She for God Only
Happens Before Chapter 1 of The Good Witch
He for god only
She for god in him
— wrote the poet, proclaiming hierarchy.
Beatrix strides through the world, punk to the last, enemy of hierarchy. Today, though, she wasn’t on foot. Instead, she was riding north with Dancer. Beatrix had a seizure disorder and couldn’t drive.
She was smoking some dank weed and counting on Dancer’s Woman Veteran license plate to keep them out of trouble as they rode up State Route 8 to Dunlap and back. Dancer turned the heater up and wrestled with the gears as they took the Toyota up, then down a hairpin curve.
It was Christmas eve and dark. Every now and then a large, low crescent moon appeared between a gap in the hills. Mostly, though, branches wove together over the narrow passage.
The dragon rose from the Sequatchie River and slithered black-scaled down the Sequatchie Valley, stirring the last leaves off the oak trees on Fredonia Mountian.
Hearing his passage below, Beatrix blew a final puff in homage or maybe just appeasement, tossed the rest of the weed out the window, and sat back in her seat. Her heavy eyebrows drew together. She closed her eyes.
“Where are we going again?”
Beatrix described some roads and rivers and a certain pink oak tree.
“Sorry, love. If it’s not on Mapquest, I can’t get there.” Dancer, slender and fair as Beatrix was weighty and dark, fought a slick of black ice, let the car glide slowly across the oncoming land, caught her traction again on a rare patch of gravely shoulder, and sped back into the proper lane, grinding gears again.
Beatrix pawed at Dancer’s cell phone in frustration and finally called up a map and relayed a few directions.
“Cagle? You said Dunlap earlier. We’re going to Cagle? We are wayyy out in nowhere here.”
Beatrix, who had grown up half in Chattanooga and half in Jasper, just nodded. It was not nowhere. The dark spoke to her — the groundwater’s currents pulled at her feet, even through the moving vehicle — and as she got nearer her cousin’s boyfriend’s house, a tang of iron and stench of craven manhood swelled her nostrils.
She snuffled. “Turn here.”
Paved road, gravel road, ice-solid mud road. Trees completely closed over top of them. Not a star, not a scrap of moving cloud, but the wind moved under the pine needles.
“Wait.”
Dancer turned the car so they were facing back the way they had came and cut the engine. The reflected eyes watching them in the dark disappeared instantly.
Beatrix struggled with the door handle. “Unlock it.” “Oh, how — ”
Dancer leaned over and let her out. The woman disentangled her skirts and petticoats, pulled her black trench coat closer, and struggled to her feet — the green Toyota rode low to the ground, and Beatrix stood nearly 6 feet tall.
Dancer looked up after her. “You need a hat.”
A few days before, Beatrix had shaved the right half her head. Now she shook her iron-gray hair deliberately to the left. “If you hear something that’s not me, drive on.” Free of the car’s entanglements, her clumsiness dropped away. She strode silently into the trees.
Dancer sat in the Toyota, ignoring her cold toes. She thought about Beatrix. She wanted her for a girlfriend — but was that ethical? Beatrix was disabled. She had seizures. She couldn’t drive. She was, not exactly homeless, but lightly housed — an artists’ collective on cold nights, the screened porch of an auntie with dementia on warm nights. She struggled to use a cell phone or work a car door handle. She was silent — some days so profoundly silent she seemed more stone than human. Then other days she would be reading something wildly unexpected — Turing or Lessing or Burroughs or Julian of Norwich — and would look at Dancer with a sudden stare (and she was a woman who never made eye contact) and lecture for an hour or more, all one long paragraph, sometimes one hour-long sentence, as far as Dancer could tell, adorned with side notes and quotes and examples, laying out her thoughts on the work and how it related to something that had just touched her mind, an interaction she’d witnessed or a pebble she’d found.
Then again, she counted on her fingers and couldn’t add or subtract.
Was there any way Dancer could date Beatrix — okay, be honest, make love to her — that wouldn’t be taking advantage? Dancer was a college-educated woman with a respectable job and an elegant apartment. Beatrix was a differently abled homeless lady whose mind was probably fried on acid. A woman who talked to fairies.
