Read Online The Grand Ballast by J.A. Rock - Free Book Online Page A

holding him, comforting him. “I think,” she said,
“if you can find someone willing to do a lot of little, good things
for you, it’s better than someone who gives you a big
promise.”
    “ I think so too.” Part of
him wanted her to leave, even as he wracked his brain for things to
say to make her stay. “Mom?”
    She squinted, as though
Bode were becoming hard to see.
    “ I’ll miss you.”
    She dropped her gaze to the
duvet. Nodded and nodded, like her head was on a spring, and then
she swallowed convulsively and stood. She left the room without
another word, and Bode wondered if he’d ever felt so
alone.
     
     
    IN THE CITY OF THE WAR
GARDENS
     
    Hilgarten was a choked
place, crowded with the drifting ambitions of its founders. Stone
foundations competed like roots for space in a bland gray loam, and
skyscrapers looked like stakes driven into the ground. Knobby
community centers and schools stood formless as rubble heaps. The
city was fantastic and decrepit, and Bode stared like a
child.
    Mr. Lein had let them out
of their coffins so they could stand on the deck of the coffin car
and be seen by the people of the city. LJ looked dreary and faint.
Sibyata kept howling at the crowds like a wolf, and pulling the
neckline of her leotard down to show her breasts. As they lurched
toward the rail yard, people followed the wagons and held their
hands out. A boy threw flowers—fierce, spindly things, their stems
still trailing roots and dirt, showering the performers in black
grit.
    The city was famous for its
war gardens. People intentionally grew plants that didn’t get
along, that robbed one another of nutrients and wound around other
stems and, like a brawl bursting out the doors of a bar into the
street, knocked down garden fences and strangled and pummeled one
another.
    The gardens had perhaps, at
one point, interested their designers. But now they required no
maintenance but admiration, and those who lived in the city were
mostly inured to their strangeness and violence.
    Several breeders of
botanical oddities had lived in the town where Bode had grown up.
Years ago, Bode and Kilroy has fallen in love with a plant called
empress weed that thrived in the yellow field where they’d
sometimes picnicked. It had a bloom wispy as cobwebs, pink as
bubble gum, and it stuck to fingers and clothes. It changed color
as the seasons went on—sometimes a raw red like damaged skin,
sometimes gold, sometimes a bristling electric blue. Its stems were
striated and thick, with thorns so sharp their ends looked like
little bits of thread.
    The ring stick was made
from empress weed, the blooms plucked, the thorny stem dried to
bone white.
    Their performance area in
Hilgarten was huge. A ring with silver gates around it, and a thick
layer of fine sawdust on the ground. The big top tent barely
covered it; there was some talk of doing an open-air
show.
    Dee, the high-wire walker,
was already in Hilgarten, wearing a high-collared pink dress and
massive sunglasses. She’d been waiting there for some time, as her
agent made clear. Her agent had a comb-over and bad taste in
ties.
    “ We took a detour,” Kilroy
muttered, striding past the agent. “I wanted to stop at the
border.”
    “ Pal,”
the agent said, “if you’re letting O’ Fauh fill your head with
nonsense about you not having the best, I mean the best, X-show,
then you’re—let me tell you something. Dee had a lot of offers.
A lot of
offers. And you know what I said? I said no, honey. No. You gotta
take Kilroy Ballast’s offer. This man, this Ballast, he’s goin’
places.” The agent turned to Dee. “Didn’t I say that,
babe?”
    Dee sighed and patted her
curls.
    Lein gave the call to come
to the dressing area—which was in a side room of a local church. As
Bode headed over, he caught Dee looking at a tangle of vines that
had choked itself to death on the ground. Bode glanced back and saw
that her agent was still talking to Kilroy, who looked on the verge
of