Kris tilted her head in a question mark, but he was already intent on angling the twelve converging flames of the crossfire to a particularly tricky twist.
Out on the asphalt, sulfur particles chafed her throat. Vegas Vic’s waving arm reminded Kris of the way her widowed mother would pull on the slot machine, her torso slumped, driving the lever again and again in a mindless void of feeling, those fruit reels spinning and flashing her into a numbness, deeper and deeper.
It was just after ten when she got home. A mist hung low over the patchy lawn, a molten wax globule in a lava lamp, and it descended over the small blackjack oaks fanned out in the soil, their bark cracked into black rectangles with orange fissures. Droplets clung to the peeling shutters of her childhood house. Inside, she set her bottle opener key ring on the kitchen table and listened. Opaque silence. From the window, she could see light shining from the open barn door below. Kris stepped onto the stone path and broke into a trot, welcoming the pain of small acorns stabbing at her bare heels. Inside, her husband had his back to the door, still in his pajama bottoms, and nothing else. He was whispering to the two dolls he called the Blackwood sisters.
“Women don’t know when they look their best,” he was saying as he teased an auburn wig with a comb.
The remaining seventy-eight dolls were posed around the room, in various stages of dress, like contestants in a child beauty pageant. Some wore cardboard signs displaying a name or anecdote. The walnut faces of the sisters were lacquered with smoky eyes and dripping red lips, and the short corduroy dresses that he had hand stitched himself, were unbuttoned down to the navel, the lewdness of their exposed bodies incongruous with cultured pearl chokers. All the dolls were forty-nine inches tall, the height of an eight-year-old girl, eyes cast sideways for the effect of sullen loneliness, with lashes so thick and drooping, it was impossible to make contact. Their breasts were fully formed, the breasts of a grown woman, pink-brown nipples, explicit and obscene, down to the goose bumps and darkened areolas. Kris had to look away.
“Wit.” Her tone was loveless, a dried bouquet of baby’s breath disintegrating at the slightest touch.
He seemed puzzled, as if he only vaguely knew her, as if she had no business being there, in his domain of dolls. His condition seemed to have deteriorated over the past few weeks.
“Who is Wit?” He had a fit of hissing laughter, like an angry goose defending her eggs, then lowered his voice as if he was going to confide something, “What is Wit?”
“Why do you talk about yourself in third person? Is this one of your riddles?” Kris shook her head. “It’s late. I just don’t think I can do this tonight.”
She turned to leave. In a bound, her husband was at her side and squeezing her upper arm.
Kris tried to pry his fingers loose, but his will was the to-the-death sort. He held his nose to her and made loud sniffing noises like a dog smelling a tree, then inhaled deeply and sensually.
“Oh, will you stop.” When she rolled her eyes in disgust and jerked her body backward, the whites of his eyes enlarged and he crushed her tighter in a wringing motion. She slapped her free palm on his shoulder and pushed, making small grunting sounds. Even when she hit his chest, he did not ease up, but pressed himself against her and nibbled on her ear.
“What are you doing! I don’t want—not this.” They continued to scuffle until he tore the front of his pants down and urinated on her bare feet, humming with spurts of laughter, his lips pursed in ecstasy. Satisfied, he abruptly sat, his back to Kris, cross-legged on the wet floor, and cradled a doll’s headless torso, caressing it once before inserting a large black spring from an old screen door.
“An artist must be cruel long enough to implant a spine,” he said, lecturing to his miniature, wooden women.
The sky was a light gray when Kris pulled herself out of bed. She was unclear whether she’d even achieved sleep. Her muscles ached. Sometime in the night, Wit had made his way beside her, a rare occurrence lately. As Kris watched her husband’s relaxed breathing, she imagined standing over him, clutching a pillow at both ends, pressing it squarely over his face, and watching his legs thrash, his stripped belly thrusting in agony, while his convulsions spaced out farther and farther between, the last popcorn kernels exploding in the pan.
In the waning light at the Mill, the wind kicked up. Kris braced herself. She gulped the dust that came hurling at her. Stepping into the sign maker’s world of fire and color, she felt her body relax. Over the speakers, some drawn-out bars of a symphony rippled with a cello pizzicato, giving her the sense of bubbles rising from the depths of the sea. Harps and violins produced the hollow tones of slithering winds. The day was not cooling down. If anything, it was getting hotter.
“Tertullio? It’s me, Kris.” Until her eyes adapted, he was a faceless silhouette, a contrast to flames of orange and blue. “I came back. For the sign.”
“Ah, Kristine. Good. I have prepared something for you. Please, come closer. And call me Tullio.”
His accent flooded her ears and echoed. She approached the cluttered table. In a chipped vase stood a lush bouquet of roses, the petals perfectly black.
“Those are for you.” His stare was blunt, forceful. Again, that impenetrable tar of his eyes threw her and she reached out for the back of a stool.
“Well, thank you. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen black roses. How unique.”
“It’s a trick of the light,” he said. “Under ordinary light, they would be ordinary.”
It seemed to her that his subtlety had layers of meaning. She was charged and spellbound, two opposing sensations that stunned her, a vacuum between repelling magnets.
“That blue light you see shining on the flowers is argon laced with mercury. Argon is from the Greek for ‘the lazy one.’ It’s one of the noble gases, along with neon, the one that makes red. A funny name. Noble. Long ago, scientists determined that these gases resisted combining with other elements. That’s where their so-called nobility comes from.”
He was welding two glass tubes together, searing the ends with his hand torch, but she was only interested in the sound of his voice.
“So, how does neon make red?” she asked.
“In its natural state, neon gas is unremarkable. It’s colorless. No odor.” He smiled tersely. “But it’s all around us. It’s a component of liquid air. We extract it by liquefying the gas and distilling the air.”
Kris nodded. She was watching his mouth more than listening.
He ran a blade across the surface of a glass, and snapped it. The methodical heartlessness of the scoring and severing sent a shiver of pleasure through her.
Tullio handed her a pair of goggles, and she hesitated, searching his face for a sign.
“There are three risks. Cutting yourself, burning yourself and electrocuting yourself.”
He took the end of the yellow hose that had been in his mouth and slipped it inside her bottom lip. She studied his face. His attention was trained on the glass he was holding to the torch.
“Now, breathe out.”
In nervous anticipation, she took a heaving breath in, instead of out. The glass imploded.
“I’m so sorry.” There was a swell of music from the speakers above and she wondered what he really thought of her. It was impossible to mine any information from those thick pits.
Tullio gave her an unmarred tube.
When the melting and bending was complete, he stepped in close behind her, guiding her hand. Together, they fastened electrodes to the ends.