Then again, thought Dancer, here I am driving the getaway car. Who’s taking advantage of whom?
Of course Dancer didn’t think she was actually driving the getaway car.
Inside the Maw
Beatrix’s cousin’s boyfriend Anthony lived in a house with his brother Prentis and his uncle Vestle, who was younger than he was. The house belonged to Vestle’s mother, but she was ill and mostly sat in her lift-you-out chair watching television.
Front room: sofa and television. Middle room: kitchen and tiny television. Bedroom, bathroom, and a lean-to porch serving as a second bedroom. That was the house.
Beatrix held up her hand and the door blew open.
“May I come in?”
Aunt Belva looked up. “Beatrix, dearie. Of course. How’d you get up here?”
“Blew in on the wind.”
Invited, Beatrix stepped through the door and waved it shut behind her. She stepped through the kitchen and bathroom to the back-porch bedroom.
Anthony, Prentis and Vestle were drinking Wild Turkey and watching Asuka fight Ronda Rousey on a computer monitor. Their internet speed was terrible; the fight kept freezing up. One lamp on a low table illuminated the room. Beatrix waited in the doorway.
“Holy shit!” Anthony jumped, then they all hollered.
Lit from beneath, Beatrix resembled an elder Johnny Rotten — or perhaps James Hook risen dripping from Davy Jones’ locker. Big nose, big ear, shaved dome, one eye hidden under a waterfall of hair.
She smelled like weed and sage and stone, and she looked like Bitches Mean Business.
“Hello, Vestle, Prentiss. How are y’all’s mommas? How about you boys go sit with auntie Belva?”
They shoved past her, and when the ruckus ended, Beatrix and Anthony were the only ones in the room.
She stepped closer. He stood up. Another step. He backed away, knocking over his chair. He fell backwards onto the Guns & Roses blanket on the double bed. Now the light was behind Beatrix and she bent over, smiling, nothing but a glint of teeth in a shadowed face, and her shadow reached out gently and pressed the boy down into the sagging mattress. Becoming more confident, the shadow slid a hand into Anthony’s mouth and forced it open.
Beatrix had a multitude of pockets in her skirts, and in one pocket she kept a pair of pliers. She fished them out. “This is for my cousin Chassidy,” she said. “I want you away from her. I want you away from her baby. And if I ever hear her name in your mouth — if I even lift up my long ear and hear you thinking about her or that baby again — you will look back on this day like it was a picnic.”
Some of Anthony’s teeth were tough to get at. She had to break them and dig them out in pieces. Might’ve left a few shards.
She left her shadow behind her. It sat gloating on Anthony’s chest until it finally dissolved.
Descent
Dancer jerked awake when Beatrix appeared inside the car. “Whoof! You’re sneaky.”
“I’m insubstantial right now. My shadow’s taking her own sweet time.”
“What?”
“Why not start the car and drive on? My hands are freezing.” She held them out to the heater vent.
Dancer started the car and eased out along the track. “I didn’t see a soul or hear a thing,” she said. “How far did we park from wherever you were going?”
“Happen half a mile.”
“Good heavens.”
“It’s all right. I move fast.”
“How long did I sleep?” Dancer yawned.
“Play some music.”
They listened to Siouxie Sioux all the way home. Smoking and riding, Beatrix thought, I could almost be in love with this little one, but should I? She’s so powerless. So innocent. I’d have to wrap myself in a cloud to keep her safe. She could only ever see my —
— the next bit of the thought was “my hindquarters,” but that was so prodigiously vain that Beatrix laughed at herself, a big laugh that shook the windows.
“What?” asked Dancer, laughing because Beatrix was. Such a joyous laugh she had. Too late, thought Dancer, I’m head over heels for this woman.
“When we get back to town,” said Beatrix, “would you mind giving me a kiss?”
Still high in the air, they rounded a corner, banking like a scaled wing on the wind. The Toyota handled perfectly. The city opened out below them, a dragon’s treasure, a net of gems spread on the frozen earth.