Everything, to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in every- 158 thing, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, when the old man’s hip had gotten too bad to allow him to easily climb, Fontaine had had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room.
Now she stands there, looking into the window, at these watches with their foxed faces, their hands unmoving, and she fears history.
Fontaine will fit her to history in some different way, she knows, and it is a history she has avoided.
Through the thick pane of the door, thick enough to bend light, the way water in a glass does, she sees that the lights are on in a space behind the shop. Another door there, not quite closed.
CLOSED/CERRADO says the dog-eared cardboard sign hung inside the glass on a suction-cup shower hook.
She knocks.
Almost immediately the inner door is opened, a figure silhouetted there against brightness.
“Hey, Fontaine. Chevette. It’s me.” –
The figure shuffles forward, and she sees that it is in fact him, this angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water. As he rounds the flat gleam of a glass-topped counter, she sees that he holds a gun, the old-fashioned kind with the cylinder that turns as the bullets are fired manually, one at a time. “Fontaine? It’s me.”
He stops there, looking. Takes a step forward. Lowers the pistol. “Chevette?”
“Yeah?”
“Hold on.” He comes forward and peers at her, past her. “You alone?”
“Yes,” she says, glancing to either side.
“Hold on-” a rattling of locks, bolts undone, and at last the door
v Opens, and he blinks at her, mystified. “You back.” “How are you, Fontaine?”
“Fine,” he says, “fine,” and steps back. “Come in.” 159 She does. The place smells of machine oil, metal polish, burnt coffee. A thousand things gleam from the depths of Fontaine’s history reef.
“Thought you were in LA,” he says.
“I was. I’m back.
He closes the door and starts locking it, an elaborate process but one he can do in the dark, in his sleep perhaps. “Old man’s gone. You know?”
“I know,” she says. “How?”
“Just old,” he says, tucking his pistol away now. “Wouldn’t get out of bed, finally. Curled up there like a baby. Clarisse she came to nurse him. She been a nurse, Clarisse. Says when they turn to face the wall, that means it’s over soon.”
Chevette wants so badly to say something, but it will not come.
“I like your hair, girl,” Fontaine says, looking at her. “Not so fierce now.”
“IT’s changing,” Fontaine says, meaning the bridge and how they live on it. He’s told her about the tendency to build these shops, how most of them are built with nonresident money, the owners hiring people to live there and maintain possession. “That Lucky Dragon,” he says, cupping a white china mug of his bitter, silted coffee, “that’s there because someone decided the money was there for it to make. Tourists buying what they need to come out here. That wouldn’t have happened, before.”
“Why do you think it is, that it’s changing?”
“It just is,” he says. “Things have a time, then they change.”
“Skinner~” she says, “he lived out his life here, didn’t he? I mean, when this was all what it was. He was here for all of that. Here when they built it.”
“Not his whole life. Just the end of it. That jacket you’re wearing, he got that in England, when he was younger. He lived there and rode motorcycles. Told me about it. Rode them up to Scotland, rode them all over. Real old ones.”
“He told me a little about it, once,” she says. “Then he came back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty soon he was out here.”