Free Noise by Darin Bradley Page A

higher intelligence that we all had now.
    It was a different Bible. They didn’t use grape juice in tiny, plastic cups once a month during the Lord’s Supper. They didn’t have a Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. They had wine, and satyrs, and a place with answers. At Delphi, the oracle talked back.
    That was the thing.
    •   •   •

    Everything was still in order in the 1890s living room. We’d stripped most of the kitchen, the study, the bedroom. Piled what we could of the plank flooring, stacked the loose bricks from the chimney. Round-edged, pink things that were stamped TEXAS . Like the ones in the lot behind the Strip. The ones to be repurposed. The lamented, vigiled bricks.
    There was moonlight coming through the windows. Bubbled and creased, like looking through Coke bottles. The Virginia creeper outside the kitchen had grown even farther inside. It obscured the window almost entirely. In places, it had come up through the domino tile. Which we hadn’t bothered with. We didn’t see much use for tile.
    The 1890s half of the house smelled like varnish and tobacco. It had that rich, old huff. Our half smelled like stale glue—and cigarettes, now. The landlord had been saying for two years that he would renovate this half. Rent it out. We didn’t want anyone else walking across the foundation, which we would feel on our side.
    I turned around when Ruth stepped into the kitchen, an abyss of dark, unfloored pier-and-beam foundation between us.
    Had the entrance to Hades been shored up like this? Planked and reinforced? I couldn’t remember. What did Orpheus think, walking into the dark? The smoke?
    She looked around at the piles. “This is all yours?”
    “Ours,” I said.
    She wrinkled her nose. “Why does it smell like pumpkin?” She was standing next to the window, which looked out over the dark side of the house, where the creepers grew. Where Adam and I had practiced.
    I shrugged. “Probably mown grass or something. From earlier.”
    She tugged at the hem of her baby T-shirt, scrutinizing the place. I thought she looked a bit
hard
for that type of shirt. It was black, at least.
    “Why do you have fertilizer?”
    She edged around the hole in the floor, toward the creeper.
    “Are you …
we
going to blow something up?”
    I reached out. Gave her a hand around the hole. I didn’t want her stepping on the joists. I wasn’t sure they were still good.
    I looked at the fertilizer. Our Place, where we were going, had already been tilled, used. Fallowed and reused. The fertilizer was for the garden there.
    “If we need to.”
    She stood next to me, looking back at the hollow floor. “How’d you get the fertilizer? Did you buy it?”
    “We got it.”
    “You won’t tell me?”
    “What does it matter? We bought some things, we stole others. Some we found.”
    She walked through, trailing a hand over the bricks, over the packets of bamboo seeds on top of the fertilizer. When we first moved in, the landlord sawed down all the bamboo in the backyard because its stalks spread like weeds. Later, the stumps were hard enough to puncture the wheels on his Jeep when he came back to work on the cross-ties shoring up the parking-lot gravel. We ordered the seeds right after. We’d let them weed all around our Place, to keep wheeled things out. We could use the stalks to fence the gardens. Down deep enough to fuck the prairie dogs and gophers.
    She stopped in front of the old bathroom, looking at the dark mirror on the back wall. I’d meant to take the mirror down. To take it with us.
    “You read the
Book?
” I asked.
    “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t want a new name.”
    “You want to be Secondary,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    I didn’t say anything. The tattoos on her arm were serpents. Dark mirror, dark hair, dark floor in the darkness. She was nothing like Mary. White Mary with a gun by the Strip.
    “I can fix things. Make things.”
    Bloody Mary
.
    “Can you weld?”
    Bloody Mary
.
    “A little. Some.