tiny pool of illumination and what streamed in from the door, the rest of the warehouse was dark, darker than it should have been.

“Come on out,” Mel said. “I get it now. I have responsibilities. Release the girl and go tell Yrwon he wins.”

“Need some change,” said a voice that didn’t sound quite as normal as it had last night. “Yeah, I got a license, I just don’t carry it on me. I’ll leave when I’m damn good an’ ready. Ain’t nothin’ for it, that’s just how things are.”

The voice was getting less distinct as it rambled on. It kept sounding more and more like someone with pneumonia. It also kept sounding closer.

“I don’t have time for this,” Mel said. “Do you want me to go back or not?”

Mel finally saw movement, the shadows seemed to pool on the patch of floor between the pool of light she stood in and Tammyjean’s. R. J. Sugarbaker rose to almost his full height; he seemed shorter, but a lot wider now. His raincoat and dirty wifebeater were supplemented by a lot of mud and water plants. His skin looked softer and slicker. His eyes bugged out even worse, and pointed in different directions.

“Looks like a scorcher today,” said the creature in its stolen voice, and shambled forward.

Mel had a tiny moment of being afraid, then felt foolish at her response. “Just a swamp monster. Been here too long,” she muttered, and started shooting.

—

“Tammyjean!” Althea’s knees wobbled when they rounded the corner. She gathered up her granddaughter in a crushing hug.

“Gramma, stop! People are watching,” said the girl, and tried to pull away.

“Who are you, Miss Smith?” Althea said after a moment. She still hadn’t let go of Tammyjean. “How you knew what you did, it isn’t normal. Are you a psychic, like those shows on TV?”

“Close enough. Here,” Mel said, tossing her a wad of twenty-dollar bills held together with a rubber band. “That’s not quite four months’ worth of rent. I’m breaking my lease. Some emergencies of my own came up. Don’t forget what I said about the cops, Miz Strunk.”

Mel watched them drive off, and dug out her wand. She made a slashing motion in the air, and a razor-thin line of light seemed to cut the far wall.

“You win, Yrwon. You dirty-playing bastard, you win.” Mel lit a cigarette, stood tall before the breach, and stepped into the infinitely-narrow gulf between here and there.